Excerpt 3.

Mystery Trio No. 2
This would never happen if we had cell phones.

Maddie Thompson leaned against the bark of a mountainous pine. She pulled a silver case from her pocket and produced a single unfiltered cigarette. Jack huffed, summiting a boulder that he could have walked around, but climbed it because Maddie climbed it and he refused to be the only who who didn't take the fun route.
She grinned. "Are you still cold?"

"I - am not - " He stopped and promptly sank against a tree, eyeing the next five feet of steep incline with dread. "How is it I'm in worse shape than - " A blaze turned Maddie's face orange until the cigarette lit; red embers glowed as the dim result. Jack watched the first plume of smoke part from Maddie's lips and drift in front of her face.

She shrugged, "I work out more than you."

"I don't smoke."

"Maybe you should," she teased, "couldn't make it worse, could it?"

Jack, typically, took her entirely seriously. "You know how smoke works, right? It gets in your lungs and causes cancer and makes it hard to breathe and - "

Maddie rolled her eyes. "I know how it works, Jack." She pushed herself from the tree and turned to survey the hill that they would now have to climb down, a slope that was perhaps even more steep than the one that they climbed. "It's a joke."

"Well," he finally caught up to her and put his hands on his knees, far less excited about stumbling down trails in the dark. "Smoking isn't a joke."

"I'll stop when I need to," Maddie promised, planning her route down. She skirted the summit to better identify a path where an inexperienced hiker would have it easiest. "It helps with stress," she said, "and I have to make it through college somehow."

She squinted at the valley opening below, something flickered in the distance; a light between the trees. For a moment, her heart stopped, her breath caught, and the thought of blazing trees and fleeing animals filled her mind.

Fire?

Jack snagged the nearest branch to balance against the slope. "Mads?"

"What's that?" Maddie pointed. Very nearly an expert outdoorsman, she knew what a fire looked like, and this - it didn't move like a fire. Fire flickered. But the faded red-orange light inside the underbrush reminded her more of ground kilns than it did flame. (Except this wasn't her summer in Mexico, and there wasn't a traditional ceramicist in the whole of Illinois.)

"Old man Algernon said this area was closed to hikers during construction," Jack pressed his lips together and leaned away from the tree, intently focused. His warm breath tickled Maddie's cheek and the thought came to her, unbidden, that Jack radiated with the same cozy warmth of winter sweaters and fireside hot coco. She blushed.

A gentle, cooling breeze brought her thoughts back to the present. "I'm not sure what it is." Maddie checked her compass and made note of the cardinal direction they faced. "Could be what we're looking for. Getting your coat can wait, right?" She jumped down the hill in a serpentine pattern, toward the light and away from the lake. Jack followed.

They traveled to the bottom of the hill and found the road, an unmarked slab of gravel in desperate need of repairs. Maddie crossed quickly and lead them into a ravine that sank between two boulder-filled slopes and melted into a grassy meadow. Grass as tall as their knees disguised the mud their footsteps sank into. A stream carved its way through the meadow, and they followed it toward a giant porous boulder that broke the monotony of the grass and mud. Beside the boulder they found the source of the light; a small, gleaming red-orange pool, caked with a cooling black crust. It spat hissing steam into the air and popped with molten liquid. Maddie's eyes stung just to look at it, and in the next step she encountered a wave of heat that stopped her in her tracks.

Sweat appeared on her neck and forehead. "That's…" Jack licked his lips. "That's not possible."

"Lava?" Maddie crouched. Stinging, burning heat surrounded her.

In the center of a cool meadow that had not witnessed volcanic activity in thousands of years, lava. Grass, full and green and budding with seeds, curved out and up from under the bed of lava, some of it even touching its rolling hot surface. The pool bubbled and popped, but none of the surrounding grass appeared even remotely distressed. Her feet sank further into mud. Maddie inched closer to the slab, her nose and throat burning from the heat.

"Don't touch it!"

"I won't." She wasn't sure if her voice carried beyond an awed whisper. The lava - if that's what it was - made no geological sense. For one, an uneven patch of meadow wasn't exactly volcanic in any sense. The stone beside the pool, just like the boulders lining the meadow, was basalt (an igneous rock), but nothing in the region had reach a melting point for millennia. When it was too hot to get any closer Maddie tossed her half-used cigarette on top of the pool.

