Authors: Nova Ren Suma
Tags: #Juvenile Fiction, #Social Issues, #Runaways, #Horror & Ghost Stories, #Visionary & Metaphysical
And if we destroy this place, this last
place
Abby
stayed
before
she
disappeared, will we set her free?
Maybe we will. Maybe doing this will
set us all free. Even me.
First go the cabins closest to the hill.
We set fire to the empty beds. Next is the
camp office, a small building with a
wraparound porch, and we run a line of
kerosene all around the porch, from end
to end. The canteen is a tiny outhouse of
a structure and we leave a fire at one
corner, like a bird’s nest. The canoes go
up as if they were doused already and
were just waiting to be set alight.
Smoke is in the air the way it always
is in the dream; it smells just the same.
But then something’s not the same.
Something’s off, and calling to me
through the smoke. A voice. And not a
voice in my head or a whisper at my ear
or the girls with the torches at my back.
This is an actual voice shouting out
into the actual night. Someone is on the
campground with me.
I’m afraid it’s a delusion, that my
mind has shattered and scattered all over
the snow. And when he reaches me and
he’s been running and the panic colors
his face and he says, “Lauren! Are you
okay? Lauren?” it takes me a long
moment to realize he’s not a ghost or an
escaped piece of a dream. He’s Jamie.
Jamie’s been here with me once
before, so I should have guessed he’d
know where to find me.
He’s shouting. At me. “Did you do
this? What did you do?”
He means the fires. When I glance
back behind him I expect to see a tidal
wave of fire, the coiling, curling lip
edged with girls holding torches as tall
as their arms will lift, so if they reach
high enough they could catch the night on
fire. They could destroy the whole
world they’ve been stolen from. They
could end everything.
But there are only the fires in the
places where I set them myself, and
there is a trail of kerosene in the snow
that no one’s dropped a match to light.
The fires are burning, and letting off
black puffs of smoke, but they’re not
near as large as I thought they would be.
The girls are nowhere to be seen.
“Why’d you do this?” he says quietly,
taking one wide step closer to me.
And I take the next step, to close the
gap. “I had to,” I say, the words thick in
my throat, forcing me to choke them out.
Also the smoke, coughing from it.
Making it difficult to speak. “She . . .
They . . .”
He holds me, and I have his arms
around me again. I know what I should
do is shove him into the pines and tell
him to start running.
Get away from me,
Jamie. I’m burning. Get away before I
burn you, too.
But there’s the way his body feels
pressed to mine. The way his fingers
brush away my tears when I didn’t even
know I was making any tears and the
way his mouth says the things that calm
the blazing fury in my head and there’s
everything we used to have between us,
not dead and trampled in the snow, but
here, somehow still among the living.
I have his voice in my ear, and it’s not
a phantom, not a demon, not a
hallucination. His voice that I lock on to
so it’s all I’m hearing.
“It’s okay,” is what he’s saying.
“Look at me. Lauren, look at me.
They’re not real. They’re not real.
I’m
real. I’m right here.”
—
61
—
WE
break apart when we notice a
flicker of movement down the hill.
There’s a figure in the distance who I
think at first must be Fiona herself, come
out to lure me away from Jamie and back
together with her and only her, the way it
was when this night started. But the
figure is in dark colors and appears
much larger than Fiona ever was, even
in my memories.
It’s a man. And I’m afraid I know who
it is.
“You called the cops on me!” I hiss at
Jamie, horrified, but he appears just as
shocked as I am, pulling me off the
pathway and into a thicket of trees.
“I didn’t, I swear,” he says, close up
against my ear. “Quiet.”
“But you called my mom.” I whisper
it as if I can worm my way into his head
for the answer, the way I have with the
girls. I watch his face as he stares down
the hill.
“Yeah,” he admits, “of course I called
her.”
“So she must have called
them
,” I say,
indicating the man at the bottom of the
hill. “The cops.”
The dark-clad figure’s movements
against the white snow are impossible to
miss. The man looks up, toward the fires
—he doesn’t seem to see us hiding in the
trees. Witnessing the fires blazing
appears to make him move even faster.
But not toward them. Toward something
else.
He’s headed for the maintenance shed,
along the path where I found my fallen
scarf. My stomach sinks when I realize:
the footprints in the snow, not an
animal’s, a man’s. The one who called
himself Officer Heaney. Is that what he
said,
Officer
Heaney, or did I mistake
him for something he wasn’t? Did I
assume?
Jamie echoes what’s coursing through
my mind. “You think that’s the same
guy?”
I nod.
“I’ve been thinking. About him. That
night. I’m not sure he was an officer . . .
A security guard, maybe. But police?”
“My mom said he wasn’t,” I say.
Whatever his name is, whoever he is,
we watch him struggling with the locks
on the door of the maintenance shed.
Pushing the door open, disappearing
inside.
“You saw that, too?” I say quietly to
Jamie, wanting to be absolutely sure. My
eyes can’t be trusted. I’m not positive if
any part of me can be trusted from now
on.
