by Dan Rix
Megan leaned over her terrarium and tapped a knuckle on the glass. “I think Salamander’s dying. She’s still not eating.”
“Yeah, because she’s not your snake,” I said. “Your snake’s dead. Dark matter took it and replaced it with that creepy-ass thing, like it did with Ashley.”
Megan rapped the glass again, but said nothing.
“I want to booby trap my house,” I announced. “She’s going to come for me again, and this time, I want to be ready. I want to set up tripwires and alarms and all that stuff. And we can use the laser thingy to detect her. We can take her down, Megan.”
“Okay, stop . . . stop,” she said. “I’m going to say it, because no one else is saying it. We killed Ashley on accident, Leona, and look what that did to us. Now you’re talking about doing it on purpose. I know we talk like we murdered her, but it wasn’t technically murder. It was manslaughter. But if we do it on purpose this time, with the intent to kill, that’s murder. You’re talking about murder.”
“I know.” A lump formed in my throat.
“Hasn’t it occurred to you that maybe that’s wrong? Like, really wrong?”
I closed my eyes and inhaled slowly. “Of course that’s occurred to me. I don’t want to kill anybody. She’s not human—it—it’s not human.”
“Uh-huh. Then what is it?”
“I don’t know. Dark matter. It’s not even Ashley’s real body. Her real body was still in the woods, remember?”
“Which I never saw, by the way. But fine, granted you’re telling the truth and this isn’t her real body, then what is it? What is dark matter?”
“I. Don’t. Know,” I said.
“That’s my point. We don’t know anything. If this stuff can assume the shape of any human, then how do I know you’re not dark matter? You’re wearing the stuff, for God’s sake.”
I picked at the invisible skin around my fingernails. “Not any human,” I said. “Just the ones whose souls it eats.”
“Where did you get that? Did it tell you that?”
I dragged my hands down my face. “Look, all I know is I need to do this. I’m supposed to do this.”
“Do you see what I’m saying? Where are you getting this?”
“We have to avenge her,” I said softly.
“We did avenge her.”
“No, we didn’t.” I shook my head, even though she couldn’t see me. “That wasn’t what we were supposed to do, Megan. We got it wrong. Me, I got it wrong. Avenging her doesn’t mean hunting criminals, it means killing the creature that ate her soul and possessed her body. That’s avenging her. That’s what I have to do.”
“Ah.” She nodded grimly. “Then there’s that.”
“If you don’t want to help me, you don’t have to,” I said.
“Of course I don’t want to help you,” she said. “But we’re in this together, right?” Megan peered into her terrarium again. “We should probably kill this snake . . . since it’s a dark matter snake.”
“Yeah, probably.”
“What about Sarah? Maybe the same thing happened to her.”
The memory stirred my unease. Sarah Erskine had supposedly killed herself, but that night in Megan’s bathroom . . . those words written in the fogged up mirror . . . help me. Had her soul been eaten too? My insides recoiled at the thought.
“Look, it’s assumed the shape of Ashley,” I said. “It has a body now, which means we can kill it.”
“How, exactly, are we going to do that?” said Megan.
“Tonight,” I said. “We have to do it tonight. Now that Ashley knows I’m invisible, she’s not going to waste any time. I just need to do something about my parents. We’re going to need the house to ourselves. I can’t be running around invisible and laying traps while they’re around.”
“Your parents. That’s a tricky one.”
“And they’ve been watching me like hawks lately.”
“Wait . . .” Megan glanced up with a sly smile. “What if I told you I could get your parents out of your house for forty-eight hours, no questions asked?”
“How?”
She cracked her knuckles. “Leave that one to me.”
“Fine, just don’t hurt anyone—”
The floor outside Megan’s bedroom creaked, and my voice cut off. My heart gave an uneasy jolt.
Unaware, Megan said loudly, “Your mom works at home on Fridays, right?
“Shh!” I said, pressing a finger to my lips.
Megan looked around. “What?”
“Did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” she said.
I listened, but now the hallway was silent. “Is anyone else home?”
“No, my parents are at work—”
A quiet knock sounded on the door, jolting me senseless.
“—and my sister wouldn’t be here this early,” Megan continued, oblivious.
I gaped at her. Did she not hear the knocking on her door?
“Shut up!” I hissed, and she finally shut up. I crept to the door, took a shaky breath, and opened it a crack to peek out.
It was Ashley.
But it wasn’t dark matter Ashley.
I recognized that instantly. For one thing, she wasn’t invisible, although a glance behind me at Megan’s blank expression confirmed my hunch—Megan couldn’t see her or hear her, only I could. For another, her blue eyes were forlorn, not menacing. This was the Ashley that had asked me to avenge her, the real Ashley. The memory of her, at least, somehow shown to me by dark matter.
“This will be my final attempt to communicate,” Ashley began in a distant, sad voice, her eyes unfocused. “If there is anybody receiving this, please tell my brother I love him and miss him, and tell my family I’m sorry—”
“Ashley, wait,” I gasped. “Can you . . . can you see me?”
