"Who do we become without knowing where we started from?"

From somewhere further down the boardwalk, a child lost his grip on his balloon.

Taehyung could see it from where he stood, blue latex drifting up, up and away until it shrunk into a bright dot and faded into the cloudless sky. He was sure that, if he listened hard enough, he’d be able to hear the child cry, the wail of a kid betrayed by gravity.

If he had his say, they’d go to the boardwalk less and the comic book store more but that wasn’t how it worked. Every group of friends had a hierarchy and in his, Taehyung was at the bottom. And even if he wasn’t, they lived in Canon Bay, a tiny, sandy town that was known only for its beaches and boardwalks. If it wasn’t for the booming summer tourism, people would drive right by Canon Bay, completely forgetting it was there. Surrounded on three sides by places far busier and far more interesting, without that famous salt water taffy and a picturesque Ferris wheel, most people wouldn’t even know Canon Bay existed.

Taehyung thought he might have preferred it that way.

In a few months, he and his friends would be sophomores. No longer the smallest fish in the pond, this was something of a celebration trip. It wasn’t like Canon Bay boasted much else to do. If they didn’t want to hit the boardwalk and battle sunburnt tourists for benches and parking spaces, they didn’t have many other choices. There was a bowling alley with outdated videogames and the perpetual smell of stale smoke, a ramshackle mall that had closed 40% of its stores in the last eighteen months and a skatepark that was largely regarded as the best place in the county to buy drugs.

The boardwalk wasn’t bad, just hot. It was summer on the east coast, of course, and so Taehyung expected the heat, but there was something about wooden planks and coarse sand that made it seem worse. Something about boardwalk heat was sticky. Sweat didn’t drip off you like when you walked home from school but clung to your skin, covering you in a thin layer of slime that acted like a siren’s song for bugs.

At least the comic book store was air-conditioned.

But the heat wasn’t Taehyung’s only complaint. It wasn’t even his biggest complaint. There was just too much at the boardwalk. Too many sights, too many sounds, too many smells. It gave him a headache. Overstimulation, his grandmother had called it. Taehyung’s most fervent supporter, Grandma had often told the rest of the family that Taehyung was sensitive, that he was special. Of course he got over-tired when he went certain places. His way of taking in stimuli and information was different from other people. How could his uniquely-wired brain not short-circuit in such a busy place?

Taehyung didn’t know for sure if that was the case. He just knew he didn’t always like the way the boardwalk made him feel. It was too busy and people jostled him on all sides, elbowing him in the ribs or shoving him from behind, all while laughing or shouting or chewing.

There were too many sounds. Kids screaming, babies crying, dogs barking. Teenagers longboarded over uneven patches of boardwalk and the sounds of the tires thunk-thunking against planks seemed to hit Taehyung directly between the eyes. Foreigners worked the kiosk games, the ones where you threw darts or flipped frogs, and shouted heavily-accented propositions at you as you passed, promising a free spin or a prize every time. Arcade games blared strangely 8-bit sound effects and carnival rides of questionable integrity offered the screeching sound of machinery mixed with warped pop music and the gleeful screams of those strapped inside.

And then, the smells. Sweet Lord, all the smells. Fried dough mixed with ocean air and coupled with the dream-team of body odor and the faint stench of vomit. Ice cream and sunblock and cigarette smoke and familiar stink of roasted corn. (Honestly, how was roasted corn enough of a boardwalk favorite for there to be three separate carts selling it?) The sickly-sweet aroma of rancid chocolate and powdered sugar seemed to waft from every garbage can and passing by any food stand resulted in a disgusting fusion of greasy foods – cheesesteak, sautéed onions, sausage and peppers, fried Oreos, funnel cake, cotton candy, hot dogs, something called “y Sauce” and some sort of fried meat that came served on a stick. (Anything served on a stick seemed to be a regional favorite. Was it a love born from convenience, or this country’s complete distaste for formal silverware?)

The sheer enormity of it made Taehyung’s stomach turn. Between the humidity and the smells, Taehyung felt like he was walking through a dense fog, like if it were perhaps two degrees hotter or if one more food stand popped up, a thick cloud of vapor would rise up and form a sort of impenetrable wall, separating him from the rest of his friends.

The weird part was that his friends loved it, even Jihoon who didn’t love anything.

Baekhyun and Mark (they weren’t technically his friends but he spent so much time with them that they might as well have been) both loved rides. Baekhyun didn’t have the stomach for most of them and usually spent the two minutes immediately following each spin on the Dandelion puking into the closest garbage can, contributing further to the giant stench-monster of Canon Bay. Jungkook, meanwhile, liked games. He at actual videogames but he destroyed everyone when it was time to shoot a basketball or knock down a pyramid of milk bottles. He was so good at the frog-flipping game that he’d been banned from two of them and Taehyung was sure Jungkook’s room was decorated with unlicensed Pokémon plushes and inflatable hammers.

Jihoon just liked people-watching, Taehyung was convinced. He was that kind of guy, pensive and inquisitive. He dissected everything, leaving no stone unturned in his mind and in conversation. He was a quiet guy, especially in class, but when he spoke, people listened. He was easily the smartest person Taehyung knew and it stood to reason that Jihoon enjoyed coming to the beach so that he could observe what he considered to be Canon Bay’s intellectually lower-class. He watched them with the same unbridled curiosity that a kid watched fish swim circles around a bowl but, unlike the kid, Jihoon never seemed to grow bored.

While he trailed behind his friends, listening to Baekhyun and Mark scream in excitement about the idea of going on the long-awaited and newly-opened Demon Spinner, Taehyung felt the familiar pang of a mosquito’s bite sink into the flesh of his neck. A second too late, he slapped his skin, his hand finding nothing but sweat. He grunted in annoyance. He already had a mosquito bite on the back of his neck. Why couldn’t it be a lightning-never-strikes-twice situation? Why did they have to double-dip?

As if he’d somehow activated it by remembering it, his existing bite began to itch and he reached back to scratch it. A nail-biter, Taehyung didn’t have much to work with and the pads of his fingers did very little to alleviate the itch. If anything, he’d made it worse. Huffing, Taehyung gave up. He’d just have to be itchy. He looked over his shoulder somewhat longingly, his eyes just catching the flashing sign of Coin Canyon.

If Taehyung had to pick a favorite part of the boardwalk, it’d be the arcade. It was dark, cool and almost completely free of bugs. The shining moment of his Canon Bay career had been the time he’d won the skee-ball jackpot on his eleventh birthday. He cashed in his tickets for a skateboard he’d never learn to ride but for one afternoon, he was king of Coin Canyon and king of Canon Bay.

Taehyung and his sort-of friends had finally reached the end of the boardwalk, the part called Thrill Pier. That’s where the rides were. The Dandelion, the Demon Spinner, the Fun Slide, the Himalaya, the Ferris wheel, Dr. Shock’s year-round haunted house, the Chair Swing, the Freefall and a couple of new additions he didn’t recognize.

There, shining in the sun and standing tall like a monument to the past, was Canon Bay’s best roller coaster. The tracks and the cars were a stunning, sparkling silver. It featured all sorts of twists and turns, not to mention a 90-degree incline and a double-loop, but the real pride of the Silver Bullet roller coaster was the tunnel. It was known to be a little disorienting but that had more to do with the darkness than the length. After being thrown for two loops, you rode straight down before leveling out and entering the tunnel. Taehyung always liked the tunnel, a welcome break from the heavy sun, but most people screamed more there than they did going upside down.

The fun part was the camera. As soon as you emerged from the tunnel, a mounted camera snapped your picture. When you were done, you could go to the booth and see how stupid you looked. (And, if you were really stupid, you could buy a copy of the picture, or put it on a keychain for eight dollars.)

If Taehyung had to pick a second favorite thing about the Canon Bay boardwalk, it would be the Silver Bullet.

Or, at least, it would have been the Silver Bullet. Back before last summer, anyway. Back before Dino Lee.

To Taehyung, it felt like it had happened yesterday. The biggest thing to ever happen in Canon Bay, and the biggest tragedy in the history of the county, it was all fresh in his mind.

He was thirteen at the time, though his birthday was right around the corner, and freshman year was staring down at him like a predator eying its prey. He spent more time on that side of town then. There was something about middle school and the boardwalk that seemed to go hand-in-hand. Besides, back then, he had more friends.

It was the weekend before the 4^th of July, the start of Canon Bay’s busy season. People came from all up and down the coast to ride rides and buy overpriced Canon Bay t-shirts. They came in throngs, exiting the city in a sort of pale-legged exodus, and paid good money to stay in hotels close to the beach.

Dino Lee was fifteen when he went missing. Given that he was only in eighth grade, Taehyung never really cared about current events. He didn’t watch the news, he didn’t read the newspaper. He did his homework, played his Xbox and worried about girls. He wasn’t worldly and precocious like Jihoon. His knowledge of politics started and ended with the name of the sitting president and he wouldn’t know that something happened in his town unless someone beat him over the head with it.

The disappearance of a local kid from his favorite part of the boardwalk didn’t just beat Taehyung over the head – it nearly knocked him out.

