An impulsive young outcast confronts his small town’s dark secrets in this atmospheric and haunting debut horror novel from brilliant new voice Jen Julian.

“Drenched in dread and yearning, Red Rabbit Ghost is the kind of Gothic novel that you don’t so much read as inhale. I loved it.” ― Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“Deeply immersive and darkly mysterious. Certain to be one of the year’s standout horror reads.” ― Craig DiLouie, author of Episode Thirteen

Read the first three chapters of  Red Rabbit Ghost, on sale June 22nd below!

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1.

Jesse keeps his dead mother’s things in an old Tarbarrel tin. Pork jerky smell, black pepper and molasses, contained alongside photographs. His mother’s senior yearbook picture—her sharp, toothy grin. A Polaroid of her and Aunt Nancy toilet-papering the Confederate Memorial in downtown Blacknot. Nancy was seventeen then, his mother nine, both dressed in bell sleeves and fringe like it was still the 60s, though the Polaroid was taken by Jesse’s grandmother in 1982. On the back, an inscription: Nancy Jane & Constance Louise, getting in trouble.

Also inside the tin: twelve postcards addressed to Nancy while she was in graduate school, messages in his mother’s affected teenage voice—If you find a man in the Queen City, bring him home so that we might sacrifice him to the swamp gods and ensure the harvest.

Also: one bracelet of black wooden beads, which he guesses his mother must have worn.

Also: a series of articles from the paper about how they found her, dead, on the banks of the Miskwa River eighteen summers ago, and a small notebook of inscrutable thoughts, facts, and fantasies (Jesse couldn’t remember his mother, so he resorted to inventing details), which he wrote when he was a kid. River highest since 1980—average water temp 71°—she had black hair, pretty face, archy eyebrows—5 foot 1—shoe size 6 1/2, bad at singing—loved Wizard of Oz, X-Files, will-o’-the-wisp, animals—spoke French and Spanish—laughed at weird stuff like ghosts—smelled like cinnamon, fixed eggs better than Nancy, came home from work wearing costumes, played chess—

And so on.

There are many things the tin does not include. According to Nancy, Connie burned a lot of keepsakes and photos in the years leading up to the final breakdown that killed her, including pictures of her and Jesse together. That is his least favorite detail about her, aside from being dead.

Remarkably, he didn’t take the tin with him to college. When he packed last August, he decided to leave it right there on the upper shelf of his closet, its time-honored home. Now, after driving back the four hours from Greensboro, he finds that Nancy has used his monthslong absence as an excuse to pack up his bedroom to turn it into an office/meditation studio. All his posters and books and old school projects are stuffed away in boxes, the walls now hung with calming beach photographs, the closet clean of his baggy high school clothes and red Miskwa High sweatshirts.

And the tin, which is not where he left it.

“Where’d you put it?” he asks Nancy, trying not to panic.

His aunt stands in the doorway, looking sheepish. “I mean.” She gestures to the boxes. “I put away a lot of shit, hon. It’s probably here.”

“Probably?”

“I did throw some things out. Your old running shoes were biohazards. What did the tin look like?”

“Like a tin,” he says. “It looked like a tin. Red. A red tin. It had the Tarbarrel logo on it. It had—all her stuff was in there.”

“Her stuff?” Nancy says.

Jesse dives into the boxes. Some are open, some already taped shut. His aunt knows what he’s talking about, of course, but in the face of his alarm, she stands calm. Or at least pretends to.

“I’m sure it’s here somewhere.”

On principle alone, he doesn’t like that she’s done this, just crunched down and packed away his entire childhood like a whole lot of junk. Trophies for cross-country crammed in with mix CDs, the complete films of Bogart and Bacall. In one box, he finds the many amusing pulp fiction book covers he hunted down in flea markets all over the county, then, digging deeper, a glass hand pipe containing the charred residue of some backwater ditch weed. He bristles at the thought of Nancy finding it. Sure, they used to sing along to Peter Tosh’s Legalize It on car trips, but that doesn’t mean he wants her to have a firsthand view of his indiscretions.

But then, maybe the invasiveness was the point. Maybe her whole meditation studio plan was just an excuse to go through his stuff, to try to understand him one last time, unravel his secrets, account for his high school misery.

“Oh, stop being so frantic,” she says. “I’ll help you.”

“Don’t!” he says. “Please, don’t touch anything else. I’ll find it myself.”

“But you know I wouldn’t have thrown that out.”

“You just said maybe you did.”

She laughs. Her expression is becoming strained.

“But I didn’t trash anything important, sweetheart. Do you really think I’d just throw out—that?”

“Connie’s things,” he says. “My mother’s things.”

There’s no official moratorium on mentioning his mother’s name, though he realizes it’s been a long time since it was uttered aloud in this house. Nancy steps back, no longer smiling. Her face flushes with indignation.

After a minute, she says, “You know, you’ve caught me off guard, Jesse, just being here. You insisted you were staying out in Greensboro for the summer. Since November, that’s been your plan, right? Get a job, get an apartment. What happened?”

He can’t even tell if she’s happy to see him. Sure, when he first got in, she rushed out to the driveway to meet him, and when Dick, his red 1998 hatchback, let out its usual tricky sputter, she laughed and said, “Now, there’s a sweet sound.” All the neighbors must’ve heard it, too. Must’ve thought, Oh, that’s Jesse Calloway. Antsy Nancy’s boy. He’s back from college, finally. Because he didn’t come back for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or Easter. Nancy, who taught film and public speaking at the community college in Kneesville, had all the same breaks he did, so each time she’d drive out to see him, and they’d stay with Minerva, her old roommate from grad school, a silver-haired lesbian. And during every visit, Nancy praised the “culture” of the city (i.e., Greensboro) in comparison to the hick trashfire of Miskwa County, and then she drank too much wine and said she would be happy enough to see Jesse survive his freshman year without alcohol poisoning or gonorrhea, which he guessed was meant to take the pressure off or something. But in all that, there was never any talk of Jesse returning home. Nancy took him at his word.

“The plan,” he says to her, “changed.”

“It changed,” she says. “What changed? You were adamant about not coming back here.”

He rips up packing tape in snaky strips, one box after another.

“What changed?” she asks again.

He finds a plastic bin of photos: Jesse and Nancy at the carnivorous plant garden in Wilmington, another one of him and his grandfather at the Fort Fisher Aquarium, then a few with his former high school friends in their ninth-grade Halloween costumes, grins with retainer wires.

“I wanted to see friends,” he says.

“Which friends?” asks Nancy.

“‘Which friends?’ Why does that matter?”

“Because. Some of your friends have a history of getting you in trouble.”

He laughs. “Well, there you go. You got me. I drove four hours to get lit at some redneck barn party. Nothing like the scene in metropolitan Blacknot. Endless ragers. Orgies day and night.”

Nancy’s flush deepens.

“You had a plan,” she says firmly. “You changed your mind so fast, that’s all I’m saying.”

“For all you know, I’ve been thinking about it for weeks. And anyway, that’s got nothing to do with you culling out my shit without asking.”

“Oh, Jesse, stop it. Just stop. I didn’t—do you seriously think I’d do that on purpose, throw out those things, my sister’s things…?”

She trails off, her voice breaking. Tears fog up her glasses.

Little fucker, says a voice in Jesse’s head. First night home, and you have lied to Nancy and made her cry. Fine work.

“I didn’t say you’d do it on purpose,” he says, trying to be nicer. “It’s fine. It’s got to be here somewhere.”

“I mean,” she says tearfully, “you didn’t even take it with you. How was I supposed to know?”

In hindsight, yes, maybe the tin would’ve been safer if he’d brought it with him to college. But he never missed it there. Until a month ago, he was hardly thinking about Connie Calloway at all. Back at school, he was an actual adult, savvy and queer and experienced. He got props for liking David Lynch and owning a discontinued car. It’s 2015 and the 90s are cool again. Everything comes back around. Everything reincarnates.

That’s what changing your life is like, he assumes: a reincarnation.

Nancy lifts her glasses, squeezes her fingers against her eyes. “I didn’t throw it out, I didn’t,” she keeps saying. “At least, I don’t think I did.”

And he keeps saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m sure you didn’t,” though really, he just wants to find the damn thing so they can stop talking about it and she can stop crying.

Then, finally, hiding under a pile of Dashiell Hammett novels, there it is. The Tarbarrel mascot—a rosy-cheeked cartoon pig—beams goofily at him from the tin’s candy-red lid. He takes a breath.

“It’s there?” Nancy asks.

“It’s here.”

“Good.” She leaves the room, swiping at her tears and muttering, “Came all the way back here to fucking worry me.”

Sometimes, Nancy takes Jesse’s bad decision-making personally, and that is not his fault.

What did she say back in August when she took his shoulders in the campus courtyard? She was crying then, too, their clothes damp with sweat from carrying his stuff upstairs in an elevator-less dorm. She hugged him like he belonged to her, a compact little yin-yang, light and dark. Nancy is honey haired and pink faced, and Jesse inherited his mother’s wiry dark curls and brown eyes and sandy-brown skin. But they shared a cringey optimism there, in that courtyard.

“I knew you’d get out of there,” she said. “You are going to kick the shit out of this place. You’re smart. You bounce back. You always have.” Something like that. He remembers looking around at everyone else squirming in the face of similar talks from parents, grandparents, siblings. Everyone is tough. Everyone is the most genius genius.

“I’m just lucky,” he told Nancy.

“You’re not just lucky,” she said. “You’ll show them. You’re resilient.”

Then the fearsome Minerva swung back around in her SUV, driving without patience (she and her ex-wife had already seen their two children off to college), and she loaded up Nancy and the empty dolly and the bungee cords, and then, with a kiss and a blink, his aunt disappeared into the shaky summer heat.

Jesse was relieved to see her go. He carried his last box up to his room, a care package Nancy assembled: rolls of quarters, double-ply toilet paper, condoms (I know you can get these at the health center, she wrote in a mortifying note, but still). He met his roommate, a kid from Cary who introduced himself with a strong handshake, as if they were making a business deal: “Alex Khan. Poli-sci.”

“Jesse Calloway,” Jesse said. “Undeclared.”

“You on Wipixx?”

Wipixx was a social media app Jesse had never heard of, so he didn’t understand the question. At the time, he assumed Alex could discern immediately that he was a backwoods clown from a trashfire county.

“I’m sorry, man,” he said. “Did you just ask me if I’m on whippets?”

Reincarnation indeed.

Jesse reclaims his room. He takes down Nancy’s tranquil photos. Goodbye, sand dunes and softly waving seagrass. He tapes up all his pulp book covers in their place. There are at least forty of them, an impressive collection. However, when he steps back to admire them, he’s disheartened to see that they don’t look as cool or eclectic as he remembers. They look like a mess.

As he rearranges them, trying in vain to make them more aesthetically pleasing, Nancy sticks her head in the doorway.

“Did you even eat dinner?” she asks sharply. “You’re like a rail.”