“Who are you talking to?” said Megan.
“Shh,” I said.
Ashley continued as if she was reading a script. “I wasn’t as strong as you thought I was, and I let the monster in, I unleashed it. It was my fault. But I will never give up, and neither will you.”
It was a pre-recording, I realized. She wasn’t interacting with us, just delivering a message.
“I’m writing this down because I think I can keep a memory of myself alive that way,” she said. “Find my diary, and you will know what to do. I don’t know exactly how much time has passed—there is no light here, only darkness—but I estimate it is now June first. If you are receiving this, then hopefully I am already dead. A single tear dropped down her cheek. “Bye, Emory . . . avenge me.”
She turned and walked up the hall, turning into the den.
“Wait!” I ran after her.
But she was already gone, leaving only the chill slipping down my back.
“Surprise!” yelled Megan, leaping into my mom’s office and scaring the crap out of her. “You and your husband are leaving this weekend for an all-expenses-paid vacation to Catalina Island, as a gift from me and Leona.” She laid out tickets and travel brochures and a printed hotel reservation.
I ambled in sheepishly behind her, nodding along. My skin was still pink and tingly from peeling off the dark matter, which really hadn’t wanted to come off. I’d only risked removing it after checking and double-checking every corner, closet, and window in the house.
My mom’s eyes widened. “Oh, wow . . . you guys . . . you guys shouldn’t have . . .”
“Leona and I wanted to do something nice for you.” She elbowed me in the ribs, and I mumbled some kind of agreement. My mind was still on my encounter with Ashley’s ghost, or whatever that thing was. She’d mentioned the date being June 1. It was now October 16. So those visions of her were in fact messages she’d recorded months ago, before she
died.
“But . . . but I have to check my calendar,” my mom was saying, scrambling around her desk. She didn’t look happy at all. If anything, she looked to be slipping into full-blown panic mode.
“Already did,” said Megan. “You’re free.”
So Ashley had been stuck somewhere, trying to communicate with her family.
Stuck where?
“What about Leona?” said my mom. “This means she’ll be home alone all weekend.”
“Already checked with my mom,” said Megan. “Leona’s spending the weekend at my house.”
“You’re . . . you’re sure?”
“It’s all taken care of, Ms. Hewitt.”
“Well, I don’t know what to say . . . um . . . thank you?” She forced a smile, which came out more like a grimace.
Megan checked her cell phone. “Oops! The boat’s leaving from the harbor at six p.m. That gives you forty minutes to pack up and pick up Mr. Hewitt. Dress warm. It’s cold there this time of year.”
Twenty minutes later, we ushered her out the door, bags packed.
“Done,” said Megan, dusting off her hands.
“It feels dishonest,” I said, watching her car back out of the driveway. Since this morning, ominously dark clouds had gathered over the mountains, casting the afternoon into an overcast gloom. Night would come early.
“Why? It’s a real vacation,” said Megan.
“It’s going to rain.”
“Not our problem.”
“It’s mean,” I said.
“I didn’t hear you come up with any ideas,” she said.
The moment my mom’s taillights vanished, I began stripping and dotting my skin with dark matter, frantic to get invisible again. “It’s only going to stress her out. She’s only going because she wants to be polite and we already paid for it—which, by the way, raises another question. How did we pay for it?”
“I paid for it,” she said.
“You don’t have money,” I scoffed.
She shrugged. “I had a little saved up.”
As dark matter advanced across my skin, leaving me see-through, I let out a sigh of relief. Safe again. “How much did it cost? I want to pay you back.”
She avoided looking at me. “It’s fine. It was nothing.”
“No, let me pay you back,” I pressed.
“Don’t worry about it. It’s fine.”
I peered at her, and suspicion crept into my voice. “Megan . . .”
“I kind of stole some money,” she blurted out. “When I was invisible. It was this rich guy who looked like a dick. I watched him type in his code at an ATM and I snagged his card afterward. It made me feel really bad, so I just hid it, but that made me feel even worse. But this seemed like a good thing to spend it on. A noble cause.” She peeked in my direction with a guilty expression. “You’re not mad are you?”
Even invisible, I couldn’t meet her eye, suddenly feeling ill. “It could have been me, I’m that way too,” I said. “Don’t you see? We’re those people, Megan. We’re those people who do messed up things, and it’s becoming a pattern. We need to work on that.”
“Deal,” she said quickly.
I turned back to my empty, dark house. “Let’s get ready for her.”
“Okay, these are our weapons,” I said, adding a baseball bat to the growing pile on my bedroom floor, which contained a fireplace poker, a hammer, a pair of screwdrivers, and the heavy crystal bookend that had once fallen on my toe and broken it.
“Don’t forget the saw,” said Megan, flexing the blade with a twang before she set it on the pile.
“This is getting morbid,” I said, picturing myself hacking away at Ashley’s invisible limbs while she did the same to mine. We’d raided my dad’s workbench and turned up all sorts of grisly weapons.
Through my windows, the overcast sky deepened, and all we got of a sunset was a brown smudge on the gray horizon.
