Danny's visions are based on actual stories I heard when I went on a tour of this yet to be disclosed place.

Chapter Three: Visions

"Even if people are still very young, they shouldn't be prevented from saying what they think." - Anne Frank

Danny

"I'm sorry," I plead. "I'm sorry, Ms. Carmichael! I won't do it again!"

Ms. Carmichael doesn't stop, not that I'd expected her to. She only scowls deeper as she locks the manacles into place. "If you were sorry, you wouldn't have done it at all."

Frightened tears sting my eyes. Boys aren't supposed to cry, so seeing me do it will only make Ms. Carmichael angrier. Holding my tears back is a struggle when I can see Christopher's malicious grin just behind Ms. Carmichael. The shadows cast by the lantern he's holding make the two of them look even scarier.

The worst part is that I brought this on myself. Our meager portions at dinner wouldn't have filled one of the rats that live down here. The bread loaf was right there. I only took one slice.

Yet, in Ms. Carmichael's eyes, I had taken ten entire loaves for myself.

I knew I would be punished. I was always the worst at my schooling, but I never felt truly stupid until now.

I didn't even get to eat the small piece I took. My stomach rumbles loudly, traitorously.

Ms. Carmichael picks her own lantern up off the ground and stands. She wags her finger at me. "Naughty children must be punished. Christopher, do as you see fit."

My heart stops when I realize that Christopher is holding one of the huge tree branches the stick boys are known for.

Christopher nods at her. "Yes, ma'am."

Ms. Carmichael gives him one of the proud smiles she reserves for her stick boys before making her way up the stairs, leaving me alone with Christopher and his branch.

My lip quivers. Tears fall silently down my cheeks.

"Be a man," Christopher says even though, at eight years of age, I am not yet a man.

He sets the lantern down just far enough to illuminate his target while not risking setting us both aflame. He grabs the branch in both hands.

"Please…" I whimper.

That was the wrong thing to say. The branch comes down hard on my leg. I scream, feeling the shock jolt up my leg. My pant-legs had scrunched up at my knees during my initial struggle against being chained. Now blood, fresh and hot, runs over my skin where the branch struck me.

"I said, be a man," Christopher scolds.

I am openly crying now, too terrified to stop myself. "Why are you doing this?"

Christopher's mouth turns upward with his cruel glee. "Because you're bad. You heard Ms. Carmichael."

He strikes me on the other leg. I scream again. Both my knees have jerked up on their own, sending blood running down my legs, ruining my shoes and socks. In my hysteria, I wonder if Ms. Carmichael will make me scrub them until the red stains come out.

"Naughty children must be punished," Christopher recites as if reading from a school book.

A different wet warmth spills into my trousers. Ms. Carmichael will surely make me clean that, too.

How can the stick boys be so callous when they are so close in age to Amelia, who is the oldest and sweetest among us?

Christopher strikes me again, swinging the branch into my side. Then the other side. He's spreading the pain around, making sure every part of me hurts.

My bare arms are next. When the branch comes down on my elbows, my wrists shoot downward in response, scraping the tender skin against the manacles. My sobs have ceased, but my tears still flow. At least, I think they do. The pain is everywhere, and there is so much blood that I can't tell whether I am truly weeping or just bleeding from the splinters that shot off the branch when Christopher struck my arms.

The next blow is to my head, and I am grateful for the darkness that comes with it.

Jack

My son willingly chained himself to the wall. Because some ghost - or whatever wanderers qualify as - told him to. If this had happened a year ago. I would have grabbed my son and got him to safety before running back down here to destroy whatever was screwing with him.

The past year has made everything so topsy-turvy, even before I knew Danny's secret.

"Danny," I say, "I don't like this."

Danny doesn't respond. His eyes stare vacantly ahead.

Then, they glow pure white.

I push down a wave of panic. He must be having one of those visions he mentioned. I hope he's right about them not hurting him.

"I'm sorry," he says in a way that brings the panic right to the surface. "I'm sorry, Ms. Carmichael! I won't do it again!"

