“A CAUTIONARY TALE”
by Stephanie Kuehn
I WAS ON THE BEACH when I met him. Dover Springs was throwing its annual Feast of Avalon party to celebrate the autumnal equinox. This tradition involved hundreds of wealthy college students playing pagan for the night. Gripping lit torches and armed with cases of beer, they’d marched off campus and down the hillside as a unified force to flood Dover Cove, that narrow sliver of beach carved along the southwest end of our midsize California coastal town, where they’d promptly set a massive bonfire ablaze. Everything after was flicker-flame and hedonistic persuasion. A drum circle pounded away near the water’s edge, a rhythmic invocation urging the toga-draped crowd to lose themselves in the sand and the darkness, to dance, drink, fight, and fuck, all beneath the bone-colored moon.
They were more than happy to oblige.
My job that night was simple enough: I was working as a student safety escort. That sounds boring, I know, but someone had to do it. It was a two-mile return hike back up to campus; Dover Springs was like a fortress, built high on a hill, overlooking the water, sequestered from the rest of the world by geography, by privilege—hell, even by iron gates. If someone felt unsafe walking alone in the darkness, I was meant to go with them and ensure they arrived back at school without getting mugged, abducted, or—the most likely scenario—passing out in their own puke before rolling into a drainage ditch to die. Of course, I wasn’t armed with a gun or pepper spray or anything other than a bright orange vest and a heavy-duty flashlight, so my role was one of illusion more than genuine protection. But that, I suppose, could be said about a lot of things.
Despite my role—or likely, because of it—I might as well have been invisible on that beach. No one bothered to speak or look at me, and the party was pretty much going full throttle by the time the stranger stumbled from the darkness. I didn’t get a chance to see where he’d come from or what he’d been doing—pissing in the sand dunes, no doubt—but I watched as he weaved his way in my direction before his legs gave out, sending him crashing to the ground, not five feet from where I was.
I didn’t say anything. My initial impression was that the guy was both extremely tall and extremely drunk; he had a half-empty bottle of Maker’s Mark gripped in one hand. He was also a Dover student, that much was obvious, but not like the others. His heavy blond hair had been styled into a Kennedy-esque swoop, and he wore ridiculous clothes for the occasion: a tweed jacket and dark tie and brown leather oxfords, all of which were the antithesis of the equinox celebration, both in overall spirit and basic common sense. Who the hell wore oxfords to the beach?
It took a moment before the stranger became aware of my presence, but when he did, he sprawled his large body across the sand like a walrus, rolling onto one side with a grunt so that he was facing me. He reached his hand to shake mine.
“Hollis English,” he boomed.
“I’m C. J.,” I replied.
“C. J. what?”
“Perez.”
“Well, C. J. Perez.” He offered me a roguish hint of a smile. “As luck would have it, you’re just the person I’ve been looking for.”
* * *
This was about the last thing I expected to hear. “You’ve been looking for me? Why?”
The stranger pushed himself up to sitting, so that we were both facing the ocean, the swell and suck of the rising tide. “Because tonight of all nights, I need what you’re offering.”
“And what would that be?”
“Safety.”
“Oh.” I relaxed a bit. “Well, sure. Yeah. Whenever you want, we can walk back up together. That’s what I’m here for.”
Hollis held up his whiskey bottle and shook it. “In the interest of self-disclosure, you should probably know that I’m really fucking drunk.”
“That’s okay. It’s sort of expected.”
“Want some?” he asked.
“No, thanks.”
“What? Don’t you drink?”
“Nah.”
He scoffed. “Why the hell not? And don’t start in with some virtue argument. I see that gold cross hanging from your neck, C. J. Perez. If you’re guilty of one sin, you’re guilty of them all. And we’re all fucking guilty. Even you.”
“I just don’t like it. Plus, I’m working.”
“Boring.” Hollis waved a disinterested hand. “Tell me what year you are. I’ve never seen you around before.”
“I’m a freshman.”
“Figures. I’m a sophomore, by the way, so my wisdom about this school is infinitely greater than yours. Anything you need to know, I’m your man. What house are you?”
“None.”
“None?”
“I’m not pledging.”
His eyes gleamed with boozy admiration. “Then you’re one smart fucking kid. First year, and you already know there’s no sense fighting tradition in a place like this. Hell, I only pledged Pike because my asshole dad did it before me. He really is an asshole, by the way. Guess that means I’ll be one too. But such is life, right?”
I didn’t answer.
Hollis leaned back on tweed-covered elbows. “How old does that make you? Eighteen? Seventeen, even? Tell me you’re a goddamn adult.”
“I’m twenty,” I said.
He snorted. “Who the hell goes away to college when they’re twenty?”
“A lot of people.”
“Really?”
“Sure.”
“Why?”
I pushed my fingers into cold sand, savoring grit. “For me, it was mostly a matter of money. I spent a couple years working after I graduated. My family, well, we were going through a hard time. I couldn’t afford to leave. Until now.”
“What happened?”
“My father died.”
“Shit.” Hollis frowned, pushing his perfect hair back. “Well, that fucking sucks. I’m sorry, man.”
“Don’t be. He was in a lot of pain.”
“But I am,” he insisted. “Losing a family member like that . . . It changes everything. It’s not easy to keep going, to keep doing what you’re supposed to do, when something happens to make it all feel pointless.”
“True. But you don’t always know how tragedy’ll change things. Because, in a way, my father dying was lucky.”
“Lucky?”
“I don’t mean it wasn’t awful. I just mean, well, we had nothing, really, after what happened, so I ended up working down at the yacht harbor, trying to save money. But it was my boss there who nominated me for this citizen scholarship program. That’s why I was offered the spot here at Dover Springs. Full ride. Room and board. It wouldn’t have happened otherwise. So, you know, fate, mysterious ways, and all that.”