There were a million reasons why Taehyung was infatuated with the case. The first was that Dino was close to Taehyung’s age. When things happen to adults, it’s bad. But when they happen to kids? That was jarring, especially for someone just two years younger. Weren’t kids supposed to be invincible? The second was that it happened so goddamned close to home. It was hard to sympathize with the things he saw on TV when his dad watched the nightly news. Rich business men being sued, gang members being shot in the city, car accidents happening to drunk teenagers on the freeway. Taehyung couldn’t relate to those stories because they were so far outside the realm of his life. But this? A kid just a little older than him disappearing out of thin air at the very boardwalk where Taehyung spent all his time?

The third reason that Taehyung couldn’t shake it was because it happened on the Silver Bullet. It literally happened on his favorite roller coaster.

It seemed impossible.

And in the days immediately following his disappearance, it started to seem as though what happened to Dino Lee was impossible.

Taehyung had seen every video from every angle. He’d watched them so many times, in fact, that he had Dino Lee committed to memory, everything from the way he parted his hair to the lime green basketball jersey he’d been wearing the day he disappeared.

Dino got into the second car with his best friend (a wiry kid named Hoseok that Taehyung remembered vividly from the subsequent news stories) at 1:05 in the afternoon. A third friend, a guy named Vernon, had been streaming it live on his phone, sure that his Instagram followers would love to see known-coward Hoseok take on the Silver Bullet. The ride continued as normal. They twisted and turned, went up 90 degrees, shot down to the double loop and went through the tunnel. Vernon was laughing his off as they entered the tunnel, endlessly amused by Hoseok’s high-pitched screaming.

And then, when they emerged from the tunnel, Dino was gone. Vernon’s laughter stopped dead and after a few confused shouts from the rest of their friends, the recording stopped, too.

That was it.

It had been that simple, that quick.

At 1:05, he boarded the Silver Bullet. By 1:08, he was gone.

(If he closed his eyes, Taehyung could still see the picture taken by the Silver Bullet’s coaster-cam. It had been seized as evidence and leaked to the press and a year later, he could still make out every detail – the look of joyous terror on that kid Hoseok’s face as he emerged from the tunnel and the glaringly empty seat beside him.)

He didn’t fall out of the car. He didn’t climb out. The safety bar was never disengaged. His seatbelt was never unbuckled. Hoseok didn’t see, hear or feel Dino leave the car. He simply entered the tunnel and never came back out.

That was the last time anyone had seen Dino Lee.

Canon Bay was effectively shut down for four days. Police scoured the boardwalk, the beaches and the surrounding area. They interviewed everyone who worked there, everyone who’d been near the Silver Bullet that day, anyone who they thought might know something. Missing posters went up all over Canon Bay. For the first time ever, their dingy town was on the news for something other than their annual Lobster Fest.

Dino Lee had simply disappeared. It was inexplicable in the most literal sense of the word. No one could explain it. No one could even offer up a theory. The cops were left scratching their heads, Dino’s family given absolutely no closure. That was, in part, what made Taehyung so obsessed with it. He was thirteen, an age where kids begin to view the world around them with purpose and try to make sense of it all. How could something happen with virtually no explanation? The police, his teachers, his parents – these were all adults he trusted. They were supposed to have answers. How come nobody could explain what happened to Dino? How could something like this happen? Boys don’t just disappear into thin air. It wasn’t possible. (Or, at least, it wasn’t supposed to be.)

So how did it happen?

Eventually, people stopped talking about Dino.

Taehyung figured it was the natural order of things but he still didn’t understand it. In the city, maybe. Bad things happened all the time. People got shot. People got mugged. People were kidnapped and assaulted and crashed their cars into trees and lampposts and buildings burned down and banks got robbed. You had to move on. It impossible get bogged down by every tragedy. Life went on and you had no choice but to move forward.

But in Canon Bay? With a crime rate as low as theirs? To Taehyung’s knowledge (and he did some research on the subject after Dino), no one had ever been murdered in Canon Bay. No one had ever disappeared. So how could a town so small forget something so big so quickly?

There, standing beneath the Silver Bullet and feeling impossibly like he was looking into the eye of a great beast with the power to simply open its jaws and swallow him whole, Taehyung wondered why people had stopped talking about Dino. While the event itself was etched permanently into his mind, the aftermath was a little fuzzy.

When had Canon Bay reopened? He remembered the roller coaster being closed for a long time after Dino. He figured half of it was out of respect to the missing (or was deceased a better word?) but the other half was probably a lack of interest from the public. Who would want to go on the ride that made a kid magically disappear?

But, then, when had it reopened?

They were standing in line for the Dreamweaver, a popular ride that let you lay on your stomach and get thrown around in the air for a little while, when Taehyung decided to broach the subject. He hadn’t been to Thrill Pier since Dino had disappeared, but he knew that Mark and Baekhyun were there a lot, probably trying to build up Baekhyun’s tolerance to G-force.

“Hey,” he said, trying to sound flippant. The smell of roasted corn was invading his nostrils but he couldn’t see any carts from where he was standing. Was it possible to get a smell stuck in your head, or was that phenomenon limited to pop songs? “Do you guys remember when the Silver Bullet reopened?”

Mark and Baekhyun, who had been engaging in some sort of strange, upright wrestling match, stopped just long enough to glare at him.

“When what?” Baekhyun asked before Mark wrapped his arms around his neck and pulled him until he was bent at the waist.

“When the Silver Bullet reopened,” Taehyung said, trying to annunciate. His English was nearly perfect, especially for a kid who’d spent the first eight years of his life in Korea, but every now and again, especially when he was nervous, his accent seemed to crawl up his throat and squeeze his words. “After Dino disappeared, it was closed for a while. I remember that. But I haven’t been to this part of the boardwalk since then. When did they finally reopen it?”

His friends were silent but the chaos around him raged on, seeming somehow louder now by comparison. He heard the bright, slightly menacing jingle from the Himalaya and the screams coming from the Dandelion, plus a kid having a tantrum over being denied a second ice cream sandwich.

Mark had released his grip on Baekhyun and stared at Taehyung with his eyebrows knit together. Baekhyun, rubbing the sore spot on his neck, cocked his head to the side like a puppy, though it was impossible to tell of he was just confused or if Mark had done serious nerve damage. Jungkook, usually stoic, straightened up, his features tight enough to show his confusion. Jihoon was looking off at the water, making it impossible for Taehyung to read his face for clues.

“No offense, Tae,” Baekhyun said, trying to straighten out his skeleton, “but what the are you talking about?”

Taehyung opened his mouth to answer but the line chose that moment to move up, granting he and his friends the next five spots on the Dreamcatcher.

Having already forgotten about Taehyung’s question, Mark, Baekhyun and Jungkook took off through the entry gates, but Taehyung stayed rooted to his spot, his mouth hanging open in bemusement.

“What did–?”

“Those guys,” Jihoon said, cutting him off and slapping Taehyung’s arm with a forced sort of playfulness. “All those chokeholds are seriously effecting the blood flow to their brains.” He snorted, that same awkward jovial quality to his voice, and then shot a glance at the ride. “Come on. Let’s go get our Dreamweaver on.”

Taehyung wanted to say something else but bit his tongue. A year before, he’d been ignorant and ill-informed, too. Was it possible that Baekhyun, Mark and Jungkook had been so wrapped up in middle school drama and summertime shenanigans that they knew nothing of Dino’s disappearance?

Knowing Mark and Baekhyun, it certainly didn’t seem unlikely.

But Jihoon?

Taehyung remembered talking to Jihoon about Dino, remembered several distinct conversations they’d had in the aftermath of his disappearance. Back then, Jihoon had been eager to theorize and speculate and point fingers. Why didn’t he want to talk about it now?

Not wanting to cause tension (it wasn’t too long ago that Taehyung spent all of his summer afternoons alone), Taehyung dropped it. His other brother was smart and social. Maybe he’d ask him.

The rest of the day went according to plan. Mark and Baekhyun rode the Dandelion and Baekhyun threw up his corndog and waffle fries. Jungkook dominated everybody at the ring toss and the football-throwing game and won a pink teddy bear for a pretty girl who’d been standing close by. Jihoon made them stop by the arcade so he could pump five dollars into the Walking Dead game and Taehyung followed behind them, down a blue raspberry slushie and keeping any further thoughts and inquiries to himself.

It was, generally, how their outings tended to go.

He was so tired and itchy by the end of the night that he passed out in the middle of his bed without showering, let alone asking his brother Seokjin anything about anything, and decided in the morning that that was probably for the best. Jin made fun of him enough as it was. Why give him additional ammunition? If there was one thing Taehyung had learned from a lifetime of being bullied, it was that it was good not to help pad a bully’s arsenal.

On July 17th, Taehyung turned fifteen. To celebrate fifteen years on the planet (as well as seven years on American soil without going postal or drowning himself – both big accomplishments), his parents bought him a bike. Taehyung wasn’t a bike enthusiast, didn’t know the difference between a dirt bike or a mountain bike, or a ten-speed and a twelve-speed, but he knew he loved his gift all the same. It was shiny and blue and, more importantly, it was his.

