The Dead and the Dark

by Courtney Gould

  Logan cast a glance at Ashley. She stared into the trees, but her gaze was unfixed. She idly ran her fingers through the end of her ponytail without a word.

  Logan inched closer. “Are you feeling okay?”

  “What?” Ashley blinked to life. “Oh, yeah. I don’t know. I feel like something’s weird today.”

  “Yeah,” Logan mused. She turned to Elexis. “Nick didn’t wanna come with? I figured you guys were like a two-for-one kind of deal.”

  Elexis frowned. “I think he got grounded for going to that party.”

  Logan sucked in a breath. “Yikes.”

  She pulled the ThermoGeist reader from her bag and smacked it until it turned on. She’d never actually held this one before, but she’d watched Alejo fire it up on TV a million times. It was a black plastic square with two silver rods protruding from its back. According to the show, the ThermoGeist was supposed to detect patches of disparate temperature in the atmosphere. Cold patches—patches that made the ThermoGeist’s little screen flash blue—indicated the presence of spirits. She’d always assumed that the ThermoGeist’s accuracy, like everything else on ParaSpectors, was exaggerated. But something about the quick way Alejo had angled the rods away from Brandon said he knew he’d unveiled a secret. Logan couldn’t shake the image. The piercing cold of the blue.

  So, she’d stolen it. Alejo and Brandon were in Ontario for the day getting groceries and making phone calls for the show. She’d packed a few other devices from their gear trunk just to be safe. The SonusX was a walkie-talkie-shaped device that emitted loud crashing sounds and could detect ghostly voices. The Umbro Illustrator was a scanner that rendered animation of any humanoid spirits in the vicinity. The Scripto8G was a chip that plugged into the headphone port of her phone. It was her favorite of her fathers’ ridiculous devices—apparently it allowed them to receive texts from ghosts.

  She’d mostly brought that one for fun.

  They made their way to the cabin and Logan’s stomach churned. Today, there was no piano music, no voices through the splintered wood, no breathing like Ashley had described. Logan calibrated the ThermoGeist and pointed it at the cabin, but the screen remained blank.

  “It looks different,” Elexis said. He wandered to the back of the cabin with his hands in his pockets. “There’s a firepit back here.”

  “Do you guys know anything about the family who lived here?” Logan asked.

  Elexis shrugged. He walked farther, pausing at the back of the cabin to admire the massive, smashed windows. “They had a cool view.”

  Logan unearthed a handful of devices from her tote bag, unsure where to start. She and Ashley made their way to the front porch and stepped into the main room. Ashley’s quiet was deeper than usual. It was unsettling. Logan glanced at her every couple of seconds to make sure she hadn’t left. She wasn’t the only thing that was different; it was like the cabin was determined to be different from the last time Logan visited. Today it didn’t feel like death or despair or magic or any of that. It felt like a wooden house in a clearing. Nothing more.

  The ThermoGeist agreed. Logan cautiously paced the cabin floor, but the square screen on the device remained unlit. There was nothing paranormal here—at least, not for her.

  Logan tasted the tang of disappointment on her tongue.

  The air outside was light with birdsong and smelled sharp like soil. Sunlight filtered into the cabin through gaps in the roof, angled like sheets of gold through the sunbathed wood. She imagined how beautiful this place might’ve been once. How it might’ve felt to stand here and listen to the piano and taste the summer wind through the open windows. She imagined white linen curtains on the far wall, a basket of fruit on the kitchen counter, a wooden light fixture over her head. It was a vision so real it felt like a memory. Logan could almost see it when she closed her eyes.

  “I feel like … I’ve been here before.”

  “You have,” Elexis called. “Twice, right?”

  “You know what I mean.” She put a hand on her hip. “Before before.”

  But there was no before. She wasn’t like Brandon and Alejo; she didn’t have memories here. This wasn’t her home. Snakebite was only supposed to be now.

  “Well,” she said, “whatever was here before, it’s gone.”

  Logan wasn’t sure she believed that.

  Ashley said nothing.

  “Hey.” Logan waved a hand in front of Ashley’s face. “Are you in there?”

