The system isn’t broken, it was
Built
This
Way.”
—A rally chant
BRIDLINGTON
It was the first night of summer according to the school calendar, and while the sun was easing down behind the mountain range of cul-de-sac roofs, Chuck Warren was on his front stoop, swaying and humming to kill some time. A few kids down the way were playing road hockey, filling the street with the echo of scraping sticks and mildly homophobic taunts. When Chuck turned to look at them, one caught his eye. Chuck waved, but the boy turned away like he hadn’t seen. There was an exchange of snickering.
Chuck thought it typical, and went back to humming and rocking, watching the sky fade darker. He hadn’t thought they’d ask him to play or anything (he’d had eleven years of outcasting), but a returned wave or something would have been nice. If they were just going to mind their business, they could at least be civil about it.
When Chuck’s father came home from a last-minute grocery run, he stepped over Chuck’s bike lying in the driveway, but he at least had the decency to offer a “Hey, Chuckie.”
Chuck waved at him slowly in the dying light. He usually smiled—for as little as Chuck talked, he smiled quite often. His father noticed his grim silence, lips together, skin cool and pale but not quite clammy. Chuck Warren looked a little like a blank-faced mannequin, or a boy in a trance. It perturbed Mr. Warren, just some, as if he felt something wrong about to happen. Had he stopped that night, asked his son to come inside with him for Cheetos and the ball game, asked his son if he drew anything that day, asked his son if school was going well and “Is anyone bothering you, Chuckie?” things would have gone differently.
Instead, he said, “Don’t dawdle, Chuckie,” and carried on inside.
Chuck rolled his eyes and went back to sitting and humming.
Chuck watched with rapt attention as the street turned from sunset orange to pre-dusk blue to the purple-black of nightfall. He tapped his fingers against the cold stoop, tightened his already broadening shoulders, and stared at the street lamp across from his two-car driveway and the small grassy median. He felt like there was a wire traced from his eyes to that light, like he couldn’t look away. The world was that unlit bulb, seemingly louder than the distant scratch and scrape of hockey sticks and the chuffing of sprinklers on every other lawn. The shadows of the hockey-playing boys were stretching longer, leaking down the road like pooling blood, and Chuck’s heart beat faster. Not fear, not yet. He was thrilled.
At long last, in what felt like a single moment, the sprinklers all turned off, the first cricket started tuning up, and the street was suddenly suspended in black summer darkness. It was the sort of dark that felt crawled-upon and tight, like worming through close branches.
And then the street lamps popped up gold and paged all kids to return home. But Chuck had other plans.
Those boys down the street swiped their net up and raced inside. In all of the neighborhood houses, in the half-hypnotized state of suburban mundanity, people drew their blinds. Even the Warrens joined them; they didn’t recall that Chuck was on the stoop and assumed he was already tucked away in his room. Doors closed, windows were covered, and it was as if every house became a solitary fortress.
Chuck Warren was on the outside, where anything might happen to him. He understood that, but he was used to being ignored.
The entire town of Bridlington was minding its own nightly business when Chuck Warren shot to his feet and righted his bike. He pulled his helmet off the driveway and strapped it on, rustled in a small hedge to find the flashlight he’d hidden earlier, and weaseled it between the helmet strap and the side of his face. It was loose—he wished he had duct tape, but asking his dad would have given him up. He was far smarter than that. He swung onto his bike while the summer air hummed and a few small-town stars popped out above him in the impossibly wide sky.
Chuck lifted his light-up shoe onto the pedal, heaved forward, and sped off down the driveway to carve out into the empty road, racing for the center of town. His face was pale like the dead, but that Chuck Warren smile was back, despite a cold, dripping feeling down his spine. Maybe Chuck knew something was off that night. Maybe he felt something keeping pace with him as he rode for the center of town.
He decided to chance it, for one good summer.
Chuck broke out into the gasping expanse of Main Street, every boutique and shop already locked and abandoned to let him ride straight out to his destiny.
He heard a door close, and he slammed his bike to a nearly somersaulting stop on the corner while the singular streetlight in all of town turned red. He turned his head and saw the diner, just four shops away. Ms. Hoang, the owner and his next-door neighbor, was still locking up. Chuck held his breath and watched her balance her flip-phone against her ear while she fumbled to turn the keys.
“I’ll be home soon,” he heard her say. The key fit, and she started to turn toward Chuck before he could back his bike up or race off. “No, I know. I know.”
She turned, and though the gold light and dark shadows made her face eyeless and ghoulish, he knew she’d seen him. Chuck flashed ice-cold, waiting for her to call him over, or walk him home, or do anything else he thought an adult might and probably should.
