Excerpt 1.

Mystery Trio No. 1
A real actual paying job.

"Sleeping bags?"

"Check."

"Tent?"

"Check."

"Lanterns?"

"Check."

"First aid?"

"Uh…"

"If you forgot - "

"Here it is!"

Maddie nodded firmly and placed a final checkmark down on her clipboard. She set the checklist aside; from within the bed of a rust-marked yellow truck bed Jack began handing down supplies, and Maddie stacked them in neat rows on the ground. In the summer sun, freckles that had been nearly invisible over winter browned over her nose; Maddie adjusted her wide-brimmed hat over her head and tugged her long sleeves down over her wrists so that they covered the ends of her floral patterned garden gloves.

Maddie's skin only ever burned, and burned very badly.

When the truck was empty Maddie adjusted her clothes all over again, although the small exposed area of her collarbone was already stained red and a triangle of sweat marked the space between her shoulderblades. She leaned against the back of the beat up Ford, a truck donated from one of Jack's uncles in Wisconsin. "Well?" She smiled kindly down at him. "How are you feeling?"

He was dizzy just watching her stand and move in a world that was so close and so far away. "Ugh." Vlad groaned and threw his arm over his eyes so that he wouldn't have to stare at the vastness of a cloudless sky. His stomach twisted, he fought the urge to throw up -

Vertigo. Vertigo was true Hell.

A shadow fell over his face, cooling. He blinked until Maddie solidified over him. "You're going to get a sunburn," she said, setting a thin silver thermos beside him, "drink some tea."

"Tea won't help."

"How would you know if you haven't had any?"

He grunted. Jack dragged a raggedy old tent across the ground until he found a suitable spot overlooking the lake. With Maddie's help, Vlad sat up, and they watched Jack unpack poles and a massive stretch of canvas. The thought of standing made his head spin. "I should be helping."

Maddie adjusted her sleeves. She wrapped her arms around her knees and shrugged. "You can help when you feel better."

"What's your excuse?"

She smiled. Her lips were pale, like the rest of her. "I'm helping you get better."

Vlad drank.

The tea was warm and tasted faintly of honey.

The lake, which was murky with clay residue when disturbed and clear when still, opened wide down a thin slope, and spanned miles wide to a line of trees on the other side. The water was nested between steep hills and sharp drops, collections of rough stone that hid just under the surface of sand; impossible to inhabit. The nearest town was downriver by two miles, and it had more cows than people. Their campsite was relatively flat and hard, but it was definitely an oddity compared to the thick forest on either side of them.

A weird place for a haunting.

Maddie proclaimed herself team boyscout and lit a fire as the sun kissed the tops of trees. She shed her long-sleeve shirt for a thin tank top, despite how wind picked up over the water and cooled the area. Whenever she dressed down, Maddie always seemed more free, her movements more fluid, her laughter more rambunctious, and her smiles brighter. She rubbed after-sun lotion on her tinted skin, set popcorn cooking over the fire, and warned Jack not to burn their dinner.

Vlad laid out southwestern blankets for everyone to sit on. Then he sat down in front of his camera bag and started unpacking, double-checking every scrap of equipment he owned, down to the scratches on the camera body. He owned a multitude of film types, although largely high ISO, as was appropriate for after-dark photography. He also had a number of high-powered flashlights - another necessity for light painting and scene setting.

Vlad liked making sure he had everything. He made sure before they left the University of Madison, Wisconsin, and twice on the eight-hour long journey to a small lake in a surprisingly mountainous region of southern Illinois. It terrified him to think that the one thing he had to contribute to this team was his equipment - unlike Maddie, resident mad scientist, and Jack, resident master engineer, he had no specific skill to offer. He was just. There.

Taking pictures.

Nearly valueless.

A heavy weight dropped on his shoulders, like dark hands rising from the deep; he squawked, and his camera just fell. It bounced off of his knee and landed lens-first in front of the fire.

"Pfft," Jack covered his grin. Vlad clutched his chest, breathing hard. He snatched his camera out of the sand and shot a glare over his shoulder. The blanket that Jack had given to him slipped off his back and he checked over his lens for scratches. "You're too jumpy," Jack accused.

"Not jumpy," Vlad muttered, deeply annoyed. He rubbed a glass cloth in small circles over the lens, constantly pausing to inspect the surface in the firelight. Was that a mark, or an eyelash hair? "I'm reasonably cautioned to the situation."

Maddie shared devious looks with Jack. "So… jumpy?"

