Rules for Vanishing

by Kate Alice Marshall

  He keeps going, prompting students to supply other ghost stories and urban legends, coming up with ideas for how to track down their origins.

  I hardly hear it. All I hear are the last words my sister spoke, muttering into her phone. On April 18, one year ago.

  We know where the road is. We’ve got the keys. That’s all we need to find her. I’m not backing down now. Not after everything we’ve done to get this close.

  And then she turned and saw me. Slammed her bedroom door closed.

  The next morning she was gone, and she never came home.

  EXHIBIT B

  “The Legend of Lucy Gallows”

  Excerpted from Local Lore:

  Stories of Briar Glen by Jason Sweet

  It was a Sunday—April 19, 1953—and Lucy Gallows’s sister was getting married on a sprawling property at the edge of the Briar Glen Woods. Little Lucy, age twelve, was the flower girl. But following an argument with her mother, she ran away into the woods in her crisp white dress with its blue ribbon around the waist. Everyone expected she’d be back in a minute or two, as soon as she calmed down, but ten minutes later she hadn’t returned—and then twenty minutes, and then half an hour.

  Lucy’s brother, Billy, was sent to fetch his sister. He walked into the woods. The only way forward was a narrow track, a deer trail through the trees. He called her name—Lucy! Lucy!—but received no answer except the calling of crows.

  And then he saw it: the road. There were roads here and there in the woods, the remnants of the original settlement of Briar Glen, which had burned down in 1863. These roads were now often nothing more than a stretch of trees planted in too straight a line to spring from nature, or one stone pressed up against another where all the rest had long since been knocked astray. At first this road was like that, a dimple in the underbrush and a few scattered stones marked with the tools of men. But as Billy chased it, the road widened, and the stones knocked up against each other, beginning to form a smooth path through the thick forest.

  He was certain that Lucy had followed the road, though he couldn’t explain the strength of the conviction to anyone who had asked afterward. And yet for all that conviction, every step he took seemed to be more difficult than the one before. As the road grew easier, his way grew harder, as if he was laboring against an invisible force.

  His feet got heavier and heavier. The air seemed to push against him. It became almost unbearable, and then—there was Lucy. He could see her ahead of him, around a slight bend in the road. She was talking to someone—a man in a patchy brown suit and a wide-brimmed hat. Billy called her name. She didn’t turn. The man bent slightly to talk to her, smiling. He put out his hand.

  Billy screamed his sister’s name and thrashed toward her. But Lucy didn’t seem to hear him. She took the stranger’s hand, and together they walked down the road. They moved swiftly, not burdened as Billy was, and the road seemed to follow, vanishing beneath Billy’s feet. In moments the road and the man and little Lucy Gallows were gone.

  Townspeople searched the woods for weeks, but no sign of Lucy was ever found. But every so often, someone stumbles across the road, winding through the woods, and sees a girl running down it, dressed in a white dress with a blue ribbon. You can never catch up with her, they say, and you will find yourself alone in the bewildering woods, with no sign of a road or a girl or a clear way home.

  So be careful what roads you take, and be careful who you follow down them.

  INTERVIEW

  SARA DONOGHUE

  May 9, 2017

  Sara Donoghue sits in the interview room. It is hard to tell what sort of building it might belong to. The walls are cinder block, painted a dingy white. An empty metal bookshelf stands against one wall; the table in the center is a cheap folding picnic table.

  Dr. Andrew Ashford enters the room and settles into the chair opposite Sara Donoghue once again. Ashford is black, dark skinned, hair silver. A dark web of scars puckers the skin on the back of one hand. He carries a briefcase, which he sets beside him on the floor. Sara Donoghue, in contrast, is a slight girl with medium-brown hair. She wears black jeans, a black tank top, and a black sweater that has slipped down one shoulder, baring a freckled shoulder. She seems tucked in on herself and tense with nervous energy.

  ASHFORD: I’m sorry about that. Our equipment is usually reliable, but we occasionally encounter technical difficulties around these sorts of events.