  “Sorry,” Ashley said. For the first time, Logan noticed the deep circles under Ashley’s eyes, dark as bruises. Her eyes were glassy and distant—even when she looked into Logan’s face it was like she couldn’t focus. “Sorry, I don’t know what’s…”

  Elexis made his way into the cabin’s main room. “Can we go home? My allergies are kicking in.”

  “No,” Logan snapped.

  “I feel kinda sick to my stomach,” Ashley said. “I think something bad happened here. It wasn’t like this before. I don’t know why I…”

  She sank onto the ratty sofa in the corner of the room and put her head in her hands. Her blond ponytail fell in waves down her back. Fear twisted like a knife in Logan’s chest. The air was too still, the cabin was too empty. Ashley was a mess.

  Something was wrong.

  “Do you see anything?” Logan asked.

  Ashley shook her head.

  Logan nodded. “Okay. I wanna take a quick look outside, then we can leave. You just … stay here.”

  Elexis and Logan left the cabin and wandered farther into the trees toward the shore. The first time Ashley had seen Tristan, he was in the trees, not the cabin. Logan juggled devices, scanning the trees, but nothing registered. Nothing indicated that this was anything other than a regular patch of trees bordering a regular lake outside a regular town. Nothing indicated that the things they had seen before still lingered here.

  They reached the water and Elexis froze.

  A piece of clothing was caught along the dusty ridge of the shore, hooked under a flat rock. The water from the lake ebbed and retracted over a red sleeve. For a moment, Logan thought the thing was breathing.

  “What’s—”

  Elexis snatched the thing from under the rock and unfurled it. A waterlogged Captain America symbol spanned the front of the hoodie.

  It was Nick’s.

  “He’ll be happy you found that.” Logan laughed.

  “No. He wouldn’t leave it.” Elexis draped the sweatshirt over his shoulder and began scouring the ground, panicked. “It’s his favorite. He wouldn’t leave it here.”

  “You guys were both out of it.”

  “Not that out of it.”

  “I—”

  Elexis pointed to Logan’s tote bag. A faint blue seared through the stitching. She fished through the bag and pulled the ThermoGeist to freedom, pointing it at the hoodie. Just like the windmill episode of ParaSpectors, the device blared solid blue. She turned it away from the hoodie and it went dark again.

  “Have you talked to Nick?” Logan asked. Her tongue felt like lead in her mouth. “Since the party?”

  Elexis shook his head.

  Logan closed her eyes. She was sinking.

  “Take that hoodie. We’re going to the police.”

  18

  Long Shadows

  Logan slipped into the passenger seat of the Ford and let out a sigh. It was only her second trip to the Owyhee County police station, but she was already tired of it. Elexis was still inside, talking to Sheriff Paris and waiting for Gracia to pick him up. The moment they left the woods, Ashley seemed clearer. The dark circles under her eyes subsided, and she was back to being her annoyingly wholesome, doe-eyed self.

  Logan, on the other hand, was hazier. Tristan Granger was a missing stranger; Nick Porter was a missing friend. Her stomach twisted until she thought she might puke.

  “I think we should talk,” Ashley said, climbing behind the steering wheel. “I’m still not … I’m just really confused.”

&
nbsp; Logan nodded. They pulled away from the station onto the lonely highway toward Barton Ranch, plucky guitar humming faintly from the radio.

  Ashley chewed on her bottom lip, eyes trained on the road ahead. “Am I losing it? Like, this isn’t normal. I know it’s not normal to see ghosts and stuff. I don’t even know if it’s possible.”

  “You’re not losing it.”

  “Then what’s happening to me?”

  Logan sighed. “I don’t know. It’s not just you, though. I’ve been off since I got here, too.”

  Ashley narrowed her eyes.

  “I’ve been having these weird dreams.” Logan looked out the window, tracing her finger along the rubber dust trap that bordered the glass. “It’ll be like a regular dream, then out of nowhere, I have to start digging.”

  “Like you’re looking for something?”

  “No. I’m digging a grave.” Logan shifted in her seat. “For myself. I crawl inside and someone starts throwing dirt on me. I can’t breathe and then I just … wake up.”

