by Rix, Dan
I hugged my knees on the couch, teeth chattering, my plate of tacos untouched in front of me. I couldn’t get warm, couldn’t stop shivering. The chill had penetrated all the way to my bones.
“You guys are crazy,” Jace scoffed. “It was just the wind.”
“The wind, my ass. He was there.” Malcolm jabbed a finger at Jace’s chest. “His phone came straight at us, and he was there. Right on top of us.”
“Then where the hell is his phone?” Jace slapped his hand away and shuffled past him, then spun around, throwing up his arms. “Where the hell is his phone, huh? You said the GPS would find his phone, Malcolm, so where’s his phone?”
“It was there, we just couldn’t see it.”
Jace gave a disbelieving laugh. “Are you guys for real? You got spooked in the dark. I get it. It’s forgivable.”
“Maybe if you hadn’t been too pussy to come,” Malcolm growled, “you would have felt what was in there.”
I kept flinching at their voices.
Everything was so loud, so bright.
“Remi,” said Malcolm’s voice, somewhere above me, “he was there, wasn’t he?”
I closed my eyes, but then all I saw was that ghostly face appearing out of thin air.
That sickening, ghostly face . . .
My eyelids sprang open, my heart thudding all over again.
“Remi, look at me.”
The silhouette standing at the pipe’s opening hadn’t looked human, its edges had been blurry . . .
“Remi . . .”
Hands gently shook my shoulder, and I looked up to see Zoe, Malcolm, and Jace staring at me.
I nodded, and whispered, “He was there.”
“Who was there?” said Jace.
“Vincent . . . it . . . I don’t know. Something was there.”
“His ghost?” Jace offered with a sneer.
“I don’t know!” I moaned, covering my face. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I don’t know.”
In my periphery, I felt Malcolm still watching me, probably thinking I had PTSD or something, and I tensed up.
“The GPS made a mistake,” said Jace.
“How does GPS work again?” Zoe asked.
“It’s satellites,” said Malcolm, finally turning away from me, letting me breathe again. “It’s all satellites. It doesn’t make mistakes.”
“Satellites can make mistakes, can’t they?” she said.
“No, if the two dots were in the same place,” Malcolm said, “the phones were in the same place. They had to be.”
“You want to know what happened?” said Jace. “I’ll tell you what happened. I’ll tell you how GPS works, because you’re wrong, Malcolm. You used an app. It wasn’t GPS that was buggy, it was the app you used that was buggy—”
“Wasn’t the app, either, numchuck,” Malcolm started to argue.
“—And you want to know why?” Jace said loudly, talking over him. “Because Vincent hacked it. He’s a computer hacker. That’s what he does. You said yourself he installed the app on your phone. He hacked it to send out fake coordinates . . . to make it look like his phone was there when it wasn’t.”
His words cut through my daze at last, and I shared a surprised look with Zoe.
We hadn’t considered that possibility . . . that Vincent, once again, might have tricked us.
But of course . . . it was possible.
Vincent was a computer whiz. Even at age sixteen, he was already making a few hundred dollars a month off android apps he’d developed, and he was always hacking our phones and driving us crazy with that kind of stuff—once he’d made it look like Trevor’s number was calling me from beyond the grave.
I’d been too scared to answer, and after it stopped ringing I burst into tears.
I refused to speak with him for a week after that. His plan, it turned out, had been to pretend he was Trevor and whisper that he forgave me for everything. Later he apologized profusely and said it was in poor taste.
Could this be another one of his tricks?
Now that I thought about it, the really frightening part had been seeing Vincent’s dot creep toward ours, when the pipe was clearly empty . . . not the face.
Maybe it was just the wind I’d seen.
“That message that comes on when we call him,” said Zoe. “Do you think he set that up, too?”
“Could be,” said Jace. “He’s certainly capable of it.”
“And the car in your garage,” said Malcolm. “I suppose he hacked that too?”
“Look, I don’t know everything, all right?” said Jace. “I just think we should stick to plausible explanations before we jump to paranormal phenomena and all that shit.”
Zoe’s cell phone buzzed on the coffee table.
“It’s my parents . . . will I be home soon?” She glanced from the phone to Malcolm, our ride home.
“Turns out I was just leaving. Zoe, Remi, get your stuff. We’re gone.” He dug out his keys and stormed out the door, leaving Zoe and me no choice but to hurry after him.
Jace called after us, “Guys, come on, we can still hang out—”
The door clacked shut behind us, cutting him off.
I would have wanted to keep hanging out—the thought of going home to my dark house right now had me filled with dread—but I couldn’t hang out alone with Jace, that would just be too awkward.
When we reached Malcolm’s convertible, Zoe and I both slid into the backseat, which earned us a raised eyebrow from him.
“I’m not a fucking chauffeur,” he said. “Someone take shotgun.”
“Oh . . . uh . . . that’s okay, we’re good,” said Zoe.
“You want a ride home? Someone take shotgun.”
Zoe caught my eye with a panicked expression, clearly as nervous about sitting up front with him as I was.
“Take the front,” she hissed.
“No, you take the front.”
Malcolm sighed loudly. “Remi, get your ass up here.”
