Chapter 1

[Fairview, 1999]

Fairview Neighborhood

Untitled 

The Boy’s feet hit the pavement running. His eyes stung with tears. On the horizon, the sun set in a blaze of orange and red.

Men sat on apartment steps smoking and downing beer. Women with lop-sided wigs and made-up faces stood on corners. One hand on the handle and the other hand holding a paper bag, a boy rode his bike in a zigzag down the street. Despair hung in the air like black-stained lace. This was life. This was Fairview, 1999.

DIVORCE: The word The Boy fled from, the word shouted when he left the apartment. Divorce meant Dad leaving. Divorce meant Dad packing up his tattered, leatherette suitcase and speeding off in his minivan. Divorce meant finding Dad passed out drunk on the couch days later. Divorce meant fighting…always fighting.

Divorce never meant Divorce, not until now. 

This time it wasn’t just yelling. This time, Dad threw something. This time, Mamma cried like something in her had broken. This time, The Boy couldn’t pretend not to care.

The Boy turned a street corner. Breathing heavily, and looking either way, he slowed to a jog.

He sank on the curb to catch his breath. His blond hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. He pulled out a cigarette from his pocket and fumbled for the lighter. 

He didn’t know why he smoked—only that it was what he’d seen Mamma do when things were bad, and they felt bad now.

Singing floated from the Presbyterian down the street. The white church glittered in the sun, like a pearl deserted among the rubble of shacks and burned-out buildings. The singing grew louder, the melody drifting over the dreary buildings. The singing pulled The Boy from the curb, to his feet and toward it.

Wednesday Night Choir Practice the church sign read. His eyes lowered towards a girl sitting and smoking on the church’s steps.

He caught the singing smoker’s eyes. “Hey,” the girl said with a voice that sounded too big for her body.

He looked the girl over. Her forehead glared like waxed glass in the heat and sweat trickled down her face like a personal shower. Her hair draped over her, flowing down her back like a dark jacket, dark as ink. A thick notepad and lotto pencil was tucked under her arm, the cardboard cover bowed from use.

“Hey,” The Boy said, returning the gesture. He tried to appear cool, indifferent. “Going inside?” He looked at the church’s wooden doors.

“Nah, that stuff’s bogus.”

The church smoker’s honesty startled The Boy, especially in regards to what The Boy’s father called ‘the good house.’ In truth,  he felt the same as the smoker, though he’d never been bold enough to admit it.

Dad had had a dream to be a preacher. It wasn’t working out for him. Maybe that’s why Mamma was so mad. 

“What are you doing here?” The Boy asked.

Instead of answering, the girl outed her cigarette on the concrete, dragging the ash on the steps until they formed the initials C.S. “Why were you sitting out there?” C.S. nodded toward the curb The Boy left. “Family trouble?”

The question hit him harder than a kickball to the stomach. “No…”

C.S. cleared her throat. “People with happy families don’t cry outside when it’s dinner time.” She jabbed the cigarette harder into the concrete, going down to her scabbed knuckles. “People with happy families don’t sit on church steps smoking.” She murmured.

She tossed the cigarette over the railing, tilted her head and looked at him. “I know what can make them happy again. Promise.”

“How old are you anyway?” The Boy swallowed roughly. How? He wanted to scream. How do you know? The darkness of C.S. ‘s eyes and the curve of her lips planted his feet to the ground, his palms started to sweat.

C.S. stood to her full height. “I’m thirteen.”

“Oh.” That made her four years older than him. It wasn’t much, but somehow, she seemed much older, like she’d seen things he didn’t. Like she lived lives he hadn’t. 

“Follow me.” The girl started down the street. “This will help.”

He followed without thinking. Like she’d tugged something loose in him just by saying it—

I know what can make them happy again.

He didn’t believe her. But he wanted to.

“What’s your name?” he called.

“Carla. Carla Santiago-Louis.”

Ink. He thought. Ink was the perfect name for her.

——-

The Silent Hill apartments were anything but silent. A ginger-headed man sat in his car and blasted music in the parking lot. Stray dogs growled, barked, and mated on the apartment pavement. Wooden beams lay fallen on the ground, next to walls chipped with paint. On the windows, garbage bags kept the sunlight out. 

He passed with Ink under the complex’s rickety stairwell and out to the other side of the building. 

The Silent Hill apartments sat on more of a mound than a hill. The artificial rise had once been a landfill back in the ’40s before city planners built cheap, three-story apartment buildings and Derek’s liquor store there.

The mound tumbled down into a valley of brown grass where Miramont cemetery and the Silent Lake rested. 

Ink led The Boy through the iron gates of the cemetery. The heavy iron clanked close behind them. “You’re not scared are you?” Ink asked, glancing at him. 

The Boy quickly shook his head, though his breathing quickened. His eyes scanned over the weathered headstones, the winged angel statues, and sun blighted grass. Beneath one tombstone, a pile of decayed flowers rustled in the wind. How would this help his family? 

“You heard about Silent Lake?” she asked. 

“I don’t think it’s true,” he said, cutting her off. 

A myth long circled in Fairview that a girl drowned in Silent Lake back in the 80s after visiting the cemetery on a dare. Police had found her nine days later, floating face down, her feet caught in the reeds, with a heron gently resting on her back. Rumors claimed her face had been frozen in a scream, her eyes wide open when they found her. 

People in Fairview said that if you even so much as dipped a toe into the lake, her ghost would reach up and drag you down with her—through her watery grave and straight into hell. A few kids swore they’d seen the specter walking the lake’s edge on cloudless nights.

“It’s just a story adults made up to keep us from playing here,” The Boy said. “We should probably go.”

A crow cawed once and fell silent. The wind whipped across the lake and carried a sour smell—wet earth and something rotting beneath it. 

Ink walked gingerly between the headstones. “Everyone here was alive before,” she said, her voice soft with sadness. “I wish I could live forever.”

She found an empty patch of grass and sat down, looking up at him. 

“This place is creepy,” The Boy admitted. 

“Why? It’s quieter than where we live. Sit down,” Ink said. “Close your eyes.”

The Boy reluctantly sat beside her. “We should go.”

“Shhhh…listen.”

He didn’t ask what he was supposed to be listening for. He heard nothing. Just the whistling in the high grass, the smooth trickle of the lake in the distance, and his heart thudding around his chest. He squeezed his eyes tighter.

Beyond the sound of the rustling of water, just beneath the shuttering of wind along the grass, a barely audible, breathy whisper emerged. He wasn’t sure if the whisper he heard came from her… or the ground. Hairs stood on the back of The Boy’s neck.

His eyes flew open. “Ink!”

She laughed. “Sorry,  that was just me.” Ink squeezed his hands. “Again?” 

This time he waited for her to close her eyes first. There it was again, just above the silence of the cemetery around them, a tinny voice cut through the static of his mind. It sounded more like his own thoughts this time. But somehow different. 

His chest eased. The tightness in his throat unknotted, just a little. 

He opened his eyes, swallowing roughly. 

Ink smiled. “Quick, write it down.”

So, The Boy did. 

He didn’t know it yet, but that was the day everything changed.