The Dark Place

by Britney S. Lewis

Genres: YA Horror

Synopsis

You can only hide from your nightmares for so long. Seventeen-year-old Hylee Williams didn’t ask to disappear. She didn’t ask to move from Kansas City, Kansas out to the suburbs in Missouri. But she did disappear, and not only that, but when she vanished from our world, she materialized in a dark, twisted version of the night that changed her life forever: the night her older brother went missing. Just as Hylee realizes this moment could be the key to unraveling the truth about her brother, she’s yanked away from the dark place back to our world. Craving a sense of normalcy, she goes to a party with her best friend—where she meets Eilam Roads. Tall, handsome, and undeniably, inexplicably familiar, Hylee can’t help the pull she feels towards him. It’s a classic teen girl-meets-boy situation, until it happens again. She disappears, right in front of him. Together, Hylee and Eilam investigate the truth about time, space, and reality, with Hylee increasingly convinced her time travel holds the key to saving her brother. But the more they learn, the more Hylee begins to see darkness lurking in her world—and in herself. Britney S. Lewis’s sophomore novel combines the quotable relatability, swoony romance, and emotional resonance of John Green with the surrealist horror imagery and razor-sharp wit of Jordan Peele. At once haunting and enchanting and entirely unforgettable.

Release date: August 8, 2023

Publisher: Disney Hyperion

Print pages: 279

Sample

PAST: NOVEMBER, NINE YEARS AGO

This is what I remembered.

Our house was draped in a sheet of mahogany from the dark, cold evening. Brown shingles covered two stories, and I hated the shingles. Couldn’t exactly pinpoint it, just that sometimes, in the night, the house looked like it might devour every limb on our bodies and chew us into small, meaty pieces.

The tree in the front yard had thin, warping branches, and with the evening glow against the curtains, it looked like someone was reaching, stretching for the window. Bulbed knuckles and long nails. A scrape there. And maybe a whisper.

Mama had finished cooking hours ago, but the smell of warm grease stuck to the roof of my mouth while I sat in the living room, controller in hand, playing Mortal Kombat with my older brother, Bubba. I was eight then. He was fifteen.

I was winning, but I’d never know if it was because that random key combination I pressed with haste worked, or because Bubba was going soft on me. He’d been doing that more, and I didn’t like it. I wasn’t a baby. I’d be in the double digits soon.

Our older cousin Juice stretched his legs out on the couch opposite us. “I’m next,” he reminded, but his eyes were on his phone while he scrolled. He’d kept saying he was up next, but Bubba and I could have gone on like that for hours and Juice wouldn’t have noticed.

“Hylee!” It was a sound I refused to register, one that I’d apparently “missed three times.” Mama came hurrying around the corner, her shoulder-length black hair swooshing, dark brown eyes narrowed, teeth clenched. “What did I say?”

Bubba paused the game, and I felt my mouth open, but I didn’t want to go make my bed like she asked me to. If I made my bed, I’d have to go to bed, and I wanted to hang out with Bubba and my older cousin.

So I shrugged my shoulders. “I don’t know,” I lied.

Her dark painted lips folded. “Hylee Marshay…get up, now.”

I stomped my feet, dropped the controller, and fell back onto the couch. “Ughh. I don’t want to.”

“Hylee,” Mama said again, her voice so thin it could slice all of us in half.

Bubba helped me to my feet. “Lee, come on. You know you’ll get in trouble if you act up.”

“But I just want to stay and play with you and Juice.”

He lowered his voice and got to my level. I could still see Mama at the corner of the living room and the hallway, a dish towel draped over her shoulder, her diamond earrings and gold chains shimmering. “Look, if you listen to Mama and make your bed, I promise…I’ll bring the game into your room, and we can play until you get sleepy. Okay?”

I gasped. “Really?”