“Still,” Hollis breathed, “that’s a steep price to pay for college.”
“Everything has a price.”
“I guess. What was he like, your dad? Were you close?”
“He was brave,” I said after a moment. Then: “Yeah, we were close.”
“Did you grow up around here? In Dover?”
“Yup.”
“Me too.”
Of course he had. This fact didn’t surprise me, even though our paths had never crossed. Hollis and I came from different worlds, after all. Like everyone I’d grown up with, I was the product of both public schools and public housing, whereas he’d clearly been raised on prep school and trust funds. Dover was funny that way, a dimorphic sun-baked beach town, populated mostly by working poor struggling to hold on to declining jobs in tourism, agriculture, and manufacturing. But there was also the Other Dover, the part that sat separate from the rest of us, an oceanfront enclave of gated communities that housed the ultra wealthy, the powerful, the influential. The people living in those communities rarely ventured to other parts of town. They never had to. And when it came time for their Ivy League–rejected offspring to flee the nest—or more accurately, hop out of it—Dover Springs was the obvious choice. Never mind that the school’s notorious exclusivity was based solely on tuition price, not reputation—the end result was the same; they could afford what others couldn’t.
“Hey, look at that,” Hollis said.
I turned to see him pointing at the hills above us, at the exact spot where the school sat, high on a distant bluff, hidden behind trees.
“What am I looking at?” I asked.
“The fog,” he said a little breathlessly.
Hollis was right. Dover Cove faced south, which meant the wind rattled our backs, blowing down from the north. Heavy gusts pushed swirling sheets of fog straight off the ocean and into the hills, where it would gather in clumps and cling to the earth until sunrise. This soupy claustrophobic gloom was a defining feature of our town. It seeped into your pores and through your mind, and even if you lived in a place with triple-pane windows and an air-purifying system to keep the fog from slinking inside and playing host to mold spores and chronic illness, there was no way to escape it completely. It was pretty much the one thing everyone in Dover had to reckon with on a fairly regular basis.
“I like the fog,” I said. “I know it’s shitty to drive in, but it always feels so familiar. Like it’s meant to be here. Like it has purpose. Yet at the same time it reminds me of things I couldn’t possibly know. A different time period, perhaps. Or a different life.”
“You mean déjà vu?” Hollis asked.
“I guess. It’s weird, but it’s something I feel a lot. This sense that I’ve been here before, on this beach, watching this fog.”
“Maybe you have,” he said softly.
I turned to look at him. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Maybe there’s more to the fog than people realize. You’ve heard of the Dover Phantom, haven’t you?”
I laughed. “Of course. Everyone’s heard of the Phantom. He’s our local legend. Our town monster. Our cautionary tale.”
“But a tale against what?”
“You tell me.”
Hollis’s eyes glittered in the moonshine. “You don’t believe he’s real, do you?”
“The Phantom?” I asked. “Yeah, sorry for the shocker, but I have a hard time believing there’s a serial killer who can materialize from the fog stalking the town of Dover.”
“Well, you should believe it because I can assure you he’s absolutely, one hundred percent real. And by the way, it’s not Dover he’s stalking.”
“It’s not?”
“Oh no,” Hollis English told me. “It’s us.”
* * *
I watched as he downed more whiskey. “Us?”
He gestured at the party, at the staggering hordes of college students.
“You mean everyone on the beach?”
“I mean our peers. Our fellow students. You and me. All of us. You think ’cause you’re at some fancy private school now, you don’t have to worry about watching your back?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Yeah, well, our precious school’s not as safe as it’s made out to be. Doesn’t matter how much our daddies pay to send us here. There’s some dark shit going on. Did you know someone broke into the admin building last night and stole some stuff?”
“What’d they take?”
“Don’t know. But the point is, even with people like you around—”
My spine stiffened. “What do you mean, people like me?”
Hollis gestured at my vest. “This. This whole useless thing you’re doing. You’re a goddamn safety escort. You’re supposed to make me feel good about being drunk and stupid and letting my guard down, but let’s be real—the world’s not any less dangerous just because you’re in it.”
“Then stop drinking,” I snapped. “And while you’re at it, find your own way back to campus.”
“Fuck you.”
Whatever. I turned my back on him and the fog and the murky hills and instead set my gaze once again on the ocean, that rippling vastness stretching toward the horizon. The drum circle—now accompanied by wasted students howling at the moon—pounded on, and while the water was somewhat calm, everything on the beach was pure chaos. The Feast of Avalon was intended to honor the balance of light and darkness, that fleeting moment of harmony on Earth’s wild tilt around the sun. But for Dover students, most of whom had never known true darkness, it was their chance to throw harmony to the wind, to raise as much as hell as they dared, so long as they woke up the next morning with their gilded futures still intact.
I’d had enough. I jumped to my feet, brushed sand from my knees. Began to walk away.
“Wait,” Hollis called after me. “Where are you going?”
I paused long enough to stare down at him, at his perfect hair and stupid oxfords, which were soaked and ruined and cost more than anything I’d ever owned. “I’m getting out of here. I’m sick of this shitty party. I’m sick of everything.”
“But you can’t leave me.”
“Sure I can.”
“Your job is literally to help me.”
“Oh, so now you care about my useless job?”
“Yes!”
“Why?”
“Please, C. J.!” The haughty expression on Hollis’s face had shifted into one of sheer panic. “I’m sorry I said that, all right? I told you I’m an asshole. But I need you. I do. Or I need someone—anyone—who’s willing to keep me safe tonight!”
