Page 51 of Middle of the Night

Then one illustration stops me cold.

It depicts a humanoid figure the same color as a shadow but with two white pinpricks for eyes. The spirit in the illustration isn’t translucent, like a stereotypical movie ghost, but it’s not completely solid, either. A human-shaped storm cloud.

I compare the illustration to the image on my phone. While the shadow captured by the trail cam doesn’t have white eyes—or any eyes at all—the rest of it appears very similar to the picture in the book.

Adding to the intrigue is how, like some of the other entries in the book, Billy had circled it with pencil.

Shadow Person.

I look to the margins of the page, which sends fear dripping down my spine like droplets of ice-cold water. There, Billy had written something that might have been innocuous at the time but is all too unnerving now.

This is real.

FOURTEEN

It’s midnight, and I’m at the laptop in my father’s study, where I’ve spent the past hour scrolling through one paranormal website after another. As a result, my head is spinning. It turns out that shadow people aren’t as easy to classify as their name suggests. They might be ghosts, or they might be imaginary, summoned by those who suffer from night terrors. Or they might be nothing at all. Just peripheral vision playing tricks on those who claim to see them.

Adding to the confusion is that, if the internet is to be believed, there are several subcategories of shadow people. Most, it seems, don’t harm anyone. They just like to hide in corners and watch you, sometimes to the point of stalking. Others cause not physical harm but a sense of extreme fear and unease with their presence alone. And still others attack, sometimes beating and choking sleeping victims.

I’ll admit to getting a shiver when I read that part, and feeling slightly better about being an insomniac.

Some shadow people roam, oblivious to the humans around them. Some only appear in the same spot. There are even shadow animals, though it boggles the mind how that works. As for what the trail cam picked up, it appears to be what’s known as a forest shadow person.

If it’s anything at all.

I’m not convinced that the trail cam snapped a picture of a shadow person, for a gazillion different reasons. It could be a glitch in the trail cam or the silhouette of an animal that just happened to look human in that moment or any of a hundred different things. Just because Billy wrote in a book thirty years ago that shadow people are real doesn’t mean they are.

Or that he became one.

Then again, what if he did?

Because something weird has been happening outside. That’s undeniable. Which is why I continue to scroll through paranormal sites with the restless intensity of a teenager looking at online porn. I search for plain old ghosts next. A mistake. There are literally thousands of websites about ghosts. So many that it brings on a stinging pain just behind my eyes.

I try to blink it away as I scan the search results, clicking one at random. It turns out to be a long list of all the different types of spirits known throughout the world. Averylong list. Less than half of which I recognize. Wraiths and shades. Djinn and mylingar. Poltergeists and phantoms and apparitions out the ass.

After another hour of scrolling, clicking, and reading, I think I have a decent grasp on the situation. Well,asituation. One that would make anyone I shared it with worried about my mental state. Honestly, I’m a bit worried myself. As a teacher of English lit, I’m well acquainted with ghosts. Hamlet’s father, requesting vengeance. The mind-shattering spirits of Shirley Jackson’s Hill House. All the phantoms and spooks that sprang from Poe’s imagination. But those were all made up. Just stories. What I’m contemplating is something else entirely.

Something utterly, impossibly real.

From my admittedly slapdash research, I’ve gathered that most ghosts have a purpose beyond scaring the shit out of people. In manycases, that purpose is to complete some form of unfinished business here on earth so they can move on. But that often requires help from the living, who can be oblivious to a ghost’s presence or needs. To get their attention, ghosts sometimes resort to that most clichéd of actions.

They haunt.

Which isn’t necessarily the kind of haunting you see in movies or gothic novels. Slamming doors and rattling chains and shrieking like a banshee down castle corridors. Ghosts are more subtle than that. They’re also patient, sometimes waiting for the right moment in which to spring into action.

For Billy, this would be the perfect moment. Events beyond my control have brought me back here, to the place where Billy disappeared. The same is true of Ashley, who never thought she’d return to Hemlock Circle. It’s slightly different with Russ and Ragesh, who never truly left, but even in their cases, life has kept them tied to this place.

All four of us were with Billy hours before he was taken. Now we’re back on Hemlock Circle for the first time in thirty years.

At the exact moment Billy’s body is found.

On what will soon be the anniversary of his death.

Looking at it from that angle makes it seem like not fate exactly, but something in the same ballpark.

What if it’s all the work of Billy?

A crazy notion, no doubt prompted by his stupid ghost book and all the stupid websites I’ve spent the night skimming. But according to those websites, there’s also some logic to it. If the primary goal of a supernatural entity is to resolve unfinished business on earth so it can retreat to the other side, then it stands to reason that Billy needs us to find out who killed him and why.

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