When Jacob finally got home later that day, he was unsure of how he was supposed to tell his parents about their ghost situation. It wasn’t something he could just bring up in casual conversation… right? The question ate at him, just as he in turn ate his dinner. Night fell, and his parents still had no idea.

He went to bed later that night, and found he hadn’t been joking about not being able to sleep after all. Every time he closed his eyes, he could hear something moving. He knew it was nothing. It could have been just some leaves outside; it might have even just been his imagination. Either way it still managed to keep him awake.

No matter what he did, he couldn’t help but imagine the ghost of the girl or of Old Lady Makenzie hovering over him. He saw them reaching out to touch him with their cold, dead hands. They would reach around his neck, and then he would spring awake at the last second.

The strange thing was, he didn’t even feel that much fear. No, what he felt was annoyance. Tonight was the first night he was sleeping in a real bed instead of an air mattress, and he wanted to enjoy it. He punched his bed, digging his fist into the mattress.

“I want to sleep,” he growled, flinching at the pain in his throat. He dragged himself out of bed and shuffled down the stairs, his throat ready for water. He made sure to move as silently as possible to not wake his parents.

However, as he got to the bottom of the stairs, he noticed his stealth was unneeded. The lights were on in the living room and he could hear his mother talking on the phone from there.

“We should have the last of the stuff out by tomorrow,” she spotted Jacob walk into the kitchen. He gave her a simple wave before filling a glass with water from the fridge.

“Oh, our old place? We had an old friend who was moving into North Palm and needed a place to stay, so we sold it to them,” his mother watched him down an entire glass of water all at once, then go for seconds. He listened in as his mother talked to someone who he assumed was a relative.

“Alright, that should be all. Thank you for everything, Stacy.” His ears perked as he recognized the name of the realtor he had met a few times. The same one who had sold them a haunted house without saying a word. He saw an opportunity and pounced.

He set the glass on the table and approached his mother sitting on the couch. She watched as he brought his hand to the side of his face and extended his thumb and pinkie. A sign they had in the family which meant ‘I want to talk to the person you are currently speaking to on the phone.’ A sign which came in handy strangely often.

“Give me a second, Stacy,” she set the phone down. “You know this is the realtor, right?”

“I know. There’s something I want to ask her about the house,” he said simply as his mother shrugged and placed the phone back to her ear.

“Hey, Stacy, my kid wants to talk to you about the house for a bit, that okay?” His mother handed the phone over to him as the plan came together in his head.

“Evening, Stacy,” he said into the phone.

“How you doing champ?” she said as Jacob cringed at the nickname she had given him the day they met. It didn’t look like she was going to stop either, so he had no choice but to power through it.

“This is going to sound a little weird, but do you have a list of previous owners of the house?” he asked innocently. His mother raised an eyebrow, but didn’t stop him.

“Sure I do. Give me a second,” he could hear the sound of rustling papers on the other end of the line. “Any particular reason you want to know? You find something belonging to an old owner?”

Despite her best attempts, Jacob could hear the barest hints of worry in her voice.

“Something like that,” he said as the papers settled.

“Here we go. List is a little short for such an old house,” she said, increasingly worried. “There are only three names here.”

“There wouldn’t happen to be a Makenzie on the list, would there?” he asked, feeling like he was allowing the guillotine to fall.

“Yeah, there’s a Margret Makenzie. She’s listed as the second to last owner before you guys,” Jacob grinned. She sounded like she knew the pain was coming.

“Did it say when she moved out?” he asked with a smirk.

“No… No it does not.” she sighed.

“Because she died in the house?” he asked.

“Because she died in the house,” she confirmed as they fell into a short rhythm.

“Because she was murdered?”

“Because she was murdered.”

“Because she got that little girl killed?”

“Because she got… How do you know all of this anyway?” she demanded, sounding more than a little pathetic.

