At ten minutes to midnight on April 30 - Walpurgisnacht, the witch haunted night of dark magic and revelry - Lucy Loud stole into the darkened kitchen, fetched a shaker of salt from the pantry, and crept back to her room, quiet as a shadow. Feeble candlelight flickered across the walls and cold droplets of April rain sluiced down the window pane like beads of blood. Lynn's bed, vacated five years ago when its occupant dribbled her way into a basketball scholarship at Duke, was shoved against the wall to give Lucy more space. Lucy, nineteen, had been alone in here for nearly six years, but she could never quite get used to how empty it was without Lynn's boundless energy. When she was around, the room seemed cramped, like the inside of a coffin. Now, it was big, massive, and every noise Lucy made echoed.

That wasn't to say that Lucy didn't enjoy it, she did. Before Lynn went to college, she had no privacy and couldn't conduct many of the rituals she read about in the arcane texts she found online. She could perform the more basic ones, but not the more advanced ones...the ones that called for animal sacrifice or for her to strip naked. If she tried, Lynn would walk in on her.

As soon as Lynn was gone, she began to indulge in all the forbidden practices that she couldn't before; She knelt nude in the middle of pentagrams and read Latin love letters to Satan, drove daggers into the hearts of small mammals she took from the woods, and mixed bubbling cauldrons that smelled like rot and ruin. She no longer had to seek out dark places to hide herself in, which was wicked, since they was no longer a little girl and couldn't fit into many of her old haunts. Like the vents. She used to love sitting in the vents with a good book. Now, at 5'7 and 120 pounds, she was way too big.

Sigh.

But that was okay. She had the room to herself and most of her siblings had left home, meaning there were fewer chances of one bothering her. Lana, now seventeen, was busy working part time at the pet store and dating her redneck boyfriend Stuart; Lola was on every cheer squad Royal County High had to offer and hung out with her bitchy friends in the rare moments she wasn't shaking pom-poms like an idiot; Lisa was Lisa and hardly ever came out of her lab; and Lily spent most of her time drawing, playing video games, and talking to some boy on the phone. Each one of Lucy's sisters interrupted her from time to time, but only from time to time. In the old days, it was every couple minutes: Luan pulling pranks, Lynn wanting to play ball, Luna looking for someone to listen to her latest song.

It was really maddening after a while.

With Lincoln, Lynn, Luan, Luna, Leni, and Lori out of the house, it was peaceful. Sometimes too peaceful. If Lucy were honest with herself, she missed her siblings. There was always something happening when they lived at home, always some kind of adventure or activity. Over the past eleven years, as they dropped out one-by-one and the younger sisters matured, life faded from the Loud house by degrees. Now, home only to four teenagers and one tween, it was a shadow of its former self, a mausoleum of solitude haunted by the memory of yelling voices, running feet, and children's laughter.

As cool and morbid as that sounded in principle, in practice, it was meh. Lucy loved her alone time, but every once in a while, she wanted to be around people. When she was a kid, she would set whatever book she was reading aside and make an excuse to go downstairs and hang out. She couldn't do that anymore because the living room nowadays was just as empty as her bedroom. Mom and Dad were usually parked on the couch watching whatever primetime sitcoms were on, but everyone else was either gone or concentrating on their own affairs.

In all truthfulness...it got lonely.

At least Lucy had the dead to chill with.

Kneeling in the middle of the room, Lucy upended the salt shaker and drew a giant pentagram on the carpet. Next, she took a black candle from the nightstand and sat it in the middle. She slipped her spellbook from its spot between the mattress and the box spring, sat it in her lap, and opened its cracked, leather bound cover. The pages were yellow and brittle with age and the type was flowery, eloquent, hand-lettered loops and swirls bespeaking a bygone age. Detailed illustrations accompanied each spell: A ram-headed creature here, a levitating woman there. Lucy flipped to the very end, stopping only when she came across a picture of a woman kneeling before a pentagram much the same way she herself was now. A spirit hovered over the pentagram, its wide eyes and open mouth putting Lucy in mind of Munch's The Scream.

She glanced at the clock on the bedside table. Two minutes to midnight. There was a heavy metal song by that title. Luna played it for her once and Lucy added it to her playlist because It talked about demons and other cool stuff.

