“No, no, no! No! Shut up, shut the fuck up!” Nicky howled at the top of her lungs. “You don’t—you don’t—get to do that. Not now, not ever, you fucking, fucking murderer.”
Chloe watched that word—murderer—land against Parker like Nicky had hit him with a sledgehammer. In an instant, he recoiled and wilted, all the life knocked clean out of him. But Nicky wasn’t done. Not quite yet. Stumbling back from him, her face twisted into a mask of hate, black fire in her bloodshot eyes.
“You should be dead already,” she said, her voice terribly calm. “I wish you’d had the balls to do what was right and killed yourself after what you did.”
Nicky jerked her shoulders, like she was going to leap at Parker again, maybe rake his eyes out this time, but Chloe stepped forward and crossed an arm over her breastbone, holding her back. Let Nicky tear through her first, if she wanted to get to him that bad. She knew she couldn’t actually stop her if Nicky decided to do it, but Chloe was done letting her friends kill her friends. There weren’t that many of them left now.
So she dug her feet into the loose dirt, roadblocking Nicky as best she could. “Nicky, don’t—”
“No,” said Nicky, shifting her bloodshot gaze down toward Chloe once more. “I can’t. I won’t. I’m done.”
She wrenched herself free of Chloe’s tenuous grasp and stalked away, past the fire and the sleeping bags, into the trees where the shadows were heaviest. Chloe stared at the ground until she was sure Nicky was gone.
“She’s okay,” she said after a moment.
Parker shook his head. “No, she’s not.”
“She will be. Eventually. She just needs time. She’s been though a lot, man. We all have.”
“I know,” said Parker. “Chloe, really, I’m—”
But Chloe waved him off. “Do me a favor. Stop apologizing, okay? It’s just making things worse.”
Parker opened his mouth as if to respond, but then closed his lips again and just nodded at her. Chloe nodded back, then limped over to her sleeping bag and eased down to lay flat on her back with her eyes closed, hoping for sleep. Maybe in dreams, things would be better. Eventually, Nicky came back from wherever she’d stormed off to, but when she did, she did so wordlessly and without even a side-glance at Parker. She was still fuming, but at least she was doing it quietly.
Chloe was thankful for that. She’d half expected Nicky to come back having built up another head of steam to take out on Parker, and the hell of it was that he would have let her. No doubt about it. Fortunately, it didn’t come to that. Nicky simply materialized out of the shadows and paced over to her place by the fire, then sat down and fixed her hollow gaze on the flames. Chloe knew better than to ask if she was okay. She knew she wasn’t. None of them were okay anymore.
Parker made up his own part of the camp in the golden light of the coming sunset, setting up his sleeping bag next to theirs, working silently while Chloe started checking over their provisions. They had food, sleeping bags, their backpacks, Nate’s bag of fireworks, Josh’s med kit, and little else. The food was already running low too; she and Nicky and Josh had worked through more than she’d thought the past two days, and today hadn’t been much different, even without Josh there to help. Still, Chloe couldn’t help feeling like there was more missing than there should have been. Maybe that was just hunger distorting her perception.
From the bottom of the bag, she fished out a can of sardines in hot sauce and tossed it to her cousin, along with a skeevy off-brand granola bar. Then she passed a packet of Pop-Tarts and a sheet of gas station jerky to Nicky, setting aside a Twix and a small tube of honey roasted peanuts for herself. Splitting their last warm can of beer between the three of them, they ate in silence and fed the fire as the light streaming through the trees dimmed and died.
When she’d polished off her dinner, Nicky crawled into her sleeping bag and rolled over, pointedly showing her back to her friends. For a minute, Chloe thought she was faking, but after a minute, they could both hear that familiar, tiny handsaw drone floating out of Nicky’s mouth. She’d never fake a snore like that—not to sell a lie. It would be too silly, and while Nicky was a lot of things, even on her best day, silly didn’t rank.
Still, Chloe waited a few minutes longer before she twisted in place to look at her cousin, and asked, “Can we talk?”