* * *
It’s fair to say I can be swayed by emotion. I guess that goes a long way in explaining how I was able to shove aside my resentment toward Hollis and the fact that he genuinely believed his safety was worth more than my own. That he genuinely believed I might agree with him. But it was the Dover way, after all, to assume that things like financial aid and scholarships would generate gratitude, not enlightenment, on the part of the recipient. In that sense his attitude was hard to take personally. So Hollis English and I ended up walking back to campus together, although he refused to tell me what it was he was afraid of and why he didn’t want to be alone.
“You have to tell me something,” I said as we left Dover Cove, walking up the rickety beach steps and past the boardwalk and the tributary that was lined with pussy willows and croaked with peeper frogs. From there we cut through the north end of town, zigzagging through the fog-hazed streets, heading for the access trail that would take us into the woods and back up to campus. “It’s going to be a long walk if you don’t talk. And I already told you about my family.”
Hollis dipped his head as we strode across the macadam. Something was jumpy and odd about him—he kept looking over his shoulder—but slugging more whiskey and smoking a clove cigarette seemed to lift his mood. “You like horror films, C. J.?”
“Yeah, sure. Sometimes, I guess.”
“What are some of your favorites?”
I thought about this. “Well, I don’t like gore. So nothing with a lot of blood.”
“Seriously?”
“Yes, seriously. I guess what I like are stories that don’t just make you scared of what’s out there, waiting to get you. I like the ones that make you scared of what might be hidden somewhere inside of yourself. Not knowing one’s own secrets, never mind anyone else’s.”
“Give me an example.”
“Jacob’s Ladder. Also Stoker The Invitation. The Exorcist, even.”
Hollis offered a begrudging nod. “Decent choices. I approve.”
“But you know, I think Psycho might be my favorite of all. I figure if someone can make you empathize with a killer, they must’ve done something right.”
“Empathy,” Hollis echoed. “Can’t say that identifying with a killer is ever what I’m looking for in a film. Or in anything.”
“What are you looking for?”
“Justice.”
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself. “When has justice ever been the source of horror? Isn’t it usually the opposite?”
Hollis scowled. “I don’t mean law-and-order-type justice. I mean more of a spiritual kind of thing. Karma or whatever. Like The Ring. Or I Spit on Your Grave.”
“You’re talking about revenge,” I said. “That’s different. Those aren’t stories about fairness.”
“Then what are they about?”
“Punishment, I guess. Retribution.”
He shrugged. “Sounds like justice to me.”
I didn’t answer. We’d reached the dirt trail that would take us into the trees and out of the town proper. The fog haze grew thicker, the shadows darker, gloom closing in on all sides. I switched on my flashlight.
Hollis grabbed for my arm. “Hey, turn that off!”
“What?”
“I said turn it off!”
“But I can’t see!”
“I mean it!”
“Fine!” He kept grabbing at me until I shoved him back; Hollis was significantly larger than I was, but he was too drunk to be very coordinated. I held on to the flashlight but finally switched it off like he asked. “What the hell?”
“I don’t want anyone to see us.”
“Like who?”
Hollis peered over his shoulder again. “Like anyone.”
“What?”
He walked faster, leaving me to catch up with him. Soon I was sweating from the effort, the trail growing steeper as we trudged upward through the night.
“You ever hear about Danielle Bradford?” Hollis asked after a moment.
I glanced at him. “She someone you know?”
“Not exactly. She was a student here back in 1915. That was the fourth year Dover Springs was in operation.”
“What about her?”
“Well, Danielle was a local, like us. She came to study music—played flute and cello, although from what I’ve learned, she wasn’t particularly talented at either. Anyway, when she was in her sophomore year, on a foggy September night, just like this one, Danielle finished practicing and left the conservatory. She was trying to make it back to her dorm before the ten o’clock curfew, according to witness reports. Only . . .”
“Only what?”
“Only she never got there. They found her body the next morning, in the bushes right outside her own room. Her throat had been slashed with a razor.”
“Jesus. Who did it?”
“They never found out. Two years later . . . it happened again. Only this time the victim was a guy. Samuel Forsythe. Also a sophomore. He didn’t show up to class after visiting with his family for a weekend in March. I guess his friends assumed he hadn’t returned to campus. Well, two days later he was found hanging from a tree in the woods behind the chapel, which used to be on the north side of campus, by the way, down by the stream. They moved it in 1956 due to flooding.”
“So he’d been murdered too?”
“That one was harder to tell. But a third student, Graham Keller, was killed the year after that, also on a night with particularly dense fog—this time in September again. He’d gotten separated from his girlfriend while hiking and was found in a clearing the next morning. He’d been stabbed in the neck repeatedly with an ice pick—so clearly murder. This sparked rumors of a serial killer in Dover. Our very own Jack the Ripper, but someone with a taste for college students, not prostitutes. And because of the fog and the mysterious nature of the deaths, it wasn’t long before the killer was given a name.”
“The Dover Phantom,” I said.
“Exactly. But you want to know what happened next?”
“What’s that?”
“The murders stopped.”
“Stopped?”
He nodded. “For over twenty years. The next killing wasn’t until March 20, 1939. Mary Downing. She was found strangled near the tennis courts. And there were two more murders. In 1941 and ’42. They stopped again until ’65, and it’s been like that ever since: three murders approximately every quarter century. We’re up to thirteen dead students now, including one a few years back, which means we’re due two more for this cycle. And sure, people know about some of these deaths, obviously. Maybe they’ve even heard of the Dover Phantom. But no one’s put all the pieces together the way that I have. No one sees it for what it really is. A pattern.”
“A pattern?”
“Yes! It means something. This is all happening for a reason. And not only do we get three killings every generation, but they all take place in late March or late September. Do you know why that is?”
“There’s a lot of fog?” I ventured.
“It’s the equinox.”
“What?”
“I’m serious. The vernal equinox is March 20 and the autumnal is tonight. September 22. Those are the two times of the year when day and night are equal, and all the killings have taken place on or within a day or two of these dates. That can’t be a coincidence.”