Outside, wind-driven rain lashed the house. The walls gave an eerie creak and the eaves moaned in a ghostly voice. Lucy brushed her bangs out of her face, then pulled her hair into a ponytail and tied it off with a red hair tie that she slipped off of her wrist.

One minute.

Rocking forward on her knees, Lucy scanned the text and began to read.

"Spiritus, videte mea vocant

Ego praecipio tibi redire in terra viventium

Transire per velum mortis

Spiritus, veni ad me

Spiritus, nunc!"

The wind grew louder, shrieking in the night, and a cold draft swept the room, the flames swaying and snuffing out. A thrumming vibration spread through the floor and icy rain pelted the window. The voice of the storm swelled like a chorus of night things welcoming the advent of something foul, and Lucy's heartbeat sped up, her breath puffing out in front of her in tiny wisps of white. The house began to shake and a cone of otherworldly blue light shot up from the candle in the center of the pentagram. It made a perfect circle on the ceiling but touched nothing else. Lucy swallowed thickly and stared up into it, tensing when she realized it teemed with shadows like a colony of mold in a petri dish.

Wind howled, thunder crashed, lightning split the night. Lucy's breath caught and her heart slammed in dread expectation. She had summoned spirits before, but none this powerful. Whatever was coming through, it was strong.

Damn it. She should have stuck to raising Grandma Harriet.

The wind reached a crashing crescendo...then, all at once, it died. Like throwing a switch, everything stopped: The thunder cut mid-boom, the rain slackened, and the light winked out, leaving the room in total darkness.

Lucy was rooted in place, the frenzied tempo of her blasting heart echoing through her skull. Her breathing came in short, ragged gasps and goosebumps raked her arms. She fumbled for her phone, found it, and opened the flashlight app. Dust motes swirled in the beam like snow, and something moved in the corner of her eyes. She jerked her head in that direction, but saw nothing.

Getting ahold of herself, she got up, crossed to the door, and flipped the switch, flooding the room with harsh white light. She was vaguely aware that she was shaking and that the hairs on the back of her neck were standing up. The air crackled with static electricity like the atmosphere before a thunderstorm, and the shadows teeming beneath her bed seemed to tremble with unholy life. She tingled all over with the creeping feeling of being watched and her ears suddenly hissed with white noise; she was certain that if she listened closely, she would hear the whispering voices of phantoms desperate to pass along messages of love and well-wishes to their families.

She wasn't alone.

She could feel a presence all around her as surely as if she were standing in the middle of a raucous crowd. She darted her eyes from nook to cranny, but didn't see anything. She wouldn't, though, she reckoned.

"H-Hello?" she asked. Her voice came as a broken croak, and the way it echoed sent shivers down her spine.

Nothing answered.

"Hello?" she asked again, firmer this time.

No reply.

Clutching her phone to her chest the way a superstitious peasant might a crucifix, she took a tentative step toward the bed.

When nothing rushed out at her, she took a deep breath and forced herself on. She knelt next to the bed, leaned over, and shined the flashlight underneath. She half-expected to be met by a pair of shining red eyes and long, razor sharp fangs. Instead, the space was deserted save for her winter boots and a cardboard box stuffed with paperbacks. She waited a moment, just in case something decided to show, then got to her knees.

Getting bolder, she checked the rest of the room, starting with under Lynn's bed and ending with the closet; she moved jackets, shirts, and dresses like Moses parting the Red Sea, but found nothing out of the way. No monsters. No monster tracks. No monster droppings. Not even the tiniest speck of ectoplasm. Her anxiety lessened by degrees until she was entirely calm. She sank onto the edge of her bed and looked around the room like a small animal feeling the air with its whiskers.

The presence was gone.

If it had been there at all.

She took a deep, hitching breath and let it out through her nose. "I should probably not do that again," she mused aloud. She glanced at the bust of Edwin the Vampire; he sat upon her dresser and regarded her with soulless eyes. Edwin had been her constant companion since she was a girl, and though she had outgrown him in many ways, she could not bring herself to get rid of him. "Don't tell anyone, okay?" she asked.

Edwin did not reply.

"Thanks," she said.