Parker wiped crumbs and oil on his jeans. “About what?”
“Nate.”
“Thought we already did,” said Parker. “He’s dead. Murdered,” he corrected himself grimly. “What else is there?”
“Not him. The other one.”
Across the fire, Parker clenched his eyes shut and rubbed at them with his thumbs, the expression on his face creasing his forehead into a series of deep canyons.
“Oh, right,” Parker said. “That.”
“Listen, we don’t have to if you don’t want to—”
“No, it’s fine.” It was most definitely not fine. “What do you want to know?”
Chloe shot a glance over toward Nicky’s sleeping form, eyeing the slight rise and fall of her chest underneath the soggy nylon.
“Maybe we should … ?” She nodded toward the trees, then back at Nicky. “Even with what she’s seen, what she’s been through … hearing it might be too much for her, asleep or not.”
“Yeah,” her cousin said. “Sure.”
Parker rose quietly and stepped over to offer her a hand up. Chloe popped the last little handful of sugar-crusted nuts into her mouth, then stitched her fingers through his and let him lift her off the ground like she weighed next to nothing. She always forgot just how gigantic he was, how powerful he’d gotten in the last few years. To Chloe, he was still the same size as her. She thought he might always be, at least in her head.
Together, they walked off into the encroaching darkness and folded themselves in between the trees, the dancing light from the campfire still close enough to cast shadows across both of their faces. Taking her crutch in both fists, Chloe pitched her back against a bare tree trunk while Parker stood with his hands stuffed deep in the pockets of his jeans, shoulders hunched up around his neck. “So what do you want to know?”
It didn’t take a genius to see that Parker really, really didn’t want to talk about this, but Chloe needed to.
“So, you said he—it—showed up yesterday morning, right?”
“Soon as I opened my eyes, yeah. He was just there, waiting for me to wake up,” he said.
“And it was always him? It always looked like Nate?”
“Yeah. I mean, no. I’m not sure.”
“How do you mean?”
“He was … blurry,” Parker said. “Like he was out of focus. All his edges were sort of soft. At first I thought it was me, you know? Bleary from sleep or something. Wasn’t wearing my glasses. But you saw what happened.”
Chloe remembered. She’d watched as the ghost’s form had bled away, leaving behind an indistinct, person-shaped smudge in its place, a hateful thing with void-black eyes and a long, Cheshire cat mouth filled with crooked teeth.
“Yeah,” she said, shuddering. “I saw. I know.”
“No, you don’t,” Parker said. “You don’t know. It didn’t just look like him, it talked like him—fuck, it even walked like him. Like a nearly perfect copy, Chloe.”
“But you figured it out. You saw past it.”
“Yeah, after two days,” he said. “Hooray for me.”
“What was it that did it?”
Parker shook his head and turned his sad, intense gaze out toward the darkness of the woods.
“It was the small things,” he said. “Lots of little stuff that just … built up.”
Chloe leaned in, meeting his eyes. “There had to be something. Something that started tipping the scales.”
Park shook his head. “Honestly? It was the way he laughed. That … thing, it laughed differently than Nate. I didn’t notice it at the beginning—or at least, I told myself I didn’t notice it. But it wasn’t N
ate’s laugh. There wasn’t any joy in it—it was just this ugly, hollow noise. Nate only ever laughed when he meant it,” he said. “You remember.”
“Yeah,” Chloe said. She knew what he was talking about. His laugh was one of the things that had drawn them to Nate in the first place—the way he would crane his head back and let these big belly laughs fly when something was really, really funny. It could fill up a room, Nate’s laughter. “He had a really great one, didn’t he?”
Park opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. Chloe understood.
“That thing … the way it laughed was this wet, dead noise. Like it was choking on its own blood,” he said after another moment. “Everything about it was like a fun house mirror version of Nate, all the mean parts and none of the good. Like being shitty and cruel enough would keep me from noticing what was missing.”
Chloe looked down at their shoes. “I don’t know, Parker. He’d been doing a pretty good job of that back before you shot him, too.”
