Page 4 of Some Kind of Haunted

“Suit yourself.” He takes a few more bites, making quick work of the pizza slice, before wiping his hands on a napkin he brought with him. He hands both to me, as if I am his personal trash can.

But I know if I do not take it from him, he will simply drop the grease-splattered items in the middle console. And I will be stuck smelling reheated soggy bread and broiled cheese for the remainder of the drive. I take one of his unused napkins and use it as a barrier between my fingers and his trash before touching it.

He pulls our rental car around to the free side of the gas pump where there is a maw of a trash can buzzing with flies, though it does not look big enough to conceal a whole gross man with a strange tongue and no teeth from view—but I can’t think about that. Holding my breath, I get out and dispose of the cardboard and grease while Logan gets out to . . . pump gas, apparently.

I have never known him to dirty his hands with such a task, claiming he can just drive out to New Jersey where there are only full-service gas stations as far as the eye can see. But this is Logan, and there is something innately knowledgeable about my brother. Things come easily to him.

I’d be more bitter about it if that didn’t so often come in handy for me.

He tops off the gas tank, then we’re back to driving. The gas station attendant gave Logan the necessary directions that his phone wouldn’t, along with some unsolicited advice on the newly opened bow-hunting season.

I am dubious about this interaction. “He looked at you, the only person in a three-hundred-mile radius—I’m just guessing—in Armani and thought, I know. This man looks like he can shoot some arrows?”

Logan grins. “I can’t help it if people see what they want to see when they look at me, Lexi.”

My stomach is starting to growl, and I know he can hear it, but I refuse to be regretful about rejecting gas station pizza.

“Almost there,” Logan tells me after another eternity slips by.

The world around us is dark now. Where there were farms there is now only the press of night, punctuated by solitary lights here and there. A farmhouse on a small rise. The suggestion of a road that might lead to something, somewhere. Clusters of ominous trees, like they’re hiding something.

At least I can see the lights of a town gleaming in the distance ahead of us. It’s a relief. I was starting to picture our so-called knitting store and supposed house in a collapsed pile of farm things, no doubt in a heap in the middle of an abandoned field. I was beginning to wonder if the “tornado alley” thing was more literal than I’d imagined, flattening the entire state and leaving these hints of wreckage in its wake. So enough of a town to require more than a single, solitary light seems promising.

But before we reach the lights, the road changes.

Out of nowhere, in all this flatness, we are suddenly going down a hill, and it takes my stomach with it, so we sink together. Halfway down, on this increasingly narrow road, there’s a giant, thick wall festooned with bright lights that’s so out of place with the cluster of houses and the steep street on the other side that I don’t even know what to make of it.

Especially when, as we drive past it, it looks more like a kind of gate made for giants. Towering up above us, made of thick, heavy, immovable-looking stone. But there are also hinges, so it’s clear it can shut, on the off chance anyone wants to lock down a random little town in Nowhere, Iowa, I guess?

I shake that off, along with a faint sense of unease, and focus on the tall, skinny brick buildings crowded on either side of the single street. Most of them are dark. A few have lights on in their second stories, but the streetlights are sporadic and dim—just enough illumination that you could jump from one pool of brightness to the next. If you had to.

Otherwise, everything seems to blend together into a dark, shrouded mystery.

A creepy mystery, but I don’t say that out loud, in case Logan agrees.

Maybe it’s the crush of the darkness that lulls me to sleep. I must be asleep, I must have dozed off, because suddenly I’m in one of my nightmares.

It has to be one of my nightmares, even though I’m in this airless rental car, wearing the same clothes I left New York in, headed toward who even knows what. Even though everything feels the same as it did a second ago and I don’t remember falling asleep.

Because the road ahead of us might be narrow and steep, but it is leading us toward a tall, sturdy obelisk that seems to glow. Spotlights, I realize, are beaming up at it from the ground. And at the top, a black-and-gold watch face stares down at us.

It fills me with a creeping sensation, like an army of beetles has taken up residence in my bloodstream.

I look over at Logan and he’s muttering about cell service. Even as the dread is slithering around my neck, like prickling fingers. I can’t seem to catch a full breath, my lungs constricting like they do when I can’t quite wake up.

It’s a dream. It has to be a dream. I squeeze my eyes shut and mentally shake myself in a bid to wake up. Because I don’t recognize this place. I can’t have feelings about a clock tower in a weird small town I’ve never been to before.

When I open my eyes, everything is the same. Logan is still complaining bitterly about his cellular signal dropping off the minute we crossed into town, but I can’t take my eyes off that clock tower.

It feels like it’s staring at me. Like the gold numbers are eyes. Or worse.

You’re being ridiculous, I tell myself. You fell asleep without the usual routine. You almost had a weird dream. Now you’re awake and in control.

Just because it’s crazy inside doesn’t mean I have to act crazy on the outside.

“What the hell am I supposed to do if I can’t make calls?” Logan continues to grouse, because he really does think the world turns entirely because he is chained to his cell phone like the dog I saw in a yard halfway up this hill, staring out at us as we went by like there was no point in offering a warning. After a moment, my brother ducks his head a little and lets out a low whistle. “What’s a small town need with a giant clock tower like that?”

Nothing good, something in my untrustworthy mind whispers.