Light makes the world safe. 

Would Lauren ever admit to that? Hell no. No one wanted to know a fifteen-year-old who's afraid of the dark. Getting called baby would be the least of her worries. Cherry Valley was too small to be an outcast.

So whenever anyone slept over she made sure to unplug the nightlight next to her bed. She and her friends always fell asleep watching crappy movies anyway so that wasn't so bad. Whenever anyone wanted to watch a scary movie Lauren would totally agree. On the inside she'd be having a heart attack. Her imagination was wild enough without ghosts and vampires and things crawling out of TVs. She shoved her TV into the hallway every night for a month after watching that one.

Or on nights like tonight when Jason had the brilliant idea to get drunk in the cemetery. You wouldn't see Lauren object to that. What else would they do? No one had a car. It was midnight and it's not like anyone's parents would drive them anywhere. Half-assed parkour on headstones it was.

The tab on the beer can made a clang sound when she flicked it. Whatever they were drinking was some skunky stuff. Scott said he found it at the back of their extra fridge in the garage. Junk was probably older than she was and tasted like licking a sidewalk. But at least it made the dark more tolerable. She wasn't as nervous with a buzz going on. She couldn't hear every bird and cricket that decided to scare the crap out of her. There was a full curtain of pitch black woods behind her she was trying to not think about and that was hard to do when all sorts of things kept making noise.

It was muggy as hell and her shirt stuck to her skin. She ran her finger under her eyes for the millionth time that night, just as afraid of running mascara as what could have been lurking in the trees at the edge of the cemetery. A headstone was at her back, the granite cool against her skin even through the shirt and a chill rolled over her body.

Scott and Jason rolled around in the grass play-fighting, hitting up against crooked stones that wobbled in the sterile light from the lantern. Shadows of flying hands and feet wavered across the stones, and Lauren tried her damndest to stifle another chill that had nothing to do with anything cold. She was as close to the light as she could get, it resting at her feet. Cradling it in her arms would give her away and make it hard to hold her beer. Right now she needed that liquid courage.

Shannon and Maria sat across from her, each to their own headstone, nursing their own crappy beer. It was a week before school let out. If this was what they all had to look forward to for two months of summer, Lauren was going to lose her mind. It made a family vacation seem almost appealing. Almost.

A small rock hit her shoulder and Lauren blinked, shaking the daze out of her brain. She looked over to Shannon who leaned forward, eyes wide and the messy bun on top of her head twitching in the light as she waited for Lauren to say something.

"You there? Chug that beer too quickly?"

Lauren moved to rub her eye and stopped herself just short of crushing the heel of her hand into her eyelashes and smearing black across her face. There'd be no recovering from that one.

"Yeah, just . . . stuff." Lauren waved it away as if it were a fly buzzing around her head. "What'd you say?"

"Daniel. You know. Baseball dude. Tight pants. Great hair. Ass to bite into. Has he texted you yet?"

A flutter in her chest made Lauren's breath catch. Daniel. Not Dan or Danny. Daniel. Hot ass was right. And hair that belonged on some surfer guy, not a no-nothing village baseball player. She couldn't help but smile as she pictured it curling out from under his cap. She wanted to flick at the curls and watch them spring.

She'd been eyeballing him all year and every chance they got her friends would shove her into Daniel when he walked by, make comments when they passed him in the lunch room, drag her to his games once the season started. He was a junior, had his own car, and was totally out of Lauren's league. Until he walked up to her when the lunch bell rang to end the feeding frenzy and asked for her number. She'd never stuttered so much in her life, but eventually she remembered what numbers were and gave hers to Daniel.

She turned on every notification her cell phone had so she wouldn't miss his text, but nothing'd come through yet. Still, Lauren pulled the cell out of her back pocket and pulled up the home screen as she said, "Not yet."

The answer was automatic, but the push notification on her phone said she had a 'hey, it's daniel' waiting for her from a number not yet in her contacts list. That flutter in her chest was back and she thought if this was what having a heart attack was like she'd eat more cheeseburgers. It was the best feeling ever.

The screen glared up at her, her mouth hanging open as she stared at the text notification, waiting for it to fizzle away and not be real. Because it couldn't possibly be real. Jason laughed, a belly laugh that echoed over the graveyard, and it pulled Lauren out of her daze for just a moment until she blinked and looked back down at her phone.

Maria snapped and Lauren flinched. "Hello? You on this planet? What is it?"

"He texted me."

She could have sworn it was just a whisper, that her friends wouldn't have heard her, but their squeals shattered the stillness of the cemetery as they scooted across the narrow aisle to sit on either side of her.

"On my god, he did," Shannon said, her voice a little too loud in Lauren's ear, but she didn't say anything.

"There's more," Maria said, pointing to the ellipses. "Open it up."

Lauren unlocked her phone and pulled up the message and frowned. The number was the same, but the message was full of gibberish. A bunch of letters thrown together that she couldn't even pronounce.