It was true—in the past year or two, something fundamental had changed inside of Nate, and while he still laughed sometimes, it had grown rare, reserved only for the times when he absolutely couldn’t hold it back. There had been something hard and bitter growing inside him; they’d all noticed it. His tongue had sharpened to a razor point, while his sense of humor had started to verge closer and closer to vicious. Maybe it was kids at school, or his grades, or his parents; none of them could have said for sure. Even at the best of times, Nate didn’t talk about his life much, and nobody ever felt like they could ask. Maybe that was the point. So instead they’d just kept on pre tending, letting him get away with it, acting like there was nothing wrong with him shooting his mouth off—until it had finally gotten him in the kind of trouble none of them could take back.
“What do you think it was?” Chloe asked. “The ghost, the, the … whatever. If it wasn’t him, what was it?”
Park turned away from her. “Something else. Something that eats the things that die out here, maybe. Whatever it was, I think it was wearing his face to get me to do what it wanted … but we never got to what that actually was.”
“You’re welcome,” Chloe said with a half-smirk.
“I’m serious, Chloe. It was trying to keep me away from you,” he said. “Whatever else it was planning, it wanted me alone.”
“Then why give you what you want? Why let you find your dad?”
Parker’s face wrinkled up. “Because if I found him dead, there was one less giant reason for me to ever go back.”
“But why keep you here?” Chloe asked. “What good does it do, keeping you around? What does the ghost, whatever it really was, get out of it?”
Parker blew air through his nose. “Why turn Adam into some horrible, bloodthirsty thing? Why do any of it? It’s just being cruel for cruelty’s sake. We’re ants under a magnifying glass. It wants something to torture.”
“I really don’t think that’s it,” said Chloe. “Listen, imagine it’s not about keeping you as a blood doll or whatever. It’s not about punishing you, nothing like that. Just think. Why would anything—anybody—not want you to leave here?”
Park’s eyes searched hers, his brows sloping off to the sides.
“Maybe it doesn’t want to be alone.”
Chloe shrugged. “It’s possible, at least.”
“But that still doesn’t answer the question of why, though. Why torture us, why warp Adam and kill Josh? Why take away everything good I have, every quiet thought, every moment of peace? Why make life so fucking awful for me, for all of us?”
Chloe shook her head. “Because if there’s nothing left in the world for you, then nothing outside of the Pine Barrens matters. You could just stay here forever.”
“What, like my dad did?” His eyes were suddenly full with tears, and he wiped them away with the back of his hand before they had a chance to spill over.
“He came out here for a reason. Maybe he was seeing ghosts too,” Chloe said.
“What, like it tried to get in his head? You really think that’s possible?”
“You guys have been coming out here for years, Park. Him even longer than you. No one could blame him if it got inside his head after all that time. Especially if it was wearing another mask. I mean, come on, it had you fooled, and you’re the smartest person I know,” Chloe said.
“I’m not that smart,” he told her. “I still fell for it.”
“That’s the point. Anyone would have. I did, and I only saw him for like thirty seconds,” she said. She reached a hand out and took her cousin’s oversized one, giving it a firm squeeze. “Let yourself off the hook for that, at least.”
“You know, the fucked up thing is that I wanted it to be real,” he whispered. “I wanted more than anything for it to really be Nate. I thought that if it was, maybe I could get a second chance with him, do things different, or at least try and make it right.”
Parker slumped back, letting his shoulders fall. He looked like he was going to start crying again.
“When he first showed up, I thought he was a hallucination. Like, I really thought I’d lost my mind.” Parker sighed, pulling his hand away. “Like he was something I’d dreamed up, an imaginary friend to keep me company or something. After he stuck around, I don’t know. I thought, why not? Why can’t it be him? Looks like him, sounds like him, so …” He jerked his head out toward the trees and the growing dark. “It was just nice to not be alone for once. Even if it was Nate.”
“Parker, you’re not alone. You haven’t ever been alone.” She tried to take his hand again, but he jerked it back.
