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You ruined it, like you always do.

The voice clangs through my skull, making me jump so hard I drop my blunt in my lap. It singes through the thin fabric of my sleep shorts, scorching the surface of my skin before I manage to get hold of it. I hiss through my teeth as I pull my shorts up my thigh and look at the mark. It better not ruin my tattoo. I did not pay the better part of ten grand for this body to be foiled by a pesky burn.

I glare at the blunt pinched between my fingers.

What is in this shit? I stick it back in the corner of my mouth, mainly to free up my hands so I can text my guy and let him know that this batch is off and he better give me a discount next time. I never usually suffer from the paranoia that some people get as a side effect, but I guess there’s a first time for everything.

I flick the rest of it out the window, not wanting to make my goopy brain any worse. Three seconds later, there’s an annoyed shout from below. I roll onto my knees and peek out the window to find one of the guys who lives above the vet clinic sticking his finger up at me.

“Sorry, Jules,” I shout down to him. Awful timing.

“It’s Juno, asswipe!” he yells. I duck back into the window just as my other neighbor shouts at him from the building door opposite.

“JUNO. Get your ass inside, now!” Dallas’s Southern drawl echoes in the quiet street. Dallas is a good guy. We went on a terrible date, laughed about it, and now we’re quasi-friends in that odd, neighborly sort of way.

“I’m coming, OLD MAN!” Juno fires back.

I watch them bicker in the entryway before Dallas grabs his chin and growls something at him that makes him stop with the attitude and go all pliant. Oof, whipped.

As soon as the show is over, I roll off the window seat and ascend the stairs to my bed. It’s early, but I feel emotionally and physically wiped out.

I look mournfully at my empty bed when I reach the mezzanine level. I’ve been okay on my own for the most part, but this last year I’ve started to feel like I want someone to share my space with. Ironic that Bellamy would show up just as those feelings started cropping up. As sad as it is, I allow myself to imagine a version of the future where he takes up space in this bed with me.

I fall asleep with my hand stretching out toward the impossible.

The surface below my feet is inky glass. Shadows surround me. The ground pulses with a visceral energy, a writhing mass of snakes underneath black ice.

When I look down, it’s not me looking back. My pulse is a harsh drumbeat in my skull, a march that quickens with every passing second.

I stumble backward as the reflection ripples. Just like at the abandoned hospital, fissures start forming in the ground, cracking and groaning beneath my feet. I try to run, but it’s no use. Vicious claws sink into the flesh of my ankle, ripping into the tendons and sinew. The creature pulls sharply and I fall, only to slam back into my own body.

I jolt upright, breath sawing out of my lungs as my heart tries to claw its way out of my chest. I try to move my legs, but the comforter is so twisted that I can barely shift them. I’m soaked through all over—grim layers of sweat seeping through my clothes and into the mattress. My hair is plastered to my temples, stringy strands of black sticking to my forehead in a way that makes me grimace. I brush them away with the heel of my hand, still panting through the ripples of my nightmare.

“What the fuck…” I whisper hoarsely to myself. Glancing at the clock on my nightstand, I see it’s just after ten thirty.

I don’t have nightmares. Not actual nightmares with freaky shit in them, anyway. Is this a stress thing? It’s probably a stress thing. No. It’s the marijuana, right? It’s got to be.

I slap my hand on the nightstand, searching for my phone. It’s usually on a bat-shaped wireless charging mat. That’s where I always put it, because everything in my apartment has a place.

This keeps happening.

Keys, sunglasses, my phone, hoodies, gym shorts. They keep disappearing, and it’s bugging me like hell. I like knowing where my things are; I like my clothes to be categorized. I don’t forget where I’ve left them.

I manage to disentangle myself from the blankets, cringing at the sensation of sweat cooling on my skin. I rip the covers off, throwing them unceremoniously over the banister.

By the time I’ve turned the apartment upside down to find my phone—in the microwave of all places—I’m ready to commit the eighth cardinal sin: googling my symptoms.

As expected, it’s a complete shitshow. I’m dying, I’ve got early-onset dementia, I’ve got a brain tumor, I’ve got this, I’ve got that. I stand in the middle of my living room, bathed in moonlight, doomscrolling through the results until I land on something interesting—a Reddit post. I scroll back up.

Am I being haunted? Or is this something different?

My thumb hovers over the link. I don’t believe in that stuff, not really. Bellamy, though…he used to say some really weird, creepy things. Stare into corners of rooms. He’d get dizzy and clammy if he ever stayed over when we had big funeral services happening. I assumed it was to do with his parents’ deaths, some residual trauma coming out at the sight of mourners and caskets.

Then he said he could see dead people, which was just some Sixth Sense-level cray cray.

I skim the thread, some story about a woman who started feeling uneasy at home, hearing things, seeing strange things. I get drawn into it, reading her recount the knocking on her windows and shuffling footsteps when there was no one there. There are hundreds of comments, people with their own, similar stories.

My eyes zero in on one talking about a Ouija board, and the nostalgic scent of woodsmoke and pine fills my nose. I remember finding Bellamy pressed against a tree with red welts and smears of blood all over his arms and legs. He scared the shit out of me that day.