This bike might not have been the new iPad Jihoon had gotten for his birthday or the trip to Universal Studios that Jungkook had gotten when he turned thirteen but to Taehyung, this bike represented freedom. His parents both worked demanding full-time jobs and Seokjin would rather die than be seen with him. Canon Bay was small enough that Taehyung could use this bike to get around. For the rest of the summer (and on weekdays after school once the academic year rolled back around), he was free to explore. Maybe he’d get a part-time job. Maybe he’d blow every cent he had on comic books and collectible figures. Maybe he’d get tan and buff from all this outdoor exercise. Maybe he’d even find himself a girlfriend.

With this bike, the world was his oyster.

Mostly, though, it was just an excuse to get out of the house. With his parents at work and his brother splitting his time between a crappy job at a diner and an onslaught of social obligations, the house was empty, lonely. Taehyung knew the truth – he was a loner. It wasn’t by choice. He was weird. He didn’t have many friends. In fact, the only real friend he counted was Jihoon. Jungkook was more of a half-friend. Baekhyun and Mark? They were, like, one-sixth friends at best. He’d been able to fake it in middle school, been able to copy what everyone else did so that he could pass as one of them, but once his true colors bled through, he usually found himself alone.

At least with a bike, he had an excuse to ride around. He plugged his headphones into his iPod (his parents refused to buy him anything more than the most basic phone on the market and that was why Taehyung was the only kid in Canon Bay with a flip phone and the only one to still be using an iPod to listen to downloaded music) and explored. Mostly, he went downtown. There, he could get a cheap lunch at a burrito place that offered student specials. He could go to the library (air-conditioned and free – his two favorite things) and read comics or he could attend free classes and workshops. Once a week, they held some sort of event downtown, everything from an ice cream festival to a chili cook-off to an art crawl. He was building his tan and expanding his mind. All cultured and bronze, what girl wouldn’t want to date him?

One afternoon, when the library was closed for renovations and he was out of money to spend on comics or burritos, Taehyung decided to ride his bike in the opposite direction. Until then, his goal had been to get out of his dinky neighborhood but that day, with no other options, he decided to be introspective. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, one that came when he reached into his pocket and found two dimes and a Snickers wrapper, but he lied and told himself he was okay with it as he begun pedaling towards the heart of the neighborhood the locals called Edgewater.

It was an apt moniker. Canon Bay was set back as east as you could go without drowning, quite literally on the edge of the water. Though Taehyung’s house wasn’t, most of his neighborhood was built on an intricate system of lagoons. (Not being on the water ended up being an unexpected blessing. When Taehyung was twelve, a massive hurricane swept through Canon Bay, destroying nearly everything in its path. The flooding was the worst of it and most of the houses that were on the water suddenly found themselves under water instead.)

As he pedaled deeper into Edgewater, effectively riding up the coast, evidence of the hurricane’s wrath was abundantly clear. From what he understood, it was sometimes cheaper to just abandon houses rather than fix them up. The hurricane had taken no prisoners, flooding houses, blowing out windows, uprooting trees, and the houses closest to the ocean told a story of destruction. Many of them seemed to have been forsaken mid-renovation.

Due to regulations that passed after the storm, houses that close to the water now needed to be raised up a certain number of feet to be considered up-to-code. Taehyung had heard his father speaking to a co-worker about it. The cost of jacking up an existing home was so great that most people would rather move than commit to paying it. That accounted for the abandoned houses, Taehyung figured, but what about the ones that still appeared to be mid-lift? It had been nearly three years since the storm. Why hadn’t these houses been finished? Had they gotten a late start, or had someone started the project just to give up on it later?

And why had he never been to this neighborhood before? He used to go for walks with his father all the time when they’d first moved to the States. Why couldn’t he remember any of these houses? Had they always walked in a different direction or was his memory beginning to fade at the ripe old age of fifteen?

He stopped his bike in front of a house that appeared to be suspended in the air by a series of tall shipping pallets. Something about it seemed inherently wrong but Taehyung couldn’t put his finger on what it was that bothered him. It was a small house, a single-story residence painted white, but the siding was stained with something dark. Dirt, Taehyung figured, or something from the water. Things hung from the base of the house, wires or something, and his mind inexplicably jumped to something much more gruesome – intestines and entrails dangling helplessly from the split belly of a monster. Taehyung thought it strange to be able to see the bottom of a house. It felt like something he shouldn’t be able to see, something from the other side of the looking glass.

From where he stood, Taehyung could see three windows. Two of them were blown out. Though he knew deep down it wasn’t the case, the house seemed to be perched awfully precariously. It looked as though a strong enough wind could knock it right over, sending somebody’s home crashing to the sand below and flattening anything that happened to be unfortunate enough to be standing in its way.

Feeling something strange in the pit of his stomach, Taehyung started pedaling again. The further he went, the worse the houses looked. The neighborhood itself hadn’t been entirely abandoned and people walked dogs and watered their lawns, a few nodding in Taehyung’s direction as he rode by. A lot of the homes were perfectly fine. A little dirty but fine. Birds chirped, kids shot hoops, cars drove by with rock music seeping through cracked windows.

It was the state of the other houses that bothered Taehyung. He couldn’t put it into words and he couldn’t trace back the source of his apprehension. It was something in his reptilian brain, something that made the hairs on the back of neck stand up.

One house in particular made him stop so suddenly that he performed an impressive but completely unintentional burnout. Turning onto a street called Magnolia, Taehyung had reached something of a dead zone, a stretch of road that was littered on both sides with deserted homes, half of them raised up on those strange pallets.

That was when he saw what could only be described as the most destroyed house yet.

It was bright yellow and two stories high, but a large part of it looked to have melted away. Though most of the top story was unaccountably intact, the left side of the first floor had somehow crumbled. With the way it had broken away, it almost looked like a handgun, the portion of the first story that remained making up the handle while the top floor resembled the barrel.

Taehyung didn’t fully understand what he was looking at. How was this house even still standing? Why was it still standing? A pile of unidentifiable rubble lay beneath the gap. Had that been the living room? The kitchen? A bedroom? Moreover, wasn’t this dangerous? This wasn’t just an abstract and unrealistic fear that a house on stilts might blow down. This house looked truly dangerous. How was the unsupported portion of the second floor even still standing? There was nothing holding it up. It looked as though it was floating, or maybe being held up by the strong hands of a noble but invisible soldier who hated to see someone’s home fall face-first towards packed earth.

He narrowed his eyes and looked more carefully. An air conditioner sat lopsided in one window and a satellite dish hung by a thread atop the disheveled roof. There were no curtains or blinds and Taehyung could see through most of the windows, catching flashes of wallpaper and bare wood. In one room, he thought he saw a poster. It looked like it was an athlete. A football player, maybe?

Someone had lived here. Maybe even someone his age. This had been someone’s home. Taehyung had been happy that his family had made it through the storm unscathed and since he was a kid, and inherently selfish, that was the only thought he’d given the storm. It was over, they’d survived and that was it.

But it hadn’t been that simple for everyone. These people, whoever they were, had lost their home. And that . It a lot. But they were gone now, hopefully living somewhere a lot nicer and a lot safer, so why was this dangerous monstrosity still standing? It was as though someone had forgotten about this neighborhood, like the inspectors and the builders and the homeowners had just wandered off and simply forgotten to come back.

Now that he thought of it, where was everyone? Where were the dogwalkers? Where were the birds? The cars? The kids playing basketball? Why did he suddenly find himself alone? He took a deep breath, shaky, and told himself that this fear he was feeling was silly and illogical. What was he so afraid of? A house? Houses weren’t scary.

He was about to laugh at himself, about to concede that he was a coward and that was why people picked on him, when his eyes happened to catch something.

Movement.

Movement in the window with the football poster.

His heart stopped beating for the slightest of seconds.

It was a bird, he told himself. Or a squirrel.

Only that wasn’t what it looked like. It wasn’t a scurrying of tiny feet or a fluttering of wings. He saw movement, a shadow. It looked as though someone had passed by the window, a split second of darkness where he could no longer see the poster. But it had been so quick and so far away.

Did he actually see something or was it just a figment of his imagination, this anxiety trying to validate itself and give him a reason to be afraid?

He was finally going crazy, something his family had been expecting for years. He was finally cracking up.

Shaking his head and accepting the fact that his eyes were playing tricks on him, Taehyung turned his bike around. He made it about three feet before braking and risking a glance over his shoulder. Squinting, he looked back at that same window. He couldn’t see the poster anymore. Only darkness. Only darkness that seemed to breathe.

He was looking at this shadow, this darkness, but it seemed like the darkness was looking at him, too.

He pedaled as hard and as fast as his legs would take him, stopping only when he was back in his nice, safe neighborhood where all the houses were on the ground and all the windows were properly sealed. He couldn’t remember passing through Edgewater, all of it a terrified blur, and only exhaled when he saw his own house on the horizon. As soon as he reached his front lawn, he launched himself off his bike, landing clumsily on the soft grass. He breathed hard, his heart drumming against his chest and his sides aching with the cramps of exertion. He stared up at the sun until his vision spotted and then closed his eyes.

He’d always had an overactive imagination. He’d always had a hard time processing certain information and stimuli. He was sensitive. He was special. That was all this was. His overstimulated brain playing tricks on him. It wouldn’t be the first time and, realistically, it probably wouldn’t be the last.

