Chapter 2: Poltergeists in Poodle Skirts
The voice evaporated. The silence it left behind was not an absence, but a presence, thick and gelatinous. Eris did not turn her head. She could not. Her body was a block of ice, a statue of pure animal fear, every nerve screaming a single, silent command: Do not move.
The rationalization came seconds later, a desperate, internal scramble. You imagined it. You wanted something to happen so badly your brain short-circuited. The silence, the fatigue, the isolation—it was an auditory hallucination. A trick. It has to be.
She forced air into her lungs, a ragged, painful gasp. “Hello?” Her own voice was a papery scrap, swallowed instantly by the vast dark.
Only the wind answered, a low moan through the pines.
“Is someone there?” Louder this time. Stupid. So stupid. If there was someone, they’d already spoken. If there wasn’t…
Her hand, moving on its own volition, found the flashlight. She clicked it on. The bright beam was a lance, cutting a swath through the inky black. It swept over the tall, skeletal speaker posts, the rust-eaten carcass of the snack bar roof, the base of the projection booth. It found nothing but waving weeds and distorted shadows that jumped and writhed as she moved.
No figure. No shape. No curious woman standing behind her.
Relief, cold and trembling, washed over her. Hallucination. It had to be. The mind could do that. She’d read the studies. She’d done segments on it.
“Okay,” she breathed, the word frosting in the air. “Okay. Time to go. Right now.”
Her body still felt leaden, but survival instinct overrode the paralysis. She scrambled to her feet, her joints stiff and aching from the cold ground. She didn’t bother to collapse the tripod. She just yanked the camera free, the movement frantic, and stuffed it into her pack. Her fingers fumbled on the zipper. Focus. Just get to the car.
She turned, aiming the flashlight beam toward the distant, invisible road where her sedan was parked. The beam caught the sagging chain, the charred ribs of the ticket booth. A path. An exit.
She took her first step, then her second. Her boots crunched on the frozen weeds. The sound was deafening in the hush. She picked up speed, a hurried walk that bordered on a jog. Don’t run. Running is an admission. Running is panic. Just walk fast. Very fast.
The snack bar and the looming projection booth were on her left, a black silhouette against the star-strewn sky. She kept the beam trained ahead, on her escape route. She refused to let it wander. She would not look.
Halfway across the field, the flashlight began to stutter.
A single, jarring flicker. Then darkness for half a second before it surged back.
Her heart seized. “No. No, no, no.”
It flickered again, a rapid strobe that made the landscape leap and shudder in nauseating pulses. She smacked the side of the metal tube, a gesture of pure futility. The beam steadied for three blessed steps, then died completely. Not a fade. An abrupt, total cessation, plunging her into a darkness so profound it felt solid.
She stopped dead. The blackness was absolute. The stars above were indifferent pinpricks, offering no light to walk by. The screen was a vague, paler smudge in the void. The trees were a solid wall of impenetrable ink.
Her breath came in short, sharp pants, pluming white in the air she could not see. She fumbled in her pack, her fingers numb, searching for the spare batteries she knew were in there. They knocked against lens caps, cabling, the hard plastic of the camera. She couldn’t find them. Her movements grew frantic, chaotic.
As she wrestled with the pack, her eyes, desperate for any reference, scanned the darkness. They adjusted by microns.
And they found it.
Not by the snack bar. Closer.
Under the projection booth, where the high, spindly legs met the earth, there was a deeper pool of shadow. And within it, a vertical stillness that did not belong. A suggestion of shape where there should only be space. It was man-height. Or woman-height. It was simply a human-shaped absence of light.
It was standing perfectly still. Facing her.
Batteries. Find the batteries.
Her fingers closed over the cold cylinders in the bottom of the bag. She tore the cap off the flashlight, her hands shaking so violently she dropped the dead ones into the grass. She didn’t care. She rammed the new ones in, positive, negative, she couldn’t see, she just forced them.
She clicked the switch. Nothing.
She clicked it again, jamming her thumb hard.
A weak, sickly yellow glow seeped from the bulb. It was less a beam and more a dull stain of light, reaching maybe five feet in front of her. It was worse than nothing. It was a confession of her vulnerability, a tiny, dying campfire in a vast, hungry wilderness.
She swung it toward the shape under the booth.
The feeble light did not so much illuminate as it did suggest. It hinted at the frayed edge of a pale coat, or a dress. It glossed over something that might have been hair, dark and unstirring by the wind. It could not reach the face. The face was a mystery, a shadow within the shadow.
The figure had moved. It was no longer directly under the booth. It had taken a single, silent step out from the supports, onto the open gravel path that led to the screen. It was ten yards closer.
“Who are you?” The question tore from her throat, a raw and desperate sound. “Show yourself!”
The shape moved again.
It did not walk. There was no sound of footsteps on gravel, no rustle of cloth. It was a sudden, seamless translation from one point to another, a slippage in the fabric of the dark. Now it was at the corner of the snack bar, partially obscured by the crumbling counter. Five yards closer.
Its silence was more terrifying than any groan or shriek. It was the silence of something that did not need to announce itself, that existed on a different set of physical laws.