He turned to look at Mama, waiting, her arms crossed tightly, and then he lowered his voice and turned back to me. “Really.” Bubba held a pinkie to the sky. “I promise,” he said, and I folded my pinkie around his. Bubba never broke promises. Never, ever. But it was then when I felt like the four walls around me crept closer. And small—I felt like the smallest of creatures being sucked whole through a straw by a monster.

Mama said my name again, but her voice sounded like it was underwater. I locked my eyes on my older brother as I walked away. His brown eyes so big, like Daddy’s, and hopeful. A smile, and he whispered, “Go,” and I went, marching past Mama in the hallway.

My bedroom was at the end of it, a small lamp on, illuminating the space. Mama flipped on the light switch, coming in behind me. “What’s with the attitude, Ms. Thing?”

I huffed and plopped on my bare bed, crossing my arms and glaring at the alarm clock. Bright red characters read: 9:00 P.M. I wanted to say something but didn’t. Too upset that I couldn’t play with Bubba when I was winning, and too distracted by the sound in the corner of my bedroom. It was like the window was breathing these slow, shallow breaths. The blinds moving just slightly. The sound. In and out. In and out. In and out.

“Hylee?”

I snapped my head to see her, her shoe tapping into the carpet—muted but still there. I got off the bed and picked up the thin sheet with the weird edges. It always went on first. I stretched it over the blue

 mattress, and then I grabbed the next sheet. Took my time as I flattened it on the bed. No wrinkles as I smoothed it out with my palms.

Mama watched me crumble to the floor as I tussled with my comforter. Pulled it here and there, trying to find where the tag was. I brought the blanket to my face, inhaled and smelled the fresh detergent. My eyes felt heavy. My fingers and toes tingled a little.

“You gotta pick up the pace,” she said. “You were supposed to do this thirty minutes ago.”

I rolled my eyes, my twisties moving as I engulfed the blanket in my arms. “Mama, I’m hurrying, but the blankets have to go on in order.”

She made a sound like she was fed up. Her lips pursed. “When I come back, this better be done.”

I tried mocking her, puckering my lips out and saying “This better be done” as I threw my comforter on the bed.

When the blanket was how I liked it, I tossed the pillows on, throwing one so hard it fell back off. It was 9:10 now.

I grabbed it, and then there was a bang. Like someone pounding on a door, but it wasn’t mine. I paused as the sound came again, louder. I stretched my neck.

It was out there…past the hallway…the front door.

Daddy shouted—asked who was there—but his voice…something sounded wrong with it. It wobbled a little, like how mine did when I was scared.

Bang.

It wasn’t a gun. It was the sound of something breaking. Wood splitting. A thud, a thud, a thud, and silence, until I heard what sounded like feet running and slipping on carpet and wood.

Bang.

Jumped to my feet, my hands balled into small fists as I hurried to my bedroom door. That was a gun. It was so loud and so sharp, my eardrums rumbled. Nothing but the sound of a machine flatlining. A hum. I almost didn’t hear someone shout for me out there.

Out.

There.

My fingers trembled as I reached for the doorknob. Twisted it slowly, my breath heavy, my chest stretching rhythmically to my fear.

And that was it.

That was all I remembered. 

 

TWO

 

PRESENT DAY: FEBRUARY

The inside of my mouth was raw from all the biting.

Torn a little, a scab probably forming.

A subtle taste of rust on the tip of my tongue.

It was the night before my first day at my new school now that I was living with Grandmommy, and the disappearing was all I could think about. A magic act, you could say. But it wasn’t. I didn’t mean to disappear….

I shifted in bed, half-asleep, half-awake, hearing the sound of my name over and over again in my head.

It was a sharp whisper, and the more I listened to it, the more I didn’t know if the voice was mine. It was almost like the day of the incident, nine years ago, stuck, unsure of what was to come.

My silk scarf made a sound on my cotton pillowcase as I turned.

Turned again. Moonlight shining in between the slats of the white blinds. I held my phone, waiting for Lucia to text me back, even though it was late.

