Chapter Text
Phoenix Drop was the kind of town where the secrets whispered louder than words, shadows of the past lingering doggedly in the cracks of crooked sidewalks, and where the walls of buildings tended to hold more than just peeling paint. It was where the truth was harder to find than a needle in a haystack. The lines of fiction and reality blurred, blending together till no one was sure what was what. Like the dense mist that carpeted the steep mountains, one was never quite sure of the truth of things.
Of course, no one normal decided to move to a town, located in the middle of towering mountains, dark woods and even darker memories, where creatures lurked in the foggy streets. Where the echoes of the past haunted each block, some literal and some metaphorical.
Yes, there was something very, very wrong with this town.
Said to have been forged from the blood of the first and last Phoenix, the town stood at the base of a valley, walled off from the rest of the world, in its own little bubble. It did not bother itself with outside matters, when there were so many internal matters to deal with.
It was a surprise that none had run away screaming. But then again, the human mind often protects itself from the darkness of the world, creating a cocoon around itself to protect the fragile sanity of one’s mind. A veil, of some sort, if one thought of it hard enough.
Unfortunately for Andromeda, her eyes could pierce that veil.
She sat in the back of the art room, fingers smudged with dark charcoal, pencil flying across the page as if it was possessed. From afar, she looked like any other student attending high school, uniform neatly pressed, hair pulled back in a loose braid, earrings small and inconspicuous. Minimalistic almost, as if she had no time to waste upon her looks.
Her eyes flicked up, dark eyelashes framing silver eyes—silver, and yet almost bordering upon white, as if she was blind and yet not—only drawing attention to the dark bruises under her eyes as if she hadn’t slept properly for ages.
The boy sat across from her, crisscrossed atop of the desk, leaning his head against his hand, water rolling down his face and dripping onto the desk. Drip. Drip. Drip. His beanie sagged over his sallow face and greasy, limp hair, as if he had been chosen to star in a teenage heartthrob movie as the weird kid, the kid with the tattoos and the piercings when they were only fifteen. He would have been, if it hadn’t been for the wound in his side, as if something had chewed on him—bit into him.
He looked at ease, despite the obvious wound in his side, when most people would likely be convulsing in agony, and beg someone to call the ambulance so they wouldn’t die.
Then again, he was dead.
His uniform was ragged at the edges, outdated and faded, sleeves pushed up to reveal the rotting flesh of his forearms, bone peaking out as if saying hello. He’d been sitting at that desk for a while now, watching Andromeda draw, quiet and careful not to disturb her. His pants were cuffed at the bottom, a ragged tear barely stitched together and still hanging open to reveal the pulsing muscle.
He leaned in to view her sketchbook, one brown eye popping out of its socket, dangling by a singular vein, the back of it chewed as if something had nibbled on it while he wasn’t looking. Small little bites, as if whatever had nibbled on it wasn’t particularly hungry.
Death wasn’t a particularly rare thing in Phoenix Drop, the townsfolk accustomed to even the most peculiar of deaths. One would have to have a particular breed of insanity to move to such a place, with a rather nefarious reputation for the strange pattern of murders throughout the years. In fact, the town could proudly trace back the murders to the very founding of the town itself, something that they considered quite a feat.
Every few years, a string of murders would occur, the targets ranging from infants to the elderly. None were safe. As always, officers and detectives attempted to solve them and clasp the criminal in chains—and yet, they were always incapable of catching the murderer. They failed every time. Of course, as with the Bermuda Triangle and similar myths, unexplained murders caught the attention of the media. Amateur sleuths traveled to this rather conspicuous town, senses running away from them at the prospect of discovering something truly macabre and dangerous—solving something that no one else had been able to. Who would be able to resist the urge? To be able to claim the right of solving something that was thought to be unsolvable by even the best of the best.
Most of them disappeared within the week’s end.
Within a month, parts of them would be scattered throughout the woods.
If particularly persistent, they’d vanish without a single trace.
For most, they didn’t concern themselves about the mysterious string of deaths that splattered the pages of the town’s history. It was a part of life. Normalized. Desensitized. The townspeople knew not to mess with whoever was doing the killing—as long as they didn’t investigate, they’d remain relatively safe.
And yet, in her second year of high school, Andromeda was determined to solve them. Even if it killed her. Why? She didn’t exactly have a reason—perhaps it was because she was simply curious. Curiosity was a powerful enough motivator for scientists to discover gravity, the atom, and how the human body operated—so why would it not be the same when it came to crimes?
Besides, she did have something that most amateur sleuths didn’t have. She could speak with the souls of the departed—ghosts. She didn’t know why she had the ability to do so. She didn’t know a lot of things about her ‘abilities’.
All she knew was that she could always see them. From as far as she could remember, there were always ghosts—haunting the street corners, hiding in the corners of her vision.
She winced, pencil freezing on the page—the figure changing before her eyes—the pencil now moving faster and faster, until she could barely keep up, her hand moving rapidly as she tried to catch up, darkening around a boy’s outline, crumpled behind bleachers. Blood pooled around his head in charcoal streaks, seeping into his clothes and darkening them as they clung to his skin. A blade glinted beside him, eyes wide and unseeing, hair curling at the edges. A leather bracelet wrapped around his wrist, the metal buckle sitting prettily on the dead boy’s pulse.