She raised her hand to him, cordial but without much intention. He didn’t return the gesture, but he knew it didn’t matter: she’d only done it to be polite, like a reflex that she seemed hardly aware of.
“I’ll be home in a bit,” she said into her cell, and she bustled off to the parking lot behind the diner. “We can talk about it then.”
Then she was gone.
Chuck wheezed out a shaking breath just as the light above him turned to green
He started off again, barreling east. Sometimes, it was helpful that people really believed in the safe haven of a small town.
Chuck zipped past the tiny movie theater, the coffee shop, the Dairy Queen. He passed the last intersection, and Main Street tapered into a lonely, tree-lined highway with scattershot street lamps all flickering and moth-circled. He passed under the blinking yellow light strung overhead, and the motel emerged on his right, glowing under the crooked VACANCY sign. Chuck had never seen the NO part lit up, and the parking lot was mostly empty. That night, a single car sat forlorn, and he was slightly fixated by the way the trunk didn’t quite close properly, like it was waiting to swallow something into it.
He rode faster, like he was being chased.
Chuck went past the motel’s huge back lawn, and then past the drowsy Mac’s convenience store and gas station. The sound of racing water grew louder and louder as he pedaled toward the shape of the bridge. The rushing was nearly maddening by the time his bike hobbled up onto the wooden beams.
Blue River shot off on either side of him, moonlit and glistening. But as isolating as that was (a boy on a bridge, with tumultuous water seemingly a hundred feet below, a silently sleeping town behind, and only the dark, toothy shape of the forest to welcome him once he crossed), all Chuck could think about was what lay ahead, and how it made white-hot sparks speed through his veins, made him grin against any cold sweat.
He was suddenly enveloped in the forest’s cool shadow, where the street lamps were blocked by rustling leaves. Instead of feeling scared, Chuck turned on his flashlight. And instead of carrying on down the winding road that would eventually take him out past the Bridlington sign and the city limits, he carved a hard, off-road left down into the mouth of a hiking trail channeled between a chain-link fence and the dark forest. It was so thin he felt like he was parting waves of ferns and creeping vines. He went tearing forward anyway, pedaling on the decline. He hit the bottom of the trail and dumped his bike into the weeds with the sound of the river rapids rushing in his skull. The crickets screamed.
On the other side of the path, against the high fence, he saw another bike waiting. She was already there. In one shift of the tree branches, the playing card fastened to the back spokes shone bone-white and blood-red. Chuck froze, wide-eyed in the shifting light. He had been promised such a card. That was why he was out so late, chancing a grounding or maybe something worse. He could have simply taken that card and the clothespin it was fastened with, popped them on his bike, and gone home to bed. But that wasn’t what this
was about, right?
Paz Espino, the owner of that bike, had said that if Chuck snuck off when the street lamps came on, if he came out to Blue River where no one would hear him scream, if he carried on to the most terrifying place in all of Bridlington, he’d get a card the proper way. He’d ride in her rattling crew, and she’d be his friend forever.
A bit of wind blew, creaking the branches together and shifting shadows over the bike in a way that made him feel nearly ill with unease. For the first time in the night, Chuck got a vague feeling that something could be wrong. There was a crack from the woods, and he flinched and peered into the trees but could see nothing but green and dark. He swallowed and turned his head to eye the gap in the fence: one clear spot with no chain-link diamonds blurring the gorge beyond. It looked like a magic portal, one that would take him right to the girl who’d promised him a good summer.
Paz Espino, it should be mentioned, had a reputation for being a notorious loudmouth, and a notorious liar.
But he wanted to believe her—no, he needed to. She’d walked up to him that day sitting alone at recess (as he usually did), except this time he was crying because eighth-grader Emily Novak had called him a slur of a very French variety, which was part of her grand tour of thrice-daily playground destruction. Emily had then gone on to call Paz a “dirty little lying—” thing that rhymes with bike, and Paz had told Emily to kiss her uncle’s ass, which Chuck had expected. Paz was one of those “bad eggs” his mother talked about, with the swearing and the ugly clothes and the rotten attitude.
What Chuck didn’t expect was Paz stomping over to him then and crouching down with blunt certainty. The other three members of her rattling crew had gone back to tripping on the double Dutch ropes and laughing anyway. Paz looked at Chuck and his tears. Chuck was stunned into silence, waiting for her to bite his head off or eat his heart raw, like a dog.
“You good at double Dutch?” she asked him instead. It wasn’t rude, or loudmouthed, or mean—she smiled, keen but kind. She didn’t look like any sort of monster: a sun-bleached ball cap backwards over two braids twisted with fading chalk-dye, her skin a warm copper, her eyes clear brown in the light, wearing a Grave Digger T-shirt and cargo shorts.
