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I take a sip of my latte. “Were there any suspects?”

She shakes her head. “It happened at night, and witnesses only say they saw a group of people wearing burlap masks holding torches. Really creepy shit. But it was the same mask Shadowface used to cover the girls’ faces in the photos over twenty years later. They’ve got to be connected somehow. But the 2002 killings were much more meticulous than the ones in the seventies. Four girls went missing over the course of a year. All that was left of them were the pictures of their dead bodies; their actual bodies were never found. Fear crippled this campus for months until it just…stopped. The Order was behind it, too. I don’t believe they ever left.”

Ever since her father got put away, she’s been obsessed with anything related to conspiracy theories. She would be a great candidate for a flat earth society or a cult.

“It sounds like you got a lot of your actual homework done last night,” I joke. Although, it’s not like I was any more productive, especially with this stranger messaging me, drumming up all sorts of feelings and memories.

And urges.

Thank god Dani didn’t notice the resemblance of that girl in the picture.

My insides start to turn, and I can’t stop thinking about the mask on the girl in the photo. I’m convinced my nameless monster wore one just like it.

I vividly remember waking up to the scent of scarecrow and a hint of spice, the scratch on my face while he was deep inside me and the gentle kisses he pressed along my collarbone. The threats he whispered while taking my virginity; the vile words that didn’t match his intoxicating actions.

Dani spent her evening finding out as much as she could about the Order, while I spent my night staring at the photo sent out to our class, masturbating to it, dreaming about my nameless monster and why he never came back. While Dani was obsessing, I was wholly consumed by him.

Breathe, Summer. It’s just a hallucination. We lived an hour away from here; there is absolutely no way this is connected.

I grab my phone, open the photo, and gaze at it, just like I did for hours yesterday. My nose crinkles.

“What’s wrong, Summer?” Dani asks.

This girl looks like me, but there is something else bugging me about it. “This photo wasn’t online,” I whisper. “I don’t remember seeing this picture before.”

The victims’ photos are easy enough to find in the underbellies of the internet, and we glanced at them before I couldn’t stomach it anymore.

Dani leans over to look as I hand my phone to her. Her bohemian braid tucked to the side of her head, falling over her slim shoulder. “I’m sure it was, and we just missed it. It sounds like people at this school like to instill fear. So fucking sick, if you ask me. But it’s kind of exciting.”

I give her a tight smile, cross my legs, and play with my hair. “Yeah, I’m sure you’re right.”

I wish I could go inside that photo and see what she was seeing. What she was experiencing while staring up at the face of her killer.

Dani continues, “Do you want to hear the freakiest thing about all of it?”

I put my phone down and face her, trying to not go there in my mind again.

“Rumors are that the killings were actually happening at this school for hundreds of years. That there were way more victims over time, and the slaughter of ‘79 and the copycat of ‘02 were just the finale. People have been dying in this town for centuries.”

I whip my head up. “What do you mean, hundreds of years?”

Leaning back on the grass, Dani holds her phone above her head, eyes glued to an article on the screen. “Well, how old is this university?”

“The giant stone bench at the entrance of campus says 1742,” I retort.

“That’s how long.”

I frown. “I don’t know, Dani… That sounds like a bit of a conspiracy theory.”

She scrolls down her phone. “The data shows an abnormal number of mysterious deaths and disappearances. They went missing in the forests that surround the town, but it’s hard to say…” She turns and gives me a wicked grin. “People believe the town was cursed, Summer. I wouldn’t be surprised if it was haunted, too.”

Curses don’t exist, and bad things don’t just happen. People make bad things happen because humanity is insane. But hundreds of years? That just sounds absurd.

“Your father went here, didn’t he?” Dani asks, casually sipping her coffee.

Fighting down a wave of emotion, I direct my attention to a red leaf that fell on my shoe. Dani gives me a sympathetic look. She regrets mentioning my father, but they are valid questions, given my family’s connection to this town.

“Yeah, he did all his schooling here. Then he moved back to Mystic, and he only came back through a fellowship and some research he did with Dr. Garcia. My grandparents grew up here, though, but they moved to Mystic after college.”