by Dan Rix
So I ran.
I pushed my body as hard as it would go, sprinting soundlessly on my toes. The wind rose to a whistle in my ears, and my loose hair whipped my chilled back. The rough asphalt stung the pads of my feet. Chest aching for oxygen, I flew through the first stop sign.
My house.
I had to get their first and batten down the hatches. Somehow, I had to stop her from getting inside, where she could hide in a broom closet or in the attic, or under my bed.
Oh God. Bit by bit, the horror dawned on me. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep. When I least expected it, she would strike.
She was trying to kill me.
A desperate adrenaline drove me until my thighs burned, until my lungs ached.
I had to get their first. Either that or run far away and never come back, leave my parents and Megan and Emory behind, live as a fugitive. Always in fear.
No, I had to make a stand.
I reached Cliff Drive, bounded off the sidewalk and darted across the street. Headlights blared behind me, gaining on me with ferocious speed. I leapt free, just as a Mustang roared past going twice the speed limit. I kept running, refusing to slow. Sweat slicked on my skin as I downed huge gulps of misty air, cooling me inside and out. A primal running instinct took over, and without heavy shoes or constricting clothing to slow me down, my body surged forward in soaring strides.
No way was I losing this race.
But even as I ran, a deeper unease lurked beneath my fears.
What had come back wasn’t Ashley. It was something else, something hollow, a puppet for dark matter to act through.
Ashley—the real Ashley—was still dead. Because I had killed her. None of my sins had been erased. I was still guilty. I would always be guilty. Always, always, always. I should let this thing kill me. I should let dark matter eat my soul—clearly it was already taking a nibble.
But the thought of dying made me sick.
I couldn’t die yet.
I had to tell Emory. I had to tell him his sister was truly gone. He had to know the creature using her body was an imposter . . . and he had to know I’d killed her. That I was responsible. That all this was my fault and no one else’s. And it had to come from me. I had to be the one to tell him.
I had to survive. For that.
By the time I rounded the corner onto my street, I’d slowed to a sluggish lope, my limbs so numb with fatigue they felt like they would fall off. Was I first?
The house looked undisturbed, windows dark.
I had to be first. I’d been running for my life. She hadn’t slept in seven days.
Gasping, I stumbled across my front lawn and groped around under a flagstone for the hidden key. Got it. Glancing behind me, I jabbed it at the keyhole, my paranoia mounting with each second.
A bush rustled at the edge of the property, yanking my gaze. Twigs cracked and leaves shook. My breath caught in my throat.
A little bird hopped out onto the driveway.
I let out a relieved breath—
A hissing crackle sounded behind me, and I nearly jumped out of my skin. I jerked toward the commotion. The lawn. In a small patch, the blades of grass shifted and bent, recently disturbed by something unseen. Then a closer patch moved, then another, ten feet away. Footsteps! Huge bounding footsteps coming straight at me—I flinched.
One by one, in each of the patches, sprinkler heads pushed up through the ground. A jet of water struck my ankle.
Sprinklers. It must be almost morning. Perfect. At least now she couldn’t cross the lawn without getting wet. Wet footprints I would see.
The key slotted at last, and I cranked the lock and yanked the door open, then pulled it tight against me as I shimmied inside, leaving no gaps. I forced it shut behind me and cranked the deadbolt, then backed away, lungs rising and falling. I’d put the hidden key back tomorrow.
The back door.
I darted toward the rear of the house, careening through the rooms, and skidded up to the back door. My hands found the knob, everything locked. I glanced around. Any other doors? Windows . . . what about windows?
I circled the house, checking each window, shoving upward to make sure they were indeed locked. In the bathroom, one was open a crack. I slammed it shut. Kitchen. Check. Dining room. Check. Bedroom. Check.
The door to my parents’ bedroom blocked my progress. I stood for a moment at their door, panting. Then I pushed it open and darted around to each of their windows. My parents didn’t stir.
What would I tell them?
Mom, Dad, there’s an invisible girl trying to kill me!
That would land me in a psychologist’s office for sure, something I’d managed to avoid all summer despite my mom’s nagging. Somehow, I doubted psychologists’ confidentiality agreements applied to murder confessions.
I moved into the living room, testing each of the windows. My gaze flicked to the fireplace, and a nervous tremor went through me. No, she wouldn’t . . . like Santa Claus?
She would.
I gathered logs from the pile and tried to light a fire. But my hands shook violently and the matches kept burning out before anything caught. I gave up and just stacked the logs on the grill. At least I would hear them fall over if she came in through the chimney.
I finished checking all the windows and returned to the foyer. My skin had begun to itch, either from fear or from the dark matter. I wanted to take it off—I’d been wearing it for too long and it made me nervous—but I couldn’t. Invisibility was my only defense.
She could still break a window. She could still get in the house. Could I fight her? I would lose. Eyes glued to the front door, I backed into a corner and slid to the floor, limbs tensed and trembling, my nerves on a knife’s edge. Each tiny creak sent a panicky jolt of electricity through my heart. I waited.