  Sara looks to the side, as if uninterested.

  ASHFORD: Tell me about your sister.

  SARA: Becca?

  ASHFORD: Do you have another sister?

  SARA: No, it’s just—what do you want to know? There’s a lot in the reports. Official records.

  ASHFORD: I want to know about your sister from your perspective. Before her disappearance. What was she like? Did she have a lot of friends?

  Sara hesitates. She speaks carefully, as if worried Ashford will get the wrong impression.

  SARA: She had us. The five of us.

  ASHFORD: The “Wildcats”?

  SARA: Yeah. But by the time she disappeared, we weren’t really hanging out together anymore. We hit high school, and Anthony and Trina got involved with sports. Mel started spending all her time with the theater kids, and Becca . . . I don’t really know what happened with Becca.

  ASHFORD: Did she have other friends?

  SARA: She was friendly with almost everyone. But she didn’t have close friends, other than us.

  ASHFORD: She didn’t meet anyone new she clicked with?

  SARA: You mean her boyfriend? I guess. But she was never serious about him.

  ASHFORD: What makes you say that?

  SARA: She liked him because he listened to her. But they didn’t belong together.

  Sara chews on her thumbnail.

  SARA: You always got the sense she didn’t belong here at all.

  ASHFORD: Did that have anything to do with the fact that she was adopted?

  SARA: What? No. I mean, it wasn’t always easy for her, I guess. Briar Glen’s about as white as you can get, and people can be pretty racist even if they don’t mean to be, but at least at home, that was never a problem. It wasn’t about not belonging, I guess. More like she deserved to belong somewhere . . . bigger. Better.

  ASHFORD: Like where?

  SARA: New York. LA. Paris. Someplace where her art could really take off.

  ASHFORD: I’ve seen some of her photographs.

  Ashford opens a folder on the table and spreads out several glossy photos. The top photo shows six preteens. A printed label has been affixed to the front, identifying each of the children. Becca and Sara stand at the center, arms around each other, Becca’s outline slightly blurred as if she’s barely managed to dash back into the frame. Despite their different ethnicities—Sara white, Becca Asian—there is something about their stances that marks them as obviously related. Anthony Beck and Nick Dessen, both white, stand to the left of the sisters, Anthony with his chin tilted up in a too-cool pose he hasn’t grown into and Nick, a skinny kid in an oversize windbreaker, mimicking him. On the right, Trina Jeffries breaks the mood with a smile, her hand lifted to tuck her hair behind her ear, and Melanie Whittaker, a black girl in a denim jacket covered in iron-on patches, curls the corner of her mouth like she can’t quite take herself seriously.

  Ashford slides this photograph to the side, baring another. Sara frowns, a faint line of confusion between her brows. He taps the new photo, an image of a young man with his face in blank shadow. The light is odd at his shoulders, as if his outline is fracturing.

  ASHFORD: What do you know about this photograph?

  SARA: I haven’t seen that one before.

  ASHFORD: What can you tell me about Nick Dessen?

  SARA: Aren’t you going to ask about the other photo?

  AS
HFORD: Which one? This one?

  He moves aside the photo of Nick Dessen and places another on the center of the table. It shows Sara, her hair damp and hanging limply around her face, standing next to a young woman wearing a white dress with a slash of blue ribbon across her waist. The girl has extended her hand; Sara has begun to lift her own, as if to take it.

  ASHFORD: You find this photo remarkable?

  SARA: Don’t you?

  ASHFORD: Not particularly. Two girls. About to hold hands.

  SARA: But she’s . . .

  ASHFORD: She’s Lucy Callow? She does bear a resemblance to the photos we have, but existing photos of Lucy Callow aren’t high quality. This could be anyone. [Pause] But it isn’t, is it? It is Lucy. You found her.

  Sara meets Ashford’s eyes. She’s silent for a moment. Then she lets out a quick, choked-off laugh.

  SARA: No. We didn’t find Lucy.

  ASHFORD: Then—

  SARA: She found us.

