Archive of Our Own

Friday, December 18, 2015
6:35pm

There were two distinct currents of déjà vu that threatened to sweep his feet out from under him as he stepped into the lodge: The first was rooted in reality, in the echo of all those weekends the four of them had spent scouring the grounds for any sign of Hannah and Beth, walking on eggshells and either muttering under their breaths or screaming until hoarse; while the second, the stronger of the two if you could believe it, was rooted in his imagination, in the sight of Chris and Ashley stomping snow off their boots and onto the doormat, in the stale smell of dust in the air, all of it centered around the sense the lodge wasn’t really empty, that there was something waiting for them in the shadows, that any second now Emily and Jess would start fighting while Matt tried to calm them down and Mike looked on in cool nonchalance…

And then the front door slammed shut and all of that melted away. He was himself again. Himself-himself too, not the omniscient and writerly voice that sometimes pretended to be him if he wasn’t careful, not the Psycho, not not-Hill (not almost-Hill, if you wanted to be a smartass about it), just…himself. Just Josh. The relief was, to put it lightly, indescribable—a world of difference from how he’d expected he would feel when stepping foot into the lodge again.

“I’ll never get over just how big this place is,” he heard Sam say from behind him, probably more to herself than any of them, and that was when he knew the odd, dizzying sense of not-quite-remembering was dead and gone.

Because he grinned.

If only you knew, Sammy, he snickered to himself, taking his beanie off and jokingly tossing it right at Chris’s face. “All kinds of space in Chez Washington,” is what he said aloud, “We’re an expansion-minded people at the end of the day, Samantha. I’ll have you know it’s really only a matter of time before Pops puts the Washington Pictures touch on everything else up here on this godforsaken mountain. Bastard’s like King Midas. Swap the gold for blood, and you can’t tell ‘em apart.”

“Y’know, I wouldn’t put it past him to repurpose that spooky old asylum—”

“Sanatorium.”

“—oh whatever! I bet he’s itching to turn that whatever-it-is into some sort of tourist spot.” Chris hadn’t, shock of shocks, been quick enough to dodge Josh’s hat, and it seemed he was bent on revenge as he lobbed it right back at him. His disappointment was palpable when Josh ducked right in time. “Whaddya guys think—ghost-themed haunted house? Or one of those 3D movie rides they have at Universal Studios?”

Spreading his arms out in a wide arc as though presenting a theater marquee, Josh dropped his voice into an announcer’s sleazy drawl. “Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve been sickened by the grisly gore of Blood Monastery 1 through 3, you’ve trembled in dread when faced with Rockabye Slaughterhouse, you were kept awake at night by the nightmarish images of Dark Fathoms Below, and now…now! You can live the terror! For one weekend only, you can creep your way through the desolate halls of the Blackwood Sanatorium, the site of many a gruesome murder, and see firsthand the—”

“…ravages of abusive medical practices in the early- to mid-1900s?” Ashley finished for him. She caught his gaze specifically to make sure he saw the exasperated look she then shot Sam, rolling her eyes and shaking her head to fulfill her role as resident party-pooper. “Probably not the thrills and chills your dad’s audience is looking for.”

He dropped his hands in feigned insult. “I think you’re underestimating the scaring power of a ramshackle hospital.”

“Or maybe you’re overestimating the scaring power of an empty building,” Sam cut in.

“Hey, that place has gotta be chock full of black mold, and that’s pretty much as scary as you can get.” Chris paused halfway through taking his coat off, clutching dramatically at his chest as he hacked and wheezed. “Oh God—oh God, the spores! They’re…they’re taking root! I can feel them…creeping through…my blood…! Infesting my liver! Or maybe my spleen! It’s definitely one of those two! I—hrrk!—I can feel myself getting…” Throughout the whole number he’d been slowly sliding to the floor, the Wicked Witch of the West doused with a bucket of Perrier, but there he stopped, dropping his pained expression for a second. “Hey, what’re the symptoms of mold poisoning, real quick?”

“Mmm…pretty much exactly what you’re doing,” Sam said coolly, walking past him to hang hers and Ashley’s coats before holding her hand out for Josh’s too.

“Yeah Cochise, I think you’ve got it.”

He glanced Ashley’s way, eyebrows shooting up, and she shrugged. “Oh, I’m not helping you. I’m absolutely in the let’s-see-where-this-goes boat with everyone else. Toot toot!”

“Well, if you guys insist. Ah-he-he-he-hem. …OH GOD, THE SPORES! THE SPOOORES! THEY’RE IN MY EYES!”

The quiet click-clack of little nails on hardwood could suddenly be heard, harkening the arrival of the lodge’s fifth guest for the weekend. From where he’d ostensibly been shaking the snow off of himself on the front mat, Charlie, the Browns’ ridiculously pudgy pug, trotted over to Chris and proceeded to cover his face in slobbery kisses.

How quickly the tables turned! The mold act quickly became actual sputtering. “Charlie, my guy, Jesus Christ, your breath is rank.”

“Yeah, and whose fault do you think that is?” As Chris got to his feet, wiping his face off with the back of his hand, Sam knelt down and scooped Charlie up with an ‘oof!’ “Couldn’t possibly be the guy who kept giving him pieces of Slim Jims on the bus ride over…”

“Couldn’t possibly.”

“Mhm.”

“The mystery will live on forever.”

Josh turned away from the others with a slow smile still tugging at his mouth. In his head, coming back to the lodge had been…well, it had been a source of no small amount of stress, leave it at that. He’d been worried it would be too much, that he’d get as far as the front steps and find he could go no further, stopped dead in his tracks like a vampire needing to be invited in. He’d expected that the sight of the dust covers and the familiar shapes hidden beneath them would look too much like ghosts, horrid death-shroud reminders of things that once had been but no longer were. Some part of him, if he was being entirely honest (something he was still actively working on, much to his own chagrin and Alan’s delight), had sort of expected to walk in and see some monstrous, leathery creature hanging from the vaulted ceiling, its milky eyes rolling and rolling in its skull until it sensed him there, vulnerable, and opened wide its jaws in a bloodcurdling, somehow accusatory, shriek.

But none of that happened. Obviously. Because at the end of the day, the lodge was the lodge, nothing more, nothing less. He knew the furniture and the rooms, he felt that faint pang of nostalgia deep in his gut when the smell of wood polish hit his olfactories, and in a way, it was an awful lot like coming home after a long trip away. No horror to be found.

“Hey.” Had Sam been beside him the whole time? Go figure. She hugged Charlie to her chest, the fingers of one hand absently scratching under his chin as she looked Josh’s way. “This is your scheduled reminder to go turn on the heater. Like now.”

“Like now?” he joked. “Are you telling me, Miss Giddings, proud outdoorswoman that you are, you can’t handle five more minutes of—”

“Now,” she repeated, offering him a pointed look when Charlie, loquacious blob of wrinkles that he was, let out one of his characteristic wheezy grumbles in agreement. “It’s gonna take forever for this place to warm up and my goosebumps have goosebumps.”

Had he been the one to ask for the reminder? Sure. That didn’t mean he was about to pass up on the line-drive she’d lobbed him. “If warming up’s what you’re looking for, I’m sure we could find more interesting ways to make that happen…” He popped his eyebrows up and down until she sucked her teeth and laughed, but that was as far as the argument went. Five minutes and yeah, all right, he could admit she had a point; the mystique of walking into a building where you were able to see your breath in front of your face had started wearing off, if ever it had existed at all. “Can I convince you in a—” Ride-along, his brain auto-filled, “—n all expenses paid trip to basement land? See the sights? Ride the rides?”

Sam’s face scrunched up in a decent approximation of Charlie’s. “Mmm, pass.”

“You sure?”

“Let me think about it. Uh…oh, okay, yeah, hard pass.”

Though he’d already started for the stairs, his grip on the bit hardly loosened. “Is this because of Cochise’s mold thing? We only cultivate friendly fungi here, I’ll have you know.” Glancing over his shoulder, he caught Chris’s attention and nodded towards the basement. “Hey congrats, Hartley, your hysterics just won you the title of Flashlight Holder Supreme. C’mon.”

“I won? I won?!” he pulled in a gasp as he jammed his coat onto one of the open hooks, turning to Ashley with a look of wide-eyed glee ridiculous enough to make her snort. “I’ve never won anything in my life, oh holy shit…uh, I’d like to thank my agent, my legal counsel, God…” He leaned in and she tilted her head up for a quick, chaste kiss, both of them beaming.

“Still getting used to that,” Sam muttered against the top of Charlie’s head, only barely loud enough for Josh to hear.

He shot back a low, “Join the club,” before Chris caught up and he clapped him on the back, ushering him down the stairs. “You ladies behave yourselves. No wild parties or blood sacrifices while we’re gone.”

“Yeah,” Chris piped in, “Wait for us to get back before breaking out the obsidian chalices and ceremonial daggers. That’s just common courtesy.”

In the twin beams of their phones’ flashlights, the basement stairs looked even gnarlier than they actually were. It was probably for that reason that they crept down them like ancient old men worried about their bones crumbling away to dust, calibrating each step before setting their weight down. Had he actually strolled down these things without looking, once upon a time? Mother of God, what had he been thinking?

Once they made it to the bottom with nary a broken bone to speak of, the subterranean silence became way too much to bear. “Y’know,” Josh pointed out, his chest unclenching at the sound of his own voice, “Now that we’re down here…all alone…sure feels like the perfect time to—”

“Don’t.”

“—remind you—”

“I swear to God man, don’t you even say it.”

“—that without anyone else up here—”

“I’m not listening.”

“—this weekend is positively dripping with—”

“NOT LISTENING, LA LA LA LA!”

“—all manner of erotic possibilities for you and—”

“Okay, I warned you. I did! I warned you. And you didn’t listen. So now, Mr. Bond, I’m afraid you have to die.” If he had to guess where he found the damn thing, it wouldn’t have been too much of a reach (the basement was, after all, where Big Bob stashed so much of his prop shit), but man oh man, there was nothing that prepared him to be smacked upside the face like that with a whole-ass skeletal arm. “I told you not to say it,” Chris said again, jiggling the arm so its hand gave a sassy little wave as he did so, “But you said it. So…”

“I’m just looking out for you, man. Really, that’s all I—” The moment his guard wavered, Josh lunged for him, wresting the plastic arm from his grasp and launching it, javelin-style, across the basement to clatter uselessly in a corner somewhere. “Next time I’m throwing you.”

He didn’t need to see Chris’s face to know he was grinning. “Sounds like someone has a bone to pick. Eh? Ehh?”

Instead of answering, Josh held his phone out to shine the light directly in his eyes, resulting in a shoving match that would’ve embarrassed even the edgiest of sixth graders. It was short-lived (as all their slap-fights were), and by the time they’d made it over to the power grid, it had devolved into half-assed nudges and pokes. “You make one joke—one fucking joke—while I’m trying to do this, Cochise, and so help me God…” He turned to throw one last look his way, and when Chris returned it with a solemn nod and a laughably incorrect Boy Scout salute, he set about pressing the right buttons and throwing the right switches to get the juice a’flowing through the lodge again.

Technically, yes, it was a one-man job. Technically, yes, he could’ve gone into the basement by his lonesome as he’d done tens, if not hundreds of times before, found the fuse box, found the water heater, and had the place up and running in a matter of minutes. Technically. He was just over the whole ‘by his lonesome’ thing. Over it by a country mile.

“Weird being back up here.” The way he’d said it like that, so casually, could only mean one thing: He’d been practicing the whole trip up. Good ol’ Cochise. “Kinda spooky.”

The world around them hummed to life and Josh shut the door protecting the fuses with a victorious snap. “Spooky? What could possibly be spooky about returning to the scene of the metaphorical crime?” He nodded towards the water heater, knowing that if Sam wasn’t able to take one of her beloved baths this weekend, it would abruptly stop being a joke—there really would be a crime committed. Against his person, no less. “Yeah, yeah, it’s weird,” he admitted as they moved their two-man show, “But what else are we gonna do, just let the place rot in our brains?”

“Depends on the spore situation.” His circle of light bobbed as though in thought. “Sure you’re gonna be like…oookay up here? With all the…” And there went the light, just going hogwild. Exactly what he needed. To get the hot water going. “…you know…”

“Emotional baggage?”

“I was gonna say ‘memories,’ but you do you.”

Josh looked over his shoulder, gesturing vaguely towards his phone. “Could you quit it?”

That seemed to stymie him for a second, and the wheels turning in his brain were suddenly clicking and whirring twice as loud as the power grid heating up around them. “No I can’t quit it, man, not after last y—”

“The light, numbnuts,” he smirked, “I meant, could you quit waving your goddamn light around like you’re trying to land a plane? Fuck sake.”

“I—oh. Uh, yeah, my bad.” The light steadied and Josh went back to knob-twisting and switch-pulling, but not before Chris got in a resolved, “I mean it though. About you being okay. It’s fucking weird being here. A-a-and that’s for me! I’m not you!”

“Thank Christ for that. Look, we lose the lodge, my fam has to get a new vacation home. Maybe in Maui. And do you have any idea what the real estate market is like right now?” He thumped the water heater with the side of his fist a couple times like one might a beloved car, then popped the side of Chris’s arm. “Yeah, okay? Yeah, being here’s weird, it’s spooky, it’s ‘part of the healing process,’ it’s whatever. We just…we used to have such a blast here, you know, and we kinda left on shitty terms last time.”

Gaze averted, Chris acted as though he’d noticed something interesting in the general vicinity of his shoes. “Not sure I recall…the terms of which you are speaking…”

“Now which one of us is bullshitting?” There were another few elbows thrown at that, halfhearted and jovial, and then he pushed him towards the stairs again. “C’mon, we waste too much time down here reenacting emotional Boy Meets World scenes, the girls are gonna get fed up with waiting for us.”

“Dump our sorry asses.”

“Start dating each other.”

“Honestly? They’d probably be better off.”

“God, don’t I know it.”

The trip up the stairs was worlds easier than the way down now that they had the lights from the landing guiding their way. The steps themselves were still hospital visits waiting to happen, and one of those days he was going to have a frank discussion with his father about the decision to keep the fucking things after they’d started to give way, but they made it, praise be, and there was no denying that the lodge felt like a completely different place now that the lights were on and the heater was hissing in full swing.

Instead of the usual cool blue glow of the moon bouncing off the snow and through the windows, the great room was lit with a warm orange light the likes of which one probably expected when entering a luxury resort. It gave the wood paneling a richer look, brought out the colors of the tapestries Linda liked to decorate with, dissolved the menacing angles and corners of the shadows to nothing, and just generally lent an air of peace and serenity to…to the…to…huh.

Oh.

Oh, something stank here.

Josh’s eyes narrowed as he stepped into the great room proper. “It’s quiet.”

“Too quiet,” Chris agreed, putting on a cowboy drawl bad enough to qualify for a life sentence. He didn’t seem quite as suspicious as Josh felt, though, as he merrily walked further into the room to pick his bagg up off the ground and fling it onto the couch instead.

He whistled a couple bars of Ennio Morricone to himself for ambiance as his eyes made a slow circuit around the main floor. Something was afoot here, all right, he’d stake his fucking life on it. “Sammy?” he called to no response. “Ash?” And then, after a moment, “Charlie?” But his calls were answered by no one and nothing. Only silence.