  “Who’s burying you?”

  Logan looked at Ashley. Even now, in the truck, far away from the stifling world of her nightmares, it was like she couldn’t breathe.

  Ashley’s mouth twisted into a careful frown. “… is it Brandon?”

  Logan looked away.

  The sun was just beyond the hills on the horizon when they made it to Barton Ranch, giving the sky an eerie red glow. All the lights in the house were off as far as Logan could tell, except for one window on the right side of the house facing the empty fields. The yellow light inside flickered.

  “Is that your room? Logan asked.

  “Yeah,” Ashley said, “but I don’t know why it’d be doing that.”

  “Huh. You’re sure it’s okay for me to come in?” Logan asked. Something about the pristine front face of the house didn’t sit well with her. “Your mom won’t care?”

  “She’s not home.” Ashley motioned lazily to the driveway. “No cars.”

  “Fair enough,” Logan said. Her head spun. Between Ashley’s strange nausea in the woods and her nightmares and Nick’s disappearance, something was happening. It wasn’t quiet and slow like the last few weeks. Something was happening tonight. She felt it in her bones, in the air, in the ground beneath her feet.

  Maybe this fear was the dark thing in Snakebite that Gracia had mentioned.

  They entered the house in silence. The main room was exactly what Logan had pictured—rural decorations and beige furniture and whitewashed walls. It was the kind of home that felt like a home. The kind of place they’d snap pictures of for cutesy magazines. It’d been a long time since Logan had been in a place like this. She tried to push down the jealousy that rose in her chest.

  A crash sounded from down the hallway, clattering like metal on wood.

  Ashley’s eyes widened. “Sounded like my room.”

  Logan nodded and they made their way toward the sound.

  Ashley’s room was a surprise. It had a twin bed covered with a pink patchwork quilt, a kid-size desk against the wall, and a bookshelf lined with old textbooks whose only purpose was to collect dust. Ashley’s room was humble and impersonal, like a preserved memory. Logan guessed this was how the room had looked for Ashley’s whole life. It was the room of a girl who’d never known herself well enough to make it her own.

  The air in the bedroom was so thick it was suffocating. Logan spotted the source of the crash. Ashley’s bulletin board was facedown in the middle of the floor with a wreckage of Polaroid photos scattered around it: pictures of Ashley with Bug and Fran, Ashley on the ranch, Ashley and Tristan. The window above her bed was wide open. Wind whistled through the screen, buffeting the curtains like a ghost’s breath. It was perfectly reasonable to assume the wind had knocked over the bulletin board.

  It was perfectly reasonable, but Logan knew it hadn’t.

  Behind them, the bedroom door slammed shut.

  The desk lamp’s bulb flickered, then burned out.

  Ashley stumbled away from Logan. She was hardly visible in the sudden darkness, but she was clearly afraid. Logan cautiously made her way over, stepping carefully to avoid the pictures.

  “What’s going on?” Logan asked.

  “I think he’s here,” Ashley whispered. “I don’t think he’s alone.”

  “Who’s here? Tristan?”

  Ashley nodded. She sank to her bed and knotted her fist in her bedspread. “I think he’s mad at me.”

  “Why would he be mad at you?”

  “Because I…”

  Tears dotted the corners of Ashley’s eyes.

  “Okay, never mind. We’ll get back to that.” Logan cleared her throat. She tried to put on a calm face, but there was nothing calm about this. Her heart raced. This wasn’t like their first trip to the cabin. She could feel something happening here. “You said he’s not alone. Who else is here?”

  “I can’t see them. It’s just, like, a feeling.” Ashley’s hands shook. “Parts of it are Tristan. Other parts … I don’t know.”

  Logan swallowed. “Try.”

  “I think it’s … Nick?” Ashley’s expression was complicated. It was tangled between hurt and fear, caught in the brambles of panic.

  Logan imagined her own expression was similar. It was the crushing, spiraling dread that she was responsible for this. She’d invited Nick to go along with them. She hadn’t made sure he was okay the next day. She hadn’t even given him a second thought until they found the hoodie.