A car drove by. Headlights streaked across the wall, then faded. Silence. Trees rustled outside. The hardwood floor shuddered underneath me, and I felt a breeze of warm air. Just the furnace firing up. Could she get in through the furnace? No, I would hear banging.
If she forced the door or broke a window, I would hear it. She couldn’t possibly get in without me knowing.
That thought let me breathe easier. Maybe she wasn’t coming tonight. As my panic subsided, my eyelids began to droop.
“Leona . . . Leona!”
My parents’ shouting woke me up, and I squinted against blinding sunlight, disoriented. I was curled up naked in the corner of the foyer, freezing cold.
And still invisible.
Uh-oh.
“Leona! . . . Leona!” My dad stomped through the foyer, and I yanked in my feet so he wouldn’t hit them. The sudden movement unleashed a twinge in my hip, bruised from sleeping on the hardwood floor.
Dark matter.
I was still wearing it . . . I’d slept with it on. Oh God.
All at once, last night came rushing back like a nightmare.
“Her car’s still here,” said my mom, meeting my dad in the hallway. “You think Megan picked her up last night after we went to bed?”
“She would have told us,” said my dad. “Maybe she went for a walk this morning.”
“Our daughter doesn’t tell us everything, you know,” said my mom. “Far from it.”
“It’s a Saturday,” said my dad. “Give her some slack.”
I climbed to my feet, pins and needles everywhere. Was it bad to wear it overnight? I felt icky all over. Had to get it off.
First I needed some clothes, which would be tricky. I peeked into the hallway, where my parents blocked the door to my room.
“I’m calling Megan,” said my mom, pressing her phone to her cheek and tapping her foot impatiently. While waiting for Megan to pick up, she moseyed into my bedroom.
No, get out of there!
My dad circled the house again. “Leona!”
I’m here, Dad.
I slunk forward to my bedroom. With her back to me, my mom nudged through my stuff with her toe, then straightened up. “Hi, Megan? It’s Kristin . . . I’m fine, thank you. You wouldn’t happen to have Leona with you, would you?”
I spotted a hoodie right behind her heel, next to a pair of cutoff jean shorts. Good enough. I darted forward and knelt to grab them.
My mom turned back into the room, forcing me to leap aside. “She’s not with you? Then where is she?” She wandered over to my bed and straightened the sheets—we’d finally gotten me an actual bed frame so I wasn’t just sleeping on a mattress. While her back was turned, I grabbed the hoodie and shorts and tiptoed out the door.
My dad’s footsteps clomped through the foyer again, cutting off my escape. “Leona!”
I veered the other way, toward the back door, pulling on the hoodie. “Dad?” I called. Maybe a little too soon.
“Leona?”
“Oh, thank God—” Together, my parents rushed toward my voice.
“Where are you guys?” I shouted, running full speed in the opposite direction as I tugged on the shorts, back into the foyer. Their footsteps closed in from the kitchen, but now I was decent.
Decent? The dark matter!
“Hang on, I forgot something.” I scrambled out the door into the front yard and knelt behind a bush, where I hastily scratched at my face. To my relief, the dark matter came away easily, and I peeled it off in large swaths. Then I trotted back inside, holding the gooey lump of dark matter in my fist. I smiled innocently.
My mom clutched her heart and gave a dramatic sigh. “Where have you been?”
“What do you mean?” I said, faking confused. “I just took a walk.”
My dad gave her a told-you-so look.
I got dressed properly, put the hidden key back under the flagstone, and felt around my bedroom for invisible bodies.
I had a text message from Emory, sent at 7:57 a.m., which I read in my car. It felt like the safest place.
She’s gone again.
A shiver slipped down my spine. So she hadn’t come over to my house last night, and she hadn’t gone home. Which meant she could be anywhere.
I checked that the doors were locked and that the keys were in the ignition—in case I had to make a quick getaway—and ran my hand across the passenger seat, behind the seatbacks, and along the back seats before I called him back. You could never be too sure.
He picked up on the fourth ring, his tone flat. “Hey.”
Emory’s voice awoke all the guilt that had lain dormant in me for the past week, after Ashley had turned up alive. But she wasn’t alive. That wasn’t his sister. I had killed his sister three months ago and left her body to rot in the woods.
Now something else was using what remained of her.
“Did you find her?” I said, trying not to let my nerves show through.
“Nope,” he said. “We had the alarms and everything. Slipped right through our fingers. She was awake this time. I talked to her ten minutes before she left.”
“Where . . . where do you think she is?” Asking the question left me breathless.
“My parents think she went back to South Carolina. I have no idea. I couldn’t find her last time, I’m not going to find her this time. And we were going to check her into a psych ward today. It’s such bullshit.”
“You sound like you’re doing okay,” I said uncertainly.
He wouldn’t be when I told him the truth.