  2

  BECCA TOOK PHOTOS for the yearbook every year, and you could always tell which ones were hers. Most of the other photos were posed or awkward, the lighting flat, the students interchangeable. Becca’s photos were different. She captured the longing of unrequited love in the way a girl stared across the classroom, her chin resting on her fist as she slumped over her desk. In the long, lean line of Anthony’s body, stretched out along the ground, the arc of the soccer ball unmistakable even in the still frame as he dove to meet it, she captured exultation and concentration. Becca had a way of making everyone feel seen.

  It was remarkable, then, how little time anyone spent looking for her.

  The official story is that she ran off with a boy. Zachary Kent. Bad news, according to my parents. He was older than her. My parents tried to forbid her from dating him—hated his pierced lip and dyed hair, the music he played, the car he drove. I only met him once, when I nearly ran into him and Becca coming out of the Half Moon Diner, his arm slung over Becca’s shoulders. Becca introduced him, but all he said to me was “Hey” before they got into his car and drove away. I saw the way she looked at him, and I saw the photo she took of him. One ankle over his knee, a notebook propped on his leg, his eyes squinting off into the distance.

  It was the kind of photograph Becca loved the most. Peeling back the layers of a person bit by bit. Making a study of them. There was curiosity in that photo, but not love. No wild abandon. She might have left home, but it wouldn’t have been for him.

  Yet they disappeared, and they disappeared together, and there had been all the fights with Mom and Dad—months of them, Becca alternating between giving them the silent treatment and screaming at them for being too controlling, while they managed to find fault in everything she did: hang out with Zachary, drop out of choir, steal away on her mysterious late-night trips she would never explain to any of us. So when she vanished, they looked for her, but not too hard; they didn’t think she wanted to be found.

  I tried to tell them about the conversation I’d heard, and what Becca had said about the road—Lucy Gallows road, I thought, though I couldn’t be sure. And my mother told one of her friends, and her friend’s daughter overheard, and suddenly the whole school seemed to know. That was how the rumor started—half rumor, half joke. The kind of nervous cruelty that kids spit out without thinking, to cover up their own uneasiness.

  Lucy Gallows took Becca Donoghue into the woods, and never let her out again.

  No one believed it, of course. It was all just a morbid joke. But Becca wasn’t the sort for jokes or urban legends. She believed. And that meant that either my sister was losing it, or I had to believe, too.

  And so I started searching. For the road. For Lucy. For my sister. It never got me anywhere.

  Until now.

  * * *

  —

  By lunchtime the novelty of the messages has started to fade, but the whispers still drive me out of the cafeteria to the back steps, where I sit with my packed lunch, staring out over the back lot at the looming trees. A single crow sits in the high branches, riding the swaying of the wind.

  The door behind me opens. The bird takes off. I shift to the side so whoever it is can get past, but they stay at the top of the steps. I turn, squinting. Vanessa stands there, her phone gripped in her hand, her backpack dangling off one shoulder. “Th-there you are,” she says.

  “Um. Hi,” I say. “Can I help you with something?”

  “Maybe,” she says. “Are you going to do it?”

  “Do what?” I ask.

  “P-play the game,” she says. “The whole thing. The road, and the k-key, and finding a p-p-partner.” Her stutter is pronounced, but she doesn’t fight it like she used to when we were younger, and it has its own relaxed flow to it. She likes to tell people it’s worth the wait to hear what she has to say.

  “Why would I?”

  “Because of Becca.”

  She says Becca and not just your sister, and I think that’s the only reason I don’t leave right away. So few people say her name anymore. Like it’s bad luck. “You don’t really believe that stupid joke, do you? That Lucy Gallows took my sister?” I’m not even sure if I believe it.

  “No. But you must be wondering if the t-texts have anything to do with her. With Becca.”

  “Of course,” I snap. Her cheeks go red and she pushes up her glasses, which has the effect of half hiding her face behind her sweater sleeve. “Why do you care, anyway?”