Ms. Carmichael? Who could that be?

I rush to my son's side as quickly as I dare when his natural glow is the only light source. I trip over something and barely register the impact before crawling the rest of the way. "Danny, can you hear me? What's going on? Is this normal?"

His still-white eyes are filled with green ghost tears. He is looking at something over my shoulder. I follow his gaze, but all I see is black nothingness. I reach for the Fenton Flashlight and curse when I realize I dropped it in my haste to get to Danny.

I turn back to Danny, and my heart lurches. My son's chin is trembling, and tears are now dripping down his gray cheeks. His head is tilted upward, looking at something above me.

Something, I realize, that only he can see.

"Please…" he breathes.

I reach out to wipe his tears away and jerk back when he screams and his leg spasms.

"Danny!" I shout. "What happened? Are you hurt?"

As I roll up his pant leg, my relief at seeing no visible injuries vanishes when my son starts openly crying and shouts brokenly, "Why are you doing this?"

I am paralyzed until he screams again and his other leg spasms.

A rush of fury washes over me. "What are you doing to him?" I demand of the beings that only my literally and figuratively angelic son can see. "What are you doing to my son?"

Danny's sobs and shouts and spasms continue. I am powerless to stop whatever it is he's seeing and feeling. I am on the verge of crying with him when I see his small wrists slam against the manacles-

That's it! I need to get him out of those chains!

Danny has stopped sobbing, but he hasn't stopped crying. "Hang in there, son," I say. I kiss his forehead even though he probably can't feel it. "I've got an idea. I just hope it works."

These chains have been here since the Civil War if not before then. They should be rusted enough that a good tug will break them.

But, I don't need to find out. Danny's head swerves to the left, and he gasps and blinks back into existence. His eyes are back to being wholly green with pupils.

"Danny," I breathe in relief. I cup his damp face in my hands. "Son, are you alright?"

Danny doesn't answer my question. "That was a child," he says shakily. He phases his hands out of the manacles. "That wasn't a soldier, Dad. That was an eight-year-old boy!"

I'm confused until I remember what Danny said about living through the wanderers' deaths. Then my confusion turns to pure horror. "Are-are you saying you watched an eight-year-old get killed?"

"I didn't just watch it!" Danny leaps to his feet and starts pacing the room, having no problems seeing in the utter blackness. He fists his hands in his hair, his white gloves blending in. I can't tell if he's going to break something or have a panic attack. "I was seeing through his eyes, thinking his thoughts-" He stops suddenly, touches his crotch, and sighs in relief. "But, thankfully, not wetting his pants."

I'm afraid to ask, but I need to know. "What happened to him?" I ask as I shakily climb to my feet. "It-it looked like you were," I shudder, "being beaten to death!"

"He-" Danny cuts himself off gives me a strange look. "What do you mean- I-I was just sitting there, wasn't I?"

My stomach churns. "No. You…you were…reacting to it. I-I think. You were jerking around and screaming and saying things like 'Please' and 'Why are you doing this?'" I blink to keep the tears at bay. "Danny, I thought you were actually being killed!"

"Oh…" Danny says like he doesn't know what else to say. He sucks air between his teeth. "Reaper didn't mention that part. Uh, c-careful!"

I nearly trip again in my haste to get to him; his glow doesn't throw as much light as you'd think. I bend over to run my hands up and down his body. "You're not hurt for real, are you?" I ask when I straighten.

My son has never seemed so small. "No. I'm okay."

He looks off to the side, focused on something invisible to my human eyes. He steps away from me and cups nothing I can see in his hands. Anyone who didn't know ghosts, particularly my son, would think that he was losing it when he starts talking to the wanderer that's presumably in front of him.

God, I wish I could see it!

"I can't believe they did that to you," Danny says with so much grief. "You weren't stupid. You were just hungry. And, it's okay for boys to cry. No matter what those-those monsters think."

I don't know what's worse: the fact that an eight-year-old had to go through…whatever that was, or the fact that my own sweet, selfless child had to experience it, was so willing to experience it.