I knew she’d be up—she was a night owl, always awake when I was asleep, and tonight, I didn’t want to sleep. I was afraid of slipping, of falling into whatever that other place was that I’d fallen into last Sunday. The thing was, I didn’t know what happened last week. One moment I was at the family cookout and the next? Gone. I vanished into thin air, then reappeared as if nothing had happened. But it had.

Watching me vanish must have changed something for my parents. The look in Daddy’s hazel eyes, the way they glossed over—it told me things were different. Grandmommy wore the same look, with the same eyes, when she picked me up from my parents’ rental this morning. She hugged me, her bones stiff like she was frozen, her stare cutting right through me as if I weren’t there at all. Then she helped me carry my things to her car. We loaded the trunk and the backseat.

Once we were on the road, she looked over at me, twisting her lips in the same way that I did, but she looked repulsed, like she’d spit me out if she had to taste any of my sour thoughts. Like I was not safe or palatable. I was unpredictable, and I knew that when my family looked at me now, they saw something different.

But it was the waiting that was unbearable.

The waiting that made me want to open the car door at the traffic light and walk down the street while I waited for Grandmommy to ask what happened. She hadn’t been at the cookout, so she didn’t witness it like Mama, Daddy, or my friend Lucia had. After, my parents were stammering and yelling, “What the fuck just happened?” While Lucia looked catatonic and whispered, “What?” under her breath repeatedly.

But not Grandmommy. Not as I sat next to her in her car, and as she pressed on the gas, all she could get out was “Are you sure you’re okay?” With that look on her face, s p i t t i n g…me…o u t.

I said, “Yeah,” and I knew that she knew it was a lie. But it was all I had, and that would have to be enough, because I didn’t understand what happened, and I felt like I was losing my sanity. I had to have imagined it, disappearing, but it felt so real.

I mean, it was real.

As I thought it over, I picked up my phone again and held it to my face, trying to will a text message to appear. Like everyone else, Lucia had been acting weird since I disappeared. I get it, it was strange, but for her to ignore me completely…that didn’t seem right. She was my friend, and I needed her.

I grumbled, kicked away my sheets. Texted Lucia again.

 

Hey

Did u get my last txt?

Could really use a friend rn

 

I locked my phone right after I sent it because I felt sorry for myself and embarrassed. Desperate, even. This was text number four since I vanished, and still, nothing.

Got up then, turned on my lamp, and dug through my book bag, pulling out my drawing pad and my pencil case. Placed everything on the little desk Grandmommy had left in this room—pencils to the right of the pad, erasers to the left. The desk itself sat by the window, and I pulled the blinds up to see what the night looked like here.

It wasn’t the same as it was in the city. See, Grandmommy lived on this cul-de-sac in a two-story home, and her backyard was on the edge of the street. The people here actually had those white picket fences. It was funny because I’d only ever heard them mentioned in songs, but there they were. Very, very white. Very, very real.

Grandmommy had worked her way up to head of accounting for the city, and now she lived in Brindleton Bay, a new suburb in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, about thirty minutes away from Kansas City, Kansas. Apparently, I lived here, too. Semipermanently, anyway.

The night in Brindleton Bay was different because it was darker—not enough light from buildings or houses, no glowing neon signs, no phones shining from people who wandered in the evening. Just darkness. And quiet.

I could see every twinkle

in the midnight sky, the moon’s face looking directly at me. Deer, and maybe a car or two. A raccoon, a possum. Country shit.

Before I drew, I crept out of my bedroom and down the staircase to the kitchen in search of the tea Grandmommy made earlier. It was probably cold now, in the fridge.

The floor creaked every third step, and I used the flashlight on my phone to light up my path. A turn, and to my surprise, Grandmommy was there, sitting at the island with a cup of tea in her hands.

“Well, shit.” Her eyes were wide, her mouth snapping shut as she held her hand to her chest. Her long brown hair was braided back, a scarf tied across her edges. She had just turned sixty and only had a few strands of gray hair. “You ’bout scared the living out of me. You’ve been so quiet tonight, I forgot you were here.”