Chuck stared at her, thinking it was some sort of joke or prank. He kept waiting for the smile to turn mean. Wasn’t this Paz Espino, who told lies about lovely Mr. Meyer? Wasn’t she caught stealing chips from the Mac’s, and suspected of breaking the coffee shop window? And wasn’t she the one his mother said to never play with, because
She’s a bad egg, Chuckie—she’s bad bad news and don’t you ever go tangling with her, but mind your manners.
Chuck knew he was supposed to fear Paz on the inside, but play it off like pity.
He also knew he was supposed to like Emily Novak.
Paz whooped when Chuck pushed himself to his feet and nodded concession. She called for her friend to drop the ropes and let Chuck have a go, and Chuck did, and he decided he would follow Paz anywhere. That was something like a premonition.
When the teachers broke their game up because someone fell and that someone said Paz pushed them, Chuck’s eyes were opened.
“I’m not a liar,” Paz told him from outside the principal’s office, and she laughed. It was a bright yet nearly ugly sound, with the bitter ring of a person who’d said it before and never been believed. “Course, that’s what a liar would say.”
That night, past when the street lamps came on, ignored by everyone who’d watched him go, Chuck stared through the magic portal in the chain-link and felt something calling him out there. It was just Blue River, a place he’d passed over dozens of times. So why did he feel like something was creeping up his spine, tightening the muscles along it, a primal preparation for trouble? There was no such thing as monsters, Chuck presumed, and any playground myths about things that haunted old mills were for dumb kids on the junior side of the line. Chuck was no dumb kid, and Paz was waiting. And he’d decided he believed her.
He felt like a ninja (of the Teenage Mutant Turtle variety, which was the only kind he knew of) when he ducked through the gap. The fence jangled around him and he went loping down the steep dirt hill. The metal DANGER: CITY DRAINAGE sign stared at him as he went.
Below, Blue River was horribly loud and fast, frothy with rapids and studded with rocks, but there was just enough space between the water and the walls of the gorge for Chuck to run without getting too wet. The mouths of the drainage tunnels in the sloping sides gaped at him. The moon shone down so bright that his flashlight seemed redundant. He raced under the bridge over all the tumbling rocks and cigarette butts and someone’s broken bong, focused straight ahead on the night’s inevitable conclusion. He drew closer and closer, and his run slowed to a nearly reverent walk.
Slowly, with the methodical laying of each foot on each uneven stone, Chuck arrived at Bridlington’s scariest meet-up spot: the old paper mill was half-sunk into the river, a collapsed story of crumbling nothing.
It looked like there were ghosts in there, or monsters, but Chuck didn’t believe in those. A creeping, more grown-up fear wondered about drifters.
He looked up, though he wasn’t sure why. It felt like he was in a daze, like something was moving his neck for him.
Up atop the mill, fearlessly high, Paz Espino stood sideways on the roof and stared out over Blue River and her dominion. She had to be the bravest person in the world, Chuck thought. He swore he saw something bone-white and blood-red sticking from Paz’s back pocket, and that made his mind up good and plenty.
Go on, the night seemed to say, though it sounded incredibly real to him over the pounding of his heart. Are you chicken?
No way.
Chuck approached the mill’s window, just a crude square gap in the cement, and clambered through, scattering shards of stone. His feet hit the uneven ground, and the sounds of the river and forest were immediately quieted to a warbling semi-silence, as if someone had hit him hard in the head and made his ears ring. His flashlight was bobbing along to his frantic breathing, like the strobing lights at awful school dances. The darkness of the mill closed in around him. It was nothing like the wide, moonlit gorge. The air smelled like wet stone.
He turned his head to shine his limited light over the wall closest to him, but the visible tunnel from his flashlight showed no stairs up to where Paz was, only twisting spray paint.
Come on, Chuckie.
He tightened his shoulders, took a slow step forward, and turned the light to the other side of the mill, so far away. He saw the outline of a rickety metal staircase, steep like a ladder, with the banister lying useless on the ground and twisted into a snakelike, wrenched-wrong shape. It was all shifting and unreal, dancing on the edge of his light, which stretched across the flat expanse of the muddy mill floor. He couldn’t see the corners. He could have sworn something moved, but when he turned his flashlight on the spot there was nothing but a broken bottle.
And yet, still, he could hear faint whisperings behind his heavy pulse, though searching for them only made his skin creep.
Chuck breathed stiffly, closed his eyes, and knew there was no going back.
