Morgan was right; I needed a break. More specifically, I needed to see our friends. There appeared a tiny, cramped bubble I closed myself off in every year come September. Right now, I was desperate to break out—and Halloween was only days away.

Classes picked up from there. I was actually sort of enjoying them, if you could imagine. It helped to remind myself what I was working for. Thankfully, neither the small, judgy group in my Nursing class nor that one guy who chased me outside the building bothered me for a while after the day Jack visited. The most I got was a condescending sneer from both of them.

Morgan informed me later, almost as if by strategy, of a small party being held at a guy named Sean's house on the 31st. Well, I say that like I didn't know him, which couldn't be further from the truth. He'd picked me up from a sad little curb on the outskirts of our high school's social hierarchy years ago, and hadn't stopped talking to me ever since. He also hadn't stopped talking ever since, period. Lovely person to be around, in the right doses.

The end of the month came sooner than expected. I'd gotten back home from a pretty lenient day of classes, my social battery just short of drained, my mood not so hasty to pick a side. The only thing on my mind was tonight's kickback. At least, it had been the only thing on my mind, until I entered the kitchen for a quick pick-me-up.

Muddy footprints trailed after one another, leading to the table in the center. I noticed my coffee pot had been emptied, and a series of light scratches lined up on the wall like tally marks. I scowled as my gaze fell upon the real kicker: a tiny piece of paper, folded up in the middle of the table with a scribbled letter J on it. I narrowed my eyes and picked it up to examine both sides. It was surprisingly clean, the most damage it seemed to have endured was the trouble of folding it up. If Jack's claw-like nails weren't retractable, I imagined it couldn't have been too easy—that is, if he was even the one who dropped this off. How many other people with J-names do I know?

Whatever. All the evidence pointed to him, anyways. I trudged upstairs and placed the note on my bedside desk to be dealt with later. Stupid guy can't even clean up after himself.

—

"Hey, you could make it!"

At 8:00, Morgan nearly crushed me in a hug as I doubtfully eyed the blank walls around Sean's doorway.

"Uh, yeah...I thought this was a Halloween party?"

"It is. Doesn't mean it has to look like one from outside." She released me and dragged me into the house by an arm. There wasn't much of interest inside, either—actually, it looked like he'd just finished taking all of his decorations down for the year. No light escaped the rooms on the side. Only the front hall was illuminated; everything else was practically a black hole. Morgan led me through one of these side rooms, past a small dining table, what looked to be a makeshift recording studio, and finally to a door of scratched, rotting wood that was locked when she tried opening it. She groaned and knocked abrasively.

"Sean! It's not funny, let us in!"

I heard his muffled voice from behind the door.

"No. Show her the other way."

Morgan groaned again, this time louder, and grabbed my hand to drag me along some more. We ended up outside again, facing an almost blank wood wall. Almost blank. There was one large square in the center that looked like it had been carved out and fitted back in; I noticed it was positioned above a tiny egress window, one that probably led to the basement. Morgan dug her fingers into one of the vertical cracks in the wood, wincing the tiniest bit, and pulled with all her might. The giant patch opened like a revolving door to reveal a rectangular hole in the dirt, reaching down god-knows-how-far. Against my better judgement, I peered over the edge with a hand on the wall to steady myself. There was a rope ladder stationed on our side of the hole, also seeming to go on forever, or at least until the darkness swallowed it up. I folded my arms and wished for illuminating daylight, or Sean's voice, some kind of reassurance that down there wasn't just...nothing. Morgan didn't seem as perturbed.

"He won't even tell me if he's the one who built this..." She scoffed and pushed her glasses up with a finger, in the most aggravated manner one could do that without breaking the frames. "And now I probably have a splinter."

I shivered in my leather jacket, looked at her and raised an eyebrow. "Well, unless he owns it now, I'm pretty sure it'd be illegal to renovate the place." Turning my attention back to the hole, I felt that same sense of uneasiness rush back to me. "Are...are we supposed to just go inside—?"

"Come down, you two, it's fine. Darla did it."

Sean sounded unbelievably cocky, even more so than when I'd last seen him. For some strange reason, it didn't annoy me now. Morgan crouched down, hoisted herself over the side of this secret entrance, and started climbing down.

"Yeah, and Darla also hopped that fence into the unfinished park when we all told her not to." She caught my gaze and gave one last exasperated shake of the head before completely sinking into the darkness. "I swear..."

Given no other options, I started heading down as well.