Danny said there are three wanderers. Which means that he's going to do this two more times. God only knows how horrible the other deaths were, but I know that Danny will gladly let himself suffer if it means helping these lost souls.

I usually take pride in my son's heart of gold. Now, it's scaring me.

Danny tilts his head back, and I assume that means the wanderer is no longer in his hands. I seize the opportunity. I carefully walk up to Danny and pull my arm around him. He looks up at me when I ask, "Do you wanna tell me what happened?"

I said that partly because I don't want my son to bottle this up like he does every other bad thought in his head. The other part is my own curiosity. After seeing what the vision did to Danny and learning just how horribly an eight-year-old died, I find myself wanting to learn about these wanderers as much as Danny does. Like him, I want them to find peace.

Danny leans against me and hugs himself. "Wanderers want someone to know their stories. I don't think Benjamin will mind if I tell you."

Benjamin. So, that's the boy's name.

Danny guides me to one of the benches, which creaks loudly but holds my weight, and tells me about his vision. I keep my arm around him, and he leans into the touch as he recounts the experience with the solemnness of a soldier recounting the wartimes. Which is appropriate, given our circumstances.

According to Danny, the boy, Benjamin, was given barely any food for dinner, so he snuck a piece of bread and got caught. Some monstrous woman called Ms. Carmichael thought that chaining Benjamin up down here was a fitting punishment for something so minor. Even worse, she had some equally monstrous teenager named Christopher beat him with a tree branch. Whether or not murder was the intent is open to debate, but the thought of harming a child so grievously, for any reason, makes my insides curdle.

And, Danny felt that. He felt everything Benjamin was feeling.

By the time Danny finishes, he is shivering and hugging himself again. "All he wanted was a little extra bread," he says quietly, brokenly.

My poor son… "I don't know if you should keep doing this."

"I can handle it," he insists.

"Danny, you're shaking."

"You're shaking!" He leaps to his feet and whirls around to face me with his fists clenched at his sides. His eyes blaze with determination. "I won't let Benjamin and his friends suffer any longer!"

I stand up and clarify. "I'm not suggesting you do. But, maybe you should call Reaper, have them figure it out. They have more experience," I assume, "so maybe it would be best to let them handle something this serious."

Danny scoffs at that. "Sure. We let them handle this one. And, the next one I have to deal with will be five times worse. People don't become wanderers by dying peacefully in their sleep, Dad. Every wanderer has some kind of awful, awful story to tell. I know you're scared for me. I'm scared too! But, that only fuels my desire to save them! And, I'll never forgive myself if I give up just because I'm afraid of what comes next."

I don't recognize the teenager before me, and I mean that in the best way.

I've seen Danny take on enemies with a smug grin and a snarky comment. I've heard him speak passionately about outer space and, more recently, his many ghostly adventures. Long before he was a ghost, I saw him run up to anyone who needed assistance, regardless of whether he could actually help or not.

I've never seen him deep in the throws of helping someone. It reminds me that he isn't a little boy anymore. It's also a terrible reminder that, no matter how bad his vision of Benjamin was or how bad the other two will be, Danny has been through worse. And, he's gotten people out of worse.

As horrible as this whole situation is, I can't remember the last time I was this proud of my son.

A real smile pulls at my lips. "When did you become a man?"

Danny reacts by blushing and smiling at the ground, looking a little more like the boy he used to be.

"I still don't like this," I admit, "but I know I can't stop you."

"No, you can't," he says smugly. He looks off to the side. "One of them heading down that hall. Hold me down if I start flailing around, will you?"

He punctuates that with a thumbs-up, trying to make it a joke. But, his smile is paper-thin.

I play along, offering two thumbs-up in response. "You've got your mother's size, so it shouldn't be too hard."

