#snops

Sam raises cupped hands to her mouth and blows through them, ignoring the dirt on her fingers and under her nails.  It’s not any worse than digging in her garden.  The shovels are a bit bigger, that’s all. 

Tucker has taken out his PDA again.  He shouldn’t.  Not here.  The screen is bright, and someone might see it.  But he can’t help but check the time, again, squinting through the fog of his breath to see the numbers.  It’s late.  But that’s not going to change in a hurry. 

Almost as one, they look down the hill, their attention drawn taught.  Something is moving down there. 

Surreptitiously, Sam puts a boot on the blade of her shovel, levering it up and into her hand.  Tucker reaches out for his, fingers brushing the smooth wooden handle, not yet pulling it free of the ground. 

They wait, still and cautious.  No matter how many times they do this, they’re never entirely at ease.

Then two spots of green, bright and alien, flare up at them from the dark.  If either of them had been carrying a flashlight, the green could have been mistaken for an animal’s eyeshine. 

They weren’t.  It wasn’t. 

Slowly, the thing in the dark comes up the hill.  It walks slowly, ponderously, its gait uneven.  Every once in a while, that green flashes again. 

The clear cold light of the moon provides a silhouette, eventually.  A black hole in the night.  A human-like figure, a body thrown over one of its shoulders, a shovel propped on the other.  It is stooped, slightly, under the weight, but the way it moves could tell anyone it had done this before.  Its eyes are flat, green coins. 

Sam blinks once, twice, three times.  Tucker just waits, still as stone.  Reality shifts.  No longer is the thing in front of them a shadow cut from nightmare, but their friend, Danny.  Normal, human, puny, blue-eyed Danny, who, for some reason, thinks it’s acceptable to wear a t-shirt in this weather and at this time of night.  He looks exhausted, and perhaps a little embarrassed.  Nothing frightening here.   

Other than the fact he’s carrying his own corpse over his shoulder. 

“You didn’t need to bring your own shovel, man,” says Tucker, compulsively pulling his PDA out again.  “We already got everything dug.”  He sounds worried. 

Danny cringes.  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to make you wait that long.”  He drums his fingers on the shaft of his shovel and adjusts his grip on the body. 

“It’s fine.  Let’s just get under cover.”  Sam turns and walks back, into the less-burned part of the forest.  She can hear Tucker following her.  Danny is, as always, silent. 

“Oof,” says Danny. 

“Huh?  Something wrong?” asks Tucker. 

“Just walked over my own grave, that’s all.”  Danny offers them a smile that could have been made from the same fabric as the moon – although with a far less steady hand. 

The response is a groan, as loud as they dare. 

“We’re going to have to change locations, soon.”

And isn’t that the truth?  Accidentally digging up one grave was one grave too many, and it isn’t as if they could mark them.  What they are doing is illegal, both in the ‘this is literally against state, federal, county, and municipal law’ sense, and the more metaphorical ‘this is an affront to the laws of nature’ sense. 

They reach their handiwork of the night before much longer.  The grave isn’t nice and rectangular, but they gave up on that early on.  It’s deep, and big enough to take what Danny’s been carrying.  That’s enough. 

Danny promptly drops his corpse into the hole.  The sound of a corpse hitting the ground like that—It isn’t exactly indescribable, and it isn’t exactly unique, but…

It sure is a sound. 

They stare at it, for a long moment.  It feels, even after all this time, that they should say something, do something, to commemorate the moment, to lay the body to rest. 

But they don’t.

Danny hefts his shovel and starts the work of pushing the dirt back in.  Shovelful by shovelful, the body is hidden from view.  Covered up.  Tucked in. 

“Well,” says Danny.  “That’s that for tonight.”

 They go back, down through the trees.  Sometimes, when he steps into the shadows of the trees, Danny goes dark again, his eyes green and glowing, but those moments become fewer and further between as they leave the fresh grave behind.  As they leave Danny’s latest death behind.  As Danny becomes more alive.

“Who was it tonight?” asks Tucker.  “Or was it more of a what this time?”

“Ember,” says Danny.

“That was fast, for her.”

“She wasn’t here for a fight, this time.”  Danny shrugs.  “Convinced her to ride my death back across the line pretty easy.  It’s almost as if—”

He stops, tilts his head to one side.  Shadows strobe across him. 

“Danny?” asks Sam. 

“Something’s here,” says Danny, his voice flat and empty, and then he's gone.

If there is one thing that is impossible for Sam and Tucker to get used to, it is the sight of their friend dropping dead. 

Sam hisses through her teeth and crouches down.  “He couldn’t even tell us who it is first?”

“It can’t be anyone too strong,” says Tucker.  “He wouldn’t risk wasting a death.”  He thumbs open the timer on his PDA.  Six minutes.  On average, a human death held a viable door open for six minutes. 

Sam shoots him a skeptical look and he winces.  There is, on occasion, a wildness in Danny's eyes beyond the green. 