“Chill, they probably just went upstairs to unpack. They—” All at once, Chris’s spine went ramrod straight. “I swear to God, if I get stuck sleeping in the antler room…”

“They’re all the fucking antler room, what fantasy world are you living in?”

“Um, I’m sorry, excuse me, you have precisely one room where a literal dead moose is the center of attention. I think that qualifies as—”

And oh, he would’ve loved to stand there and riff with Chris for the rest of the night, trading quips about how, in a resort with at least twenty bedrooms, he wouldn’t get stuck in the one with a mounted moose head, and even if he did, there were roughly three hundred couches he could take his pick from (including that mystifying specimen in the third floor’s master bathroom), but this? This was not the time for that.

He raised a hand to cut him off, slowly creeping towards the dining room. The doors had been left ajar, you see, when he’d been fairly sure they’d been shut tight upon their arrival. To him? Well, put simply, that shit reeked of shenanigans. “Stay frosty, Cochise.”

“Heat’s on. Can’t. If you’d said ‘Stay toasty,’ maybe I’d be your guy, but—”

“I think we’ve got—man, shut up—I think we’ve got a Code Red situation on our hands.” He reached back, flailing with one of his arms until he managed to smack some part of Chris. Without bothering to catch his eye, he jerked his chin towards the dining room doors standing oh-so-slightly and oh-so-suspiciously open, taking another careful step forward. His neck craned this way and that, but there just wasn’t enough room to get a good look at what lay beyond those doors. “Very funny, ladies,” he taunted, “Is this what we’ve reduced ourselves to? Jump-scares? Really? And here I thought you were better than that.”

“Still think they’re probably unpacking upstairs,” Chris muttered from just behind him, his voice and proximity making it clear that no, actually, he didn’t think that in the slightest. “Aaany second now, they’re gonna come down the stairs and stand there watching our dumb asses playing Red-Light-Green-Light and—”

Josh held his hand up and Chris shut his mouth. There was no doubt in his mind anymore: Those doors had absolutely, unquestionably, irrefutably, unmistakably been shut when they’d arrived.

The girls thought they were slick, huh? They thought crouching in the shadows of the dining room, hands pressed tight to their mouths to keep their giggles tamped down, eyes shooting back and forth between one another and the wedge of light coming from the great room, made for a quality prank? That’s what they thought?

Honestly, he was insulted. Had he taught them nothing?

“Last chance to save face,” he singsonged, taking the final step towards the threshold. “We can all be adults and just admit—” He threw the doors open wide mid-breath, and they crashed to either side of the wall, rattling the nearby photos in their frames and sending the tines of the antler chandelier swinging. A curt chop of his hand and the light switch clicked on, filling the dining room with light enough to show them…nothing.

Beside him, Chris’s shoulders slumped in relief. “Ha! See? Told you! They’re upstairs getting settled, talking about cute boys or milk substitutes or whatever the hell it is they talk about when they’re alone, and we’re here being all paranoid. It’s a bad look, bro! Real bad look.”

His mouth turned down. Since when were his instincts so off? This had had prankery written all over it…hadn’t it? “Shit,” he sighed, “Welp. Shoulda known better, I guess. Put a gun to my head, I can’t remember one time where they managed to actually get us.”

Chris patted his shoulder. “Call it wishful thinking. You want them to graduate to our level. That’s understandable, but think about it—we’re pros.”

“Maybe one day.”

“And what a day that’ll be.”

A good point, an excellent one even! When it came to pranks and mischief and misadventures, there had never been a better duo than the two of them; no one was willing to put in the time, the energy, the blood, sweat, and tears that they were willing to spill. If nothing else, the past year had been proof of that.

Laughing, Josh snapped the lights off again, turning away from the dining room. His intention had been…well, he wasn’t sure what his intention had been, but he guessed it didn’t matter, because that was when he saw the eyes.

He turned, and when he did, found himself face-to-face with a pair of cold, blank eyes, only inches from his. Black. Glassy. Utterly devoid of sentience or feeling or—

Yeah, okay, so he screamed. So what? Chris did too!

The laughter that filled the great room was nothing short of hysterical. Setting the mounted deer heads onto the console table, Sam and Ashley made a big show of high-fiving, ending their little victory dance with a quick (joyous) bump of their hips.

“Laaast chaaance to saaave faaace.” Sam’s mockery was edgeless, all bright bubbling glee and schoolyard excitement. “I don’t say this often, but I kinda wish someone had been filming that, you know?”

Ashley’s grin was positively sharklike. “Oh, I know. Believe me, Sam, I know. God, you guys should’ve seen your faces…‘Uhhh, I think we have a Code Red on our hands.’ How melodramatic can you get? Like, really?”

“Oh, ha ha.”

“That was the highest I’ve ever heard a guy scream, I think.”

“Real funny.”

“No, it was impressive! Seriously! Have you considered a career in opera, maybe?”

When the clanging of his heart eased into something more manageable, he had no choice. He had to acknowledge it. Begrudgingly, Josh gave a few slow claps, his smile listing hard to one side. “Laugh it up.”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“Uh huh. Laugh it riiight on up. Last I checked, we’re still at ‘Josh and Cochise: Roughly a million; Sam and Ash: One,’ so I’m not sure I’d be as proud as you two are, but…”

Ashley flapped her hand in his face until Chris snatched her from behind, pulling her back and making her yelp in surprise before she collapsed into giggles again. She was content enough to be manhandled, it seemed, because she just leaned back against him and let herself be held. “Look, we just thought we’d show you ding-dongs how it feels, that’s all.”

“Uh huh. A likely story.”

“Well,” Sam added, her voice taking on a thoughtful tone as she considered the table. “I’ll admit I had an ulterior motive. Had to get some of those freaky things off the walls, blech. I swear, what is it with your family and dead animals?”

Now that his shock had worn off and he could—again, begrudgingly—see the obvious humor in it, there was none of the shaking and all of his usual panache as he closed the space between them, tugging Sam into a loose mockery of a chokehold. “You really don’t listen, do you, Giddings? We are an expansion-minded people! Woe betide the deer foolish enough to get in our way.”

“Or moose.”

“Or moose, yeah.”

“Or elk.”

“Same as deer.”

“Not really.”

“Literally the exact same animal.”

“Literally not, but okay.”

It was a new sense of surreality that overcame him as they stood there cracking jokes, one very, very different from what he’d first felt when stepping foot into the lodge. It wasn’t the déjà vu of the real world intertwining with his story, nor was it the hungry maw of memory opening wide to slick him with saliva to make the swallowing easier. If he had to call it something, maybe…maybe it would be déjà vu’s lesser-known cousin, that stranger presque vu, herald of things not-quite seen, not-quite known, but (har de har) almost. It struck him then, as the lodge’s heater buzzed like so many insects under their feet, filling the building bottom to top with thick, syrupy warmth, that he could’ve lost this, it all could’ve slipped from his grasp. They could’ve ended up exactly like the others, too guilty to look at each other, too angry to speak unless it was to vagueblog about each other on Facebook…

And there’d been a second there where they almost had. Almost, almost, almost. The more time went on, the more sense he saw in that dumbass nickname Emily and Jess had given them. Things had almost ended badly. Things had almost ended, period.

But they hadn’t. And they wouldn’t, so help him God, forever and ever amen.

“Well, if you two are done patting yourselves on the back…” Josh made himself say it while that warm and fuzzy feeling remained, knowing he’d chicken out otherwise, “I’ve got a little proposition I’d like to raise over dinner.”

The reactions were immediate.

“Uh oh,” Sam said flatly, her hands still hanging onto his arm as he pretended to squeeze her.

“This can’t be good,” Ashley piped in, leaving it at that.

“No thanks,” Chris agreed, “Your ‘propositions’ usually involve me getting seriously embarrassed at best, engaging in full-frontal nudity at worst, and I-I-I think I speak for the whole group, Charlie included, when I say no one wants to see that.”

His sigh made it clear he heard them. It also made it clear he was going to ignore them. “So here’s what we’re gonna do. We’re gonna go fire up the oven. We’re gonna pray to High Holy God Above that those frozen pizzas we picked up are actually edible, even though we’re probably gonna end up eating a bag of Cheetos each instead, and once we’re plump as Christmas geese, I’m gonna tell you guys why it is I dragged your sorry asses all the way up this mountain.”

He watched as a ripple of suspicion spread out from him to each of the others in turn, visible as waves on a pond. Looks, not of dread, but of apprehension, passed through their group, ending only when Sam tilted her head back to look up at him. “…what happened to ‘relaxing winter break trip,’ Josh? What happened to that?”

“I never said it was gonna be relaxing.”

“You did.”

“I said it would be ‘interesting.’”

“I think I would’ve remembered if you said ‘interesting,’” she smirked, “Because I know what you mean when you say that word. It’s never good.”

It had been his plan since he’d decided to take Alan’s advice and invite them up for a few days and it was still his plan now, but even so, he felt his resolve falter. Wobble. He clung to it as tightly as he could. “I think,” he said again, tightening his grip around Sam until she had no choice but to fold against him (rolling her eyes all the while, of course), “That we better get lots of good sleep tonight, boys and girls, because I’ve got plans for this weekend.” He took in their sidelong glances with something resembling his usual grin. “Big plans.”

***

Saturday, December 19, 2015
2:50am

The door was open. She wanted to go in. She’d tried to go in. She didn’t want to go in. She’d made it as far as the threshold. The door remained open.

On paper, it made sense, that door being open—the wood probably swelled with the spring thaw, only to freeze up again when winter came, so leaving the doors shut was asking for stuck jambs and rusty hinges and all other sorts of architectural headaches—but that didn’t mean she liked it. No, it didn’t mean she liked it at all.

“…Sam?”

It was probably a testament to how absorbed she was in her own bullshit that she didn’t jump. Really she should’ve, it was the middle of the night after all, the lodge nearly too dark to navigate, and she hadn’t heard anyone else approaching, but the most she managed was a distracted, “Mhm?” as she continued to stare past the door and into the pitch-black room beyond.

“You okay?”

Even through the thick fabric of her pjs, the wood of the doorframe was chilly along the length of her spine. It was surprisingly nice, a grounding force keeping her from being swept up in whatever was going on inside her head. That time, her “Mhm” sounded a bit surer of itself. Not a whole lot, but enough.

“You sure? You’re kind of, like…Blair Witching it. And I’m not saying you can’t be okay doing that, it’s just that, um, in my experience, the two don’t usually go together.”

Her smile broke through slowly, curling up one side of her mouth before the other, less cracks spreading across a thin layer of ice and more ivy weaving itself along a hanging trellis. “I’m okay.” The use of actual words had a bolstering effect, it seemed, because when she turned towards her, Sam saw Ashley’s shoulders relax. “How many people have you seen Blair Witching, though? You make it sound like it’s been a lot.”

“More than I’d want it to be.” And she was a little too preoccupied to ask what on Earth was behind the distant look that crossed her face then, but she tried to file it away for later.

There was another question she wanted to ask instead, one more obvious and—more to the point—with what she hoped was a less bizarre answer. “What are you doing up?” She took her first good look at Ashley, eyeing her oversized sleep shirt with a quirked brow.

Well now. That was interesting.

It was hard to say whether or not Ashley realized what she’d noticed, but if Sam had to guess, she’d say she had. Noticing was sort of one of her strong suits, after all, and there was something awfully convenient about how she took that precise moment to cross her arms over her chest. “I had to pee.”

She glanced towards the master bathroom, her eyebrows climbing ever higher. “There’s no toilet in that bathroom. Just that awful, awful couch.”

Caught, Ashley averted her gaze, her story changing just as quickly. Always came with a backup plan, didn’t she? “…okay, I thought maybe you’d snuck off to do your weird bath thing.”

“Um, okay? My bath thing isn’t weird.”

“It’s a little weird, Sam.”

Despite the slander being spoken against her totally normal enjoyment of baths, she couldn’t help but smile. “Wait…hang on. If you thought I was in the tub, why’d you come up?”

Her posture changed again, the toes of one sock anxiously sliding across the flooring to cut a path in the thin layer of dust. “I wanted to make sure you hadn’t drowned.”

“In the bathtub.”

“It’s deep!”

Sam uncrossed her own arms and playfully swatted in Ashley’s general direction. “You’re such a bad liar.”

“I’m not lying!” Though it wouldn’t have taken much to avoid Sam’s hand, she let herself get clipped, taking the excuse to shove her away. “Did it ever occur to you that maybe I’m just so used to listening to you mumble in your sleep that like, I get nervous when I don’t hear it?”

What a sweet, loving thing for a (still fairly new) roommate to say! And she might’ve believed it, too, if she’d been able to look her in the eye when she said it. “Aww! I mean, you’re still lying, but aww!”

Ashley threw her hands into the air. “Jiminy Christmas, Sam! Okay, fine! I was…I was worried, okay? I just wanted to check on you.” Then a pause. “To see if you were okay. With all this. You know…being back here.” Another pause. “And then I find you—”

“Blair Witching.”

“—Blair Witching, yeah.”

Finally, a story that made sense. Sam felt her earlier smile resurface, the one that was tired but not impatient, exhausted but (she hoped) not unkind. “Well, not counting the Blair Witching, rest assured that I am a-okay.”

Part of her had expected that to be that—Ashley would return the smile, maybe pat her shoulder, then say her bleary goodnights and pad down the hall again. It was, after all, a very weird thing she was doing, standing there in the doorway. It was weird and…heavy? Heavy, yeah. Not sad exactly, but not not sad; not concerning, but not not concerning. Had their places been swapped, had it been her finding Ashley staring into a dark room in the middle of the night, Sam wasn’t convinced she would’ve stuck around to figure out what was going on.

But Ashley did. She set her shoulder against the other side of the doorframe, leaning in much the same way she was. She didn’t stare into Hannah’s room though—oh no, Sam didn’t think she’d be looking towards Hannah’s stuff at all, not when she could absolutely feel the weight of her eyes on her.

“Wanna know something stupid?” she asked when the quiet breathing of the lodge matched up with hers. “It’s not stupid in a funny way…at least I don’t think so…it’s more your run-of-the-mill stupid-stupid.”

“Sam. Please. I’m dating Chris, my threshold for stupid-stupid is like, crazy high.” She let out a soft laugh. “Try me.”

Well, she did have a point there. Sam drummed her fingers along her arm for another moment as she tried to figure out how to best phrase it…and then scrapped that idea and just said it as it occurred to her. “I did this last time we were here.”

“What, loitered outside the bathroom listening to people pee?” Ashley offered her a sympathetic little smile when Sam rolled her eyes towards her. “What? I—oh, right. No toilet. Whoops.”

She pretended to sigh in disappointment. “Such a dweeb.”

“Hey!”

“I calls ‘em like I sees ‘em, Ash.” That was good for a laugh, but there was no missing the tension hiding just beneath. For both of them it had been a nervous sound, the sort of tightly wound giggle heard at slumber parties right as the Ouija board was pulled out. They were just having fun, trying to enjoy themselves…but they knew the ground they were on was less than steady. They didn’t believe the planchette would move, but neither were they ready to feel it pulse beneath their fingertips like a living thing. That laugh reminded them they could still put the board back in the box, so to speak. They could close the door, turn around, leave, go back to sleep between their nice, warm, cozy covers…they could let it go.

But letting stuff go hadn’t exactly worked out for them, historically speaking.