My mouth fell open. “Why me?”
“Because I said so, that’s why.”
I glared at Zoe, unbuckled my seatbelt, and trudged around to the front of the car feeling like a dog with its tail tucked between its legs.
I sank into the front seat with a huff and crossed my arms. “There. Better?”
“Much,” he said, flipping on his headlights and pulling out.
I rolled my eyes and yanked on my seatbelt.
No one said a word on the drive home. One, because Malcolm was clearly in a mood, and two, I always clammed up when I was in the front seat with him.
We dropped off Zoe first, since she was closest.
Then it was just Malcolm and me.
Alone.
He jammed the stick into gear and we took off, leaving my stomach far behind.
I gulped down an uneasy swallow.
“The stars are really pretty tonight,” I said, immediately regretting it.
He said nothing.
I really, really wished Vincent was here right now.
I risked a peek at him. Carved out of shadow, his high cheekbones caught the light of the cabins we passed, which, together with his brooding eyes and razor-sharp jaw—clamped angrily as he shifted gears—made him look deadly.
Yep. Definitely in a mood.
I averted my eyes, feeling a thrill of fear . . . and, strangely, excitement.
He pulled in front of my house.
“Bye thanks for the ride see you tomorrow,” I blurted out, ripping off my seatbelt and diving for the handle—
“Wait.”
My heart sank.
Nervously, I looked back at Malcolm and found him chewing his lip.
“There was something in there with us,” he said. “You felt it, right?”
“I don’t remember what I saw. Jace might be right. It could’ve been wind—”
“The GPS didn’t make a mistake, Remi. There was something there . . . you know there was something there.”
I coul
dn’t meet his probing gaze. “I don’t know what I saw, Malcolm.”
In my lit-up kitchen window, my dad was washing the dishes, and suddenly I longed to be inside with him . . . not out here in the dark, talking about ghosts.
“The reason I’m bringing it up is”—Malcolm took a deep breath and let it out—“I saw something last night. Right before the flash. Something I haven’t told you guys about.”
I looked up sharply, my pulse quickening. “What?”
“I didn’t tell you guys because I wasn’t sure what it was, and it freaked me the hell out.” His throat bobbed up and down a swallow. “I think Vincent saw it, too.”
Now he was scaring me.
“Wh-what? What did you see?” My voice barely came out a whisper.
He stared straight ahead for a long time before answering.
“There was this . . . this thing standing on the side of the road. I only saw it out of the corner of my eye, but . . .” he shook his head grimly, then slowly raised his gaze to mine, “. . . I don’t think it was human.”
Chapter 7
High-energy physicist Clara Hopkins stared in disbelief at the raised hairs on her forearms, tilting her arm this way and that under her flashlight.
“This is fantastic,” she said. “This is incredible. The whole hillside’s electrically charged.”
Her scalp, too, bristled as she moved, and she felt wisps of her hair standing straight up.
“Whatever the source, it’s not man-made,” said her colleague, Dr. Jennifer Stevenson, flipping the dial of her meter and shaking her head. “It’s not an AC field . . . and CPUC said there’s nothing running through this area.”
“I find that hard to believe,” Clara muttered. “We’re a stone’s throw from a twenty-teraelectronvolt collider, and there is nothing in this area? Really?”
“Those lines go across the lake bed. That’s what they said.”
That had been their first theory.
A downed high-voltage power line, maybe.
But power lines almost exclusively used alternating current, or AC.
This was a direct current field, similar to earth’s naturally occurring geo-magnetic field. Only this source was much, much stronger.
And it moved.
Using the Doppler radar, they’d tracked the atmospheric anomaly to this area of the woods, just below Ridgeview Drive. Wielding handheld Gauss meters, her team of scientists were now combing the hillside, searching for the source of the electromagnet field.
Her radio crackled with their back and forth.
“Reading a spike over here, north of you guys.”
“Roger that.”
“These boulders around here are huge. We could be picking up ferromagnetic deposits.”
Clara raised her radio to her mouth. “Not at the level we’re reading, guys. Keep looking.”
They hadn’t found the source, yet.
What they had found was an SUV crashed at the bottom of the ravine, which looked recent.
Weird as heck thing to find. Maybe some drunk high school kids who’d lost control and fled the scene.
From out of the woods, a stray flashlight beam swept across Dr. Stevenson, momentarily illuminating the floating strands of her hair.
It reminded Clara of that famous photo of the McQuilken brothers, which still spooked her to this day.
Hiking in Sequoia National Park in foul weather conditions, the brothers had noticed their long hair standing on end. They’d posed for the camera, grinning, oblivious that they were seconds away from getting struck by lightning.
Except here, the sky was crystal clear.
Through gaps in the pine trees, the dense band of the Milky Way galaxy shined brightly, the stars brilliant, crystalline points. Without a city nearby to cause light pollution, the night sky was ripe for stargazing.
“Dr. Hopkins,” her radio hissed. “I think we got a source over here.”
The rush of excitement made Clara’s heart race. “Come on, let’s go!”
She and Dr. Stevenson scrambled down the ravine, following the animated voices and radio crackles toward a distant cluster of flashlights.