His cheeks burned. They were all thinking about the gas station, the cashier with the strawberry hair, and the ice machine. Vlad readied his camera; if he pressed it to his face they couldn't see him blush. Click. A still of Jack prodding the fire. Click. Maddie's bare hands plucking popcorn out of a pot. Click. A shot of the night sky that would doubtless come out black, but gave him an excuse to lay on his back. The woven blankets Jack provided scratched his arms and itched through his shirt. Vlad lowered his camera.

Stars filled the night sky, changing it from black to blue to purple.

"Think we're going to find anything?"

Every other time he'd asked this there had been a chorus of yes's and of course and we're not doing this trip for nothing. But now, in the reality of it, in the fading summer heat and the presence of soft water touching the lake shore, certainty didn't exist. "Well," Jack prodded the fire, his lips set in a frown that was very much unlike him, "at least it's a job. A real, actual, paying job." He rolled back his shoulders. "My grandpa always said that makes us professionals."

"Professionals at what?"

"That's easy," Maddie said. She pressed her lips together. The fire popped, dark smoke reflected its light high into the air. Maddie chewed on her dinner, stopping occasionally to poke the fire, thoughtful.

In the end, it was Vlad who sat up and spoke, "we're documentarians."

Maddie snorted, "no."

"Why not?"

"That doesn't involve the research, or the science behind the whole thing."

"Who says there's no research in recording stuff?" Vlad rubbed his neck. "And it's not like our research is very realistic - " her skeptical look blackened, "I mean, it's not proven, and it's mainly theoretical. We're going to prove it. Obviously." He flushed. Her almost-glare faded away. She went back to tending popcorn and Vlad relaxed.

"We're not making a documentary," she muttered, "we're scientists."

"Technically, you're the only scientist," Jack commented. He stared into the fire, having not moved at all, except that his frown may have gotten deeper and his shoulders tighter. The unstable firelight changed the shape of the shadows on his nose, and his very round face seemed almost hollowed by it. He met each of their eyes in turn, and got to his feet, grim. "I know what we are."

They waited, captivated by his presence; Jack searched the distant horizon - the wind tossed strand of his hair across his face. "We're ghost hunters."

A single unpopped kernel of corn burst open.

Maddie exploded, a deep laugh that came from her belly and echoed through the trees; it bounced back to them, a changed sound. She clutched her chest, shaking. "That has, nothing - " Jack's expression of complete forlorn despair only managed to set her off all over again. Maddie gasped. Her thin neck glowed orange with the firelight. Click. She relaxed on her elbows, looking up at Jack and beaming. "That's the least accurate definition I've ever heard. Ghost hunting," she snorted, "we're researching wisps, Jack. Not taking to the woods with a rifle and a couple of snares."

Jack sat back down. "We're looking for them, though. That's a kind of hunting."

"And technically we do shoot them," Vlad added, holding up his camera and focusing the lens on Maddie. She looked at him. Her hair orange, her lips curved slightly upward. Click. "Plus, it sounds cool."

Jack nodded.

Maddie glanced between the two of them and finally shrugged, leaning forward to poke at the fire some more. "...Alright," she relented, "it does sound a little cool."

Vlad fiddled with his camera. There was a warmth in his chest, a kind of excitement that made the forbidding forest feel inviting, and upcoming hike and prospect of a ghost hunt - a real, actual ghost hunt - seem an invigorating conquest. For the first time that night, he stopped thinking about what skills he didn't have, and started feeling like a part of something that was bigger than him, bigger than all of them.

"So I guess we'd call this the first investigation of the Mystery Trio; Actual Professional Ghost Hunters, right?"

Tree bark dug into his back. The camera lens pressed tight to his eye. His arms tucked against his chest. "I think… I've got it." Vlad pulled in a careful, shallow breath, mentally checking if he was moving at all. Without a tripod, the margin for human error blurring a long exposure was exponential. "Alright - paint." Cli - Maddie and Jack turned on their flashlights and rolled them over abandoned cabins; Jack focused on the bulldozer and half-formed foundations, Maddie directed her light on the site behind it, catching every building and the shadows between the trees. Vlad counted. Twenty four, twenty five... "Okay stop!"- ick.

He lowered the lens. "I think I got it." He let the camera hang around his neck and rubbed his eyes. "Anything else we should get?"

"How many more shots do you have?"

"Four, but I have plenty of film."

Maddie crossed the muddy road between them and the construction site to climb into the front seat of the bulldozer, sitting inside and pulling a box of cigarettes from her pocket. She set one between her lips and covered the end. The flash of her lighter struck her face in a warm, soft light. Vlad wished he'd still had his camera ready. "None of the accounts were at the cabins," the tobacco on the end of her cigarette glowed and dimmed. Maddie expelled smoke into the night air and shivered. "I think we've done enough of scene-setting. We'll probably see more activity down at the shore, where the accounts took place."