He started his ecstatic sprint to the stairs, never minding what danger lurked in the shadows. He was halfway there—halfway to Paz, to a playing card, to a perfect summer after eleven years as an outcast—when his watch chimed his 9:15 bedtime. It rang loud and obvious in the black silence. He stumbled forward, something caught his ankle, and he went crashing down to his bare knees. He barely
had time to register what had tripped him before spindly, hard things crept over his ankles. Fingers. Hands.
Chuck heard something laughing in the darkness, a bubbly gurgle, followed by a high-pitched squeal ringing out around the room, creaking and echoing. Something dripped cold on the back of his neck. He smelled not just old stone but blood, and rot.
Chuck had one second to know the end was coming, to regret nothing. And then the ground smashed apart from under him, and he was yanked down into the dark to die bloody.
The rest of the town slept. Except for Paz.
FUGITIVE
The Boy came into town on a string of good luck that he was hardly aware of. All he knew was that he’d finally graduated high school, the summer sun was glinting through his windshield, his AC was cranked, the wind was rustling the canopy of branches that soared out over the road, and he was driving like there were sirens in his wake. His copilot (a dog named Bird) was sticking his head out the window, eyes squinted, feathery fur streaming.
Bird sniffed the air, all hot pavement and cold trees, and a bloody sort of scent that the Boy couldn’t catch, and probably wouldn’t care to either.
He was feeling good, slick, busy reciting monologues. “Is this a dagger which I see before me,” he said, reaching one hand out over the wheel. The heat from his windshield warmed his skin. The Boy was an actor; he had dropped his voice low. “The handle toward my hand? Bird, come, let me clutch thee.”
Bird slipped back through the half-cracked window to gnaw the Boy’s reaching hand. The sun was dappling through the trees, and the Boy’s chest felt tight in a way that was quite all right. He rattled his way through Macbeth’s dagger soliloquy, and then something from some teenybopper movie he’d watched as a kid.
The Boy tapped his fingers on the steering wheel and whipped down the smooth curves of the road at a decently illegal speed. He caught his reflection in the sun-washed windshield: his hair was uneven but short, and the wavy texture hid the hack-job. He looked cool, he thought: reinvention was going well. His gas light had come on, so he knew he’d be smart to set up in the next place he crawled into. He passed a blue sign wrapped in vines that proudly proclaimed barely nine thousand residents.
“Bridlington,” he said, tasting it. “Sound good enough, buddy ol’ pal?”
Bird barked, and panted like he was smiling.
Now what the Boy didn’t know about Bridlington was that the local police precinct barely scraped ten people, and they’d kept their major crime rate so low it was like the town was blessed by an almighty spirit of good citizenship and do-right attitude. It was the kind of thing that would probably look great on a billboard, and it meant that all six beat cops strained at their leashes and bit down hard on petty things like smoking under the bridge, riding ATVs around private farmland…or speeding. Bridlington’s very own chief of police particularly enjoyed popping out his tripod chair and some paperwork next to the Blue River bridge, right where the speed limit abruptly sunk to something far more residential. Every local knew this; the good captain was mostly concerned with catching arrogant newcomers.
And so the Boy raced closer and closer to the bridge, the speedometer only going higher. He was ecstatic, electric—nothing would stop him when the forest opened up and released him into searing sunshine that burned his eyes. The car thundered off cracked pavement and onto the strange new rhythm of wooden planks. Blue River tore off in either direction.
It felt like being suspended for a moment, hovering in nothingness.
When the Boy’s car hit road again, and kept on rocketing, no one stopped him. Fortunately for the Boy, the other benefit of sitting next to the bridge was that the captain had an eye and an ear on that old abandoned mill, and he had gone sauntering down there after thinking he saw someone. Which meant his tripod chair was empty and tipped over in the Boy’s renegade wake.
The Boy had gotten lucky.
Besides the great majesty of Blue River and the less-than-great husk
of the mill, the first thing Bridlington offered the Boy was a Mac’s convenience store and gas station, which was exactly what he needed. He hauled left into the sparse parking lot and up to the pumps. The first was striped in tape with a sign that probably said something about it being out of order, but the sun was too bright on the stark-white paper.
“Boooo,” the Boy said, and drove up to the next. Bird started sniffing fiercely again. With the windows down, the air reeked of chalky, dry cement. The Boy shut the car off, shot two finger-guns at Bird, and let his voice sink as low as it could possibly go without turning to gravel and scrape. “Be right back, copilot.”
Bird smile-panted. The Boy kissed his nose very quickly before swinging out of his car and slamming the door behind him.
Thunk!
(Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk)
The sound seemed to float off around the gas station, rattle the chain-link at the edges, and reverberate across the street to where the forest stretched a little past the gorge. Then it was only silence aside from the faint sizzle of the deliriously hot day.
Everything seemed still, a little too far from the town and from the river. ...
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