“There was a power saw out there too,” said Megan. “You might be able to cut off her head—”
“I’m not cutting off her head with a power saw,” I snapped.
“We forgot knives!” Megan hurried off to my kitchen, leaving me alone with our arsenal, and a very bad feeling in the pit of my stomach. We couldn’t kill someone like this. What was I thinking?
Megan came back and dumped a bundle of kitchen knives on the pile. The clatter startled me. “Do your parents have a gun?” she asked next.
I shook my head, then added, “No.”
“You could probably kill her with a knife, although you’d have to stab her in the heart. It would be hard to aim. We could make one invisible.”
“I can’t do this,” I moaned, sliding to my knees and dragging my fingers through my hair. “I can’t stab someone.”
“I bet you can if she’s trying to stab you first.” Megan had chosen to remain visible. Ashley wasn’t after her, she’d argued, though it probably had more to do with the symbols ticking off on her skin. “You could always try to choke her.”
“I can’t do this,” I repeated, fingers still knotted in my hair.
“It’s you or her, Leona.”
“Okay . . . I can do this, I can do this.” I took a deep, shuddering breath and stood up, my knees wobbly, and moved to the other pile. The stuff for booby traps—thumb tacks, nails, fishing line, garbage bags, sewing needles, Sarah’s apparatus, dental floss, duct tape and scissors.
“What if she brings a gun?” said Megan.
“Then we’re dead.” I nudged aside the fishing line with my toe, uncovering a container of sleigh bells from our Christmas decorations. “We’ll put up tripwire around the house—along the driveway, across the side yard, through the garden—bells attached to fishing line. She won’t be able to see them at night. That way we’ll at least hear her . . . but how do we kill her?”
“Stab her in the throat,” offered Megan, now rummaging through our supplies.
I thought of the other booby traps I’d learned about as a kid.
A bucket balanced over a door, so when she opened it . . .
Yeah, not unless I got a bucket of acid strong enough to dissolve flesh. The thought made me shudder. “How the hell do we kill her?” I muttered.
“We could hit her with a car,” said Megan. “Like we did last time.”
“She’d just jump to the side,” I said, thinking aloud. “Maybe if we could lay some kind of trap . . . use one of us as bait . . . then we’d just have to get her in the right spot—and we’d know when she’s there because we have Sarah’s Apparatus—then bam, she’s dead.”
“Yeah, fine, but what’s the trap?” said Megan.
I dragged my hands down my face and sighed. “I don’t know.”
“We should probably set something up soon,” said Megan, glancing uneasily at the windows, “before it’s completely dark outside.”
“First let’s do another pass through the house.” I grabbed the fireplace poker and handed the baseball bat to Megan, who crept up to the door. My grip on the poker tightened. Standing clear, she mouthed, “Three . . . two . . . one—”
She yanked the door open.
I lunged and thrust the poker out into the dark hallway, skewering empty air. I moved up the hallway, swinging it in widening circles. Megan covered my back, jabbing at the corners with her bat. We spread out in the foyer, yanking our weapons around and around.
“Foyer’s clear,” said Megan.
“Front door?” I called, moving into the living room to repeat the process.
The handle rattled behind me. “Locked.”
I zigzagged through the room, plunging the poker into obvious hiding spots first—behind the couch, under the card table, between the bookshelf and the entertainment center—then spre
ad out to the less obvious ones—crouching in the fireplace, lying flat against the wall, even standing in the middle of the room. My poker struck nothing invisible. No one here.
Thankfully, the old hardwood floor creaked, so there was no way she was getting out undetected during our search. Next I checked the windows, and Megan finished the search behind me. “All clear,” she announced.
“Windows shut and locked,” I said.
“Living room’s clear,” she said loudly, even though I was right next to her. “You know, I feel like I’m talking to myself.”
“I’m not taking it off,” I said.
“Great. Do what it wants, Leona.”
“Like I have any other choice,” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said, leading the way into the dining room.
“Wait,” I said, hurrying back to my bedroom. “Guard the doorway. I want to close off this room so she can’t creep in here while we’re checking the other rooms.”
“She’s not even in the house,” she muttered.
“Megan, I thought she wasn’t in my car and then she ambushed me and nearly killed me, so shut up, okay? Just guard the door.” I gathered fishing line, duct tape, and bells from my bedroom and carried them back into the foyer.
Megan watched the pile come to a rest at her feet. I threaded a dozen bells onto the fishing line, nudged Megan out of the way, and began taping the line in a crisscross pattern across the doorway. Reassuringly, the bells jingled nonstop.
“She could just take that down, you know,” said Megan.
“Not without us hearing,” I said.
I pushed on the fishing line to test it, and the bells chimed faintly. Satisfied she couldn’t enter—or exit—the living room unheard, I had just begun to wind the spare line back around the spool when a loud ding-dong rang through the foyer, freezing my blood. The spool fell from my hand, clanging on the hardwood.
The doorbell.
There was someone at the door.
We were standing in the foyer, not three feet away from it.