Jack rubbed his hands together and blew on them. Maddie nodded, "it's cold, Fenton."

"It's summer."

"Welcome to high elevation," she muttered. "Well. High elevation plus ghosts."

"You need a jacket after all, city slicker?" Vlad added.

Jack made a face. Maddie hopped from the bulldozer and grabbed his arm, she then nodded at Vlad and pointed down the slope that stretched from the camp construction site down to the water. "Jack and I will go get a coat, if you go down and find a place to shoot from?"

"Alone?" Vlad blinked.

"You're the one who didn't bring a tripod and for some reason that means you need an extra twenty minutes to set up." Maddie smirked. "You're not scared, are you? I thought you were a professional?"

"I'm…" He wound his camera, flushing. She was teasing him, and he knew that, and he needed to focus on not getting a strange combination of embarrassment and butterflies. "I'm a professional," he stepped around them and started down the hill, "and I'm not afraid of anything!" he added over his shoulder.

Her laugh followed him.

The heat in his face didn't fade until Vlad arrived at the lake shore, where wind carried the sound of waves to him and the smell of swampish water took him back into reality. Vlad took a moment to untangle his hair from its tie and redo it into a braid that wouldn't feel loose or uncomfortable.

He found a collection of stones that stretched into the water and captured ripples between them. The sound of waves slapping stone echoed between the boulders. They were tall, almost as tall as his shoulders, and relatively difficult to climb on to - but it was the kind of perfect-height vantage point for a camera to set a scene, and without a tripod, he wasn't going to get much better. Vlad slipped the camera over his shoulder and hauled himself on top of one of the boulders that split the lake and the shore. He found a flat space on top of the rock and set it to point at the forest. After some fiddling, adjusting the shot to include a balanced image, there wasn't anything he could do until Maddie and Jack came back to paint light across the landscape.

He waited.

Just looking at the dark gaps between the trees began to make his skin crawl. Vlad clasped his hands together and swung his legs over the edge of the boulder, because there wasn't anything scary about forests. Or lakes. Or the water that now seemed too close to his feet, so close that anything under the surface might be able to reach up and untie his shoelaces. Vlad shivered, zipped his jacket up to his throat, and squinted across the vast lake.

Was that a campsite on the other side? A fire between the trees? He squinted. The shore on the opposite side was only a black smudge, barely discernible from the night sky. But something distant seemed to let off a dim glow, a flicker in the darkness.

Click.

Vlad froze.

He looked over his shoulder, where the camera remained innocently balanced on top of the boulder. The Canon TX used a heavy manual shutter, the kind that was impossible to set off by wind alone. He gingerly picked up the camera, blinking, sure he had wound it earlier; Vlad brought the camera up to his eye and hit the release. No sound. It wasn't wound anymore. "Okay." Vlad searched the beach, hot and cold all over. "Very funny." He squinted at the film count.

Only three shots left.

Vlad inspected the forest, his heart pounding in his ears. Ghosts are a real and metaphysical remnant of consciousness. Not scary. Maddie wasn't around to give her usual curt and dismissive reassurances. Memories would have to do. "You're wasting my film. Ha-ha." He wound the next shot and aimed his camera at the forest, peering through the lens.

There was a space between the trees that had been empty, but when he lifted the finder to his eye, it was empty no more. In the view through the lens a small white fawn stood at the edge of the forest. Its fur cast an unnatural light, its beady red eyes fixated on Vlad, on the camera, and watched. Its little legs moved nervously back and forth, though in truth they were only half legs, with no real hooves that met the ground. Vlad breathed very slowly.

Click.

He took the shot this time.

The creature coiled, ears flat, and sprinted back into the forest without a sound. Vlad lowered the camera, his lips were numb, his throat clogged. He rasped to breathe. He wasn't entirely sure if what he had just seen was real. His stomach felt empty and heavy all at once, and all too suddenly the top of a boulder was simply too high of a place to be. He scrambled off of it, legs shaking when they hit the ground. He sprinted across the beach, leaving the waves and the surf behind.

He stumbled into their campsite, which was as empty as they had left it; the fire was banked over and cold, the tent devoid of life, and the truck sitting just exactly as they had left it. Jack's one and only jacket hung over the front seat, untouched.

His friends were gone.

Up next:
Chapter Two: Teenagers are Idiots
(it takes one to know one)