He lightly punches me in the side before leading down the hallway I still can't see. Then he stops suddenly and tells me to stay put before fast-walking to a spot nearby. "Hey, you guys?" He picks something up off the ground: the Fenton Flashlight. "It's cool if you prefer it dark, but can you at least turn my dad's flashlight back on? I don't want him to be stuck in total darkness." Moments later, the flashlight flickers back to life. "Thank you."

"Yeah, thanks," I add as Danny hands the flashlight back to me. The relief I feel to have some actual light is palpable. "Shall we?" I say to Danny.

He leads me down the hall.

Danny

The hallway is an empty line of stone and darkness that's broken up only by my natural glow and the beam from Dad's flashlight. It does nothing for the apprehensive swirls in my stomach.

Benjamin's death plays on a loop in my mind. I wish there was a way for me to leap into the vision, rescue Benjamin, and beat his tormentors with a tree branch. No child could ever deserve such a horrible death.

And, I have a feeling that that wasn't the last I'll see of Ms. Carmichael, who was obviously the leader. Nor, the "stick boys," whom I can only assume are just as bad, if Christopher is any indicator.

I wish I could say that Benjamin passed on after I learned what happened to him, but he isn't ready yet. He didn't tell me as much; instinct did the talking. Maybe he's waiting for his friends.

The second wanderer flies into a rectangular hole that's been carved into the wall about two feet above the ground. It's big enough for me to crawl through, though Dad might want to suck it in if he plans on following me.

He points the flashlight into the hole and echoes my thoughts. "I don't know if I can fit in there."

I balance on my arms as I stick my upper body into the hole and look around. I'd estimate that it's about as deep as I am tall, maybe a little deeper, and veers off to the left. As far as height goes, it's the same as the opening. A medium-sized dog could stand upright, and his head would still touch the ceiling.

The wanderer is hovering at the deepest part of the hole. "Well," I say as I climb in, "here goes something."

"Be careful," Dad says. "I'll be right here, okay?"

"Okay," I reply, more grateful than ever that he's here with me.

When I reach the stone wall at the end, I sit in the corner with my back against the wall and curl into a fetal position. That just feels like what I'm supposed to do.

I lean my head against the corner and feel the dizziness once more.

My teeth won't stop chattering. My hunger pains are merciless. My trousers have long been soiled despite the fact that there is nothing inside of me. I still weep on occasion, but I am too parched for any tears to form.

I don't know how long it's been since Ms. Carmichael and her stick boys manhandled me into the pit. It must have been days by now.

Not a speck of light can reach this place. The only way out being sealed shut only makes the darkness that much more consuming.

I'm tired. So tired.

But, I don't regret what I did.

I recall the shock on Ms. Carmichael's face when she saw me with one of the stick boys' tree branches. I hit her as hard as I could. Once. Twice. After that, Shawn and Roderick, the latter being the stick boy I stole my weapon from, grabbed me.

I wish I could have hit that rotten wench a few more times. Maybe I would have killed her. She deserves it for what she did to Amelia.

If my thoughts and actions send me to Hell, so be it. I lost faith in God when Sarah left and Rosa Carmichael took over.

I am not an idiot. I know Rosa is never letting me out. That's fine. It means that I died trying to protect everyone from that creature who dare calls herself a woman.

My only regret is not doing more.

Jack

Danny is completely still throughout. The only sign that anything is happening is the white glow of his eyes. Otherwise, there is nothing but his slowly loosening fetal position and a look of defeat.

I don't know if this is better or worse than the last one. At least there doesn't seem to be a risk of him hurting himself.

"Danny?" I call to him, not expecting a response.

On second thought, this is worse than the last, because I have no indication of what's happening. At least when he was chained up, I could do something, even if it wouldn't have actually helped.

Here, he is stagnant. Sitting silently in a dark hole. And, there is nothing I can do.

There's no way I can fit in there, but I want to try anyway. I want to crawl in there and just be near him.

I'm about to give it a go when Danny gasps and blinks out of the vision. "How bad was it?" I ask.