Normally, I would have laughed at Grandmommy—I would have poked fun at how frazzled she looked, but I couldn’t tonight. That part of my brain was turned off because all I could think about was what happened when I disappeared and then after.

I was ripped right away from the couch, and suddenly I was on my feet, at our old family house, in the night. It was brown and waiting. So much bigger than I remembered it. Haunting. There was that flickering light on the back porch, the stillness, and that girl. The way her mouth was, how she didn’t have any eyes, and the familiarity and terror I felt when she touched me: cold and afraid, but also like I was missing something.

“Sorry, Grandmommy,” I said, trying to shush the memories away. “I just wanted some tea. Couldn’t sleep much. It’s too quiet here.”

She smacked her lips. “I know, I know. But you’ll get used to it,” she said, and it sounded like something she repeated to herself until it was true. A manifestation. I wondered how long it had taken for her to adjust to the suburbs. She’d been out here for six years now, but it didn’t feel like it.

A kettle was set on the stove, the water still warm. I grabbed a tea bag and poured the water into an old white mug before dunking the bag in.

“Why are you up, anyway? Are you nervous about your new school tomorrow?” Grandmommy asked.

I shrugged as I took a sip. “Kind of. Not sure what the people are like here.”

She nodded, her hands clasping her mug, and inside me, I felt a tugging, like little fingers were pulling down on my ribs, and since Grandmommy hadn’t asked yet, I wondered how she felt about the whole thing.

“Grandmommy, do you think what happened to me was real?”

She furrowed her brow, held her mug tighter—I could see the tips of her fingers turning a shade of red—and she took a sip. “Do I…think it was real?” she said, and the way she said it, how it was all drawn out, made me feel like she was reminding herself that

 I’d spoken. Her eyes shifted around the dimly lit kitchen. The darkness around her seeming darker than before. “Was it real?” she said again. “Why would you ask that?”

My eyes welled, and I felt the warmness flooding my body. I wasn’t even sad, I was angry. Because of that. Because she couldn’t answer the question. And while earlier I’d nibbled at the thought that it was okay she didn’t bring it up, that maybe it brought peace, I knew now that it wasn’t, and her silence on the issue made me feel so small and so weak, like I’d been tucked away and every movement I made was invisible.

And it was odd of her. Grandmommy always had something to say. Always inserted her opinion even when it wasn’t wanted.

“Because we haven’t talked about it,” I said, and I would not let my voice break. I would not. I would be strong. I would say what I meant, and only—only as a last resort would I lie. “And it was strange, and everyone else freaked out because how could this happen, but you haven’t…I mean, you haven’t said anything, and I don’t know why. And I’m afraid that if we don’t talk about it, we’ll forget. It’d be like when our house got broken into all over again. Like when Bubba—”

Grandmommy’s deep sigh cut me off, and she scooted her chair away from the island, that sound so harsh against reality that I twitched as she got up to walk toward me. Her arms open, her plaid pajamas swishing a hard cotton sound before they welcomed me in. The voice in my head was back, growing louder: Hylee.

Pressed my face against Grandmommy’s chest, my cheek smashing, and the smell of her chamomile tea wafted around me. I wondered how many times Grandmommy had had to comfort Daddy like this. It was only ever the two of them.

When she let me go, her hazel eyes looked crooked. Why was that? “Here’s what I know, Hylee: We don’t really know what happened Sunday. But just…leave it alone.”

I wanted to crawl out of my skin. What a suggestion. “What if I don’t want to leave it alone? What if I can’t? What if it happens again? Then what?” I crossed my arms, pressed my back against the oven handle.

Grandmommy’s jaw shifted, a deviance trickling around her irises. A tic in her face, and she stared. A look that sent me back to that other place, but only for a moment. Only long enough to make believe that Grandmommy’s mouth was vined and twisted. The skin around her eyes gluing together now, eyes gone. Her face wrinkling like a raisin.