He looks at her, startled. “I had something on the road.”

“Well, if you get hungry, you know, there’s a chess pie in the fridge. That’s still your favorite, right?”

Jesse feels suddenly ashamed of himself.

Later, when he goes to the kitchen, he finds the pie in the fridge: a pristine golden disc of butter and sugar. He’s not hungry, but he takes the pie out and stands in the kitchen doorway with it, fork in hand.

Nancy is grading finals in the den. The local news plays on mute. The windows are open to the night air of late spring, filling the room with an eggy smell. Nancy notices him standing there, sets aside her papers, and holds out an arm. He comes to sit by her.

“Sorry,” he says.

“Same,” she says. “I shouldn’t have gone through your stuff without asking.”

On the news, a young teacher leads a camera crew around his old elementary school. The hallway is lined with scribbly drawings of animals. Jesse experiences a wave of nostalgia. He pokes the chess pie with his fork.

“I know you can’t help it,” he says, “but you don’t need to worry. I won’t go anywhere near Pinewood. I promise.”

“Hmm,” Nancy says. “Thing is, sweetheart, it’s Blacknot.” She pronounces it the way the old locals do, like Black-nut. “If you’re here, you’re near everything.”

Jesse shrugs and looks down at the pie in his lap. He begins to eat it, so sweet it feels like it’s burning his tongue.

“You’re not going to cut a piece?” says Nancy. “You’re just going to eat it like that, like a monster?”

He licks the fork. “Uh-huh.”

She digs in herself, and they sit like that for a while, trading the fork back and forth until there’s a huge hole in the pie, as if an alien burst out of it. Jesse stares at the hole. Already, his stomach is telling him this was a mistake.

“Of course,” Nancy says, “I’m happy you’re here. Stay as long as you need.”

“Thank you. I know.”

“But you should know you won’t find a job. Merle hired out your spot at the diner.”

“I won’t be here long enough to get a job. A couple days, tops.”

She reaches out and brushes the hair off his forehead. “This new haircut… I don’t know about this haircut. It’s a little hipster-y.”

He bats her hand away. “No, it isn’t.”

“What do you think they’ll say about you when you’re waltzing around downtown Blacknot looking like this?”

“They’ll say, ‘That kid has his shit together.’ I mean, come on, I cleaned off the nail polish. What’s the issue?”

She squeezes his cheek. “I just want you to be careful.”

“I will, I will. Don’t fuss.”

He can see in her face that she doubts him; not that he’s lying, but that he’s making a promise he can’t keep. This is often the soul of her doubt, and the soul of his deceit. He believes wholeheartedly any promise he makes to anyone, every time.

He goes to bed early that night. The drive wore him out, he says. By three AM, he’s wide awake, listening to Nancy’s snores on the other side of the house and staring once again at the collage of book covers on his wall. They’re almost disturbing to him now; why is that? He lights a candle. His room is dark and hot. Most of these he didn’t even find himself, actually. The best ones—Alligator-Women from the Swamp Planet, which features the tagline “They’re here… and they’re horny!” and Attack of the Mutant Mushrooms, in which the monsters resemble dildos—those were gifts from Harlan. Thrifting is one of few gay activities a closeted man can enjoy in this county.

If Jesse wanted to, he could find other pieces of Harlan all around the room. A pair of jeans, pierced in the crotch by a spring in Harlan’s couch. A Union army coat button, which Harlan’s uncle found at the battlefield over in Kinston. But only Jesse would know the significance of these things; Nancy wouldn’t be able to pick them out.

God help him if she could.

But he’s not here for this. He doesn’t need this collection. He’s not a fucking kid anymore. His aunt’s impulse to cull, he feels it, too—though in a different, more volatile way. One by one, he tears the book covers away and takes them down the hall to the bathroom. There, he begins to burn them in the sink. The Alligator-Women curl up and turn black; the Mutant Mushrooms shrivel. The fire flares up unexpectedly and nearly catches the hand towel, and he is forced to open the bathroom window and let the smoke out into the night—

Whoosh. A flood of swamp stench hits him hard in the face. Low tide and hog farm. Confederate jasmine. Stale hot air. The assault seems personal, like this place has been waiting for him. Like it sees him. He never wanted to come back here. This stinking, suffocating place.

A rising wave of sugar burns the back of his throat. He leans over the toilet, and it comes up fast. A full-body retching. An exorcism.

That’s a bad sign. A terrible idea all around, this trip. But then he returns to his room, drained and shaky, and he sees his phone lit up on the bedside table.

A Wipixx message from Cat:

Welcome home

You want still pictures of your mother?

His heart hammers. This. This is what he’s here for.

Yes

Please

Tomorrow come town to bridge 9am

Tell no one

2.

On Sunday, in church, Alice stands next to her stepmother, whose impressive lyric soprano rings in her ear like clover flowers. In all of Alice’s eighteen years on this earth, this may be the only thing she has ever found impressive about Bobbie Swink.

Would you be free from the burden of sin? There’s power in the blood, power in the blood. Would you o’er evil a victory win? There’s wonderful power in the blood.

The congregation is especially sleepy this week, which lets Bobbie’s voice rise to the rafters. Alice looks over her shoulder at a row of youth group kids who have been prodded to church by their parents, shadow-eyed faces dripping with hangover sweat. There was a party last night somewhere in town.

There is power, power, wonder-working power—in the precious blood of the Lamb.

Two verses later, Bobbie pokes Alice’s arm. She takes a break between “sin stains are lost” and “life-giving flow” to hiss through her teeth—“Sing!”—but Alice shakes her hand away and stares straight ahead at the pipe organ and the strident bouquet of lilies on the altar. Bobbie wants Alice to take part in something, to blend in. Which Bobbie herself would like to do. Pastor Moseley once asked her why she didn’t sing in the choir, and Bobbie, with an earnest modesty that made Alice cringe, insisted she couldn’t carry a tune to save her life. “I would die of embarrassment,” she said.

Eventually, Alice feels the gaze of her father, who’s standing as an usher in the side aisle. She looks at him dead-on. Compared to the other patriarchs, Euel is scruffy in his wrinkled linen dress shirt, mustache untamed, hair loose and floppy on his forehead. He lowers his chin, raising his two salt-and-pepper eyebrows as if he knows exactly what’s unfolding in her brain, as if he is asking her outright: This is the hill you’re gonna die on?

Alice sucks in a breath, and as the congregation approaches the last refrain, she belts out the words, flat and heavy as a falling brick—“IN THE PRECIOUS BLOOD OF THE LAMB.”

Bobbie grips her arm, digs her nails in.

“Beautiful, y’all,” says Pastor Moseley. “Couldn’t’ve sung it better myself. Praise be to God.”

The congregation replies in dreary unison: “Praise be to God.”

They sit. Alice looks at the indentations of Bobbie’s nails on her arm, then at Euel. She sees his cryptic smile, the slow shake of his head. Eyes burn into her back; she can feel them. But when she turns to look, most of the congregation appears not to have noticed her outburst. In fact, there is only one pair of eyes staring from the far back corner of the sanctuary where the Taylor family sits, Bill and Val and their pretty sixteen-year-old daughter, Morgan. The parents exhibit the stiff, bourgeois dryness typical of Alice’s neighbors, but Morgan looks like many of the other youth group kids: slouched, sweaty, likely recovering from the Dixie bacchanal that’s still in her bloodstream. She’s glaring at Alice, mouth slightly open, an expression that hovers somewhere between puzzlement and scorn.

Alice turns away. For all she knows, Morgan is still drunk, agonized by the wail of the organ. Alice has been told she shouldn’t drink at all because of the medications she’s been taking, but even so, she knows if she ever went to a high school party—she would not; no one would invite her; no one would have the opportunity to—if such a thing ever happened, she would find it deeply unproductive. Without a doubt, an ordinary kind of rebellion.

She stays quiet until the end of the service, when the congregation parades out onto downtown Main Street, all quaint and sunny and lined with skinny, wire-bound oaks, new sidewalks filled with glittery mica. Pastor Moseley stands in the narthex, shaking hands. When Alice comes through the line, he bows his head to her.

“Mighty strong voice today, Alice Catherine,” he says.

“Thank you,” she says flatly. “I was moved.”

Pastor Moseley laughs. Behind them, Alice can hear Bobbie thrumming with embarrassment.

“Nothing wrong with that,” he says. “Always best to let the Spirit dictate your volume.”

On the sidewalk, Bobbie whispers in her ear, “Why do you needle me so?”

“You told me to sing,” Alice says.

“Oh, heavens, Alice. Be serious.” She cranes her neck in search of Euel, but he’s already gotten caught up in a conversation with Councilman Bale, his wife, Ouida, and chatty, doll-faced Mrs. Moseley. Bobbie watches the group nervously, gripping and un-gripping her fingers.

“I told him he couldn’t go and chat forever like he usually does,” she says. “You’ve got your appointment at one thirty.”

“There’s plenty of time,” Alice says. But Bobbie is already trying to slide her way into Euel’s conversation, laughing at someone’s joke, tapping at Euel’s arm. Alice stays where she is, lest she feel compelled to needle Bobbie more.

That’s when Morgan Taylor pops out of nowhere.

“Hey, girl!” she chirps, leaning close into Alice’s periphery. “Hi.”

Alice steps back.

“Oh. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you.”

The girl is giving her a very odd, strained smile. In the glare of the sun, she seems even more wilted, eyes raccooned, pit stains spreading on her seersucker dress. She wipes her arm across her forehead.

“It’s hot. You don’t have a tissue or anything, do you? There’s sweat in my eyes.”

“I don’t.” Alice looks around. Where did the parents go? “Sorry.”

Morgan fans herself with the church bulletin. “You’re lucky. You look like you don’t sweat at all.”

“I guess.”

“All graceful. All tall and stuff. How tall are you?”

Alice looks down at Morgan’s sweaty ash-blond head. She is tall, it’s true. But she has never been graceful. Before Euel took her out of grade school, the kids had called her Frankenberry because she walked with a forward lurch and hunched her shoulders. Spooky Alice with her strange, sallow complexion, and her huge eyes, so dark they look black, and her hair, kinked and coarse in a way that always stressed Bobbie—Hair with personality, she used to say. Her face, she’s been told, is without personality, as blank as a glass of water.

No one would call Alice graceful unless they were flattering her. And now, going from what Alice knows about Morgan Taylor—an average, affluent, Southern American teen—and what she assumes Morgan Taylor has heard about her, she is right to suspect an ulterior motive to this conversation.

“Well, never mind,” Morgan says. “Hey—you know you’re only a couple houses down from me, right?”

“Yes. I know.”

“Remember when you used to come over to our house to play with my sister and me? Lauren had a game where we all pretended we found a portal to this other world? And Lauren became a sorceress and I became a magic horse?”

Alice looks toward her father, chatting now with Pastor Moseley, who has slipped quite naturally into the conversation. They look like they’re making plans.