“Back when we were…sheesh, it seems like a hundred years ago now, doesn’t it? Back when we were still coming up for search parties and stuff, there was this one night where I just…I don’t know, I got it into my head that if I walked in there like nothing was different, like everything was totally normal, Hannah would just…be there. Does that make any kind of sense?” She turned from Ashley then, not because she couldn’t bear to look at her (she could) but to try and recapture some of that fleeting feeling from so long ago. “If I just walked into her room and said ‘Hi!’ or ‘Hey you!’ or, or anything, she’d answer. I guess I thought I’d see her there, sitting on her bed, and we’d realize we’d overlooked her somehow…that she’d been there all along and we just missed her every time we got close. So I stood outside the door and I…” The laugh that escaped her that time didn’t sound much like a laugh, nervous or otherwise. “…just…couldn’t bring myself to go in.”

“Sam…” Ashley’s hand was warm when she reached over and took hers.

“Oh please. I’m fine. Seriously.” Instead of an answer she got a Look™, so she squeezed her hand. “Seriously! I am. I’m just telling you a story, okay? An old one! I couldn’t go in. I was too freaked out and I got in my own head about how impossible it would be if—when—she wasn’t actually in there. I’d have to stand there surrounded by all her stuff and it would be…” Ugh. Exasperated more than anything else, she lightly bonked her head on the doorjamb. “Creepy,” she finally managed to wrench out of her chest. “It would’ve been creepy. Then I felt worse for letting myself feel that way because…well, because it was Hannah. Hannah wasn’t creepy. She wasn’t scary. She was my friend. So why should it feel that way? Why should I feel that way?”

Her head lolled against the doorframe yet again, her eyes finding their way to the shape of Hannah’s desk like a tongue kept finding the hole left by a pulled tooth. Was that how she felt tonight? Right now? Hard to say. The fact remained, though, that while the door was open, she hadn’t been able to walk in. No matter how hard she tried. And she’d tried.

“Y’know,” Ashley said after an eternity, “Way back when—and I mean like, even further back than what you’re talking about—you said something to me that really stuck.” She took a breath and Sam had the sense she was having some sort of internal debate with herself. “I was being pretty crappy and saying things I shouldn’t’ve, and you pointed out that it could’ve been me that everyone pulled that prank on.”

“Oh God, Ash—”

“No, hang on.” The hand not squeezing hers made an appearance, silencing her with a wave. “You were right, Sam. You were so, so right: It could’ve been me! It could’ve! It wasn’t, but…but it made me think about stuff. I was never as close with Hannah as you were, or Beth for that matter really, and I sort of just knew them from afar, know what I mean? They were always ‘Josh’s sisters’ in my head, people who I knew of, but didn’t totally know, and like…you saying that made me put myself in their shoes, I guess. And if I’m being honest, I still…I can’t say that I know what I would’ve done if it had been me. If what happened to Hannah happened to me…I don’t know what I would’ve done. So I can’t say I would’ve done it differently. That’s nuts, right? But I really can’t.”

She squeezed her hand.

“But,” she continued, pointedly holding her gaze, “What I do know, Sam, is that if it did happen to me…I’d want to know that I had a friend like you who loved me enough to stand outside my door and wait for me to come home.” Her shoulders rose and fell in a weak shrug. “Even if it seemed kinda creepy.”

Sam looked at her. She looked back. From somewhere below them, the heater continued to purr like an oversized cat, sated and content.

What surged up from the soles of her feet and into her chest in that moment was the same feeling she got just before hoisting herself up onto the first handhold on a climbing wall, there was no point in convincing herself otherwise. It was the burst of adrenalized determination that made even the sheerest rockface look possible—doable. A powerful feeling but a fleeting one, she knew, so, not saying another word, with her hand grasping Ashley’s and her breath held fast in her chest, Sam steeled herself to cross that last border, the final threshold she’d created in her own mind.

She stepped into Hannah’s room.

It was familiarity that she’d always expected to slam into her first, to rise up until it lapped at her ankles, her calves, her knees in a current of nostalgia both agonizing and sweet, causing her cheeks to flatten tight against her teeth and her skin to break into goosebumps as, all the while, tears welled in her eyes…and yet…that wasn’t what happened.

It took her a second, maybe as long as two, to understand what was going on. She stood there in the dark of Hannah’s bedroom, Ashley’s palm warm and pressed flush to hers, surrounded by the furniture and books and notes and clothes she’d seen so many times before, and…and that crippling wave of familiarity did not come. She turned towards Hannah’s bed, its pillows forever indented, and it did not come. She glanced at the desk to her other side, hastily scribbled notes in Hannah’s handwriting appearing faded beneath a fine layer of dust, and it did not come. She looked to the bureau, the corkboard, the socks carelessly half-tucked away into drawers, and still it did not come.

There was no lingering sense that Hannah was hiding or waiting nearby, no inkling, however irrational, that she’d pop into existence if only Sam willed her there hard enough. Hannah had simply been there once upon a time and now she was not—she’d left her mark upon the room like initials carved into the bark of a tree, pressing the shape of herself into the space in such a way that there would always be some sort of scar…but nothing more. The air didn’t smell like her, the bedroom didn’t feel like her, and all at once, unbidden, a single stupid thought came to her, no doubt the result of the million or so movies she’d humored Josh by sitting through: This was how people described a house after an exorcism. Or…a cleansing. Or a…blessing? Whatever that crap was called. It was light, it was empty, it was like she’d been suffocating and now there was room to breathe.

And so, in much the same way she’d been disappointed in herself for thinking of the room as ‘creepy’ before, one thought led to another, led to another, and—whoop, there were the tears she’d expected!—she couldn’t stop herself from falling prey to yet another inane thought.

There were no more ghosts in Blackwood Pines. There was only them, her friends, those both there and not, lost and found, past and present and future.

She couldn’t stop the watery little laugh that idea brought with it, nor could she hide how she was swiping at her eyes with her other hand. That was fine, though, Ashley didn’t seem to mind. “Oh my God,” she muttered, giving Ash’s fingers one last squeeze before letting go, brushing her cheeks with her palms. “I feel like such an idiot…I couldn’t even think about coming in here last time, and…here we are. And it’s…” Sam raised her arms, let them fall, turned around and repeated the gesture. It was a good thing the guys weren’t there, she thought, because there was no way they would’ve let that artful bird mime go without comment. “It’s a room!”

The lights flickered on as Ashley found the switch, and that only drove home how ridiculous she felt; when it had just been the thin bars of light coming through the blinds, it had been easy to imagine those prickles at the back of her neck. It was, uh, significantly less so now that all the bright pastels of Hannah’s décor were on display, leave it at that.

“Boy oh boy…all that for nothing. For a room.” Each laugh felt cleansing, like she was scrubbing out her chest and lungs with a coarse brush. Her fingers were livewires as her hands raked through her hair and then dropped to her sides again.

They kept doing that, her hands, moving up and dropping down, moving up and dropping down, and much as she wanted to believe it was late-night restlessness, it wasn’t. The climbing wall analogy had hit just a smidge too close to home—she knew the rush of an obstacle overcome when it washed over her, and hoo boy, this was it. As though the simple act of thinking about it had made it so, she realized, yup, they were up again. When she dropped them that time, her fingers landed on the edge of Hannah’s bureau to anxiously tap at the dust there. She moved them to trace a picture frame, an old hair tie, and then, smiling, the shining blue box whose twin lived in Beth’s room.

There was no way in heck Ashley wanted to hear her wax poetic about this crud, but as her thumbs slid up to raise the box’s lid, it tumbled out of her all the same. “After standing out there for like, ever, last time, I ended up in Beth’s room. Made a real boob of myself in front of Josh.”

“Guess it’s a good thing he’s an even bigger boob, huh?” Ashley asked, giving her side a gentle, teasing poke.

The plastic ballerina popped up once she’d opened the lid all the way, dancing the slow and meticulous dance of a wind-up that hadn’t been properly, well, wound-up. “That’s us. A big ol’ pair of boobs.” She’d expected another joke from her, something about being perky, probably, and didn’t get it. In fact, when she caught sight of Ashley’s face in Hannah’s mirror, laughter seemed to be the furthest thing from her mind.

It took her a second to place the look on her face, the lateness of the hour and the rush of conquering the room sort of scrambling that part of her brain, but eventually she recognized it as (uh oh) her thinking face. Her connecting the dots face. Her ‘you guys better watch out because I don’t need any paw prints to pick out all of Blue’s clues’ face. That face was such a welcome relief when they were in an escape room with five minutes left on the clock, but everywhere else? Nerve-wracking.

Sam tracked her line of sight and found it, perplexingly, on Hannah’s music box. That unlocked another memory from last year. Smiling, she picked the music box up and turned it around, twisting the wind-up key so the dancer came back to life. “You two are so alike sometimes that it’s spooky, did you know that?”

Ashley blinked a couple times before finally tearing her eyes away from the ballerina…but it was impossible to notice how they kept darting back to her every other word or so. “Alike? Who?”

“You and Josh.” She laughed at the face Ashley pulled. “He got all weird about Beth’s music box too. When we were being boobs together, I mean.” Then, as it occurred to her. “You guys have some kinda inside joke I came in too late on?” It wasn’t out of the question—even with her status as an Almost firmly in place, certificate hung on her wall and everything, there were still those times where the three of them would make some reference she didn’t get or laugh at something that meant nothing to her. Just then it seemed the most logical thing in the world that this might very well be one of those moments, another dumb hanger-on from childhood that would take too long (and wouldn’t be funny enough) to bother explaining.

The thinking face resurfaced, a crease appearing between Ashley’s eyebrows as her lips pressed together…and then it was gone, replaced by her earlier smile. “Yeah, something like that,” she shrugged.

“Can’t imagine what you weirdos could find funny about jewelry boxes, but hey…” She offered Ashley the box and was promptly declined, so she set it back where she found it, covering up the perfect dust-less patch where it had been sitting undisturbed for so long. “I am a-okay with not knowing.” She turned away from the bureau and looked around Hannah’s room for a long, long moment, hands on her hips, and once she’d had her fill of the butterflies and sequins and stripes, let out a deep sigh of relief. “We should probably go to bed. Sounds like Josh has something stupid planned for tomorrow and I just have this feeling we’re gonna have to be on our toes around him and Chris after the deer thing.”

“You sure?” Ashley asked. “Are you gonna be all right to sleep?”

“Sleep? Oh, I’m gonna sleep.” She didn’t even need to think about it. Sam nodded, taking one last look before starting for the door. “Honestly, I think I’m probably going to conk out like a log after this.” Her eyes narrowed. “I might be mixing my metaphors.”

“Oooh yeah, it’s bedtime all right,” Ashley laughed, joining her at the door before turning the lights out. After a beat she paused, lower lip disappearing into her mouth for a fraction of a fraction of a second…and then in a few brisk strides, she’d made her way over to Hannah’s bureau again, gently closing the music box. The tinny refrain of Frère Jacques cut off mid-note. “Don’t want it to like, get dusty inside,” she explained with a sheepish grin as they walked into the hall, pulling Hannah’s door shut behind them, and though she smiled in return, Sam couldn’t shake the feeling that she’d just been fed a half-truth.

***

9:42am  

God, he’d forgotten how good a solid night’s sleep felt in the lodge. Not that he’d admit it under threat of death, but maybe, just mayyybe, Sam was onto something when she ranted about the benefits of fresh air or whatever. Possibly. Jury was out on that one. Still, he’d woken up way earlier than usual, and despite the expected grogginess, shit…he felt amazing! Well-rested and like, ready to take on the day no matter what it had in store. The world was his oyster!

…and then he remembered Josh saying over dinner that the day’s itinerary included a, quote, ‘good long walk,’ and decided yeah, on second thought, he was still going to need to caffeinate like a motherfucker.

Halfway down the stairs, he could hear rattling coming from the kitchen that could only mean one thing: There was an early bird pecking around for their worm. Their soy-based, cruelty-free, cageless worm. Chris slowed his pace and lightened his steps, hoping to get a jump on Sam before she realized he was there.

This was…perfect. After that shit with the mounted heads? He was due. Yes, he most certainly was! He padded down the last few steps grinning like a fool, and when he spotted her standing at the counter with her back to him, oh! Oh, he was excited. Already he was picturing how high she’d jump, how shrill her gasp would be, and—

And he would’ve gotten away with it too, if it hadn’t been for that meddling dog.

He hadn’t even noticed Charlie there, but that was the moment he chose to make himself known, barking one of his yappy little yips before trotting into the kitchen from between Chris’s feet, his nails click-clacking on the tile every step of the way.

Then it was he who jumped (and okay, yeah, sure, yelped), only barely catching himself on the edge of the kitchen island before he could trip over his own damn feet. “Charlie! Et tu, Brute?!”

As though she’d heard him coming from a mile away—which, to be fair, wasn’t out of the question—Sam giggled and made a point to loudly coo at the pug as she knelt down and snuggled his wrinkly face. “Who’s a good guard dog? Huh? Who’s a good boy? I think it’s you!”

“False. Demonstrably false.” Caffeine? Who needed the stuff when there was adrenaline ripe for the picking?

Or…absorbing?

Generating?

Whatever. It was too early in the morning for figures of speech. Chris maneuvered himself onto one of the island’s stools before dramatically looking towards the two of them, speaking in the choked-up cadence of a soap opera character left at the altar. “You are not a good boy, Charlie Brown! You’re a cad and a scoundrel! This is how you repay me? For all I’ve done? All the chicken nuggets I’ve given you over the years? I thought we had something special.”

To his credit, Charlie did look up at him…there just wasn’t any understanding, much less any insult, in those buggy eyes of his. Only love. There was only ever love in those bulging eyes. As Sam continued to dote on him, his curlicue tail whapped against the floor, his tongue lolled out of his mouth, and…aw man, how was he supposed to stay mad at him with a face like that?! It wasn’t fair.

“You’re so lucky you’re cute,” Chris sighed, resting his arms atop the island. “So fucking lucky.”

The Keurig that had been running in the background finally stopped, giving Sam her cue to leave Charlie be. “Better not let Ashley hear you threatening him like that,” she teased as she stood and grabbed her mug.

“Ash knows he’s an opportunist, okay? Trust me. No one understands the depths of Charles’s treachery quite like—ooh, French roast, please,” he said, his tirade forgotten the moment she lifted a K-Cup and shook it in offering.

“You know…” She plunked the cup into the coffeemaker and shut the lid, going about mixing sugar and (blech) almond milk into her own. “While we’re on the topic…”

“Of Charlie’s many crimes? Heavy convo to have first thing in the morning. You sure you’re ready for that?”

She rolled her eyes at him from over the rim of her mug. “Yeah Chris, I think he’s been running a big tax scam in between napping and farting all day.”

He narrowed his eyes as he turned back towards Charlie. “I knew it. That’s how they got Capone. Tax-man gets us all eventually.”

“Ha ha. Real funny. Almost as funny as this thing that happened last night.” Sam blew on her coffee a couple times before taking a tentative sip. “Not funny in like a ha-ha way, but funny in a huh-well-that’s-weird way, know what I mean?” As the Keurig moaned and groaned behind her, she drummed her fingers on her mug and for no reason he could discern, Chris had the awful suspicion he was about to be in some kind of trouble.

He bared all his teeth in a grimace-grin and prepared for the worst.

“So I ran into Ashley last night…” Sam began, letting her voice trail off as though she was—what?—expecting him to tell the rest of the story for her?

“Yeah, real weird, Sam. Running into one of the three other people staying in the lodge. That’s some serious Twilight Zone shit right there.” A massive yawn overtook him then. That coffee couldn’t come fast enough.