When the initial wave of panic had finally passed, Taehyung laughed at himself. Had he always been this easily startled? Or was it something new? This summer was going to if he kept making a fool of himself. First looking like an at the boardwalk and now this. He definitely wasn’t popular enough to be taking these sorts of risks. Play it cool, fly under the radar, don’t make waves. He knew the drill.

Feeling silly, he peeled himself off the grass, pulled his crappy cell phone out of his pocket and called Jihoon. Jihoon probably wouldn’t judge him even if he was morphing into a squeamish nutbar. That’s what friends were for, right?

“Hey, buddy,” he said, his voice sound dreamy to his own ears. He tucked his free arm behind his head and winced against the bright sunlight. “Do you want to see if Jungkook is free and then we can go swimming?”

Jihoon agreed, Taehyung threw on his swimsuit and the rest of the day was fine.

It would always be fine as long as he kept himself in line.

It took him nearly three months to return to Edgewater.

The school year had begun and while he’d naively been expecting some sort of monumental change, tenth grade felt an awful lot like ninth. His backpack was too heavy, his locker was too small and he only had two classed with Jihoon. (He had four classes, though, with Mark and that felt like some sort of sick cosmic joke.)

Classwork made the days feel long but with September winding down, the days were actually getting shorter. He woke up at six every day with the same thing on his mind – he couldn’t wait for the school day to be over so that he could get home and ride his bike. He didn’t ride his bike every day anymore. Sometimes he went over to Jihoon’s to play videogames. Sometimes he and the other boys went to Jungkook’s soccer games. He’d even been forced to go over to Mark’s a handful of times when they’d been assigned each other’s partner on a group project.

When he did get to ride his bike, it was something of a special event. His father had started paying him for completing odd jobs around the house – washing his car, taking out the garbage, cleaning out the garage – and with extra spending money in his pocket, Taehyung found himself spending hours at a time window shopping. Should he buy videogames? Accessories for his bike? Food for him and his friends?

The possibilities were endless.

It was one of the last days of September when Edgewater called to him. In all honesty, Taehyung had more-or-less forgotten all about that afternoon. Between summer plans and the beginning of the school year, there was so much on Taehyung’s plate that creepy, distant memories became just that – memories. Nothing had happened to him that day. He hadn’t been in danger. The lack of anything real to show for his experience that afternoon made it very easy for it to drift into the shadows of his mind. If he’d been attacked – by a shadow monster or, more realistically, by the wildlife that now called that broken house home – it would have been real. He’d have scars to show for it, medical bills or the receipts from the local pharmacy.

But what had happened really? He’d ridden his bike, found a storm-wrecked house, seen a shadow and gotten spooked. Once the initial horror of that scare had worn off, it was forgettable. There had been a lot to do the latter half of the summer, at lot to see, a lot to experience.

That afternoon in Edgewater? It felt more like a weird dream than anything.

The irony, of course, was that a dream was what reminded Taehyung of its existence at all. He hadn’t really thought about it since it happened but one night, with October just around the corner, Taehyung fell asleep and dreamt of crumbling houses and tall, seemingly indestructible shipping pallets. In his dream, the houses were huge, monstrous skyscrapers. The biggest of all was the yellow house he’d seen, the one with the eviscerated first floor and the football poster on the wall. He woke up sweating, but he attributed that to the residual summer heat. Canon Bay always seemed to have a hard time cooling down once August faded away.

The dream picked a humid Sunday morning to reveal itself and upon opening his tired eyes, Taehyung immediately felt a strange tug at the base of his brainstem. It was like the mosquito bite that day at the boardwalk – as soon as he recalled it, began to itch. Now that he suddenly remembered Edgewater existed, he felt a strong urge to visit it again.

As far as he knew, he had nothing else to do.

Somewhat slowly (was he stalling?), he crawled out of bed, peeled off his sweat-soaked pajamas and changed into something breathable. He ate his breakfast (cereal, and he did so very leisurely) and retrieved his bike from its usual space in the garage. Still, it was a snail’s pace. He couldn’t quite make sense of the juxtaposition. He wanted to return to Edgewater – the urge to do so was almost tangible, like magnets being drawn to each other – so why was he suddenly so hesitant?

He felt better once he started pedaling. That was almost always the case. The sunshine, no longer as intense as it had been weeks before, felt good. The breeze on his skin felt even better. Though his pulse began to race as he to Long Street, the road that would take him through the heart of Edgewater, he felt good. He felt alive.

Everything was as he remembered it, just less hazy. The houses were there, in their various stages of destruction, some hoisted up on those sickly pallets, others sitting peacefully on the ground with cracked shutters and holey roofs. This was what he’d been afraid of? A neighborhood?

He thought it was silly now. He knew there was no danger, knew that he’d let his own imagination fool him. It was like staying up all night as a kid, terrified to the bone by the ghostly fingers outside your window, only to realize in the daylight that those bony, treacherous fingers were just tree branches. There was a twinge of embarrassment threatening to flush his cheeks.

I was afraid of that? Really?

He ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair. He’d stopped his bike just before Magnolia, the street that had led him to the yellow, gun-shaped house that haunted his dream. Something stopped him from continuing down that street, something outside of his consciousness, something that he couldn’t even give a voice. It wasn’t a stream of consciousness, nothing that communicated clearly, nothing that spoke to him in words. It was something silent that buzzed with a low, steady frequency. Whatever it was, it told him not to go back down Magnolia.

So he didn’t.

He turned his bike around and considered his options. While we he rode back the way he came, he made note of some other side streets, all named for trees – Chestnut Lane, Spruce Road, Pine Alley. At random, he selected Birch Way. The houses here seemed nicer. The destruction was a lot less frequent. It seemed like there were more whole, happy houses than ones damaged by the storm.

It was shady, too. There were more trees here than in his own neighborhood and Taehyung figured idly that that was probably why all the streets had the names that they did. It was quiet but, then, this part of town tended to be after Labor Day. Once the summer was over and the tourists and seasonal residents went home, things tended to quiet down. It would be like this until Memorial Day rolled around and the season kicked off all over again.

For now, Taehyung made a note to take solace in the peace.

Distracted as he was, Taehyung wasn’t even sure how he’d seen the path.

His eyesight wasn’t his strongest feature. He’d never needed glasses or contacts but he was the kind of kid who spent a lot of time squinting. He squinted to read his textbooks, squinted to read the board. It wasn’t bad enough to require a prescription but it did occasionally give him a headache.

Still, his vision wasn’t usually good enough to spot a stray dirt path, especially when he wasn’t looking for it, and double-especially when it was hidden behind two poorly-maintained bushes. The right side of the street had given way to a stretch of forest – trees upon trees upon trees. It didn’t seem to go that deep, probably only a few hundred feet that Taehyung figured let out to another part of the neighborhood, probably on a street called Maple or Willow.

There was no sign announcing or explaining it but there was certainly a path cutting through the woods. Taehyung simply navigated around the shrubs, looking down at the geological makeup of the trail. It was about a foot wide, a strange combination of rock and sand that looked out of place compared to the green grass on either side of it. Taehyung glanced at the tires of his bike. What sort of terrain could they handle? Was he able to take a quick trek through the woods, or should he stick to the streets? Was his bike a mountain bike? Could the tires handle anything tougher than smooth blacktop?

He was about to find out for himself when his phone rang, the hunk-of-junk vibrating in the pocket of his shorts and blasting his embarrassing out-of-date ringtone for the enjoyment of the trees and the chipmunks.

“Where are you?” his mother asked him in rapid Korean. “Did you forget your cousins are coming over today?” Yes, he had. “Your dad is going to make burgers.”

“I went for a bike ride,” he said. Noticing something crawling on the trail, Taehyung climbed off his bike and put the kickstand down. “I’ll be home soon. No pit stops.”

“Pit stops?”

“You know. No stopping for snacks or anything.”

“Right,” she said. His mother always seemed mildly exhausted by his humor. “See you soon.”

He flipped his phone shut (how sad was it that he still had a phone that could flip shut?) and crouched beside the path. Several large bugs crawled across the sand, stopping when they reached the grass and correcting their course to stay atop the gravelly pebbles. Taehyung had never been scared of bugs so he inched forward and got a better look, not worried that the bugs would be equally curious about him and get closer.

But… what kind of bugs were these? 

They looked vaguely like cockroaches, at least in their shape. They were a bit bigger, though. (Taehyung knew that firsthand – their first American apartment had left a lot to be desired. He knew all about all types of domestic vermin.) They weren’t the right color either. Cockroaches were brown. These bugs were a deep red. (What was darker – blood red or crimson?) Their wings were large and translucent and their antennas were long and curled.

He’d never seen bugs like this before. He flipped his phone back open (so sad, truly) and snapped a picture of the one closest to his foot. It wasn’t a great picture – his phone couldn’t take great pictures – but it would do. At the very least, it would help him research it later. He’d Google bugs native to their area and compare the pictures online to the one he’d taken.

It wasn’t exactly Sherlock’s greatest mystery but at least it’d give him something to do instead of his history paper.