I almost dropped

the mug, and I gasped, used my other hand to grab hold of the oven handle. I wanted to count to make it go away. I needed to count.

One.

“Go to bed, Hylee,” Grandmommy said, her mouth not moving, dark shadows rising around her like smoke with tentacles.

Two.

She came closer, patted my shoulder, and I almost sank. “It’ll all be fine in the morning.”

Three.

I blinked, and she was herself again. My breathing eased a little, but I still felt uncomfortable. Did that really happen?

“But, Grandmommy.” My voice was only a whisper. If I spoke too loud, would the darkness come back?

“Good night,” she said, and she walked past me, leaving the kitchen. I waited for her to come back, maybe say more, but then her bedroom door closed, and my shoulders dropped.

That was it.

The kitchen seemed eerie now that she was gone, and a rush of fear pressed into my gut. What was that?

I set my mug in the sink and rushed up the staircase as if someone was following behind me—step for step, right on my heels.

No one was there when I closed my bedroom door. Even if I thought I heard something.

I exhaled, returned to the desk, checked my phone. Still no texts. I was pissed because I was confused and alone. I didn’t get why Grandmommy didn’t want to talk this through with me, or why Lucia was avoiding me. I needed someone, anyone, to listen to me.

She probably thinks you’re weird.

Shut up, I told my thoughts. Just shut up. And I sat down, took another breath, my eyes blurring. I turned on the

playlist, grabbed a soft charcoal pencil, flipped open a new page in my drawing pad. I sniffled as my eyes leaked. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.

Pressed pencil to paper and drew. The act of drawing would clear my mind, bring clarity. It always had. I kept drawing until the lines on the page turned into hands. They were the hands I saw in my head the night our family home was broken into, when I was in the tub, before the officer found me. I had different versions of them, filling notebook after notebook, and I could draw them with my eyes closed if I needed to. I knew these hands better than I knew myself. But tonight, I drew them with trepidation because after I disappeared, I saw a different version of these hands in my head.

And I hoped that drawing them might help me understand them better.

 

THREE

PAST: FEBRUARY, TWO WEEKS AGO—THE DISAPPEARANCE

At first, I was there.

At Mama and Daddy’s new rental, which I despised.

I didn’t like the smell—it was this old, milky thing that lingered—but I guessed it was better than the apartment complexes we’d been moving in and out of since I was nine. Nothing would ever really feel like home—not like the one I grew up in. The one where Bubba and I were twisted pinkies, always promising. Because even if everything in life was scientifically proven to end one day, our words were always forever.

It was the day before my seventeenth birthday, a Sunday, and Mama and Daddy wanted to have a small cookout.

The adults were on the back porch because Mama said even though I was turning seventeen, I still wasn’t old enough to be in “grown folks’ bidness.” Which really meant they didn’t want to teach me to play spades—a mistake on their part because should I decide to go off to college and return, my family would cause absolute havoc upon the realization that I didn’t know how to play.

“You really let them white folks get to you, huh?” an uncle would say. Or, “Dang, Hylee, how you don’t know how to play? You’re Black!”

Yet none of that would be a surprise. They say all those things anyway.

Whatever.

Anyway, I was glad that Lucia had arrived because my cousins weren’t here, and I could always count on her for a good time. Lucia and I had been besties since sixth grade when we were plopped in the same art class and assigned to sit next to each other.

Now we were on the couch in the living room, right across from the incense that was almost burned down to the end.

She was cackling over some video she’d found of a cat wailing as it tried to jump from one ledge to the other. It was the kind of funny where you laughed so hard you cried, and then you started sniffling because you were crying, and I figured I could use a laugh like that, but my stomach felt weird, uneasy. Maybe it was from how fast I’d eaten the baked beans and deviled eggs.

I stood up after but had to immediately sit back down. Felt like my head was on a Tilt-a-Whirl, and the bass from the music felt much louder than before—it blurred my vision—and I could feel it. I could feel the sound waves pushing through my ears. A migraine coming on, probably. It had to be.