  “I d-don’t believe in ghosts,” Vanessa says. “But I like history. And mysteries. I want to know who wrote these. And what it’s supposed to mean. I thought, since you d-did all that research, you might know.”

  “Oh.” There’s something wrong with me, since Becca vanished. If anyone so much as hints at what happened, I react like they’re attacking me. Even with my friends. Which is why I don’t have any left. “Here, sit down,” I say, gesturing for Vanessa to join me on the steps. She perches on the top step, a little above me.

  “So, Lucy Gallows,” I say. “Real name Lucy Callow. Disappeared on April 19, 1953. Wednesday’s the anniversary. Her brother was arrested for her murder, but since they never found the body, they couldn’t really make a case and he was released. She was fifteen, not twelve, and she was a bridesmaid, not a flower girl, but otherwise the story’s pretty much what they say.”

  “And the game is that stupid thing everyone played when we were little kids,” Vanessa says.

  “Not exactly,” I say. “You’ve played it?”

  “Sure. When I was, l-like, eight,” she says.

  “Me too,” I say. With Anthony. Standing at the end of the road into the woods, on either side of the median line. Hold hands. Close your eyes. Take thirteen steps. Supposedly, this summons the specter of Lucy Gallows to walk beside you.

  “Did anything happen?” Vanessa asks, leaning forward.

  “Of course not.” There are two ways the game “works”: either you’re young and imaginative enough that you conjure the brush of a breeze into the brush of Lucy Gallows’s hand, the skittering of leaves into her footsteps, the creak of trees into her spectral cries—or you have friends sneaking up behind you to mess with you. Similarly, there are two kinds of people who play the game: kids young enough to still believe in magic, and teenagers trying to impress crushes.

  “But you said n-not exactly. So what’s different?”

  “There’s an older version,” I say. “Or a different one, at least. You’re still supposed to have a partner and take thirteen steps, but it doesn’t have anything to do with Lucy. It’s supposed to summon the road—or it’s how you get down the road, or something. The road has seven gates. If you get through them all, you get—something. Like a wish. That story is older than the Lucy Gallows story—older than Lucy Callow. Some people say she might have known the story, and that’s why she got on the road when it appeared.”r />
  “Some people?” Vanessa asks, eyebrows raised.

  “Ms. Evans,” I clarify. The town librarian was the same age as Lucy when she went missing, and she was my best source for all game-related lore. For a while, a seventy-eight-year-old woman was the person I talked to the most.

  “I’ve never heard of that part of the g-game,” Vanessa says, pushing up her glasses with the side of her thumb.

  “It got dropped at some point, I guess,” I say. “Maybe in the eighties when those kids went missing?”

  “I thought that was a rumor,” Vanessa says. “Satanic p-p-panic and stuff. Those kids just ran away.”

  “That’s what everyone decided,” I reply, voice flat. Vanessa bites her lip, her eyes dancing away from mine. I guess I’m officially Trauma Girl, with the black clothes and the antisocial reputation to match. I’ve gotten used to that particular reaction, since I refuse to politely pretend Becca never existed.

  Vanessa clears her throat. “So you need a partner,” she says. “And a key?”

  That’s the part that made my stomach lurch, when I saw the message. Because I’ve never mentioned the keys. I’ve never heard anyone but Becca talk about them. The only place I’ve seen them mentioned, other than that overheard conversation, is her notebook, left behind when she vanished. “The keys open the gates. They have to be your keys. They connect you to the gates—to the road. I think.” Becca’s notes were vague on that front.

  “So all that’s l-left is finding the road,” Vanessa says. “The one just off Cartwright?”

  “That’s where people play the game, but the spot where Lucy’s brother claimed he saw her was actually, like, five miles west of there,” I say.

  “Is there a road there?”

  “Well, no,” I say, shrugging. “But there wouldn’t be, if it was a ghostly apparition, would there? Except when Lucy’s out haunting.” I keep my voice casual, like there isn’t a hand tightening around my throat with every word. Because if I was normal, if I had moved on and let go of this fanciful coping strategy, as my mother once suggested, none of this would bother me.