On the Day I Died by Candace Fleming Read Free Book Online

justice baloney.
I
didn’t deserve my fate. I didn’t have it coming. It just happened. Death’s like that, you know? Capricious.” He paused, then laughed, a deep, rich laugh. “How’s that for an SAT vocab word, huh?
Capricious
.” He pointed. “Hey … um … what’s your name?”
    “Mike.”
    “Hey, Mike, you want to hear a capricious story?”
    Do I have a choice? thought Mike.

T HE CHICAGO STATE ASYLUM for the Insane—or what was left of it, anyway—was just six blocks from my house. The place had been abandoned so long even my dad couldn’t remember a time when it was open, and he’d lived in the neighborhood his entire life—almost fifty years! Left to decay, it was creepy as crap. Its gables and towers jutted into the stormy sky like evil fists, and its dark windows made me think of a skeleton’s eye sockets. You know, bleak and empty, but still full of secrets. Its paint peeled. Slates from its roof littered the overgrown ground. And you could hear rusting KEEP OUT signs banging whenever the wind howled.
    Oh, yeah, Dracula would have loved this place.
    So would Edgar Allan Poe.
    And me. Most definitely me. Already, I could imagine a series of my black-and-white photographs of the placehanging on the art room wall; already hear Mr. Adair, the honors art teacher, saying something like “Forlorn and intriguing, exuding a sense of transience, the ruins of the asylum are a reminder of mortality, proof that nothing is forever.”
    A+ work for sure. I’d probably even score a primo spot in the senior exhibition. And why not? A project like this would be
epic
!
    The idea had come to me the night my buddy, Aidan, and I were hanging out in his basement stuffing our faces with leftover Chinese and flipping through the cable channels. Aidan tucked a forkful of lo mein noodles into his mouth, then came to a total stop.
    “Cool,” he said, noodles dangling, “
Specter Searchers
!” He dropped the remote and reached for the soy sauce.
    We watched as a couple of so-called paranormal experts—a big-gutted guy with a face full of piercings, and a girl who could definitely have used a couple of doughnuts—stumbled around a dark basement.
    “Oooh, did you see that?” gasped the girl, whirling and shining her flashlight into a corner littered with crushed beer cans and cigarette butts.
    “It was a ghost,” declared Gut Guy, as if his saying so made it true.
    The girl rubbed her bony arms. “It’s cold,” she whimpered.
    “A cold spot,” said Gut Guy. Then, for those viewers who still might not have connected the dots, he added, “A cold spot is an indicator of paranormal activity.”
    I couldn’t stand it. “This is all a crock,” I erupted. “There aren’t any ghosts down there.”
    “They just found one, didn’t they?” Aidan said, pointing at the screen with a cold egg roll.
    “They
said
they found one. But where’s the proof—the irrefutable, scientific proof?”
    Aidan stared at me blankly. Let’s face it. He wasn’t exactly a brainiac. Still, he had other things going for him. Like his laid-back personality. Like the fact that he could put up with what some of the other kids at school called my superiority complex.
    What? I’m supposed to apologize for being smart?
    “Who needs proof?” Aidan finally said with a shrug. “Ghosts just
are
.”
    And that was when it struck me—I’d do a little urban exploration of my own! But instead of stumbling around in dark corridors and moldy basements looking for ghosts, I’d set out to prove that there was no such thing. That ghosts were merely the result of superstitious minds and tiny intellects. Urban legends created by people willing and eager to believe the unbelievable. And I knew just where I’d go—the Chicago State Asylum for the Insane.
    “You’re kidding, right?” said Aidan after I told him my idea. “That place rates like a two hundred on the haunt-o-meter!”
    I knew the stories, of course. Everyone in my