“I don’t know why I was thinking about that lately,” says Morgan. “How’ve you been?”

“Sedated,” says Alice.

Morgan’s first response is to laugh, but then she seems to remember that two summers ago Alice was spending four months as an inpatient at Croatan Psychiatric Hospital. A silence passes. When Morgan speaks again, her voice is awkward and apologetic.

“It’s—it’s just like the song, you know. ‘Twenty twenty twenty-four hours to go-oh…’”

“I think I should head on,” Alice says, pointing nowhere.

“Oh. Sure, right. Catch up soon, maybe?”

Alice lurches her way over to Euel.

Her father extends his arm, drawing her in between him and Bobbie. “Alice Catherine,” he says. “If we invite these rowdy folks over to the house tomorrow evening, will you play for them? I’ve been telling them how you’re killing Debussy and you need a chance to show off.” He pulls Alice deeper into the circle, letting the Bales and the Moseleys have a good look at her. “She’s incredible, friends. She’ll send you to a new plane of existence.”

Alice would like to not be in this circle. She’s starting to think she would rather take her chances with Morgan.

“I’m not any good with Debussy yet,” she says.

“Like hell you’re not any good. You’re a demon on that harp. One thing, though—” Euel holds up his finger to the group. “They only get a performance if they behave.”

“If who behaves?” says Pastor Moseley. “In front of my own church, you tell me to behave?”

“Just don’t give him any rum,” says Mrs. Moseley.

“And I’ll drink whatever rum you don’t give him,” says Ouida Bale.

Their swell of laughter shakes Alice’s brain. Over Ouida’s shoulder, she can still see Morgan standing there on the sidewalk, looking at her. Then she slowly wanders off, and Alice wonders if she dodged that conversation too quickly. What was that about? What did that girl want? Girls like Morgan never had any interest in Alice, just as Alice had no interest in them.

So much has happened between now and those school days when Alice used to play with other kids, before her isolated homeschooling era. She barely remembers Morgan or her sister or their games. Recently, she overheard a conversation between Bobbie and Mrs. Taylor about how Morgan has “come out of her shell” in the past couple years, as if introverts were invertebrates. What they really mean is that Morgan is a girl who has figured out the rules regarding her volume: Don’t be a drip, but don’t be a loudmouth either.

Alice feels her stepmother beside her, an anxious, coiling spring. She reaches over Alice to pat her husband’s arm.

“We should go if we want time to grab lunch.”

Euel looks at his watch. “Ah. You’re right.” He waves broadly to his circle of folks. “Let’s say six tomorrow? Six is good for everybody?”

Nods and affirmations. They all disperse cordially.

On the way to the car, Euel whispers to Alice:

“I thought we’d talked about going a little easy on Bobbie, hmm? Maybe give her some slack now and then?”

“I’m not any good with Debussy yet,” Alice insists.

“You’re not—aw, honey, they won’t know the difference. Just do your best.”

“I don’t want to play.”

He looks at her, their eyes level. She doesn’t have his eyes, which are cheerful and blue, an unusual slate blue, the pupils surrounded by a ring of gold. Alice has wondered if that gold ring is why everyone finds her father so fucking charming.

“Yes, you do,” he says. “You love playing more than anything.”

Two hours later, she’s sitting in her therapist’s office at the New Bridges Counseling & Wellness Center in South Greene. Her therapist’s name, for whatever reason, she can never remember. Kayla or Marla, or maybe Wendy. Alice turns a small black stone over and over in her hand. She stole the stone from the bowl-shaped fountain in the corner of the room and takes pleasure that the therapist doesn’t notice.

It’s not that she hates the therapist. The therapist tries. She lights her office with dim pink salt lamps and flameless candles, and the burbling fountain does put Alice in a calm state, as she assumes it’s supposed to. The therapist is young and sweet-faced, and when she speaks, the confident positivity in her voice is so sincere it’s genuinely affecting. Whenever Alice is in the room with her, she thinks, Yes; maybe I could set reasonable goals for myself. Become less angry. More logical.

“He told me to play for his friends again.”

“Did that make you anxious?” asks the therapist.

Alice looks down at her hands and the stone hidden inside them. She shrugs.

“You’ve said you’re uncomfortable playing for your father’s friends. Why?”

Alice reflects on that a moment and says, “You know the story of the Pied Piper? Where he lures out the children? Playing for his friends makes me feel like the pipe.”

“You feel like he’s using you,” the therapist observes.

“I do. Yeah.”

“But in this scenario,” the therapist goes on, “you’re the one playing the instrument. Not your father.”

She tilts her head, as if waiting for a reply, but Alice stays quiet.

“I remember a few sessions back,” the therapist says, “you talked about how you sometimes frame your life as a fairy tale. Cinderella and her evil stepmother, Snow White, Sleeping Beauty. Now you’re a pipe, an instrument. What links these? What did we talk about?”

The stone in her hand responds, a warm vibration.

“Agency,” says Alice.

The therapist taps her pen, preparing to say something Alice knows she has said before. “Remember, if your father, or anyone, asks something of you, you’re going to feel whatever you’re going to feel about it, whether that’s pressure or resentment or anger. The trick is to choose to deal with those feelings productively, to communicate them. Otherwise, they build up.”

Sometimes, Alice can successfully convince herself that this is, in fact, her only problem. She is not good at managing her feelings.

It’s a useful thought for today’s session. Eventually, they move on from the issue of playing for her father’s friends and dig back into Alice’s past, when she ends up talking at length about the incident at Calvary Academy, third grade, when her teacher called her a liar, and she bit the woman’s wrist so hard she damaged a ligament. Nine stitches. Alice can still remember the taste of blood in her mouth, how it felt like victory when Euel pulled her out of school. Just private tutors since then, and whatever Bobbie, a former middle school math teacher, could manage to stuff in her brain. Alice has an active mind, so she’s been told. If she wants to learn something, she fixates on it until the learning is complete. But when it came to assimilating her with other kids, Euel posited that it was fine if Alice preferred being by herself—“All the great geniuses were mavericks,” and so on—and Bobbie, though desperate for her to be “normal,” was too ashamed to keep pushing all those ill-fated playdates with other homeschooled children. In fact, though she is now eighteen, playing pretend with Morgan and her sister was probably the last time Alice had what could be called friends.

“Nine stitches is an awful lot of anger,” the therapist says. “You don’t remember what you were accused of lying about?”

“No,” Alice says, but that’s not true. She remembers exactly. “It’s all a haze. That was less than a month after my mother—after she left.”

The therapist jumps on that, this easy explanation for the crippling of Alice’s emotional and social state of being. She writes mysteriously and energetically on her legal pad, single words, Alice imagines, with a half dozen exclamation points. Progress!!!!!! Coping!!!!!! The therapist is a person who gets excited about moving past things.

Sometimes, she’ll mention a goal: college, some big future career—Juilliard even! The possibilities!—as if all these things could be delivered at Alice’s will. As if the psychiatrist at Croatan had not told her father that she wasn’t stable enough for college, not anytime soon.

“Just keep in mind,” the therapist tells her, “don’t be down on yourself for being where you are. Don’t worry about where other people are. You’re in a safe space. You’re talented. You’re building boundaries between yourself and your parents. You have your library job. You are sorting things out, and that’s exactly what you’re meant to be doing.”

This is exactly what I’m meant to be doing.

Then, as usual, she sets one foot outside the therapist’s office, and her optimism dissolves.

Everything she left out of their discussion creeps back. She forgets to check the placard by the door to remind herself what the therapist’s name is, and she begins to wonder again whose lucky tit her father pulled to schedule therapy appointments on Sundays. Now she’s in the parking lot, fuming, and Tanisha Patton, Euel’s beautiful, smartly dressed assistant, is already pulling up in her silver sedan. Agency. Alice weighs the word in her mind. What does anybody know about agency?

She gets in the car, still holding the stone she snatched from the fountain.

“How’d therapy go?” Mrs. Patton asks, and Alice answers automatically—“Fine”—while worrying the stone with her thumb.

Mrs. Patton side-eyes her. “What’s that? A charm?”

“Just a stone.”

“Onyx?”

“Could be.” Alice looks at it, so shiny she can see a tiny reflection of herself. “I stole it from in there.”

“Hmm,” says Mrs. Patton. She turns west out of the parking lot and takes the long way back to Euel’s house on Eden Circle, past the golf course, intermittent patches of swamp, a series of strip malls. They listen to Prince, an old CD Mrs. Patton has been playing in her car for months.

“So kleptomania’s one of your things?” she asks.

“Not if I don’t get caught,” says Alice.

Mrs. Patton looks amused, but she doesn’t say anything. Prince is partying like it’s 1999.

“Tanisha,” says Alice. “Are you free tomorrow night? Euel’s having some people over for dinner. Pastor Moseley and his wife. The Bales.”

“Tomorrow,” Mrs. Patton says. “Tomorrow’s my birthday.”

“All the more reason for you to come. We can celebrate.”

She laughs. “Baby, there are plenty of folks I’d like to hang out with on my birthday, and they ain’t it. You have fun, though.”

Alice looks out the passenger window at the trees blurring by, squirmy black power lines snaking overhead.

“It’s going to be terrible,” she says.

For a while, they don’t say anything to each other. Mrs. Patton’s only gesture is to glance down and brush a bit of lint off her blazer. Deep, vivid aubergine. Church clothes, probably—though Mrs. Patton is always immaculately styled, to the point where it sometimes makes her uncomfortable to look at. Chic jewelry, towering heels, glossy black nails. Her hair is always shiny and expertly relaxed. She’s been Euel’s assistant for over a year now. Confident. Flawless.

“So,” says Alice. “Did you get them?”

“I did,” says Mrs. Patton. “And you’ve got cash?”

Alice digs in her shoulder bag and produces a roll of about three hundred dollars. Some of it is her own, earned from the small paycheck she gets from working at the library. Some of it she sifted out of Bobbie’s pocketbook or her father’s wallet. Fives and tens here or there.

Mrs. Patton unrolls the money and counts it quickly in her lap while sitting at a stop sign. Then she produces a brown paper bag from her purse and hands it to Alice.

Inside is a clear packet filled with tick-size black kernels. Witchfingers. They’re so light in Alice’s hand it’s like holding nothing.

“There aren’t many here,” she says.

“You didn’t say you needed a ton,” says Mrs. Patton. “Plus, they’re a challenge to find.”

Alice opens the bag and taps one of the kernels into her hand. She holds it gently between thumb and forefinger, tests its puffy stiffness, smells it. Rot sweet, almost fruity. She tries to listen but detects no sound, like the thing is frozen.

Mrs. Patton watches her out of the corner of her eye.

“There are stories about how they used to eat them,” Alice says. “Just like this.”

“Who did?”

“The Angel Battalion, that spiritualist cult I told you about, hit their height in the 1890s. They thought witchfingers gave them visions of the future.”

Mrs. Patton looks alarmed. “You said you were just burying them.”

