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The later the evening, the louder the chirping of the crickets, the more insistent the insect-buzz. Octavia holds her hand out, palm down, and lets the tops of the tall grasses whisper against her skin. It’s nearly nine already and the sky is the color of ripening plums, and flicks and wisps of fireflies wink in and out in the soft, summer air.
Her brother doesn’t like her being out this late alone when they’re at home, but he’s either decided that the countryside is safer, or just given up on trying to control her. Dirt paths hide the sound of her footsteps. The season asks for no schedules, imposes no responsibilities, and everyone knows everyone else and asks nothing, says nothing. She’s always seen and never hindered and he doesn’t do much more than sigh, now, when she grabs an apple from the kitchen table on her way out, late morning and the slow heat of the day still building, and she can pretend it will always be like this. They’re only living with their stepdad’s family for the summer. But out here summer becomes an endless season.
Even as she walks, the bruised yellow of the sky darkens, and purple shadows deepen over the neighbor’s picket fence, and the low-set blue and white and yellow houses, and in the distance the sedate green rises of the hills.
Monty lives at the very end of the last street at the edge of the village. His house is two stories high, with a peaked roof over the attic, and a round window like a single eye in the middle of the top floor. Around the house, his parents have sewn a lush garden of wildflowers, running unchecked across the front yard, on either side of the front walk, caged in at last only by a low, gray fence. In the back, they’re growing a small plot of vegetables. And by the side, they have left standing the most ancient, gnarled, and imposing tree Octavia has ever seen.
During thunderstorms, its long branches and thick leaves thwack against the house and scratch at the windows like raging ghosts, threatening to drown out the rain. When temperatures rise, the best outdoor space is down in the dirt between the tree and the house, leaning back against the stone foundation, pretending to shiver in the deep, impenetrable shade. They spent a whole afternoon there once, writing messages in the grime of the basement window, imagining hauntings.
That was early on. Not the first day they met, but early. Possibly the start of the whole thing.
Now Octavia finds the split low in the trunk of the tree, and balances her foot there, and hauls herself up. The bark scratches at her bare legs. Her skin this summer is always scratched, bruised, and bug-bitten, and she’s usually got some dirt or dust on her, often enough now that Bellamy’s stopped asking her about every little scrape. Let me know when you break a limb, he’d said, like he was washing his hands of her, but fond.
She climbs all the way up to the thick branch that extends toward the roof of the porch, balances herself there for a moment, then jumps, landing in a crouch on the still-warm slate. Then she duck-walks the three steps to Monty’s window and raps her knuckles on the glass. The noise is to announce her presence only, not to gain entrance. The window is unlocked so she can slide it open herself, pleased by the effort it takes and the way the frame always sticks, the scrape of wood against wood and the thwick of noise as it rises. She pushes it all the way up, then expertly climbs in.
“Leave it open,” Monty says, without looking up. He’s sitting on his bed with his radio on his lap, intent on pulling out the dead batteries from the back.
“Hello to you, too,” Octavia answers, as she dusts herself off. “Where’s Jasper?”
“Downstairs. Should be up in a minute.”
Monty’s room is narrow and long, furnished with an excess number of lights. He’s got them all turned on now, which won’t do at all, but Octavia spots a group of unlit candles on an awkwardly cleared space on his desk, another bunch on the table where he keeps his plants. The window next to his bed is also open, letting in the sweet scent of warm night air, and in the corner by the door, the standing fan turns slowly, creakily, rotating a fine breeze through the room.
Octavia grabs the desk chair and rolls it around, so she can sit in it backwards, resting her arms and chin on the back. When Monty finally fishes out the batteries, he tosses them to her, and she throws them in the trash, where they land with a dull thump at the bottom of the bin. She’s watching him slip new batteries in when the door to the bedroom opens: Jasper arriving, belatedly, with a large, clear plastic bowl of popcorn held in the crook of his arms.
“Are you ready yet? I brought snacks. Hi, Octavia.” He sounds a bit breathless, as if he’d run up the stairs, and when he tries to wave at her, he almost drops the bowl. Still he manages to kick the door closed on the first try.
