The Dead and the Dark

by Courtney Gould

  They made their way to the front door. The piano music continued, following them all the way to the rotting front porch. When Ashley pressed the door open, the music stopped, replaced by the groan of old wood under their feet. The inside of the cabin looked less surreal than the outside; the floor was littered with beer cans, spent cigarettes, and dusty footprints. The walls were etched with names. A ratty gray sofa was pressed into the corner of the main room, and beside it, a dirt-stained cloth covered what Logan assumed was a piano. She didn’t need to uncover it to know it hadn’t been played in years. She’d have been surprised if it could still make music at all.

  “What is this?” Logan asked.

  Ashley paced along the main room, running her fingertips along the walls. “I don’t really know. John found it when we were in eighth grade. It was on one of his dad’s maps. We started coming out here on weekends so our parents wouldn’t find us.”

  Logan nodded. “Tristan came here, too?”

  “Yeah.”

  Logan turned to the window facing the lake. Fragments of broken glass littered the dirt outside, catching specks of white sunlight. Down the bank, Lake Owyhee ebbed at the shore. This place was beautiful once. Logan could almost picture it.

  Behind her, Ashley gasped.

  She faced the front of the room, staggered like she meant to run. Her eyes were fixed on the empty space in front of her.

  “What’s—”

  “Shhh,” Ashley hissed. “Do you not hear that?”

  Logan listened, but aside from the standard sounds of the woods and the cabin, she heard nothing. Ashley’s eyes were wide with fear. She backed up slowly until her shoulders met the wall.

  “They’re coming inside.”

  “Who?” Logan whispered.

  Ashley looked at Logan, blue eyes teary with panic. She turned back to face the door, and her expression changed from fear to confusion. “It’s … your dad?”

  It was Logan’s turn to be confused. She watched the front door, following Ashley’s gaze, but there was nothing. Not even a shadow she could mistake for a person. She heard no voices. No footsteps. It was just the forest and the cabin and the nothing.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Ashley kept staring, palms flat against the wall.

  “Ashley,” Logan tried.

  “He’s…” Ashley closed her eyes. “I’m trying to … he’s yelling at someone. He just keeps saying he doesn’t know.”

  “Who?” Logan demanded.

  “Your dad,” Ashley said again. “Oh … uh, Brandon.”

  Another handful of silent moments passed, Ashley’s glassy eyes fixed on a point in the center of the cabin. Logan closed her eyes, tried to hear, but there was nothing. “What’s happening?”

  “It sounds like someone else is talking to him, but I can’t hear them. Brandon says he’s sorry. He says he doesn’t know what to do.”

  “There’s no one here.”

  Ashley’s gaze snapped to Logan. “You have to see him. There’s no way it’s just…”

  Logan stared at the entrance to the cabin, but it was empty. Her stomach sank. The whole cabin was empty. There was no way someone was in this cabin and she couldn’t see them. This wasn’t the kind of thing that happened in real life. Invisible people were the kind of thing that happened on a filler episode of ParaSpectors when they didn’t have the budget for special effects.

  Logan swallowed. “What’s he doing now?”

  “Just standing there.” Ashley said. She narrowed her eyes. “It’s like he’s listening. Not to us. He says they have to go. He says…” She paused and looked at Logan. “… He says people will find out. He says no one can find the body.”

  “What?” Logan asked. “What body?”

  “I don’t know,” Ashley said. “I’m just repeating—”

  She went silent again.

  Logan sank to the sofa and closed her eyes and listened, but there was nothing.

  “You really can’t see this?” Ashley asked.

  “No, I can’t see it,” Logan snapped. “I can’t tell if you’re … is this a prank? There’s no way this is real.”

  Ashley shook her head. “I can’t really see him anymore.”

  Logan pressed her face into her palms. The cabin spun around her. It was like she was stuck in a nightmare again. This had to be a joke, some ruse to make fun of her, but Logan couldn’t understand the punch line.

  “He’s gone,” Ashley murmured. “I don’t understand. I—”

  “Who was he talking to?” Logan asked quickly. “My dad?”