“I know, but I might like some visions. I could enjoy seeing the future.”

“Alice, they’re not for eating. You’ll be throwing up all night.”

Alice opens her mouth wide and holds the kernel over her tongue. Mrs. Patton stops the car in the middle of the road so she can turn and look at Alice as she speaks.

“Listen up,” she says. “I got you those because I trust you. Okay? I had to find my way to some shady backwoods dens to get them and I’ve got a lot more to lose than you do.”

Alice lowers her hand and contritely puts the kernel back with the others. “I know.”

“I’d lose my job, my two boys. They would put me in jail. I’d have to watch footage of their high school graduations from prison.”

“I was only kidding,” says Alice.

“Just making sure you knew.”

“I said I knew.” Alice puts the witchfingers in her shoulder bag. “I’m not going to eat them. It’s for a ritual.”

“So you said,” Mrs. Patton says.

“But if I ever did eat them, I’d report back to you all the visions I had.”

“Mm-hmm. Can’t wait.”

When they reach the Swink property, Mrs. Patton takes the gravel drive to the guesthouse, which Euel once used as a music room. Now it belongs to Alice. A big boxwood hedge shields it from the gaze of the main house, which gives her some privacy. She has her own kitchenette, her own stone veranda. From there, she can see the Miskwa River through a drooping canopy of live oaks.

Mrs. Patton looks out on this pretty spread with raised eyebrows, then looks at Alice as if to say, See? See what you’re risking? This nice bit of independence you’ve managed to get for yourself ? And Alice returns a look that’s supposed to say, Fuck you, though with her expressionless face, who knows if Mrs. Patton picks up on it. Plus, it does no good for her to lash out at someone who’s been helping her. (Transference!!!!!!)

“You can handle that fool dinner by yourself,” Mrs. Patton says. “That’s what I think.”

“But it’ll help to have someone there who’s on my side.”

“And what will I do there exactly? Pick up people’s empty drink glasses? Help Bobbie carry out the crackers and the cheese log?”

“No,” Alice says. “Bobbie would never serve a cheese log in springtime. Cheese logs are for the holidays.”

“Well, see. I didn’t even know that. I never know these things. My husband will have something put together for me.”

“Please. I’m asking you. Please come.”

At the sincerity of the plea, Mrs. Patton’s face softens into pity.

“Not making any promises.”

She lets Alice out at the door. No sign of life in the main house, which means that Euel and Bobbie are still out, running errands, visiting with folks, schmoozing. She never knows why their schedule is always so packed.

All the better. She waves goodbye to Mrs. Patton, her sedan disappearing down the drive. The witchfingers are in her bag, the black stone in her fist.

It is onyx. She can tell. When she holds it to her ear, its latticed molecules chant darkly.

Ai—ai—ai—ai—ai <?HBG-PAGE-NUMBER PAGE=”27″?><?HBG-PAGE-NUMBER PAGE=”28″?>F<emphasis role=”small-caps”>ROM THE</em> N<emphasis role=”small-caps”>OTEBOOKS OF</em> K<emphasis role=”small-caps”>ATRINA</em> M<emphasis role=”small-caps”>ORROW</em>, S<emphasis role=”small-caps”>PRING</em> 1994 June 12 Yellow flowering saltweed, versatile and not hard to find. Grows at Hook Bend and sounds like kittens crying. Practical purposes—analgesic, improves skin, gets rid of eye floaters, smells earthy and eggy, opens the heart up.

Love incantation—My heart is open. Fill me up with dirt and water, breath and blood.

3.

In Miskwa County, when you say “town,” as in, “I’m going into town for the farmers market,” it’s assumed you mean Blacknot, though there’s a whole constellation of other little boroughs nearby—Pinewood, Apple Hill, Shy Creek, Vernontown, South Greene—with their own character and disproportionate sense of pride. Blacknot sits on the north bank of the Miskwa River. The bridge—Jesse knows only one that Cat could be talking about—runs a mile across marsh and river into South Greene, which exists solely because rich people in the 80s wanted to escape the stench of hog farms. Since Jesse was a kid, there’s been an emphatic downtown Blacknot revitalization effort, an insistence that the town is charming, despite the smell.

“The farmers market?” Nancy says. She turns from the stove, where she’s frying sausage patties. “I need goat cheese. Let me get out of my sweatpants and we’ll go together.”

“Don’t rush,” Jesse says. “I’m meeting up with some folks there. Jaelah and her cousin. The usual crew.”

“Isn’t it weird for you to be out of bed before noon?”

Jesse steals a sausage barehanded from the skillet. Nancy slaps at him—“Tch! That grease will burn you!”—but he has told his lie so naturally that she sends him off with some money to bring back the goat cheese himself. Truthfully, Jesse has no idea whether his former friends are home from college and wouldn’t want to see them anyway, and by the time he gets to the rendezvous spot—the bridge, where he will finally meet Cat—he’s forgotten he even mentioned them.

Jesse is familiar with the rendezvous spot. A trail winds away to his left through the marsh and along the river, past the radio station and the Walmart and the movie theater, past soybean fields and stretches of pinewoods, all the way back to the high school. He ran that trail for cross-country many times. A weatherworn bench stands at the trailhead, looking out over the water, the black pluff mud, the bright green lawns and white plantation-style houses of South Greene.

He can’t sit down. He paces.

The day’s heat rises. The spot under the bridge becomes an odorous oven of fishy concrete and fry grease from the waterfront restaurants. Up the path behind him, in Spartina Square, the Saturday farmers market is at a boil. Sweating families claim picnic spots on the lawn, their unleashed dogs nosing their way into people’s crotches and ice cream cups. White tents line the walkways, tables filled with produce, summer sausage, shells painted like Santa Clauses. A high school girl sells food truck biscuits with fancy toppings—Gouda cheese, candied bacon.

An hour goes by like that.

Music begins to play from the pavilion. Local cover bands typically exhibit their mediocre skills at the farmers market every Saturday, though this—the discordant pairing of banjo and synthesizer, the hum of a theremin—is not a Carolina beach jam. The noise makes Jesse nauseous.

Why is Cat so late? Why are they not responding to his messages?

Another twenty minutes pass, and he leaves the rendezvous spot to circle the park, hoping to find that Cat is watching him from afar. Won’t do him any good; he doesn’t know what they look like. And this is an ordinary Blacknot crowd anyway, filled with the same old faces. There’s that history teacher who once threw a chair against the whiteboard and still kept his job somehow; and that freckly girl who was in her parents’ furniture store commercials; and the First Baptist pastor taking a selfie with his uncannily beautiful wife.

Under the pavilion, among the three bandmates who are retuning their equipment, Jesse recognizes Idgy Sawyer, who graduated two years before him, dropped out of college, and has now found his passion in writing strange, sad music. His current band is called the Undead Corpse of the Confederacy. They are selling CDs at a table next to the driftwood vivariums, ten dollars, cash, check, or Venmo. The bandmates behind Idgy appear nervous to be there, as if they’re not sure what to do with their instruments, and the audience, too, judging from the array of faces, is regretting this.

Jesse edges closer. He hears someone shout his name:

“Calloway!”

He should not be as surprised as he is to run into someone he knows so quickly. Morgan Taylor, rising high school senior, is coming toward him across the grass. He spies her parents over by the courthouse garden, chatting with the Baptist pastor. South Greene people. Republicans in pastel.

“You’re in big trouble, Calloway,” Morgan calls to him.

“Why’s that, M?” he calls back.

Upon reaching him, she immediately begins fiddling with his clothes, his hair, his partially grown-out undercut. She pokes at the cartilage piercing one of his friends gave him back in March.

“Hey, ow!” Jesse cries, brushing her away. “That’s still tender.”

“What is all this?” she says, laughing. “New clothes, new hair. Like you’re in disguise.”

“Maybe I am,” he says. “I’m on a mission.”

“Oh, a mission? Is that why you came back to town after practically a whole year and didn’t even bother to tell me?”

“It’s a secret.”

“Well, buddy, you better share it. That’s the only way I’m letting you off the hook.”

Jesse glances over her shoulder at the trailhead. In truth, he would like to find someone to tell his story to, how he decided to come back and why. Still, he’s not sure Morgan is the right person. She is what they call a “spring senior”—precocious, boosted to kindergarten at a young age and now on track to graduate at seventeen. She and Jesse hooked up in the fall semester of his senior year, then several times throughout the spring and summer, and she was always good at keeping her own secrets—quick, clandestine meetups at friends’ houses, in his car, in the abandoned dugout at the middle school; they got pretty creative. But he’s always questioned how well she keeps the secrets of others.

Morgan notices his hesitation. She looks across the lawn to her parents, still talking with the pastor. “How ’bout you tell me later. What are you doing tonight?”

“I don’t know,” Jesse says. “Nothing.”

“There’s a get-together at the Koonces’. Your buddy Red is back in town house-sitting for his parents. You should come.”

“A party?”

“It’s not a party.” Her smile intensifies, almost hungry. “Come out! Why come back if you’re not gonna see people?”

“I don’t know if I want to see people.” He stuffs his hands in his pockets. “Who’s going to be there?”

“Who? I don’t know. It’s a little get-together. Red’s friends. My friends.” She shrugs and smiles. “And I’ll be there. Looking to have a little fun.”

Now that Jesse has spent a year in college, Morgan’s flirting is greener than he remembers. Sweet, but a little embarrassing.

“Aren’t you seeing someone?” he asks. “Back in February, you posted something—”

“Are you talking about Greg Stubbs?”

“Yeah, Greg Stubbs. How’s he?”

She throws her head back and groans. “Oh my god, Jesse. That boy didn’t know how to do anything. I’m serious.” She whispers in his ear, “He thought the clitoris was in the butt.”

Jesse laughs. “You’re so mean.”

“It’s not mean! It’s only mean if it’s not true. I think he watches a lot of porn. He kept asking to put his thing on my face. Like, slap it against my face! It was weird.”

“You shouldn’t be telling me this.”

“Why not? You don’t know Greg. Who’s it hurt to tell you?”

Behind them, the Undead Corpse of the Confederacy finishes one song, then another. A theremin warbles over the park. Jesse knows what would happen if he went out to meet Morgan. The question is whether he would benefit from the distraction.

“Why do you keep looking at the bridge?” she asks him.

“What?” he says, turning back to her. “I’m not.”

She smiles. On the other side of the lawn, her parents laugh loudly at one of the pastor’s jokes. “You should come out,” she says. “You look like you need it. Plan smart, huh? Come at nine, leave by midnight. Avoid Peach Hill.”

“Peach Hill?” he says. “Oh—that big sinkhole is still in the road?”

“Sure is, friend.”

“You’d think they’d have filled it in by now. It’s been, like, two years.”

“Well,” she says. “That’s Fucknut for you.”

Morgan leaves him, rejoining her parents across the lawn. They seem to pretend as though she never left, and she, too, laughs at the pastor’s joke, though she wasn’t there to hear it. Jesse has realized that you can always tell someone is from South Greene by the way they laugh, a kind of restrained, performative chuckle, but he’s never told Morgan this.

