Bad Blood

by Carly Anne West

  Fear is an excellent motivator, though, and the smells and the sounds around me are unnerving enough to bring me back to consciousness.

  Unsteady but on my feet, I blink hard a few times, then rub my eyes to try to bring them back into focus. Through the rhythmic pounding of my head, my vision slowly pulls into focus, and to my surprise, I can actually see through this darkness, if only a little. The walls are dark and slick looking, and slightly domed as though in the shape of a tube rather than the rectangle of a normal hallway.

  This is no hallway, though.

  The center of the narrow ground appears to come together at an angle, and in the middle is what at first looks like an oil slick. I bend to touch it and discover it’s just water, but if I could see it better, I’m sure it would be brackish. I can feel its graininess. It doesn’t run like a river. It merely sits.

  The walls around me are close.

  Too close.

  I try to look up, to see where I fell from, but the ceiling and whatever looms above ten feet is the only thing I can’t see at all. It’s one giant shadow.

  I have two choices: to turn around and walk into the dark, or to move forward toward a small, glowing light in the distance.

  I choose the light, moving as swiftly as I dare with my head still swimming and my ears still ringing.

  I’m practically on top of the wall before I see it, and when I do, I realize I’m at a T in the road, an option to turn right or left.

  It’s almost immediately to my left that I see the lantern.

  The dome where the light emanates from is cracked and dimming, but there’s no doubt in my mind that this is the camping lantern that I last saw in my grandparents’ office up above. Though it wasn’t cracked before.

  There wasn’t a dark red smear along the glass, which has dried to a crusted brown.

  Without a doubt, there was not, lying right beside it, an open wallet.

  I stoop to pick up the billfold, working hard to steady my hand. There, behind the little plastic window of the wallet is a driver’s license, the smiling, affable face of Ike Gershowitz staring up at me.

  On the little plastic window is a fingerprint, stamped in dried blood.

  I look down at the deep scrape on my shin, wanting nothing more than to see it dripping blood, but whatever was there before has crusted over now. There’s zero chance that the blood on Mr. Gershowitz’s wallet is mine.

  I don’t want to remember the conversations I’ve overheard. I’d do anything not to remember.

  I’m telling you, things are happening. Strange things, like before …

  They were so deep into the woods, even the police couldn’t believe they’d gotten that far …

  They were so freaked, they couldn’t even talk …

  All I’m saying is, you’d have to be crazy to go into these woods alone …

  I look down at the wallet again. A thin, high whine drifts on the dank air from somewhere I can’t see—somewhere at the other end of the tunnel.

  Then, without warning, the last of the light seeps from the broken lantern.

  Leaving me alone in the dark, a bloody wallet from a missing man in my hand, and a howl at my back.

  My stomach tightens, and a cry fills the air. When my throat starts to burn, I realize it’s me who is screaming.

  CARLY ANNE WEST is the author of the YA novels The Murmurings and The Bargaining. She holds an MFA in English and Writing from Mills College and lives with her husband and two kids near Portland, Oregon. Visit her at carlyannewest.com.

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  First printing 2020

  Cover design by Heather Daugherty

  Cover art by Tim Heitz

  Interior art by Artful Doodlers Ltd.

  e-ISBN 978-1-338-60866-3

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