Chapter 1
Darcy couldn’t stop crying, wailing really. Diane Lewis was pretty sure the last time Darcy had been this hysterical was the ill fated 3rd birthday party at Chuck E. Cheese, but that had been years ago. Her daughter was 9 now and while, yes, she could be dramatic at times, the drama was always a means to an end. That end being whatever Darcy had put her mind to that day.
But that was her daughter. Strong-willed and smart as a whip. Darcy’s independence and tenacity were why this situation was so worrying to Diane. The young girl’s sobbing had woken Diane out of a dead sleep from all the way down the hall. By the time she had gotten to her room, Darcy had graduated to full blown howls.
Diane had rocked her little girl, hugged her to her chest, and spoken steadily into her ear, but nothing she did calmed Darcy down. She wasn’t proud to admit it, but after 20 minutes of unsuccessful consoling, Diane had had to leave the room because Darcy’s voice was starting to give her the strangest headache… like her head was vibrating and her eyesight was going dark. She had left to get some water, maybe some Advil, with every intention of coming right back to her distressed child, but as she was getting a cup in the kitchen, the house became silent.
Diane turned to find Darcy, cheeks red and glistening, in the doorway.
“Honey,” Diane went to kneel in front of Darcy, cup forgotten on the counter, “Are you alright?”
Diane was so close that she could see Darcy’s pupils narrow as they focused on her. Darcy took a small breath and let out words so soft that Diane had to ask her to repeat herself.
“Grandma’s gone, Mama.”
“Grandma? What do you mean?”
Darcy’s shoulders curled inward and she hung her head to duck her mother’s gaze. “Grandma. She…” another shuddering inhale rocked her small frame, “Her arm hurt. She was going to sleep and her arm started to hurt and then her chest was burning and then… then we weren’t in her room anymore.”
Tears had started to slide down her face again, so Diane wrapped her in her arms. “Oh, honey, it was just a bad dream. Grandma’s fine. It’s okay, shh,” she whispered to her daughter as she picked her up and headed back to bed.
Diane could feel the neck of her sleep shirt growing damp where Darcy was hiding her face. “No, Mama, Grandma’s gone, she’s gone…”
Darcy’s whimpers began to die out as exhaustion took over the child. Diane laid down on her own bed and cuddled Darcy to her chest.
They slept until a phone call roused Diane. She left Darcy asleep and hugging a pillow to pick up the ringing phone on her desk.
It was the Fort Lauderdale Police Department. Her mother had died in the night. Heart attack, they said.
Diane couldn’t remember what she told the police officer on the phone. All she could remember was staring at Darcy’s sleeping face and remembering her words from the night before.
“Her arm hurt. She was going to sleep and her arm started to hurt and then her chest was burning and then… then we weren’t in her room anymore.”
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Darcy and her mother didn’t talk about that night. Not really. Diane had just told Darcy to never tell anyone about her dream. Her mother had looked so scared that Darcy hadn’t even corrected her.
It hadn’t been a dream because she’d been awake the whole time.
But Darcy didn’t tell her mother that. She didn’t tell Mama about how Grandma had been moaning and clutching at her chest, restlessly writhing in her bed, until she saw Darcy. She didn’t tell Mama that Grandma had only stilled when Darcy had climbed onto the bed and tried to give her a hug. She didn’t tell Mama that Grandma had only smiled at Darcy when the hug went right through her like Darcy’s arms were made of clouds. Darcy definitely didn’t tell Mama about how she could only touch Grandma when they weren’t in Grandma’s room anymore.
It was almost like they were outside, but there was no ground or sky or light. Just shadows that danced in the corner of your eye, but melted away when you looked right at them.
It should have been scary. Darcy thought it would have been if Grandma hadn’t been there. She didn’t say anything to her granddaughter, but only knelt to give Darcy a hug that normally would have been warm and soft. This hug was cold and hard, but no less comforting.
Some part of Darcy knew that she wouldn’t see her Grandma again. Knew that she was going away to a place that Darcy couldn’t go. Darcy just knew it without knowing why, like when she knew that stray dog was scared and going to bite her when she found it in an alley after school. Darcy had just had to look into the dog’s eyes and then she understood. This time there were no eyes to look into, but her body knew it just the same: Grandma was leaving.
Grandma let go of Darcy and smoothed one wrinkled hand over her cheek. Darcy closed her eyes as she felt her Grandma’s lips kiss her forehead, but was distracted by a frozen sensation creeping up her legs. She didn’t have time to open her eyes before Grandma’s lips were gone and the ice had swallowed her.
The next thing she knew, she was screaming in her bed.
Darcy sometimes thought that her mom had made herself forget about that night. She wasn’t mad about that, not really, because even at her young age, she knew that what had happened wasn’t normal.
She had gone to her grandmother’s funeral, and had wondered why so many of these people wept over the wooden box over the altar. Didn’t they know that wasn’t where Grandma was? Her mama had explained that Grandma’s body was in there, but that wasn’t her.
As she watched more and more people spill tears on the wood or press kissed fingertips to the oak or lay down roses, she realized that they didn’t know. Darcy did, but it was like when she knew Grandma was leaving or when she knew the dog would bite her. Darcy could feel Grandma in that other place. It wasn’t like the man in the black robes had talked about when he had spoken about Grandma being here in her mom and in Darcy herself or in the special cookies they would make with her recipe at Christmas.
If Darcy concentrated hard enough, she could feel Grandma as well as she could feel the grooves in the rail under her hands or the tear in the velvet cushion of the pew under her legs.
Looking around at all of the other people dressed in black and burying their faces in handkerchiefs, Darcy knew this wasn’t normal.