Sparing another two-second glance at the strange insects, Taehyung got back on his bike and turned around. He didn’t want to risk being late to a meeting with his family. Hell hath no fury like a Korean mother scorned. He knew that firsthand, too.

He truly meant to look up those bugs the second he found himself alone. But thanks to his chipper and overly-ambitious first-year math teacher, he had a lot of geometry to do. And Taehyung at geometry. It took him two hours and by then, he was so tired and so flustered that he his TV, watched fifteen minutes of Futurama and fell asleep.

He’d always been a good sleeper. He was the type to pass out in the middle of homework, the middle of a phone call, the middle of a movie. He could sleep anywhere. If he needed a nap, it was easy to pick a comfy chair and grab twenty minutes of rest. Seokjin had always been an insomniac, always complained about difficulty falling asleep, but Taehyung couldn’t relate. (It was, however, nice to know that there was something his brother at, even if it was something stupid like sleep.)

That was why it was so weird when he woke up in the middle of the night. He never woke up before his alarm. He slept like a baby, slept like the dead, slept like a log. Even as a kid, he slept deeply. He never had accidents (incredible bladder control, that one), never woke up for a glass of water, never stirred. He went to sleep and stayed asleep. That was how it had always been.

That night, he woke up.

He wasn’t sure what time it was. For a second, he wasn’t even sure where he was. He was disoriented, lost. It only took him a moment to figure out why.

His room was flooded with light. Bright, white, all-illuminating light. His lights weren’t on. His lamp was off, his ceiling fan was off, even his TV was off (and that was weird since he had fallen asleep with it on). He sat straight up and looked around, his sleep-logged brain trying to find the source of the light.

It wasn’t coming from anywhere in his room.

Scrambling to his feet, Taehyung went to his window. He was on the second floor but… could a car be facing his house? Was it headlights? Had there been some sort of accident? Were the cops outside?

He threw open his window and nearly choked on his own confusion. The entire neighborhood was lit by the same sterile, powerful light. He looked to his alarm clock but found that the screen had gone dark. He fumbled for his watch. It was where he’d left it, sitting on his desk, and his shaking fingers managing to hit the backlight before his brain realized he didn’t need it.

It was after two in the morning. It had been cloudy that night, completely hiding the moon and all the stars. It should have been pitch dark outside his window, save for the dull glow of streetlights or the headlights on any car that happened to be passing by. But it wasn’t. It was bright. Brighter than daylight, whiter than daylight. He’d never seen his town in this light before, never seen anything in this type of lighting. It was eerie and much too still. There were no cars moving. There was nothing moving at all.

It looked as though someone had hit pause in the middle of a lightning strike, freezing the town in a flash of light that had only ever meant to be temporary. For a split second, it almost reminded him of a midnight blizzard, the way whiteness coated the ground, the grass, the cars, the houses, and the sky taking on that strange, dark orange even in the dead of night. It held that same sort of serenity, that same sort of surrealism. If it had been lightning, or if it had been a blizzard, at least it would have been natural. But this? This was anything but.

Just like that, the light went out. The world was flooded with darkness once again and the stark contrast was so sudden that Taehyung actually recoiled away from his window. He put his hand on his chest, feeling the rapid drumming of his heart, and squeezed the watch still in his hand. Suddenly, he felt incredibly vulnerable. The darkness now seemed darker than it ought to be and Taehyung felt like he was being watched. He made a mad dash for his bed, a kid afraid that the monster under his bed would grab his ankles, and pulled the covers over his head despite the warm weather.

His alarm went off and Taehyung woke up. He must’ve fallen asleep almost immediately. Cautiously, he pulled the blankets down and peeked at the world around him. The sun was on its way up. Birds were chirping. His alarm clock, blaring its usual shrill demand, seemed to be working again. His TV was on, tuned to the same channel he’d been watching the night before. His watch was still in his hand.

He’d dreamed it all, Taehyung deduced. It had been such a vivid dream that he’d actually gotten out of bed and grabbed his watch, but it was a dream nevertheless. Though he’d never admit to it, Taehyung actually breathed a sigh of relief.

His imagination really had been getting the best of him lately.

As he slammed his hand down on the top of his alarm clock, Taehyung wondered if he should channel his powerful imagination into something productive. He’d always been a decent artist. Maybe he’d start writing his own comic books. He was pretty tight with the guy who owned the local comic book store. Maybe he’d even let Taehyung sell a few.

He didn’t tell anyone about his dream. His parents would just think he was crazy (and they already sort of thought that so why make matters worse?) and his brother would’ve been merciless. (“Does wittle Taehyungie need to sleep in Mommy and Daddy’s room? They’ll keep the big, bad monsters away!”) And his fraction-friends? They didn’t need any new reasons to . Besides, even if they wouldn’t, teenage boys weren’t supposed to sit around and talk about their dreams. s and superhero movies, maybe, but never dreams.

Thanks to a pop quiz in biology and a drunk driving assembly that took up second and third period, Taehyung had forgotten all about his dream. That was, until fifth period geometry. It was one of the classes he shared with Jihoon but the seating chart hadn’t allowed them to get very close. Jihoon was one row over and four seats back, a cruel choice for a student as short as Jihoon but one that allowed him the solitude he otherwise craved.

One row over and two seats ahead was a young man named Jongin Kim. He was good-looking, athletic, one of those that hit puberty young enough to skip over his awkward years and enter high school with the mature ease of a guy more than halfway to manhood. Taehyung was pretty sure that Jongin was friends with Jungkook but since he didn’t keep tabs on the local jocks, he wasn’t entirely sure. (Didn’t all the muscle-heads know each other?)

Their teacher had stepped into the hallway to speak with the assistant principal and left them a series of do-now problems on the board. Taehyung was struggling through a problem involving a bastardly triangle when Jongin started speaking. Normally, Taehyung would have just tuned him out but this time, he wasn’t talking about lacrosse helmets or baseball scores.

“Hey, did anyone see that crazy light last night?” he asked. Taehyung looked up so fast his neck cracked. He reached up to try and fuse his vertebrae back together and stared blankly at Jongin, certain he must’ve misheard. Jongin had been talking to his friends, boys named Bobby and Kyungsoo who sat near him, but his tone implied that it was a question meant for anyone who wanted to answer it.

“What light?” Bobby asked. He’d already given up on the assignment and was playing an apocalypse shooter game on his phone.

“You didn’t see it?” Jongin asked and then whistled disbelievingly. “It must’ve been around two AM. I stole one of my brother’s energy drinks after dinner so that I could get in a good workout and the caffeine blew out my brain. I was up all night, otherwise I would’ve missed it. Anyway, it was nuts. It was like lightning but it lasted forever. At least thirty seconds.” Bobby started laughing, rude, snorting laughter that told Jongin he didn’t believe a word of it but Jongin waved him off, turning his body so that he was speaking more to Kyungsoo. “It was seriously crazy. It was like someone had hit a light switch and the sun for a minute. But it wasn’t the same color as the sun, you know? Because the sun is warm and orangey but this was white. Like those long, tube lightbulbs at stores.” He pointed up to the rectangles of light sewn into the school’s dirty stucco ceiling. “Almost like these.”

“Like artificial lighting,” Kyungsoo amended helpfully. “Like fluorescent lighting.”

“Exactly!” Jongin said, reminding Taehyung of a puppy wagging its tail. “So you saw it, then?”

“No,” Kyungsoo said, his stoic persona cracking as he burst into laughter. “You’re off it, man. What would cause that sort of light?” Other kids in class were laughing, too, shooting Jongin glances from where they sat. Jongin frowned, clearly having not expected such resistance from his classmates.

“I don’t know,” he said sheepishly. “I didn’t say I knew what caused it. But I know I saw it!”

“Sure you did,” said Bobby, reaching across the aisle to pat Jongin’s shoulder, a condescending gesture meant to embarrass him. From what Taehyung could see, he succeeded. “We totally believe you.”

“I’m going to ask Mr. Reynolds,” Jongin said petulantly. Mr. Reynolds was the most popular teacher in the science department and, in Jongin’s mind, the closest thing they had to a brilliant scientist. “He’ll tell us what it was.” There were another few mocking whispers and Jongin looked around the room. “Really? None of you saw it? Nobody else? Come on. Weird happens in this town all the time! I’m the only one who saw it?”

Taehyung hoped he didn’t look at him. He knew himself well enough to know that his face had gone white. He felt cold inside. The light… it hadn’t been a dream. Jongin had seen it, too. Taehyung opened his mouth to say something, wanted to back him up and tell Jongin that he’d seen it and that he wasn’t imaging it, but the words died in his throat. If he spoke, he would’ve stuttered. He would’ve mispronounced something. Everyone would’ve made fun of him. Everyone would’ve laughed.

Better they laugh at Jongin. He could take it. At the end of the day, he was still tall and handsome and popular. He’d shake this off in a few minutes and be back on top of his game by lunchtime. This wouldn’t make or break him. But Taehyung? He couldn’t bear to be the of the joke right now. His reputation was nonexistent and sad as it was.

He’d talk to Jongin later, he decided. Maybe during lunch or during gym. He’d take him aside (Jongin had always been nice to him – he’d understand why Taehyung was being secretive) and they’d talk about the bright light and maybe even those creepy bugs by the path.