I hopped down from the ladder's last flimsy rung and reopened my eyes—yeah, I'd kept them shut on the way down, get over it—to a spacious, brightly-lit room covered floor to ceiling in all the house's missing Halloween decorations. Sean, that shy but talkative bastard, was setting down various bottles of soda on a table in the corner. It seemed he was having a hard time getting a huge banner (reading "Yikes!" in corny orange letters) to stay where it was supposed to. Darla sat cross-legged on a blood red couch opposite to him, flipping through the pages of a magazine and looking unbelievably bored. She glanced up upon my arrival, a tiny smile fighting its way onto her face.

"Oh, hey. You're here."

"Don't act like you didn't know," I shot back, taking off my jacket and looking around for a place to hang it. Sean turned around, noticed my predicament, and wordlessly pointed to a coat rack on the far end of the room. I raised an eyebrow at the convenience.

"You've got a whole setup here, don't you?"

"Took the liberty to make my own mini-house down here. Not allowed to touch anything in the side rooms off of it, but I won't complain." As he propped up one more plastic bottle on the table, a pained grin flashed across his face. "Just be careful where you go wandering. My landlord is one bloodthirsty woman, I can tell you that."

I chuckled and hung my coat up, rejecting his offer of a hug in exchange for a high-five. "What's up?"

"Too much. Honestly, I thought you'd have more questions about the door..."

"I'm not sure if I want to know at this point. Darla, how've you been?"

Darla stretched her arms out, undoubtedly cracking a few joints in the process, and flipped a few orange locks over her shoulder. "Splendid," she said in a deadpan voice that made me snort.

"Um, okay, more specific?"

"Oh, you know me, Sawyer, always doing the same old thing. I definitely won't have anything to talk about once it's story time." Her eyes flashed wickedly over the magazine as she dove back in, scanning page after page for something of interest. Why she was looking in a Vogue issue from over five years ago for entertainment was beyond me. I approached the couch where both she and Morgan had made themselves comfortable, hesitant to sit down just yet. The room grew uncomfortably quiet, and I realized what was wrong.

"...did you guys plan for any music to be playing here? Or are we just going to sit around in silence for the rest of the night."

Sean's eyes lit up. "Well, how about some oldies?" I caught a glimpse of the CD his hand was inching towards, on a high shelf up against the wall. The Four Seasons. I rolled my eyes.

"Oh my god, this again."

"What? They were stars of their time! There's a movie about them and everything."

"C'mon, Sawyer, just let him have this." Morgan pushed me down to sit under the guise of giving me a pat on the shoulder, and I begrudgingly accepted defeat. Sean popped the CD into this old, dusty player across the room and started humming along to "Big Girls Don't Cry"—a song I had heard one too many times ever since I came out to this bunch.

"Oh, guys, I forgot...!" He rushed over to a huge but worn TV in the middle of the wall and retrieved a fistful of cables that were connected to some sort of gaming console I was unfamiliar with. "Somebody in my dorm room last year loaned me a bunch of games. Most of them are multiplayer, is anyone in the mood?"

Morgan raised a confident hand. "Only if it's Nightmare Rangers. I know you'll rig anything else we play."

"And I know that's just your language for 'I can only win games I've already played against a newbie—'"

"Not true! And I can see the disk behind your back!" She pointed accusingly at his right hand, and he seemed to take a sudden and remarkable interest in the wall beside him.

"Hey, I just think we could level the playing field a little. How about Conundrum? Competitive Mode? It works better with the system, anyway."

Morgan narrowed her eyes in skepticism. "...alright. I'll pander to you this time, Colins. But I am setting it up, not you." She got up and held her hand out for the Conundrum disk, sticking out her tongue as Sean gave it up and stepped out of her way. Frankie Valli kept singing his heart out in the background, regaining Sean's attention to my dismay.

"Told my girl we had to break up, hopin' that she would call my bluff..." He sang softly, nudging Darla in the side. I sighed and stood up to get a drink while she giggled and joined in.

"Then she said, to my surprise—"

"Shut...up...Sean...Colins!" I practically yelled to the melody, getting a surprised laugh from everyone. The boy in question raised an eyebrow once I'd sat back down and pointed at me.

"Hey, you got the harmony right! I'm rubbing off on you."

I groaned. "Oh, no."

"Oh, yes!"

"You've gotten so obsessed with the 50s, it's insane! I can't associate myself with you anymore," I said, dramatically holding out my hands and looking away like I was facing a walking scandal. Sean and Morgan started their game while Darla slapped me on the back, probably not aiming to break my ribs but fulfilling the mission anyways.