"What the hell?" Shannon said.

"Stupid phone," Maria added. "Get out and go back into it."

Lauren backed out of the message app, stared at her cluttered home screen for a second, and then went back in. Same thing. Like the message was corrupted or something, or the phone was just being weird.

"I'll restart it," she said, and powered the thing down.

"If all you're gonna do is play with each other all night I'm gonna go home. I didn't come here to watch you two hug it out," Maria yelled to Scott and Jason, but they just kept rolling around.

At least a couple of them could entertain themselves.

The home screen came back up, but it kept flickering like an old TV screen.

"What the hell is wrong with your phone? Drop it in the toilet or something?" Shannon asked.

"No clue," Lauren said as she tried to swipe the screen with no luck. Shannon and Maria lost interest and drifted back to the other side of the aisle.

She looked back down and frowned. The screen flickered, flashing drilling into her head and an ache welled up behind her eyes. Her background was supposed to be a shirtless Chris Hemsworth. What started back at her were shadowed trees. The flickering made it look like they were swaying. She blinked, but nothing changed.

Moisture beaded on the screen and Lauren ran her thumb along the glass. Ice cold but bone dry. Droplets streaked down the untouchable side of the glass. The scene flickered again and a woman's face popped up onto the screen, wide-eyed, mouth open in a silent scream. Lauren gasped and dropped her phone, but the image remained.

Sterile screen glow flickered on the grass as droplets turned to tears and tracked down defined cheeks. Hair pasted to a wrinkled forehead. Eyes were red and bloodshot. Slowly the mouth closed and Lauren watched the lips form a single obvious word. Please.

Fingers fisted the matted hair on the woman's scalp. A knife lowered from the top of the screen and touched the woman's hairline. Crying eyes closed and she shuddered under the blade. Thick red trickled with the water down her face and the woman's eyes scrunched up, her mouth hinged open, and a scream rang in Lauren's ears.

Lauren slapped her hands to the sides of her head and kicked her phone away. It clacked against a gravestone and landed face down in the grass. A thin line of light remained for a second before shutting off, plunging the cell into the shadows hovering over it. A heavy darkness surrounded the headstone, the phone. A darkness so thick Lauren could almost touch it. And it might touch back.

She snatched the electric lantern and cradled it in her lap, pointing it toward her phone. The sterile light pushed the velvet shadows back, revealed the crabby-looking grass huddled between two ancient gravestones. Made the phone look like . . . just a phone as it sat there.

"Dude, you all right? You're a bit spazzy tonight," Maria said from the comfort of her own gravestone, as if a scream didn't just tear through the night. Lauren looked at her and tried to control her breathing. "You read Daniel's texts yet or what?"

"No," Lauren whispered, her voice catching in her throat. "Phone's being funny."

"Told you," Shannon said. "Get your parents to get you an iPhone. Apple doesn't have these problems."

She turned back to the phone, black plastic taunting her in the white glow of the lantern. Slowly she leaned forward, cautiously reaching for her phone.

And froze.

Listened.

All she could hear was her heart pounding in her ears. An occasional rustle of leaves as the wind blew through.

No Shannon or Maria, Scott or Jason.

Silence.

"Guys?"

A cricket's chirp answered her, but that was it. No rustling clothes or muffled giggles. They didn't know. They couldn't know about her fear of the dark. She was too good at hiding it.

"Shannon?" Nothing. "Maria?" Quiet.

With a lightning snatch Mr. Miyagi would be proud of, Lauren grabbed her phone and immediately jerked her hand away. Fingers tapped against each other. Feeling the skin. Sticking in a tacky substance that now coated her palm. She lowered her hand into the lantern light and heard the drumming of her heart pounding in her head.

Blood.

"Shannon?" Lauren screeched, all pretense of fearlessness gone. Screw that. She dragged her blood-caked fingers through the grass as she cried out again. "Maria?"

Nothing. Even the crickets weren't chirping.

Moisture weighed heavy in the air, muffling the night into something that could absorb noise, take Lauren's cries away from her.

"Scott? Jason? C'mon, cut it out."

She was on the verge of freaking right the hell out, but she tried not to sound desperate. Tried to not let the tears water down her voice too much.

It's just a joke. They're being dicks. It's a joke.

The night adjusted to her eyes and the world was less black and more varying shades of darkness. Shadowed leaves against a navy sky. Tombstones black rectangles against the glare of a too-far street light, casting little more than a haze.

Crab grass scrunched under someone's foot, but no one spoke. Fabric rustled together. Something slid along the ground. The dragging was a constant shush punctuated by crunch. Crunch. Crunch.

Eyes thick with tears blurred the night into an even more incomprehensible smudge. Everything blended together. She couldn't focus. She could barely see. Something winked against the dull orange haze. Fluttered past her fuzzy vision.

