“Oh shit.” Everyone closed in.
“Is it blood?” someone whispered.
The first girl crept closer, her face ghost white. She put her fingers in the stain and sniffed them.
“It’s just wine,” she announced loudly. “Red wine.”
“Fucking Hollis.” The crowd stepped back. Turned away. The party quickly picked up where it had left off. Iron Butterfly crooned once more about walking the land, and the bottle of Fireball returned to the table, along with the shot glasses.
“Where do you think he went?” Zoe asked me.
“No idea. You know him better than I do.”
“Not really. I mean, we went to school together growing up, but he was always such a snob. He changed after what happened with his sister, of course, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“What happened with his sister?”
Zoe touched her horns. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“She died. It happened a few years back. Up here, actually. She hung herself in the woods down by the quarry. It was around this time of year, and from everything I heard, it was definitely a suicide, but Hollis always thought otherwise.”
“She hung herself?”
She nodded.
“He had a knife, Zoe.”
“I know.”
“Have you seen him with it before?”
“No.”
I fretted. “This isn’t good. His sister dying like she did, it’s—”
“It’s what?” she pressed.
“Well, one of the risk factors for suicide is a family history of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“So you think he might hurt himself?”
“I don’t know. But I’m worried. I should go find him.”
Zoe bit her lip. “You want me to come with you?”
I did want that, of course, but knew better than to say so. “I’ll be fine. I can take care of it on my own.”
A hint of relief sparked in her eyes. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “I’ll need it.”
*
Then I was in the fog again, running, moving, as fast as I could. I fled the frat house, tearing down the porch steps and sprinting for the trees, away from the noise and the party. Once on the main footpath, my shoes pounded the earth, as fast I dared to go. My flashlight was useless in the soup, and it was only my studied knowledge of the winding circuit of trails that carried me across the far edges of campus. Toward my destination.
I kept going, navigating on pure faith and desperation, crossing over no less than two clattering bridges in the process. The Dover River churned beneath me, and the deeper I ran into the creeping tendrils of fog and clinging haze, the greater my sense of déjà vu grew. I’d made this breathless journey before, it seemed—perhaps in some other lifetime or some other world, but I’d been filled with this exact same swell of fatalism.
I knew how this story ended.
Didn’t I?
Reaching the quarry at last—the spot where Hollis’s sister had lost her life—I stumbled my way around the perimeter. The air reeked of moss and stone, and with the way mist had gathered on the water’s surface, the entire area resembled a frothing cauldron.
I cupped my hands together. Called out: “Hollis! Hollis, where are you?”
No answer.
I kept stumbling, kept calling his name. Until there, finally, on the far edge of the water, perched high on a boulder and hidden beneath the swaying branches of a large willow tree, I found him. Air slipped from my lungs, and I hurried forward on grateful legs, only to have my gratitude veer toward panic as I realized just how close he was to tumbling into the frigid water.
“Hey, C. J.,” Hollis said as I approached, although he didn’t bother lifting his head. His words were slurring worse than ever. “You look like a goddamn angel.”
The halo. He meant my halo. “Why’d you run away like that?”
“I had to, man. I had no fucking choice.”
“You do have a choice, Hollis. I promise you.”
“I really don’t.” His voice cracked, taking on a plaintive tone.
“Hey, hey, why don’t you give me those.” Climbing up, reaching him at last, I gently plucked both the hunting knife and whiskey bottle from his hands. Hollis absolutely did not need either.
“I puked,” he told me, gesturing at the ground. “A lot.”
My nose wrinkled. “That’s okay. But maybe you should come in a little closer from the edge. You don’t want to fall in. You’ll drown.”
“I know you don’t believe me,” he said sullenly. “No one does. Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”
I sighed. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Hollis. Just sad. Zoe told me about your sister.”
His eyes brimmed with sorrow. “They killed her. I know they did. She didn’t fucking kill herself.”
“Maybe someone did kill her. I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do know it wasn’t a coven that did it. Or a witch. Or anything at all like that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because evil is a man-made commodity. One hundred percent. Do you remember what I said earlier? The most frightening thing is the knowledge that true evil lays within. Not in magic or the supernatural. But in ourselves.”
Hollis waved at the cross I wore around my neck. The one that had been my father’s. “You really believe that?”
“I’m not saying there aren’t things in this world we don’t understand. But those doctors you were talking about? The Lunacy Commission? They were just men. Bad men, who died many, many years ago, the way that all men do. Yes, they used their wealth and status to profit off the suffering of others, and yes, when that hospital burned down and killed those nineteen patients, it was a tragedy. But a human tragedy. Of the most unjust and unfair sort. But you want to know what else I believe?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“That while man doesn’t endure, the evil he creates does. There are men alive today with different faces, who wield different power, but that old Lunacy Commission still exists. It never went anywhere. It may take on different forms, but its function is always the same. So the pattern you should be looking for is one of exploitation, not magic. Because those deaths you’re so interested in aren’t the reason. They’re the reaction.”
“But a reaction to what? Why would any of this happen?”
I crawled closer to sit beside him on the rock. “Maybe I can explain it this way: you and I, we both grew up here in Dover, but our lives, the way we see the world, couldn’t be more different.”
Hollis let his head loll in my direction. “You think?”
“I know. And see, first off, the Dover Phantom, this killer you’re so obsessed with, well, when I was a kid, I wasn’t taught that he was a monster. Or anything to fear. In part, of course, because people like me didn’t come to places like this. We were never the ones in harm’s way.”
“Well, you’re here now.”
I smiled. “But I’m really not. Just because I was offered a scholarship doesn’t mean I took it. Like you told me, this school’s not as safe as it appears. For example, last night, it wasn’t hard for me to break into one of your admin buildings and steal this vest. Or to sit on the beach and wait for the school drunk to find me.”