Sam, though…Sam just kept smirking that inscrutable smirk at him, and that couldn’t have been good. “Here’s the thing…” Oh, she was talking like she hadn’t heard him. This was capital-B Bad. “What I can’t figure out is…well, she was wearing this shirt, right? Way too big for her, but sleep shirts are usually like that, so whatever. Only…” Another sip, and still that grin didn’t budge. “Only her shirt said ‘Seniors 2012’ and…hmm…that’s gotta be a mistake, don’t you think? Since she graduated in 2014, I mean.”

He let his head loll back onto his shoulders.

With a coy flutter of her eyelashes, the sort that said ‘Haha, silly me, I think I just realized something!,’ Sam gasped. “Oh man, hang on…isn’t 2012 the year you and Josh graduated? Wow. This keeps getting weirder!”

Chris didn’t say a word. He did, however, raise one of his fingers towards her. Just the one. The only one that needed raising, in his mind.

“Do you think she stole it?” She lowered her voice to a stage-whisper that did nothing to hide the cruel witch-cackle of her laughter. “Think she ransacked Josh’s closet when none of us were looking? That’s awfully devious for her.”

“Can you just gimme the coffee, please?”

But goddamn it, she wasn’t letting it go! Totally ignoring his fresh, piping hot, ready-to-drink coffee right beside her, letting it go cold and stale and gross and undrinkable, Sam just…well, she just kept fucking going: “She must’ve. I mean, where else would she have gotten a Seniors 2012 shirt?”

“Who knows. Glitch in the Matrix, probably.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird, though?”

“So weird, Sam. It’s so weird.”

“It had to be one of Josh’s…or maybe she found it at a thrift store or something, but…see, this is what I’m saying, though! Ash doesn’t strike me as someone who would wear a stranger’s clothes, so it can’t be thrifted, which brings me back to—”

There was only so much a man could take! “Could I please, just…have my fucking coffee? That’s all I want, Sam. I-i-it’s all I’ve ever wanted.” He had the sense she knew precisely how badly he wanted to put his head down onto the table and die, and why shouldn’t she? His face had to be about as red as the devil’s shiny buttcheeks by then. It didn’t matter that she didn’t say a thing after that—he knew Sam was gloating as she slid his mug carefully across the island to him. He took it, held it in his hand, and after a long minute of cringing under the weight of her eyes, Chris groaned. “There’s nothing to talk about here.”

Sam’s grin was evident in the shape of her vowels. “Oh, I think there’s something to talk about.”

“Then it’s a good thing no one asked you.”

“Didn’t they?”

“No. They didn’t.” He took a long, bracing gulp. “They didn’t even consider asking you. You weren’t even on the list of potential consultants. Your name never crossed their minds.”

Then, blissfully, there was silence. They drank their coffee, Charlie crunched his kibble from the bowl set out for him, and Chris foolishly allowed himself to believe that the worst had passed and Sam would let him know peace.

“So is it just that you let her borrow it? Or were you two, like—”

“There’s nothing to talk about!” The crack in his voice probably didn’t help his case, if Sam collapsing into a fit of giggles was anything to go by. “I hate you so much. You’re uninvited from my next birthday party…and the one after that! Know what? Christmas, too! You’re off the list.”

“Uh huh.”

“All the lists.”

“Okay.”

“For the foreseeable future.”

“I’m crying on the inside, really.”

“Join the club.” Walking in like he owned the place (which, technically, uh, he did), Josh leaned himself against the island, planting a loud smack of a kiss on Sam’s cheek before stealing her mug and taking a sip. His face immediately scrunched into a scowl of absolute disgust. “Oh Jesus fucki…what is that?!”

“Don’t start that! There’s no way you taste a difference.”

“My palate is refined in ways you can’t even begin to imagine. God. You trying to poison me or something?” He handed the coffee back to her, complete with tongue stuck out and loud retching sounds. “Feeding me that shit in my own house. There are other ways to murder a man, Sammy. Kinder ways. Gentler ways.”

“It’s almond milk, you big baby.”

Josh swiveled his head towards Chris, eyebrows high, and mouthed a few words: You believe this shit?

And the euphoria of having the attention off of himself was so fucking intense, so palpable, so downright joyous, that he had no choice. He had to commit himself to the bit. Casting his eyes down in disbelief, Chris slowly shook his head and sighed. I’m sorry, he mouthed back, then raised his hands, palms together as if in prayer.

There was a scraping sound as the stool beside him was pulled out, and then a familiar pressure at his side when Ashley sat, leaning her shoulder against his. “Do you know how much water it takes to grow a single almond, Sam?” she asked as she helped herself to Chris’s coffee, carrying on their tradition of ignoring the reality of germs, “Like, tons. Way more than it takes to keep a cow alive.”

“Wow.”

“I’m just saying.”

“Ha! For once Nancy Drew comes through with the hard-hitting facts.”

“Yeah, Sam, maybe you should think about the strain your obsessive vegan lifestyle is putting on…our…plan…et…” It was right around that time, as the first of the caffeine began to seep into his bloodstream, that Chris realized he was not out of the woods (so to speak). No, he suspected he was still very much in trouble, and in a very big way. He thought this—nay, knew this—because as he sat there at the island, looking at the others with sleepy, bleary eyes, it dawned on him.

They were all already dressed. Fully dressed. With shoes and everything.

Not saying a goddamn word, he took his coffee back from Ashley and knocked most of it back in one ill-thought-out swallow, coughing and hacking when the heat hit the back of his throat a moment later. “Since when do you assholes wake up this early?! Sam, sure, she’s a freaking masochist—”

“Nice.”

“—but I thought you two had common sense! How long have you been awake?!”

He didn’t like the way they were shrugging, oh no he did not.

Josh drummed his fingers on the island as though it was helping him to remember. “A couple hours?”

“A few,” Ashley corrected.

“A-a-and what? You just weren’t gonna wake me up?!”

Her lower lip pooched out in something that was wayyy too teasing to be a pout. “We tried,” Ashley assured him. “You literally cannot be woken up. It was sort of impressive, actually.”

“Yeah, check it,” Josh grinned, all three of them leaning in towards the center of the island as he pulled his phone out and began flipping through his camera roll. His finger just kept flicking through photos, each one an increasingly unflattering snapshot of Chris’s sleeping face. “We started posing you at a certain point, man. You should talk to a doctor or something, what if an intruder burst in?”

Sam stopped him on an especially spectacular snapshot, tapping the screen with her nail. “That’s my new contact photo for you.”

His head was already back on the table. “I hate you.” He’d said it earlier, but that had been a simpler time. A more innocent time. A time before this bullshit. “I hate you guys so much.”

The pressure of Ashley at his side only increased as she scooted closer to him, wrapping one of her arms around his middle in a half-hug. “No you don’t.”

“I do.”

“You don’t, though.”

“I do, though.”

“Nuh-uh. You should be thanking us, honestly. Josh wanted to put your hand in warm water to see if you’d wet the bed.” She assumed a stricken expression when he glanced over to her. “We talked him out of it.”

“This time,” Josh grinned, a warning if he’d ever heard one. He slapped his hand down on the countertop to punctuate the thought, pushing himself up to stand straight. “Now, how’s about you go put on some pants, Cochise? We’ve got places to go, things to do, shit to see, and you know I love you man, but you are seriously holding us up.”

He groaned and the noise that came out of him not terribly different from how he imagined a beached whale might sound. “I don’t even get to eat breakfast? I thought this was supposed to be a vacation!”

Ever-so-helpfully, Sam lifted a backpack from the other side of the island, letting it swing for a moment to show how heavy it was. “Tons of snacks packed. You can eat on the way. That’s what happens when you sleep until the middle of the day.”

“It’s not—the middle of t—oh fuck you guys.” Ah, but he knew a losing battle, Chris Hartley did, so he let himself be herded back up the stairs, let himself be jeered and goaded until he was dressed, dealt with the slings and arrows of their jokes and their catcalls and their stupid crap, and he pretended not to smile the whole damn time. It’s what they deserved, those animals.

This was, to be fair, way earlier than he typically did human things meant for humans. Things like thinking. Or talking. Or existing in a physical sense. But whatever big, secret operation Josh had planned? Well, he was pretty fucking excited about it, and after everything the four of them had been through recently? A good heaping dose of excitement sounded pretty good…even if it was being served up well before noon.

It wasn’t until they were all bundled up in their coats and boots that any of them began to understand what it was that they were actually in for.

“Eh…you might wanna leave Charlie here, Ash.” Josh had just tugged a beanie down over his ears as he caught sight of her clipping his harness on. “I don’t think he’s gonna get into too much trouble if we leave him here for a sec.”

“You’d think that,” Chris cut in, jabbing Josh’s side with an elbow. “But this is Charles we’re talking about. Who among us can say they’ve plumbed the depths of his depravity?”

From where he was sitting on the ground, a runner of drool plopped out of Charlie’s mouth.

“Oh come on, I’ll carry him if he slows us down! How often does he get the chance to see scenery like out h—”

“We’re not going outside.”

It would’ve been dramatic to say the world stopped around them, that the lodge became quiet enough one might’ve been able to hear a fly fart, had the temperature not been so low as to make flies (much less their gas) possible. It would’ve been dramatic, but it also would’ve been accurate.

Four little kids bundled up tight in their thickly padded jackets and their insulated boots, already sweating in their gloves and hats and, in Sam’s case, flannel scarf, and they weren’t going outside? They weren’t going outside. They stared at Josh in hopes of an answer, and all they got for their trouble was a knowing shrug. “Trust me, okay? You’re gonna be glad you got all zipped up. But…” He pitched his voice down in a play at being mysterious, “Where we’re going…the danger is ever-present…” His voice returned to normal, “The danger of doggy doom, at least. Trust me, leave Charlie, okay? I’m saving you at least twelve panic attacks.”

For a second, maybe longer but probably not, Ashley was silent. Then, she finished bundling Charlie up and said what they were all thinking. “…yeah, and causing me about twelve more by not saying what the frig you’re planning.”

He stooped in a low bow. “The Washington motto. If I’m not making you nervous, I’m doing something wrong.”

“Have you considered getting a new motto?” Adjusting the knot of her scarf, Sam followed Josh down the stairs, the look on her face making it clear she was just as lost as the rest of them were. “Like…I don’t know…”

“Melts in your mouth, not in your hand.”

“Thanks Chris.”

“I’m here to help.” He dropped Ashley a wink, but whatever laughter that a-plus joke should’ve earned him went up in a puff of smoke the instant Josh threw open a very familiar door.

“I will suggest, my lovelies,” he grinned, “That this is the part of the show where you turn on your flashlights and watch your step.” He gave Ashley and Charlie one last exhausted look, “And keep your morbidly obese pets inside the ride at all times.”

The comment about Charlie’s weight rolled off her back like water off a duck. “Why are you taking us into the basement?” Ashley asked, the corners of her mouth beginning to tuck themselves inwards.

“You’ll see.”

“That’s not a frigging answer, Josh!”

“I said you’ll see!” And then he was down the stairs, retracing the path they’d taken last night, and…well, Chris had to remind himself that Josh being this excited about something had to be a good thing. Right?

Right?

The air of the basement was, uh…pretty much the same as it had been during their electrical escapade. Chilly. Kinda dusty. Probably definitely not actually full of spores slowly sinking their tendrils into his brainmeat. He hoped.

“You lovely people don’t mind if we walk and talk, do you? You know how I get if I don’t hear my own voice for more than a couple minutes at a time…”

Already it was getting dark enough around them to make it hard to tell, but Sam assumed an expression of perfect innocence dramatic enough to be seen nonetheless, fluttering her eyelashes at him. “I can’t even imagine what you mean. How do you get?”

“Yeah Josh, how do you get?”

“God, with friends like you guys, who needs enemies? You believe this shit, Cochise?”

“I think this is what Caesar probably felt like. But I, for one,” he said before the girls could launch another attack, “Would love a guided tour, my good man!” His foot caught on something and it was only the grace of God (and Ashley) that he didn’t fall over when he turned to see Satan’s very own antique rocking horse wibble-wobbling beside him. “Augh! Jesus f—why do you guys even keep haunted-ass shit like this?!”

Unconcerned with the soulless eyes of that nightmare of eras long since past, Josh led them…uh…huh. He led them…towards the very back of the basement. The area that Mr. Washington had always told them was off-limits.

Uh oh.

“Not a guided tour! Not in the traditional sense, anyway.” There was a brief sound before Josh produced something from his pocket; a key, it would seem, as a moment later, the door to Bob’s prop storage swung open. “If I may…I’d like to remind you all of a favorite story of mine as we make our way into the bowels of the mountain itself.” He disappeared through the door, quickly followed by Sam (who shot them an amused look before slipping into the shadows), leaving him and Ashley alone in the basement proper.

“…so this is it, huh? I always sort of knew I’d die in this basement. My mom warned me this was how it would happen. Really wishing I’d listened to her right about now.”

“That’s so not funny, Chris.” Ashley’s flashlight beam jiggled along with Charlie’s breath, first lighting up a box of old film reels, then a massive dry-cell battery. “God! He knows I hate basements! Why did it have to be the freaking basement?!”

Josh’s voice rang out again, strangely—almost impossibly—more distant than it should’ve been, given how big he’d figured the storage room to be. “Hey lovebirds, you’re missing the story!”

And then, hot on his heels, Sam piped in, “Guys! This is…this is nuts!”

Chris glanced her way. “…oh, we’re definitely dying in this basement.”

“Yup,” Ashley deadpanned.

"...got your back?"

The sigh she heaved was, in his opinion, mayhaps a touch too dramatic for the occasion. "And I got yours."

“At least we’re dying together.” He caught her eye and grinned when she laughed, holding his free hand out for her to take.

“Romantic,” she muttered as she shoved her phone into the breast pocket of her coat so the flashlight still lit the way, taking his hand in hers. Wonder of wonders, she squeezed his fingers and that was it—she stepped into the storage room, bringing him with her.

It didn’t take long to see what Sam had meant: The place really wasn’t that big. It was more of a claustrophobic hallway than an actual room, less a closet and more a crawlspace, but once they’d found themselves at the end of it, another door stood open before them, promising more space beyond.

Ashley’s grasp on his hand tightened exponentially as they stepped into that new darkness, the sound of her breath quickening, and okay, when he didn’t immediately see Josh or Sam waiting for them…maybe he started to get kind of panicked himself. Until…

Until his ears…

Popped?

Until his ears popped.

Wait, why were his ears popping?

Making sure to keep his light pointed in front of him, lest either of the Browns freak out and bolt, he asked, “Did you, uh, feel that?” his apprehension only growing when he realized…what the fuck?!

“Since when is there an echo in the lodge?” Uh oh. Sherlock mode engaged. The grip on his hand slackened despite the darkness, and there it went, all the tension drained from Ashley’s voice to be replaced wholesale with curiosity.

The sound of footsteps doubled, tripled, quadrupled, and after what sounded like an entire army marching over to them, two cellphone lights bobbed back into view, illuminating Josh and Sam’s faces. To him, they looked a bit like gleeful ghosts, pale and bright-eyed and grinning.

“This is…crazy!” Sam was laughing as she grabbed at the dark, taking hold of one of Chris’s arms. “You guys are not going to believe this! You’re not!”

“What aren’t we gonna believe, exactly?”

