Suckers - J.A. Konrath

"Ha-ha. Hey, Kyle, why don't you ask your dad where babies come from?"
"Daddy, where do—?"
"All right, all right, let's just watch the movie," I said. "There may be more meltings in
store!"
After the bittersweet conclusion, where a few people died, we went back downstairs. The
girls were seated in a circle, all the lights out except for a pair of flashlights, and screamed as one
when we entered the living room. It took a few minutes to translate the shrieks and giggles, but
we figured out that they were telling ghost stories.
"Have any of you heard about the Taywood house?" asked Roger.
A couple more minutes of screaming and giggling indicated that no, they had not. I had, and
in fact was the one who told Roger about it, so I sat on the couch and waited for him to
completely mess up the story.
Roger motioned for two of the girls to scoot over and make room, and then joined the circle.
He took one of the flashlights and shined it up into his face, which was supposed to make him
look eerie but really just made it look like he had a light-up nose. "Most ghost stories take place
hundreds of years ago, but not this one," he said in a spooky voice. "The Taywood house was
built a mere five years ago, by a man named Jarvis Taywood."
It was four years ago, and the man's name was Jervis, but Roger at least had the basic
concept right.
"Jarvis was a crazy old man, and less than a month after he finished the house, he killed
himself. Nobody knows why he did it, but he jumped into some molten plastic at a chair
manufacturing company. All they ever found were his shoes, sitting by the vat of plastic, with a
suicide note tucked inside. It's said that whenever you sit on a plastic chair, you may just be
sitting on old Jarvis."
That statement received several squeals of delight and disgust. It was, in fact, the truth (or,
more likely, just the correct version of a complete lie), though if I'd been telling the story I
would've changed it to a chocolate manufacturing company, so that I could end it with "And you
may have eaten him TONIGHT!"
"Anyway," Roger continued, "his family lived in the house for another year, but every once
in a while they would hear weird noises. Only at night, never during the day. Creaking footsteps
on the staircase. Whispering. And none of them could explain it, but the whole family felt like
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