Chapter Two

Callery, Pennsylvania is asleep by nine P.M. It's a small town, with a whopping population of 398 at the 2011 census, meaning that there aren't nearly enough people to have an active nighttime scene. I hear that in other places, Friday nights are a big deal, with people dressing up and going out on the town for a night of drinking and dancing and who knows what kinds of ungodly things. In Callery, unless you're planning to throw a party at the general supply store, stuff like that just doesn't happen. Apart from the rare occasion when there's a festival or other event in town, the neighborhood streets have been cleared out by nine.

Kids who can be bothered might drive out to Cameo, a club in the heart of the county that doesn't card, or sneak some beer out of their parents' stash and hang out on the bleachers at the high school. But then there's kids like me, who, with strict parents and no car, are forced to spend their Friday nights trapped in the house, lamenting over the fact that they're unable to wander the empty and badly lit streets.

Friday nights, for me, were routine. Juliette Westbury, my neighbor and close friend, would show up at my door at seven in the evening, right after dinner, laden down with a pillow, sleeping bag, and a gargantuan makeup box that was bigger than she was. It was our ritual to paint our faces, style our hair, and dress up like we were going out, only to crash in my room and watch chick flicks and vulgar comedy films until two A.M. She'd sleep over until the next day, but leave before breakfast because my mother's cooking can break down even the kindest spirits.

That night was just like any other before it: Juliette and I were in my bathroom, elbowing each other for space as we applied eyeshadow up to our eyebrows. Juliette's long, copper blonde hair was spun into a braided side ponytail atop her head, pulled back completely so that it exposed her round face and baby blue eyes.

“Parker Sage, will you please pass me the blush?” Juliette asked, holding out a hand without looking at me. I clapped it into her hand, trying to hold back a laugh at the sound of her voice. But Juliette, being the uncannily perspicacious person that she is, noticed my amusement without even looking at me. She lowered the brush from her face and glanced over at me, giving me the same dry stare that I had received so many times before.

“I have known you for six years, sweetheart,” she drawled. “It's about time that you get a hold of yourself and stop laughing at my accent every time I speak.”

I bit down on my tongue to quell the giggles bubbling up in my throat. “Don't be so touchy about it,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I ridicule your voice out of love.”

“Oh, I'm really feeling the love,” she muttered.

If there's one thing I love about Juliette, it's her accent. She and her family moved in from Louisiana when we were ten, and six years in Pennsylvania hasn't been able to shave off the Southern twang in her voice.

The first thing I ever said to her, when we first met, was, “Your voice is really weird sounding.” She took one look at me and the smile fell off her face and she replied, “Your face is really weird lookin'.”

I decided I liked her after that.

Juliette was pretty and dainty and careful, and my mother liked her because she said “please” and “thank you” and always called me Parker Sage. But I learned not to be fooled by her faux manners and Southern hospitality; that girl can dole out insults like nobody's business.

“Parker Sage,” Juliette said offhandedly, “I do hope you realize that it looks like someone slammed a door on your right eye.”

I rest my case.

By midnight, my mom had gone to bed, and Juliette and I were about halfway through Stepbrothers. We'd been sprawled out across my bed in dresses and full makeup for over three hours, watching terribly hilarious comedies from Juliette's bottomless movie collection. I'd all but forgotten about the nightmare by then, as I lay there with my legs crossed and my face in the soft fur of a snoozing Zipper. My eyes were beginning to slip shut, unable to focus on the TV mounted on the wall above my desk.

“Wanna sneak over to Stan's?” Juliette asked as Brennan and Dale were beat up by children and forced to lick dog feces. Stan's was a seedy bar at the edge of town, walking distance from my house, that sold drinks to minors for two dollars over regular price. It was a licentious, illegal rip-off, but if you were a teenager craving alcohol, it was your best bet. The two of us sometimes sneaked over if we knew my mother wouldn't catch us and drank just enough to feel buzzed, but not so much that we'd be hungover the next morning.

After my rough dream the night before, that sounded pretty good—but my limbs were deadweight, and I wasn't sure I had the energy to haul my behind out the window.