"And you've gotten a lot more uptight since..." After a variety of doubtful facial expressions, she pursed her lips and shrugged. "Actually, I'm pretty sure you've always been this uptight. Has the whole 'doctor, doctor' thing helped at all?"

"Why do you insist on calling it that?" I sighed and leaned forward to get a better look at the tiny scoreboard up on-screen. Sean was in the lead. "You say it like it's a phase."

"Yeah, a life phase! You'll be into this right now, and then for years until you either give up or die. Then in your next life, you can—hey!" She stuck her tongue out at me after wrestling off the pillow I'd thrown in her face. "Don't know why I'm telling this to you, anyway, Little Miss Non-Believer. You'll thank me one day."

"Maybe when I'm 92 and on my deathbed," I scoffed, letting my eyes fall half-closed. Despite herself, Darla leaned onto me and started braiding a tiny section of my hair.

"Well, I'll wait," she said, her voice deep and ominous. "I will wait."

"Good to know."

"French braid or box braid?"

"Whichever one looks more ridiculous on me. Hey, do you still have that old journal of yours, or whatever you call it?"

"The collection of my prophetic genius." Darla sighed and halted her braiding, and though I couldn't see her face, I knew she was clad with some somber, wistful expression. "Poor thing perished in a fire uptown, months ago."

I rested my head in one hand and raised an eyebrow. "Didn't you bring it to someone's birthday in August and demand they 'choose their fortune'?"

She snickered and pat me twice on the head. "Yeah, I'm just screwing with you. Hey, whichever one of you dies first, can you get the notebook? It's in my bag," she yelled, much louder than she needed to, at the two fixated on Sean's TV.

"You heard her, Sean, you're getting it once you die," Morgan said through her teeth. It was amusing to see her so invested in this game. Sean let out a hoot of laughter.

"You really think I'm gonna lose, don't you?!"

"I know you are!" Within a split second, her face switched from frighteningly determined to dismayed and caught off guard. "Shit, no, enemy's right there! I thought we were playing on easy—"

"BOOM! Ha! I told you, leveling the playing field!" Sean stood up, arms raised in victory, and promptly collapsed onto the couch next to Darla and me. Despite her loss, Morgan was visibly holding back laughter as Sean celebrated.

"And now I am crowned as rightful king of this game—"

"Okay, buddy, dial it back a little." I chuckled and patted his shoulder, looking around the room for Darla's bag since I knew nobody else would remember to get it now. "Morgan, you okay? I mean, you did just die by the bull-man's hands..." Hooves?

She let out a deep breath and adjusted her glasses, face still reading shock at the game's abrupt end. "Eh. I guess it was my fault for not checking the settings. I'll say we owe each other a rematch," she said, giving me another one of her knowing smiles.

I tossed Darla her leather-bound notebook, altered to no end with rips, tiny burned holes in its pages torn right from an old diary, even a small drawing of an animal skull glued to one corner of the cover. She was nothing if not "authentic," in her own, slightly off-putting way.

"Alright, ladies, it's time for the party to really begin." She gradually found her element as she flipped through the pages, walking up to the snack table and grabbing a bottle of Gatorade without so much as a second glance. There were many fruitless pauses, with which all of us grew more and more anxious. Finally, she approached the far wall and switched off the lights, leaving only the TV and her cell phone to illuminate the room. Sean closed his eyes and sighed.

"Okay. Just to be clear, we're not gonna summon anything, are we? I don't give extended invitations anymore, especially not to your supernatural creatures."

Darla produced a pencil from out of nowhere and grinned, twirling it between her fingers. "Who says they haven't already been summoned? Do you really think you'd notice if one of us had too many teeth, or never blinked?"

"Ugh, stop, stop it!" I pinched my forehead with one hand and held out the other in a desperate attempt to shut her up. "Just...tell us what we're doing. What the deal is."

"But that's no fun!" she protested.

"Come on, I know you've wanted to use that old notebook of yours for something. What's the page you're on right now?"

Her gaze snapped back to the book, and she answered my question with a sly one of her own.

"What'd you guys say to a seance? You know, real Halloween stuff. It doesn't have to be big—"

"Woah, slow your roll there, Darla." Sean held up his hands with a nervous smile. "You know this house is rented, right? I don't really care if ghosts are real or not, but if anything gets damaged the Mahogany Witch will have my head."

I'm going to assume "Mahogany Witch" means his landlord.

Darla winced in his honor. "Right. Uh, what if I promise to be really careful?"