I was beyond baffled. “So you think these deaths are connected—both to each other and to a specific celestial event? But why?”
“That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I mean, it’s a whole century of murder, but because it’s been happening over such a long period of time, no one cares. Except me.”
“So why do you care?”
His voice hardened. “Are you saying you don’t?”
“No, but you want me to believe in a killer who strikes every twenty-five years or so, exactly three times, only on these dates, and that he’s been around for over a hundred years?”
“That’s right.”
“How could that be?”
“I’ve thought about that.” Hollis licked his lips. “A lot. Because the killings being random would be the most obvious explanation. Dover has crime. Hell, we’ve had our fair share of murders around here; it’s no wonder not everything is front-page news. Did you know that during the seventies, there were at least three active serial killers in this general part of California?”
I nodded because I did know. Dover, for all its gated excess and idyllic seaside beauty, was known for its drifting population and increasing drug trade. Loose morals and New Age fetishism. Beneath our summer tans and salt-spray ease, darker urges lingered. Violence. Racism. Cultish ideologies. Utter greed and dirt-cheap pleasures. “But that doesn’t answer the question about how he could be around for such a long period of time.”
“Well, what if the killer’s not a he?”
I cocked my head. “You mean, what if the killer’s a woman?”
“No, I mean, what if the reason the killings have been happening for so long is because the killer’s not a who, but a what?”
* * *
I gaped at Hollis, but before I could respond, the roar of an approaching car engine made me jump. We’d reached the junction where the wooded trail joined with the main drive leading up to the school, and I whipped around in time to see a pair of headlights careening out of a hairpin turn and rocketing up the hillside.
I stumbled back at the sight, reaching to pull Hollis with me, only to find him not reacting to the vehicle at all—he just stood there, staring at me in that strange way of his. It was creepy, really, so I hissed: “What do you mean, the killer’s a what? Like a tree?”
“No, not like a tree,” he snapped peevishly. “You’re an idiot.”
“Then what are you talking about?”
But Hollis refused to answer. Instead, he folded his arms and set his jaw, like I’d offended him in some way. I didn’t get a chance to ask more questions because the approaching vehicle—which turned out to be a silver pickup, its bed filled with a crowd of shouting students—blared its horn and came to a screeching stop beside us. The air reeked of burned rubber.
“Hollis English!” The driver of the truck leaned out of the window. “Holy shit. What the hell are you doing out here?”
Hollis said nothing, but I stepped forward, put on my friendliest smile. “We were just heading back to campus. Want to give us a ride?”
“Who are you?” a girl from the back asked me. She wore a Giants hat and knelt on the wheel well. “I’ve never seen you before.”
A guy seated beside her shone a flashlight at me—the reflective piping on my vest lit up in an embarrassing way—and he hooted. “Look at that! He’s a safety escort, Z. Hollis needs a grown-up to walk around with him.”
The girl clapped her hands. “That makes total sense.”
“Doesn’t it?”
She looked at me again. “So how long have you been working here?”
“Huh?”
“You’re one of the new hires for the grounds staff, right? That’s why you got stuck doing this?”
Her friend rolled his eyes. “Jesus, Z. He’s a student. Probably doing work-study or something.”
I nodded.
“Come on,” the driver said impatiently. “I don’t give a fuck who the kid is so long as he doesn’t jack us. Get in the back already. Let’s go.”
We scrambled into the truck bed, where I promptly thanked everyone and introduced myself. Hollis, on the other hand, remained a sullen heap, pulling his knees to his chest and refusing to say anything, despite the fact everyone appeared to know who he was.
“You coming to the after-party?” The girl with the Giants hat squeezed between us. She seemed to want to make things up with me. “Or are safety escorts not allowed to have any fun?”
“What after-party?” I asked.
“At Pike house. Hollis knows about it. He’s supposed to be helping host the damn thing, but you know how he is.”
“Not really. We just met tonight.”
The girl grinned. “He hasn’t tried to convince you to go ghost hunting with him, has he?”
“Uh, that hasn’t come up.”
Her eyes sparkled. “But he told you about the ghosts, didn’t he?”
I glanced at Hollis, who looked more miserable than ever. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Oh, he told you,” the girl said brightly. “I can tell. And look, we all think he’s nuts, but who knows? Maybe he’s right. Maybe we’re all being haunted.”
“Haunted?” I echoed.
She pinched my arm. “He’s not going to puke, is he? He looks like he’s going to puke.”
“He might. He’s had a lot to drink. More than he should’ve, that’s for sure.”
Hollis lifted his head, just enough to glare at me. “You know, I can hear you, Perez.”
“Sorry,” I muttered.
He kept up with the glaring long enough to pull his whiskey bottle from his pocket and drink more.
The girl whispered in my ear, “Don’t worry about him. He’s always like this. He’s been strange ever since . . .”
“Ever since what?” I asked.
“Never mind. He just needs to have fun. And you know, after that shitty thing I said to you earlier, maybe you do too.”
I hesitated. “Yeah, maybe.”
The truck rocked through a pothole, sending the girl bouncing against me. She laughed at my startled expression. “Well, in that case,” she said. “There’s no excuse. You have to come to our party.”
* * *
The truck paused briefly at the security gate before finally rolling on to campus. The ground fog beneath us had grown so dense the road had all but vanished. Everything else still twinkled with beauty, with seclusion; the Dover Springs property was a lush woodland oasis consisting of almost two hundred acres of tree-lined trails, quaint classrooms speckled among the redwoods, and swinging footbridges that stretched across burbling creeks.