“Yeah,” Parker said, “I have been. For months now. Ever since my dad left.”
“That’s not true—”
“It is,” Parker cut her off. “You know it is. My mom’s barely functional and getting worse. She holds it together just enough to not get fired from her job and to buy another pint of gin. But she’s not my mom anymore, Chloe. She’s just this sad, bled-out shell that I live with. Another ghost to add to the list. Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about, because I know you do.”
Chloe shook her head and looked away from her cousin, hoping he couldn’t see her cheeks and neck burning apple red in the soft darkness. Yeah, she’d had some idea of what Uncle Dave’s disappearance had done to Aunt Lori. She’d seen the red-thread veins breaking out across her nose and cheeks, the glassy glaze that filmed her eyes. Hell, even as far back as Christmas, with the splotches and stains on her clothes, the juniper fumes on her breath, Chloe had known something was really wrong. Everybody knew. It was way worse than normal family-holiday drunk.
Parker had barely spoken to anyone that day. He’d just sat in the corner on his phone, his face knotted with rage. After they’d finally left, the rest of the grown-ups, her parents included, all stood around the kitchen, gossiping and bemoaning the sad, tragic state of the Cunninghams. Except none of them had bothered asking if Park or Lori needed help. Nobody had said anything. They were content to sit there and smile and open their presents and ignore everything that had gone so terribly wrong. It was easier for everyone if they just pretended.
On the way home, her mom and dad had actually asked her if she’d had a nice time. Like nothing had happened at all. Like they’d forgotten.
“Okay, but you’ve had us,” said Chloe. “Me, and Adam and Nicky and—”
Park shook his head. “No, I didn’t.”
“What? Of course you did—”
“No,” he said, “I didn’t. Ever since Dad disappeared, you guys have pulled back from me. All of you. You know you have.”
“Parker, come on, that’s not fair—”
All of a sudden his hands were on her shoulders, holding her at attention. His eyes were still wide and watery, but there was a seriousness there that she hadn’t seen before. A Parker she’d never met, filtering through to the surface.
“No, listen to me. I don’t blame you—I get it. It’s a lot to de
al with. I’ve been a lot to deal with. You’ve done what you could, but you can only do so much. You have your own problems to deal with, your own shit that doesn’t have anything to do with me. You have your own lives. I’m not mad.” He let her go and leaned back again, wiping at his eyes. “Shit’s just been hard, you know? It sucks, dealing with something like this on your own.”
He wasn’t wrong—she had pulled away from him. They all had. It wasn’t like they’d all gotten together one day and decided Fuck Parker; it wasn’t even a conscious choice. He just hadn’t been the easiest person to be around since his dad had vanished, so it was easier to not be around him. They still ate lunches together, they still hung out, but yeah, they did it a little less than they used to. Or they’d just not invited him as much. Chloe had hoped he wouldn’t notice, but of course he had. He wasn’t stupid.
“I’m sorry, Parker,” Chloe said, her voice quavering. “You deserve better than that.”
“Almost everybody deserves better,” said Parker. “It doesn’t mean we necessarily get it.”
She looked up at him again, and in the shadows and low light, she caught another glimpse of the man he’d grow up to be someday. Quiet and thoughtful, and more than a little weary. She could see where the wrinkles would dart in at the corners of his eyes, the lines of his cheekbones that would thin out and grow blade-sharp with age, the way his hair would get shaggy and go salt-and-pepper long before it seemed like it should. Just like his dad’s.
“So what do we do now?” Chloe asked.
“I think we do what you guys have been trying to do since we first showed up.”
“We pack up and get the fuck out of here.”
“Yep.”
Chloe took a deep breath and blew all the air out of her lungs in a tight, thin stream. “Okay. How do we do that? You’re the camper here.”
“Forest has got to end at some point,” said Parker. “We just keep walking the way we’ve been walking. Eventually we’ve got to hit something. This is New Jersey, for god’s sake, not the wilds of Montana or whatever. There’ll be an expressway or another campground or something eventually.”
The Night Will Find Us Page 20