"Do you have anything else we can do? Something less direct contact with the dead-y?"

After a strained silence, she pulled a small yet deadly-looking dagger out of her pocket with a blank expression. "...see any deer pass by this place recently?"

"Animal sacrifice. Illegal."

She put the dagger away with an irritated huff and checked her phone. "I don't know, then! Can you have an open flame in the house?"

"Not started by you."

Darla stole another quick glance at her phone, seeming to realize something. "Oh...alright." Turning to us with a trademarked mischievous grin, she folded her hands in her lap and let her gaze shift around the room ominously.

"How do you all feel...about creepypasta?"

Shit.

True to what I'd expected, Morgan and Sean looked enamored with the idea. Normally I would've jumped on that train, especially this late at night, and at this time of year. But everything I'd experienced beforehand with Jack and the prospect of these things being real made me want to shrink into a corner and hug my knees until Darla stopped talking—and knowing her, that could take forever.

"I've got, like, twenty of them here in my bookmarks. There are all these classics...have you guys heard of the Slenderman?"

I sighed. "Everyone's heard of Slenderman, Darla—wait, you collected them?"

She threw a crooked smile my way. "Yeah, what about it? It's not like they're going to haunt me because they're all in the same webpage folder." For a moment, there was a glimmer of surprise in her eyes. "Are you...scared? Of a bunch of crappy urban legends?"

Didn't seem so crappy to you a second ago. I leaned back into the cushions, arms crossed and eyes shut. "I-I just think they're boring, is all. Do we really need to get our Halloween high off of this stuff? Let's go into the woods, or a haunted house, or...wait, no, that's definitely not a good idea."

"I don't know about you," Morgan piped up, shifting close to me and linking our arms, "but I'm actually kind of interested in this. They're, what, just some internet ghost stories?"

Darla seemed to enjoy the strange power she had over us now. A mysterious smile stretched across her face again as she combed some hair over her eyes, in an attempt to channel Cousin It. "Sometimes ghosts. Sometimes malevolent creatures from the pits of hell, the undead looking for vengeance, cryptids that always show up where you least expect them to...some of them are just straight serial killers."

"As opposed to gay ones," I muttered under my breath. She didn't stop to laugh.

"Some of them haunt our technology, some sneak down city streets, looking for their next victim. Some...well, a lot of them just haunt one person. And none of them are real," she finished with an almost arrogant sense of certainty. I raised an eyebrow.

"Hold on, so you don't even believe in them? What happened to—"

Darla scoffed and waved me away with a dismissive hand. "Please. I might be the craziest occultist try-hard you've ever met, but I can think of Nessie sightings realer than creepypasta. I mean, it's been confirmed that most of them are fake! Stories have gotten taken down, apology posts have been made, for Christ's sake..." she trailed off as she caught sight of my face again. Despite myself, I narrowed my eyes and fiddled with the hem of my shirt.

"That's what you think."

Wait, wait, what are you doing? Stop. You can't tell them, who knows what would happen—

"Oh, do we have ourselves another believer?" Sean teased from the side.

"Just shut up," I snapped. Immediately, I regretted it, and shrunk into myself even further. The room fell dead quiet for a moment. Morgan furrowed her eyebrows and placed a hand on my shoulder.

"Hey, Soy, are you alright? We can do something else, if you really don't—"

"N-no. I'm okay. Sorry, Sean, I..." I tried to sigh, but it came out more like a huge yawn. "It's just been a weird year for me so far. New classes, naturally, so there's new people who are still having a hard time with—well, you know."

"I get it. And we're all trying to have fun right now. Are you sure you're okay? You've never really been easy to scare, you know Darla didn't mean anything about—"

"I'm not scared!" I scoffed and sat up, holding my head as it started to pound. I couldn't even tell my best friend what had been going on for the past month, how every day felt like a disaster waiting to happen because of what he told me. Why I believed him in the first place, about me having to cover his tracks to keep us both alive, I would never know. That's probably what scared—no, concerned me the most; that I believed him. And I couldn't tell a soul. Morgan held up her hands in surprise.

"Okay. You're not scared. I never said that. But I feel like something's wrong."

"It's fine. I was being snappy, I'm sorry, let's just drop this whole thing. Darla, you can do your creepy, haunted, witchy-stories-thing if you want to."

Darla raised her eyebrows, phone still in hand. "Uh...okay. Thanks. Actually, 'witchy' reminds me of something. Hold on..." She rummaged through her bag and fished out a small piece of paper, most likely a list of some sorts. She scanned through it quickly, nodding once and turning her attention back to us.