Clustered on the east side of campus, a row of stately frat houses sat far from the freshman dorms, close to the trees, and after we’d parked in the nearby student lot and were walking up toward Pike house, the girl with the Giants hat pulled a pair of devil horns from her purse. I watched as she slipped them on over her baseball hat before digging around for a glittery silver halo that she gently placed on top of my head.
“What’s this for?” I asked.
“You’re going to need it where we’re going.”
“I am? What kind of party is this?”
“You still don’t know?”
“No.”
The girl grinned as she trotted up the front porch steps ahead of me. “Heaven and hell.”
Part—all right, most—of me longed to follow her, but when I turned to look for Hollis, I felt a twinge of guilt. Or shame, really, for having abandoned him. While everyone else from the truck was flooding into the frat house, he remained standing off to the side, in the shadows, with his broad shoulders slumped and his hands in his pockets.
“Nice halo,” he muttered as I walked over to him.
“I bet I can find you one.”
He shook his head. “Go get laid if you want. You don’t need to take care of me.”
“I don’t want to get laid.”
“Everyone wants to get laid.”
“Well, I don’t,” I insisted.
He pouted. “I’m not hunting ghosts, by the way. Zoe hears what she wants.”
“Yeah, well, you were the one who said we were all in danger from a killer who wasn’t a person. What’re people supposed to think?”
“We are in danger!” he cried. “All of us! Right now. Well, technically, you aren’t. But the rest of us are.”
“Why not me?”
His eyes flashed. “You really want to know?”
“Yes!”
“Then I’ll show you. Come on.” Hollis turned and beckoned for me to follow, leading me up onto the porch, through the frat house front door, and straight into hell.
Once inside, I stopped and stared. Then I couldn’t stop staring. It was impressive, really, to see how quickly the party had moved from beach to home. Unlike Hollis and me, everyone else apparently must’ve driven back to campus after the eleven p.m. bonfire cutoff. The entire downstairs of Pike house was currently decorated in flames and pitchforks while a black light lit the living room with swirls of neon and the crush of painted bodies. Iron Butterfly’s “In-a-Gadda-Da-Vida” thundered over the speakers, set on hellish repeat, and the line for the keg stretched from the kitchen, winding down a long hallway.
I probably would’ve kept standing there for all eternity except Hollis tapped my shoulder and pointed to a staircase. Spell broken, I nodded and trailed after him, departing hell and ascending into a world bright and glittering—the second floor of the frat house had been transformed into a cloudy fog machine–generated sort of paradise. Every surface was covered in aluminum foil and flickered with candlelight. Glitter and angel wings fluttered from the ceiling while Sia sang passionately.
The party’s theme, it dawned on me, was a direct nod to the Feast of Avalon—that other celebration of light and dark, good and evil, those warring forces of our world. But there was no time for any deeper theological musing; dragging me down a confusing twist of corridors, Hollis quickly pulled me into a filthy bedroom and shut the door behind us. Then locked it. I looked around. The place was disgusting. It resembled a rat’s nest more than anything else—papers were tacked to the wall, clothes strewn everywhere, dishes piled in a corner, including dirty ones crusted with bits of food.
“Nasty.” I pointed at a small cloud of fruit flies. “Don’t you eat in the dining hall ever?”
“Not anymore,” he said. “Now look at this.”
“At what?”
“Right here.” Shoving a bunch of crap onto the floor, he switched on a desk lamp and flipped open his laptop. Huddled beside him, I watched as he got online and pulled up the Dover Springs website, navigating to the page titled “Our History.” “Tell me what you see.”
I squinted at the screen. The page described information I already knew: how the site of Dover Springs had originally housed a private mental asylum that had been in operation from 1886 to 1907, at which point the hospital had tragically burned down. Rather than rebuild, the doctors who had operated the asylum decided it would be better and more charitable for the Dover community to start a private university instead.
“Okay,” I said when I was done reading. “So what?”
“Did you look at the picture?”
I hadn’t, but on the page was an old black-and-white photograph of a group of stuffy-looking old white guys—the school’s founders. They were standing on the main campus’s lawn, flanking a large sign with the Dover Springs crest carved into it.
“How many people are in that photo?” Hollis asked.
I quickly counted. “Thirteen.”
“Do you consider that a good number or a bad one?”
I paused. “An unlucky one.”
“Fair enough,” Hollis said. “Well, I’ve been curious about the real history behind this place, so I did some digging into who these guys were and especially the asylum that was here before. The one that burned. And despite all that charitable talk, it was a pretty fucking awful place. There were reports of abuse. Neglect. People claimed they were wrongfully held for years on end. Families were broken up. Spouses couldn’t get their loved ones out, even when they wanted to leave.”
I frowned. “But that’s just how it was back then, right? People with mental illnesses weren’t treated fairly. Or humanely. I mean, it’s shitty, but I don’t know that it means the Dover Springs Asylum was any more cruel than any other place.”
“Maybe not. But they were definitely more corrupt. Did you know that the town of Dover used to have a special committee that had the power to determine if someone needed to be institutionalized? And their decisions were legally binding. There were no hearings or means of recourse; they had complete discretion. This committee called themselves the Commission of Lunacy.”
“No way,” I said. “That can’t be a real thing.”
“It was. And from the records I found, those same thirteen doctors who ran that hellhole, who got subsidies from the state for every patient they housed, were the exact same doctors who made up the commission.”
I pointed at the photo. “These guys?”
He nodded. “It’s all on record, if you know where to look. With the commission’s power, they were able to have Dover citizens committed for the most ridiculous reasons: being distraught over a breakup, losing faith in their religion. Even for getting fired from a job or protesting unfair work practices. Usually, it was poor people. Or women.”
“Jesus.”