The static electricity built as she moved closer, prickling her skin. Like moving through needles.
“This is amazing . . . this is incredible,” she murmured.
They found the other scientists gathered around the base of a large pine tree, pointing their beams up through its thick canopy.
A technician moved around the trunk, consulting his Gauss meter. “It’s coming from up in this tree.”
“My God,” she whispered, craning her neck, “it’s in a tree?”
The low, bushy branches blocked her view completely.
They would need more than puny flashlights.
“Let’s get some more light, guys. Let’s find out what’s up there.”
Within minutes, a diesel generator and floodlights were set up around the tree’s perimeter, bathing it in a white blaze.
But whatever the source of the field, it was well hidden. The tree could be a hundred and fifty feet high, all hulking limbs and bristly pine needles.
What the hell’s an EM source doing up in a tree?
This wasn’t magnetic tree sap they were dealing with, was it?
This close, she could feel its power, tugging at her scalp and the roots of her hair.
But it felt like more than just an EM field source.
There was some kind of presence up there, an aura, almost, and she had the creepy sense, peering up into the high branches, that something up there was peering back down at her.
She couldn’t tell if it was the static electricity or her unease that made her skin crawl.
“What’s that on the bark there?” Dr. Stevenson pointed.
The floodlights were trained at the trunk, about twenty feet up, where three deep gouges were etched into the bark. They panned up to another set of scratches, three feet higher.
Clara strained to make them out, and when she did, a shiver of fear ran down her spine.
“Those are claw marks,” she said.
Chapter 8
“Remi, can I talk to you?” My dad’s voice startled me in my bedroom doorway, and I turned—still jumpy from what Malcolm had told me—to find him drying his hands with the dishtowel, a scowl on his face.
“Yeah, what?” Distractedly, I brushed hair out of my face.
A heavy fear sat low in my belly, his words replaying in my brain.
I don’t think it was human.
Surely, Malcolm had just seen a shadow. He said himself he’d only seen it out of the corner of his eye . . . whatever it was.
It was nothing. It had to be nothing.
Like that charred-out stump I’d seen today, or me thinking I’d seen a figure silhouetted at the end of the pipe, when I hadn’t.
At night, the forest did that. It messed with your head.
Slowly, I brought my breathing under control.
“Just now,” said my dad, “was that Malcolm who dropped you off?”
Even if he had seen a figure, how would he tell if it was human or not?
It had been much too dark.
Even Malcolm can make mistakes.
“Remi?”
I let myself focus on my dad. “Why does it matter?”
“You guys were talking for a while, I noticed.”
“So?”
After all that happened today, the last thing I needed was a lecture from my dad.
“Remi, you know how I feel about him.”
His hostile tone instantly put me on the defensive. “Oh my God, he just gave me a ride home. We weren’t having sex, or anything.”
He flinched at the mention of sex. “Next time, call me, okay? Mom or I will pick you up. Or have Jace drive you home . . . I trust Jace.”
“Thanks,” I said dryly, “but I can decide who to trust for myself. I’m going to be living on my own in a month, in case you forgot.”
He gave a loud sigh. “Wh
y do you not get this, Remi? You’re going to UCLA next year. He’s enlisting in the military.”
“He’s going to Annapolis, Dad. There’s a big difference.”
“The boy is a thug, sweetie.”
“Just so you know, Annapolis has an acceptance rate of 7.9%. That’s lower than MIT’s. When he graduates, he’ll be a commissioned officer. Not everyone wants to be an accountant, Dad.”
“What part of ‘I don’t trust him’ don’t you understand?” he snapped.
I flinched at his outburst, and turned away to hide my stinging eyes. “Okay,” I said, just to make him leave me alone. “I’ll stop hanging out with him, if that’s what you want.”
He gave me the slitty eyes, then threw up a hand and stormed off. “Whatever, do what you want. I can’t stop you.”
Watching him leave, I felt that bottomless sadness unfurl inside me.
I used to be Daddy’s Little Girl.
Now he was ashamed of me. Now he only ever spoke to me to chastise me, to criticize me, to blame me.
Like my mom, and like everyone at school, he believed Trevor’s suicide was my fault.
They knew my friends had bullied him. They knew I hadn’t defended him like I should have. They knew I’d been a mean, rotten older sister, and that because of me, he was dead.
My gaze flicked to Trevor’s door, which permanently remained closed.
We went about our lives, averting our eyes from it, ignoring it, like you’d ignore an amputation.
But it was always there, always hovering in our periphery. Always taunting us. The door that used to lead to Trevor . . . that now led nowhere.
Everyone bullies their younger siblings, my therapist would always tell me, to help me get over my guilt.
It never worked.
I crossed the hall and placed my palm against his door. The wood felt warm, much warmer than my frozen hands.
I took a deep breath, and pushed inside.
One look, and my stomach knotted painfully, the wound still raw.
His room was as he’d left it nine months ago.
I forced myself to look, to remember.
The bed had been made, his childhood stuffed animals piled in front of the pillows. Sports trophies and comic books lined the shelves. The room only amplified the loss in my heart, and my throat squeezed tighter and tighter until I could only breathe in short, shallow gasps.