“You mean I sound pissed off instead of sad? Yeah, I guess that’s an improvement. Because I’m over this crap. She’s gone for three months without telling anyone she’s even alive—we all think she’s dead—then she comes back for a week and freaks us all out and runs away again. I mean, what the hell is that? It’s like she’s trying to twist the knife. You know what, I don’t even care anymore. And what I hate the most is I know I have no right to be mad at her, because she’s healing right now, but I’m still mad. I just don’t know who to be mad at.”
“You could me mad at me,” I said softly.
He actually laughed. “Why would I be mad at you? You’re fucking adorable, you’re the most difficult girl to be mad at I know.”
His comment made me blush. “Maybe because I’m a horrible person and you should be mad at me.”
“Ooh, I’m real scared,” he said.
“I’m not trying to scare you, I’m trying to warn you.”
A pause. “To stay away from you, right? Because you’re broken, is that it?”
“Because I hurt people, Emory. Don’t act like you’ve heard my story a thousand times before.”
“No, once would be too many.”
I closed my eyes. “Please take me seriously.”
“I like this,” he said. “You getting upset. You need that. I like you better with an edge.”
“I’m not going to take your bait,” I said. “I know what you’re doing. You’re trying to rile me up, and it’s not going to work. I’m not ever going to be mad at you, Emory. No matter what you do.”
“Wow,” he said. “Free pass to be an asshole, huh?”
“If you want to be.”
“To what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You’re not an asshole—Look, can I talk to you?” I asked, trying to steer us back on track. “Like, in person? There’s something I need to tell you about Ashley.”
“Yeah, come over to my house,” he said, his tone instantly serious.
“No, go somewhere . . .” I glanced around the interior of my car and checked the locks again. “Go somewhere public. Where there’s lots of people.”
“Scared I’m going to kidnap you?”
“It’s not you I’m scared of.”
Chapter 11
“She’s not your sister,” I blurted the moment Emory slid into the passenger seat of my Corolla, gunning it away from the curb before anyone invisible could slip into the car. Those terrible words had been bouncing around in my brain for the last ten minutes as I drove up and down State Street looking for him, and now I just wanted them out. It was a warm Saturday afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, which meant the downtown shopping district was swarming with people.
That way if she wanted to attack me, she’d have to cause a scene.
Emory’s gaze hovered in my periphery. I swallowed the lump in my throat and dug my hole a little deeper. “The real Ashley is dead. She died three months ago. This one is an imposter.” I focused on the road so I wouldn’t have to meet his eyes.
“Yeah, sometimes it feels that way.” Emory craned his neck to peer at the growing line of cars behind me. “Come on, you drive like my grandma. Can we get out of here?”
“Don’t rush me,” I said, gripping the steering wheel with white knuckles.
“Want me to drive?”
“Are you even listening?” I said, stealing a glance at him. “I’m talking about your sister.”
“Yeah, she’s not herself. I noticed too.”
“No, it’s not her,” I said, more forcefully. “That thing that showed up in her bedroom is literally not even human, it’s some creature that made itself look like her . . . it’s dark matter.”
“Dark matter?” he said.
“Mm-hmm. That stuff your dad’s been collecting. It’s alive, and some of it got inside her and ate her soul or something. It can make things invisible, too. That’s what she did—what it did—it made itself invisible. That’s why you can’t find her. And now she’s trying to kill me.”
“Okay, Speedy Gonzales, let’s start from the beginning and try that again,” he said. “This time a little slower.”
I to
ok a deep breath. And then I told him all about dark matter. I told him about the meteorite and how it felt wet and sticky, I told him about Major Rod Connor and his cleanup crew, I told him how dark matter made Megan and me invisible and how it spoke to me, and how a grad student named Sarah Erskine had found out how to see it before she promptly committed suicide, and how she’d later written help me in Megan’s bathroom mirror. I even told him that Ashley had appeared to me and told me to avenge her.
I also left out a lot.
I left out killing her and hiding the evidence.
I left out sneaking into his house while invisible so I could lead him to her corpse, pretending to be her ghost. I told him I’d overheard the stuff about her soul being eaten and needing to kill me at school, not in his house.
I lied, like always. A lie by omission.
But slowly, slowly I was inching toward the truth. Soon, I would be strong enough to confess.
After I finished, I peeked at him to see his reaction, my heart galloping like a racehorse.
“I knew it wasn’t her,” he whispered. “The body I found . . . they did the DNA test, they measured the bones, they even compared dental records . . . that was Ashley. I didn’t know what to believe. My dad thought the samples were contaminated, but I knew that was her body when I found her there. I knew she was dead. But I was willing to believe anything to have her back—that she’d gotten a second chance, that she’d been resurrected—anything.”
“So you believe me?” I said, feeling lighter already.
He looked up at me, his eyes anxious. “Have you gone to the police?”
“What are they going to do?” I said. “They’re not going to look for her, Emory. She shouldn’t even exist. They’ve had Ashley’s body for two weeks, so the case is closed as far as they’re concerned. They’re not going to look for a ghost.”
“You said she’s trying to kill you.”