Last time on the Summoning, oh my god this is so tedious.

It’s now the night of the fourth day, and Chloe asks Rae to help her do the laundry. She explains that she didn’t tell Rae about the ghost thing because she’s having trouble with the idea herself.

“Why? You can talk to the dead. How cool is that?”

This is kinda dumb, but for once, it’s accurately teenage girl dumb. Good job, book!

“If you can prove you’re seeing ghosts, why not just tell them?”
A perfectly logical question, but at the thought, some deep-rooted instinct screamed Don’t tell! Never tell!

By “instinct” she means “author puppetry”, naturally.

Chloe mumbles some stuff about it being a bad idea while she’s there, nevermind that plan a, pretend everything’s normal and get out early, is already a bust, and she has two adults who seem like they’d listen to her and pull her out.

Anyway, this excuse makes Rae suddenly agree that yes, doing nothing is indeed the best plan because Gill is boring and unimaginative. Yes, Rae, that’s the only possible reason a psychiatrist wouldn’t give you a thumbs-up to enjoy your delusions, because she’s just too narrowminded.

Chloe explains that there is a ghost downstairs but she can’t hear it properly and she thinks it’s the meds. Midway through her explanation she remembers Liz, again, and then ignores it, again. Finally, she says the ghost wanted her to open the basement door.

Her head whipped around so fast she winced and rubbed her neck.
“That door?” Her eyes glittered. “The locked basement door?”
“Yes, cliché, I know. Whoooo, don’t go into the locked room, little girl.”
Rae was already striding to the door.
I said, “I thought maybe, we could, you know, check it out. Like open it.”
“Duh, of course. I’d have done that days ago.” She jiggled the handle. “How can you live with the suspense?”

Rae, you may be an irritating special snowflake, but at least you get shit done.

Chloe says that she’s sure there’s nothing behind there anyway, just boring Christmas decorations or something they happen to not want the kids messing with. Chloe, that would be reasonable if there wasn’t A FUCKING GHOST TELLING YOU TO OPEN THE GODDAMN DOOR. You can believe you see ghosts, you can believe a ghost told you to do something, but you can’t believe in something hidden behind a fucking door? Only one of those three things is a real thing!

“The bodies of Lyle House kids who never went home …”
She grinned, but I froze, thinking of Liz.
“Geez, I’m kidding. You are such a girl.”
“No, I’ve just seen too many movies.”

I’ve never seen a girl say “you are such a girl”. And possibly this is just from living in a moderately liberal area, but I have, in fact, never heard anyone say this even around girls once past elementary school. I will fully believe it’s something one boy might say to another. But two girls?

Anyway, notice Chloe still isn’t saying something about Liz. This is because she realizes that Rae acts upon shit, and as should be obvious by this point, the thought of the plot moving is something Chloe hates.

“Another crappy lock, so easy a six-year-old with a credit card can pick it.”
“Not many six-year-olds have credit cards.”
“I bet Tori did. That’s who this house is made for.” She lifted a sponge, shook her head, and dropped it back into the box. “Rich kids whose only use for a credit card is buying a new pair of Timbs . They stick cheap locks on the doors, knowing you guys will turn the handle and say ‘huh, locked’ and walk away.”
“That’s—”
She stopped me with a look. “Unfair? Uh, that’s exactly what you did, girl.”

I’m really not sure I agree with this assessment. Plenty of poor kids are scared of getting in trouble, while plenty of rich kids are insulated from the consequences because daddy has money to pay off whoever they angered but not time to deal with them. Also, if this place services rich kids, it should have the money for expensive locks and put them on just to assure the parents that they take security seriously.

(Timbs are apparently shoes. They don’t look especially fashionable, especially not to girls like Tori. They also don’t seem especially expensive – google gets me a bunch that are all under $100, which is hardly cheap but it’s what you’d expect for a shoe.)

But whatever. Rae’s beliefs about rich kids may be of dubious accuracy, but she’s right about Chloe being lame.