The last thread of rationalization snapped.
This was no hallucination. This was no hoax. The email, the warnings, the voice—they were all beads on the same sinister string, and she was holding the end of it.
Eris ran.
She dropped the useless flashlight. She turned her back on the shape and she ran blind, toward where she prayed the road was. The pack on her back slammed against her spine, the camera inside a punishing weight. She stumbled immediately, her foot catching in a gopher hole or a tangle of weed. She went down hard, one knee smashing into the frozen earth, a bolt of white-hot pain shooting up her leg. A cry escaped her, swallowed by the night.
She clawed herself upright, not feeling the pain, only the primal drive to put distance between her and that silent, advancing stillness. She ran with her arms outstretched, like a swimmer in a pitch-black sea, expecting at any moment to slam into a speaker post or the side of her car.
The ground sloped upward. The road? Was this the road? Her feet hit uneven gravel. Yes.
A sound behind her. Not footsteps. A dry, dragging whisper, like a body being pulled slowly through dead grass. It was close. Closer than it had any right to be.
She did not look back. She could not. To look back was to freeze. To look back was to see it face-to-face.
She veered to the right, praying her memory of the car’s position was true. Her outstretched hand struck cold, smooth metal. The hood of her sedan. A sob of relief and terror burst from her lips.
She fumbled along the side, found the door handle. It was locked.
Her keys. In the ignition.
She dug into her jeans pocket, fingers slick with cold sweat, and pulled out the key fob. She mashed the unlock button. The car gave a quiet, civilized chirp and the interior lights bloomed—a sudden, shocking oasis of yellow.
The light spilled out of the windows, painting a short, brave rectangle on the gravel and weeds.
In that rectangle, for a fraction of a second, she saw its shadow.
It stretched long and thin from the direction of the field, a distortion that didn’t match the angles of the speaker posts. A humanoid shape, but wrong. The head was misshapen, the arms too long. It was the shadow of the figure under the booth, cast by a light source that did not exist in her world.
Then it was gone. The shadow retracted, vanishing into the greater dark beyond the car’s glow as if it had never been.
Eris wrenched the door open and threw herself inside. She slammed the door shut, the thunk of solid metal and glass a beautiful, definitive sound. She hit the locks. All four doors echoed with a solid clunk.
She sat there, hands glued to the steering wheel, staring into the darkness beyond her windshield. Her breath fogged the glass in frantic, rapid pulses. She saw nothing but the faint, star-lit outline of the screen and the deeper black of the woods.
She turned the key. The engine roared to life, unbearably loud. She flipped on the high beams.
Twin shafts of brilliant white light lanced across the field, illuminating the sea of brown grass, the speaker posts, the base of the screen.
The space under the projection booth was empty. The path by the snack bar was clear. There was no figure. No shape. No sign of movement at all.
It was just a dead field again.
Her hands were shaking so violently she could barely grip the wheel. She threw the car into drive and spun the wheel, the tires spraying gravel and dirt. The headlights swept a crazed arc across the towering screen, and for one dizzying instant, she thought she saw something on it. Not a reflection. A dark, wet stain marring the peeling white paint, roughly at the center. A shape like a spilled can of black paint, or a shadow that had been burned into the surface.
Then the car was pointed down the mountain road, and she was accelerating, fleeing back the way she came, the beams carving a tunnel through the clutching trees. She did not look in the rearview mirror. She could not bear to see what might be standing in the middle of the road behind her, watching her go, or worse, perched in the back seat, its face still a mystery.
The car hurtled down Blackspruce Pike, the shocks barking in protest at the ruts. Her mind was a shattered pane of glass, reflecting fragments of the last hour: the curious voice, the failing light, the advancing silence, the wrong shadow.
She drove for twenty minutes before the trembling in her limbs subsided enough for a coherent thought to form. It was a stupid, professional thought, a ghost of her old self.
You dropped the camera.
It was back there, in the field or by the snack bar, where she’d torn it from the tripod in her panic. The camera with the last hour of footage on it. The footage of her vigil, her sign-off, and… everything after. The audio would have captured her questions, her fear. It might have captured the voice.
“Who were you talking to?”
The memory of it, so clear and casual, sent a fresh wave of nausea through her.
She couldn’t go back. Not tonight. Not ever.
But the camera. The evidence. It was the only thing that could prove she hadn’t lost her mind. It was the only thing that gave any of this a point.
She pulled over to the side of the narrow road, the tires crunching on damp pine needles. The forest pressed close on both sides. She put her forehead against the cool steering wheel, breathing hard.
She had to get to a motel. Somewhere with walls and lights and other people. She had to check the footage on her laptop. She had to see if it was real.
She lifted her head and glanced, for the first time, into the rearview mirror.
It was angled wrong, showing only the empty back seat and the dark rear window. A shard of her own pale, wide-eyed face stared back from the corner of the glass.
And on the clear, clean surface of the window itself, drawn in the thin film of mountain mist and road dust, were two words, cursive and delicate, as if traced by a languid finger:
Come Back.