“Let's skip it this week,” I said, a yawn escaping my lips. “We'll go next Friday.”

Juliette shrugged, rubbed at her eye so that her mascara smeared. “Whatever.”

I was drifting off into hazy half-consciousness when a frantic buzzing erupted beneath my shoulder, drawing a yelp from Zipper and sending her skittering off the bed. I shook myself awake and pried my phone from beneath my arm to check the caller I.D.

“Who is it?” asked Juliette, her voice muffled by my gray striped comforter.

“Logan,” I replied. “I'm gonna take it outside.”

She muttered something that might have been anything from “okay” to “I hope you pitch off your balcony and die” as I swung my legs out of bed and padded across my large room to the ornate glass door on the right wall. My room connected to a small, half-circle balcony that looked out onto the street, and I stepped out onto it before accepting the call.

“Hey, what's up?” I said, sliding the door closed behind me. It was chilly outside, just as autumn should be, with a nip in the air that bit at my skin through my sweatshirt.

“Hey,” Logan said, his voice sleepy, as I leaned against the white rails and stared down the street punctuated with lights. “You gonna be okay tonight? Should I come over or anything?”

I sighed, rubbing my arm with one hand as my eyes roved over Stella Home's house across the street. “That's tempting,” I admitted, “but I think I'll be fine.” I smirked slightly. “Unless, of course, you want to come over. Juliette is here, after all.”

Through the speaker of my iPhone, I heard him swallow, and imagined that he was blushing at the other end of the line. Since Juliette moved in next door to me, Logan had had a giant crush on her. The three of us were close and hung out often, but that didn't stop him from acting like geek every time Juliette so much as glanced in his direction.

“N-no, um—I trust Juliette to keep you safe.”

“Yeah?” I inquired. “Well, who's going to keep her safe?”

An exasperated sigh from his side. “Parker, don't make me hang up on you again.”

I allowed myself a private grin at his annoyance. Some might argue that it was cruel of me to tease him about his crush, because Juliette had blatantly rejected him on more than one occasion, but I was pretty sure that being his best friend gave me some kind of right. Besides: Juliette had admitted that she found his advances cute. It's just that she was older than us—seventeen years old, and a senior in high school—and had a strict policy against dating someone younger than her. Personally, I didn't think a year made much of a difference; maybe it was a Southern thing.

I didn't say anything for a moment after that, content to simply listen to Logan's breathing and know that he was there. I leaned my elbows against the railing, resting my chin on the back of my hand as I surveyed the street below. The house across the street, a white paneled two-story, had a deep front yard of overgrown grass and spindly weeds. I knew that from memory—right then, the yard was shrouded in darkness. The moon was just a sliver, so the only light came from a streetlight in the middle of the sidewalk that cast a thin sphere of brightness onto the grass.

I merely scanned over the streetlamp, instead pointing my attention to the darkened sky. Logan's call was still connected, but I couldn't hear his breaths anymore, and figured he must have set the phone down. He did that sometimes. I counted the stars, the clear shining points against a blanket of black velvet, idly connecting them together into their constellations.

A breeze whipped through the air just then, sending an icy finger through my whole body, and I knew that it was time to go inside. Unfortunately for me, I was ridiculously susceptible to sickness. Even ten minutes out in the cold was known to have me in bed with pneumonia. Juliette always claimed that it was because I was too thin—but I digress.

“Hey, Logan,” I said quietly, “I think I'm gonna go, okay?”

There was no response—most likely, my best friend had fallen asleep, as was his dorky habit. Shaking my head, I swept my gaze back toward earth, past Stella's white house and weedy lawn that was only partly illuminated, and was just about to turn back into my room when I realized—

There was someone standing under the streetlight.

And they were staring straight at me.

“Oh my God!” I shrieked, jumping back so far that I hit the door. That roused Logan, and his voice immediately came through the speaker, shouting, “What? What? Parker, what happened?”

I was half sitting, half standing against the glass, my eyes squeezed shut and two fingers pressed to my neck. My pulse was hammering.

“Parker?” Logan repeated.