  “I don’t know.” Ashley ran a shaking hand through her ponytail. “I don’t know what I saw. I don’t—”

  Logan checked her phone, but they were miles from service. She wanted to ask Alejo about this. She needed real answers, not Ashley’s I don’t knows.

  “Do you think your dad is the one who lived here?” Ashley asked. “He said something about ‘the house.’”

  “Here?” Logan gestured to the ruined living room. “This place has been abandoned for decades at least. There’s no way he lived here.”

  “Then why would he be here?”

  “It wouldn’t make any sense to live here,” Logan said. “It’s miles from anything. It’s completely isolated. He’d be completely…”

  “… alone,” Ashley finished.

  Ashley joined Logan on the sofa. They sat in silence, Logan with her face in her hands and Ashley facing the front door. The breeze through the cabin was colder now, though Logan suspected that was because of the anxiety churning in her gut. Brandon had been right when he said that things in Snakebite were wrong. But the disappearance, the ghosts, they weren’t supposed to involve him. She came out here with Ashley to clear Brandon’s name, not tie him to the mystery.

  First Ashley had seen the ghost of her boyfriend. Now she’d seen Brandon. It would be impossible to convince her the two weren’t connected.

  “What do we do now?” Logan asked.

  Ashley leaned back. Her hands still shook. She looked out the cabin window and closed her eyes. “You come with me. We have … a lot to talk about.”

  12

  Herd Of Black Sheep

  They drove back to Snakebite in silence.

  Ashley led Logan into the Chokecherry, Snakebite’s one and only pub. She wondered how the Chokecherry looked to an outsider. She’d grown up ogling the walls packed with old records and toy trains and football jerseys and acoustic guitars. It smelled like wing sauce and grease, the air coated in a film of oily kitchen heat. Pictures of cattle farms and rusty tractors were nailed haphazardly into the wood paneling. An old shotgun was mounted behind the bar, complete with gold antlers engraved on the handle. There wasn’t a building in Snakebite that was more quintessentially Snakebite. The history of their little town was recorded here in piles of memorabilia.

  Today, the pub was empty, which was unsurprising on a weekday. The sky outside careened toward dusk, and Ashley’s stomach moaned for some old-fashioned bar food. They slipped into an old vinyl booth, Logan on one side and Ashley on the other. Gus—the Chokecherry’s owner, bartender, waiter, and janitor—made his way to their booth with a notepad in his hand.

  “Hey, Gus,” Ashley said. “Just the Black Butte and some fries.”

  Gus nodded and turned to Logan, who looked from Ashley to Gus and back again like the whole setup was a trap. Finally, she took a look at the menu and cleared her throat. “Uh, I’ll have the drink she said, plus some wings? And can I get those to go?”

  “No, she’s staying,” Ashley said. She still had a thousand questions, and Logan wasn’t leaving until she got some answers. “Everything is for here. I’ll pay.”

  Gus eyed Logan. “You over twenty-one?”

  “… Yes?” Logan tried.

  Gus shrugged and made his way back to the kitchen, leaving them alone. Never in the history of the Chokecherry had Gus actually checked someone’s ID. It was an unspoken rule—every teen in Snakebite ca
me here for cheap beer and fries, and as long as they promised not to drive and paid their check in full, Gus had no problem serving. The police in Snakebite didn’t care, and the type of police who did care would never set foot in a town this far from civilization.

  Logan settled into her side of the booth. She wore her discomfort plain on her face, and Ashley wasn’t sure if it was the bar or the ghosts or that she just didn’t want to be here with the girl who’d just told her that her father’s ghost had rattled off a bunch of incriminating things. She couldn’t blame Logan if it was all of the above. A Johnny Cash song blared from the jukebox across the pub. A gnat buzzed by Ashley’s ear.

  She leaned forward until Logan met her eyes. “I think we should talk about—”

  “Yeah, I know,” Logan snapped. “I just … can I have some time to, like, process?”

  “Sure, yeah,” Ashley said. She looked at the etched tabletop and studied the woodgrain. “I’m freaked out, too. I’m the one who saw it. I guess I’m just confused. I mean, your dad isn’t dead.”