Standing, she undressed and slipped into an oversized white T-shirt. Unbeknownst to her, something watched from beneath her bed. Then, turning away, it disappeared into the outlet. As a spark of electricity, it moved along the wires, not knowing where it was going and not caring. At long last, after so many years trapped between worlds like a fly between two window panes, it was back in the land of love and sunshine. It could not recall who it had been or just how long it had waited in the chilly darkness, but it knew that it certainly had once lived: The things it saw were familiar though indefinably different, like an old friend's face seen after decades apart. Memory flickered on the edges on its being like firelit shadows, but none broke free and presented themselves. The entity did not know its name or its nature, its sex or its creed, but none of those things mattered.

The only thing that did was this: It lived. In some way, shape, form, or state, it lived, and some way, it could be human again.

Zapping with joy, it wormed its way toward faint and distant light.

It emerged through another outlet in the next bedroom over. It paused and observed. A table laden with beakers, tubes, and other equipment stood against one wall and a girl with messy brown hair sat at a computer terminal, the soft blue glow emanating from the screen skimming the lenses of her Coke bottle glasses. Her acne splotched face was devoid of emotion and her nostrils gently flared as she took conscious sips of air. She was about fifteen or sixteen and clad in a white lab coat over a green turtleneck sweater. Her tiny breasts made hardly an outline and her stomach stuck ever so slightly over the waistband of her maroon pants, suggesting a sedentary lifestyle. Her fingers, nails clear and unvarnished, flew across the keyboard and her eyes scanned the screen as though text were flashing by at breakneck speeds and if she didn't follow along she would fall behind.

The entity slithered out of the socket as an invisible whiff of energy and floated toward her.

Lisa Loud sat back from her computer with a sigh and ran her fingers through her tangled hair. It was past midnight by the clock in the lower right hand corner of the screen, and she had been reading lines of code for nearly three hours straight. A pinprick of pain smoldered in the center of her forehead and her grainy eyes throbbed like twin hearts gripped in cardiac arrest. Her lumbar region ached, her buttocks itched from being sat upon for so long, and her stomach rumbled emptily. She drew a deep, cumbersome breath and realized the room was hot, the air stagnant. Fat beads of sweat dotted her upper lip and when she scratched her scalp, her hair was damp. When she was engrossed in something, the world shrank away and she entered a hazy sort of mental fugue wherein she became blind and deaf to her surroundings. A fire could break out behind her and she would be none the wiser until the flames began to lick the nape of her neck. Hours passed like seconds and hours passed as minutes.

Her siblings disparagingly referred to it as "blackout mode" and while that phrase annoyed her, it was an apt designation, for she did, in a way, black out. The others teased her for it and she was acutely aware of her brain's singularity, but her mind worked the way it worked and there was nothing she could do about it.

Not that she wished to. She was perfectly content with herself.

That wasn't to say she didn't have flaws and didn't like certain aspects of her character. Everyone has traits they aren't fond of, and despite her vastly superior intellect, she was no different. For one, she wished she could better connect with her contemporaries. Among her peers, she was, and had always been, an outcast. She placed no value on the things her classmates did, nor did she share their interests. Other girls her age busied themselves with fashion, make-up, and boy bands whilst she was consumed with the same burning thirst for knowledge that had plagued her since her earliest years. And plague was the perfect word to describe it, for sometimes it felt almost like a burden. The devices and mechanizations of the universe fascinated her, and she was saddled with the need to explore, observe, and understand them. Lana often said that her head was lodged within her posterior (only she used more pedestrian language) and perhaps it was. She had no social life to speak of, few friends, and concerned herself with things that, for all intents and purposes, were knowable only to herself.

She acted as though these things did not bother her, but they secretly did. She was what one might call a "brainiac" but she was also human, and human beings are social creatures. She had never been able to establish a strong bond with anyone, not even her siblings, and that left her feeling a curious sense of unfulfillment. She loved her brother and sisters, and they loved her (even if they did mercilessly lambast her), however there existed a schism between them. They did not speak the same tongue nor were their customs alike. They were cultures divided and if she pondered the matter much, it would begin to trouble her. The only person to whom she felt any real kinship was David, her classmate. His pursuits and occupations were in line with her own and they understood each other in a way that no one else did.

That brought her to her second major flaw.

Over the past several years, her body had undergone a powerful chemical chain reaction to which the unsightly blemishes on her face bore damning testimony. Her physiology sustained radical alterations and she found herself suffering from an affliction that she knew she would one day endure, but did not fully understand even after much scholarly research.

