Gemstones | Winners ✮ Anthology

The Box by @StephanieProchaska

There's nothing to worry about. Ghosts aren't real.

They walked up the crumbling footpath, and Nate almost tripped over a loose bit of concrete. James saw him and laughed.

"Forget your glasses?" James asked, pretending to be helpful.

Nate didn't bother to respond. Instead, he just pushed his very-present glasses further up his nose, wondering yet again what they were doing here.

"Maybe we really shouldn't be doing this." Nate said for what must have been the tenth time that night.

"Look, if you don't want to go, you don't have to." James told him. "But me and Eric are going in."

"Yeah, right." Nate said. "If I don't, you'll make fun of me 'til I die."

"Oh, that's definitely happening either way." Eric said, clapping him on the back.

"Gee, thanks." Nate grumbled.

"Any time – what are friends for?" Eric replied cheerfully.

Still, as they approached the house, James and Eric stopped being quite so jovial. The wind picked up, and the wooden shutters on an upstairs window banged open and shut. Nate tried to smother a shiver.

The door was unlocked. Nate had expected nothing less in a condemned house, but James was clearly disappointed. He scoffed to himself and hung the hammer he'd brought through one of the belt loops on his jeans.

"Guess I won't be needing this." he mumbled to himself.

"Not unless you find any ghosts that need a beating. Eh?" Eric said, nudging Nate in the ribs. But neither Nate nor James found it particularly amusing.

"So clever." James mumbled.

"I thought so." Eric shrugged, undaunted.

The three boys stepped into the hall, their footsteps echoing off the half-rotted floorboards and exposed walls. The door slammed shut behind them, and Nate jumped about a foot in the air.

"Sorry." James murmured.

"Seriously?" Nate was already about to have a heart attack. Couldn't James be just a little more careful?

Someone snickered in the dark. Nate couldn't tell if it was James or Eric.

"Come on – I heard the room where it happened is upstairs." Despite the fact that there was no one else in the house, James still whispered.

No one answered.

Nate's heart raced even faster as he slowly followed his friends down the hallway and up the creaking stairs. As they climbed, Eric apparently decided it would be a good idea to tell them all yet again what had happened in this house.

"It was almost half a century ago." Eric started, being almost as quiet as James. "They say Old Man Acker had always been perfectly normal up until that fateful night. Then one day, without any warning–"

"Yeah, we know." Nate snapped. He was louder than he'd meant to be, but he couldn't take hearing that story yet again – especially when he was currently in that very house.

"Well, fine then." Eric grumbled, but he thankfully shut his mouth.

They made it up to the second floor. Nate squinted in the darkness, looking left and right as he tried to reassure himself that nothing was up here.

The boys walked down the creaking, narrow hall until they finally came to the spare room at the far end of the house – the room where it had happened. Nate tried not to think about how the length of the hall meant that in the event of an emergency, they couldn't be farther from the stairs.