“Because the house is famous around town for being haunted by two ghosts, something that would have been nice to know before we moved in,” he said before noticing his mother was making the sign for him to pass the phone back to her. He did as he was told with glee and started walking back to the kitchen, to both drink water and watch the fireworks.

“Stacy, explain,” she said into the phone with a glare on her face. He could hear Stacy say something over the phone to his irate mother.

“What do you mean it’s true?” his mother demanded. “Dear god, Stacy, couldn’t you have at least told us? In fact, aren’t you supposed to tell us stuff like this?” Stacy must have said something even worse because his mother’s eyes widened. “You hired a guy to do what?”

Jacob tried to quiet his laughter as he imagined Stacy on the other end of the line.

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“Cheapest house? Of course it’s going to be cheap if two people died on the property.” His mother glared before suddenly calming down a little, and then a lot. “Wait, the other choices were how much?”

Jacob gave a disapproving frown. This was not going as planned.

“Well in that case, I’ll tell my husband about it tomorrow and then get back to,” she said before hanging up the phone and turning to Jacob. “Okay so good news, you have a roommate now. Her name is Sam. She died a year or two younger then you and she and Ms. Makenzie are the only reason we can afford this really nice house. Now go upstairs, make nice to your new roommate, and we’ll talk more about this tomorrow.”

Jacob could only stare at his mother before finishing his second glass of water and heading back upstairs. He laid down on his bed and tried to shut his eyes and go to sleep.

“Goodnight, Sam,” he said, trying to trick his brain this was all normal. He might have fallen asleep at that point, because when he next heard a strange noise outside his room, he could feel that time had passed. His eyes snapped open and he rushed out of bed.

“Sam… is that you?” he asked into the empty room, not really expecting an answer but trying anyway.

Like he expected, there was no answer.

He started to relax, only to hear the sound of something skittering in the dark. It was above him, and since the ceiling above him was clear, then whatever it was, it was in the attic.

He grabbed a pair of sneakers, not wanting to mess up his feet with the dusty attic floor. It was the only room they still hadn’t cleaned, and they had been planning to set it up tomorrow.

He slowly climbed the stairs to the small space above. It was almost like he remembered, an empty, dusty room with a ceiling just a bit too short for most people. In fact, there was only a single thing out of place, the one thing which drew his eye.

Standing at the windowsill was a dark figure. In the dim gloom of the attic, he could barely make out a couple of shapes and animal parts he knew didn’t go together. However, before he could say or do anything, the figure leaped out the window.

He ran to the edge, and was just in time to see the figure scurry under the bushes next to the back fence which separated the backyard from the forest beyond.

Jacob rushed down to the first floor, going as quickly as he could without making a sound. He slid the glass door aside and walked out into the moonlit backyard. He glanced up and saw a full moon looking down at him.

“Of course it’s a full moon,” he mumbled while walking towards the bushes. Tonight was far too strange for it to be lit by anything other than a full moon.

Still, it was pretty useful. The full moon gave off enough light to see the bush slightly rustle in place. Whatever it was, it was still here. He approached the bush slowly, not making any sudden moves.

He stood at arm’s length from the bush, frozen but ready to burst into movement. The leaves rustled again and his hands snapped forward to part the bushes.

“Got you!” he said in an excited whisper, only for his excitement to fade as he revealed an empty bush. He wondered how it had managed to escape when he looked deeper in and saw a hole in the fence completely hidden by the bush. It was just large enough for whatever he saw to make it though. It was also just large enough for him to squeeze through.

He looked past the hole and saw some more bushes rustle. He wondered for a second if it could have been the wind, only to realize he couldn’t feel any wind on his skin, nor hear the sound of it whistling through the air.

The rustling died down as the sound began to distance itself from him.

Jacob swallowed his fear and started walking through the hole into the forest beyond.

Despite the name Oakwood, the forest was a mix of mostly slash pines and a few other trees. The thin pines surrounded him, giving him just enough visibility once he looked above the many bushes and ferns which littered the ground.