She shook her head and disappeared when she moved her phone’s light. “You just have to see—come on!”

Grinning like the Halloween ghoul he’d always dreamt of becoming, Josh held his own phone directly under his chin, giving his cheeks and forehead a campfire glow. “If you’ll come right this way, friends and fans,” he said, ushering them onwards, “I’ll be more than happy to regale you with the story of the Blackwood Sanatorium.”

Welp. There went the last of his tension. His shoulders slumped. His jaw unclenched. His eyes rolled. “Dude. Seriously?! Y-you brought us under the lodge to tell us that old zombie cannibal shi—” In a twist none of them predicted, Ashley’s hold on his hand tightened again and Chris found himself yanked deeper into the darkness. “Christ in a canoe, Ash, keep your pants on! I’m coming, I’m coming!”

“The Blackwood Sanat—”

“Miners brought up sick, one bit a nurse, killed the staff,” Ashley recited, “Yeah Josh, we know, we’ve only heard you tell it about a zillion times…”

He’d expected Josh to bristle at that, honestly—if there was one thing he hated, boy howdy, it was having the wind knocked from his sails. The S.S. Edgelord didn’t falter, though, and wasn’t that a relief in and of itself. “That’s true! But here’s the thing, okay? I’ve never told you what happened after that part of the story."

“After. As in…the part that happened after everyone was dead. Yeah, wow, I sure wonder what happened in that epilogue.” Something grabbed him by the shoulder and…okay, maybe there was still some tension left in him, because he jumped like a wind-up toy.

“Think about it, Cochise,” Josh drawled, sounding as though his face was right beside his. “They had to get the bodies outta there somehow, didn’t they? Can’t just leave ‘em to rot. But…but, but, buuut…the sanatorium’s in a valley. In the middle of a forest. And those woods? Lovely. Dark. Deep. How on Earth do you manage to move a boatload of corpses through all that?”

That time, it was much less of a shock when Ashley jumped in with an answer. “Most tuberculosis hospitals had tunnels built under them.” There was a sense of wonder in her voice that bordered on awe, and it seemed entirely possible at once that with their fingers laced tight like that, she’d be able to feel his pulse pick up as his heart flip-flopped. “That way the sick and dying wouldn’t have to actually see the dead. They could just pretend they weren’t there.”

“Great!” he said, pinwheeling his free arm as he very nearly toppled down what must’ve been the world’s most dangerous staircase, only Ashley and Josh boxing him in keeping him from going sprawling. “All very informative! If I’m ever on Jeopardy!, I’ll def be sure to thank you guys when I win it big, but what the fuck does this have to do with dragging us down to Hell, exactly?”

The pressure in his ears returned, then popped, then shifted in a way he couldn’t really describe. He wasn’t sure why or how, but something about that shift in pressure made him suspect they space they’d come to at the base of the stairs was…open. Big. Like, seriously big. But since all they had were four puny phone flashlights to illuminate the way, that suspicion didn’t really matter.

It wasn’t a reassuring feeling.

“Well,” Josh continued in his smarmiest of voices, Anthony Hopkins meets David Attenborough, “Those tunnels have to go somewhere, don’t they? They need to connect to something.”

It clicked. All at once, it made perfect, horrible, beautiful, ridiculous sense. He knew where they were going.

“Josh,” Chris said slowly, honestly pretty proud of himself for keeping his own juvenile excitement out of his voice. “Bro. Did Bob. Tell us. Not go to into his prop room. Because. It connects. To the fucking. Sanatorium?!”

In a flash, the heat from Josh’s body was gone from beside him. A moment later he and Sam reappeared, something huge and hulking and metal right behind them. It was like a shitty backdrop from a knock-off Nightmare on Elm Street dream sequence…one where the protagonist was an OSHA representative. “Y’know Cochise, the answer might surprise you.”

“That’s an elevator,” Ashley said, sounding distant, or distracted, or disconnected, or some other word that started with dis- that he couldn’t think of because so much of his brain was currently grappling with the reality of their destination. She gave him Charlie before he could disagree (another dis- word, but not one that worked), pulling her phone out of her pocket to train the light on the massive wall of metal grating. “The lodge must’ve been a health resort before a ski resort…they’d put those by the hospitals for family members and…so that’s…this is how…”

Yup. Sherlock mode. Set phasers to nerd.

Welp, at least he’d gotten through a day or so of this trip with a girlfriend who was interested in him. It had been fun while it lasted. Oh, how he’d treasure those memories. The way Ash’s light kept zipping around, it became clear at once that his girlfriend was gone, baby, gone, and now, left in her place, was Miss Marple, herself.

“Could. You. Imagine. The sheer volume of fuckery we would’ve gotten up to—whoop, down to, I guess, huh—if we’d known this was here when we were kids?!” He laughed, walking up to the elevator and hooking his fingers in the rusty metal links.

Ashley’s voice was flat as she pointed out, “You’d be dead. You’d both be very, very dead.”

“Or! Or we would’ve had the time of our young lives and come out stronger for it.”

“Only you wouldn’t be. Because you’d be dead.”

He swept his light out to see what else of the room he could make out, and holy cow, Josh hadn’t been kidding when he’d said there were sights to see. The place looked to be part of another lodge entirely, another hotel, dusty boxes and tables stacked with chairs lining the walls. The lighting was awful, obviously, but if he squinted, he thought he could see the tattered remains of wallpaper still clinging to a few of the far walls, made gauzy with cobwebs. “You might have a point,” he agreed when he turned and finally got a look at the steep set of stairs they’d just come down. “We’d probably be pretty dead.”

“Are we actually about to go snoop around a condemned hospital? Really? That’s what you brought us here for?” She was laughing as she said it, but Chris thought he detected a whiff of doubt in Sam’s tone.

“I did in fact bring you up here to snoop around a condemned hospital, Samantha my dear. Well, I’m taking you there shortly, anyway, because we have—”

“Definitely have to go down further.” Josh was struck silent when Ashley spoke for him. “Body chutes had to go like, way far down underground for contamination reasons, so I bet…I bet there are a few more sub-basements we have to go through first.” She paused, and he couldn’t tell without shining his light directly in her face (something he refrained from doing because it didn’t seem like the best boyfriend move to pull), but he thought he heard another odd note enter Ash’s voice when she added. “Probably like, two or three, I’d guess.”

“…thank you, Detective Brown. As always, you are obnoxiously correct.” There was something off in Josh’s voice too, apparent only when he really, really listened for it. It wasn’t anything ominous, nothing to get in a twist about, but…it sort of…well, it almost sounded like Josh and Ashley were in on some joke he and Sam hadn’t been clued in on.

“We’re all getting tetanus this weekend, aren’t we?” Sam asked, suddenly very close to him as she leaned in to pet Charlie, her light going all over the place.

“Hey, look at it this way…at least we’ll be getting it as a group! You know what they say: Nothing brings people together quite like lockjaw.”

Charlie’s weight was lifted from his arms as Sam claimed him for her own, their constant back-and-forth custody battle raging ever onwards. “I know you think you’re helping,” she laughed, “But you’re not.”

“I have never made a situation better in my life, Sam. I do not intend on breaking that streak now.” What he didn’t say was that he was also incredibly excited to get to poke around the sanatorium he and Josh had spent their childhoods being warned about. Someone would probably end up getting cut, sure, and all of them would get spooked, but how many people had the chance to list that off during the inevitable ‘What I did over winter break’ icebreakers when class started up again? Good idea or not, bad idea or not, he was a man full of caffeine and fresh mountain air, and the world was his oyster.

The fact that Josh and Ash were getting along like the good ol’ days? Yeah, yeah that helped too.

When they’d had their fill of the cavernous room, Josh pointed his light down another horrifying staircase, and Chris was only too happy to volunteer to go first that time. He had absolutely zero idea what to expect from the old, broken down asylum, but with the way Josh kept raving about cannibals and Ashley kept firing off historical facts and Sam kept sighing, he just knew it was going to be good.

***

Sunday, December 20, 2015
3:07am

He didn’t like that it kept ringing through. It felt wrong to hear that noise against his ear, so small, so unimportant…and so goddamn unnecessarily sad. The final ring ended, followed by a quiet click, and Josh hung up before it could roll into voicemail. Just like he’d done the past five times.

His hands hung limply between his knees as he lowered the phone again, passing it back and forth between his fingers even as he turned his gaze towards the trees. When the silhouettes of those snowy sentinels standing out against the green-blue glow of the northern lights became too much for him to bear, he hung his head, he took a deep breath, he tried to remember the count Alan was always trying to get him to use.

“This is weird,” he said on his second exhale. A cloud of steam punctuated the thought, glittering in the air where his breath met Blackwood’s. One of his hands, the one not currently holding his phone, came up to scrub at his cheek. “Why are you doing this, man? What’s the point?” Around him, the mountain offered no answer; it was perfectly, peacefully silent, the snow continuing to fall in fluffy fat drifts, the breeze doing little more than rustling the pine and spruce branches overhead. Except for the far-off hooting of an owl, not a creature seemed to be stirring at that late hour.

Josh pulled in another breath but found he couldn’t hold it for more than a second or two. It tumbled out of him in a laugh that felt shaky in his chest. “What?” he asked himself, sliding his hand to the back of his neck as though he could rub his embarrassment away like a muscle cramp. “You actually waiting for a scream? Jesus pleez-us, buddy boy, someone’s going full Shining on this one…all work and no play makes Josh a fucking basket case.”

It was hard to say how long he let himself sit there, the concrete of the lodge’s steps slowly but surely freezing his buns off, the snow peppering his shoulders and the knit of his hat, his fingers turning his phone over and over again. It was a while. Yeah, he could say that much—it was a while. He sat and sat, doing his breathing and watching the reflection of the aurora dance its ghostly dance on the snow.

He was, he knew, trying to talk himself out of it. Not that there was any use pretending the urge would pass. Because it wouldn’t. At the very least, it hadn’t yet.

He’d come out there knowing what he was going to do, what he needed to do, and it was only a matter of time before he did the damn thing. Whether it took him ten seconds or ten hours was another question entirely, but he was going to do it. He was. All he was doing there on the steps was delaying the inevitable. Dragging his feet. Maybe…maybe hoping that the sun would come up and the others would wake up and come looking for him and they’d give him an excuse not to do it.

Only, he knew he couldn’t let that happen this time. This was just…it was something he couldn’t avoid. One more deep breath, then. One more deep breath and he hit redial. One more deep breath and he brought his phone back to his ear. And just as it had before, the line rang and rang, just like any normal phone would.

He braced his elbows on his knees and screwed his eyes shut, pinching the bridge of his nose as he waited and his heart bounced against his ribs like a trapped animal trying to free itself. There was something about the ringing, he reflected for the millionth time that night, that felt so goddamn wrong. It was its own kind of heartbeat in a way, a sign of life where it didn’t belong, a rhythm both shrill and somehow organic, an uncaring metronome counting down to that click like a jury-rigged egg timer ticking down the seconds before an explosion, and—

Click.

Voicemail picked up.

“Hey,” the recording said, followed by a pause just long enough to make his chest clench with hope—hope that she’d somehow actually answered, that she’d just found her phone lying around and hit accept, that the past couple years had all been a horrible misunderstanding and she was ready to come home now—but short enough to remind him that she couldn’t. That she never would. “I’m not here. You know what to do!”

He barely waited for the beep to let it out. “Some parents we got, huh? Man, sure is a good fuckin’ thing neither of us is, say, a psych major or anything…otherwise, wow, we might have to unpack why it is that Big Bob and Lovely Linda can forget about checking in with the cops for months at a time without losing sleep, but they’re still willing to shell out for a data plan with two cellphone lines that aren’t getting used.” The sound that came out of him was meant to be a laugh. It wasn’t one.

“Gooood fuckin’ thing,” Josh repeated. He took another deep breath, trying to steady himself despite knowing it would never happen. “We’d also probably have to address the whole ‘leaving a message on a dead girl’s phone’ thing, so…phew. Imagine my relief. No psych majors here, no sir, no ma’am, just a drop-out and a…oh shit, what were you again? Fuck me, I ca—ah, right, you were undecided, Pops loved that. That’s why I can’t reme—anyway, good thing neither of us have to sit and untangle that knot. Bet there’s a lot of seriously deep, resonating trauma hiding under all that. The generational kind, y’know. Or the early childhood kind. Or, shit, all of the above.”

It occurred to him he was talking way too fast to be understood, but that was probably okay, wasn’t it? It wasn’t like Beth was going to be checking her messages anytime soon, and…wait, did voicemails still time out? Was that still a thing that happened? Shit, maybe he needed to be talking fast…faster, even.

“This is weird,” he muttered after a beat, “This is so weird, me doing…whatever this is. Not like you’ll hear it. Or care. But…fuck. Fuck.” He swallowed. “We’re at the lodge. And, just…” Deep breaths, Josh, he could hear the Alan in his head reminding him, Deep breaths. “I miss you. And I love you. And it doesn’t do any good now, but I just wanted to say that…that I’m sorry—that I didn’t wake up in time, that I didn’t take you seriously about the others starting shit, that…that, uh…that…” His throat clicked and the phone beeped cheerfully, the only warning he had before the line went dead and he realized he’d been cut off.

Ah, so voicemails did still time out.

Great.

Still, the floodgates had opened. There was no stopping it now that he’d started. For all intents and purposes, he thought it amounted to about the same. “I’m sorry it took me so long to tell you any of that. I was so busy just…fucking…hating Hannah and hating myself for hating her, and I did wh…goddamn it, I did what everyone else did, B. I let you get swallowed up by all that. I was focused so hard on her that…that I started forgetting about your part in all this, and…I shouldn’t have done that. I shouldn’t have done that shit, and I’m sorry that I let it happen.

“You were always just…always looking out for her, y’know? That should’ve been my job, but I guess we all know how shit turns out when you trust me to think about other people first.” He scoffed and the sound felt so much colder than the air around him. Alan would’ve had something to say about that, of course, no doubt something starting with ‘you need to be kinder to yourself’ and ending with ‘please don’t talk that way in my office,’ but he wasn’t in Alan’s office, and even if he had been, he thought even he would’ve had to agree to a certain extent.

“You shouldn’t have fucking followed her out there, and I’m not letting go of that one, but I shouldn’t have been drinking on my meds and I shouldn’t have invited Emily and Jess and Matt and fucking Mike, and I shouldn’t have told everyone to wait to go looking for you, so like…I know I can’t judge. And I don’t. I mean, I do, but. I’m trying not to.” The screen of his phone finally blinked black to save on battery, and yet he talked as though they were connected by that line. In a way, he liked to think they were. It brought him more comfort than he could’ve expected.

“So I’m sorry for that. For saying you were stupid. I mean, you were, don’t get it twisted, but…you know what I’m saying. Mostly I’m sorry for what happened after. What Hannah did to you—what I helped her do to you.”

If there was anything he’d come to understand in Alan’s office over the past year or so, it was that there had been more to his story than he’d intended, layers that he hadn’t been ready to peel away in the light of day and had so instead subconsciously slid into the narrative. In the end, it was hard to deny that, well, Hannah had eaten Beth. Maybe not in a totally literal sense, nothing as grisly and gory as what he’d written, but she’d eaten her all the same. The shadow of her humiliation had cast a pall over everything it touched, a dark corona of guilt that people couldn’t fight. It was why he had been able to ring through Beth’s line while Hannah’s number was immediately answered by a mechanical voice that oh-so-politely informed the caller that her mailbox was full before disconnecting.