Jamie only nods, watching. He stays
very, very silent. His body straightens
and I swear he goes cold, colder than the
snow we’re knee-deep in right now.
Near us, the fires continue to burn. But
if we walk the path down and out of the
campground, we’d have to pass the
maintenance shed. I know now that the
man isn’t a police officer, and I feel very
sure that we don’t want him to see us.
He comes out carrying some things in
his arms—papers? A bag, or some kind
of blanket? We’re not close enough to
see what—and then he turns fast, down a
side path and into the trees, which I
guess is another way to get on and off the
campground that I didn’t know about.
He’s gone, just like that. He came here
only to take some things from that shed,
and he left with the fires still burning.
Jamie’s focus is all on me now,
saying we have to go. We have to call
911 about the fires, and we have to get
me out of here, and he’s torn, I can tell,
not sure what to do first. I’m reeking
with kerosene, my face surely blackened
by fire smoke and ash—I can tell when I
cough and wipe my mouth and a streak
of soot comes off on my sleeve. But
when we reach the bottom of the hill,
when we get to the turn that will take us
to the camp exit, where my van and
whatever car Jamie used to get himself
here is parked, I stop and ground my feet
in. The door to the maintenance shed is
no longer locked. In fact, it hangs partly
open, as if there’s nothing in there to
hide.
Of course I have to see.
Jamie doesn’t understand; he’s still
pulling me away, saying we need to get
out of there, I’ll be caught, they’ll know I
did this, I’ll be arrested for arson, and
more things I can’t hear. The fires are
burning. And yet I won’t budge.
I feel sure I’m going to find someone
inside that shed.
I imagine her: Abby Sinclair, in the
flesh. I imagine with so much of me that I
even begin to think I can hear her voice.
That she’s in there. That I’ve brought her
to life. That now she’s calling out—for
help, from me.
Fiona Burke was right: Setting the
fires has led me to her, the real girl she
is apart from her Missing poster. It’s
happened as Fiona told me it would.
Even Jamie should be able to see.
But now the image before me flickers,
and it’s not the dreamscape that comes
back to me this time. It’s the questions.
In a rush I think about what the doctor
said. Those nurses at the hospital, the
ones who couldn’t remember my name,
who gave me the pills in the little paper
cup. Does this mean they’re right about
me?
This girl shouting for my help, she’s a
voice in my head—that’s what they’d
tell me. They’d tell me Fiona Burke is a
figment of my imagination, one grown
from a traumatic night in my past and
turned real. They’d tell me all the girls
are visions I’ve brought to life from the
Missing notices I found online and on
bulletin boards and in the post office.
Those girls may indeed be real, but my
dreams that star them, my conversations
among them, the memories of theirs I’ve
walked through, all of that, every detail
and flash of color and cough of smoke,
every ounce, is a delusion I’ve
concocted. Isn’t that what the doctor
would tell me? These girls don’t know I
exist. They don’t know I’ve claimed
them and made them a part of my life,
sleeping with their photocopied faces
under my mattress every night. That this
is my psychosis.
That I was—and continue to be—
making this all up.
But then I have to answer the
questions with more questions: What if
that voice calling for help
is
real?
What if I’ve found Abby Sinclair,
who went missing from this place
months ago and who’s been kept here, a
prisoner, all this time? What if I made
everything up except for this?
All I have to do is push open that door
to find out.
And if there’s no one inside, if there’s
no body attached to the voice that’s
screaming and I turn around and I feel
my throat and I discover it’s my own
voice, my delusion, my dream come to
violent life, I’ll admit I’m wrong.
I’ll be what they say I am, and I’ll
disown all I’ve seen. I’ll swallow the
pills for the rest of my natural-born life.
—
62
—
WHEN
the door opens to silence—
and darkness; and no girl, alive or not
alive; no girl at all—I think I’ve lost
everything. Most of all, my mind.
Because I was wrong. Everything
about me is wrong.
Maybe that’s why I’m not able to see
the shine of it for some time. But when I
do—when it catches the light somehow,
when it flashes, brighter than the fire
outside and brighter than all the snow—
my breath goes with it.
It fell, I guess, on the ground, when he
was carrying out whatever he had in his
arms. It fell facedown, splayed open on
the concrete.
I am holding it in my hands when I
hear the sirens. When the fire truck
comes and the police after that. I am
holding it in my hands.
It’s made of plastic; it’s purple,
gaudy,
and
shiny,
with
glitter
sandwiched between the translucent
decorative sleeves. Its pockets are
stuffed full, so the single snap doesn’t
work to keep it closed. And inside there
are pictures of her and her friends, and a
mass of loose change that spills out all
over my boots, nickels mostly, and
there’s an ID card from a Catholic
school in New Jersey, and ticket stubs
and clothing tags and little scrawled
notes for things she may have wanted to
remember and a dollop of chewed gum
making some of the contents stick