I’m still listening to the steps behind me when we come across the first gravestone.
It sticks out of the ground like a broken tooth in a rotted gum, the soil lumpy around it. It might have been a classic tombstone shape once, but the top is cracked off and weathered. Even with our flashlights fixed on it, it’s impossible to make out what might be carved on the surface—is that an eight or a nine? A T or an R?
It’s a few feet off the road. I edge up close to the edge but don’t stick so much as a fingertip over.
“If we get attacked by zombies, I’m out,” Jeremy mutters. Trina hushes him.
“There’s another one up there,” Anthony says, pointing his flashlight. We traipse along. Sure enough, another tombstone juts out of the soil, leaning slantwise. Still unreadable. As we walk, more appear. Some farther out, some so close you could almost stretch out and touch them from the road, though no one tries. A stone angel hovers over a cluster of three headstones, her hands and face worn away, her wings broken.
“Spooky,” Anthony says as we pass a double headstone. Husband and wife, maybe.
“I don’t know. It seems almost normal,” I say.
A tumbled-down stone wall intersects the road up ahead. A sign, wooden and rotten, sticks half out of the dirt just beyond, no more legible than the tombstones.
“This must be the town,” Trina says. “Lots of towns used to have a cemetery just outside, right?”
It sure seems like she’s right. As we keep walking, our flashlights sweep over the remnants of foundations—stones still stacked into the corner of a house, hip high, or a lintel and stairs still persisting amid root, vine, and mud. The road widens, and then the stones peter out. For a moment that panics me, but the road is still obvious. It’s just dirt instead of stone. We walk through what might have once been the town square, skirting the open maw of a ruined well, padding silently past a huge, toppled building that might have been a town hall or something.
“Hey, look,” Trina says. “Burn marks. They’re on all the buildings.”
We pause, our beams branching out as we confirm the finding. Sure enough, every building has some black scar—scorched beams lodged in the earth, mortar turned black and crumbling between the stones, metal soot-stained and pocked.
“Oh, crap,” Kyle says, sounding excited. “You know what this is? Briar Glen. BG. It’s right in the notebook. This is the old Briar Glen, the one that burned down.”
“Could be,” Anthony says. “No way to know for sure.”
“We’re in the Briar Glen Woods, aren’t we?” Kyle says, and from the look on his face, he immediately regrets the question.
“I have no idea,” Anthony says. “None of us do.”
“But it could be,” Kyle says. “Right, Vanessa? You’re the history expert. Does this look like Briar Glen?”
Vanessa bites her lip, eyes widening as we all look at her. “I d-d-d—” She cuts off and looks apologetic as the word fails to come. I frown slightly, not sure why that bothers me. “S-sorry. I d-don’t know,” she continues. “It could be. I would need to look at a map.”
“I don’t think you’re going to find a map of this place, V,” Jeremy says. “Are we done sightseeing? Can we go?”
“We can go,” I say, trying to decide just how much of a problem he’s going to be.
We come to the edge of town quickly, and then the stone road picks up again, rolling along like it was never interrupted.
“Was that it?” Jeremy asks. “That was the town? I thought it would be a bigger deal. Like the darkness.”
The Liar’s Gate, I remember from Becca’s notebook. It fits with that thing in the dark. Pretending to be Anthony. I shudder. And the notebook called this the Sinner’s Gate. So what’s waiting for us?
“There’s another tombstone,” Trina says. She’s stopped, holding her flashlight in both hands close to her chest.
This tombstone is shattered, like the other one. The same sort of broken-tooth shape. Or is it exactly the same? But it can’t be the same stone, because I can make out the text carved on this one.
MAURA O’MALLEY
LOVING MOTHER
D. 1856
“Another cemetery. Great,” Anthony says.
“It’s gonna be zombies,” Jeremy says. “Guarantee it. Just you fucking wait.” He stomps out ahead, tension in every line of his body.
There are more tombstones than before, but they’re in nearly the same arrangement. There is the same cluster of three, the angel perched atop the center one whole this time, wings outstretched, only the ends of the feathers snapped off.
