Moss

by Lisa Lueddecke

Genres: YA Dark Fantasy

Synopsis

A girl returns to her hometown and the sinister bogland surrounding it in search of her missing sister in this harrowing, atmospheric young adult horror perfect for fans of Shea Ernshaw and The Haunting of Hill House.

I know how to find her. Don’t follow me. I mean it. It will break Dad if you do. I love you, Em.
P.S. Stay away from the Sedge Man. He won’t stop, like a hunter, until there’s nothing left of you.

A year after her sister Eve’s sudden disappearance, Emma returns to the small town of Scarrow in northern Maine. The police have no leads, the neighbors spread rumors about her father’s involvement, and the vast bogland known as the Moss lies in wait beside the house like a hungry beast.

Darkly familiar shadows and specters fill her dreams and the quiet spaces between her thoughts. Something is following her, pulling her to the Moss, and it’s growing stronger by the day. Could it be what called to her sister? Or even to their mother, when Emma was only a child?

Haunted by the ghosts of the past, Emma knows she is the only one who can uncover the truth and save her sister…unless she gets lost herself.

Release date: September 30, 2025

Publisher: Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers

Print pages: 336

Sample

Chapter One

ONE
I am a thousand feet above Maine, and there is a dead girl sitting beside me.

The trick is not to look directly at her. If I do, she’s gone before I’ve finished turning my head. Vanishing like a star in the dawn. But if I don’t look at her, she reappears, haunting the edges of my vision. A white gown, dark hair that’s matted and mangled, her mouth open in horror. A silent scream.

Breathe. This is not my first ghost, but it is the closest I’ve come to one, and the cold air tumbling off her feels like the wind on a winter’s day. I grip the armrest as we descend lower and lower over the cloudy state. My state. My home, once upon a time. I have always loved it here, with its wild woods and gnarled coastlines and mist that lies thick with secrets. But for the past 368 days, my home has been far away, on the sun-kissed beaches of California.

“A place of healing,” my father said when he sold me on the idea, immediately after my sister disappeared.

I do not love California, but my aunt does, enough to make it her home for the past fifteen years, and she loved me enough to let me spend a year in her guest room. The change was jarring, even shocking, though I did grow fond of the boardwalks and palm trees, and the sense of life and future that lights up everything out there. If California is the future, then Maine is the ancient, cobwebbed past. Myth and murk to mint and modern.

And that suits me just fine. I’ve grown used to my houses having a few ghosts, and my forests a few secrets. Although my sister and I were the only ones who could see the ghosts, and I always felt like we were the secrets.

But the girl sitting next to me now is something else. She isn’t like the splintered shadows or threadbare figures that dart across the room in the dead of night. Nor is she like the eyes I sometimes swear I feel watching me when I step outside our house and draw near to the bog that stretches away behind the house for dozens of miles.

The Moss, as it’s commonly known. From an old word for British bog land. Uneven earth and pools of murky water, lanky trees in staccato clusters, swampy vines trailing down into the depths. The largest collection of peat in New England, though my father lets no one go near it, even outside of our family.

Click. Whirr. The plane glides closer and closer to the ground. The sun dashes behind gunmetal-gray clouds that threaten a late-afternoon thunderstorm.

My breath is still tight in my chest, hairs on the back of my neck standing up as every inch of me can feel the presence to my left. The presence that never boarded the plane with me.

I am the only passenger.

It has been a long night and day of travel. The red-eye from Los Angeles to Boston. Then an endless wait in the airport because only two flights a day run up to the backwater airport that will save me a five-hour drive into the more unsettled parts of Maine, and I missed the first one. The girl beside me now was not there on the other flight. She was not there in the airport. She was not there when this small, creaky plane first took off.

Watching me with blackened eyes and tangled hair, earnestly, like time is short and I just don’t know it yet.

The landing gear thunks distressingly loudly as the ground comes ever closer. Ahead, the pilots chat to someone in the tower. Just another day for everyone. Business as usual. Unaware of the dead girl in the seat beside me.

“Who are you?” My whisper is small but sharp, hard to hear above the high-pitched hum of the engine. “What do you want?”

My eyes keep darting over to her. To take in every detail I can. To understand who she is. Why she’s here. But every time I do, she vanishes. Back again in the next moment, when I avert my eyes.

I cast my gaze toward the window. Only a few hundred feet more to go. Glance partially in her direction again, this time she’s leaning toward me, wide eyes trained on me. Only inches from my face. The stench of damp earth and mire invades my senses, and I want to pull away, pressing up against the window of the plane, but I stand firm. This is my flight. My plane. My return home.

“Who are you?” Louder this time, but it is still little more than a grating sensation in my throat.

Looking as close to her as her vanishing habit will let me, I wait. I’ve seen ghosts before. I’ve seen her before. But not like this. Not so blatant and close and real. And certainly not so persistent. The two ghosts with which I am familiar are shy, fragmented things, never whole and real and stark like this one. A glimpse, a scrap, a taunt from a corner that you can just manage to convince yourself was a trick of the light.

In the seconds before the wheels at last kiss the runway, a hollow voice whispers in my ear.

Stay away.

Then another voice dances behind it, half-hidden by other noises.

It’s cold, Emma. It’s cold, and it’s dark. Let me out.

And the plane is on the ground, and light misting rain gathers on the front window, and the seat beside me is empty.

She’s gone, as suddenly and horrifically as she appeared.

Gone.

My breath comes in gasps now, like catching my breath after diving underwater. I run a hand through the air where she sat only seconds ago but feel nothing save for a pocket of cold air. Part of me starts to doubt if she was ever really there at all, but the stench of rot still clings to the edge of my senses. I’ve stopped letting myself think for too long about why my sister Eve and I were so… strange. Why we could see things others couldn’t. Obsessing over the why felt useless when I could instead focus on the who. Who are they? Why do they want to be seen?

One of the pilots looks back at me while we taxi to our gate. He sees my heavy breathing, my hand still clutching the armrest like the safety of the flight depends on it.

“Nervous flier, eh?” He grins, showing a piece of chewing gum between his teeth.

“Claustrophobic,” I half lie. I’ve never been afraid of flying. There aren’t that many things that scare me, and all of them are back at my father’s house.

Calling it a gate feels rich, when really there’s just one small terminal building and the plane just sort of parks right outside it. The inside of the plane is hardly any bigger than a minivan, so when one of the pilots hauls the door open, I just jump straight down onto the tarmac. My legs sting and ache with the sudden stretch, but I’m grateful to be free. Too much flying and cramped seats and airport gates and not enough fresh Maine air.

“This way.”

A moody airline employee, sipping an iced coffee, motions me toward the door of the terminal.

“We’ll get your bag in a few minutes.”

I move slowly toward the door, enjoying the space to walk, then turn to take one last look at the plane before the door closes behind me.

A girl’s face watches me, half-hidden by the reflection of the clouds. Her mouth is open in that dreadful, silent scream.

And then the door closes, and she’s gone.