He returns to the trailhead. Over the next half hour, he listens to Idgy’s band. For a coda, they do a cover of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation,” the most upbeat song they’ve played so far, followed by a spate of polite but unconvincing applause. All the while, Jesse wonders bleakly if Cat could string him along another month or so. They could, if they said the right thing, schedule another two or three secret rendezvous and convince him they’d be there for sure this time. Go to this abandoned warehouse, Jesse. Go out to the swamp and dig a shallow grave.

He’s about ready to leave when they finally send word.

What is problem?

Did you find is what given?

Cat. With their frank, weird, idiosyncratic grammar. He looks to either side of him as if Cat might suddenly appear. A speedboat zips by under the bridge, sloshing its wake on the bank. Is Cat on that boat? A shirtless jogger comes up the trail. Is that them?

I thought you’d be here

No

I left for you under the bench this morning

Sure enough, when Jesse drops to his knees and scrounges, he finds a brown envelope taped to the underside of the bench. His hands tremble as he pries it away. He is shocked at Cat’s carelessness.

This was not well thought out

Anyone could have found it

Yes but you have it now?

He doesn’t reply. He runs to his car and speeds home.

Contents of Cat’s envelope: photocopies of an autopsy report, a half dozen pictures of the scene, and an article from The Horn, Sunday, June 7, 1998. Jesse keeps the same article in the Tarbarrel tin, though Cat has highlighted this one and marked it up with marginalia. PINEWOOD WOMAN FOUND DEAD

The remains oftwenty-four-year-old Pinewood resident Constance Calloway have been found on the banks of the Miskwa River a mile from her home, according to the Miskwa County Sheriff’s Department. 56 Redbug Rd, demolished in 03—walked from there??Ms. Calloway and her fifteen-month-old son were reported missing Thursday evening by Nancy Calloway, Ms. Calloway’s sister. The child was found on the banks near his mother’s body, unharmed. lost time, 35 hrs between disappearance and discovery

On Saturday, June 6, at approximately sixAM, fishermanHarry Bishop heard a cry while boating downriver and drew close enough to observe the scene, at which point heextracted the child from the riverbank and notified authorities.

“I thought I was hearing a ghost,” Bishop said.“I wasn’t six feet away when I realized what I was looking at.” (Bishop = obsessive archivist, but nothing in his memoir notes??)

Ms. Calloway is believed to have diedsometime between three and fiveAM. She was employed as a receptionist at the Tarbarrel processing plant,though she had not reported for work in the three weeks prior to her death. (demoted, work record missing) Her son is currently in the custody of Nancy Calloway.Ms. Nancy Calloway declined to comment for this article.

Sheriff Martina Hupp states that the cause of Ms. Calloway’s death was“at this time not determined to be suspicious,” however, she is unwilling to release specific details at this time. The Miskwa County Sheriff’s Department is handling the investigation. (LIES—could not handle a suitcase w/ all ten fingers)

Jesse sits on the floor of his bedroom, the Tarbarrel tin open next to him. Cat’s handwriting is fascinating—small, cramped, delicate. Girl handwriting. He’s been wondering about their gender since they contacted him a month ago.

Not that this has been his most pressing question.

The pictures interest him the most. Here is the marshy bank where Harry Bishop found him. Two numbered placards mark some fragment of unseen evidence. In another photo, a large stick stands upright in the mud. Objects are piled around it: vines, a hammer, a candle, a bowl filled with stones, feathers, buckeyes, the skull of a small animal. Patchy shadows hang in the background, along with what looks like a soiled white sheet. Though he looks at it for a long time, he can’t make sense of it.

Okay, Cat

What is this picture with the sheet?

They’re quick to reply. They’ve been waiting.

What sheet?

Jesse looks on the back, where Cat has numbered each photo.

Number 5 with the dirty sheet

There is no sheet.

He looks at the picture again. His vision goes dim at the edges.

Cat is right. It’s not a sheet. It’s a body.

Nancy calls his name from somewhere in the house. Jesse stuffs the contents of Cat’s envelope into the Tarbarrel tin and shoves it under the bed. He fears that the panic will be there on his face and that Nancy will see it, but as she opens his bedroom door he sinks out of his body and into a state of calm, like he’s watching himself from under the floor.

“Did you get goat cheese?” she asks. “You forgot, didn’t you?”

“Yeah. Sorry.”

“What are you up to?”

“Just going through old stuff.”

Connie, pale gray and in a fetal position, wrapped mummy-like in mud-stained pajamas.

“You want to talk about it?” Nancy asks.

He laughs. “Talk about what?”

She looks at him awhile longer, then drifts away down the hall. He gets up and closes the door behind her.

Hours go by. Midday light shifts over his bedroom as he studies the photos, trying to see past the web of black hair that hangs in his mother’s face. She looks drowned, only she didn’t drown; the autopsy report says heart failure. Elsewhere, the report notes signs of stress and poor nutrition—brittle hair, yellow nail beds. She weighed only eighty pounds. Her teeth had become fragile, her molars fractured. Possible drug abuse, says the autopsy. Unclear.

What has she done with this stick?

Can you understand?

You do not know what it means?

Why would he know what it means, aside from the obvious? He could tell from the way the family talked about his mother that she lost her mind. Nancy would share childhood postcards, but she wouldn’t speculate with him about how Connie ended up dead by that river, her young child exposed to snakes and alligators and deadly currents.

I don’t know what any of this means

Well pay attention, nobody else cared to know what it meant

Nobody asked questions

Your chance is now

Yes

So what next?

You have the answers?

Cat goes quiet for a while, but Jesse can see them in the reply, thinking. He grips his mother’s wooden bracelet. He counts each bead.

First you must ask your friend Tooly how to get into Night House

Tooly? Can they really mean Tooly?

Tooly Quinn, Harry Bishop’s grandson: a skinny, quiet, horsey-faced kid, kicker on the football team, notoriously stupid. By some miracle, he graduated in Jesse’s year. Now he lives with his mother in a trailer west of Pinewood.

The Night House, which Jesse knows well, is up in Pinewood, too.

I already know how to get into the Night House

I’ve been there a hundred times

There is a secret way in

You must find it, Tooly knows

Tooly and I aren’t exactly friends

Did Tooly’s grandfather tell him something?

Can’t I just speak to Bishop?

Cat pauses again, taking their time.

Are you saying

that you are afraid of a person named Tooly?

He laughs at that. He can’t help it.

Cat, be honest

Are you psycho?

I don’t think so

This town is psycho

Here everyone is fucked

I want to find the truth like you do

Then tell me who you are

A silence passes as he sits there, hoping. Sometimes, Cat will withdraw when he asks too many questions. The next message he gets says come out tonite mi amante!!—which is not Cat, but Morgan. She sends it along with a gif of a girl sliding out of a chair onto the floor. Imma be bored af…

Jesse puts the phone on the floor, his palms damp with sweat. His fingertips look like he’s been in the water, submerged in the river for hours. Eight years ago, Nancy was banned from checking out books from the Miskwa County Public Library. Because of Jesse’s investigating.

In the years after Mr. Bishop rescued Jesse on the riverbank, he shyly retreated to his old life. He did not respond to Jesse’s emails, though it was possible that Mr. Bishop was not an email person. Still, Jesse knew that Mr. Bishop was an amateur genealogist, that he haunted the library archives on weekends, and when he found him there at one of the microfiche readers and asked him what he remembered, Mr. Bishop said, “I’ll figure it out one day. But until then, let me be.”

Beyond that, he wouldn’t budge, so Jesse went to Miss Velda, the librarian. Her hair was already white back then. There’s a saying in town that gossip ages you.

“Well,” she said, “I always heard around town there was some man Connie was seeing up in Pinewood. A friend of mine said that girl courted pigs. A hog man, maybe, one of the white ones. ’Course they were mostly Mexican then and they’re all Mexican now. Tarbarrel only hires immigrants. Swooped in, bought out the local folks, promised jobs, and they only hire immigrants. Now Pinewood’s a trash heap, all those unemployed white fools with no education, drugs coming straight down the line from cartels through Wilmington—”

Jesse remembers a pause, a downward glance, as if Miss Velda suddenly remembered who she was talking to. Back then, his only understanding of cartels came from television; Mexican and drugs were words that snapped together. He didn’t know then that the entire town suspected that he himself was part Mexican, that Mom Calloway had taken up with a man whose wife once babysat Nancy, a man from Oaxaca who spent his days shuttling pigs through chutes. This being the source of Connie’s darker features in a family of pasty blonds.

Miss Velda then recanted and told him he had no business knowing about Mexican drug cartels. Still, Jesse pressed her about the pigs. What did she mean when she said his mother used to “court pigs”? And Miss Velda hedged awhile longer, as if trying to think of a child-friendly way to explain something else Jesse had no business knowing.

“There’s a story in the Bible,” she said finally, “where Jesus casts out a demon and sends it into a herd of pigs, and then sends the pigs over a cliff.”

But this explained nothing, and he dreamed that night about pigs stampeding through his bedroom, and in the morning, he called his senile grandfather at the VA hospital. What was everyone keeping from him? What had folks been saying about his mother? That’s when Nancy caught on. By the time Jesse showed up at the sheriff’s station to ask for the case file, Sheriff Hupp had been instructed to turn him away, and when Nancy found out what Miss Velda told him, she descended on the library to rage that Miss Velda was an insufferable busybody shitwit who had no business interacting with children. Miss Velda told Nancy to please return her overdue copy of Dreams from My Father and never return.

All this to say, Jesse can’t set foot in the library, can’t smell its book glue and plastic and mold, without feeling vaguely mortified.

Snow-haired Miss Velda is still there when he visits that Saturday afternoon. She comes out from the back with a stack of books in her arms and looks astonished to see him.

“Hi, baby! Hi, hi! Oh, that haircut looks so smart on you. How’s school?”

“Fantastic,” he says, helping her with her books. He doesn’t elaborate, which seems to disappoint her, and while he imagines it would be fun to spin tales to her about the hedonistic excesses of liberal campus life, he’s on a mission here. He asks if Mr. Bishop is around.

“Oh.” Miss Velda frowns, patting her bun. “I hate to be the one to tell you, but Harry passed back in December.”

“Oh no! I’m sorry.”

“Stroke. Sudden thing.”

“That’s awful.”

“Just before Christmas, too, that poor family. First the grandson, now this.”

She’s referring to Tooly’s older brother, Sam, who died a couple years back. Quinns are a type; they always know where to find meth and oxy and fentanyl. The younger ones bring their brothers and cousins to parties to help them sell it. Occasionally, they die. They OD, jump off roofs into swimming pools, wreck their ATVs. Miss Velda was right when she called Pinewood a trash heap.

Jesse was hoping he could avoid Tooly and deal with his granddad instead, but no. Whether Mr. Bishop ever “figured it out” or not, Jesse has missed his chance. Maybe Cat knew that already.

