The Dead and the Dark

by Courtney Gould

  As if on cue, the man bursts through the cabin the door and the Dark shudders. It has pictured this moment all these months. The man is the original host. He is the one who pulled the Dark from the ether, who gave it a form. He is the only one who can unmake the Dark, and the Dark will not be unmade.

  Say hello to your father.

  “Logan,” the man gasps, nearly collapsing with relief. He takes a step toward her, but he senses that she is wrong. He hesitates and his eyes land on the gun in her hand. His face drains of color.

  The girl sucks in a sharp breath. “Hello.”

  The man is frozen. He looks at her, and he recognizes it. He didn’t recognize it in the sheriff, but he recognizes it in her. He sees the shadows he is so familiar with in her eyes. He has seen these shadows in the mirror a thousand times. It pleases the Dark that the man remembers so well. As hard as the man has tried to cut it away, the Dark’s presence still lingers in him.

  “Logan, what happened?” the man asks. “Did it—?”

  Tell him what will happen now, the Dark hisses into the girl’s ear. Tell him what he will pay for.

  The girl steels herself. Her grip on the gun tightens, slick with sweat. “You’re gonna finish what you started,” she chokes. “You knew it wouldn’t last. We weren’t both gonna make it.”

  Almost too quickly, this breaks the man. It is so much easier than the Dark thought. Behind thick lenses, his eyes close to keep from clouding with tears. The man’s sun rises and sets with the girl. The Dark remembers that the girl wrapping her small fingers around the man’s thumb was the first time he had ever felt truly alive. It is only right that she end him. It is only right that the girl the Dark brought back for him be the one to take his life.

  A life for a life, the Dark whispers to her.

  “Logan,” the man says, “I know it’s so strong. And it doesn’t feel like you can fight it. But just … think about who you are.”

  The girl’s brow twitches in a small act of resistance. The Dark doubles down in her bones. It scrapes against her skull, filling up her head so there’s no room for anything else. It finds the small, trembling part of her that it needs; it finds the part of her that hates the man standing in front of her. It finds memories of forgotten birthdays, of nights spent watching his face on the TV, of dinners all by herself. It finds the tunnel in Tulsa, the hateful way her father looked at her, the fear that filled her up. It finds the lonely, quaking beat of her heart and takes hold.

  He doesn’t love you, the Dark reminds her. He didn’t save you. I did.

  The girl raises the gun. Her hand shakes.

  “Hey, hey,” the man says, hands raised in defense. “Logan, listen to me. It seems louder than everything else. But you can ignore it. If you just—”

  Shoot him.

  The girl does.

  She hesitates at the last moment, swinging to the left to avoid the man’s chest. The bullet pierces his shoulder and he collapses to his knees. He groans in pain and it sounds like music to the Dark. It is much better than piano song. Blood pools in the man’s hand, and he bites his lip to keep from crying out.

  “How are you here?” the man demands. His gentleness dissipates and he is only frantic agony, voice rasping with pain. “Why didn’t you die? It was years.”

  The man still doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand how the Dark came to be in the first place. He doesn’t understand why he was chosen to be the Dark’s first host. He doesn’t understand what sustains it now.

  The girl understands, because she feels the place where the Dark holds her. It fastens its grip on a knotted, misshapen piece of her heart that was supposed to hold her absent father. She has always known that this piece of her is blackened and rotted. She understands what feeds the Dark in a way the man never could.

  Tell him why, the Dark whispers.

  “It chose you because you hated Snakebite so much. When you didn’t hate Snakebite anymore, it had to find something else.… It stayed alive because…”

  The man remembers now. He remembers the quiet motel rooms and the long, empty stretches of highway. He remembers his husband’s voice, choked with static through the phone. He remembers closing his eyes trying to remember the details of his daughter’s face. He remembers the exhaustion aching in his bones as he forced himself to keep going, treading water to stay alive. He understands the Dark the way a stone understands a dam released over it.

  The man looks at his hands.

  “… because I hated myself.”

  Again, the Dark commands. Kill him.