The same double headstone. Exactly the same. And there, standing at the edge of the cemetery, is the sign. Upright.
BRIAR GLEN
The sky is a foreboding shade of gray, the first hints of reflected light filtering to us, and we can see the shape of the town beyond our flashlights. Walls stand; roofs remain. But it’s the same town. I’m sure of it.
“Everyone stay close,” I say, fighting to make my voice louder than a whisper. It’s not an instruction I need to give. We bunch up as we walk through the center of the town, our footsteps the only sound, tramp and scrape.
The buildings show no signs of fire, but they have a neglected look about them. Vines whispering up toward windowsills. Roofs beginning to sag. A broom discarded at the base of a wall, collecting spiders and dust. No sign of anyone, either a visitor like us or—
Or whoever might belong on the road.
“Look at that,” Trina says, shining her flashlight on the lintel of a house. There’s graffiti scrawled in what looks like chalk, there and elsewhere.
DAHUT, it reads. And then: THE GATE IS OPEN
WHERE TRAVEL WE
YS AWAITS
THE TOLL IS BLOOD
The words aren’t like spray-paint tags, stylized, jagged, or loopy. They’re written in a steady, blocky hand. Almost formal.
“It says that in the notebook, too. ‘Dahut,’” I say. “Sound familiar to anyone?” A round of shaking heads. Is it a name? A place? A magic word? We creep along, the sound of my voice seeming to linger, waiting for something to drown it out.
There’s more writing around the well. Lowercase letters, cursive, looping around the rim. The stones break up the words, and they continue in a circle, as if there is no beginning, no ending.
the sea rushes in her lover rushes in her lover is the sea she unlocks the gate he floods her salt her lips salt her thighs salt her tongue we are drowned the sea rushes in
My eye tracks it around and around and around, as if I’m caught in the loop of it, as if I’ll never break free. I realize I’m reading it aloud, the words on my lips like a puzzle, like a riddle, and the others are listening, transfixed as I am. I can’t stop.
“Dahut,” Miranda says suddenly, clearly, and I stutter to a stop. We flinch back from the well, looking at each other wildly. The light on the horizon has a bruised quality. How long have we been standing here? “Sunrise soon. We should move,” she says. As if sunrise means something to her that it doesn’t to me, but Miranda seems to have a handle on this place the way none of the rest of us do, so I nod like it makes sense.
Perhaps the words are the trap the road set for us. And if we walk away from the well, we’ll be free. The next gate will be waiting.
We find the grave again instead.
“Maura O’Malley,” Vanessa says. We barely break stride this time. Some part of us has expected this. No echo comes only once. “I wonder how she died. By fire or by flood or—”
“Stop,” Trina whispers. “Just stop.”
The angel, the double headstone, the sign: BRIAR GLEN.
The paint is fresh. There are flowers planted at the base. They have bright yellow centers and thick, fleshy purple petals. Dark crimson veins spider over them. Their leaves are blunted spades, sp
layed out over the dirt in a way that makes it look like the flowers are pulling, pushing themselves free of the soil.
“What is this?” Trina asks.
“Seven times through,” Kyle says, and I nod. He continues. “The notebook said seven times through, then you’re free. So we have to walk through the town seven times before we get to the next gate.”
“That . . . sounds right,” Anthony says. “In a twisted logic sort of way.”
“Easy enough,” I say, trying to stay upbeat. It doesn’t exactly come naturally to me, and Anthony gives me a skeptical look. “That’s twice. This is the third time. Four more after. We can do that.” Becca used to be the one who talked everyone into things. I was her second-in-command. I’m not used to playing leader, but I know we need one. “Stick together, don’t dawdle, and watch each other’s backs.”
“You got it, boss,” Anthony says. Mel snorts, but she’s bouncing on the balls of her feet, ready to move, and when I start out, the others follow.
The light is dim but strengthening. We don’t need our flashlights to see the buildings up ahead anymore. The stone is whitewashed; the wood painted. Flower beds grow in front of all the houses, the same purple flowers, the same bright yellow centers.