Everyone remembered Hannah’s misery, her embarrassment, her tears, her betrayal…but no one ever fucking remembered Beth. It was hard not to blame Hannah for that, even posthumously.

“Sorry.” Maybe he said it, maybe he only thought it, maybe it didn’t matter. Whatever it was, it felt like an ending, an amen, and what remained of his breath rushed out of him in a sigh. The next breath he pulled in felt so much freer than the last. Josh allowed himself a slight smile at the realization of his relief, wondering why oh why he’d let it fester for so long.

Only it had probably been for the same reason he’d let a lot of things fester for as long as they had, huh? Plain old human fear of the unknown, of having to admit she was gone, that he’d been left alone.

It was the sound of footsteps that did it, shaking him free of those thoughts and surprising a laugh out of him; a strange reaction, maybe, but shit…not to keep bringing him up, but when Alan was right, the man was right, and as the sound of crunching snow grew louder behind him, Josh couldn’t deny that he’d had a point, once upon a time: There really wasn’t any mistaking your family’s footsteps in the middle of the night, was there? Even if they weren’t exactly blood.

He didn’t raise his head and didn’t need to. He could see the boots that had come to rest beside him through a little gap between his arm and leg and, yup, oh yeah…chalk up a(nother) win for Alan, that slick Swedish son of a bitch. A moment later, something decidedly too solid to be a hand tapped him on the shoulder and he set his phone down between his feet to reach over and take it without looking up, accepting the thermos with both hands as a kid might. It was just warm enough to make him realize what a dumb decision it had been to sit outside for that long without wearing gloves.

After he popped the lid and took a sip of the hot chocolate inside, his guest finally spoke up. “Been out here a long time,” Ashley commented, the toes of her boots giving a slight wiggle beside him as she stood hunched against the cold. “You okay?”

A good point and a valid question. He hadn’t exactly been paying attention to the time, but if the numbness in his ass was anything to go by, it probably made sense that a rescue team had been sent. Josh shrugged, bobbled his head. ‘Okay’ was such a subjective term, after all, and he had just been on a conference call with his dead sister, so…

She sighed above him. He didn’t miss how she’d conveniently omitted how long she’d been out there. Or for how long she’d been listening. Which she had been. Obviously. “You want company?”

Another shrug. Another bobble.

And then from her, no surprises there, another sigh.

Ashley hunkered down on the step next to him, making him realize that…huh. He hadn’t needed to move to make room. It would’ve been only natural for him to sit smack dab in the middle of the stairs, right? But he hadn’t. He’d gone out of his way, or so it seemed, to sit to one side as though he’d expected company—though who he’d expected was anyone’s guess.

Next to him, nearly close enough for their shoulders to touch, Ashley sat with her knees together and feet splayed apart, her own thermos set beside her so that her hands could absently knot and unknot as she made a point to not look at him. “You’re so bad at this.”

Lifting his head into the chill, he scoffed. “I’m bad at this? I’m bad at your fakey-fake nodding game, that’s what you’re telling me?”

“The point of yessing and noing,” she said, and not without a pretty decent dollop of that good old-fashioned Ashley Brown know-it-allism, “Is to answer yes or no. There’s not a third ‘Uhhh…I dunno’ option.”

“Maybe you need one.”

She sniffed airily. “You’re still bad at it.”

“Truly, my heart is broken. I can’t fathom how I’ll ever recover from this.” He turned her way and made to grab for her beanie when he saw her smirk. All that time out in the cold must’ve done a number on his reflexes, though—she wriggled away just in time to avoid him. “That smart mouth of yours what got you voted as the sadsack ambassador?”

“Huh?”

He nodded back towards the lodge. “Not for nothing, pipsqueak, but I’ve noticed there seems to be a running pattern with you dorks. Namely, whenever you get, oh, just…just a hint, just a whiff of Washington bullshit on the air, it’s usually little Miss Sunshine or the court jester that come running full-tilt to put an end to it before I start playing the Donnie Darko soundtrack while staring wistfully into space. The fact you’re here suggests some sort of outside influence, so, level with me. What was it? They trying to encourage some kinda personal growth? Did you lose nose-goes? Is there dissent among the ranks, perhaps? The seeds of rebellion being sown? Or—”

“They passed out halfway through the movie and they’re both sleeping like babies. If babies had like…really bad deviated septums. Man, I thought Charlie snored, but those two put him to shame.”

Josh pressed a hand to his heart. “They’re such little angels.”

Still doing that thing she did where she pretended she wasn’t laughing even though she very much was, Ashley rocked to the side to shove him with her shoulder. “And shut up, no one got a…did you say ‘a whiff of Washington bullshit on the air?’ God, you’re full of yourself. Not everything’s about you.”

It seemed the illustrious kid detective Encyclopedia Brown herself had forgotten to whom she was speaking! “Ah, how foolish. Obviously you just decided ‘Wow, what a beautiful night to wander the grounds like a Victorian-era ghost haunting an old estate’ then, huh?”

“Maybe I did, you don’t know.”

“Au contraire, Ash, my love. I think I’ve got a pretty solid idea.”

“Whatever.” She dropped her hands into her lap, at least for the time being, and blew a long stream of icy breath into the air in front of them. “Fat lotta thanks I get for bringing you cocoa.”

“My friendship is a thankless thing,” he chuckled, only half-joking, “The whims of an artiste are inscrutable at best.”

A single soft laugh came from her nose. “At best.”

They both knew the silence that fell between them would be short-lived. It was obvious in the shape of Ashley’s shoulders (held a bit too high) and the way Josh kept twisting at the thermos’s cap (fingers making the metal squeak each time). It had been a long couple of days up there on the mountain, not even an entire weekend but somehow a lifetime, and there were certain things that they knew the other hadn’t missed. But they let it breathe, that silence. They let the wind whisper through the trees and the snow fall onto their eyelashes, and if neither of them could lift their eyes from their boots or the tree line for the time being, that was all right.

Before too long, Ashley drew in what he would call a resigned breath. “There’s something I’ve been meaning to talk to you about. I…I’ve been thinking about how to say it for a while now, so I’m just…gonna rip the band-aid off, okay?”

His eyebrows shot up into his hairline right as his stomach shot down into his feet.

She squared her shoulders, clutched that much tighter onto her own thermos, and let it all out in a rush. “You really don’t need the whole romantic scene thing in the second act. Like…I’m sorry Josh, but it’s incredibly unnecessary.”

“Romantic s…” What she’d said didn’t just click in his head then, it clunked into place with enough force to send him reeling, head moving back, eyes blinking, hands pinwheeling as he tried to metaphorically find his center of gravity. “Good fucking God—do you mean the sex scene, Ashley Brown? Are you referring to the scene where boning occurs?”

Dear sweet Ashley soldiered on like she hadn’t heard him, though her sudden increase in volume suggested she had, indeed. “It’s incredibly. Unnecessary. To the plot.”

“Maybe I like the sex scene in the second act, you ever think about that?”

“Look.”

“You ever think about that, Ash?”

“All I’m saying,” she flared her fingers as she said it, “Is that if you’re trying to build up the audience’s connection with these characters before plunging them into the big twist in act three, there are better ways to do it than shoehorning in an awkwardly written scene like that.”

Oh.

Oh no she did not.

He turned at that slight, fixing her with a stare radiating indignation. “Awkwardly written.”

“So, here’s what I was thinking instead…”

“Awkwardly.” He set his thermos down between them on the step. “Written.” Josh leaned in so his and Ashley’s faces were nearly touching. “Do you realize whose fancy-ass lodge you’re in right now? Okay, scratch that—do you realize whose fancy-ass lodge you’re outside of right now? Awkwardly written. You wanna sleep out here in the snow, Red Riding Hood? We can make that happen.”

The proximity did nothing to slow her down. “What if instead of them immediately getting naked after being chased through the woods and fearing for their lives, they both get, like, really open and vulnerable and talk about how they use their Alpha Male-Dumb Blonde acts as façades to cover up how crappy their confidence actually is?”

A beat. Then two. Then Josh sat back with a groan, letting his head loll onto his shoulders so his breath fogged the air above them, a wispy ghost twin of the northern lights. “Why in God’s name are you the way that you are? Who hurt you? Will you tell me that much, Ash? Is there a factory settings button I can press somewhere that turns you into someone who isn’t a total buzzkill, or is this really how we’re doomed to live out the rest of our lives?”

She gave his shoulder a good shove, but there was no missing her laughter. “It’s just an editorial suggestion!”

“Uh huh.”

“Consider it.”

“Okay, how about this: I will consider taking the requisite horror movie sex scene and mangling it into some weird heart-to-heart between the two sluttiest characters in the cast if…and only if…you consider incorporating naughty words like ‘sex’ and ‘fuck’ and ‘hell’ and maybe even ‘bitch,’ into your vocabulary.”

“Oh my God.”

“You’re a goddamn adult—start talking like one.”

From the corner of his eye, he could see her lips purse and her brow furrow, but he pretended to be unaware of whatever inner turmoil the ultimatum had stirred up inside of her. Josh took up his thermos again, popped the top to take a sip, and once he’d finished, it seemed Ashley had come to some kind of decision. “Hey Josh?

“Mhm?”

She waited until he met her eyes. “Go fuck yourself.”

“Oh holy shit, you are serious about this!”

Then they were laughing like two kids in study hall, trying to tamp it all down but failing miserably, hunched over themselves with shaking shoulders and reddening cheeks. It was a scene he would’ve scrunched his face up at before, maybe even stuck his tongue out at…not now, though…not now. For everything else his stupid story had been, for everything else it had done, the way it had mended that invisible, jagged rift between him and Ashley had turned out to be what he was most thankful for. Maybe they weren’t preteens hanging out on her mom’s balcony and bitching about study hall as they swatted at mosquitos, but they were close enough. He hadn’t realized how much he’d missed it until he had it back.

When the laughter slowed, then tapered, then stopped, he took another long drink, savoring the frothy foam of melted marshmallows. She’d really gone all out with those little bastards, too, probably spurred on by Sam mentioning earlier in the day that they were jam-packed with gelatin, those fluffy pillows of sweetness, and she’d pass on them, thanks. The thought made him grin a bit wider, threatening to bring his chuckles back full force.

He should’ve realized Ashley’s silence had taken on a more contemplative edge than his had. He didn’t.

“So…hey. Earlier, when we were in the sanatorium…”

And here it was—the real reason she’d come out into the cold to find him. To him, it sounded as though this was the thing she’d been thinking about for a while, what she’d been gearing herself up for, not her feedback on his dumbass story. The tone of her voice made his stomach tense, tentative and anxious, and he let his breath out in a huff, knowing without really knowing that this was about to be capital-S Something. “Yeah-huh?”

“It was pretty creepy, the noises and junk coming from the upper floors, wasn’t it? All that rusty old metal scraping whenever the wind blew?” There was a faint rustle as she hugged her knees to her chest. “It was awful.”

“Sure was.”

“Almost sounded like…” She stopped for a second, her lower lip disappearing inside her mouth. Then she let it go. “Almost kinda sounded like screaming.”

That was when he looked away from the woods and sized her up. Really sized her up. “I mean…I guess,” he said. “Inasmuch as a rusty door hinge can sound like a scream, sure.”

Her shoulders rose with her breath. Then they fell. When they rose again, she spoke. “I didn’t say it sounded like a person screaming.” Her hands kept doing their little dance in front of her knees, fingers tangling before disappearing into her sleeves. It was a nervous thing, that hand-jive, but Ash herself was a nervous thing. He had the idea, though, that much like he’d been with his call to Beth, she wasn’t going to let herself chicken out of this one. “I know you said you got a lot of your ideas for the Wendigo—the ones in your story, I mean, not like, the preexisting mythology—from coming up here and listening to the weird noises at night, but…well…excuse me for saying so, but the stuff I heard in that old hospital sure sounded a hell of a lot more like what I read than any random animal call from out there in the woods.”

The desire to hide his face was strong. Stronger than strong. Somehow (and he wasn’t sure even he knew how), he managed to stave it off.

“Were you going into that place alone too?”

He worked a knuckle hard into his temple. Two could play at the anxious hand movements game. “As a matter of fact…”

“Josh.”

“I didn’t die, Mom, so I don’t see how this pertains to…” As he talked, Ashley dropped her head into her hands. She wasn’t laughing, she wasn’t crying, she wasn’t doing much of anything, and that…that got him to shut his yap. At least for a second. “It was a dumb call. Real dumb. But it’s not like I ever got hurt, or—”

“How long were you coming up here alone?” There was nowhere he could go to escape those big, doleful eyes of hers when she straightened up. Her eyebrows were drawn together high and tight, her mouth a wrinkle of concern beneath her reddening nose. “Was it the whole time?”

“The whole time what?”

Her fingers spread out before she dropped her hands to her sides. “The whole time you were writing, Josh. Were you up here the whole time you were working on it?”

“N—” he caught himself as the lie prepared to jump out of his mouth. That wouldn’t’ve been fair, not with Ash right there, laying her cards out on the table like that, clearly uncomfortable, clearly every bit as scared of this conversation as he was, and she didn’t deserve to suffer through that while he avoided the question. This talk was happening one way or another, and after everything they’d been through, he thought he owed her the truth. “Not the whole time. Most of it, but not all of it. I wrote a good chunk back at home, too. It, uh…wasn’t a strictly Blackwood affair, you understand.”

For a long while she didn’t say anything. She sat beside him, her knees pressed together hard enough to crack walnuts, her toes pointed in towards each other, her mouth scrunched into a tight wrinkle. He’d always been decent at reading Ashley’s mind, so it wasn’t too difficult for him to take a stab in the dark as to what was ripping and tearing through it now.

It occurred to him that he could’ve made a joke, could’ve deflected, could’ve changed the subject and quickly hurried back into the lodge…

He didn’t, though, and wasn’t that strange? He didn’t.

“Sam showed me Hannah’s music box,” she said after a time, “And I thought it was weird, but I figured it was just a coincidence—the song. I would’ve let myself keep thinking that too, only…only you brought us down into those sub-basements under the lodge, and…” Whether from remembering the dankness of the rooms or something else entirely, she shivered beneath all her layers. “Everything was just…it was too much. It was all…there. The stairs, the writing nook, the tunnels…and then I felt like the world’s biggest idiot because it had been staring me in the face all along! It was right there, and I hadn’t noticed it, or hadn’t wanted to, and you’d even told me the part with the miners and the cave-in was based on that campfire story you’re always going on about, but…”

She struggled to find the right words, her fingers kneading at the extra fabric of her sleeves, and when it took her longer than he could bear, Josh rocked slightly to the side and nudged her with his elbow. “Say it,” he teased, “Out loud.”

Confusion clouded her eyes for an instant as she looked over to him…and then her entire body sagged. “You’re an idiot.”

Josh sucked his teeth and snapped his fingers as if to signal ‘aw shucks.’ “Sorry, the line we were looking for was ‘You’re a vampire.’ But hey, thanks for playing, make sure to grab a consolation prize on the way out.” He snickered, but the worried smile on Ashley’s face did very little to relieve the tension in his gut. This was a talk he’d been anticipating since he’d sent her his story in the first place, and now that it was upon him, he knew the only way out was through. He waved for her to continue. “Go on. Ask.”

“Josh.”

“Let’s just do this if we’re gonna do this, okay?”