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Darcy tried to figure out what had happened and had decided it had to be that something was wrong with her.
To be honest, she didn’t look any different than everyone else. She didn’t know what she had expected, though. It’s not like she was going to find that she had sprouted tiny antennas or a sudden tail. She’s pretty sure she would have noticed that right off the bat.
Physically, she was a totally normal child. She had dreaded going to her first annual check up after Grandma’s funeral, fully convinced that the doctor was going to take one look at her and know something was wrong. To her relief and surprise, she had received a perfect bill of health from him.
There was a small dash of disappointment, too, because she had no concrete clue as to what was happening with her.
She could still feel her Grandma when she tried. It was nice because even though she couldn’t reach her grandmother in any tangible way, it still meant that she was out there somewhere. Darcy just let that be the end of it for a while. Puberty was hard enough without extra things making her stand out. The Early Onset of Extreme Boobage at 12 had been traumatic enough, thank you very much.
She had contended with spelling bees and friends to play Hogwarts with and the end of elementary school and then middle school and acne and school dances and what did you do with curly hair and crushes on boys and before she knew it, she was in highschool. All without another Unexplainable Incident.
It’s not like that night with her Grandmother ever truly left her, but she had a life to live. That feeling was always there, in the back of her mind, but she pushed it aside for the most part. She didn’t understand it so what was the point?
Ignoring it worked for a time.
Until it didn’t.
The highschool in Darcy’s small hometown had a Carnival Fundraiser every year on Halloween that should have been lame to teenagers, but had the advantage of being a decades old tradition. The whole town came out for the event. There were ‘spooky’ hay rides, caramel apples, giant turkey legs, rigged games, and most importantly, a Haunted House.
The Haunted House was legendary because it was always run by the senior class and each grade went all out to top the year before. In 1997, the vice principal had peed his pants in the clown room and that had become the benchmark upon which all other Houses were judged.
Darcy had never really cared for the Haunted House because it was hard to be frightened of wax and red corn syrup when you’re real life resembled a big budget horror film, but she always ended up going through it with her friends. Her junior year was no different. She had been talking to a senior named Matt who was in Debate Club with her, and he had not stopped going on about the room in which he was working. Darcy figured she could fake a swoon into his arms or something.
She was too busy thinking about Matt’s arms to notice the creeping cold up her back. By the time they had reached the second floor of the house, a creepy asylum, she was shivering so hard her teeth were cracking together. She was about to comment on the temperature when she noticed her friends were actually sweating and taking off their jackets. It was only then that she saw, in the corner of her eyes, a black mass swirling to enshroud the only light source in the room: an industrial lamp filled with red bulbs to give off an eery glow. Darcy screamed as the whole room was covered in darkness.
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Her friends told the police that the first thing that had happened was Darcy screaming. The room went dark as Darcy wailed. They said they all saw an explosion and smelt something burning. They had run out of the house, but had had to drag an out of it Darcy with them. They told police that once they were outside, they had realized that it had to have just been a trick of the house and were trying to calm down Darcy so they could all go back inside when it happened.
There was a bright burst of orange light from one of the windows to the basement and then an eruption of fire. The whole house had been evacuated and the fire department called.
The police interviewed witnesses as the firemen did their best to put out the fire. They made their way through the crowd systematically to ensure they talked to everyone who had been in the house. The rest of the visitors all reported that they heard a scream from somewhere inside the home, but thought nothing of it since it was a Haunted House. They all couldn’t have known that the rooms had been sound proofed with layers upon layers of foam and fabric so that each room could be it’s own experience and no sounds should have reached beyond a room’s four walls. Roughly ten minutes after that one scream, the basement went up in flames.
The officer interviewing Darcy’s group said that they were suffering from shock because it was impossible for them to have experienced the explosion before it happened. He couldn’t explain how the whole house had heard Darcy screaming, but the police had bigger matters at hand than to try and make sense of what was, in their minds, panicked babblings of people who had just gone through scarring events.
Darcy had remained quiet. No one found that strange and assumed it was just her method of dealing with the trauma of being on the fringe of such a violent display. They weren’t wrong about it being her coping method, but they were wrong about which trauma.
Because Darcy knew that the tragedy here was not the ruin of the historic, old home, but rather the body the department was about to find near the ignition site. Maybe Darcy should have spoken up, but they would find him anyway. If she did tell them, they would want to know how she knew there was someone down there. And she couldn’t tell them the truth.
The truth was that as soon as that shadow had put out the lights, she had seen the boy going down the steps to the basement where supplies were kept to get more fake blood. She knew, with the same instincts as before, that this boy was going to go to that same place her Grandma had gone. This boy was going to die.
He couldn’t see her like her grandmother had, but she knew it was because she was watching something that hadn’t yet happened. It wasn’t far enough in advance for her to have been able to stop it. This boy was marked and there was nothing she could do to change that. She watched him heave a heavy bucket full of liquid into his arms and saw the wires behind him spark. Saw that same spark land on forgotten propane tanks hidden under piles of props. Saw the fire engulf the boy before he knew what was happening. Saw him burn.
By the time she had come back into herself, she was screeching an unnatural melody and her friends were staring blankly behind her. She turned and saw a window to the scene she had just left, could feel the warmth of fire and smell the…
Darcy had enough presence of mind to turn away from the cop taking their statement before she emptied the contents of her stomach. The officer looked at her with pity as one of her friends held her hair back. He was called away by an anxious looking colleague where they had a hushed conversation before grimly stalking over to the now smoldering house.
Darcy didn’t look back. She knew what they would find.