The Dead and the Dark

by Courtney Gould

  A boy separates from the party. He drunkenly ambles away from the light of the cabin into the twisted, swaying junipers along the shore. The host inhales the night air and it smells like fresh water and soil. It smells like peril.

  The host is afraid.

  He is excited.

  “What if they catch us this time?” the host asks. “I shouldn’t be here.”

  They cannot catch a shadow, the Dark breathes. They cannot catch someone who was never here.

  The host nods. He knows how to hide. He’s been doing it his whole life. He’s been hiding the very nature of who he is. He’s been hiding so long that indulging in this violence feels like a lie when it is his only truth.

  The boy continues down the slope toward the water. He is oblivious to the woods around him because he believes he has nothing to fear. It is this kind of ignorance that makes it so easy for the host. The boy stops at the shore and faces the water.

  The host stands behind him, just out of sight. The moonlight on the lake ripples white over the boy’s face, but the host’s face is shadowed by thick boughs of juniper.

  His heart beats with fear and anticipation in equal measure.

  Now is your chance, the Dark whispers. Take it.

  The host hesitates when the boy turns to look at the trees. His eyes are wide and brown, but they do not fear.

  Not yet.

  The host’s heart beats once, twice, and then he moves.

  By the time the boy understands that he is not alone, the host has him. By the time he understands that he will die, it is too late to scream. Farther in the trees, the cabin is emptying. The children laugh and, only feet away, the boy is gone.

  The host has never felt stronger. The Dark has never felt stronger.

  16

  Sunny Side Up

  The first thing Logan smelled in the morning was bacon. Bacon and cat hair and the faintly sweet scent of Red Bull. The ceiling looked like the crosshatched one in her motel room, but the lighting came in from the wrong side of the room.

  She wasn’t supposed to be in her room, anyway. She’d fallen asleep in the back of Ashley’s truck. Or at least, she was pretty sure she had. Everything after the kitchen was hazy.

  Logan sat up and a pile of blankets fell to the floor around her. She hadn’t slept on a bed at all, apparently. The futon under her was mostly spring and no cushion. Elexis sat a few feet away playing a video game.

  Like hers, Elexis’s room was connected to the room next door. The door between them was wide open, and considering the lack of bacon or cats in Elexis’s half, Logan guessed the smells were coming from the other room.

  She stood, carefully clutching a blanket around her shoulders to hide the mussed black dress she’d worn out the night before. A mirror hung on the wall over the futon, forcing her to face the monstrous version of herself who’d spent a full night in makeup. Her eyeliner was smudged into a streak of black that made her look more like a demon than a girl.

  “Morning,” Elexis said. Logan couldn’t see his face, but the smugness was clear in his voice. “Sleep okay?”

  “I guess…” Logan trailed off. “Uh, how did I get here?”

  “Your girlfriend dropped us off this morning. She didn’t want any people in the truck bed when she got back to the ranch since her mom is evil.”

  “My…” Logan started. She scowled. “Hilarious. Where’s your buddy?”

  “Nick got a ride with John and the others.”

  “Climbing the social ladder. I thought he’d ride with Ashley considering he’s, you know, in love.”

  Elexis shrugged and kept playing his video game.

  Logan wandered to the open door between rooms and whispered, “Who lives in this one?”

  Elexis cupped a hand over his mouth. “Nana, she’s awake.”

  In the next room, a chair creaked. Logan followed the sound. The room attached to Elexis’s was slightly different from the others she’d seen at the Bates. Instead of a second bed, there was a slab of mint-green countertop, complete with a sink and stove. A twin bed was pushed against the back wall, surrounded by framed pictures of a dark-haired family. Logan recognized the toddler in one photo as a much younger, much cuter Elexis. In another photo was a teenage boy in high-waisted shorts ordering pizza from the stand in the parking lot, presumably before it closed down. It took her a moment longer than it should’ve to recognize the teen as Alejo. In front of the TV, a crocheted doily was draped over the back of a rust-orange recliner. Gracia sat in the recliner with her feet elevated, spectacled gaze laser-focused on the TV.

