by Chloe Garner
<><><>
“Well, this is it,” Sam said, folding up the map and sliding it into his back pocket. “This is where the last two hikers went missing. They stood at the edge of a wide rocky valley where the resulting rivers from two waterfalls intersected. Samantha sat on a ledge and gaped.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
“It’s cold and hard and there’s no food,” Jason said. “But sure, I could see why you’d like it.”
Sam grinned at him.
“Backpackers,” he said, sitting down next to Samantha. “They registered a course with the warden. Would have been camping in this valley for a few days when they went missing. Some day-hikers saw them a week ago, then five days ago the warden was walking the paths and found their campsite abandoned.”
“Why do people leave perfectly good civilization and come out here in the middle of nowhere?” Jason asked.
“Is he always like this?” Samantha asked.
“Actually, no. Usually he’s the annoyingly cheerful one when we’re working,” Sam told her.
Jason grunted.
“Anyway, three days ago a local couple were out here celebrating their anniversary. Their friends said he proposed here a few years ago. They were supposed to be at a dinner in West Yellowstone that night, about an hour away, but they never showed up. Everyone figured they’d gotten lost, but they never turned up.”
“Bet you a dollar they were here too late,” Jason said.
“Yeah,” Sam agreed. “Eighteen years ago, there was a rash of disappearances around here, and then again before that, here in this area. The records aren’t quite as available, before that.”
“Well, let’s go find a place to wait,” Jason said.
Sam and Samantha stood to follow Jason down a deerpath into the valley. They found a cove of trees that would shelter them from the wind well enough, and Sam started looking for firewood.
“I thought you didn’t camp,” Samantha observed as Jason leaned against a tree, looking down at the river plain.
“No one’s sleeping tonight,” he said.
“Oh?”
“Ghosts are night creatures, almost always,” Jason said. She nodded.
“So we’re staying up all night looking for a ghost,” she said.
“Yup.”
“Then, if no one minds, I’m going to take a nap.”
“You can sleep now?” Sam asked, dumping a load of dead branches in a pile next to one of the trees. The clearing looked like it might have been used as a campsite on occasion, with a char mark in the middle and a space without any optimistic bushes or trees. She pulled a blanket out of her backpack and laid it on the ground, sitting down on it and watching Sam work.
“I prefer to sleep during the day, actually. Mostly I’ve just learned to sleep when I get a chance.”
“Wish I could figure that one out,” he said. She smiled and laid down, her head on her backpack, and pulled half the blanket over her shoulder.
“Sleep well,” Sam said. She smiled and cuddled into her blanket.
<><><>
Sam and Jason sat next to the fire, feeding it wood, as they watched the sun set.
“You figure?” Jason asked.
“Yeah,” Sam answered. He stood to go wake Samantha.
“Leave her,” Jason said.
“What?”
“Leave her here. At least until we figure out what we’re up against.”
“Leave her alone, sleeping on the ground in an area where they routinely get animal attacks, and where we know people are going missing because of a spirit or something else? Are you insane?”
“She’s sleeping by the fire, and we’re out looking for the spirit. Nothing’s going to get her, here,” Jason said. Sam looked at her hesitantly.
“She held her own with the Night Hag, fine, but this could be anything. I don’t want her getting in the middle of something before we’ve got a handle on it.”
Sam shrugged.
“All right, fine. But we come back and check on her. Soon.”
Jason nodded.
“Fine. Let’s go.”
<><><>
Samantha woke up groggy, woodsmoke blowing in her face.
She never slept that hard.
She never slept that hard.
She struggled for wakefulness, but she couldn’t quite get a grasp on it. Something important had been going on. She was looking for something. There was a goal. She had to get to the goal.
She stood, her blanket falling away, and cold night air shocked her, but she still couldn’t process where she was. She was alone in the dark with a fire that illuminated a three-quarter circle of trees and no more. She didn’t like the trees. They looked menacing. She didn’t like the fire. It had dried out her face and made her thirsty. She heard, somewhere, the sound of water, and she picked up her backpack and followed it.
A full moon and a clear host of stars lit the plain in front of her. She felt like she might have woken up on a foreign planet, and she shivered, pulling her backpack tight against her back. Something in the darkness startled and she jumped and nearly screamed.
Where was she?
Where was she?
She stumbled and fell down, glancing over her shoulder. She couldn’t see the fire any more, though she hadn’t gone very far. The water wasn’t in front of her, any more, but to her right. She stayed on the ground, listening, trying to clear her head.
What was she looking for?
She pulled the iron knife out of her boot and, feeling a bit more like she should have, she stood and continued toward the river. The tops of the grasses flashed white, and everything else was black. She kept a hand out, low, in front of her, trying to find things she might trip over, as she held the knife out in front of her threateningly.
She was strong. Something inside of her still knew that, deep underneath thick layers of screaming terror and confusion. She just had to get back in control. She spun at another noise, nearly tripping over her own feet again, but could see nothing. The grasses shifted as the breeze turned slightly. She crouched, her entire body shaking.
“Sam?” she called. “Jason?”