“You don’t know where I’d find his grandson on a Saturday afternoon, do you?” he asks Miss Velda. “The younger one. Obviously. Does he ever come by?”

She laughs. “Little Tooly? At the library? You’re kidding.”

Jesse shrugs, smiling wryly.

“Last I heard, he was bussing tables at Fishingham’s, but they let him go. Harry had his hopes up when that kid graduated, but you know Pinewood. Trees can’t grow in salt mines, et cetera.” She stands for a moment, hands on hips, then slides an incredulous eye to Jesse. “Are you friends with that boy?”

“No, not really. There’s just something I want to ask him.”

A pause settles between them. He can feel her antennae sparking.

“Maybe there’s something else you can help me with,” he says. “Can you tell me anything about the Night House? The old Simms place?”

“Oh!” Her eyes brighten. “Oh, yes, yes, yes.” And she sweeps him off to the stacks.

In the nonfiction section, she points him toward several books that have been set aside on a display table. Eastern Carolina Industry, 1865–1929; The 20s That Never Were: Exploring the Lost Generations of Blacknot; That Recent Unpleasantness: Despair and Decorum in Restoration Carolina. The most surprising find is a book authored by none other than Harry Bishop himself: Stars, Bars, and Gars: Fish Tales of the Miskwa River.

“Self-published,” Miss Velda says, like she needs to set the record straight. “Charles Mercer is the one who built that house. There’s a biography about him somewhere…”

“I learned about him in school,” Jesse says. “I’m more interested in the house itself.”

“Ah well.” Miss Velda finds a photo of the house in East Carolina Industry and shows it to him. “It weren’t ever that impressive, far as plantation houses go. You can see here, where the original house is—it’s not big. But then Mercer lost everything, and Simms moved his cotton mill down from Boston, and he bought the place for a steal, slapped all these additions on—see, the wing with all the dormers, and the widow’s walk, and the wraparound porch in back. Victorian tackiness. There used to be oak hardwood in the front foyer, but Simms put in that hideous green tile, looks like a public bathroom. Nothing about the house makes sense anymore.”

She checks in to see if Jesse’s still listening.

“Green tile,” he says. “Criminal.”

Miss Velda laughs. “I’m sure that don’t mean much to you.”

Jesse scans the page in East Carolina Industry. In 1933, Virgil Simms’s son hit the market crash, shot his wife and his two kids, and hanged himself in the attic. Then the house was purchased by a forty-something war widow named Clara Lewton, who turned it into a brothel.

“That’s where ‘Night House’ comes from,” Miss Velda says. “It’s haunted, of course. Lewton’s girls left in the early 50s and the place has been empty ever since.”

Empty-ish, Jesse thinks.

“Miss Velda,” he says. “Did you ever hear anything about a secret way into the house? Like a hidden room?”

“Never,” whispers Miss Velda, captivated. “What’re you looking for, the family silver?”

“I heard Tooly knows about a secret way in.”

“Oh, wow. Well, I’ll be.”

Jesse waves his hand. “Just something I heard.”

Miss Velda rubs her chin, eyes glittering. “I could look into that.”

“Nah, just rumors. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

With this seed planted, Jesse then explores the nonfiction section on his own. He returns to check out a copy of Belles and BLOOD!: Strange and Unsolved Killings of the South. Miss Velda looks at the book and then at him.

“Is your aunt Nancy gonna see this?”

“Miss Velda,” he says, laughing. She continues to look at him, dead serious, until he shakes his head no. “Also—maybe don’t tell her I was here.”

Miss Velda slides the book over the counter. “Don’t get me in trouble.” Nine ten PM. The lights of the Koonce farmhouse shine yellow on the lawn, shadows sliding across the porch, silhouettes in the downstairs windows. They’re an old Blacknot family, the Koonces, not wealthy, but generous. Real people people. Robert Edward Lee Koonce III is now three years graduated from Miskwa High, and yet here he is, back in town to throw “the house-sitting party.” And Jesse, standing tensely next to his car at the side of the road, knows that anybody could be here: bougie South Greene teens like Morgan, twentysomething townies, even Kneesville kids, whom he raced in regionals, or a random clique of girls from the Christian school in New Bern. Why those folks come all the way out here, he’ll never know. Already, there are at least thirty cars parked all zigzaggy in the front yard, a bonfire flashing in the dark beside the barn, loud laughter, squealing girls, a boy’s belch echoing into the crickety woods.

Jesse approaches the glow of the open doorway carefully, as if walking a balance beam.

Come early, leave early.

But he has a feeling he’s walking headlong into chaos, like what happens at this party will echo through the lives of Miskwa County teens all summer long. These things are always like that here—all that school-year tension builds up and up, culminating in a desperate, messy, shit-faced event. On the porch, six recent graduates shout to one another, four girls saying over and over in a round how important their friendships are, two boys teetering on the verge of an explosive argument, Wolfpack versus Tar Heels. When Jesse enters the house there’s another argument to his left, Tamera Dawes hissing into the face of her boyfriend, “It’s not about what happened at cotillion, Marcus!” Jesse gives them a wide berth. He knows most of the faces—the kids sitting on the couch, cross-legged on the floor playing cards, blocking doorways. There are the Wyland brothers, edgelord assholes who succeeded Jesse on the cross-country team; valedictorian Emmalee Smallwood, who lost her mind after graduation and set her college acceptance letters on fire; and Idgy Sawyer, sitting mournfully at the bottom of the stairs picking at his banjo. Its twang clashes with the subdued hip-hop coming from a phone on the coffee table; someone has put it in a mason jar to amplify its sound.

He searches the room, face by face.

“Calloway!” Red Koonce thunders his name. “Is that Calloway?”

Jesse salutes to his host. “Red!”

Red is a big freckly guy, curly rust-colored hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. He pulls Jesse into a crushing bear hug. Over his shoulder, Jesse sees the beer crates piled fortress-high on the kitchen counter—piss beer, cheap.

“Goddamn, you little shit!” Red shouts, angry-happy, Jesse’s friends used to call it. “I heard you were back in town, but I thought, naw, Calloway’s too smart to come back just to hang out with the likes of us.”

“Give me enough to drink and I’ll hang out with anybody,” Jesse says. “Even you, Red.”

He didn’t intend to drink here, but the line comes easy—like riding a bike. Red grabs his shirt collar and yanks him toward the kitchen.

“Is Tooly here?” Jesse asks along the way.

“Tooly? Why?”

“I’m looking for him.”

“I don’t know who the hell is here. Come on! Let’s get some drink in you, son!”

Jesse falls seamlessly into a conversation with a group of guys from Red’s year. They talk about college and college ball and college drugs, and they talk about the high school (how shitty it still is) and the sinkhole (What town is so broke they can’t fix a sinkhole?). Jesse finds an assortment of half-empty liquor bottles hiding behind the beer. People’s voices circle his head, and he pours himself a shot.

A girl flies through the kitchen—“Hey! Calloway! Morgan is looking for you.”—but he catches only a streamer of hair disappearing behind a doorway and doesn’t know who it was.

“Okay,” he says to no one. “I’ll go find her.” Jesse finds Tooly on the deck with a few friends. Red has the back door open, people coming and going with the mosquitos. Jesse slaps one on his forearm. Bloodsplat.

As he approaches, drink in hand, Tooly looks up in surprise.

“Calluhwee.” He slurs his words in a way that might be his accent or drunkenness or just a straight-up speech impediment. But his face isn’t horsey; Jesse remembered it wrong. Tooly actually has delicate, vulnerable features, soft orange freckles on his nose and chin. His hair hangs over one side of his face like a blond eye patch.

“Whendju get in?”

“Yesterday,” Jesse says. “I’m not here for long.” His brain loops—ask him about ask him about ask him about. “Hey, I’m sorry to hear about your granddad. Miss Velda told me.”

A beat. Tooly’s three Pinewood friends glance at Jesse, then turn away and begin talking to one another. Tooly is jittery, his leg bouncing.

“’Kay, thanks.”

Another awkward beat. There’s supposed to be some casual conversation between condolences and the question Jesse wants to ask, but he’s struggling to figure out what to say. At school, he and Tooly weren’t anything close to friends. Though, when Jesse started sneaking up to Pinewood, to Bittern’s Rest, to the Night House, Tooly was a regular fixture there. Were they friends then? Would either of them have ever called the other that sincerely?

Jesse says quickly, “I was wondering if—”

“Hey, man, I dunnonothin.”

“You—you mean, about Connie?”

Tooly squints. “’Bout huh? Cannee what?”

Jesse stares, dumbfounded. “What?”

Are they that drunk already?

He tries again: “Your granddad—and Connie, my mother. He ever talk to you about it?”

Tooly begins to look irritated. “’Bout what?”

“About—” Jesse says. “About finding her.”

Tooly lets out a noise, a grunt and a sigh at once. “Man—get out my face.”

He shoulders Jesse aside and goes back into the house. Jesse tries to follow just as Red barrels his way onto the deck, bumping kids to the left and right, drinks sloshing. He zeroes in on Jesse, throws an arm over his shoulders, and stage-whispers warm, fermented breath into his ear.

“Hey there, skinny playa. There’s some South Greene girls looking for you.”

Jesse looks toward the door where Tooly disappeared. “Sounds promising.”

“You be careful, son. Them girls over the bridge, they got little kitty cat claws.”

“You actually say things like that, Red?”

Red hisses and pantomimes a cat scratch. Jesse ducks away into the kitchen. He can’t find Tooly, but since he’s already here next to the booze, he pours another drink. Now he’s crossing the yard through a skunky cloud of pot smoke and angst and emotional disasters. A girl whose name he can’t remember is sitting in the dirt at the base of the porch steps, weeping; he worries she’s alone until he spots a friend ferrying water to her from the kitchen—“You just need to hydrate, Lexi, come on!”—like Red’s party is a team sport.

Morgan is over by the firepit with two other South Greene girls, Brooke Barnes and Kayleigh Dowell, their cat-eye makeup stark in the glow of the flames. When Morgan sees him, she jumps up and squeals, throwing her arms around his neck.

“Where have you been?” Her hair smells like woodsmoke.

“Come late, leave late,” he says. “Is Tooly out here?”

“Who?” Morgan hiccups. Jesse steadies her wobble and, to his surprise, feels concern. Why is that? He’s seen Morgan drunk before; he’s not her dad.

“What’re you drinking?” he asks.

She shakes a metal flask at him. “Moscow mule. You want some? It’s got vodka, cream soda, lemon vodka, strawberry bitters. And one other thing, I forget. Red made it for me.”

“I don’t think that’s a Moscow mule.”

“Maybe not to you, college boy. Here, you drink it.”

He takes the flask and throws it back. Like a chess pie, the concoction is so sweet it’s corrosive.