The ghost did not look like the boy in the sketch.
The pencil clattered against the desk as she looked up, glancing at the ghost boy. The ghost stared back, another water droplet rolling down his face from the socket of his eye. How had this one died? Drowning? Perhaps something had eaten him? Why was he wet?
Wet. Water. So, he drowned. That didn’t explain the gaping wound in his side—the one that was rotten. Ghosts—at least from her own experience—only haunted places where they died. Phoenix Drop High School didn’t have any wells, or bodies of water for that matter. None on the blueprints.
Why was a drowned ghost haunting the halls of a high school?
Andromeda flipped to the front page of her sketchbook, the one with the blueprint she may or may not have copied down whilst in the principal’s office for a…transgression (nothing too bad). What year was it issued in?
Two entire decades old.
For a normal school, this wouldn’t have been a drastic change, seeing as how the layout would have remained the same year after year, the school pouring their entire budget into the football team instead of other facilities which were available to all students.
No, Phoenix Drop High didn’t have that problem. Instead, every year, owned by an eccentric principal, the layout changed. Old buildings would be torn down within the span of the summer vacations, only to be replaced with another, newer building on the very same foundation.
Perhaps an older blueprint would reveal countless other secret passages and wells, scattered about the school…and provide an explanation why a drowned spirit was wandering the halls. It was two decades old. Still, it was fairly recent for a school such as this one, the layout changing out each year. Perhaps an older blueprint would reveal hidden passages and wells hidden within the school…and provide an explanation as to why a drowned ghost was wandering these halls.
Her sketchbook, moving of its own volition, flipped pages until it landed once more upon the sketch of the murdered boy behind the bleachers. And then, Andromeda heard a voice.
Raspy. As if the speaker hadn’t spoken in a long time.
“They killed me. Stabbed me with a knife. Buried my body beneath the field…bones sealed beneath the cement of the new gym…” It hissed, and Andromeda’s hand, helpless under the spirit’s influence, sketched out another scene: colors bleeding across the page, the same body askew in a ditch as dirt piled over its lifeless eyes.
The pencil clattered as it hit the desk.
Her head jerked up, like a puppet, under someone else’s control. Eyes glowing violet now, her hand frozen mid-stroke as something spoke through her.
“They buried it. Behind the gym…the secret…their idea of a messed up trophy…”
Her mind was empty.
Until it was not, flooding with the tastes, the scents, and emotions that certainly were not hers. And before her very eyes, a picture was painted, a portal to another time. A time before she was born.
Its
D
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-
It was past midnight when the field went silent.
Crickets did not dare to chirp, and no animal ventured outside that night, as if something unspoken had filled the air, silencing their voices. A paper bag rolled through the stand, a leftover from the game earlier that day, peanut shells littering the floor.
The bleachers, flecks of cheap blue paint chipping off the sides, groaned as weight shifted above them. A pair of sneakers scuffed the wood, followed by the unmistakable metallic scrape of a blade unsheathing. The only light was a dull, flickering lamplight surrounding the soccer field. The wind, that night, was frigid, as if Death had come for a visit.
“Please…please, don’t do this,” the boy whispered, backing up against the silver railing. “I-I didn’t tell anyone. I swear.”
The shadow creeped forward, dark hoodie and darker pants.
“You saw something you weren’t supposed to.” It titled its head at a strange angle, as if it was…not quite human. “I liked you.”
“I won’t say anything, I promise!”
“That’s what the last one said too.”
Thud.
The body hit the ground, his head colliding with the metal bar before ultimately meeting the ground. A heartbeat passed, then another. A dark stain began to spread beneath him, the grass greedily sucking the lifeblood as if it was water.
And maybe it was.
The figure stood over the corpse, shaking its head in disappointment. Crouching down, it looked as if they were caressing the boy’s face. “I told you not to follow me.”
The boy’s arms were bare.
-
Slowly, as if it were being stolen from her very mind, the vibrant colors, the pain, the fear, and the feeling all floated away. If she thought about it, she could remember it vaguely…but the memory was no more but a leaf in the wind.
She could no longer remember it with the same clarity as she had just witnessed it.
Not even memories were forever.
Her eyes dimmed from their purple, flipping to a plain brown, body slumping heavily over the desk, pale and shaking. Her breath came in harsh pants, frosting in the air. It hadn’t been so cold before. The ghost had been angry. It had to be, to take this much out of her during a possession.
From what she could recall, they were a young one, who died as a teenager.
And they died near the old soccer fields.
Well, she’d always considered that place cursed, especially after last year’s incident.
As for the gym…she didn’t know when this ghost had died, so she hardly knew which gym he was talking about. In the total history of change, PDH had had at least five different gyms, all in different locations. In fact, one was currently being remodeled into an indoor pool for the swim team, who had a year long season.
She didn’t remember drawing the two sketches in front of her: one of a dead boy, and the other a map of the school from the 1990s. Helpful ghost at least, no matter how angry it was.