Who was Sam?
She closed her eyes hard and shook her head.
Now the river was on her left.
She turned again and kept walking, slow, crouched, tensed for something to jump out of the tall grass.
Slowly, a peacefulness started to bloom in her chest, untwisting muscles, making her breathe easier. She sat on the ground and held her head in her hands, breathing, on the verge of crying.
What was that?
She took a deep breath, smelling night air. The river was on her left again, but it was okay. She could hear her way there.
She could hear someone playing a violin, high, sad, sweet, and she no longer felt the need to crouch low over the ground, or menace the darkness. Her arms dropped to her sides and she took another deep breath of cool night air. She could get there with her eyes closed, from here, she knew. He was waiting there for her. Knew she was looking for him, and was ready for her to be there. Now. Already.
Opening her eyes and grinning up at the moon, she shook her hair out in the clean air and watched the stars for just a second, then started through the grass at a quick walk. The grasses tangled over her toes and around her boots, but it was a simple, easy march across known ground. The violin player. He was just over there.
She left the deep grasses and dropped into the lowest part of the river plain, where the river had made its way down to stones, and she saw him, standing in the rapids on gray moonlit rocks, playing his violin. His hair, his clothes, even his skin was silver with moonlight, and his violin was black but for where the edges caught the silver light. She gasped at the beauty of him, and the music drew her on. He looked up from his violin, his arm still taking slow, masterful passes across the instrument with the bow, and his eyes found hers. She smiled, tears coming to her eyes, and she walked to the edge of the river. He stopped pla
ying and held out a hand to her.
“Be careful, my lovely. The rocks are slick.”
She nodded, waiting for him. He made his way slowly across the wide rapid, picking his way from rock to rock and holding the magical violin and bow in one hand. She smiled at the grace of him. He looked up at her again and smiled.
“Are you coming with me?”
She nodded eagerly.
Of course.
Of course.
He held out a hand to her and she reached out to take it.
The sound of the gun going off was like a grenade in her serene consciousness, and suddenly she looked at the ephemeral form with eyes that remembered who she was. His image swirled as the shot went through him, and he looked at her and snarled, his face now that of a grizzled mountain man with a well-worn hat. In his hand, he held a clutch of bones. He snatched at her, but there was another gunshot and his arm vaporized and began to reform. She stumbled back, looking for the source of the noise.
“Sam,” Sam said, running across the muddy embankment. Jason came from another direction, the shotgun at his shoulder pointed at the spirit. Sam put his arm around her and pulled her back further.
“Are you okay?” he asked. She nodded and shook her head at the same time.
“Fine. What happened?”
“Same thing that happened to the other lost hikers. That’s a Nix. Draws lost travelers in with music, then drowns them. We need to get to higher ground.”
She allowed him to pull her up a steep embankment that she didn’t remember coming down, and Jason followed, walking backwards carefully. Sam pulled him up the slope and they stood watching the Nix.
“What do you shoot a ghost with?” Samantha asked.
“Iron shot,” Jason said, only now dropping the sight of the shotgun down slightly.
“Theoretically, he should be confined to the reaches of the river, but that could include the entire floodplain. We should keep going,” Sam said. Jason nodded.
“I’ve got it. Keep going.”
Sam pulled a long knife out of a sheath at his hip and pulled Samantha back through the waist-deep grass over rough, rocky ground. At times they were up to their knees in mud. Samantha couldn’t figure out why she couldn’t remember the slog.
“Iron?” she asked. Sam nodded, and she pulled the rod out from the leather bands on her leg. If she got another whack at him, she was going to take it.
They got back to the campsite almost a full mile away, and Samantha shook her head.
“I don’t remember walking that far,” she said. “I was so confused.”
“That’s why we don’t bring amateurs,” Jason said.
“That’s why we shouldn’t have left her alone,” Sam countered. They looked at each other for a minute.
“Well, upside, you had the great foresight to fall under his spell so we could figure out what he is,” Jason said. Samantha dropped her backpack and sat down in front of the fire, rubbing her legs and shivering. Sam went to get more firewood.
“How many more nights you figure we’ve got of technical full moon coverage?” Jason asked. Sam looked up at the sky.
“Two. Three, tops,” he said.
“We should hike out and go find internet,” Jason said. Sam shook his head.
“Not ‘till dawn,” he said.
“We’re losing hours, man,” Jason complained. Sam rubbed Samantha’s back, kneeling next to her.
“She’s shaking, Jason. The Nix had a grip on her. Give her some time.”
She shook her head.
“No. No, if the right thing to do were to go, we’d go.” She glared up at Jason. “But you’re a massive idiot if you think that hiking out of here in the dead of night is a good idea. You can’t see more than six feet in front of you, in good light. In shade, one of you would be off a ledge in the first mile. We shouldn’t hike out until light because it’s just a dumb idea.”
Jason sat down hard next to her.
“Look, I sympathize what you went through tonight. I do.” He paused. “I’m sorry. You’re right. We’ll wait until dawn.”
She nodded and turned back to the fire.
“So how do you kill it?”
