One Hundred Candles [2] by Mara Purnhagen Read Free Book Online Page B

watched Bliss with the same solemn expression. I wondered how long they had been assembled here, telling their stories. It had to take hours to get through a hundred of them.
    “One of the coaches came by to tell us the game was cancelled,” Bliss continued. “He came in a different door than we had, so he passed by the bookshelves where we had heard the noises. He got upset. He started yelling at us about how we should respect school property. We had no idea what he was talking about, of course.”
    Bliss looked around the circle. “As we were leaving, we saw what he meant. There were books lying all over the floor between the stacks. Books that had come from some of the top shelves. And none of us had been anywhere near those shelves.”
    I thought Bliss was trying too hard to make her voice sound dramatic, but other people nodded and seemed impressed.
    “But the really weird thing was that all of the books were open and turned to page fifty-five.”
    She lit her candle. I counted the remaining votives. There were eleven left, and I was glad we had arrived so late in the game. Sitting around coming up with stories was tough, but listening to a hundred? No, thanks.
    The next few anecdotes involved incidents I’d heard about a thousand times. A boy claimed that he could hear a baby crying in the basement of his uncle’s house. A girl felt like someone was following her up a staircase where she worked. Others knew people who had witnessed wispy white ghosts or felt cold spots in otherwise warm rooms.
    As I listened, I automatically debunked these stories in my head. Most of them were caused by the environment where they took place. Old paint and different kinds of mold could trigger intense hallucinations or strong feelings in otherwise normal, healthy people. Bad wiring and electrical problems also contributed to unexplained anxiety or even the sensation that someone was standing close by. And nine times out of ten, cold spots were simply drafts that no one had detected before. I had helped my parents with literally thousands of investigations, and over ninety percent of the time, there was nothing truly paranormal about what was happening, even if it seemed really spooky. Of course, it only took one seriously supernatural incident to shake you to the bones.
    Soon, only two candles remained. No one was volunteering, and I guessed it was because they’d already exhausted every story they knew. Gwyn had jokingly called us “fresh victims,” but, as the silence stretched, I knew that everyone was counting on us to come up with the final two tales.
    I pulled a candle toward me and described a memory from when I was younger and we lived in an old Victorian-era house. “The rocking chair would move by itself, like someone was sitting there,” I explained. “It happened all the time, usually right after dinner.”
    As I lit my candle, I wondered if I had broken the rules of the game. I had told the truth, but Gwyn had asked for stories of the unexplained, and honestly, the rocking chair wasn’t totally paranormal. According to my parents, it moved because of residual energy. People who had lived in the house long before us had probably owned a rocking chair. Someone had likely sat in that chair every day after dinner for years, until the basic, repetitive act of rocking became its own kind of energy, and that energy imprinted itself upon the house. There was no human spirit residing in our living room, merely a thread of the past replaying itself over and over.
    One candle remained. I was ready for the game to be over so we could turn on all the lights and go back across the street to celebrate the New Year. We’d been sitting in the circle for about an hour, and I was more than ready to get up, stretch my legs and even return to the noise and chaos of Harris’s house. It would feel normal, at least, to cram myself into a packed living room instead of listening to the quiet fears of others.
    I was about to get it over