  The girl grips the handle of the gun. Instead of the lonely memories the Dark feeds her, she recalls a moment spent with the man: a quiet car ride into town, a birthday party where her fathers dressed as Ghostbusters, a trip to an amusement park filled with smiles and laughter. The memories are ancient, buried under hurt and longing, but she clings to them like the sun-bleached bones of what her life could have been. She lives in the memories, pushing back against the Dark. Wind whistles through the loose boards of the cabin and raises pinpricks on the girl’s flesh. She shakes. Beads of sweat collect at her brow, but she does not bend.

  The man looks at her and smiles. “I did everything wrong. I get it.”

  “No, you don’t,” the girl says through clenched teeth.

  “It’s probably too late, but can I tell you some things about us?” the man asks. “Not when we were in LA or on the road. Before that, when we lived here. Do you remember that? Five years of just you, me, and your dad.”

  The girl’s head reels. Even with all the Dark has shown her, she does not remember this place. But the Dark remembers. It remembers pulling the girl’s bones from the dirt and piecing her back together—marrow to muscle, skin to skin, blood rushing through her veins. It remembers placing her in the man’s arms in the place where she now stands alone.

  It hurts her that she does not remember this. She wants to claw at her mind until it gives her memories back to her.

  “We were so happy when we lived here. I wanted it to be like that forever—just the three of us. Me and your dad were in love, but the day I saw you, it all clicked.” The man is still smiling with tears in his eyes, and the sight confuses the girl. She has never heard the man speak of love and happiness. She has never seen him cry. She doesn’t understand what these things mean.

  He continues.

  “You got sick. You went too fast. We couldn’t—I couldn’t—live without you.” The man tries to stand, but his arm won’t support him. He grits his teeth in pain and keeps himself from toppling to the floor. “I’m the one who gave this thing power. I let it feed on me for years. And I was so stupid, because I didn’t know what it could do. I didn’t know if it would start poisoning another town. I didn’t know if it would make me hurt people. I didn’t know if it would make me hurt you. I thought you would be safer without me.”

  Enough of this, the Dark hisses, kill him and be done with it. The things he says now do not make up for your loneliness. He cannot undo the pain.

  The girl closes her eyes and presses her palm to her forehead. It is a gesture the man recognizes as hers, not the Dark’s. He smiles, frail but hopeful, because he thinks he can draw her out. He thinks he can separate his daughter from the Dark. He forgets that the Dark does not capture, it becomes.

  The Dark presses against the girl’s ear, warm and quiet and calm. He cannot erase the way you hurt, but I can. I only want to take away your pain. I become stronger when you are stronger. Be strong now.

  “Logan,” the man says again. He shudders and his fingers are slick with his own blood. “I let this thing out, but I don’t regret it. I would do it again. I would let it kill me to keep you alive.”

  The Dark takes the girl by the throat. She can hardly breathe. Her heart trembles in the Dark’s grip. Hot tears cloud her eyes as she looks into the man’s face. She hates him, but she loves him, too. Both emotions rage like wildfire in her gut—they come from the same place. To the girl, they feel
the same.

  “No, that’s not … that doesn’t make any sense.” With tears muddled in her throat, the girl asks, “If it was all for me, why did you leave me alone?”

  The man’s expression shatters. He reaches for his daughter’s hand and she raises the gun again. This is how the man will die. After his years of wandering, of avoiding his family, of hating himself for his mistakes, this is how it will end. She will forever remember the way he sounded when he died—just flesh against wood, and then nothing.

  “I’m so sorry,” the man says. He closes his eyes and braces himself. “If you have to do it, I…”

  He cannot finish his sentence.

  This is the end.

  “I never wanted you to go away,” the girl croaks. She has never told the truth of it; she has never said the words out loud. She closes her eyes and hot tears rush down her face. “I wanted you to love me.”

  “I do love you.” The man takes the girl’s hand. His palm is wet with sweat and blood. He shakes with fear, but he holds her and breathes, “I love you more than anything. I love you and I’m so sorry.”

  He does not love you, the Dark tears into her. This is what you have always wanted. You hated him from the beginning—

  “No.”