<><><>
“Naming magic,” Samantha said to herself, up ahead, as they wandered back up the deer path to the top of the river bowl. “I thought it was dead. I thought it was beyond dead.”
“What?” Sam asked.
“Sorry. Just hard to believe that naming a ghost can kill it,” she said.
“Not as easy as it sounds,” Jason called back.
“Not as hard as a lot of things I could imagine,” Samantha answered. Jason laughed.
“Amen to that.”
Sam was impressed at how quickly Samantha had bounced back. He had sat with the near-victims of ghosts more times than he could count, and they all acted the same. The shaking, the crying, the desire to be around light and heat. The desire to be held. Men in their forties had sat in his arms and cried for hours. Jason still mocked him for it. Sometimes someone would surprise him, but someone a ghost had actually touched - he had seen the Nix’ fingers around Samantha’s wrist - sometimes they never even came back.
Samantha had stared into the fire with a fierce determination that looked for everything he knew like a Ranger. Someone who had stared at ghosts before, and who came away every time with the need to destroy them. She carried that determination with her everywhere, he was recognizing. She had left her duffel bag in the car, but she wouldn’t be parted from the backpack. He guessed it weighed more than fifty pounds, and she had carried it in and would carry it out without complaining over the eight-mile trek to the tiny fire road where they left the Cruiser. Even with just the simple bag Sam carried - water, guns, ammo - he could feel the strain from the previous day’s hike, and the elevation was wearing on him, too. He let Samantha get further ahead of him so that he wouldn’t have to try so hard to mask how hard he was breathing. Jason set a brutal pace; it didn’t matter how much his brother was suffering, Jason would always set a brutal pace.
Sam had looked up a cell coverage map before they had gotten to the park, and it would be a fifteen minute drive, at least, from where they had parked to where he’d be able to even send Simon a text to let him know what they had found. Finding the name of a man who had been dead for some unknown period of time in the middle of an area that had never been settled by record-keeping bureaucrats was going to be near-impossible, in any period of time. Expecting Simon to figure it out in less than thirty hours - they would need the name before they hiked back in to the river valley - was demanding the heroic.
He switched his bag from one shoulder to the other and plodded on, watching Samantha’s backpack bob up and down as she walked. He wouldn’t quit until she did. It didn’t matter how bad his lungs had scorched and how hard his heart was beating. His mouth hung open and he wanted nothing more than to walk with his hands on his knees, but she was upright, so so was he.
He knew he was in better shape than this.
He passed the time working through first one method then another for figuring out who the Nix was. They were men who knew, at the moment of their deaths, that they were destined for damnation. They were all clearly evil, to such a degree that they would refuse to leave their bodies to avoid the punishments they deserved. Their flesh would rot away, and they would ultimately end up at a river crossing or a rapids, where they would pull people in and push them down the river, chasing them until they were beaten to death on the rocks or drowned. Why eighteen years? There were lots of calendar cycles that were relevant to ghosts, but mostly their cycle times were personal. Something important had happened over eighteen years in his life, or he had died eighteen years after something important.
Finally Jason called back that they had found the road. They walked along it for a ways before they found the Cruiser, and Sam gratefully dropped into the passenger seat.
“Did that feel like a lot more than eight miles to you?” Jason asked.
Sam nodded.
“Yeah.”
“It’s the elevation,” Samantha said. “Low oxygen.”
“You sound fine,” Jason said.
“Yeah.”
Jason waited for a second then shook his head at Sam and started the car.
“Where to?”
“I need internet. Simon can’t do all this on his own.”
“Simon?” Samantha asked. Jason glanced at Sam, then sighed and shrugged.
“Simon is our Seeker,” Sam said slowly, still wondering if he wanted to tell her this.
“Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Yeah. What?”
“Huh.”
She grinned.
“You want me to spell it out? I assume that you’ve got someone finding stuff for you to do. Seeker seems pretty self-explanatory, doesn’t it?”
Sam looked at her for another minute, then nodded.
“I guess it is.”
“Is it some big secret?” Samantha asked.
“Seekers are a big deal,” Jason said into the rearview. “We never meet them. That way we can’t betray them.”
“Oh. Well, that makes sense. They’re your squishies.”
“Beg your pardon?” Jason said. Sam laughed.
“Yeah. Exactly,” he said. Jason looked at him, eyebrows up, looking for an explanation. “In role-play games, the ones who don’t fight, but who are critical to the quest anyway. Some people call them squishies.”
“Right,” Jason said, rubbing a finger across his lips. “And for a second I thought you were talking about something dirty. Should have figured it would be a nerd joke.”
Sam looked into the back seat to apologize, but Samantha was grinning. He laughed to himself and settled down into his seat, nodding off quickly as they drove back down the mountain.
<><><>
They had found a mostly-empty ski resort that offered wireless and Sam spent all of the next day talking with Simon and looking for a way to track down the Nix. At some point, Samantha excused herself and went to go sleep for a few hours, and Jason had been in and out, bringing food and drink most of the time, but sometimes just disappearing and reappearing a few hours later.