"Okay. I've got one. Not exactly creepypasta, I actually kind of forgot what it was attached to...definitely some other, more famous story. I think it might've gotten taken down. It's a demon called Chernobog."

Sean snickered. "So they're running out of names for all the demons now. Isn't that some kind of abandoned town in Ukraine?"

"Cherno-bog, my dearest Sean, not Chernobyl. And I...well, I honestly don't know why they call it that. But it isn't as ridiculous as it sounds. This thing is a Slavic legend, one of a species of demons—think like the 'big three'. Satan, Lucifer, and this guy. Everything else about it's pretty standard, other than that it's probably the one most people deem real. At the very least, plausible." She surveyed the room, disappointed when nobody gave a substantial reaction in then next few seconds. She sighed. "Do you want to know why?"

"Oh, yeah, sure," said everybody, more-or-less. Darla looked as if she was starting to think maybe it was a bad idea to host her story time this late at night, when almost nobody was capable of coherent...well, anything. She sighed again.

"Anyway, there's been a bunch of weird physical evidence of Chernobog all around the world. His name's carved, in various languages, into surfaces that are basically impossible to carve into. Random circles of ash with a 'purified' center, some people call it, in the middle of forests where no camping sites have been set up. Conspiracy theories suggest he has henchmen, about a hundred in every country, gathering followers for him or wreaking chaos where they're ordered. Some say they're all just lunatics obeying the same imaginary deity. His name's been tied, in one way or another, to pretty much every inexplicable disaster people can get their hands on. It's a little gross, come to think of it, whether he's real or not."

"Um. Yeah. What do you think about it, though, do you think that he..." I stifled a yawn with my hand. "...that Cherny-boy's real?" The tiny conflict from earlier had left me completely. Darla shrugged and took a sip of her Gatorade. It threw me off a bit, seeing somebody like her drinking what was basically radioactive sour-candy water.

"Can't say much for sure. I think people definitely follow him, and on a worldwide scale, too. All the little signs people have found of him are pretty cool. Kind of sad, though."

"Why?" Morgan asked.

"'Cause he used to be this great, terrible god people would worship in Slavic tribes, not just a cheap name companies throw into pop culture, or wherever he is nowadays." She gave an exaggerated little shiver with her teeth grinding. "Makes my blood boil just talking about it. I want to be a caveman again."

Again...?

—

"That was fun y'all. Can't wait for a PROPER spooking next year :P"

"Oh come on, you wouldn't be able to handle it. Be glad we kept things vanilla this time."

I scoffed and shook my head at Darla's text while waiting for my stop to be called. The lights reflecting on the windows of the bus, as well as cars passing by in a blur, completely obscured my view of whatever was out there beyond the street. My grip on the standing pole tightened just in time for a speed bump, and I nearly dropped my phone. A good thing I didn't, since that would've ripped my headphones right off and exposed me to the two other people here as a cheesy pop music lover.

Call it whatever you want, but now's our last chance

Stick it to the nonbelievers, give me this one last dance—

"Excuse me, miss, but your necklace is lovely. Where did you get it?"

I hastily paused the song and looked to my right. A short, middle-aged woman sitting opposite me was awkwardly pointing at her neck. I took a moment to process her question, my face growing warmer by the second.

"...oh. Uh, thanks. It was from a little stand on a shore in Mexico, got it with some birthday money." I looked down at the necklace in question; it was really just a small shark tooth on a piece of string. Brought back fond memories, so I wore it around often. "The place is probably long gone now. Sorry."

The lady shook her head with a warm smile. "That's alright. You know, my son has a tooth like that. Lots of them, in fact."

I had to blink to catch it all—this woman's eyes felt just a little too beady to be real. For a second, they looked like they were about to fall out, while her smile turned into a wide grin which turned into a face practically split in half. I gulped and blinked again.

She went back to normal.

Do you really think you'd notice if someone had too many teeth?

I got off the bus at the next stop, music blaring in my ears so that my head pounded with rhythm instead of an anxious heartbeat.

"Hello, house," I sighed, shutting the door behind me and leaning against it for comfort. I knew better than to try and think at this hour, but...

No. No but's. You are going to sleep right now, you can think all you want in the morning.

I collapsed onto the bed with such harshness I felt the mattress frame creak under my weight. This was true happiness; just coming back from a friend's house late at night with nothing to do but rest. I was practically melting into my covers, like chocolate on a warm plate. I felt so relaxed that I'd almost forgotten about the note on my nightstand.