  The girl shakes.

  Kill him.

  The girl drops the gun and something inside her erupts. The cabin explodes in a shockwave of nothing. Broken glass clatters against rotted wood and the ceiling groans, shifting in its wake. The man topples backward and slams against the cabin’s front door.

  The Dark scrambles for a foothold in the girl’s mind. In an instant, the blackened, rotted place it nestled is gone. She is flooded with light, and it burns the Dark. There is nowhere to hide, nowhere to hold, nowhere to whisper. There is no hate here and the Dark is left scrambling in the unrelenting light. The cabin is all at once a ruin, a home, and a memory. The man is both young and old. The Dark unravels, fluttering around them like flakes of ash.

  And then it is nothing.

  It tears itself from the girl’s mind, slowly evaporating in the untethered air. The girl’s eyes shut and her knees buckle. Her vision turns black as she falls and falls.

  38

  Swimming In The Smoke

  Logan never hit the ground.

  Brandon’s arms—her father’s arms—were there to catch her. The cabin spun and spun and, for a moment, she saw it all. Not the strained, filmy past the Dark had showed her; everything. Every memory she had concentrated into one moment. Golden sunlight pouring through the lakefront window, the ceilings vaulted by massive wood beams, the air that smelled like woodsmoke and apple cider. Just faintly, the piano played a lullaby. It was everything she’d lost, drifting back to her like a sheet of falling dust.

  Brandon was different. He smiled at her, but he was younger than the Brandon she knew. His eyes were alive with a joy she’d never seen, bright and dancing as sunlit water. He laughed and his eyes clouded with tears.

  They were alive.

  “I’m so sorry,” Brandon whispered.

  And then he was Brandon again; the real Brandon. The one who was both alive and dead, both here and gone. The cabin righted itself in a single moment. The Dark’s residue ebbed away and they were left there on the floor, surrounded by rotting wood and silence. Somewhere far away, lake water lapped ashore. Somewhere farther away, the last of the Dark scuttled into the shadows until there was nothing left.

  It was over.

  Brandon’s eyes were half obscured by a deep crack in his glasses. Blood spotted the ridge of his jaw, but he was smiling. He wrapped his good arm around Logan’s back and pulled her against his chest. Logan’s arms hung at her sides in disbelief. This had to be a dream. The weight of it crashed over her with sudden, unrelenting force. She wasn’t dead, she wasn’t dreaming, she was alive and there was no Dark left in her because there was no Dark anywhere.

  Before she could help it, she was crying. Brandon held her, cautious at first like he wasn’t sure he was allowed, and then he was crying, too. They held each other and shook and cried because they were alive.

  Beside them, the floorboards groaned. Elexis stirred, massaging the purple welt on his brow. His expression pinched. “I … where am I?”

  Logan blinked. She untangled herself from Brandon’s arms and clambered to Elexis’s side, fumbling to untie the rope binding him to the piano. “Oh my god. Please say you’re okay.”

  Elexis groped along the cabin floor for his glasses. Other than the knotted bruise at his brow, he looked unharmed. Logan plucked his glasses from the rubble and grimaced. One lens was missing and the wire frame was bent. She held the glasses between them and laughed uneasily. Elexis groaned. “Awesome.”

  Logan hugged him. “I’ll buy you, like, a thousand new pairs. I’m so happy you’re alive.”

  “Whoa,” Elexis breathed. He looked over Logan’s shoulder. “Mr. Woodley, are you okay?”

  Brandon cradled his injured arm and offered a pained smile. Blood stained his hand and soaked into his frayed jeans. It was worse than Logan had realized; guilt knotted in her stomach like a clenched fist.

  She’d done this. She’d pulled the trigger.

  “I’m fine.” Brandon glanced at his arm. “But … maybe we should get out of here?”

  Logan nodded to Elexis. Slowly, they hoisted Brandon from the ground with his good arm over Logan’s shoulders. Brandon winced at the pressure, but slowly, they hobbled out of the cabin.