“Holy hell,” I hissed. “Logan, there's someone out here, there's someone watching me from across the street, and oh God, Logan, you know that no one comes out this late, but they're there, and they're watching.”

I thought I heard him swear before he said, “Parker, who is it? Do you recognize them? Is it a man or a woman?”

“I don't know!” I cried, shaking with surprise and adrenaline and fear. “I'm not looking!”

I pressed my hand to my face, feeling my eyelashes crunch. There was only one thing I remembered about the person, and it was their eyes; their black, black, inkwell eyes, unblinking and staring at me, staring at me still and—

As if of their own accord, my eyes snapped open. I pressed back into the door as I stared across the street, dreading what I would see.

But the sidewalk was empty. There was no one there.

I gasped, eliciting an immediate “What?” from Logan.

“They're gone,” I whispered. “There's no one.”

Silence.

Crickets.

No one across the street.

“Are you sure they're gone?” Logan asked. Then, after a pause, he added, quieter, “Are you sure they were there?”

Just like with that terrible nightmare, I tried to convince myself that I had just been seeing things, but it didn't work. This time, the scene was cemented in my memory. Maybe I couldn't remember the person's face or what they were wearing, but I knew I had seen those eyes. There was no way that something could be burning a hole in my mind like that and not be real.

“I'm sure,” I said with absolute certainty. “They were there. Now they're gone.”

I looked up and down the street, squinting at the dark crevices and shadows. I saw no one.

“Well, go inside, okay?” Logan's voice sounded strange, tight. “There's no guarantee that whoever you saw was malicious, but I don't want you to take the chance. Just go inside.”

“Right,” I mumbled shakily, “inside.”

I fumbled with the door, slipping back into my room and locking it again behind me. Juliette was in the bathroom; she had missed the whole episode.

“Are you inside?” Logan questioned.

I nodded, remembered he couldn't see me, and gave an affirmative grunt. My hands were shaking, my body quivering. I slid to the ground, holding onto my phone for dear life, and pulled my curtains forcefully shut. I didn't know who I'd just seen, but they were real. And I didn't want to leave myself in open view.

“I don't know what just happened,” I said, feeling the need to say something but not knowing what. “I don't scare easily, Logan; you know that. What was that?”

My best friend blew out a gust of air. “It think it's the nightmares, Parker. It's like the lesson in psych the other day, about how the mind can take a perfectly normal sight and twist it into something completely unlike what it's actually seeing.”

I gave a wobbly laugh. “Are you saying I'm hallucinating?”

In the bathroom, the toilet flushed. On the TV screen, Brennan and Dale were arguing. Logan's voice, when he spoke, was very serious.

“No,” he said. “I'm saying that your mind is under a lot of stress, and it's reflecting that into reality. The person you saw was probably just a late night jogger—they're rare, but not impossible. The part about them watching you was all in your head.”

“Yeah, that's probably all it was,” I agreed, just to appease him. “You're right. It's the nightmares.”

“Exactly.” Logan sounded pleased. “Now go to sleep, okay? You sound like you need it.”

I swallowed hard. The prospect of sleep was not sounding great, especially after seeing that person outside. But at Logan's comment, I heaved a giant, arcing yawn.

“I do,” I murmured. “I definitely do. 'Night, Logan.”

“Goodnight,” Logan replied, sounding distinctly relieved. “And remember, Parker—it was just a jogger. I'll see you tomorrow.”

As we both hung up, I sauteed those words in my mind. Under a lot of stress. Not impossible. All in your head.

Just a jogger.

But I remembered those eyes, those solid onyx eyes that burned me even from so far away, and I knew (I knew) that whoever that person was—they were no jogger.

◙════════════◙

It wasn't until nearly three hours later that we finally went to sleep, after we'd exhausted our eyes and turned our brains to sludge with another two movies. My mind was brimming with the schmaltzy sweetness of Cinderella—I'd managed deter Juliette from sneaking in an impromptu showing of Saw II, though only with the promise that we'd watch it the following week—which I would normally loathe, but tonight, the image of twirling blue ballgowns behind my eyelids was bringing me much needed repose.