  “It’s my fault,” Ashley whispered. “Both of them.”

  Logan hesitated. She was several things, but “comforting” was not one of them. Ashley’s breath was shaky, eyes red and swollen with tears. It was fear and anger and grief all at once. Logan reached for Ashley’s shoulder, but hesitated an inch away. She thought of what Brandon asked people on the show—she could at least do that.

  “Tell me about Tristan. Not what he’s like now. Before, when he was—”

  “—alive?”

  “When he was here,” Logan clarified.

  “Why?”

  “Because it helps. I think.”

  Ashley’s lips quivered. She wiped her eyes and nodded. “Okay. Um, he was really great. He was always super nice. We spent a lot of time together.” She cleared her throat and whispered, “I’m sorry. I don’t really know what to say.”

  “Tell me something specific.”

  “There was this one time he wanted to see a horror movie together. It was about a nun or something.” Ashley stopped for a moment, then laughed. “I’d just failed this math test so my mom said I couldn’t go out. I was here by myself, and I heard this banging on the roof. When I opened the window, he was there. He’d downloaded the movie off some site and set it up on his computer so we could watch it on the roof. He said I wasn’t breaking the rules if I never left the house.”

  Logan smiled.

  “It was so stupid.” Ashley wiped her eyes. “We should’ve just watched it inside. But he was just like that. He thought watching it on the roof made it a romantic thing. Once he got an idea, he had to make it happen.”

  Ashley looked into the distance—into where Logan assumed Tristan was—and another tear rolled down her cheek. This wasn’t the kind of face a person made when they just missed someone, Logan thought. There was something else here, deeper and more painful than grief. There was guilt. Logan saw it in her eyes.

  She braced herself.

  “Why did you say it’s your fault?”

  Ashley closed her eyes. “I told you I was the last one who saw him the night he disappeared.”

  “Right.”

  “He was here because I told him I wanted to talk. Tristan was supposed to apply for college and move away. I thought he was going to.” Ashley sucked in a deep breath. “But then he decided not to apply. He wanted to stay here. In Snakebite. With me.”

  Ashley’s voice cracked.

  Logan reached out and put a hand on her shoulder. She knew where this w
as going. The house was quiet except for Ashley’s small, choked breaths.

  “I didn’t want him to stay. We broke up.” Ashley spat the words out like they burned her tongue. “I thought we could still be friends like we were before. Everything was gonna be okay. But then his mom didn’t see him. John didn’t see him. No one saw him after that, and I just … if something happened to him. If he did something to himself, I—”

  “Did you tell anyone?”

  Ashley shook her head.

  Logan gently took her wrist. “Hey, this is not on you.”

  Ashley rested her fingers softly against Logan’s hand, breathing slow and quiet like she needed the silence to soak up the words. The breeze through her open window was sickly warm, too hot for nighttime. It hushed through the curtains like a whisper.

  “What if they’re both haunting me because they’re…”

  Logan squeezed her wrist. “You saw my dad at the cabin. He’s alive.”

  “Tristan and Nick could be alive, too.”

  “Right,” Logan said. She wished she believed it.

  Suddenly, a crack sounded from the roof. Not a crack, a slow groan. It was weight against the wood, slow and deliberate. It was footsteps, each one measured as though the creature above them struggled to balance. The sound started at the center of Ashley’s bedroom ceiling, getting closer to the window above her bed with each step.

  Ashley closed her eyes. Logan felt her racing pulse through the inside of her wrist.

  The footsteps arrived above the window, and then stopped. The night outside was thick and dark as molasses. Logan felt a pull toward it, briefly, when her tote bag buzzed. This time it wasn’t the light of the ThermoGeist flashing. It was her phone. Logan didn’t recognize the ringtone. A message alert titled SCRIPTO8G popped up on her lock screen.

  Ashley leaned over Logan’s shoulder to read.

  unknown: FOLLOW

  A chill crept up Logan’s spine. She looked at Ashley, but she couldn’t find the words to explain what it meant. According to the part of her brain that believed in rational answers—in provable science—it made no sense.

  “Is this Tristan?” Logan asked the empty room.