Glowing green eyes lock on me for only a moment before landing on something else. He crawls forward and cups what's probably the wanderer in his hand. "I know how you feel," he says to it. His next words make my heart stutter guiltily in my chest. "I used to get punished for doing good. For so long, people thought I was a monster even though all I wanted to do was protect people. But, I never regretted doing it, and I'm glad you don't either." Danny remembers I'm here and hastily lies, "I-I wasn't talking about you!"

I shake my head and gesture for him to come forward. "Get out of there, son."

"Dad," he says desperately as he takes my offered hand and climbs out of the hole, "that's all in the past-"

"Danny, it's fine," I say even though it isn't and it never will be. "I know how I was."

Danny's expression crumbles further. "Dad-"

"Why don't you tell me about the wanderer?" I suggest, eager to change the subject.

Danny lets it go, but I can tell he's going to come back to this. "His name is Louis," Danny says. "They trapped him in there for days. No food, no water. Not even so much as a lantern. He was eleven!" My blood runs cold at the information. As Danny speaks, he sounds less grief-stricken and more angry. "You know why he was in there? It was that Carmichael lady!" Danny starts pacing up and down the hall. "She did…something to Louis's friend. I don't know what, but it must have been truly awful! Louis attacked Carmichael, so she had her stupid stick boys trap him in there." When Danny storms up to me, he is flushed green with rage. "I don't even know how Louis died! Dehydration, starvation, hypothermia, all of it? Take your pick! He was eleven, Dad!" Danny rakes his hands through his hair. I hear a low growl that I at first think is coming from an animal but then realize it's coming from my son. "An eight-year-old was chained up and beaten to death for stealing a slice of bread! An eleven-year-old was thrown into a fucking hole in the wall because he was protecting someone! What kind of church is this?" His voice deepened to an inhuman tone on the last sentence.

"Danny!" I drop the flashlight and grab him by the shoulders and kneel down to his level. "Danny, breathe!"

Danny's face is still bright green. His eyes are wild and glowing brighter than usual. He takes my advice and breathes, but every breath sounds like a quiet growl.

I have never seen my son like this. Never.

"Listen to me, son." I feel like I'm soothing a wolverine who's protecting his babies. Which, in a way, I am. "I think we should take a break."

Danny opens his mouth, but a cat-like shriek comes out instead of words. I almost fall backwards from shock. I actually need to remind myself that this is my child. My sweet, gentle child, who is desperate to help other sweet, gentle children.

People think that Danny takes after me, and he does in a lot of ways, but that violent protectiveness is all his mother.

Danny hears the sound he just made and shakes his head clear. "Sorry. I do that sometimes now." He rubs the back of his neck. "Only when I'm, like, way into Obsession."

Now that he's acting more like himself, I try again. "Let's take a break. I know you want to help these kids. And, I suspect the third one is a kid as well. But, for God's sake, look at you! I didn't even know you could get that angry!"

"Don't pretend you're not as upset as I am," Danny argues.

"I don't think that I am," I confess. "Because, unlike you, I didn't have to go through it. I'm learning about it secondhand. You lived through the deaths of two innocent children! Danny, nobody can do that and not be affected. And, I'm not just talking about the anger."

Danny doesn't respond. He lowers head, his bangs hiding his eyes. His fists are still shaking at his sides.

"It's probably late by now. Let's get dinner, head back to the hotel, and get some rest. Don't argue," I say when he lifts his head and opens his mouth. "You're no help to anyone if you're exhausted."

"I'm not exhausted," he says through a choked, quivering voice.

I send him a pointed look. "Maybe not physically."

His bravado finally breaks, revealing the raw sorrow hidden beneath. He presses his lips together when the lower one starts to tremble. Once he composes himself, "They've been here for so long…"

"Then, what's one more day? You've given them hope, Danny. I'm sure they won't mind waiting until tomorrow."

Danny sniffs and brushes a stray tear off his cheek. He looks at something above me: Louis, Benjamin, and whatever the third one's name is. "Is that true? You won't mind if we finish up tomorrow?" The wanderers must answer, because Danny nods at me with a new spark in his eyes. "Okay."