  She turned in the recliner and beamed. “Are you feeling better?”

  “Totally.” Logan patted sweat from her forehead. “I … thanks for letting me crash here. I really like the decorations.”

  Gracia held up her deep green doily in progress. “You want one? This is for your dad.”

  “I—”

  “I think yours will be red.”

  Logan smiled. “You don’t have to do that. But I’d love one.”

  “Give me a week.” Gracia laughed. “I didn’t know you and Elexis were friends. You must be a miracle worker. I can never get him out of his room.”

  “Happy to help,” Logan said. A familiar voice rang from the TV screen. Logan spotted her fathers’ faces, inverted by an infrared camera. She laughed under her breath. “You’re a fan?”

  “I watch every week. Even the repeats. When your dad left, he promised he’d call, but he never did. Never told me what was going on with you guys. This is the only way I saw him.” Gracia motioned to a plate of cooked bacon on the counter. “Help yourself to some breakfast. You and me need to catch up.”

  “I should get back to—”

  “You only want to see Elexis, not me?” Gracia asked.

  Logan shook her head. Gracia’s old-lady sympathy tactics were underhanded, but she had to respect them. She plucked a strip of bacon from the plate and sat at Gracia’s window-side table. She vaguely recognized this episode of ParaSpectors, though the details escaped her. Maybe it was the one where their camera operator was possessed by Satan. After a while, they began to blur.

  The show went to commercial and Gracia turned.

  “You were so sick when you got here,” she said. “Do you need anything? Juice? Water?”

  “Sick,” Logan repeated. A piece of her hoped Gracia thought it was a stomach bug and not too much beer. “I must’ve had a fever or something.”

  Gracia smiled.

  She knew.

  “Wait until her dads find out,” Elexis called from his room.

  Logan chewed on her bacon. “They don’t care.”

  “They would have no room to judge.” Gracia chuckled. “After the messes I saw back in the day, I could tell stories that would have them blushing.”

  Suddenly, Logan was paying attention. She leaned forward—she couldn’t believe she hadn’t thought to try Gracia for information sooner. She’d had an encyclopedia of Snakebite history living next door this whole time.

  “Your dad never told you about when he was your age?”

  Logan shook her head.

  “Oh, he was always ending up in my room after crazy nights out. His parents—my sister and her husband—they were a lot stricter than your dads. If he came home sick they would’ve put him on the street. Which … well, never mind. I must’ve cleaned him up a thousand times before sending him back to his room.”

  “Wow,” Logan breathed, immediately abandoning her attempt to figure out what kind of relative that made Gracia to her. “Brandon, too?”

  Gracia pursed her lips in thought. A gnat buzzed around the rim of her coffee mug and, from Elexis’s room, virtual gunfire echoed off the walls. “No,” she said finally. “Not Brandon so much. Alejo was a party kid. I don’t think they knew each other back then.”

  “So Dad was the wild one?”

  “He was always a good boy,” Gracia clarified. “It was that Tammy Barton who tried to make him bad. She was always
dragging him everywhere, making him go to bars and parties with all that drinking. She wanted him to be a bad kid like her. Probably made her feel better about herself.”

  “Wait,” Logan cut in. “Dad was friends with Ashley’s mom?”

  Gracia blinked. “Friends? They were dating. Always telling everyone they were so in love. But your dad was always causing trouble with his dating. First the Bartons were mad at him and Tammy, then everyone was mad at him and Brandon.”

  Logan choked.

  “No one ever told you? You’re making me into a chismosa,” Gracia said. “Ask your dads to tell you more about Snakebite back then.”

  “What was Brandon like?” Logan pushed. “Tell me about him.”

  Gracia looked at her for a long moment. “I shouldn’t say anything about it. It’s not my business.”

  Logan tried to swallow her desperation for information. She wanted to know what Brandon had been like. In a way, she barely knew what he was like now. Before she could ask, Gracia shook her head.

  “Honesty for honesty,” she said. “I always tried to teach your daddy that when he was little. How about you tell me something?”