Lauren dug in a heel and pushed herself back, away from the noise inching toward her. Her elbow sent the lantern into a piece of stone and it blinked out its light. Breaths drowning in tears, she scrambled for the lantern, but her shaking fingers couldn't find a switch. Couldn't make it work.

She rolled between two headstones, putting the rock between her and the aisle, the woods at her back.

Exposed.

Shush. Crunch. Shush. Crunch.

At her feet laid her phone. Clumsy fingers gripped onto the familiar plastic and she hugged it to her chest. Heavy breathing froze her. Slowly her eyes dragged up and a shape, distinctly black against the starry night, hovered over the headstone.

Lips clenched together and she held her breath, not trusting her gasps to stay quiet. Tears caught in her eyelashes as she pressed her cheek to the cool stone and watched the thing lumber toward her. Each footstep crunch was thunder in her ears and every blade of grass snagged whatever it was sliding.

It crunched past her and she lowered her eyes to the ground, finally catching a glimpse of the source of the shush. Darkness hid most of it, but moonlight caught the waxy sheen of flesh, lifeless fingers twitching with the movement, as it dragged past. Lauren crouched lower and pressed a hand to her mouth, not trusting her screams to stay hidden on their own.

For a second the world was silent. No crunches. No shushes. No haggard breaths. Until a siren call tore apart the night. A shriek burst from her throat as she fumbled with the phone, screen lit like a beacon and calling the thing in the graveyard right to her.

Tears turned the screen into a kaleidoscope of colors and she blindly groped for the off button. In the weighty quiet, her breath hitched in her chest, barbed into her lungs like razors, and she waited.

Crickets. Birds. Bugs.

The cemetery was empty.

After another few moments of silent waiting Lauren pushed away from the headstone and struggled to her feet. Her knees creaked, her legs and back achy from crouching. Nothing could stop the shaking. Especially when she saw the streetlights.

Missing.

A thick fog rolled in and blotted out the light, making it look like they weren't even there. Lauren rubbed her eyes, no longer caring about her make-up, thinking her mind was playing tricks. It was a mirage. But when her vision focused again the haze was still there, boxing her into the cemetery. Making her little dead world even darker.

Clouds rolled in overhead, dimming what little light there was even more.

The night stilled.

Nature silenced.

Lauren stepped back, crunching grass underfoot loud in the quiet.

A snort stopped her cold.

Thuds tapped the ground, fabric shifted against fabric.

The snort came again, air through flapping skin, and hit the back of her neck, hot and moist, ruffling her hair. Lips flapped as hooves clopped and Lauren didn't dare move.

Nothing had ridden up behind her. There wasn't enough time. There was nothing to drown out the noise. She wouldn't have missed a horse.

It was just there.

Fat drops fell heavy on her head. She looked up to the sky and rain fell harder, a bitter, stinging storm that felt more like a deep fall rain than a summer shower. The sky opened up and she was soaked through in moments, wet down to her bones with a chill that moved itself in.

Instead of going toward the woods she stepped away from the horse. Only to have her foot snag and she fell to the ground with a squelch. The grass sopping, mud soaking into her clothes, her hair plastered to her head.

Her phone still in her hand, she pushed the button and the screen glowed. Still on the ground she swung around and shined the light to where her feet were.

Gorge pushed its way up and Lauren kicked away from the mess at her feet.

Sprawled on the ground, in clothes far too old to be from this century, lay a little boy. Maybe ten years old. Eyes frozen open, mouth slack. A thick strip of blood-smeared skull shined in the light, tufts of hair and flesh stuck in the gore.

Like the flesh had been ripped away.

Screams tore rabid from her throat, shredding their way out of her mouth even as the phone went dark and the mutilated boy was handed back over to the shadows.

Scream after scream shrieked from her mouth as she lay on the ground, soaked through and surrounded by death.

A light flashed on overhead and Lauren's screams stopped as she cringed away from the light, a hand up to her eyes to shield them. Two faces emerged from behind the brightness, bone dry and twisted with worried looks.

Shannon and Maria hovered over her, the light shaking in Maria's hand as their lips struggled to form words.

"Wh-what happened?" Shannon asked, her mouth turned down, her eyes not believing what she was seeing.

Ice-cold water dripped down Lauren's face. Her clothes clung to her body, making her teeth chatter. She looked at her friends, tried to form words of her own, but something behind them caught her eye.

A figured approached, the outline of a horse visible in the light from the lantern. The horse snorted and the memory of air hitting her neck made her choke.

When the horse got closer to the light, the rider became more than a nightmare blurred in the dark. Uplit in weak light, sinister shadows pooled on its face, its flesh gray and lined, eyes sunken into its skull, blood splattered across it all. Its red uniform glistening with beads of water, brass buttons sparkling in the light. The sword made a metallic ting as it pulled it from its scabbard, but Shannon and Maria didn't react. The didn't see.

It raised the sword high, its face twisted in a mask of rage, and Lauren screamed.