  “Right.”

  “So that’s two now.”

  Logan arched a brow.

  “Two ghost-spirit things I’ve seen of people that aren’t dead.”

  “Two?”

  “Tristan,” Ashley clarified. “This means he’s probably alive.”

  Logan pressed her face into her palms and dragged her fingertips down her face, stretching the skin under her eyes. “It doesn’t make any sense. I am so confused.”

  Ashley was confused, too. Seeing and hearing Tristan was one thing, but this was something else entirely. Tristan was only a glimpse. He was moments of familiarity, there and gone as quick as a flash of lightning. Seeing Logan’s dad was real. He’d been so lifelike it seemed impossible that Logan didn’t see him, too. Brandon Woodley had been there in the cabin, standing in front of her. She could’ve reached out and touched him if she hadn’t been so afraid.

  “Your dads never said anything about the cabin before?” Ashley asked.

  A shadow passed over Logan’s expression. Ashley got the sense that she’d stepped on loose terrain. She didn’t know much about Brandon Woodley or Alejo Ortiz. She didn’t know anything about who they were before they left Snakebite, or who they were now. Why they’d disappeared for so many years. She ran her thumbnail along a crack in the table, searching for the right words.

  Ashley leaned in. “I just wanna understand what I saw.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’m not gonna tell anyone about it. If that’s what you’re worried about. It’s probably good we saw it, though. If someone else saw what we saw—”

  “—what you saw,” Logan clarified.

  “—they might think it looked bad.”

  Logan’s eyes narrowed. “Are you blackmailing me?”

  “Oh my god, no.” Ashley ran a hand through her ponytail. “I just meant, could you tell me a little more about him? Both of your dads, actually. You know more than anyone else.”

  “I didn’t even know they were from here until a few months ago.” Logan rolled her eyes. “Why are you asking? So you can go snitch? I know they didn’t kill anyone.”

  The door to the kitchen swung open, effectively ending the argument. Gus placed their food and drinks on the table and disappeared back into the kitchen. Ashley stared at her fries in silence. She didn’t want to be friends with Logan, but they both had a stake in this. They both needed answers. Logan tentatively took a sip of beer and her nose wrinkled up; apparently she was put off by the taste. She slid it away and folded her arms.

  “I’m not gonna snitch,” Ashley said. “No one would believe me, anyway.”

  “They’d believe you more than my dads.” Logan picked apart one of her wings, delicately avoiding getting sauce on her fingers. “Everyone already hates us. It wouldn’t even be that much of a stretch. They’d be happy you gave them a reason.”

  Ashley frowned. It was a fair point.

  “I don’t want a killer. A killer means that Tristan’s…” Ashley pointed at Logan with a fry. “We want the same thing. We just want things to go back to normal.”

  “Normal,” Logan scoffed.

  Ashley rolled her eyes. “I’m not blackmailing you.”

  “Sure.”

  “You really don’t like me, do you?”

  Logan stopped dissecting her wings and looked up. “It’s not personal. I hate literally everyone in this town.”

  “It feels a little personal.”

  “Probably because you’re used to everyone liking you.”

  Ashley huffed. “I’m not … never mind.”

  Logan cleared her throat and smiled. “So, what’s next in the investigation? We know the cabin is haunted. It’s maybe connected to your boyfriend.”

  Ashley frowned. “We find out more about the cabin, I guess. I can ask my mom. You ask your dads about it, too. Once we figure out what it is, we can plan next steps. We should definitely go back, though.”

  The bell on the Chokecherry’s front door rang and Ashley froze. Fran and John strode in, eyes locked on Ashley’s table like they were on a mission. Ashley looked for Paul trailing behind them, but for the first time since she could remember, they were alone. Logan turned around and eyed Fran and John with casual interest.

  “Ashley,” Fran said, leaning onto their table. “Where have you been? I texted you, like, a million times this morning. Are you feeling better?”

  Ashley smiled. “Sorry, it’s been a weird day.”