It burst into flame and sank under the simmering surface. Maddie backed away quickly, rubbing at the heat on her eyes and face. Jack put an arm around her shoulders and held her back, as if worried she might get too close again. "How did it get here?" he asked.

She didn't have an answer. One college geology class never really prepared her to explain volcanic refuse vacationing with a bunch of wildflowers. She shook her head, "It doesn't make sense."

"Maybe it isn't lava? Maybe it's something else?"

He didn't say what. There wasn't any kind of answer. Maddie rubbed her nose, her skin fought the attention and threatened to crack. "We should find a way to test it. Do you think there's anything back at camp that might - "

The arm around Maddie's shoulders tightened and dragged her backward; fat embers popped like grease off a frying pan and the pool hissed. It crept across the grass, expanding in all directions. The two of them were blasted by another wave of hot gas, and then the pool began to dim. Its bright oranges and reds grew gray, and then black, and then - miraculously - it faded into the same consistency and texture of a shadow. Unharmed grass sprouted through the shadow, which dimmed until it disappeared completely.

It left no trace. The earth was unscorched, the space that the lava had occupied filled with tall and healthy wild grass. Maddie untangled herself from Jack and walked cautiously to the space the pool occupied. Mud threatened to capture her shoes. Stalks of foliage bent in the wind. The area was cold and damp, though residual heat continued to sting her cheeks. "That… happened, right?"

"I saw it," Jack affirmed.

"But…" Maddie dropped to her knees and searched. She needed something, anything that might provide evidence of their experience. Her fingers found mud, more mud, and pebbles. "That's not possible!" Water seeped into her jeans. "It has to be something, it has to make sense, it has to have an explanation! This kind of thing doesn't just disappear - " Maddie stopped. She found something that didn't fit the calm meadow and scooped up a handful of dirt that contained a small sample of ash - still warm - smelling faintly of tobacco and menthol. "Unless…" Her jaw hung open, "It's paranormal."

Maddie yanked her cigarette case from her pocket and dumped the contents to collect the sample of ash and earth and grass. "Paranormal," Jack repeated, "... ghost… lava?"

"If people can become ghosts, why not events?" Maddie theorized, snapping her cigarette case closed and gingerly passing it up to Jack. "It could have been thousands, even millions of years ago!"

"But ghosts are post-conscious beings." Jack replied slowly, brushing his thumb over the tin case. "Lava doesn't have a consciousness, does it?"

Maddie picked up the items she'd dumped on the ground - six cigarettes, two with filters and four without, a tampon, a business card from Alderto's, and her student ID. "We don't know that!" She peeled her jacket off of her shoulders and laid it out on the ground where she thought the edge of the impossible pool might have been. Then she stood and marched to the stream to pluck out fist-sized rocks. "Our research is only beginning, and we can't assume to know everything! There's got to be a theory out there we haven't thought of. Who knows? Maybe ghosts aren't conscious at all!" Her face flushed with excitement. "Help me collect some rocks to mark where it was. We need to establish a radius of study while it's still fresh."

"Mads."

She plucked three medium sized stones from the water.

"Maddie."

She tossed one back, thinking it too slimy.

"Hey, Thompson!"

Maddie turned around, "What?"

Jack pointed up the ravine where the meadow stretched and turned back into forest. The mountain was one of three that surrounded Algernon's crater-shaped lake; between its clustered vegetation was another orange glow, definitely not a fire. "Another one."

The rocks all tumbled back into the stream, forgotten. Maddie threw herself at Jack and snatched his arm, "Let's go!" she tugged.

Jack flushed, "But -Mads - we're forgetting someone?"

"Vlad can take care of himself!" Maddie pulled. "It's gonna vanish! We have to go now!"

Jack hesitated. He had a feeling he might follow her to the ends of the earth, but it wasn't a feeling he understood until that moment, surrounded by unnatural occurrences, faced with the completely untamed vigor in Maddie's eyes as she pulled on his arm. His heart skipped a beat, he grinned with confidence that wasn't real, "Lead on, Mads!"

They raced up the hill, against time, against logic, but with the fire of discovery illuminating the path ahead.