Once I'd had a few moments to calm down, I'd decided that Logan was probably right: I'd just been messing around with reality. Superstition had never been my style, and as I pondered it further, I really began to realize how ridiculous my fear had been. There was no law in Callery saying that a person couldn't be outside at midnight, and in the darkness an innocent human being had become a ghastly phantom.

I opted not to tell Juliette what I'd seen, because jogger or not, she was the kind of person who'd insist that we go outside with butcher's knives, find the offender, and hack him or her to pieces. And despite being ninety-nine point nine percent certain that what I'd seen was a trick of light, I wasn't particularly eager to go outside at all hours and risk the wrath of my mother. That's what I told myself, anyway—and I wasn't having any trouble believing it.

At two fifty-seven A.M., Cinderella came to a happily ever after ending, and I reached one deadened arm over to turn off the television. It turned out, though, that the remote just happened to be miles away, at the foot of my bed. And as it happens, that's just where Juliette lay sprawled out, having fallen asleep at some point between the ball and the wedding.

At two fifty-nine, I said “screw it” out loud, stifling a yawn as I reached for my pillow. The TV had become a pixelated field of blue and it was buzzing slightly, but I just pressed my face into the sheet and ignored it. It was dark in my room—I'd turned out the light ages ago—but it wasn't frightening just then. The shadows were shadows, but that's all they were and they wouldn't hurt me if I didn't let them.

At exactly three o'clock A.M., I fell asleep and didn't dream. I slept without incident for half an hour.

At three thirty-three, I opened my eyes to darkness.

And that's when the horror began.

◙════════════◙

Once again, I was frozen. My body was immobilized, anchored in place by some kind of dragging weight. There was pressure on my chest, pressure like when you're at the bottom of the ocean without air and water is flowing into your mouth and the depth is slowly crushing your lungs.

I knew that feeling; I'd been there.

And here, in my room, it was happening again.

My eyes were the only things that could move, and they swept to the left just in time to see the numbers on my digital clock change to three thirty-four. Fear was pulsing through my body, begging it to move. I could, just barely, see my arms and legs splayed out before me, but no command from my brain could make them move. I could feel my chest tightening, fighting, as that bone-crushing tension increased, so heavy now that it should have snapped me in two.

I swear to God, if I hadn't known better, I would have said that someone was sitting on my chest, someone who was invisible and unnaturally heavy and wanted to suck the life out of my soul. What I felt was utter panic like razor-edged butterflies in my stomach, violent and insistent. I longed to press my fingers to my pulse, to make sure I was still alive and not trapped in a terrible hell, but my fingers would not even twitch.

And that's when I noticed something else—the light of the television had dimmed.

With a strange, mounting fear in my stomach, I hurled my gaze to the side before I could hesitate. And there—there—right in front of the still-buzzing TV screen, a figure stood.

It had no face; no features; nothing to identify it by. But it stood beside my bed, tall and shadowed, a calignous being that watched me in my terror. There were no eyes on the vague form of its face, but I felt it staring at me, boring its glare into the center of my forehead.

A thousand panicked thoughts raced through my mind, but none of them had traction and they just kept slipping through in an endless frenzy. I tried to pray, but all the words in my head were sludge, they weren't fast enough, and they weren't enough to save me when the figure moved.

When it slid toward me.

When it reached out something that looked like an arm and brushed it over my face.

A cold breath dusted my cheek, turning my skin to ice. The figure remained there for a moment, its invisible eyes tearing me to pieces, before moving backward, away from me. Without turning, it edged to my door and dissipated into foggy nothingness.

Then air came rushing back into my lungs.

Then my limbs were set free in a twitching delirium.

Briefly, for a few raging heartbeats, I was plunged into an infernal sleep, and the world slipped away for a moment.

When I woke up, I was screaming.

-----

A/N: So I've never been to Callery and I don't know any people from there, but I needed a small town in Pennsylvania and I liked its name. So yeah. Everything I say about Callery apart from that its in Butler County and it exists is just from my imagination. Just a warning~

I think I was in some kind of stupor through all of November, because I'm reading over all this and thinking "...when the hell did I write that?"