  “Apparently.” Fran shot a skeptical look at Logan. “I’m Fran, and this is John.”

  “Yeah, we’ve met,” Logan said coolly. “Heard you were missing a bikini top.”

  Fran flushed. She turned back to Ashley and snatched a french fry off her plate. “Looks like you’re almost done. You can give us a ride home.”

  “I…” Ashley looked to Logan.

  Logan shrugged. “I’ll be fine. Just give me your number and we’ll meet up later.”

  Ashley tapped her phone number into Logan’s phone, then followed Fran and John into the night.

  The air was warm and sweet outside the Chokecherry. On most summer nights, the dry wind down the main road smelled like barbecued meat and whiskey, but tonight it carried the strange, pungent musk of grief, too.

  Ashley climbed into the driver’s seat of the Ford, and John and Fran both crawled into the back seat. She felt uncomfortably like a chauffeur. Fran playfully shoved John, and he shoved her back before slipping his hand into hers. They laughed, quiet and warm, and the whole display punched Ashley in the stomach. It was stupid to be jealous, but she wasn’t sure what else to be.

  “So, is this a thing now?” Ashley asked.

  Fran cleared her throat. “Yeah, uh, I guess it is. We made it official last night. I should’ve told you.”

  “I don’t know. Ash didn’t tell you she was hanging out with what’s-her-name,” John noted.

  They pulled away from the Chokecherry, away from the buildings on Main Street into the unlit rows of houses along the lake. The Ford rumbled in the night and Ashley kept quiet. She should care about Fran’s dating life, but her thoughts were snagged on the cabin. On the ghosts. On Logan.

  “You’re lucky we saved you.” Fran laughed. “God, your face. You have that face you do when you’re pretending to listen, where your eyes get all wide. You were doing it so bad talking to what’s-her-face.”

  “I was not. She’s actually kind of interesting.”

  “You’re just too nice,” Fran said. “We were randomly walking by and I was like, John, oh my god, she’s way too nice for this. She doesn’t know how to leave. We have to rescue her.”

  “And we did,” John added. “You’re welcome, Barton.”

  Ashley was glad they were shrouded in dark, because she was sure the face she made would start a fight. She wasn’t sure what was happening to her. Ashley Barton didn’t start fights. She didn’t argue with people. She didn’t have meltdowns in the woods.

&
nbsp; They kept driving until they came to John Paris’s house. It was a squat, green house that fit neatly between two identical houses in different colors. John climbed out of the back seat and made his way to the door, but Fran walked quietly to the driver’s side window.

  “Hey,” she whispered. “You know I love you.”

  Ashley smiled. “Thanks. Love you, too.”

  “I know you’ve got a lot going on. All of this … is it still Tristan?”

  Ashley looked out the windshield. It was Tristan in a way that she couldn’t explain. It wasn’t just that he was missing. He was still here, lingering like a shadow at her every step. It was that she was seeing things she shouldn’t be able to, and no one would believe her if she tried to explain it.

  No one but Logan, and Logan was a whole different problem.

  “I don’t want you to feel left out ’cause of me and John,” Fran continued. “Like, you’re my everything. You and Tristan were such goals. I remember looking at you and him and thinking I had to find something like that.” Fran ran her shoe through the gravel at the side of the road. “We’re gonna find him and get him back. But…”

  Ashley cleared her throat. “But if we don’t find him.”

  “… if we don’t find him, or if something happened to him. I don’t know—you’re my best friend. Are you gonna be okay again?”

  Ashley blinked at the porch light. It was a fair question, but it struck a place in her that felt like an endless pit. She felt for an answer, but there was only this dark, empty feeling. She put on a smile. “I’ll be fine eventually. Just … give me some time.”

  Fran nodded. “Yeah … I mean, yeah, of course. It really sucks. But I’m here for you no matter what.”

  “I think I just need something to feel normal again,” Ashley said. She pursed her lips. An idea bloomed in the back of her mind. She could hit two birds with one stone—get more investigating done without disappearing on Fran and the others. She could still make this whole thing work. “We should do something at the cabin. Like we used to.”

  “That sounds really fun.”