“The worst of it is, when the hospital caught fire, all the staff and doctors got out safely, but they didn’t go back for a lot of the patients. And you know how long it must’ve taken the fire department to get up that hill. By the time they arrived, nineteen patients had died, locked in their rooms; some in restraints, waiting for help that never came. Can you imagine? Being shut in there for no reason in the first place—or because someone wanted you locked up and out of the way—and then dying like that, completely helpless?”
“I really can’t,” I said, although I wondered if he knew anything at all about our country’s current issue with mass incarceration. “It’s disgusting. But, Hollis, these doctors, the school founders . . . When you said the killer wasn’t a who but a what, what did you mean?”
“I meant, what if the killer’s not a person at all, but a whole group of people?”
My mind spun. Thirteen. He’d said there’d been thirteen doctors.
“What kind of group?” I asked cautiously.
“What else?” Hollis said. “A coven.”
* * *
A coven. I stepped back from his desk. “You can’t actually believe that.”
His face colored. “Sure I can! It makes sense, doesn’t it? They were the Commission of Lunacy, for God’s sake. They essentially murdered nineteen innocent people who they wrongly locked up, and as a result, they were rewarded with this school, where they profited even more. If that’s not evil, I don’t know what is. And so maybe that coven is still around. Maybe those same thirteen men weren’t men at all, and they have to keep killing every so often, in order to . . .”
I stared at him. “In order to what?”
“Stay alive,” he whispered.
I blew air through my cheeks. “That still doesn’t explain the time period. I haven’t seen any hundred-and-fifty-year-old men wandering around Dover recently.”
“But what if they don’t look old? What if that’s the point? Think about it: If you needed a constant stream of young people to sacrifice for your own eternal youth, and you couldn’t run your asylum scam anymore, what better plan could you have than building your own elite university and inviting those young people to pay you for the privilege of coming here?”
I was speechless. This wasn’t just drunken rambling. This poor guy really believed what he was saying, that those same thirteen men still lived up here, still walked among the students, in some youthful form or another.
He kept going. “It’s the equinox. That’s the key. I thought it was ghosts at first; you know, some sort of specter. But that was wrong. The celestial event is definitely part of the ritual, which means there’s a good chance someone here on campus is going to die tonight. Before sunrise. Although you don’t have to worry about being targeted.”
“Why’s that?” I asked.
“You’re too old. Everyone who’s been killed so far has been nineteen.”
“Nineteen?”
“The same number as those who died in the fire.”
“Ah.” Then it hit me. “Wait. How old are you, Hollis?”
The smile he gave was a grim one. “I’ll be twenty next week.”
* * *
There was no talking sense to him after that. Hollis really and truly believed what he was saying, and nothing I said changed his mind. Apparently, a coven of witches was running the school and sacrificing its own students on the nights of the equinox in some black magic blood rite so that they could live forever. It was a terrifying thought, sure. But not one I could bring myself to believe.
At all.
“So what’re you going to do?” I asked after we’d gone back and forth for a bit. It was clear our opinions on the matter were deadlocked. It was also clear he resented my skepticism.
Hollis paced the room. “I told you. Tonight’s the best shot I’ll ever have, so I’m going to find the Phantom and I’m going to stop him.”
“Him?”
“Them!”
“How?”
“I don’t know!”
I went for the opening. “See! That’s just it. You don’t even know what you’re looking for, which means you won’t find it and you won’t disprove it, and that means you’ll just keep—”
“Shut up!” Hollis stopped to seethe in my direction. “I already know you don’t fucking believe me. You’ve made that pretty goddamn clear.”
“It’s not that. . . .”
He walked toward me then. His hands were curled into fists. “You don’t get it, do you? I don’t want your opinion. I never wanted it, C. J. It’s worthless to me because you don’t know shit about anything. So just shut your mouth. Okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
Hollis sneered. “You’re pathetic.”
I didn’t argue with him on that point. Instead, I shut my mouth and stood there, staring at the floor, waiting until Hollis had grabbed his coat and his whiskey bottle and stormed from the room.
Slammed the door behind him.
* * *
I stayed like that for a while, unsure of what to do or how to do it or if I should even do anything at all. But in the end I couldn’t do nothing. So after a few minutes, I left Hollis’s room, winding my way back through heaven and down the staircase into hell, where I found the party had grown more crowded, more out of control. Iron Butterfly’s seventeen-minute psychedelic dirge droned on while someone lined up shots of Fireball on the dining room table. I couldn’t see Hollis anywhere, but I did spot Zoe, the girl from the truck who’d given me my halo. She was leaning against the wall, still in her Giants cap and devil horns, and I couldn’t help myself. I went to her.
“Hey,” I said.
She smiled. “It’s the safety escort.”
“My name’s C. J.”
“How ’bout a drink, C. J.?”
“No, thanks.”
“You know, I still think it’s weird,” she said.
“What’s weird?”
“That I’ve never seen you before. You don’t look familiar at all.”
“It’s a big campus,” I said.
“It’s really not.”
My cheeks warmed. “Yeah, well, it’s pretty easy to be invisible when everyone wants to pretend you don’t exist.”
Her brow furrowed. “Why would anyone want to pretend that?”
I opened my mouth, but before I could say anything else, the music cut off. The overhead lights came on, too.
“Oh shit,” Zoe whispered, and pointed behind me.
I turned and groaned. Hollis English was standing on a coffee table in the middle of the living room. He looked more disheveled than ever: his hair a greasy mess, his eyes wild and bloodshot, his oxfords somehow missing. In one hand he still held on to that damn whiskey bottle, but in the other he gripped what appeared to be a large hunting knife, the kind with a long jagged-edge blade. He definitely hadn’t had that before. I held my breath, watching in horror as Hollis staggered, almost fell, then raised the knife high above his head with a roar of fury.