In short, she had entered puberty and, to borrow a phrase that Lana used in relation to her experience with math, it was kicking her ass. The most notable change to her body was, of course, its shape. Her hips had widened, her chest was full, and her rear had assumed a gentle and feminne curve. She was, in other words, decidedly female, and thus bore all the attendant characteristics of her gender. The lining of her uterus shedded once a month and expelled from her vagina in the form of blood and tissue, dark hair grew in the junction of her thighs, and she was prone to thoughts of a certain nature. Sexual thoughts.

All of that was perfectly normal for a girl transitioning to womanhood and did not especially vex her (though she loathed the emotional rollercoaster she went through every time she mensutrated). What did perturb her was his damned acne. Her face resembled a blasted martian landscape, and no matter how much she scrubbed, the pimples, blackheads, and cysts remained.

Lisa had never been vain, but looking into the mirror disheartened her, for the acne was abominable.

What truly discomposed her, however, were the fluttery feelings that cropped up every time she was around David. To be short: She was infatuated with him.

That in of itself wasn't worrisome - even cerebral titans sample the sweet wine of love and lust - but her incompetence was. Lisa was not an emotional person and the thought of approaching David as a potential love interest made her wholly uncomfortable. What would she even say? Were she to do it, what method would be the correct one? The only thing she could do was be blunt - the intricacies of flirting and subtly were lost on her - but when she played such a scenario out in her mind, it always felt awkward.

Were the circumstances different, she would pronounce it hopeless and move onto something else, but she couldn't. She was quite fond of David. Being around him made her feel as though a kaleidoscope of butterflies had nested in her stomach, and just thinking about him brought a smile to her face. To be frank: She wanted him as her boyfriend.

She was stuck for how to proceed, and if she were honest with herself, she was uneasy at the prospect of him rejecting her. She had been friends with David for years and knew all too well what his type of woman was: Pretty, petite, and feminine.

Like Lindsey Sweetwater.

David, like her, was not entirely forthcoming with his emotions, but she had seen the way he looked at Lindsey, and it turned her stomach.

She wished he would look at her that way.

Just thinking about it made her feel warm and tingly, and a sly smile crossed her lips, only to die an ignominious death because he never would. He didn't want her and why would he? She was shy, mousy, and unappealing. She was pale from spending too much time indoors, her hair was always tangled and knotted because she didn't have the patience to brush it, and her acne made her look like a pepperoni pizza.

As Lucy might say: Sigh.

Something brushed the side of her neck, and she started. She touched the spot with her fingertips, expecting a fly, but there was nothing there. Her earlobe tickled, and she scratched it, a puzzled frown puckering her lips. There was something -

That thought cut off when a tiny thing slipped into her ear, making her wince. She plunged her pinkie in to dislodge it, and all at once, a sudden wave of vertigo came over her. She felt movement deep in her ear canal, then searing heat. She hissed through her teeth and let out a pained moan that turned into a breathy cry of pain. Incomprehensible images flashed across the backs of her eyelids and pressure swelled in her skull. A loud burst of toneless sound filled her head, and for a moment, her thoughts muddled and the edges of her consciousness turned gray. She clawed at her temples and sucked air over her teeth, the images coming faster like photographs in a slideshow on cocaine. A voice not her own seemed to ring through her mind, and for a second, she had the strangest sense of wrongness, as though she were someone or somewhere she shouldn't be.

As quickly as it started, it was over.

Shaking and panting, Lisa threaded her fingers through her hair and caught her breath. She creaked one eye open and before her, the screen blurred, then swam into focus. She sat up straight, and the room swayed drunkenly from side to side, nearly spilling her out of her chair. She gripped the arms of her chair and held on for dear life.

Something was wrong.

When the room was still, she pushed herself up on watery legs and held onto the desk for support. She bowed her head and took a series of deep breaths in an attempt to regain control of her faculties. When she trusted herself to stand unassisted, she pushed away from the desk and nearly fell.

Some outside force seemed to guide her to her bed, and she was powerless to do anything but let it lead her. She flopped face first on the mattress, and instantly, she began to drift. Unseen hands reached up from the darkness, laid hold of her, and pulled her down. She kicked, fought, and thrashed, panic clutching her chest, but they were too strong. They dragged her into the void, and slowly, she faded.

Was she dying?

Is this what dying was like?

She tried to push herself up, but it was no use.

And after a while, Lisa Loud knew no more.