“It looks nice,” Trina says. “It doesn’t—it doesn’t look dangerous.”
“I think everything here is dangerous,” Anthony says.
We’re passing the first house when I see her: a girl in the window, framed between two crisp white curtains. She stands as if she’s watching us—except her back is turned, a brown plait running straight down between her shoulder blades, a blue ribbon at the end. Her hands are lifted to her face, cupped gently, covering her eyes, her nose, her mouth, so that I can’t see anything but the curve of her jaw, the pink shell of her ear.
I grab Anthony’s hand. My voice crouches at the back of my mouth, but I force it out. “There’s someone there,” I whisper.
“They’re in all the buildings,” Mel says. She’s right. Every building has at least one figure. Men. Women. Children. Three in one window, a mother and two children. Hands over their faces. Turned away from us. Their clothes are old-fashioned, white and gray. Wide sleeves for the women, button-up shirts or suit jackets for the men. They don’t move as we pass. Don’t turn to look or leave the windows. I count seven. Twelve. Seventeen. And still more. Yet the silence of the place remains, as if we are the only things breathing here.
“Who are they?” Trina asks. “Are they the people that—are they ghosts?”
“Only two people died in the fire that destroyed Briar Glen,” Vanessa says, almost contemptuous.
“They can’t be people like us,” Trina says. “People like Isaac.”
“No,” I say. “I don’t think so.”
“I’m not sure they’re people at all,” Mel says, and no one disagrees.
There is writing on the well again. Crammed together, almost illegible. I make out DAHUT and BLOOD and GATE and little else, because none of us want to stop, and I don’t want to start reading again and leave us spellbound with those silent, still people all around us.
“Hurry,” Miranda whispers. She’s watching the horizon. I don’t know if she’s talking to me or whispering to herself.
The edge of town. The empty road. The cemetery. Trina moans, a sound of frustration and fear and foreboding, but we keep going, entering the town once more.
They aren’t in the houses any longer. They’re outside them. Some of them stand on their porches. Or between the houses. Standing with their hands over their faces, their backs to us. Farther off, among the trees, I see a woman standing, her hair blowing in the wind. Her ribbon has come loose; it dances away. She makes no move to capture it.
A crow caws. We seize into stillness, startled like a herd of deer. The bird flaps into sight, stoops in the air, and lands on the broad shoulder of a bearded man. It cocks its head at us, tilting its beak aside to fix us with one black, canny eye. And then it plunges its beak into the man’s neck.
It stabs, and stabs again, the way a shorebird spears a fish on its beak. The man doesn’t move. Doesn’t even flinch. Blood and bits of skin fly out as the bird shakes its beak and drives it in again, making a gurgling, cawing noise.
“Oh God,” Trina whispers. “Oh God.”
The crow gets hold of something long and stringy and red. It pulls and pulls and the thing—the tendon, the ligament, the bit of flesh—stretches, pulling away, dripping blood, until it comes free with a sucking, tearing sound, and blood gushes from the wound, pours down the man’s neck and his shoulder and seeps into his gray shirt, and still he doesn’t move, he doesn’t scream. The bird tips its head, and the meat slides down its gullet.
We run. I don’t know who moves first. It doesn’t matter. We run together, away from the man and away from the crow, past the others standing, faces hidden. We run through the center of the town.
The words are spilling down the sides of the well, tangling up with each other. I don’t look at them. We just have to get out of here.
And then we stumble to a stop, grabbing at each other, heaving for breath.
A man stands at the edge of town, square in the middle of the road just a stone’s throw away from us. His clothes are black. He looks like a priest, but the book clasped under his arm is not a Bible. The symbol etched on the cover shows concentric circles, thin, one inside the other inside the other. I can’t count them from here, but I have a guess at their number. The wind catches the ribbons that thread between the pages of the book, making them flutter.
“They haven’t done anything to us,” I whisper. “They haven’t hurt us. They just stand there. Let’s—let’s keep going.”