  “Oh,” Logan said. “Uh, sure.”

  Gracia popped a honey-lemon cough drop into her mouth and mulled over it quietly. Her salt-and-pepper hair fell in loose curls over her shoulder. “What case are those boys here for?”

  “I don’t really know,” Logan admitted. “They said it’s little stuff. Changes in the weather. Some weird sightings.”

  Gracia shook her head. “The weather didn’t change until your dad came here.”

  “What?”

  “It started in January,” Gracia said. “It snowed. It doesn’t snow here. In spring, it was floods. And now this heat. It wasn’t like this before your dad arrived.”

  She didn’t say came home.

  “I…” Logan started. “Why is it changing now?”

  “Good question.” Gracia laughed. “I don’t know. I want to know what your dads think. I could tell them my thoughts, but they don’t listen to me. They never have.”

  Logan looked at her hands. She’d thought there was something off since she first got here, from the creepy mob at the cemetery to the strange heat to the cabin. But until now, it was like everyone else thought it was normal. Gracia said that Snakebite was wrong and Logan was flooded with a sudden crash of relief.

  “Was it ever like this before?”

  Gracia chewed on the question. “You know, for a long time I felt it. There was a thing under Snakebite, like a little buzzing. It was like it made people nervous, even if they didn’t know it was there. It was quieter than it is now. But then, one day it was gone. None of us ever really talked about it, but I know we all felt it go. Like we could breathe again. The little buzzing sound went away the day your dads left Snakebite.”

  The last sentence dropped like a stone in Logan’s stomach. “And it didn’t come back until…”

  “Until Brandon returned.”

  “So, wait—”

  Gracia held up a hand. “In a minute. The show is back on.”

  BRANDON VOICEOVER: Alejo and I have never seen a haunted windmill before. The investigation this morning turned up nothing, but any good paranormal investigator knows that most ghosts come out at night.

  BRANDON: Can we check this loose patch?

  [Brandon walks to the side of the windmill and nudges the crumbled brick with the edge of his shoe.]

  BRANDON: It looks like a crawl space, doesn’t it?

  [Alejo crouches and looks through the bricks.]

  ALEJO: Too small for anything human.

  [He looks at the camera.]

  Gracia laughed and crunched on a burned strip of bacon. Logan wanted to laugh—her fathers were always overdramatic on the show, which Twitter loved for screencap potential—but Gracia’s words still sat heavy in her gut.

  [Brandon points to Alejo’s satchel.]

  BRANDON: Let’s get the ThermoGeist on this. I have a good feeling.

  [Alejo digs through his satchel and pulls out the ThermoGeist. He points it at the open night, waiting for it to calibrate. He swings it toward the hole in the windmill’s side. As the ThermoGeist passes, it flickers blue.]

  “Wait,” Logan said. “Is this a recording?”

  “Yes,” Gracia said. “I love your dad, but this show comes on past my bedtime. I always record.”

  “Can I rewind it?”

  Gracia arched a brow, but surrendered the remote. Logan sat up and rewound the episode by a few frames. The ThermoGeist was steady in Alejo’s hand, dead quiet each inch of the way to the crawl space.

  Except one.

  It passed so quickly it was almost impossible to see. As the ThermoGeist passed Brandon, it flickered. Not soft like a glitch. Not small like a temperature difference. Not a mistake.

  It passed Brandon and it flared the color of the dead.

  17

  Old Sins

  Ashley yanked the Ford across the lakeside highway, knocking Logan against the passenger door. Elexis groaned in the back seat, tapping away at his phone. At first, this whole investigation thing had felt like a longshot. But now, with revelations unspooling themselves everywhere she looked, it felt real. Logan didn’t know what they would find at the end of this—she didn’t even know what they were trying to solve—but they were getting close.

  She and Ashley weren’t friends. They were just investigating Tristan Granger’s disappearance together. But after the party at the cabin, there was something easy between them. Maybe it was just the comfort of knowing Ashley had already seen her messy drunk and passed out.