I remember I couldn’t breathe too well, a bubble of air trapped in my throat.

I remember Lucia’s small voice asking if I was okay, but she felt so far away from me.

I remember one of Mama’s beauty shop friends tapping my shoulder. She must have come out of nowhere, but I could still smell the oil sheen in her hair.

I remember Daddy’s voice growing louder over the music, shouting my name like it would avert the coming, like it would avert what was about to happen next. He—he must have come from nowhere, too.

I thought I’d tilt my head back, to rest it, just for a second, just for a moment, but in that instant, I felt myself sink.

The sofa engulfed me like dough rising around fingers.

And then.

And then there was no light.

My joints felt disconnected from my body, my limbs gooey. All I could hear was my breath at first, the way it accelerated.

It was fire, electricity, and something more—much, much more.

When I ended up—where I ended up—it was night, and the stillness was so frigid, I felt my cheeks crack from the cold. I was in the backyard of my childhood home. I knew I was because I recognized that big tree there, the way it shifted and bent over

the wooden gazebo, the way the arms stretched out nakedly, like it wanted to scoop me up.

And the light, on the back porch, the way it was greenish and flickering. Always flickering. And the edge of the driveway, where I stood, the way it crumbled at the end, the way it ruined me and Bubba’s waterslide.

How did I get here?

The night was too quiet to feel real. No wind. No crickets. Not even a car passing by. I pressed my arms against my abdomen. Chills skittering like small bugs across my brown skin, down my spine. I could hear my breath leaving my body, jagged, a light puff filling the air.

Took a step forward, up the driveway, and the porch light stopped flickering. On cue, almost, like it was waiting for me.

To the right of the driveway, in a patch of dead grass, something shiny.

I thought I should probably leave it alone. It was dark, and I didn’t know where the hell I was, but it looked familiar.

I walked over to grab it, and when I pinched it between my fingers, I knew immediately. It was Bubba’s coin. He always had it on him; I hadn’t seen it in years. On both sides it had a skull and the words memento mori around the curvature.

Sirens then, the sound screeching. I pocketed the coin and ran back to the driveway. The flashing of red and blue lights bleeding into the darkness. Familiarity screaming at me. Footsteps slapping against pavement. A little Black girl running toward me from the other end of the driveway.

Running.

The ballies on the ends of her plaits clacking together. Closer, she got closer. And I could see now—I could see how her mouth twisted in the same way that vines twisted up the sides of the house. Her lips were stitched together, and the smallest, tiniest flowers budded on the edges of where her smile ended. There was skin covering where her eyes should have been. No eyelashes or anything—all of it gone.

And she would not stop coming for me.

The closer she got, the more I felt like I knew her, but I couldn’t move. It felt like I couldn’t breathe. My organs were filled with terror, my face numb.

Someone help me. Help me. Help!

And this had to be a dream. It had to be. Then she touched me, and I screamed, the sound ripping through my body, filling the night like the sirens. Then another voice came from somewhere, the sound of my name.

Hylee.

I was pulled into darkness again. Gone. Then a thud.

“Ow,” I grumbled, my forehead bouncing back against something hard. When I opened my eyes, I could see through blurry lenses that I was back at Mama and Daddy’s rental, lying on the front porch,

, beneath the porch light. I had been in the living room before, sitting on the couch. How—What was happening?

I lifted my head to see them, and the dizziness was back. Mama, Daddy, Lucia, and Sherie—they were all there, all wearing the same face. They looked as terrified as I had been, and confused. Their eyebrows twisted into scowls; their mouths hung low.

Was all of that real? I rolled onto my back, seeing my breath in the evening air, and when I did, I reached into my pocket, feeling the edge of cold, smooth metal. Memento mori. Bubba’s coin.

And I knew then, I knew that it wasn’t a dream. And then I threw up on the porch as reality punched me in the gut.

I had been sucked into some weird dimension.

I had been taken back to the place I hadn’t been in nine years.

Not since the incident.