Donated by an uncle living in upstate New York, Jack's truck - once a glossy beauty of yellow paint and a classically fitted hubcap - resembled something akin to junkyard trash. The back bumper was not only dented but hanging on two bolts. The paint had chipped and worn away, the exposed metal grew several colonies of rust. The truck's bed sported a crack from corner to corner and the engine overheated twice on the drive from Madison. Its saving grace was the radio. Vlad climbed into the driver's seat and dusted off the old CB that nestled just above their actual radio, the one meant for news and music rather than short range communication. He lifted the keys off the dashboard and started the engine. The old car roared.

Vlad clutched the steering wheel and bit his lip. Eyes hidden in shadows watched him. He closed the door and locked it, just in case his paranoia was valid. The musty-smelling cab provided him with an illusion of security, at least enough of it to inspire Vlad to pick up the CB receiver. "Hello?" He asked.

Vlad turned the volume knob until the sound of static made him uncomfortable. He held the receiver's square microphone close to his lips. "Transmitting from Algernon's Lake, is anyone there?" He waited. Static. "Reporting an emergency. Repeat: an emergency. I have - I lost - my friends are missing in the forest. Over." Vlad listened to the buzz of the radio, his pulse accelerated. He wrapped his free hand around the steering wheel to ground himself.

He did not look outside of the car.

Nothing's out there anyway.

It's fine.

"I repeat, is anyone receiving? Over."

The smelled of sun-baked leather and dust found a way down his throat. He started to breathe harder, trying not to cough. "We're in the country." Vlad spoke out loud to stave off the creeping sensation of a menacing silence. "People have radios, they use them. Calm down." He did not calm down. "... Then again. In the mountains, with all the trees a signal like this can't travel more than ten miles." Vlad believed optimism was a farce to hide from fear; he rationalized and organized facts with nothing but cold logic. Reason conquers fear. Vlad closed his eyes. He dropped his shoulders.

The keys were in the ignition.

The engine purred.

He had fuel.

Vlad made a decision. It wasn't tasteful. "I hate driving." He fumbled with the seatbelt and adjusted the center mirror. He was pretty sure that a gas station was fairly close down the road; they'd at least have a working phone. "If anyone can hear me," Vlad spoke into the radio. "my friends are missing in the woods. I'm en route to find help. Over."

He backed slowly out of the campsite. The truck lurched onto the road with a great shudder and ambled around pot holes. The radio hummed electrostatic. Headlights illuminated trees. He drove at fifteen miles per hour, then twenty, then thirty, and was sailing past forty when a halo of gold light appeared around a bend in the road. He hit the brakes, believing that the car would go skidding into a halt, but it merely slowed naturally like most cars traveling at reasonable speeds do.

A small gas station with rounded corners and shrubs overgrown in the parking lot illuminated the darkness as the only glimmer of civilization between the local town and Algernon's construction site. It largely served to supply the summer hikers that usually combed valleys and mountains in the summer. He parked next to a large propane tank. There were no other cars in the vicinity, and although eight p.m. had come and gone, the lights inside of the station remained on.

He climbed out of the cab. His legs shook and he had to pause to compose himself. He ached for company, for the feeling of the watching forest to go away, for normalcy. Vlad slung his camera around his neck where it felt solid and safe; the gas station promised to restore normalcy. An OPEN sign in the window had a hand-painted red inscription beneath the pressed letters read pardon our dust. He stepped inside. A silver bell chimed, florescent lights stung. To his left stretched the shelves of a convenience store, stocked with sheaves of wood and hearty foods and a few spare cook pots. The other half of the building was hidden behind a plastic tarp that he immediately lifted to check for monsters.

A white and chrome counter had been half destroyed, presumably, by the sledgehammer that rested against it. Wedged between a wall and the front windows a sheaf of plywood protected a tremendous stack of red chairs and tables from scratching the glass. In the center of the dusty floor a very clearly dead jukebox laid on its side. Not really satisfied that nothing would leap from the dismantled diner to eat him, Vlad let the tarp fall back into place. A piece of paper taped to the plastic read UNDER CONSTRUCTION in faded black pen.

He stuck his hands in his pockets and followed the tarp to the register.

Nobody stood behind it.

"Hello?" Vlad leaned over the counter and peered into what he presumed was the break room. Empty, save for a grill pressed up against the back wall.