“Hey,” she waves back, smiling.
“Almost ready,” Monty answers, snapping the plastic cover back into place. He glances up at them briefly. “Maybe you two could make yourselves useful and help?”
“Um, hello? Already useful? Popcorn?” Jasper holds up the bowl, shakes it back and forth so the kernels make a susurrus noise, but Monty just rolls his eyes.
“Um, hello—lights?” He sets the radio on the edge of his desk and flips it on, a sheen of static rising as he turns the volume up. “I still have to find the station.”
“It’s almost nine, isn’t it?” Octavia asks. She’s found the matches, tucked away behind Monty’s alarm clock, and is starting to light the candles on the desk, one by one. Jasper sets the bowl of popcorn on the bed, easily catches the half of the packet she rips off and throws to him. Then he sets to work on the candles on the other side of the room. The radio is still wafting in and out of static, catching bits of music and talk in between, as Monty’s deft fingers slide the dial carefully along. This particular station is always hard to find.
“Almost,” he answers. The word slips out on half-caught breath, broken in two between the syllables. Jasper kills the overhead light. Outside the sunset has settled nearly into darkness, so now the only illumination comes from the flickering candle flames, yellow-orange and intent, dancing in the breeze from the unsteady fan, shivering like living things. Octavia hears, rather than sees, Jasper climbing up onto the end of Monty’s bed. She’s staring at the candlelight closest to her and at the thin red line of the radio dial. She hears the rustle of the popcorn in the bowl, and the slow crunch of a single kernel caught between back teeth.
The radio whines, a high-pitched creak then blur of sound. Then something settles. Octavia leans closer, pressed up against the back of her chair. Monty pulls his hands back gently, as if afraid to disturb the perfect balance, but when the static doesn’t return, he slides himself back again onto the bed. She can just make out how he leans against the wall.
Jasper edges a little closer and offers him the popcorn bowl.
The broadcast starts with a single bright sound, an electronic bong of sound, and underneath a crackling. From this rustling rises a voice, deep and monotone, coming to them like a secret, an invitation from a far distance.
“Do you feel safe? Are you at ease in your own home? Are you protected from all that could harm or threaten you?”
Octavia rolls the chair a little closer, as if she couldn’t hear. She’s too aware of the open window at her back.
Behind the voice, a low gathering of organ chords.
“Are you sure?”
And then, a high, decisive note, like a warning, or a scream.
She almost jumps when something pokes at the edge of her arm. It takes her too many seconds to realize it’s just the popcorn bowl, being clumsily offered, and she cringes at the slight rustling, like wind through gnarled tree branches, of her own fingers as she gathers a handful of kernels.
Tonight’s adventure, the voice tells them, will take them far across a violent, treacherous sea, to a lonely, desolate outpost, an abandoned lighthouse on a forgotten coast—
“This will be a good one,” Jasper whispers, and Monty elbows him hard in the ribs.
Octavia feels her own body slow and distant from herself, her own movements like someone else’s movements, the crack of a popcorn kernel between her own back teeth like a sound mysteriously calling from that deserted coastline, that haunted, broken beacon that once watched over the sea. She can feel the warmth of the still night air through the window, disturbed by the artificial breeze that wafts intermittently across her skin, the breeze that makes the bright candle flames and the summer heat somehow bearable, and yet she is not really here. She is beyond these physical sensations.
Of everything Jasper and Monty have shown her this summer, these old radio broadcasts are her favorite. She knows one of the local stations is playing them, as a special program for the season. That is the logical explanation, the one she gives Bellamy, the one he accepts, and which seems the most real over breakfast with the high rays of sun streaming down over the kitchen tiles. But it isn’t what seems real when she’s breathlessly listening to the waves lapping against the lifeboat, and the strain of the oars creaking as the last survivors finally bump against the shore. What she’s hearing is real, and it comes to her from a time and place she cannot name or quite discern.
The lighthouse, dark and imposing, against a background of slow-merging thunderclouds. She hears the deep rolls of thunder, distant, framed by low organ notes.