Yeah, that’s what they’d do. The nerd and the jock coming together over strange happenings in Canon Bay! It was destiny.

Back in his seat, Jongin’s shoulders slumped. Fruitlessly, he looked over his shoulder, hoping to find someone who would help him out. Instead, he found Taehyung. In that split second of eye contact, Taehyung felt something between them. An understanding. A silent understanding. He saw it in the way Jongin’s eyes lit up. It was a wordless exchange but it was an exchange nevertheless.

You saw it, too?

I did. But don’t say anything.

Jongin nodded, not as an answer to any silent question but as a symbol of understanding. With that, a small smile crossed his lips and he turned back to the front.

Never underestimate the power of a small act of loyalty, Taehyung figured.

From the back of the room, Jihoon swallowed hard. He looked to Taehyung, then to Jongin, then back down at his paper. He’d already finished all of the do-now questions (math was easy for him, just another puzzle for Jihoon Lee to master and solve) but it was safer for everyone in the conversation, everyone in the room and everyone in Canon Bay if he kept his head down.

He looked down at his answers, erased them, and then answered them all over again.

Taehyung didn’t get to talk to Jongin that day. It was a combination of poor timing and general forgetfulness. Sure, it was groundbreaking to know that someone else had seen the light and that someone else had noticed all the weird that had been going on lately, but they had to run the mile in gym class, choose a passage for a Shakespeare recitation in English and a girl talked to him during lunch. (A pretty one, too. Granted, she was just asking him about the homework in science but still. It flustered him to the point of sweating and forgetting everything else in the world.)

When it came down to it, he’d just lost track of time. He’d blinked and the day was over, the last bell pulling him from his thoughts and reminding him that he’d meant to talk to Jongin about what he’d said in math. Taehyung threw his backpack over his shoulder and made a break for the front door, but the mob of other students with the same plan made it impossible to get out on-time.

By the time he did get outside, Jongin was already walking up the path that would lead him home. Taehyung began to chase after him but hesitated. Jongin was flanked by two older, taller jocks, football players named Seunghyun and Chanyeol, and they both had a reputation for shoving kids like Taehyung into trash cans. He stopped short, his sneakers sliding on the sandy pavement and threatening to send him over teakettle in front of six classmates waiting for the bus.

Regaining his balance, he took a breath and reconsidered. What would that conversation even sound like? Hey, Seunghyun! Hey, Chanyeol! You mind if I steal Jongin for a second? We need to talk about a mysterious, possibly supernatural bright light we both saw last night. No, really! It’s important! It might be dangerous! Hey, what are you doing? Oh, please don’t throw me in a Dumpster again. I just got the trash-stains out of my pants from last time!

No, it wouldn’t be wise. Not today. Jongin had always been nice to him but that courtesy had never extended to the other jocks. Jongin wasn’t like the other lug-heads. Something about him was unique. That day, while his larger counterparts wore t-shirts and Nike shorts, Jongin wore a pink hooded sweatshirt and a yellow baseball cap. Taehyung thought he looked like a character from the sports anime he used to watch as a kid.

He’d talk to Jongin tomorrow. He’d wait for him outside math class. It was a little creepy but Taehyung thought it was for the greater good. Better took like a freak for a few seconds in private than to look like one in front of half the school.

He had homework anyway.

He ended up going to Jihoon’s that night. He needed help with his geometry and once there, Mrs. Lee invited him to stay for dinner. Taco night. He’d eaten enough of Mrs. Lee’s cooking to know that anything she made was guaranteed to be delicious, but he politely declined. Jihoon didn’t seem quite like himself, something that could’ve been attributed to any number of things knowing how moody Jihoon could get, and Taehyung didn’t want to impose any further.

He went home, watched a Korean drama with his mother and went to bed at a reasonable hour. To his relief, there were no bright lights, no nightmares about crumbling houses, no strange occurrences at all. It was as if the simple validation from Jongin had managed to scare all his demons away. No longer feeling so alone, Taehyung slept well.

He slept well right up until his mother shook him awake the following morning.

She hadn’t woken him up since grade school. Since seventh grade, he’d been at the mercy of his alarm clock. But there she was, sitting on the edge of his mattress and jostling him by his shoulders.

“Taehyung, get up,” she said.

“What?” he mumbled, his heavy eyelids resisting. “Why? What’s wrong?”

“Do you know a boy named Jongin?” she asked. “Jongin Kim? Do you know him?”

She was still shaking him and Taehyung reached out, wrapped his fingers around her thin arms and said, “Mom, I’m up. Please stop shaking me. Slow down. What is wrong?”

Grudgingly, his mother let him go. He sat up on his own, rubbed his eyes and got a good look at her. She was still in her robe. Glancing at his alarm clock, he saw that he still had thirty more minutes to sleep.

“Do you know Jongin Kim?” she repeated slower.

“Yes,” Taehyung said. “He’s in my grade. Why?”

“Did you see him yesterday?”

Taehyung swallowed hard, his mouth suddenly dry as the sand lodged in the treads of his sneakers. His brain had finally caught up with his ears and he realized what his mother was asking. More than that, he had a sudden, sick understanding of why she might be asking.

“Yes,” he answered slowly. “He’s in my math class.”

“Is that the only time you saw him?”

He considered lying but realized almost immediately that that wouldn’t do anyone any good, least of all Jongin Kim.

“I saw him as I was coming out of school,” he admitted. “He was walking home with his friends but we walk opposite directions.”

His mother nodded, her lips pressed into a thin line.

“I got a call from your friend Mingyu’s mom.” (Mingyu wasn’t his friend so much as a kid who shoved his head into a toilet every other day the entire year of fifth grade, but his mother didn’t need to know that, especially when she was in a book club with his mother.) “Jongin’s parents reported him missing last night. He never came home from school. His friends walked with him all the way to house and said they even saw him go inside but he’s missing. Gone.”

Just like Dino.

It was an intrusive thought, but apt. Taehyung felt a wave of nausea churn in his gut, thick and all-encompassing. It wrapped around his spine and curled up his esophagus. He felt it when he breathed. It was like a vine, expanding when he exhaled and constricting when he breathed back in.

“He’s missing,” Taehyung repeated, a statement more than a question. Was this what it felt like to be in shock? “Jongin is missing.”

She sat with him and spoke for a few more minutes. She told him that there might be police at school who’d want to question every kid who saw him that day, told him to be careful because you can never trust anyone and don’t know what’s out there or who’s watching, and told him how much she loved him and wanted him to be safe, but Taehyung didn’t hear a word of it.

Jongin was missing.

Just like Dino.

His mother was right – there were police officers at school. Every kid in tenth grade had to speak with him. Some, kids who didn’t know Jongin, had nothing to offer. Others, his friends and those who spoke with him daily, had a lot more to say. Taehyung was completely truthful – he didn’t know Jongin that well but he was a really good guy, and though he’d seen him in math class and walking home, he hadn’t spoken to him at all and didn’t know anything about where he went after he left school.

He wanted to ask the cop about Dino Lee, wanted to ask if he thought there was any connection, but he didn’t. Couldn’t.

The cop offered a restrained smile, thanked Taehyung, and let him get back to class.

Taehyung felt sick the rest of the day. He skipped lunch, kept his head down and took the long way home after last bell. He needed some time to himself. The very next day, the school’s computer club printed up a bunch of missing persons fliers and the principal made an announcement to see if anyone wanted to volunteer to help hand them out after school.

Taehyung was the first person in line.

Armed with a sports drink, a heavy-duty stapler and 300 posters, Taehyung took off on his bike. He handed one to every person he saw, by far the most social afternoon of his entire life. He bowed his head as people took papers, thanking them and begging them to keep an eye out. He plastered telephone poles and bulletin boards with them, fully committed to wallpapering all of Canon Bay with Jongin’s picture and the number to call if anyone saw him.

After covering a graffitied stretch of brick wall near the train station, Taehyung took a break. He parked his bike, sat on a weather-tarnished bench and took a long swig of his drink. The air was beginning to cool, but slowly. Summer wasn’t going down without a fight. He screwed the lid back on his drink and dropped into the side pocket of his bag, then leaned heavily against the back of the bench.

How was this happening again? How was it possible? And how wasn’t it a bigger deal?

Two teenagers disappearing from Canon Bay in a little over a year? Why wasn’t the FBI investigating this? Clearly there was someone on the loose, a predator. Sure, Dino’s disappearance seemed inexplicable but there was a reason for it. He had to be somewhere. Something had to have happened inside the tunnel of the Silver Bullet. Someone must’ve taken him, and now that same person had taken Jongin. Why wasn’t this a bigger deal?

Taehyung let his head fall back and he stared up at the cloudless sky above.

Why hadn’t he talked to Jongin yesterday? Why did he have to be such a coward? Jongin was a stand-up guy. Maybe if Taehyung had approached him after school and brought up the white light, Jongin would’ve told his other friends to take a hike. Taehyung could’ve walked him home. Certainly nobody would dare to snatch him if there was a witness that close by, right?. Maybe if Taehyung had manned up and talked to him, Jongin would still be around.

His father always told him that guilt was a useless emotion but in that moment, he didn’t know what else to feel.