His skin crawled.

"Anyone in here?" Vlad asked. The hair on his neck and arms stood on edge.

First Maddie and Jack, now this. Maybe something was…

"Nope." Vlad marched to a phone that rested between a coffee pot and a postcard stand. "The cashier is on break. Smoking, probably," He yanked the phone down and spun its old-fashioned dialer. "There is nothing supernatural about this."

He pressed the phone to his ear.

Wet.

His stomach dropped. Vlad pulled the phone away. Water bubbled out of the holes in the receiver and dripped down his arm. He clenched his teeth, reason conquers fear. "Hilarious," Vlad said, swiping away the top layer. The water only resurfaced. "But I'm definitely not scared." He shook the phone, droplets scattered, and the steady leak transformed into more of a gushing. A pool began to form at his feet, spreading with each second. Vlad dropped the phone and let it crash against the wall; it cracked along the handle, liquid began pouring through the cracks.

Okay. Mistakes were made.

Not to worry.

He's a professional.

Vlad lifted his camera. His shoes began to soak. He moved and the moment his foot landed he understood that it was wrong. His heel caught the slick floor at exactly the wrong angle, and he went flying. His elbows crashed into the postcards, his fingers scraped against the wall, and then a loud crack.

A ceiling. Lights flickering. Dazed. Pieces of the postcard display jabbed into his back. Water soaked his hair. Vlad's fingers slipped, struggling with the task of pulling himself pack up. Nausea rolled, he sank back to the floor. A black case beside him. His camera, on the floor, the back of the case open and exposed. He pressed his lips together, uncertain if that was right or wrong. Inside of the case, a black-brownish strip of film exposed to the bright lights above. Water circled the camera, slowly rising. Any higher and it would spill into the film chamber. Brown leaves moved on the waves around the camera, riding on the water with exceptional balance. The leaves had legs. Raft spiders, Vlad recognized the species from his high school arachnid phase. The long hairs on their feet allowed them to hunt while walking across still pools. Floating spiders drifted toward his equipment, the open case, the exposed film.

The.

Exposed.

Film.

"No!" He scrambled, everything hurt. Vlad heaved himself up, dizzy but determined. Water swelled over his wrists as he clambered onto his hands and knees and lunged at the camera, spiders flipped under the violent surface. He snatched it up shook it clean, then closed

the case. Breathing hard, Vlad stopped until black spots cleared from his vision and then hauled himself up. Postcards floated around his sneakers. His breathing came shallow and labored, but one instinct shouted above the rest.

Escape.

He clutched a shelf to help himself stay steady while edging towards the door. The water swelled over his ankles and swirled around him with a surprisingly active current. Spiders crept out of dark corners, around boxes, on top of shelves; they gathered in moving brown hoards of wiggling legs. A thousand eyes followed his retreat with ominous intent. He made it to the door, shaking from head to foot, and pressed it open.

The door gave way with no resistance. Forced to cling to the metal frame as water cascaded into the parking lot, Vlad could only watch helplessly when his camera case popped back open and a roll of supposedly secured film dropped into the rushing current.

Vlad stumbled outside, the smell of rain and storm overwhelmed him and he didn't fully remember opening the car door until he was climbing inside of Jack's truck. The ignition roared, he slammed on the gas, the car gave a violent shudder and shot leapt at the wall of glass. Vlad neglected to put the car in reverse; in a panic he yanked the steering wheel to the left. The car tipped.

Flying is a strange sensation.

A weightlessness that Vlad could only compare to skating on paved ice filled his chest. He watched the hub of the car scratch a window pane in horror; the glass shuddered in reply just as the car completed its turn and detached from the building. The two wheels in the air struck the ground squealing, the car bounced like a rock skipping over water. It raced over asphalt and dove into the brambles beside the convenience store, branches clawing at the doors windows. Vlad took his foot from the gas a moment too late, the car burst out of the thistles and the headlights caught a glimpse of a massive black trunk before they plummeted into it.

The crash yanked his whole body; the wheel slammed into him, his ears rung, he lost all the air in his lungs. The hood crunched, the front of the truck wrapped around the tree while the back wheels lifted from the ground. Vlad's head hit windshield and his skin split.

The car collapsed in a great cloud of dust.