  Logan wasn’t sure.

  “I found out something else,” Logan said.

  “What?” Ashley asked, clearly only halfway paying attention.

  “Our parents used to date.”

  Ashley looked at her, then focused back on the road. “Wait, like my mom? No way, that’s—”

  “Guess which dad.”

  Ashley scrunched up her nose. “Alejo? I’m assuming. I heard them talking at the store one time and their conversation was so weird. They were saying they hated each other, but I don’t know.”

  “I’m still in shock.” Logan unfolded her legs, propping her feet up on the dash. “I just kinda assumed my dads were together since birth. They’re so annoying about it.”

  Ashley slapped Logan’s ankles. “Feet off the dash.”

  Logan rolled her eyes.

  “Was he, you know … back then?”

  “Was he bi?” Logan snorted. “Yeah, the whole time.”

  Ashley blinked. “Oh, he’s both. I didn’t know.”

  The truck hiccupped over one pothole, then another, and Logan restrained her laughter. “You’re so straight.”

  Ashley opened her mouth, but nothing came out. She shoved Logan against the passenger door. “Stop—I’m trying. I get it. It’s just all really new to me.”

  “Well I, for one, am glad we’re not sisters. It would’ve made this whole thing weird.”

  Ashley paused. “Would’ve made what weird?”

  Logan said nothing. She wasn’t sure what she meant.

  They reached the gravel turnout at the edge of the trees and Logan hopped out of the truck and stretched her arms. Ashley unfolded herself from the driver’s seat while Elexis remained in the back seat, lying down with his jacket draped over his face. Logan knocked on his window.

  “C’mon,” she said. “We’ve got ghost busting to do.”

  Elexis groaned.

  “I’m confused, though. If the thing lit up at your dad, shouldn’t we be talking to him?” Ashley asked.

  “Brandon is only part of it. I’m talking about the gear, though. I watched a few other episodes just to check, and they never point the ThermoGeist at Brandon. They point it at Alejo sometimes and nothing. But on Brandon it registered, like, immediately.”

  Logan had spent the past few days holed up in her motel room with her eyes glued to the TV. S
aying she’d watched “a few” episodes was an understatement. She’d known that they were potentially dealing with something paranormal, but she’d never thought Brandon himself was the source. She thought of the Brandon from her dream, garbed in strange darkness, voice deeper than an ocean. Maybe none of it was connected, maybe it was all connected.

  She needed to get the ghosts at the cabin to talk.

  She needed the truth.

  Elexis hoisted himself out of the back seat. “Okay. Pretending that any of this is real, what does that mean?”

  “It means the ThermoGeist flagged something paranormal on him. Maybe a spirit? Something bad.” Logan shouldered her tote bag and locked the car door. The gravel turnout was quieter in the daytime. Logan shook off the feeling that she was trespassing. “Which means the gear works. We can use it on the ghosts in the cabin.”

  “And then we’ll talk to Brandon?” Ashley asked.

  “Maybe.” Logan scratched the back of her head. “I don’t know.”

  Ashley frowned.

  “Why bring me?” Elexis asked. “I thought this was you guys’ thing.”

  “We’re family,” Logan said. “Family helps each other.”

  “You don’t help me with anything.”

  “I would if you asked.”

  Elexis shrugged and straightened his beanie. It wasn’t just about family, though. Since the party, something had changed in Logan’s chest. Looking at Ashley felt different now. There was the same irritation, the same skepticism, the same doubt she always felt. But it was like she’d been looking at a blurry photo before, and now the details had come into focus. She looked at Ashley and she saw eyes the color of clear water, lips that hinted at a phantom smile, the gentle way she turned her head when she looked at Logan. This dumb, tugging feeling about straight girls wasn’t new, and it was never worth it. But Ashley wasn’t just a straight girl. She was the daughter of a sworn enemy, she had the power to throw Logan out of town in the blink of an eye, and she was searching for her missing boyfriend, whom she still seemed very into.

  Elexis wasn’t just family—he was a buffer.