“Shit,” he says. She laughs and pulls him down into the grass. Morgan keeps him here. She won’t let him leave. She points out Gregg Stubbs: a nondescriptly good-looking white kid over by the barn, whose stiff jaw gives the impression of someone who grinds his teeth. Occasionally, he’ll glance in the direction of Morgan and Jesse sitting together by the bonfire and quickly look away.

“So that’s the penis slapper,” says Jesse.

“Shh!” Morgan claps her hand over his mouth. Her two friends flop over in hysterics.

“You told him about that?” says Brooke.

“Sure,” says Morgan. “Jesse’s one of the girls. You can tell him anything.”

“I said Greg was trying to give her a wet willy,” says Kayleigh.

“Shut up.” Morgan throws grass at Kayleigh’s face.

“No, I think they call that cockclocking,” says Jesse. The girls shriek. Morgan yanks his hair.

“I’m serious, stop. He’s standing right over there.”

With one slow, conspicuous motion, all four of them turn to look at Greg. Greg ignores them, pretending to watch the drunken game of cornhole taking place on the lawn.

“He seems so sad,” says Brooke.

“Well,” says Kayleigh. “Now he knows what it feels like to get shafted.”

They all lose it then.

“Y’all are the worst,” says Morgan. Morgan, Brooke, and Kayleigh’s conversation spins so fast it’s hard to keep up: Morgan feels bad about breaking things off with Greg, because Greg didn’t do anything explicitly wrong. Kayleigh doesn’t like Greg for watching so much porn, but Brooke says you can’t shame people for liking porn, that’s sex-shaming. And they’re all sex-shamers for making fun of poor Greg’s fetishes, shame on them. Morgan says it isn’t even about the penis slapping. She says it’s weird, because here she finally dated a guy her parents like, and she ended up not liking him. When Greg came to dinner, Mr. and Mrs. Taylor had only the most positive things to say about him—his strong handshake, his good manners. Mr. Taylor plays golf or something with Mr. Stubbs, so maybe that means Greg comes preapproved, like a car.

Jesse drinks. He enjoys sitting and listening. He likes how girls let their conversations go off like a frenetic flying machine, how they talk as if he’s not there, their daydreams and desires on display.

“So,” says Brooke. “How’s college life been for you? You seeing anybody?”

Jesse is still running checks on who comes and goes from the house, the circle of faces in the yard smudged in firelight. He turns back to the girls and realizes Brooke is speaking to him. “Like, dating?” he says. “Some folks here and there. Nothing serious.”

“Girls?” Brooke asks coyly. “Boys?”

“Brooke!” shrieks Morgan, mortified.

Jesse stares at the three of them, their made-up faces sweaty and shadowed. He can tell Brooke’s cheeks are flushed, that she’s realized her mistake.

“Girls, boys,” he says easily. “Everything in between.”

Brooke is sheepish. Morgan glares at her. Jesse realizes he’s still holding Morgan’s flask. He tips it back until it’s empty. Where is Tooly? He doesn’t care. He’s no longer searching faces. The girls have caravanned to the bathroom, and he finds himself back in a conversation with Red, his gracious host. He’s still in the grass near the firepit, sprawled on his back and gazing at the stars. Red is shirtless, slumped in a lawn chair.

“I worry about you, Calloway,” he says. “Out there on your own.”

“I’m not alone,” says Jesse. “I’ve made plenty of friends.”

“What kind of friends?”

“Nerdy friends. They’re from all over. They’re eclectic.”

“Okay. I don’t know what you mean by that, but nerds are good. You need to be around nerds, little dude, anybody who can chill you out. You were crazy. I mean—you were crazier than me, I think.”

Jesse watches the blurred silhouettes of legs pass back and forth over the bonfire. Crazy. The word slides through his head like melted ice cream. When he closes his eyes, the earth tilts.

Red laughs. “Hey, remember that night you showed up at Jaelah Harrison’s place? That was messed up, man.”

“Nah, Red, that wasn’t me,” Jesse says.

“Yeah, it was,” Red says, his voice floating along. “What do you mean that weren’t you? You got stuck in the hedge. We had to pull your ass out.”

“That was a different guy. A jillion years ago.”

“Really, man?” Red laughs again. “Pretty sure that was your blood I had to scrub out of my sweatshirt. My mom thought somebody’d been stabbed.”

Jesse doesn’t say anything. Red shrugs, and then someone calls for him across the yard and he’s gone. Jesse stays where he is. After a while, someone prods him in the ribs, hard enough to startle him. “Calloway!” Morgan says, leaning down to clap in his face. “Wake! Up!” He rallies. The mason jar sound system whines out the refrains of Yeezy: Everybody know I’m a motherfuckin’ monster. Morgan hugs Tamera Dawes, whose face is tearstained, and who says she’s leaving and is never coming to another one of these fucking parties ever again. Jesse isn’t sure where Brooke and Kayleigh have gone.

Tooly crosses the living room in front of him, following unsteadily on the heels of his friends.

“Hey,” says Jesse, grabbing Tooly’s arm.

Tooly stumbles and whips around, startled. “Spahder fangers,” he says.

“Huh?”

Tooly’s pupils are dilated. In the overhead glow of a string of Christmas lights, his face is sweaty and flushed. “Nothing,” he says.

“Can I talk to you?” Jesse asks.

“Why? You lookinferHarlan?”

The room goes muffled, as if Jesse’s skull has filled with cotton. Tooly’s friends head outside without him.

“Jim,” Tooly says combatively. “Jim Harlan.”

“No,” Jesse says, sparking awake again. “No, no, no, no. I’m not looking for him. It’s not about him.”

“Man, whatchuwan then?”

“Someone told me—they talk me to told you—” Oh hell, he’s drunk. “Sorry. The Night House. There’s something in the Night House.”

Tooly blinks, dim-faced.

Jesse feels like the whole room is watching them. He whispers, “There’s a secret way to get inside the—”

“Naw, naw,” Tooly says. “Leave me alone. I don’t owe you shit.”

He hurries for the door.

Jesse stares after him, cheeks blazing, suddenly angry. Owe him? Jesse didn’t say anything about anyone owing him, and even if he had, maybe Tooly does owe him. Because it isn’t going to be Tooly who keeps this secret from him, not Tooly. For God’s sake.

He pushes ahead through a knot of drunk senior girls, returning to the deck where Tooly has rejoined his friends. Tooly sees Jesse coming at him and stumbles back in surprise.

“Hey, what do you think this is about?” Jesse shouts. “I was only asking. I wasn’t asking you to do anything. You don’t owe me enough to answer a fucking question?”

Tooly, in reply, hauls back and punches him hard in the face. Jesse tumbles off the deck into the grass.

This happens so fast it feels more like a spell of vertigo than a punch. Then there’s a wave of laughter, and the drunk senior girls are crowding around him, and a hot pain splits his cheekbone. Someone shouts, “Damn, boy, you took that one full-on!” By the time Jesse’s sitting up, Tooly is sprinting off alone toward the tree line at the edge of Red’s yard, and Morgan is poking her head out the back door, screaming: “Where’s the fight? Did I miss it?” He staggers down the hall, coming back from the bathroom. His cheeks are numb. Someone stares at him from the doorway, and he stops, squinting at a smeary backlit face. A familiar aura of concern and disapproval catches his heart. Jim. Jim Harlan. But no—it’s just one of Red’s friends.

“Hey, Punchy, want to learn to block?”

Jesse slides past. “Nah. I’m good.”

Morgan meets him in the living room. “Why did he hit you? What happened?”

“I scared ’im,” he says. “Don’t worry about it.”

Flash forward. They’re outside on the front-porch steps. She grabs his shirt and kisses him hard, like she’s trying to pin him in one place. He tastes the concoction they’ve been drinking all night, though now it isn’t so bad. Like hot, melted Skittles. Three thirty AM. Jesse and Morgan leave Red Koonce’s place and head southeast toward downtown. It happens easily, like it was meant to. Morgan pats the dashboard of his car and says, “Hey, Dick, long time no see,” and then she hooks up her phone to his cassette deck so that she can scream-sing pop songs. As usual, Blacknot is dead, the streetlights blinking, the river black and still. Jesse settles along the waterside east of Spartina Square and rolls down the windows. Warm swampy breeze. Undercurrent of hog farm.

Morgan finds Belles and BLOOD! in the passenger seat and skims through it. “Murder, murder, murder,” she says. “Plotting to kill someone?”

“You bet,” says Jesse.

“Can I help? Who’s the mark?”

“Red. I want his party empire.”

“Love it! Yes! And look—” She scrounges in her purse and presents a bottle of lemon vodka: “I stole this from his kitchen!”

Jesse’s weird dad conscience comes back, making him wary. “You’re gonna get me in trouble, M.”

“Aw, hush, you like trouble.” She takes a swig and hands the bottle to Jesse, but he caps it and sets it down in the floorboard.

Morgan watches him a moment. Then she reaches out to his aching cheek, brushing the spot where Tooly punched him.

“Does it hurt?”

“Nah,” he says.

She leans forward and kisses him. He puts his hand on the back of her neck, fine, sweat-damp hair warm between his fingers. Morgan’s face is a comfort: smudged mascara around big, bright eyes, a pillowy upper lip. Girl kisses are like that—soft and subtle. He kisses her back, first on the mouth, then on the throat, breathing in the smell of the firepit, the kitchen-cleaner sting of lemon vodka. He hears her breathing him in, too. He hopes his anxious day hasn’t made him stink.

“Condom?” she whispers.

“I have one,” he says, bunching her skirt around her thighs. “But we don’t need it yet.”

Morgan blushes, suddenly bashful. “Okay.”

“What, Greg Stubbs never went down on you? Bet it would’ve been something to see him try.”

“Oh, shut up!” She laughs, swatting at him.

He lets the seats back. The mechanics are tricky with Dick’s console between them, but he’s always enjoyed the challenge of sex in a car. The comfort of being tight and pretzeled. The thrill of being partly exposed. Morgan puts her feet against the door, and he slides her skirt up the rest of the way. He kisses the folds of her stomach, her pubis mound. “Oh,” she says, and grabs a fistful of his hair.

He takes his time. He’s in no hurry.

Then she screams, high-pitched, filled with terror.

Jesus, what did he do wrong? He pulls back, but Morgan, in her sudden panic, forces her skirt down and tents his head. He has to pry her hands off to free himself. When he finally gets a look at her, her face is white, eyes wide, and she’s pointing, jabbing her finger over his shoulder through the driver’s side window whispering, “There—there—there—!”

But there’s nothing. The parking lot stretches empty up to Main Street, darkened in the lacy shadows of oak trees. Down the block, a red streetlight blinks.

“I don’t see anything.”

“It walked past the window. It looked in at us; I saw it!”

“Okay,” he says, resting his hand on her arm. “It’s okay. I believe you. What was it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know. A ghost. A—a creature—Jesus.” She presses the back of her hand against her mouth, eyes wet with tears. “No, wait—where are you going? Don’t go out there!” She grabs for him. “Don’t—!”