  The sky was splashed with pale dawn and the trees were quiet, leaning in the wind like they were forming a way out. Logan’s breath stung her chest with the effort of keeping Brandon upright. In the distance, the trees flashed red and blue. The gravel turnout was littered with state police, and at the front of the pack, Logan recognized Ashley, Alejo, and Gracia.

  It took everything she had not to break into a sprint.

  Logan and Elexis hauled Brandon the rest of the way to the gravel before Alejo rushed to meet them. He pressed one hand on Logan’s back and used the other to hold Brandon in place. Brandon slumped into his shoulder, breath rasping. He threw his head back against Alejo’s arm and laughed into the dawn.

  “What happened?” Alejo asked. “There are paramedics. Someone will—”

  “It’s gone.” Brandon lolled his forehead against Alejo’s neck. Blood from his shoulder painted Alejo’s denim jacket red. “It’s gone.”

  Alejo didn’t speak. He stared, knuckles turning white as his grip on Brandon tightened. He looked into Logan’s eyes, silently begging her to confirm it.

  She nodded.

  “Oh my god,” Alejo breathed. He inhaled sharply and covered his mouth with a shaking hand. When he blinked, he was crying, too. The morning wind was cold and bitter, but Alejo pulled them together in a hug tight enough to block out the chill. He shook until his tears melted into laughter.

  “It’s okay. It didn’t take her,” Brandon croaked. “We’re finally gonna be okay.”

  Logan looked over Alejo’s shoulder. Gracia had swept Elexis into a hug so tight she was shocked Elexis could breathe. Gracia peppered his face with kisses, muttering inaudibly in his ear. Ashley stood behind them, hesitant like she wasn’t sure if she deserved to celebrate. Her eyes were red and swollen. She looked at the horizon with a smile that was relieved and pained at once.

  “I’ll be right back,” Logan whispered.

  She made her way to Ashley. Paramedics quickly swarmed Brandon, working to patch up his shoulder. It was a surreal scene—for the first time since she’d come to Snakebite, it was like there was a world outside. There were people beyond this little town. Someone in the real world cared about what happened here. They weren’t stuck in a cage. They hadn’t just come here to die.

  “Hey,” Logan said.

  Ashley blinked away from the horizon and focused on Logan’s face. She wiped tears from her eyes and smiled wearily. “Hey.”

  “I hope your night was a little less eventful than mine,” Logan mused.r />
  “I don’t think it was.”

  Logan gestured to the crowd of police cars. “Did you call the cavalry?”

  “I did. Actually, I think Fran called them first.” Ashley looked at the ground. “I, uh … we found Tristan.”

  Logan’s eyes widened. She knew better than to ask, but she couldn’t help herself. There was still a piece of hope lodged in her chest, small and trembling. “Alive?”

  Ashley gave her a tight-lipped frown. Slowly, she shook her head. Her lips quivered and the tears she’d clearly been fighting resurfaced.

  “I’m sorry,” Logan said. She felt selfish for a moment for being so happy that her family had survived this. Logan took Ashley’s hand tentatively. “I’m so sorry.”

  They both looked out at the hills in silence. Earlier tonight—or yesterday, Logan guessed—she’d thought this place was a prison. And it was, in a sense. But without the Dark, there was beauty in it. There was hope.

  Ashley took Logan’s face in her hands. She pulled Logan to her and kissed her like they were the only people in the turnout. Like they were the only people in the world. Logan held Ashley’s shoulders and kissed her back. She didn’t know what they would do next—where they would go—but Logan kissed her and kissed her.

  They were alive.

  For now, that was enough.

  39

  Only Homesick Ghosts

  It was a quiet morning in Snakebite.

  It had been two weeks since Paris’s basement. Two weeks since Snakebite learned their sheriff had killed three children. Two weeks of people asking questions before promptly realizing they didn’t want the answers. Two weeks since Ashley had seen Tristan for the last time. His funeral was a quiet, hard thing. But it was a relief. Winter would come again and Tristan would still be gone, but at least he wasn’t lost.

  At least he was home.

  Ashley wasn’t sure she could ever call Snakebite home again.