“One of you here,” he screeched, “is a killer! You’re worse than that, even. You’re a monster. I know what you’re planning, so you can quit hiding behind whatever mask you’re wearing. Show yourself! Come after me this time and stop being such a goddamn coward!”
In response, the crowd around him began hooting and laughing, as if this were a performance they’d seen before.
“Maybe it’s me tonight!” someone called out.
“Or me!” yelled another.
“Maybe we all want you dead!”
“Or undead!”
“No . . . definitely dead!”
“Should I do something?” I whispered to Zoe. “This is bad.”
She shook her head. “The best thing to do is ignore him. He won’t remember any of this tomorrow.”
That seemed a reasonable tactic, except a guy who I recognized from earlier as the driver of the silver pickup, elbowed his way through the crowd right then and swaggered up to Hollis. The expression on his face was one of pure disgust.
“Let’s do this, English,” he said. “I’m sick of your paranoid shit. If it weren’t for your dad, I would’ve kicked your ass out of this house by now. So yeah, tonight, I’m all for doing whatever the hell it is you want. If one of us is looking to kill you, let’s just be done with it. Okay?”
Hollis shrugged. “Okay.”
The guy snapped his fingers.
And the lights went out.
For the first ten seconds there was silence. Zoe reached for my hand, and I held hers. Then I heard a thud, like bodies colliding. Followed by what sounded like a piece of furniture tipping over. Someone screamed and glass shattered, and that was when panic set in because everyone was shouting and moving, and someone shoved me from behind. I wrapped my arms around Zoe, to keep her from being run into, and more screaming started and—
The lights came back on.
Hollis was nowhere to be found.
“Hey, where is he?” a voice shouted.
“What the hell?” The truck driver guy lay on the floor, rubbing his cheek. “That asshole sucker punched me.”
“Look!” A girl with feathery angel wings pointed at the carpet next to the now-tipped-over coffee table. A dark stain covered the gray shag. It hadn’t been there before.
“Oh shit.” Everyone closed in.
“Is it blood?” someone whispered.
The first girl crept closer, her face ghost white. She put her fingers in the stain and sniffed them.
“It’s just wine,” she announced loudly. “Red wine.”
“Fucking Hollis.” The crowd stepped back. Turned away. The party quickly picked up where it had left off. Iron Butterfly crooned once more about walking the land, and the bottle of Fireball returned to the table, along with the shot glasses.
“Where do you think he went?” Zoe asked me.
“No idea. You know him better than I do.”
“Not really. I mean, we went to school together growing up, but he was always such a snob. He changed after what happened with his sister, of course, but that’s to be expected, isn’t it?”
“What happened with his sister?”
Zoe touched her horns. “You don’t know?”
“No.”
“She died. It happened a few years back. Up here, actually. She hung herself in the woods down by the quarry. It was around this time of year, and from everything I heard, it was definitely a suicide, but Hollis always thought otherwise.”
“She hung herself?”
She nodded.
“He had a knife, Zoe.”
“I know.”
“Have you seen him with it before?”
“No.”
I fretted. “This isn’t good. His sister dying like she did, it’s—”
“It’s what?” she pressed.
“Well, one of the risk factors for suicide is a family history of it.”
“How do you know that?”
“I just do.”
“So you think he might hurt himself?”
“I don’t know. But I’m worried. I should go find him.”
Zoe bit her lip. “You want me to come with you?”
I did want that, of course, but knew better than to say so. “I’ll be fine. I can take care of it on my own.”
A hint of relief sparked in her eyes. “Good luck.”
“Thanks,” I told her. “I’ll need it.”
* * *
Then I was in the fog again, running, moving, as fast as I could. I fled the frat house, tearing down the porch steps and sprinting for the trees, away from the noise and the party. Once on the main footpath, my shoes pounded the earth, as fast I dared to go. My flashlight was useless in the soup, and it was only my studied knowledge of the winding circuit of trails that carried me across the far edges of campus. Toward my destination.
I kept going, navigating on pure faith and desperation, crossing over no less than two clattering bridges in the process. The Dover River churned beneath me, and the deeper I ran into the creeping tendrils of fog and clinging haze, the greater my sense of déjà vu grew. I’d made this breathless journey before, it seemed—perhaps in some other lifetime or some other world, but I’d been filled with this exact same swell of fatalism.
I knew how this story ended.
Didn’t I?
Reaching the quarry at last—the spot where Hollis’s sister had lost her life—I stumbled my way around the perimeter. The air reeked of moss and stone, and with the way mist had gathered on the water’s surface, the entire area resembled a frothing cauldron.
I cupped my hands together. Called out: “Hollis! Hollis, where are you?”
No answer.
I kept stumbling, kept calling his name. Until there, finally, on the far edge of the water, perched high on a boulder and hidden beneath the swaying branches of a large willow tree, I found him. Air slipped from my lungs, and I hurried forward on grateful legs, only to have my gratitude veer toward panic as I realized just how close he was to tumbling into the frigid water.
“Hey, C. J.,” Hollis said as I approached, although he didn’t bother lifting his head. His words were slurring worse than ever. “You look like a goddamn angel.”
The halo. He meant my halo. “Why’d you run away like that?”
“I had to, man. I had no fucking choice.”
“You do have a choice, Hollis. I promise you.”
“I really don’t.” His voice cracked, taking on a plaintive tone.
“Hey, hey, why don’t you give me those.” Climbing up, reaching him at last, I gently plucked both the hunting knife and whiskey bottle from his hands. Hollis absolutely did not need either.
“I puked,” he told me, gesturing at the ground. “A lot.”
My nose wrinkled. “That’s okay. But maybe you should come in a little closer from the edge. You don’t want to fall in. You’ll drown.”
“I know you don’t believe me,” he said sullenly. “No one does. Everyone thinks I’m crazy.”