Jeremy lets out a strangled sound as we edge forward, skirting to the very limit of the road. The preacher’s hands aren’t covering his face, I realize, because they’re holding the book. It’s tucked under one arm, and the opposite hand rests on its spine. He stares straight ahead and makes no move to intercept us.
He has no eyes.
They aren’t empty sockets. They aren’t a flat expanse of flesh, or caved-in lids, or simply closed. They are the nothing-void that Isaac’s were for that split second, but the nothingness persists. It belongs. It is impossible to describe the sensation of not seeing, of perceiving nonexistence. I want to describe it as gray, I want to remember it as gray, but it is not. It is emptiness, filling him. It is hollowness, made solid.
He stares at me, and I stare back. I don’t know how he can see without eyes, but he sees me. Knows me. The others are edging past. Trina looks away. Mel nearly walks backward, trying to keep her eyes on him. Jeremy gets past him and then stands as if to block any approach, if he decides to lunge. Anthony grabs at my hand.
“Let’s get out of here,” he says.
The man’s mouth opens, his lips cracking like dried mud as they move. “The gate is not a gate of iron. The Liar’s Gate is darkness and deceit. The Sinner’s Gate is guilt, and it is judgment. The toll is blood, Sara Donoghue. The toll is blood, and the wicked among you must pay.”
The crow caws. It flies to him, lands on his shoulder. A stringy gob of gore hangs from its beak. Its feathers ruffle out.
“Sunrise is coming,” he says, but this time he tilts his head toward Miranda.
“Sara, let’s go.” Anthony is pulling at me. I let him drag me along. The crow calls, and it sounds like it’s laughing. We stumble-run our way out of the town, onto the empty road. As soon as we’re out of sight, we stop. We all know what we’ll find, if we keep going. The same town, over and over again.
* * *
—
“There has to be a way to make this stop,” Trina says. We’ve been standing, waiting to be shaken from this terrible inertia, for at least two solid minutes. “A trick or something. A way to make it stop repeating.”
Vanessa shivers, fingertips playing
with the ends of her sleeves. “The Sinner’s Gate. That’s what he said. The Sinner’s Gate and—and guilt, and judgment. And the toll is blood, and one of us has to pay.”
“It can’t mean—he can’t mean that one of us has to die. No way. That’s—that’s not fair,” Mel says, shaking her head.
Jeremy snorts. “Fair? You think this place cares about fair?”
“He didn’t say one of us. He said the wicked among us.” Trina’s voice is soft, almost vanishing in the dark.
Mel chuckles. “Guess you’re safe, then.” Trina doesn’t look at her, eyes dropping to the ground. “Hey. It was a joke, Miss Valedictorian, Never-Missed-a-Curfew. I’m just saying, if anyone in this group is wicked, it’s got to be me.”
Anthony rolls his eyes. “Yeah, underage drinking is so cutting-edge.”
“I’ve done worse things.”
“Like?”
“I dunno. Old-timey preacher man probably wouldn’t like the whole lesbian thing.”
Trina interrupts, voice sharp and almost angry. “You aren’t wicked, Mel.”
Mel’s eyes spark. An argument’s easier than fear, but if we start sniping at each other, we’ll have to waste our energy patching up self-inflicted wounds. I’m rusty at playing peacemaker. It’s like an atrophied muscle, but I used to know the Wildcats so well I could stop an argument three syllables in.
“We just have to get through,” I say. “Seven times, that’s what the book says. They haven’t done anything to us.”
“Yet,” Vanessa points out. “Yet. They’re going to turn on us, can’t you see that? But he said there was a toll. Maybe we can pay it, and get through without—without whatever’s waiting.”
“Nothing in the town has tried to hurt us,” I remind them. I know how to keep the Wildcats together, but Vanessa I don’t know as well. She’s a classmate, not a friend. “I say we keep going. If something does go wrong, then we can run.”
Vanessa shakes her head. “I’m telling you, it’s not going to be that easy. He said the wicked among us. I think we have to consider who that might be.”
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