She peered down at the map. The sketching was…crude (clearly the ghost was not a very good artist) and the writing was atrocious, but she could make out a few details, and those were the most critical ones.
“An underground lake? Is that where you drowned?” Andromeda looked up at the other ghost (the one who was now rudely dripping water onto her desk and nearly soaking her sketchbook), pointing to a cavern on the map.
The ghost nodded helpfully.
“Ok…uh…” she narrowed her eyes down at the map, “Wait. How’d you even get in there? There’s no…entrance marked on it…”
The ghost shrugged.
“Thank you,” Andromeda deadpanned. “That’s helpful.”
The boy looked at her.
And grinned.
“He’s watching you now, you know. You interest him.”
Andromeda froze. “Who’s ‘he’? Why am I only learning this now? Also, that’s sort of creepy? Why the hell is he watching me? He sounds like a creep—”
“He likes you,” the boy tilted his head to the side (unconcerned of human matters), water dripping down his cheeks and falling into the hollow socket of his left eye. “A lot. But he knows you can see us. That you listen.”
“Definitely a creep,” she deadpanned, “Thank you for confirming that—but I kind of need more information about him than that—?”
Frustratingly, the coaxing for elaboration did not work.
He stared at her. “‘Stop meddling,’ he says,” the ghost paused, tilting his head to the side as if tuned into a radio that Andromeda could not hear (given Andromeda’s track record, she wouldn’t doubt the possibility. Ghosts were weird). “Or else…”
The ghost’s brow furrowed, “Or else…something vaguely threatening will happen. He hasn’t decided yet.”
“So, uh, is that the end of the message from my mysterious stalker?” Andromeda arched an eyebrow.
“Oh!” the boy beamed, “Or else, you’re next!”
“...that’s nice. Glad you enjoy the thought of my imminent death so gladdening.” she said dryly. A chill, sharp and sudden, ran down her spine as the ghost faded away into the shadows with that slightly concerning bright smile, the connection breaking as her eyes faded back to their natural eye color. Brown.
Brown like caffeine, like the steady color of wood used to build a ship. Or like fertilizer.
Andromeda’s lungs felt like they had been begging for air throughout the entire encounter, as if she hadn’t taken a single breath whilst in the presence of the ghost, and her lungs had just remembered that she—being human—needed oxygen. She blinked. Once. Her eyes felt dry, having not blinked during her exchange with the slightly creepy, soggy ghost. She rolled her neck, before finally glancing down at her sketchbook, looking over the sketches with a satisfied nod.
Perfect.
“You okay, Ghostie?”
The voice startled her, low and familiar. Aaron Lycan stood by the doorway, dark eyes furrowed with concern (?). He always had a quiet presence, which he often misused to sneak up on innocents on purpose (the innocents in question being solely Andromeda). He knew something was off.
He always did.
Which was…infuriating.
Incredibly infuriating.
“Noooooo,” she groaned immediately, playing it up for sympathy purposes. “Get me an espresso?”
He snorted. “No.”
“Mean.”
“Shut up,” he rolled his eyes, before softening, almost fractionally. “You’re not still hung up over the kid who died last week, are you?”
“...uh. No?”
Aaron gave her an unimpressed look, that he always seemed to reserve only for her. Her lying skills (which were flawless, by the way) never seemed to work on him for some reason, as if he could sniff out the truth. Annoying. “You went to the theater again, didn’t you? To ‘investigate’ the crime scene?”
“...maybe.”
“Why do I even try with you anymore—”
“Because I’m lovely?”
Aaron nodded in a way that made Andromeda suspect he was only nodding along to get her to shut up, her eyes automatically narrowing in suspicion. “It’s true! I’m absolutely brilliant—”
“Sure, Ghostie. Sure,” he pulled out a folded note from his hoodie pocket, the notebook paper creased. “On a more serious matter,” he dangled the paper in front of Andromeda’s nose, the faintest whiff of perfume drifting from the paper, “I found this lying in my locker this morning. Care to guess?”
“Detention slip with a love letter written on the back?” Andromeda said, arching an eyebrow. “Obviously, you’re a troublemaker with a whole host of secret admirers, and you’ve gotten detention again. Should I call your sister and tell on you? I wonder how she’d react, hearing that the oh-so great Alp—”
“No!” Aaron said, exasperated, “It’s a clue—Put that phone down right now—” he swatted at Andromeda’s hand, which had been sneakily reaching for her phone. “Do you want it or not?!?”
“But…the temptation is far too great…getting you in trouble is so fun….” she replied, holding her phone out of reach from Aaron’s grasp.
“Do you want the note or not?”
“Fineeeeee….” Andromeda grumbled, snatching the folded note, and reluctantly setting her phone down on the desk beside her.
The paper was worn, the handwriting messy and nearly illegible. It looked as if it had been hastily torn out of a notebook, and was dosed in an unhealthy amount of perfume.
‘He didn’t fall. He was pushed. Don’t trust the ones who smile too wide. Beware of whispers.’
“What kind of cryptic bullshit is this? I expected at least a little more help than this!”
“Beggers can’t be choosers.”