I sighed. “I don’t think you’re crazy, Hollis. Just sad. Zoe told me about your sister.”
His eyes brimmed with sorrow. “They killed her. I know they did. She didn’t fucking kill herself.”
“Maybe someone did kill her. I don’t know. I really don’t. But I do know it wasn’t a coven that did it. Or a witch. Or anything at all like that.”
“How can you be sure?”
“Because evil is a man-made commodity. One hundred percent. Do you remember what I said earlier? The most frightening thing is the knowledge that true evil lays within. Not in magic or the supernatural. But in ourselves.”
Hollis waved at the cross I wore around my neck. The one that had been my father’s. “You really believe that?”
“I’m not saying there aren’t things in this world we don’t understand. But those doctors you were talking about? The Lunacy Commission? They were just men. Bad men, who died many, many years ago, the way that all men do. Yes, they used their wealth and status to profit off the suffering of others, and yes, when that hospital burned down and killed those nineteen patients, it was a tragedy. But a human tragedy. Of the most unjust and unfair sort. But you want to know what else I believe?”
“What’s that?” he asked.
“That while man doesn’t endure, the evil he creates does. There are men alive today with different faces, who wield different power, but that old Lunacy Commission still exists. It never went anywhere. It may take on different forms, but its function is always the same. So the pattern you should be looking for is one of exploitation, not magic. Because those deaths you’re so interested in aren’t the reason. They’re the reaction.”
“But a reaction to what? Why would any of this happen?”
I crawled closer to sit beside him on the rock. “Maybe I can explain it this way: you and I, we both grew up here in Dover, but our lives, the way we see the world, couldn’t be more different.”
Hollis let his head loll in my direction. “You think?”
“I know. And see, first off, the Dover Phantom, this killer you’re so obsessed with, well, when I was a kid, I wasn’t taught that he was a monster. Or anything to fear. In part, of course, because people like me didn’t come to places like this. We were never the ones in harm’s way.”
“Well, you’re here now.”
I smiled. “But I’m really not. Just because I was offered a scholarship doesn’t mean I took it. Like you told me, this school’s not as safe as it appears. For example, last night, it wasn’t hard for me to break into one of your admin buildings and steal this vest. Or to sit on the beach and wait for the school drunk to find me.”
His face clouded with confusion. “Huh?”
“Look,” I said soothingly. “I know you’ve thought a lot about this. But sometimes, to see the whole truth, you have to step back from what’s personal in order to take in the bigger picture.”
“What picture is that?”
“What does your father do, Hollis?”
“He works for a pharmaceutical company. TriGen. He’s the CFO. But what does that have to—”
“Did you know my dad worked for that same company? In one of the manufacturing plants. And when he got injured on the job, TriGen wouldn’t pay his workers’ comp claim. Not only that, but they fired him and countersued in order to set an example for their other workers. My dad stood up to them—I told you he was brave—but between his medical bills and legal fees, he never had a chance. He lost everything in a matter of months. So when he drove to the beach on a clear night when the stars were shining and shot himself, it was his gift to us. TriGen dropped the suit and paid his bills. Not because they cared, obviously, but even they knew better than to bring a grieving widow into the courtroom.”
“Jesus. Fuck. I’m sorry, man. That’s terrible. I had no idea.”
I kept smiling. “Yeah, well, there’s a lot of terrible in this world. Because there are a lot of things people like you don’t want to see. Or change. It’s what you’ve been taught, but it doesn’t have to be your destiny.”
Hollis shot me a dark look. “What do you mean, people like me?”
“I mean, people who refuse to accept that a force they’ve always seen as monstrous is actually something different altogether.”
“Like what?”
“Like a hero. A human one, but a hero nonetheless.”
His eyes bulged. “What are you talking about? I don’t fucking believe that.”
“You sure?”
“Yes! I’m absolutely sure!”
“Then I’m sorry to hear that,” I said. And I was sorry. I’d done what I could. Like so many heroes before me, I’d looked to the equinox and strived to bring balance to an unbalanced world. But balance was more fleeting than I’d realized. If Hollis had already gone so far as to create his own mythology in order to avoid having to point the finger anywhere but at his own values, there wasn’t much I could’ve done to persuade him in the first place. He didn’t want logic; he preferred tilting at windmills.
So maybe I really did know the ending to this story.
“You know those nineteen people who died here? In that fire?” I asked softly.
“Sure. Of course.”
“Well, they weren’t the only ones who suffered. Their loved ones did too. Maybe their suffering was even greater—having to live in the aftermath and watch those killers profit and get away with murder.”
“Yeah, maybe. What does that have to do with anything?”
I leaned close to whisper in his ear. “It has to do with the fact that you were right, Hollis. The Phantom isn’t a he. Or a who. The Phantom is all of us who haven’t forgotten or forgiven that one moment of agony and injustice. Who are still called, every generation, in the name of equity, to try to meet our counterpart from the other side halfway. But when justice isn’t given—and it never is—that’s when we’re forced to take something else.”
“What’s that?” he demanded.
“Retribution.”
Disbelief became terror when Hollis saw me raise the knife and understood what I planned to do with it. He recoiled, scrambling back to get away from me, but with the steep drop and the water behind him, there was nowhere to go.
“C. J.!” he cried out, holding his hands up. “Why? Why are you doing this? What did I do?”
I moved in swiftly then. Gripping the hunting knife, pinning him down with my knee, I felt no anger in my heart, no wrath or vengeance, just the cool breeze of certitude. Hadn’t I known this was how it would be? Monsters never understood they were the ones in need of slaying.
“Cautionary tales aren’t meant to be told,” I whispered before I brought the knife down. Before the blood began to spray. “They’re meant to be heard. So we’ll keep telling this one, over and over, for as long as we have to. Until someday, somehow, you finally begin to listen.”