An owl hooted and took off from a nearby tree. The wind carried a foreign, almost imperceptible song as it whistled through the trees. Clouds covered the moon.

Vlad did not move.

It wasn't because he knew he couldn't move, but because he had no desire to find out. Warm liquid oozed from his eyebrow to his nose. His bones vibrated with adrenaline. He sank down the steering wheel until his chin landed on top of it, and there he stayed. A bad taste pooled in his mouth. He closed his eyes and did not think about blood or spiders or water in places it should not be. He tried not to think about anything at all, except for the fact that he hated driving. Passionately hated driving. Hated driving and cars and car crashes with every fiber of his being.

Vlad remained slumped against the steering wheel meticulously deciding what else he hated until the radio crackled to life. The volume was still turned obnoxiously high, a stately voice made him wince and reach for the knob to turn it down, only then confirming that his right hand could in fact function. A man claiming to be an officer over a fuzzy CB connection gave a weather report. Something about clouds and storms and "going to be a big one." Stretching his arm to the radio felt like stretching it across miles, and convincing his fingers to wrap around the receiver took more energy than his final exams. Despite this, Vlad brought the radio to his lips. "Hello?"

The crack in his voice surprised him. Vlad licked his lips (iron, blood) and breathed through the liquid that pooled between his teeth. He spat, sticky wetness dribbled from his chin. "H-help," he ventured, "I need help."

His stomach flipped. Maybe no one would hear. Maybe the receiver was broken. Maybe the weather report was a figment of his imagination, or a radio broadcast with no one on the other end to hear him. Maybe he was going to die out here.

"This is Sheriff Cobb," the voice on the other line responded, distant but intensely serious. "What is your emergency? Over."

Vlad argued with his thumb to get it to press, and then had to convince his throat to make words. "Crashed." He blinked at the blurry, fuzzy radio. It took him a moment to realize that he need to concentrate before it came into focus, and a moment longer than that to realize his thumb was still on the button. He let go. His head spun.

" - location? Over."

Vlad lifted his head, peeling out of sticky residue. He tasted salt and his head swam. He propped his chin on the wheel and fought a violent urge to throw up.

"Hello?"

Vlad cleared his throat. His shoulder became pins and needles. The arm attached to it rested on the dashboard, and Vlad experienced a small relief that the elevated limb responded and his fingers twitched on command. He slowly, painfully, drew his left arm back towards himself. The radio chattered at him, stern. The officer forgot to say over, but would pause intermittently between sharply articulated questions for an answer.

"I can move." Vlad announced into the radio. He was certain this is what the officer wanted to know.

"That's good," the voice replied, a mixture of static and words. "But I need you to stay still, alright? I'm calling backup, but I need to know where to find you. Do you know where you are?"

Vlad looked around. "Trees."

"Very good. Are you on the I-9?"

Vlad squinted out at the trees and the bushes and the forest. "...A light."

"Near a house? A town? Streetlights?"

Between the trees, light shifted. It bobbed between shadows and split into three lights. Vlad pressed his lips together. They blazed like fireflies and wove through the undergrowth toward the van. They grew in size, or got closer, or both. Something like that.

"Talk to me, son."

"I think," his voice trembled to form each word. A glowing mist that became shapes, glowing and sharpening into identifiable forms. Creatures, even, with the most unmistakable slotted eyes. "there are lions."

"Stay inside the car. Do not move. Stay with me, where are you?"

Vlad stopped listening. The lights that were shapes that were definitely lions circled the car. Or at least, they were lions, but not lions from the mountains of Illinois. They had none of the lithe markings of a cougar, and were built much something traveling the plains of Africa. Except Vlad had been to a zoo. He knew what a lion looked like. These creatures, unearthly in every respect, were not African. They had ideas of manes, tufts of thick fur around their necks, but nothing quite so typically majestic. And if he thought about it, if he got right down to it, if he could just think through the hazy to really truly say what he meant, it would be their size. Lions were most definitely not tall enough to look him in the eye.