Despite his best attempts to move silently, the leaves, needles, and branches under his feet proved to be more trouble than he expected. He made crunching sounds with every step. At the very least, it helped him leave a trail for himself to make it back home. An upturned stone here, a broken branch there, it wasn’t much but it would do.

At least following whatever it was he was following wasn’t that hard. In fact, it was as bad at being sneaky as he was. It had made enough noise to wake him in the middle of the night and it was making enough noise to track it with no trouble through the woods.

The worst part for Jacob was he could tell it was trying. The noise came and went, most from the same cracking leaves and snapping branches he was stepping on.

The night air was a symphony of bug, frogs, bird calls, and other small animals. This thing’s additions sounded like someone had decided to add an air horn into the mix.

He must have walked for nearly half an hour by the time he could feel whatever it was begin to slow down. He was reminded of something he had read once. Humans weren’t the best sprinters on earth, but they were the best marathon runners. They had more endurance than any other animal, and were capable of hunting by just walking their prey to death.

A trick Jacob had just pulled off.

The mystery creature came to a stop, and he took a second to wonder if he was dreaming. The night so far certainly didn’t feel real, and a dream like this would make sense considering how boring the town of Oakwood was.

Well, if it was a dream, might as well follow it through. He reached out with his arms and parted the bushes to reveal… nothing.

He wondered where it had gone when he suddenly heard the familiar sounding of cracking leaves and snapping twigs coming from right behind him. He turned around and knew he was not dreaming. He knew his imagination couldn’t come up with anything like what was peeking out from the bush.

The first thing he noticed were the teeth, a full row of sharp, dog-like teeth. Surrounding them was a Doberman’s head with two glowing red eyes in their normal place, as well as two more glowing red eyes right behind them. Instead of fur, it was covered in glossy, black chitin, the stuff bug shells were made of. Atop its head were a pair of almost rabbit-like ears, twitching and swiveling around, almost like they were tracking him.

He gulped as both he and the monster stared at each other. The two simply stood still, waiting for the other to move.

The monster was the first to move, the leaves rustling as it began to pull the rest of its body out of them. Jacob saw legs, too many legs. Legs of too many animals which were not meant to go together like that. The exact combination he wasn’t sure, he had bolted and was already dashing though the woods.

If there was a tree root, he jumped over it. Brush and low branches were swatted to the side. Any attempt at stealth was abandoned in favor of speed, anything to put distance between him and his pursuer. And the entire time, he could hear the monster running behind him, the many legs chittering and scrambling on the ground as it tried to catch him.

He dashed through the trees, running past an old oak tree when he realized he wasn’t hearing the monster anymore. He slowed down for a second, only to hear something huge in the bushes right next to him.

He jumped, a foolish mistake.

He tripped on the exposed roots of the old tree and fell over. He winced as his knee landed on a sharp rock, scraping it badly. He held in his yells as he weathered the pain.

He got back to his feet as quickly as he could and kept on running. He ignored both the pain and blood coming out of his knee the best he could as the forest rushed past him.

None of it mattered, not the pain every time his foot hit the ground, not the small scratches on his arms from swatting branches aside, and not the incline he was running up.

He’d end up paying for that last one.

He swatted another bush aside only to realize he was at the end of the road. He had run so fast he hadn’t noticed he’d been running up a hill. He only learned it now that there was a steep drop in front of him.

Jacob tried to stop, he really did, but he was moving far too quickly. He fell as his mind went into overdrive, the world around him slowing down.

The drop wasn’t high enough to kill him, but it would hurt. He’d probably break whatever hit the ground first too. Of course, if it was one of his legs then the monster wouldn’t have much trouble catching him anyway…

He curled into a ball, hoping it would help, and shut his eyes as he braced for impact.

A whooshing sound from above got his attention. He looked upwards and saw the monster leaping off the cliff and diving right at him. His two eyes meet its four as he saw two long legs reach out and grab him. He started screaming as it pulled him up and covered him with its body.