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“It’s Hatchetfield,” Steph shrugs, a hint of hesitation in her voice. “People go missing every day.”
Today marked the third day that Richie Lipschitz had been missing for. And with each passing hour, he’d been getting more and more worried. The fact that the police were- from his perspective- not pulling their weight didn’t help.
And in the moment, neither was Steph. “A man is missing, and you’re seriously shrugging it off?!” Pete exclaims.
“No,” She continues. “What I’m saying is, the police have like, a billion more missing person cases to take care of, and this is only the latest. Of course they’re not pulling their weight.”
He stops at that. That… damn, that was actually a good point! How didn’t he think of that before? He tries to come up with a good response before just sighing. “Something’s up with this damn town…”
Steph looks at him, raising an eyebrow. “You’re only noticing this now?”
“No, it’s just…” he trails off. God, he feels like he’d been here a million times: this would be the part where something crazy comes to mind, something you only see in books or movies, yet ties all the loose ends together in a way that can’t be explained by anything else.
…That was actually a shockingly specific scenario, now that he thought about it. How’d he come up with something like that?
“Look, in a town like this? There’s a million reasons why people could go missing,” she says, finishing his thoughts for him. While her words were harsh to say the least, there was a slight twinge of sympathy in her voice. “Murderers, kidnappers, bears on crack-“
“-Ghosts.”
Pete and Steph’s attentions were drawn to the person at the table who had been so uncharacteristically silent that they had almost forgotten about her. Up until now, Grace had seemed… lost in thought, rattled almost, but now it appears she has something to say. “Like the Downed Nighthawk of Hatchetfield High, or the Men Lost in Time.”
Doing a mental double take from her words, Pete exclaims, “That’s the first thing that comes to your mind?!” at the same time that Steph asks, “Chastity, since when do you know anything about ghosts?”
“Since now!” She says, rather blatantly dodging the question. “And, come on, it fits too perfectly! Haven’t you guys heard the stories?”
“No,” the two chorus.
Grace, admittedly, doesn’t look too surprised at that. Just goes to show how weird she is, he supposes. After sighing, she leans in closer, her sights focusing on him. “Pete, in all your time at Hatchetfield High, have you ever heard a voice insulting you behind your back, but then turned around to see nothing there? No footsteps, no mocking laughter, not a trace of the bully you swore was just behind you?”
As he listens to the story, Pete stops. He wants to say that that’s crazy, that that hadn’t happened to him and it never has. But… while he doesn’t remember anything of the sort happening to him, he swears he’s been in a similar situation before.
Noticing this, she continues. “Well, in Hatchetfield High, those and many other kinds of inexplicable bullying cases are explained away by the Downed Nighthawk of Hatchetfield High. They say he used to be the Nighthawks’ star quarterback before was murdered about six years ago, just two weeks before the big game.”
“Ever since, his angry spirit has been stalking their halls, having sworn to purge all nerds from the school. However,” she raises a finger, “He’s cursed to only be able to interact with the physical world once every fifteen days, twelve hours, 31 minutes and five seconds: exactly the amount of time it took for his body to be discovered after he was killed.”
Asides from the oddly specific details, this seems… rather typical for a ghost story. Except… “Interesting story, but what the hell does this have to do with Richie being missing?”
“Because he’s killed before!” She exclaims. “They say the first of his victims was drowned in the toilet. The second was- reportedly- wedgied to death. Now, I’m not saying that all hope is lost, but at the same time… we can’t rule out the possibility that the Downed Nighthawk has a third victim now, right?”
Pete freezes. But not for the reasons the others were likely thinking of. Star quarterback murdered two weeks before the big game, comes back as a ghost and haunts nerds, drowns people in the toilet and wedgies them to death…
…He’s heard this story before. He knows he has, without a doubt. He can’t for the life of him remember where or when he last heard it, but the details seem far too familiar for it to just be a coincidence.
“…No.” Steph thinks out loud: and from just the look in her eyes, and the slight hesitation in her voice, he can tell she was thinking the same thing he had. “No, that’s just a story. Don’t fuck around, Grace.”
Grace, in response, hesitantly sighs. “You’re right, Steph. There’s a whole lot more likely explanations… like the Men Lost in Time, for example.”
“Oh my god, Chastity!”
“Don’t say the Lord’s name in vain,” she scolds before beginning another story. “They say that sometimes, when people in town go missing, a family member or friend of theirs will claim to see them down a dark alley, or in the window of a house.”
“We didn’t ask for another ghost story, Grace-“
“Let me finish! However, only the friend or family member would see them. Anyone else wouldn’t notice a thing, despite them reportedly being right there. When this phenomenon started, people didn’t think much of it… until those people started to go missing themselves.”
Pete thinks for a moment. It sounded ridiculous at first, sure, but now that he thinks about it… there was definitely a few occasions, at school or some other occasion, where he thought he saw Ted in the corner of his eye, but then turn to see that his phantom brother had disappeared.
…No, this was completely crazy. There was no way these ghost stories could actually be true.
But if they were…
“The hallucinations are always described as being as young and healthy as they were the last time they were seen alive, no matter how many years it had been since their disappearance,” Grace finishes. “This trait, as well as the fact that the people would apparently be completely still, not blinking or even breathing, dubbed the phenomena The Men Lost in Time.”
Then, a cold silence fills the air as the two think for a moment, having both apparently experienced this thing. After all, it didn’t take a detective to realise that something was wrong with Hatchetfield.
“…We don’t know for sure,” Pete finally says. “There’s a million other explanations behind this.”
Grace seems… almost disappointed by that. She opens her mouth for just a second, about to retort before giving in. “…Yeah, you’re probably right.”
“It’s Hatchetfield,” Steph shrugs, a hint of hesitation in her voice. “People go missing every day.”