A flicker of something awfully close to pity threatened to overwrite the concern in her gaze, but it was gone as quickly as it had come. “How much of it was based on…all this?”

And though he’d had a year—a literal goddamn year—to come up with a halfway decent answer to that question, he was disappointed to realize he just didn’t have one. Such was the life of a procrastinator, he supposed. “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, not all of it. Just, uh…” He poked her with his elbow again and tightened his lips into the best smile he could manage. “…almost.”

If the smile she gave in return was meant to reflect his, then oof, maybe it hadn’t been that convincing after all.

“Not the, uh…not the characters, though,” and shit, there was no masking how much of an afterthought that had been. “That would’ve been exceptionally uncool. Maybe even downright insulting. A fireable friend offense, as it were.”

In all the time Ashley had been helping him edit, how often had he stopped to imagine what her reaction to that information might be? Every single time he entertained that thought, without fail, this was the point in the scenario where she puffed up and stormed off after screaming in his face. He was prepared to handle ‘Are you kidding me?!’ He’d planned how to weasel out of ‘How could you write such terrible stuff about us?!’ He’d anticipated her sagacious understanding curdling into outrage when she connected the dots to find she had been Scaredy Cat all along, that Scaredy Cat had been her, that she was the one he’d smacked around and tied up and thrown into the dark and left to fend for herself as her brain swelled and her friends thought only of how they’d save him in the end.

What he hadn’t prepared for was the way she kept looking at him, silent and impassive, thoughtful and concerned. No, he hadn’t been ready for that outcome in the slightest, but boy was he glad he’d never given her either of those fucking endings to read. The relief of that alone was nearly enough to outweigh the jitters he was dealing with.

“…sooo…?”

Ashley took a deep breath and slumped forward as she let it out. “So?”

Josh smoothed his hands down the fabric of his jeans, ironing out wrinkles that weren’t even there in his imagination. “I don’t know what happens next.”

“In the story, or…?”

Proving both that she was right (as usual) and that he was abysmal at her game of yeses and nos, he shrugged.

For a time, the only sounds around them were those of the Pines: the owl hooting from somewhere closer than it had been before, a branch snapping from under a deer’s hoof or the weight of the snow, the wind picking up then dying down, and the lodge’s power grid humming softly underneath. Nothing screamed or shouted or staggered towards them through the ice. No echoes called out to them like forgotten friends. There were no Wendigo. No ghosts. No one-eyed hunters with a pack of wolves at their heel. There was only the two of them.

“Well,” came her sigh, “Sometimes when I’m stuck…it helps to kinda go piece-by-piece, if that makes sense? Because even if you don’t know exactly where to go next, you might have ideas about how some of it happens. So, for example…” She held his gaze as one might hold a dying baby bird in their hand. “What about Comedic Relief?”

He tried to keep his expression neutral. It didn’t feel especially neutral. “What about him?”

He could see the gears whirring in her head, that Ashley Brown, the beloved and beleaguered Sherlock of the group, her eyes searching his face. For what? Eh, that wasn’t for him to know. Something in her eyes told him she’d found it, though…whatever it was, she’d found it. Perhaps in spades. “Do his friends go back for him?”

Yeah, so much for maintaining a neutral fucking expression. “They do, yeah. They go back and they do their darnedest to just…” A quick pantomime of plucking something from the ground. “…yoink that little shit out of the pit he got himself into, but…”

“But they’re kinda dumb,” Ashley finished for him, causing him to literally—literally—reel back like she’d smacked him upside the head.

“Wh—no. No. I mean…okay, they’re maybe a little dumb.”

“Uh huh.”

“Let’s say dumb-adjacent.”

“Okay.”

“But the real problem is…he sort of…I’m not going to say he likes the pit, because he doesn’t—he hates that fucking thing with every fiber of his being—but in a way, it’s…it’s comfortable.”

“Comfortable? It’s full of dead things!”

“Well yeah it’s full of dead things, but they’re familiar dead things! They’re his dead things. Do you get what I’m saying?”

She folded her arms across her knees again. “Oh my God.”

“He doesn’t smell the rot anymore. He knows what’s in the pit and his eyes are used to the dark, and…” He swallowed hard. “Sometimes he gets…real scared that they’ve gotten so used to the dark that, if he lets them help pull him all the way out, the sun’s gonna hurt too much for him to see.”

She didn’t say anything to that. She did, however, set her head on his shoulder.

“And that’s a problem, Ash, a serious fucking problem, because you can pull and pull and pull until the cows come home, but when someone’s stuck like that, you can’t just drag ‘em out on your own—oh nonono, the person in the pit’s gotta want come out too. So our friend here’s gonna need to do some legwork of his own, and like…he’s trying, and he’s been trying, and, spoiler alert, he’s gonna keep trying, but…” A familiar rustle gave him reason to think maybe she’d moved to look up at him, but it took him a second or two to muster up the nerve to check. “Those mines are nuts, you know. Icy and shit. So even though they’re pulling up above, and he keeps trying to find the next foothold, sometimes that ice is too much. Or he gets tired. Or he slips, and…I don’t know.”

Ashley was, in fact, looking up at him. He almost wished she wasn’t. She blinked a couple times as though really taking him in for the first time since they’d met. It wasn’t an entirely unpleasant sensation, but he couldn’t help feeling a bit like a butterfly pinned to a board, his soft bits exposed and left to her mercy. “For what it’s worth…I’m pretty sure the others can pull a little harder when that happens. Carry a little more weight until he finds his footing again.” She shrugged her shoulders and turned to look at the trees, her ear nestled against his shoulder. “Don’t get me wrong, like I said before, I know the three of them are all about as stupid as you can get, but—”

He brought the thermos up to his mouth and took a drink, hoping it might loosen the muscles of his throat. It didn’t, but the warmth of the hot chocolate bloomed in his stomach and quickly spread to his fingers and toes until he felt wrapped in a blanket from the inside out. “I thought we settled this earlier. They’re stupid-adjacent.”

“—but be that as it may, I think they can manage to put a tiny bit more muscle into it when the line goes slack. I mean, look at all the other crap they do during the course of the night, right? What’s a little more elbow-grease?”

Oh yeah. The waterworks were a legitimate threat now. T-minus ten, nine, eight… “Long night, though. That fucker put them through so much, only makes sense they’d get tired.”

“There’re three of them, they’ll be fine.” It was like every argument he had she was ready to shoot down right off the cuff. She wasn’t even waiting, just waving his counterpoints away as soon as he voiced them, making them disappear midair like a cheap magic trick. “Heck, they can take turns if it comes to that.”

“I dunno. They’re all pretty scrawny. And bruised, sure, but mostly scrawny. Final Girl’s probably got some muscle going on, between you and me, but the other two? Please. I really think you’re overestimating their strength here.”

“Aw c’mon, there’s no way Comedic Relief weighs that much. He’s a scrawny nerd too. Trust me, the others can do it, no sweat.”

“It’s a shitty way for them to spend their time.”

“Then I guess it’s a good thing they’ve already decided they want to do it.” She raised her eyebrows and turned to him once more, something like a smirk toying at the very edges of her mouth. “Deus ex machina, chump. There’s no getting out of this one, sorry.”

Josh rolled his eyes and made a covert swipe across his face with the sleeve of his jacket. He knew there wasn’t any way in hell she’d be fooled by him saying he was scratching his nose or anything like that, so he didn’t even try—instead, he finished the dregs of his cocoa in a few monstrous gulps, hoping it would buy him a bit of time to sort his thoughts.

It didn’t.

“That the end, then? ‘They pull him out of the pit and they all live happily ever after’?”

She snorted, “Ew. Absolutely not.”

He shook his thermos, knowing full well there was nothing left to slosh around. “That it? You’re full to bursting with editorial suggestions when it comes to one itty-bitty baby wolverine or a perfectly reasonable sex scene, but when it comes to ending the fucking thing suddenly you’re all outta notes?” To show he was kidding around, he huffed half a laugh through his nose. “Shame, shame.” A flash of silver in his periphery got him to look up, and after a second of thinking about it, he took Ashley’s offered thermos to finish off her cocoa too.

“What if…” she started, then shook her head, looking out towards the tree line as he had.

“What if…?”

“Nah, it’s dumb.”

“Dumber than no ending at all, huh?”

Her head rocked side to side for a second, shaking loose some of the snow dusting the top of her beanie. “What if…instead of ‘They pull him out of the pit and they all live happily ever after,’ you just…I dunno, what if you did something more like…‘They pull him out of the pit and they all live.’” She looked up at him. “‘The end.’ Or, if you’re going to be a horror nerd about it, ‘To be continued.’” He must’ve been quiet for a beat too long, though, because a second later she was shrugging, going back to her awkward hand-sleeve dance. “See? Told you. Dumb.”

Before he’d really made up his mind, Josh took her by the wrist, stilling her movement. “‘They all live,’ hmm?” he said once she’d relaxed as much as she was going to, testing the weight of the idea on his tongue. “‘They all live.’” He wet his lips and they froze over almost instantly. “I think…huh. I think I could get behind that.”

“…yeah?”

“Yeah. Yeah, know what? I really…I really think I could.” It was right around then, feeling the springy fabric in his snow-numbed fingers, he realized he hadn’t quite let go of her sleeve yet. He did, but only after giving it a joking tweak. “‘They all live,’” he said again. “That might be it, kid. We might just have ourselves a winner.”

“Told you I’d get that writing credit on a Josh-Wash production,” she joked, her posture telling him in no uncertain terms how pleased she was that her idea had passed muster. “Don’t worry about like, royalties or whatever, just make sure you buy me a nice cozy beach house when you make it big. One with a huge bay window so I can watch the ocean while I write.” Her grin remained, but for the barest of moments, it took on a slightly more pensive edge. “Still haven’t let the others read it, huh?”

“God, no.”

“You should.” She shimmied to the side, giving him another light shove. “Chris has probably forgotten you were even planning on writing a movie by now—”

“Probably? You have too much faith in that fool. You’ve let those luscious lips of his blind you to his many, many, many flaws. I knew this would happen.”

“—but Sam’s probably going out of her mind.” Then, sighing, “She doesn’t forget anything.”

“Oh, believe you me, I know that one. I might not know much, but I know that one for damn sure.”

“Just something to consider.”

“Like all of your other editorial suggestions.”

“Like all of my other editorial suggestions.”

Another gust of wind blew past them briefly but brutally, causing them to hurriedly clamp their hands down on their hats lest they be lost to the mountain. When it passed, Ashley clapped her hands to her thighs and made to get up, her movements creaky with frost, and while she opened her mouth (no doubt to say something about the hour or the chill or the wind or Charlie and Chris’s combined separation anxiety or all of the above), she didn’t get a chance to make her excuse or her exit.

He hadn’t decided to do it on a conscious level, grabbing her arm like that, but he’d done it all the same, keeping her from standing. “Do you wanna just…sit here for a sec? We don’t have to talk about…anything, really. I mean, unless you want to. I, uh…” There it was, rearing its ugly head—that childish fear of abandonment, of rejection. It had been a good long while since he’d crouched at that particular beast’s feet, waiting to be crushed. “I don’t think I’m really ready to go in yet, and…I guess I’d rather not be alone out here.”

The tension went from her legs so quickly, one might’ve thought staying out a while longer had been her idea from the start. “Hey, you’re the one buying me a lavish beach house, I think I can keep you company for a few more minutes.” He might’ve expected her to hug her knees again, but she was nothing if not full of surprises, that Ashley Brown; instead, she angled herself so her back leaned along his side, her legs spread along the length of the stair. Eventually, he felt the weight of her head on his shoulder again.

What ending do you need?

When Alan had first asked him that question, he hadn’t had an answer. Fuck that, he hadn’t even had an inkling. The word itself had made his chest and throat clench to pinholes, hurting him in places he hadn’t known to exist. It had been a visceral fear, an ancient thing rooted in too many dark, shadowy corners for him to parse out. The only endings he’d been able to dream up had been nightmares, ugly and unfair, jagged at the edges, cruel for the sake of cruelty, and when Alan had said he’d hated them, Josh had flinched…and he’d understood, too. He hadn’t been able to fathom a happy ending for Until Dawn, and he still couldn’t, but…

But something that hinted at the possibility of happiness? Something where the faintest glimmer of a silver lining could be seen through the soot and the blood? Something equal parts bitter and sweet where no promises were made in regard to happiness then, now, or in the future? Something ceding to neither resignation nor defeat? Something that allowed for a wink to the audience, a whisper behind a hand, a passing prayer muttered breathlessly that maybe, just maybe, if you wished hard enough or believed in fairies and clapped, the light would come out in the morning? Something that wasn’t a conclusion per se, not really, but like one, close enough, sort of, kind of, maybe, almost?

An almost-ending?

And they all live.

What his cast of characters did with those lives once they got off the mountain? Well, that was up to them. The story was over, the writer’s pen had been set down, the ink had dried. Now it was their turn to figure that shit out, his characters. But they’d have the chance to do that. Maybe they’d win, maybe they’d lose, maybe they’d fail a hundred times for every miserable little victory they managed to scrounge up, but…they’d get to do it. They’d get to try. They’d get to live.

Yeah.

Yeah, that felt just about right, actually.

And they all live.

Roll credits.

They sat there until their jackets grew stiff and their eyelashes were heavy with half-melted snowflakes, watching the opalescent ribbon of light in the sky turn and twist over and through itself, and when the sun began peeking up from the horizon, they got up. Smiling all the way, he noticed, Albertan winter be damned. They were both smiling.

***

3:43pm

By the time they made it down the cable cars with all their bags, the sun was high in the sky. It did nothing for the cold, but made the snow at the foot of the mountain painfully, even blindingly, bright. As quickly as she blinked her gathering tears away, more came to take their place, and when the first rolled down her cheek, the others’ oohs and ahhs were immediate…which was mostly to say ‘patronizing.’ Jerks.

“Aw, Ash…I know you’re gonna miss the lodge, but uh, don’t you think maybe you’re overdoing it a little?”

“Oh hush.” She rolled her gloves up just enough that she could wipe her cheeks with the heels of her hands. “Is this what vampires feel like?! Geez oh Pete!” Squeezing her eyes shut against the light, she scurried forward up the path, Charlie hugged tightly to her chest, both of them waiting for the cool relief of the bus.

From somewhere beside her, Josh scoffed. “Depends. What vampires we talking about here? Dracula? Nosferatu? Those 30 Days of Night motherfuckers? I know we’re not talking Twilight, because those glittery sons of bitches looove the sun…”

She lashed out with her arm to smack him and found only air. Figured.

“Little to your left!” Sam laughed, and aha! That did it, all right! …er, left. “Man, I was so hoping I would’ve been able to turn you guys into nature lovers by now. Kinda bummed, not gonna lie.”

The three of them—the four of them, if one counted Charlie—reacted perfectly in sync, groaning and grumbling to harmonize with the rumbling of the idling bus waiting for them. They’d made a lot of progress in a lot of ways since last year, but…yeah, the chances of any of them becoming outdoorsy? Still, um…unlikely. (And that was being incredibly optimistic.)

Sam’s groan was a mournful thing, grieving hundreds of thousands of hypothetical hikes and nature expeditions. It was the sound of someone finally realizing, after months and months and months of trying, there was no changing a tiger’s stripes. She’d thrown her hat in with a group of inside-kids, and they were simply too accustomed to LED screens and greasy takeout boxes to venture into the ardent unknown of the great, green world outside. Ashley wanted to feel sorry for her, she really did, but also…man, it would be really nice to not have to look into those puppy-dog eyes she pulled at six a.m. when all she wanted to do was sleep and all Sam wanted to do was convince her to hit the outdoor track for a morning jog.