But it’s too late to talk about that now.  The moon-cast shadows undulate across the ground, twitching and fluttering like living things.  It's ink and blackness and the trees bending away from the sky to reveal stars that were both too close and too green. 

The dark isn’t the only thing there.  There's something artificial, a presence the forest resists.  An intruder.  An outsider.  A predator, stalking, hunting, not looking for them, but it doesn’t care about collateral damage. 

Sam curses under her breath.  “Skulker.”

The two ghosts clash and writhe, dead, unmade things in a place they should not exist.  They give the body, the corpse, a wide berth, Skulker not willing to get close enough to the body and the door for Danny to push him through, and Danny clearly not wanting Skulker to get too close to Sam and Tucker. 

The problem with Skulker is that he’s always been out for blood.  Danny is his current prey, but that isn’t a good thing to count on. 

“Do you think Vlad let him through again?” whispers Tucker, his words standing stark against the silence. 

It’s probable.  There aren’t enough human deaths in Amity Park to justify how often certain ghosts return.  Any death can make a door, even a plant’s, even an animal’s, but those doors are usually too small and too brief for ghosts like Skulker to get through, if they aren’t called to them specifically.  But someone like Vlad or Danny can die again and again, as many times as needed. 

Tucker sees Danny’s body twitch and he yelps, putting a tree between him and it.  Sam is more proactive.  She brings the flat of her shovel down on its head.  The ghosts that leak out are stripes of neon against dark grass.  The light is swallowed by the empty places between the trees. 

“How much time?” she asks Tucker breathlessly. 

“Three minutes,” he says, holding up his PDA.

“We need to get out of here.”

“What?  But—”

She grabs his wrist and hauls him into the dark.

It isn’t only black in there.  Star-flashes and moonlight twinkle and strobe as they run.  There are eyes, green and uncountable.  There is sound – gunfire swallowed by snow, the twang of bowstrings, the last gasp of prey, devoured.  The trees slide by them, studiously avoiding their path.  Soft mounds of earth flicker with gentle stars, the ground beneath them a mirror of the sky above.  It is like running between two mirrors.

This landscape, Sam realizes, a little late, does not favor Skulker very much at all.  Not here, in Danny’s own personal graveyard.

And the shadows retreat, pulled away like ink being absorbed by a napkin. 

Sam and Tucker look back, over their shoulders.  Two green eyes stare at them from what isn’t, in retrospect, very far away at all.  Danny’s body lies on the ground below, barely visible.  The eyes do not leave them, even as the shadow they are in stoops to pluck the shovel from the limp hand of Danny’s body and start digging. 

The shadows beneath the trees don’t seem very dark anymore.  The moonlight is almost blinding. 

The timer on Tucker’s PDA goes off, loudly.  He hisses at it, annoyed that, somewhere along the way, he’d turned the volume on. 

“Heck,” says Sam. 

“Yeah,” agrees Tucker, vehemently.  “Where’d my shovel go?”

They find it before too long.  There aren’t too many places it could have gone.  They join Danny in digging.  Two graves in one night are really too much, but they’ve done more, and they’ve done worse.  They aren’t like Vlad, can’t just let them build up until it’s efficient to dispose of them, or whatever he does.  Something tells them that whatever is probably worse than they’re imagining. 

Between blinks, Danny is himself again, and the grave is finished before the moon starts to set. 

It is late.  It is early.  It is time to go home. 

The thing about three teenagers with shovels walking the city streets at night is that they’re noticed.  Amity Park isn’t New York, but any city worth its name stirs in its sleep.  Midnight flights to the airport, inadvisably long bachelor parties, late movies, insomnia, homelessness. 

Tucker’s been monitoring the ghost hunting and cryptid forums for a while, and he’s emailed Danny links to each one that mentions him.  Sam has clippings from the paper about calls to animal control about something with green eyes, about something that couldn’t possibly be human.  Then, of course, there are the calls to the police about something dragging or carrying bodies from all sorts of places. 

There had been an investigation at one point.  There had to be.  But nothing had been found.  There hadn’t been anything to find.  No missing bodies, no mysterious disappearances, no deaths.  Just a green-eyed shadow and its mysterious companions. 

Sam knows her parents, at least, think the whole thing is a prank.  Tucker’s think it is people seeing things when there was nothing there, like bigfoot.  The less said about what Danny’s parents think about it, the better. 

Sam’s house is furthest from the center of town, and they drop her off first, the shadows on the trellis giving her a boost when she climbed.  Tucker and Danny then have the typical argument about whether it’s better to bring Tucker or Danny home first.  Danny, Tucker argues, has just fought not one, but two ghosts.  Tucker, Danny argues, cannot come back from the dead.  Danny wins, as usual. 

That leaves Danny, real and not, alive and not, to wander home.  He waves cheerfully at a drunk who watches him pass with wide eyes and turns onto his street.  He breathes in, deeply, tasting the ash that still flavors the air all these months later.  He opens his eyes just in time for the winter sun to beam through the skeleton of one of the buildings that bracket the crater that was once Fentonworks. 

No one lives here anymore. 

No one is waiting for him.