He carefully pulls himself away and steps out of the car, scanning first one side of the parking lot, then the other. On the asphalt, there’s a smear of black mud, washed up from a recent rain. Also scat, little dark pellets the size of blueberries. He shines his phone out onto the park lawn. A dozen luminous eyes stare back at him. Over the rush of the breeze, he hears hooves treading in the grass.

“There’s a bunch of deer.” He leans into the window. “Is that what you saw?”

Morgan shakes her head.

“What did you see? What’d it look like?”

“I don’t know. Not a deer. It walked by the fucking window.”

“Look.” He points toward the park. “You see them?”

The deer flee, skinny legs sweeping under a streetlamp on Desmond Street. But there’s one among their herd that doesn’t move. It remains beneath an oak tree, flat as a shadow, erect like a person, but leaching out a quivering, feral presence. Through a web of hair, it stares straight at him. He stares back. A ghost, like Morgan said? He can feel its gaze pulling at him. Seeing through him. He takes a step forward as Morgan cries out again from the car, “Stop, Jesse! Are you insane?”

He stops. The shadow is gone.

It doesn’t take long for him to wonder whether he saw anything at all. He feels disappointed when he gets back in the car next to Morgan.

“I think we’re… a little drunk,” he says.

Morgan is still watching through the back window, but her face slowly trades its terror for embarrassment. She, too, is questioning whether she saw anything. When she turns back around, she avoids his eyes.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

Her face crumples.

“Morgan.”

She begins to cry.

“But why—” she whispers shakily. “Why did Tooly do that to you? You couldn’t have scared him. Look at you.”

Jesse is surprised. He had assumed they were through talking about this.

“Maybe I should just take you home,” he says.

“You hate me.”

“Huh? Why would I hate you?”

“He’s a homophobe. Tooly Quinn. Everyone knows it. That whole family’s a trashfire.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” Jesse says. “Look, I don’t think that’s why he hit me. Also, it’s Fucknut. You expect folks to be woke?”

“I told you to come. And someone attacked you. I’m so stupid.”

“Please, stop. It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry I told Brooke and Kayleigh you’re bi. I’m sorry I invited Greg to my house and not you. You must hate me. I’m a fucking clown.”

“M.” He grips her hands.

She doesn’t understand. He never wanted to go to her house. That was the point. When she first flirted with him at the diner that miserable summer and later hooked up with him at the live nativity in Spartina Square, he’d been looking for something that wasn’t going to work. Maybe he had used Morgan, and maybe she had used him, too—as a fling, a personal rebellion. Jesse was not preapproved. But that didn’t matter. Morgan was a rebound. They wouldn’t have been anything to each other if Harlan hadn’t ruined him first.

“I don’t hate you,” he says. “I’m not mad at you.”

Morgan presses her face into his shoulder and sobs. Later, he drives her back across the bridge to Brooke’s place, where she’ll sneak into the pool house and rejoin her friends. Jesse keeps the windows rolled down as he drives, allowing the mascara stains on his shirt to dry. Morgan laughs at herself in the side mirror.

“I’m a mess.”

“Nah, you’re all right, M,” he says.

With their catching up unconsummated, he feels emptied out and stuffed up at the same time. It’s as if two nights have taken place—a normal one, deeply familiar, and one where nothing was normal at all.

He needs to tell her. Set the record straight.

“What happened with Tooly was my fault,” he confesses. “I was asking him some weird questions.”

Morgan pauses from wiping the streaky eye makeup off her face. “What questions?”

“Did you know his granddad was the guy who found me? He died back in December. I didn’t know that until yesterday.”

Morgan has to think about this. When she remembers, her mouth falls open. “Oh.”

“There’s a special reason I came back. Someone has been contacting me about Connie Calloway’s death. They have photos, case materials. I came here to try to link up with them.”

“Photos,” Morgan says. “Of your mother? Of the scene?” Her eyes press him with an expression of unwelcome pity. “That’s awful.”

“Yeah.”

Morgan is quiet for a bit, as if waiting for him to offer details. When he doesn’t, she says, “Who’s this person you’re linking up with?”

“Don’t tell anyone about this, M, okay?”

“Swear to God.”

So out it comes—Cat, who messaged him over Wipixx one morning after a bender, then the month of anonymous DMs, the promises, a wealth of secrets, the bridge rendezvous, the directive to talk to Tooly, to ask him about some secret entryway to the Night House. Morgan listens to his story. When he’s finished, she squints at him.

“Why do you have a Wipixx account?”

“It wasn’t my idea. My roommate suggested it.”

Morgan glances into the backseat, where she tossed Belles and BLOOD! “Okay,” she sighs. “How did this person convince you?”

“What?”

“Convince you. What did they do to make you think you could trust them?”

“Why wouldn’t I trust them?”

“You never thought you should tell someone else? Sheriff Hupp? Nancy—?”

“No, no. Nancy will shut it down. That’s what she does. And if I tell Hupp, she’ll tell Nancy.” He pauses, trying to remember which secrets he has and hasn’t shared with Morgan—not his secrets, but Nancy’s. Her and Hupp. Minerva, the proud sapphic roommate from grad school. “They’re close, is all.”

The worry in Morgan’s face deepens.

“Look, you don’t understand,” he says. “They never told me the whole story about what happened to her. So if I go to them now, I’d lose my chance. Plus, I promised Cat I wouldn’t tell.”

“But you’re telling me,” Morgan says.

“I’m telling you because you’re my friend.”

He’s well into South Greene—past the wrought iron security gate and the golf course, past vast front lawns, darkened facades, the extra wings that make the houses look like monsters with multiple backs. There someone’s four-wheeler parked in a driveway. There someone’s smooth, marshmallow-shaped hedges. A six-car garage faces the street, announcing priorities. He looks all around to avoid Morgan’s skeptical stare.

“Jess,” she says. “What if this person messaging you is out to hurt you somehow?”

He laughs. “Why would they want to do that?”

“Jesus, I don’t know. There’s some real kooky people out there. You don’t know who you’re dealing with.”

“But I do know them,” he says. “We talked for a month, I told you. We talked about Blacknot and what this place is like, what it’s like to grow up here. They know it all. And they get the people here. They’ve been listening.” He can tell from Morgan’s look that she isn’t convinced, but he goes on. “I feel like I know them, like I dreamed them. It’s a connection.”

Morgan shakes her head. “Sounds like a crush, my dude. Like you’re into this person.”

“No.” He laughs again. “It’s not like that.”

“That’s twisted.” She points to the road. “Go on and pull over. Brooke’s house is there.”

Dick’s engine sputters as he parks, loud enough to wake up the neighborhood. They both flinch, but no lights come on. All is quiet except for the usual summer riot of crickets and cicadas, the occasional croak of a bullfrog.

“Let me see these messages,” Morgan says, holding out her hand. “I’m pretty good at picking up on subtext.”

He doesn’t want to show her. Saying all this aloud has him feeling embarrassed. While he believes the connection is there, he’s afraid it’ll go sour if he exposes it to scrutiny. Still, the longer Morgan holds out her hand, the longer he knows he must give her the phone, and he does, and she sits there for a minute, reading.

Eventually, she laughs.

“You’re kidding with this,” she says. “You’re fucking with me. This was all a joke.”

“No.”

“Did Kayleigh put you up to this?”

“No?”

She reads from the phone, “Altar blood? Ivy tongue?”

“What?” Jesse says.

Her smile vanishes. She can see the earnest confusion on his face.

“It’s just,” she says slowly, “random words. It doesn’t make any sense.”

He takes the phone back from her. The Wipixx exchanges are as she says. Cat’s messages, and his replies.

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ember

Smoke Needle Spindle grove

Sage skull hemlock bone

Smoke Needle palm Star sea arrow star

Tar honey oyster

Altar blood spade Arrow

red Smoke ember

laurel Honey Vessel

Palm root

Ivy tongue

tinArrow

Cross flesh Vessel

“You wrote that,” Morgan says.

“No, I didn’t.”

“It’s right there.”

“I didn’t write it.”

But he sees it for himself. Iron feather spit Vessel / Crow vessel Dogwood briar Tooly / Cross knife wormMoss gate red Night House… Swallow thistle bone Hymn path. This is his exchange with Cat from beginning to end.

“Honest,” he pleads. “Just earlier today, I was reading these. Everything made sense.”

Morgan’s face is solemn, but her eyes show fear. “They must’ve gotten ahold of your phone somehow. They did something to it. Did you leave it anywhere while you were at Red’s?”

“I don’t know.” His heart pounds. The light of the phone burns his eyes. “This is crazy.”

Morgan unbuckles her seatbelt, but he doesn’t want her to leave him. Cat has found him out. They know he’s just shared their secret, and for the first time, he feels afraid.

“Cat,” Morgan says. “Like the animal?”

“Like Catherine, I think,” says Jesse. “What do I do about this?”

She gets out of the car, stumbling. At first, he thinks she’ll wander off without a word, text him again when she’s forgotten all this, but then she turns back and leans into the passenger side window. “Give me a day,” she says. “I’m kinda shook right now.” With that, she wobbles off down the sidewalk and disappears through a shadowed gate.

---

Red Rabbit Ghost

by Jen Julian

An impulsive young outcast confronts his small town’s dark secrets in this atmospheric and haunting debut horror novel from brilliant new voice Jen Julian.

“Drenched in dread and yearning, Red Rabbit Ghost is the kind of Gothic novel that you don’t so much read as inhale. I loved it.” ― Kelly Link, author of The Book of Love

“Deeply immersive and darkly mysterious. Certain to be one of the year’s standout horror reads.” ― Craig DiLouie, author of Episode Thirteen

Eighteen years ago, an infant Jesse Calloway was found wailing on the bank of a river, his mother dead beside him. The mystery of her death has haunted him all his life, and despite every effort, he has never been able to uncover the truth.

Now someone is promising him answers. An anonymous source claims that they’ll tell him everything. But only if he returns to the hometown he swore he’d left in the rearview.

But in Blacknot, North Carolina, nothing is as it seems. It’s a town that buries its secrets deep. Jesse’s relentless investigation garners attention from intimidating locals, including his dangerous ex-boyfriend. And he’ll soon discover that this backwater town hides a volatile and haunting place on its desolate edge.

The Night House is calling. Some secrets are better left buried…

“At once elegiac and deeply visceral. A bittersweet ode to all the ways in which a place can haunt us long after we’ve departed―and transform us when we return.” ― Georgia Summers, #1 international bestselling author 

“Julian weaves a dark spell with the bones of southern gothic storytelling and gorgeous prose. To enter this haunted swamp of a novel is to lose yourself in cosmic mystery.” ― Andy Marino, author of The Swarm

Price

$18.99

Price

$24.99 CAD

Format

Trade Paperback

1. ebook
2. Audiobook Download (Unabridged)

This item is a preorder. Your payment method will be charged immediately, and the product is expected to ship on or around July 22, 2025. This date is subject to change due to shipping delays beyond our control.

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