Anyway, the cardboard just rips and Chloe tries to fish it out with her nails, which isn’t easy since they were cut.

When I’d woken in the hospital, my nails had been filed to the pink, like they’d been worried I’d commit suicide by scratching.

No idea if people would do this. It reminds me of how when we used to leave our cat at the vet, he’d always come back with clipped nails, which was particularly unnecessary given he never scratched. Still not sure what was up with that, it doesn’t happen with the cats now.

Chloe probably figures she’s successfully dodged plot once again, but Rae isn’t going to give up.

“We’re going to need the key,” she pronounced, straightening. “It might be on the ring with the one for the shed in the kitchen.”

…I really have to ask what on earth the point of a locked door even is if you keep the key around for anyone to use.

Chloe heads up to get it and sees Derek, who somehow knows she’s there even though she hasn’t made a sound. You know, Derek, maybe if you’d just pretended she snuck up on you she’d be a bit less freaked out all the time. Social skills.

Even more creepily, he knows about their conversation, telling her that their key is on a different ring – which, conveniently, he immediately finds for her.

“Try these.” He dropped them in my hand and walked past me to the kitchen door. “I have no idea what you guys are doing down there, but next time you want to secretly open a locked door, don’t whale on it hard enough to bring down the house.”

He must know exactly what they’re doing, because he knew she was planning to grab the first keyring when she hadn’t made a move for it yet.

“When I brought the keys downstairs, I didn’t tell Rae that Derek knew what we were up to. She might have decided to abort the plan

While I’m glad Chloe isn’t actively trying to slow the plot train here, let’s be honest, Chloe just habitually doesn’t tell anyone anything, she doesn’t do it for any particular reason.

They find an empty closet. So it’s probably a bricked up passage.

“This is weird. Who builds a closet, doesn’t put anything in it, then locks it? There’s gotta be a catch.” She rapped on the wall. “Yow! It’s concrete. Painted concrete. Scraped my knuckles good.” She touched the adjoining walls. “I don’t get it. Where’s the rest of the basement?”

I JUST SAID IT’S PROBABLY BRICKED UP PAY ATTENTION

“It’s a half basement. My aunt lived in an old Victorian place before she got sick of the renovations and moved into a condo. She said when her house was built, it didn’t have a basement at all, just a crawl space under the house. Then someone dug out a room for the laundry. She used to have real bad problems with flooding and stuff. Maybe that’s why this is empty and locked. So no one uses it.”

What the fuck. How is that more likely.

Rae asks the obvious question: what does the ghost want?

Chloe ignores this to instead say that she told Rae there wouldn’t be anything interesting in there.

Chloe also feels cold and nervous, so Rae assumes that means ghost. Chloe is stupid, so it doesn’t occur to her to try to remember if she felt like this any of the other times and just rolls with it and asks if there’s anybody there. Rae tells her to close her eyes and focus, despite the fact all the times Chloe’s seen anything it’s been with her eyes open, and Chloe just does that too. When she opens them, she sees the ghost for a second.

I saw a man dressed in a gray suit, clean shaven, wearing a fedora and horn-rimmed glasses, like someone out of the fifties.

Most boring ghost ever.

While Chloe looks around to see if she can get another flash, she bangs into a ladder hidden behind the door, which leads up to another tiny door, which leads to a crawlspace. My only associations with crawlspaces are where you stick bodies.

A musty stink billowed out.
The smell of the moldering dead.
Right. Like I knew what the dead smelled like.

Yeah, but you should know what crawlspaces smell like, since instead of my association, which I’d expect anyone familiar with horror films to share, your only connection is with your aunt’s place. Unused holes in the ground made of dirt don’t stink. There’s a reason we find certain smells repellant, and it’s because they usually bode ill.

“A dirt crawl space,” I said. “With no light switch, We’re going to need a flashlight. I saw one—”
“I know. My turn to get it.”

And there again we randomly end.

Well, at least something interesting’s happening! And maybe they’ll find Liz’s corpse and the bodies of all the other children who didn’t take their meds like they were supposed to.