The Dead and the Dark(45)

“Is this Tristan?” Logan asked the empty room.

Silence, and then her phone buzzed.

unknown: TRISTAN

Ashley gasped. She took the phone from Logan’s hands, staring at the screen like she thought he might appear to her. Her hands shook, but no messages came through.

“Tristan,” Logan continued. “Where do you want us to go?”

unknown: GRAVE

“The cemetery,” Ashley breathed. “Tristan, are we supposed to meet you there?”

unknown: OLD

They met each other’s eyes. Logan listened, but she only heard the branches outside and the horses in the barn and the slow, lumbering groans of old wood. Ashley looked at the floor, slowly muttering the word old to herself like it would eventually make sense.

She looked up.

“Old grave. It’s Pioneer Cemetery.”



* * *



As it turned out, driving was much harder during a panic attack.

Ashley rolled along Main Street, following the dull shine of Snakebite’s sparse streetlights. Most of the stores and restaurants along the main strip of town were closed for the night, but at the end of the road there was a blip of life. The Chokecherry still glowed faintly gold against the harsh blackness of the night. Ashley could just make out the thumps of classic rock pulsing from the jukebox inside.

Past the main stretch, the streetlights fell away and they were left in darkness. Storefronts gave way to the sprawling plateaus of farmland on one side and the black, ebbing mass of the lake on the other. Fog rolled in over the highway in a thin blanket of slate gray. Ashley turned on her low beams and pushed ahead, unable to shake the feeling that there was something hiding in the mist.

“Another message,” Logan said from the passenger seat. “It says CLOSE.”

“Yeah,” Ashley said. Her heart hammered in her throat. “Pioneer Cemetery is just around the corner.”

“I think we stopped here on the way into town.”

“You did,” Ashley said, maybe too quickly. She cleared her throat. “The day of Tristan’s vigil. I saw you and your dad there.”

Logan looked at her but said nothing.

They rounded a massive black hill and the Ford’s headlights caught on the squat fence that enclosed Pioneer Cemetery. The graves here were especially pitiful at night—only mounds of dirt bathed in yellow headlight beams. Outside the truck, the wind moaned. It was heavier now than it had been when they left the ranch, heavier than it should be.

“Do you feel that?” Ashley asked.

Logan nodded. They climbed out of the truck and the packed dirt sounded hollow under their feet. The stone key stood resolute at the front of the graveyard, unflinching in the wind, the names etched into the stone almost as indistinguishable as the graves themselves. Beyond the key, the graveyard was black.

Ashley turned on her phone flashlight. Logan handed her the ThermoGeist.

At the back of the cemetery, the shadows moved. Not like the wind, but like an animal. Like some great, lumbering thing. Ashley narrowed her eyes, trying to track the shape of it.

The ThermoGeist lit up.

“Oh my god, look!” Ashley shouted over the wind. The ThermoGeist flared brighter than her phone, streaking the muck of the graveyard in blue. The light tugged her toward the back of the cemetery plot, toward the moving dark, with a magnetism she couldn’t explain.

Ashley suddenly understood that she was standing alone.

“Logan?”

She whipped around. The white light from her phone glinted off Logan’s hair. Logan, who was still standing at the front of the cemetery with her eyes trained on the stone key. Logan, who looked like a ghost herself. Logan, who was so still Ashley wondered if she was breathing. In the murky black of night, she was a shadow of a person. Her expression wasn’t right—brows furrowed, eyes wide, neck strained forward as if she couldn’t read the etched words. The ThermoGeist continued to flare, begging Ashley to follow it to the back of the cemetery.

“Logan?” Ashley called again. “What are you looking at?”

“I…” Logan glanced up, hauled out of her trance. The wind whipped her hair into a flurry of black at her shoulders. “There’s a name on here, but it’s…”

Ashley pocketed the ThermoGeist and made her way back to the key. They didn’t have time for this. Logan’s gaze was fixed on the engraved names in front of them, and Ashley followed her gaze to one in particular. For a moment, it didn’t register, and then her heart snagged on the hyphen.

ORTIZ-WOODLEY, 2003–2007



“Wait, like…” Ashley breathed.

Logan pushed a hand into her hair to keep it out of her face. “I don’t get it. What does this mean?”

Every device in Logan’s tote bag began screeching.

Ashley cupped her hands over her ears. The wind through the graveyard picked up, piercing through the black night with a bite sharp enough to draw blood. The darkness at the back of the cemetery transformed. It was two masses now, both hunched over and swaying in the wind. They gathered at the very edge of the cemetery where the dirt met tufts of yellow grass, circling one mound of dirt just off the Pioneer Cemetery plot, hidden from the main walkway.

The ThermoGeist flared again, but instead of flashing the blue light, it was a steady, unflinching red.