The radio chattered very urgently. He dropped the receiver. A lion (or a ghost of one, since lions don't have white glowing fur or crimson eyes) stood at the shockingly unbroken window. Its head nearly filled the frame. Frost gathered on the pane. With still-numb fingers, Vlad wiped it away. He shivered. Snowflakes gathered at the edges of the window, the creature behind it became only a blurry fuzz of white light. It wasn't particularly frightening, Vlad decided. He spread his fingers across the glass and reveled at its strange coldness. The glass was not cold in a regular sense, though he shivered, but cold in a way that resonated in his bones and made his stomach twist and revived memories of the time he'd been lost in a blizzard when he was nine years old. He pressed his hand harder to the glass, chasing that memory, hungry to see it through to its end, to what really happened before his father found him in the snow.

A block of ice pressed into his palm. His fingers turned numb. He could see it, the storm in all its rage and power, taking out power lines, howling through the streets, burying entire houses in hours. He saw himself, or a version thereof, struggling through piles up to his knees, clinging to his books with his head tucked down against gale-force winds. He called his father's name, praying that he would be heard before the snow swallowed him whole.

A presence lurked in the storm, wavering and shifting in the wind. An instinct in his gut gave him pause, he couldn't have possibly shiver harder than he already was, but his spine began to tingle and his teeth chattered with newfound energy. "Daleel?"

The presence that solidified above him was not his father.

Seven slanted eyes peered at him down a long black snout that ended in crystal-like teeth, a mouth big enough to devour him in one bite, and drool that refracted rainbows in all directions. It wore the shape of a wolf in the same way P-40 pilots dress up their airplanes like great whites; clearly and mechanically a disguise for a greater predator. Its height was as tall as the big bad wolf from The Three Little Pigs, but in an alternate version where he gobbles the whole house down.

Music that wasn't quite music and not quite sound chewed on his ears, DOES IT SURVIVE?

Vlad shivered with his whole body. He licked his lips, which cracked, "...It d-does." He said meekly, thinking of how The Three Little Pigs was supposed to end.

The creature, some kind of demon that his father warned about, perked what might have been mistaken for ears. All seven of its starlight-composed eyes locked on him, and its black fur glinted with hidden gems, galaxies, worlds beyond the void. Its supernatural voice both sang sweetly and dripped with an almost tangible warmth. DOES IT FEAR?

The storm seemed to calm, the horrible burning from his nose, to his ears, and to his fingertips dulled. Wind whipped the trees around them into a flurry, but Vlad felt none of its bitterness. "Th-this isn't scary." He folded his arms tight to his chest and tried to remember what his father told him about heaven and hell. Nothing useful.

The creature tilted back its enormous head and let loose a howl that shook the foundations of the earth itself. IT WILL LIVE. Giant black paws landed on either side of him, the great animal moved with speed and grace beyond its size. Around him it circled, its long black fur growing longer, wider, wrapping around him until the world outside reversed shades of light and dark. The snow fell black, and the shadows of the trees transformed into beacons. Here, warmth bloomed from his frozen toes and climbed upward to fill his whole chest.

The beast rested beside him, still an ethereal being painted by the night sky, but small enough to be mistaken for a horse. IT IS YOUNG.

"Are you going to eat me?"

IT IS RUDE.

Vlad clutched his books and squinted with heightened suspicion that he might have already died in the storm. His voice echoed through the quiet and dark storm. "You're going to eat me."

The creature grunted, a strangely musical sound. NOT WE, THAT CONSUMES IT. The beast shifted to peer at a glimmer hiding between the trees. Arms and legs and shoulders, a human figure with starved red eyes. The wolf snapped its teeth and released a sound like thunder. The figure turned and fled. SHADOWS HUNGER FOR LIFE.

"W-what," Everything went blurry, the snow, the shadows, the eyes of the creature itself. "What are you?"

Blackness swelled in front of him, the cold yanked on his chest, and he drifted from the world. Even faded, beautiful music like a billion harmonized voices rang clear, TOGETHER, ONE. APART, NOTHING. WE ARE SHADOWS NO LONGER.

.

The car door popped open. Red and blue lights blinded him. "Found you," A deep voice, familiar, said with a released breath. "Can you hear me? Son? We've got an ambulance on the way."

Vlad blinked at the sheriff's badge, then the sheriff himself, who resembled neither a wolf nor a lion. He shivered. Hungry. Tired. Cold.

He closed his eyes and slept.

Hmm.

-Catalyst

.

Up next:
Chapter Four: Deal with the Dead
(all insecurities are half off)