It was with one last look towards the mountain that Sam hiked her bag higher up onto her shoulder and stepped up into the bus, her cheery little “Hello,” nearly swallowed up by the engine. Josh was next, swinging himself into the narrow entry. He didn’t turn for a parting glance, nor did she hear him say anything, but she could imagine the crooked smile and two-finger salute he was doubtlessly flashing the driver’s way. Then Chris hoisted himself up the first step, disappearing into the belly of the bus, and then there was one, the others having left her to stand alone in the blinding light and freezing cold, Charlie’s phlegmatic breathing hot against her arm.

Now or never, she thought to herself, and then screwed her courage to the sticking place. Climbing into the bus was a relief on one of her senses at least, taking away the awful edge of that brilliant winter light, but her breath still plumed out in front of her face as she willed her voice to sound natural and not, well, rehearsed. “Hi, thanks for coming so far out of the way for us. We really, really appreciate it,” she said to the bus driver, an older guy with what seemed to be the remnants of an awful burn around the left side of his face. She smiled, he smiled back, and phew, that was her cue to scurry away to join the others.

Dorming with Sam hadn’t been a miracle cure for her anxieties, not by any stretch of the imagination, but each baby step felt like a victory of its own. She wasn’t even shaking as she set her bag down with everyone else’s!

Well, okay, she wasn’t shaking as much as she usually did. Close enough.

She contentedly plunked herself down beside Chris afterwards, wadding up an extra sweater to make Charlie a warm nest for the journey home. “Can I make a request?” she asked, aiming the question mostly towards Sam and Josh while settling against Chris’s side, his arm finding its way around her as if by magnetism. “If we could not spend the next like, four-hour drive playing I Spy, I’d be so grateful.”

The bus chugged to life beneath them a moment later, the scenery of Blackwood County slowly inching past the windows. It was hard to believe that’d been it—that had been the big trip they’d all been fretting over for the past few weeks. They came, they saw, they conquered, and there’d been no screaming, no sobbing, no painful arguments. It had been a nice visit to the Pines, that was all, a quiet winter getaway with a(n admittedly unconventional) tour of an abandoned tuberculosis ward.

“Sounds to me like someone’s still kinda salty about my last turn…” Sam’s voice brought her out of her thoughts and into the real world in time to catch the flicker of a tongue being stuck out her way. “I told you I was a champ, it’s not my fault you guys didn’t believe me.”

She rolled her eyes towards her, blinking once in disbelief. “Sam. How on Earth was I—how were any of us!—supposed to get ‘great horned owl’ from ‘I spy something brown?!’”

“See? Salty! The complaints of a sore loser, that’s all I’m hearing.”

Then Chris got in on it, his hand smacking against the window as he gestured towards the foliage whipping by. “Uhhh, dunno if you noticed, but everything is brown up here! O-o-or white! Or, okay, green, but—”

"My name is Brown!"

Sam crossed one leg neatly over the other, miming smoothing a skirt over her thighs. “Salty…” she leaned forward as though sharing a singsong secret with Josh, who’d claimed not one but two entire seats for himself, and he snickered right along with her. “All right, fine! If you think my idea’s so bad, then what do you suggest? You want to just sit around and do nothing for—”

“Yes.”

“Ha ha, Chris. We’re not—”

“Sitting and doing nothing sounds perfectly fucking ideal after the weekend I just had. First, I am menaced with dead deer. Then, I am dragged out of bed to go spelunking under the lodge, walking like twelve goddamn miles to and from that spooky old mold factory just so Ash and Josh can go full Discovery Channel on us and lecture us on the wonders of the consumption. Then, just when I think we’re going to sleep in this morning, I am again pulled from the warm embrace of my bed to hike through the woods just so we can sign the guest book in the cabin, so yeah! Yeah, actually? Sitting and doing nothing? Sign me up for that! I am dreaming of sitting and doing nothing! My hamstrings are dreaming of sitting and doing nothing!”

“…well, now that Cochise has aired his grievances…”

The arm that he’d slung across her shoulders pulled away so he could hold it up in the air like a kid in class. “My vote goes to silent contemplation of the many, many sins we committed out here this weekend.” From over the frames of his glasses, he shot her a hopeful look. “M’lady?”

“I’m not saying naptime is like, a bad idea…”

“Come on!”

“Ha!”

“But we’ve gotta do something to pass the time! You know how long this drive feels when all you have to do is stare at your phone, it’s like an eternity!”

“This is what I’m saying! Well, if you spoilsports don’t want to play I Spy, we could always…oh, huh, there’s not really a lot of through-traffic up here, is there? So much for the license plate game…”

“Here we go: This is why I always tell you dopes to leave the heavy lifting to me.” There was a note in Josh’s voice that immediately caught her attention. Only, that wasn’t right. It didn’t catch her so much as it snagged her like a sticky strand of spiderweb, making it impossible to ignore.

In books, in movies, even on tv, there would’ve been a pause. A beat just long enough for the audience to understand ‘Oh snap, this is going to be important, isn’t it?’ But if she’d learned anything over the past year or so, it was that there were rarely poignant pauses before the world changed.

“I’ve got an idea.”

A ripple of suspicion coursed through her, making her turn. He hadn’t been looking her way when he’d said it, but he did then, holding her gaze for the sole purpose of cocking an eyebrow brow.

Behind him, Sam slumped dramatically. “Oh man, not Social Suicide again…I’m still sore from last night!”

“It’s not—”

Chris craned his neck her way with a look of bemusement. “Wait, why the fuck are you sore?!”

“Remember the dare with the fireplace?”

“I—oh. Oooh! Yeah, okay, no, that does make sense. My bad. Carry on!”

“It’s not Social Suicide.” Josh raised his voice and rolled his eyes, and while his smirk was as laidback as ever, Ashley suddenly didn’t buy it.

Was he…? No way. No way!

“Contrary to popular belief, I’m not just a one-trick pony, you ingrates.” There were some doubtful noises at that. “Yeah, uh huh, all right. Know what? I’ll remember that shit. Next time you want a picturesque chateau from which you can enjoy the winter wonderland of my family’s property—”

“Oh my God, shut uuup!” Ashley sighed, hoping if she smiled the right way, if she laughed just enough, Sam and Chris wouldn’t catch on that she knew what was happening. “Will you get to the point?”

Whether or not he knew that she knew was beyond her, because per the usual, Josh was the very picture of nonchalance, stretched across his two seats, his back and head resting against the window, his feet poking into the aisle. “It occurs to me,” he drawled, inspecting his nails in a melodramatic show of banality, “That after going on and on about it last Halloween, I haven’t really gone out of my way to share the fruits of my labor with any of you.”

Sam’s eyes flit from him to Ashley, then past her towards Chris. “Uh oh.”

“Dude. You talk about so many things. All the time. How the fuck do you expect us to know what this—”

It was a risky move, one that threatened to clue the others in that she’d been his accomplice for nearly a year now, but…she couldn’t help herself. Assuming the best, most convincing voice she could, Ashley leaned towards the aisle and murmured, “…is this your movie?”

Well that did it. Chris sat bolt upright and Sam came terribly close to launching herself over the back of Josh’s seat, hanging her face over it to stare incredulously down at him. “Oh my God, is it?” she grinned. “Do you have it? Is it done?!”

With a shrug and a jut of his chin that managed to convey no emotion in particular, Josh lifted his phone into the air and gave it a wave. “Is any work of art ever really done? I ask you.”

“Have you been holding out on us?” Chris also leaned in towards the aisle, Charlie making a confused sound as he was jostled forward on Ashley’s lap. “We’ve been up here in the middle of nowhere singing Kumbaya and holding hands and talking about our hopes and dreams for the future while we could’ve been listening to Ash correct your grammar?” He sat back again, feigning insult. “Are we even friends?!”

That time, Josh definitely glanced her way. His eyebrows popped up once, obviously in reference to her correcting his grammar, and neither one of them could contain their secretive little smirks at that. “Well pardon me for making you eat your veggies before getting to dessert.”

“Oh, ick,” Sam joked, “Do me a fav? Don’t ever compare your gory horror stuff to dessert, okay?”

“Ah, but Sammy, dessert has helped pave the way for many an indie horror writer. Cherry juice? Fantastic blood substitute. Smear that shit on your fingers? Can’t tell the difference. Strawberry pie filling? Just what you need when the script calls for blood and guts but you can’t afford a shipment of freshly butchered hog innards to strew around the set. Don’t even get me started on the awful things you can do with Jell-O…”

She reached down and gently pressed her fingers to his mouth to stop him before he could explain. “Double ick. Forget I said anything.”

Experience had taught her this sort of back-and-forth could (and likely would) last the whole drive back unless someone stepped in, so that’s exactly what she did. “Are you…gonna let us read it?” Ashley asked.

He hummed uncertainly. “Am I gonna let you read it…” Josh repeated, still waving his phone around. “Well…yes and no. See, here’s what I’m thinking. While I know Cochise would love nothing more than for all of us to pull out our phones and ignore each other for the rest of our time driving over the river and through the woods—”

Chris’s hands jutted out past her, pressed together in prayer.

“—I think that’d be an awfully boring way to experience the terror…the drama…the pulse-pounding action that I have in store for you all. So.” Another one of his dramatic pauses, the corner of his mouth ticking ever upward. “I’m thinking maybe we do a cold read.”

The prayer hands immediately dropped. “I call sexy, tormented protagonist with a dark past!” Chris said, making a show of clearing his throat and striking a broody pose. “Or, you know…whatever…”

“I’m so bad at voices, but if you guys promise not to make fun of me, I am so down.” As expected, Sam’s smile was nothing short of brilliant, giving the sunlight peeking through the bus windows a run for its money.

“As long as I don’t have to be a super bitchy character,” Ashley warned, and warned pointedly, at that, “Then count me in too!”

He flicked his thumb and the screen of his phone lit up. “Congrats, you’ve all just sealed your fates. Without any further ado, let’s just dive right on in. Now, be warned, you will have to sign an NDA before you step foot off this bus, and I will sue you within an inch of your life if so much as a whisper of my IP shows up on the internet, but if we’re all on the same page with that…” He met her eyes again, just for a moment, just a second, and she might’ve imagined it, but Ashley could’ve sworn there was a question there. We actually doing this? that question might’ve been, How’d we get here, huh? But then, speaking in the clear, easy tones of a born showman, he began the story she knew only too well, and whatever doubts he might’ve had seemed to vanish into the air. “Then here we go. ‘Wednesday, December 24, 2014. Six weeks until The Anniversary.’”

Ashley’s smile threatened to squinch her eyes shut. She didn’t want to reveal her hand, didn’t want Sam or Chris to catch on that this was a story she’d heard before, but that was easier said than done.

“Aw shit, Ash, he just started! There’s no way you’re already bored to tears!”

She shoved Chris’s hand away as he wiped her cheek with his thumb, sticking her tongue out at him before nestling herself down into her coat again, turning the fullness of her attention towards Josh. “It’s just the sun,” she said, glad for once of her tragic case of Full Eyes and how easily the others accepted her getting misty. “Now shush! Josh probably worked really hard on this and I want to hear it.”

“Yeah Chris,” Sam teased, “Why don’t you shut that giant yap of yours?”

“Giant? Madam, you wound me. I—”

“If you troglodytes don’t all shut up, we’re never getting to the end before we get home.” It was a hollow threat, obviously. A year of workshopping had trimmed Josh's story down a fair bit, but holy cow, there was still no way in hell they were getting anywhere near the fiery explosion at the lod…the haunted mansion before the bus rolled into their stop! But...well, she didn’t speak up to correct Josh. If anything, she just smiled that much harder. “One more word outta either of you, and your speaking roles are going to Charlie.”

At the sound of his name, Charlie lifted his head from Ashley’s lap, looking around the bus in wide-eyed panic. No shocker there. Fear of public speaking was definitely a Brown family specialty.

Chris blew a raspberry of a laugh but made himself more comfortable all the same, giving her cheek one last brush with his thumb before lacing his fingers behind his head like a pillow. “Uh huh. Yeah, let me tell you how I think that’s gonna shake out. Since you wrote this, everyone’s gonna get torn apart limb from limb and tossed into a woodchipper, sooo…”

Lowering his phone, Josh fixed Chris with a look that was probably meant to be stony. To her, though, there was no mistaking the dark gleam of sardonic glee in his eyes, just threatening to bubble over. “You, Christopher,” he began, speaking very slowly, “Clearly know nothing of my work.”

“Pfft. Okay. No woodchipper, then? Gotcha.”

He had the gall—the audacity—to look injured at that, turning to Sam long enough to get a snort out of her by pulling an expression of outrage that wouldn’t have been out of place on the face of a middle-aged woman having her coupon rejected in Whole Foods. “You think I’m that fucking predictable, man? Wow.”

“Hey, you and I both know I’ve seen all the Blood Monastery series, bro. I know how a Washington movie ends, and it ends with—”

“Know what I think?” she piped in, throwing Chris a haughty glance. “I think he’s gonna surprise us.” Ashley let that stew for a moment before tapping her chin, thoughtfully adding, “I bet all of the main characters are fine in the end.”

Chris stared at her as though her entire face had suddenly melted off to reveal a slightly smaller face beneath it, and it became even harder to keep from showing her hand. “Yeah, okay. Uh huh. Sure.”

“You know…as much as it hurts me to agree with Chris…”

“Thanks Sam. Really. Thanks. I’m glad our friendship means so much to you. I can always count on you to lift me up.”

“Ten bucks.” The others fell perfectly silent around her…and then broke into a gale of laughter. “I mean it!” Ashley grinned, Charlie’s collar jingling as she scratched his chin. “Ten dollars says I’m right and not even one main character winds up dead!”

“My father told me to never bet against crazy people, but for you, Ash? For you, I’ll make an exception.” Patting his pocket where, ostensibly, his wallet and, even more ostensibly, at least ten dollars resided, Chris accepted her bet. And sealed his fate. “Easiest ten-spot I’ve ever made.”

Sam held both of her hands up as though in surrender. “I’m not touching this with a twenty-foot pole,” she laughed, “But okay, sorry, sorry!” She leaned forward, arms folded against the back of Josh’s seat, and playfully ruffled his hair. “Floor’s all yours. Promise.”

With one last halfhearted glare their way (ruined, she had to note, by the wink he dropped her), Josh brought his phone up once more, clearing his throat. “‘That was how he’d been thinking about time—in terms of the anniversary,” he continued to read, “‘Not Christmas, not New Year’s Eve, but capital-T, capital-A, The Anniversary.’”

That was how capital-T, capital-A, The Almosts began the long drive home from the lodge, listening casually at first, then raptly, then scrambling to vie for as many speaking parts as they could get, no doubt making the bus driver’s afternoon much stranger than he’d anticipated while the hours flew by in a rush of drama and tension and close calls in a series of tunnels described as being suspiciously similar to the ones they’d explored only the day before. It was a very different ending than that of their last visit to the Pines, mostly because…well, it didn’t feel like an ending at all. If anything, Ashley thought between bouts of laughter at ridiculous character voices and gasps prompted by plot twists she already knew were coming, it kind of felt like a beginning.