He let his head fall further back, effectively giving himself an upside-down look at the world behind him. He used to do this as a kid, stand on his head and look at things from a fresh perspective. (It was things like this that made his parents think he was nuts.) Like this, the sky was green and the grass was blue. In this case, looking across the local railroad, the train tracks were suspended in the air. He wished a train would come by, a two-hundred-ton locomotive appearing to fly through the sky.

But Taehyung didn’t see a train.

He did see a figure in the distance. Being upside down was inherently vexing, all the blood in his head making his vision hazy, but that was what he saw – a far-away figure, a tall person, dressed all in black. He couldn’t see a distinct shirt or pair of pants. If anything, it looked like a long, dark coat. But who would be wearing a coat in this weather?

He sat back up but did so much too quickly. The subsequent head rush was intense and disorienting. He took a few seconds to blink through the blurriness and the colored spots, and once he could see clearly, he spun around to get a better look at the person on the other side of the tracks.

But they were gone.

Had he imagined it? He was upside down and a little dehydrated. Had it been something else? A bird? A tree? A shadow?

He shook his head, lightly slapping himself across the face to ground himself in the moment.

That vivid imagination of his was beginning to get troublesome. He had bigger fish to fry than shadows on train tracks. With a renewed fervor, Taehyung climbed back on his bike and headed to the biggest grocery store in town. There’d be lots of places to hang fliers there. Lots of people would see them and the police would get tons of tips that would lead them to Jongin.

Jongin Kim was never found.

A month passed. The fliers came down first, then the memorial outside the boys’ locker room. People stopped talking about it. The Kim family moved away. Kids bought costumes, carved pumpkins, went trick-or-treating. The fog of mourning that had encompassed the school since the day Jongin disappeared lifted and gave way to passionate football fandom and excitement about homecoming.

Taehyung didn’t understand any of it.

Where was the outrage? Where was the agony? Where was the goddamned FBI? How many more kids had to go missing before people started to care? Didn’t Jongin deserve better? Didn’t Dino? Why was Canon Bay so quick to forget? Was he living in a town of narcissistic, cold-blooded sociopaths or was it something else, something deeper?

It wasn’t until the first week of November that it became too much for Taehyung to bear. The air outside having finally cooled down, the windows of Taehyung’s home had all been cracked, filling his house with the long-awaited crispness of autumn. It was his mother’s favorite time of year and he watched as she busily (and somewhat uncharacteristically) buzzed around the kitchen, cooking up something he wouldn’t be allowed to eat until the next day.

The domesticity of it had him reeling. Why was he home, safe and sound, surrounded by good food and pumpkin-scented candles when Jongin and Dino could be anywhere?

The turmoil inside of him was so great that it forced him to do something he never did – open up to his mother.

“I just don’t get it,” he said suddenly, his voice cutting through the quiet kitchen.

“What don’t you get?” his mother asked amicably, barely looking over her shoulder as she rinsed vegetables.

“Why did the cops give up so easily? Why didn’t they look harder? First Dino disappears and I get that it was inexplicable and impossible and no one could understand it. But then Jongin? Jongin was just walking home. Someone had to see something. Don’t they get it? If they never found Dino, it means that whoever took him is still out there. And they probably took Jongin, too. There’s someone in Canon Bay taking kids and nobody cares! Who’s next? Me? Jihoon? Jungkook? How many kids have to go missing before they give a damn?” He huffed, only basically aware that he’d swore in front of his mother, and wiped fresh tears from his cheeks with the back of his hand. “How come everyone moved on so quickly, huh? I didn’t. Maybe I didn’t know Dino but Jongin was nice to me. Now he’s gone and nobody cares. It’s barely been a month and nobody cares.”

Slowly, Taehyung’s mother had turned off the sink and turned around. She put down her vegetables, dried her hands and watched her son with the most maternal of concern in her eyes. She didn’t interrupt, didn’t move a muscle until he was finished speaking, and when he was, she simply nodded once and moved to close the gap between them.

“Oh, Taehyung,” she said sadly, putting her hand on the top of his head. “Are you getting tired again? Is that it?” Tired. That was the words his parents used when he was eleven and moody and not making much sense. They thought he had demons in his head, or something else certifiably wrong with him. Hadn’t they ever stopped to think that he was an awkward kid living in a country with a huge ing language barrier, going through puberty with no support system? Wasn’t he allowed to have his issues without being accused of being insane? By his own parents?

“What?” he said, resisting the urge to shake her off when she wrapped her arms around him in a seemingly-phony motherly embrace. “No, Mom, listen to me. I know it sounds stupid or paranoid but two kids going missing in one year? From a town this small? Don’t you think that, statistically, there’s something that–”

She squeezed him tighter and kissed the top of his head, beginning to compulsively smooth down his hair the way she used to when he’d had episodes as a child.

“Honey, you’re safe,” she said. “Nobody has ever gone missing from Canon Bay and you won’t either, okay? You’re completely safe. This town is safe. I promise you. Have you been having bad dreams again? Oh, my baby. You’re probably so tired.”

Taehyung was dumbfounded. He sat there and let his mother cry over him, repeating the same phrases she had four years before when his mental health had been everyone in the family’s favorite taboo, but it wasn’t until he went to bed that night that it all began to sink in. 

His mother didn’t remember Dino’s disappearance. She didn’t remember Jongin’s. How could that be? She’d been glued to the TV the first few days after Dino, swearing up and down that Taehyung would never go back to that “godforsaken boardwalk.” And Jongin? She knew Jongin. She’d worked with his mother, albeit briefly. Jesus, she’d been the one to tell Taehyung about Jongin’s disappearance! How was it possible that she had no idea what he was talking about?

Taehyung thought back to that afternoon on the boardwalk with Jihoon and his half-friends. He’d brought up Dino and they’d looked at him like he was crazy, even though he distinctly remembered talking to Jihoon about it in the aftermath. They’d forgotten, too.

But how?

The bright light. The path through the woods. The bugs.

Jongin had seen the light, too. Aside from Taehyung, it seemed like Jongin had been the only other person to see the light. Had he known about the weird houses, too? The blood-red cockroaches with their too-big wings? And just where did that path lead?

Taehyung made up his mind almost immediately. For the first time ever, he stayed up all night, completely unable to close his eyes, let alone get any sleep.

He stayed in bed past his alarm the next morning, something that made his mother come up to check on him. Putting on his best sad-and-crazy puppy-dog eyes, Taehyung asked if he could stay home from school and get some sleep. Naturally, his mother obliged without a moment’s hesitation. If her sickly. nutty son wanted a day to rest and heal, who was she to interfere?

He waited until the house was completely empty, and then counted to a thousand just in case his mother forgot her wallet or his brother decided to skip school and bring a girl home. When he was confident that he was alone, he changed out of his pajamas, stole one of his brother’s energy drinks from the fridge and downed it on his walk from the kitchen to the garage.

It burned his throat and stained his tongue blue but he knew it would come in handy. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d pulled an honest-to-goodness all-nighter.

By now, he knew the drill. He knew how to get to Edgewater and he remembered where he’d found the path. It was still there, hidden behind shrubbery in the middle of Birch Way, but Taehyung swore he only remembered there being two bushes last time. Now, there were four. Only a month had passed. How long did it take for bushes to grow?

It didn’t matter. He pressed on, sure that this path and these bugs were somehow related to everything else that had been going on. Come to think of it…

Taehyung climbed off his bike (he needed to anyway – the bushes were too thick to drive through and navigating around them meant riding over sticks and rocks that could puncture his tires) and knelt beside the path. Where were the bugs? There had been dozens of them last time but now, nothing. Not a spider or an ant or a stray leaf either. Were the crimson creepy-crawlies summer bugs or something? Did they flee when the weather got warmer?

Taehyung shrugged it off. One less thing to worry about. He walked his bike across the path, though made it a point to roll bike along the grass rather than the trail itself. It was rockier than he remembered, sandier, and the terrain crunched beneath his feet as he walked. It wasn’t a very long trek, but the woods on either side of him did seem to be thicker than he’d first imagined. The trees overhead formed a jungle-like canopy that blocked the sun and shrouded him in ghoulish shadows until the trail opened up into a neighborhood and daylight returned.

Taehyung had never seen this neighborhood before, but he also wasn’t sure that neighborhood was the right word for where he found himself. The grass gave way to smooth, clean blacktop and Taehyung found himself at the apex of a fork in the road. That in itself was strange. Didn’t two roads tend to fork off of an existing single road? Why would it branch off of a trail? The path was much too narrow for any car to pass, the forest much too dense to allow anything larger than Taehyung and his bike.

Perhaps it was still under construction.

Taehyung was suddenly faced with a choice – left or right.

Jihoon had told him once that, psychologically speaking, most people tended to go to the right. With that in mind, Taehyung went left.

At first glance, it looked eerily similar to Magnolia Street, with damaged homes of varying sizes. It was only upon closer inspection that Taehyung realized how wrong he was. These houses weren’t damaged, just… incomplete. These houses didn’t appear to be abandoned mid-repair but, instead, abandoned mid-build. Though the skeletons had been assembled and raised (these houses were lifted up on big, thick logs rather than those accordion-like shipping pallets), the houses were missing details. They lacked siding, showing Taehyung the rough, textured wood that usually lay beneath smooth paneling, and doors and windows had yet to be installed. The rectangular cuts had been made but nothing filled them, reminding Taehyung of a child’s toothless grin. He knew what should be there. They just hadn’t grown in yet.

