The Creeping

It’s too much to be a coincidence,” Sam says for the third time. I slump in the passenger seat and cover my face. Since we left the library, I’ve been trying to stitch my words into anything believable, anything less horrible than the evil taking shape in Savage. Griever warned us, didn’t she? She said I’d wish to be blind if I kept looking in Savage’s dark corners. I’m not ready to gouge my eyes out, but I’m close.

Sam turns onto the two-lane highway heading toward Old Savage Cemetery.

“Wait a sec, let me get this straight. I almost lost it in the library I’m so eeked out, and now you’re taking me to the cemetery?” Zoey asks, a nervous laugh fluting her voice. “We should be heading home to pack. We should be booking it to make the first flight to Chi-town to stay with Stella’s whorebag of a mother. And I mean whorebag in the worst way possible.” She leans forward and wraps her arms around me and the seat. I hug her arms back; Zoey took my mother leaving me almost as hard as I did.

“There could be more little girls, Zo. The newspaper archives weren’t complete. If we find a bunch of headstones for kids, then that’s even more of a pattern to show Shane,” I explain as she rests her chin on my shoulder.

“Otherwise he’ll say it’s a coincidence or that it doesn’t mean anything,” Sam adds.

Zoey pops up and wags a finger triumphantly. “But what if the families never added a headstone? Hello? No kiddie corpse, no grave, mathemagicians.”

Sam tilts his head, mulling it over. “That’s possible, I guess. But I bet that if families held out hope, they’d still want their daughter to have a headstone in the family plot.”

Zoey stomps her heel against the back of the driver’s seat. “Fine, but at the first sign of any monsters, I’m out. I just wish the Savage PD wasn’t so epically snowballs incompetent. I’m not effing Nancy Drew.”

The sky darkens as we get closer—kind of an ominous sign—and tiny drops of rain speckle the highway. The air in the wagon sweats. I wrap my hair in a knot on the nape of my neck and concentrate on deep, calming breaths.

As we come to a stop on the gravel lot adjacent to the cemetery, Zoey says, “About all this monster randomness, nothing like that actually exists, right?” She sounds young and scared.

“No, Zo. Of course not,” I say, my stomach flip-flopping in a way it wouldn’t have if she’d asked me a week ago.

She leans forward, tugging on my sleeve. “So why were you talking about monsters? Why did that dumpy old lady mention them? Why were we hunting them?” Panic makes her pitch rise.

Sam twists to face her. “People are always looking for someone or something to blame for the bad that happens. It’s just the scariest thing people can think up.”

He probably can’t see it, but I can spot her vulnerability fading as she tips her head and blinks lazily at him. “It’s not the scariest thing I can think of,” she says smoothly.

“What do you mean?” I ask, suspicious.

“The devil,” she says in a singsong voice, slipping out of the car, into the rain.

A white-hot flash of anger sears through me. Zoey knows it freaks me out to talk about stuff like that, especially here, of all places. Our one and only major fight—more like all-out war—was over her insisting that we use a Ouija board to—get this—contact Jeanie’s ghost on Halloween night freshman year.

I jump out of the car and shout, “Why would you say that? We’re about to go searching through a graveyard, Zo. Why can’t you ever keep your big mouth shut?”

She stops abruptly; her white tank top already has Dalmatian spots from the rain. In the dim light her edges blur, making her a shimmery specter under the iron heart of the cemetery gate. She calls over her shoulder, “Isn’t the devil just the ultimate monster?” A chill travels up my spine.

“You sure you want to do this?” Sam says at my side, making me start. I nod a little and then grab his hand, lacing my fingers with his, trying to feel his skin on mine more than I feel scared.

Zoey disappears into the cemetery, after tapping the heart, and we follow. “Talking about supernatural phenomena still freaks you out, huh?” Sam asks. I try to focus on a gray van and a beige four-door parked at the opposite end of the lot. Most likely deserted cars from the last kegger.