She’s never been to an actual lighthouse or a deserted coast, and there aren’t any oceans near the village. But there is a river, whispering, invisible, through the long grass not far from her house, a river that eventually rises up into something more respectable as it cuts through downtown, but which lies low and secretive where she knows it best, glinting and sparkling blue beneath the sun. Out by her house, it’s more a creek than a river, shallow enough to splash in, cold against her ankles and feet as she jumps from one half-submerged rock to the next.
Jasper and Monty took her cryptid hunting there a couple days in a row, in the shallows of late afternoon and evening. They crept along the edge of the water, barefoot and quiet. Dirt and mud stuck to the soles of their feet; tiny rocks poked up from the soil. The subtle music of the water sounded a distressing trill in the quiet, hiding perhaps splashes and hints of movement that could not be contained. Jasper, an expert on local stories, explained that the creatures they were looking for were small and slight, long-native to the village land, prone to trickery but not malicious.
“You’re making this up,” Monty had said, as he leaned down to peer into the grass.
She didn’t know at the time that this would be the summer of the not-quite-seen, the season she cannot help but tempt herself with everything she almost believes. But she can’t stop listening for the sounds of fairy-beings from the creek, when she sleeps with her window open at night. She’s the one who suggests the trip out to the cemetery, where they creep past cracked old gravestones, through overgrown byways of grass between the markers, and listen for mysterious noises in the wind that smells like oncoming torrential summer rain. Jasper swears later that he saw a ghost, and Monty’s rattled, but won’t admit it, but Octavia—she only pauses a moment at the gate before they leave, unsure what she might have seen there, in the crackle of distant lightning-heat, in the dense and humid orange light.
The shipwrecked travelers are exploring the lighthouse, warily, slowly. Their footsteps creak on rotten steps.
The popcorn bowl is abandoned on the floor by Monty’s bed, and Jasper is hugging his knees to his chest. Octavia plays with the frayed ends of her cutoff jeans, her fingers tense and nervous.
More thrilling than the river or the cemetery was the afternoon they stood in Jasper’s second-floor bathroom, crammed in around the vanity, and turned off all the lights and tried to summon spirits in the mirror. Nothing happened, but the moment before they said each name for the third time always twisted up in her stomach like the most obscene and frightening sickness, a few seconds of pure belief, of pure terror like a cliff’s edge—Monty and Jasper to either side of her, holding her hands so tightly that it hurt.
Outside the lighthouse, the wind howls, a storm threatens. Rats scurry down along the wooden floorboards. What will they find at the top of the stairs?
Thud of footsteps on the stairs.
Too close.
Jasper jumps and reaches out for Monty’s hand, and Octavia sits up, suddenly alert, and looks over her shoulder at the open window, the closed bedroom door.
“What was that?” she whispers.
“Nothing,” Monty answers, too quick, and Jasper says,
“I thought your parents weren’t home?”
In the lighthouse, the travelers are speaking in low, scared voices, debating, worried. One of them wants to open the old sea chest. Those are footsteps now, undoubtedly, climbing closer and closer up the stairs, just beyond the door.
“They’re not,” Monty says, voice cutting whisper-thin and barely audible through the heat.
The traveler opens the chest. A long, slow, painful creak. Octavia feels it in her lungs, which have stopped working, which ache with stillness. The organ sound rises, high tense notes—she cannot breathe; she cannot move—
A knock on the door, and a shriek over the radio waves.
“Monty?”
Now the horrid fear of the travelers seems distant, as Octavia takes a deep and shaky breath, her hand over her mouth, the tension in her muscles now a muted pain and her blood still rushing. The queasy aftermath of adrenaline washes over her. Jasper has his hand over his heart.
“Monty?” Mrs. Green’s familiar voice calls again. “Are you there? We came home early. We wanted to let you know.”
“Okay, Mom,” he calls back, but his voice is still shaky, and so is his hand, as he passes it over his face. “Thanks!”
“Okay, we’ll be downstairs,” she says, and then the footsteps creak away again, slowly receding, as the organ plays a deep, slow dirge. Octavia catches Monty’s eye, then Jasper’s, over the dance of candlelight. As the tail end of impossible tension and pure panic hits them, they cannot help but laugh.