Had this been the beginning of a neighborhood? He’d heard of that. Sometimes builders flattened a huge plot of land and built up an entire neighborhood at once. Had they started construction on multiple homes and lost funding or authorization from the township? Was that why the woods were still there, why there was no smooth road leading into it? Was it simply a real estate venture gone awry? Maybe property value had plummeted after the storm. If it happened once, it could happen again, and people didn’t want to live somewhere so dangerous.

It made enough sense.

He kept walking. He wasn’t consciously aware of the fact that he was still walking his bike rather than riding it, a detail that felt secondary to all the questions that had vaporized around his head and trapped him in a haze. The deeper he went, the larger the houses got. Ranches became two and three-story homes and those soon became mansions. What was bigger than a mansion? A palace? A fortress?

All of the houses were raised but they only got higher and higher. The first skeleton-houses he’d seen had been lifted the normal amount, the legally-obligated few feet that would protect them in the event of another awful storm, but now? These houses (if you could even call them that) towered over him. Some were so high that Taehyung was confident that an additional house could fit under them. Without the pallet-like jacks, Taehyung inferred that these homes hadn’t been lifted but instead purposely built up that high. But how? And why?

The road bent to the left and Taehyung followed the curve. Here, the houses were bigger, impossibly so, and spaced farther and farther apart. It no longer resembled a neighborhood but instead, something far more sinister. In the distance, he saw water but… how was that possible? He’d been traveling west. The ocean shouldn’t have been on that side. It should have been in the other direction, only visible if he’d gone down the right road instead of left. He’d always had a good sense of direction. Hell, just by looking at the position of the sun, he knew where he was. How was it possible for the ocean to be on the wrong side?

He was nearing the end of the road. He hadn’t seen a single sign anywhere. None of the houses had mailboxes or house numbers. In fact, aside from the houses, he hadn’t seen much of anything at all. No bugs, no birds, no people. Just pavement, grass, sand and these almost-but-not-quite homes.

When he saw the last few houses (only, no, houses just wasn’t the right word – structures, maybe, but definitely not houses), he stopped dead in his tracks. There were four of them at the end of the street, all on the left side of the road. Each one was bigger than the next. Taehyung had to fight every instinct in his body to let himself get closer. Moving his legs felt like trudging through tons of wet cement and his head and heart pounded in unison, the drumbeat of warning. His body was telling him no. It was his lizard brain again, that cold-blooded, self-serving part of his unconscious that tried to keep him alive.

But he had to get closer.

He had to see.

He had to know for sure.

These weren’t houses. Absolutely nothing about them resembled any house or home Taehyung had ever seen. Gone were the conventional details of a house, no pointed roof or wrap-around porch or bay windows. These were rectangles, eerie in their geometric perfection. They were raised so high in the air that it would’ve required a series of ladders to get inside. Even if you did have the means to get up there, how would you get inside? None of the four houses (buildings, structures, monstrosities, abominations) had doors.

Instead, they had windows. Huge, gaping windows, mammoth rectangles that ran up and down the front of each building in perfect symmetry. The larger the structure, the larger the windows, but each building boasted eight in total – four on each side.

Taehyung felt as though he’d been struck in the head, a blow so vicious that it sent all of his thoughts scattering to hide in the shadows. His mind had fallen so quiet that he felt it through his body, a silence too profound for humans. Brains were never supposed to be this quiet. But there was nothing he could think of, nothing he could say, no words in either language for what Taehyung was seeing.

None of this should have existed.

These buildings were far too large, far too insidious. They were made of wood, just like the houses he had passed. They weren’t skyscrapers. Skyscraper were made up of beams and girders and went up in urban areas, not forgotten neighborhoods by the beach.

These were, for lack of a better word, wrong.

Everything about this was wrong.

As soon as he thought it, his heart seemed to turn to iron and drop with a dull splash in his stomach.

He’d felt this once before. Just once.

When his family first moved to America, Taehyung was eight. He couldn’t speak a word of English and, subsequently, he couldn’t read it, either. Their first summer in Canon Bay was a whirlwind of boardwalk trips and summertime fun. One afternoon in August, they’d gone to the beach. Armed with a red and yellow boogie board, Taehyung decided he was brave enough to hit the surf.

He couldn’t read any of the signs that warned him about riptides and strong currents, and he couldn’t understand what the white people were shouting at him as he started swimming out.

It wasn’t until he turned back with the intention of smiling and waving at his brother that he realized how far he’d gone out. The shore seemed to be miles away, the lifeguard a mere dot on the sand. His parents had rushes to the edge of the water, screaming for him, and locals and tourist alike were pale with worry. They were all worried he was going to catch his death in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

He’d gone too far and now he was in grave danger.

That was the exact feeling he had right now, but he knew that nobody was coming to rescues him with a bright red kayak this time around.

Taehyung got closer, though no part of him knew how it was happening. Perhaps he’d accepted his fate somehow and maxed himself out with fear. His heart was still drumming hard against his bones and the acidic taste of adrenaline burned the back of his tongue, but he marched on. He left his bike parked in the middle of the winding, unnamed street and moved almost magnetically towards the largest “house” on the left.

How had he not seen any of these from the road? They were so big, so impossibly big. He should have been able to see them in the distance as he approached. They were just so huge, so much bigger than anything Taehyung had ever seen.

It was tall enough that Taehyung had to crane his neck as he got closer. The windows were gargantuan, nearly the size of small houses themselves. He walked closer, ignoring the screeching of alarm bells inside his own head, and that’s when he saw it. He needed to squint – the house was still far off, its sheer size the only reason that Taehyung could see it clearly at all.

But he could see it.

Movement in the windows.

This wasn’t like the house on Magnolia. It wasn’t a quick shadow or a flash of darkness out of the corner of his eye. This was deliberate, constant movement. He tried to get closer but something was stopping him, something physical, something tangible. He was pretty sure there was no such thing as an invisible wall or forcefield but, then, he’d also been pretty sure that there was no such thing as abandoned monster buildings in a forgotten neighborhood at the edge of Edgewater.

He tried to move closer but he couldn’t. Instead, he squinted harder, using his hand to shield his eyes from the sun.

It didn’t just look like movement. It looked like waving.

It looked like bodies.

So many bodies.

He opened his mouth (honestly, what was he going to say?) but choked on his fear. All that came out was a squeak. He wanted to run towards the building, stand right beneath it and look directly up at it, but he was rooted to the ground.

Bodies. People. There were people inside those buildings. He stepped backwards, nearly losing his balance on shaky legs, and looked back at the other three houses. Movement. All of the windows were alive with movement, the jerky, desperate flailing of human limbs.

There were people inside the buildings.

He needed binoculars. He needed a phone that had a real camera with a zoom feature. He needed something to break down the invisible barrier and get closer. He needed to know. There were people inside the buildings but… how the did they get there? These houses were raised so high off the ground. They didn’t even have doors. There were no stairs, no ladders, no elevator. These were grotesque creations, buildings that shouldn’t exist, abominations in the most literal of forms.

How were there people inside of them?

How?

Why?

Why?

He turned around, facing the other side of the street. There were no houses here, just open space. Back the way he came, near one of the smaller, skeletal homes, he saw another figure like the one he’d seen that day at the train tracks. Dressed in a dark cloak and distinctly human-shaped, it simply stood there, watching him.

He waved his arms, trying to get its attention, and opened his mouth again. He wanted to cry for help, wanted to tell the guy that was clearly following him to pick up his phone and call 911, that there were people trapped, but nothing came out. He turned back to the building, hoping to find the words to string together, but when he turned back again, the figure was gone.

He was on his own.

No lifeguard, no mysterious savior, no safety net.

He was completely alone in a neighborhood that wasn’t supposed to exist.

Taehyung gasped like he’d been punched in the stomach, all of the air leaving his lungs in a sharp burst. Nothing had caused it. It was purely a physical reaction to the stress, his body trying to express the strife happening inside his brain.

How was this happening? And why?

He strained his eyes, hoping to make out a single person among the mass of bodies. Did they see him? Were they calling to him? Screaming for help?

It was so hard to see. They were so far away, so far up. He saw colors more than actual, distinct people. He saw something red, maybe a shirt. He saw something pink. A dress? In the lowest window of the largest building, Taehyung swore he saw a flash of lime green.

A basketball jersey? Dino Lee?

Taehyung stumbled back, actually lost his balance and recoiled, at the thought of Dino Lee inside one of these horrible, horrible buildings. Immediately, his eyes searched for Jongin. What had he been wearing? A pink hoodie and a yellow hat. He searched but it was in vain. The buildings were too big and his eyes were too damn small. He’d never be able to see it without getting closer.

He clenched his fists at his sides and tried again, lowering his head and taking long, purposeful steps in the direction of the biggest building.

Something stopped him.

It wasn’t an invisible barrier or the weight of his fear.

It was an intrusive thought, a sudden voice in his head.

The scariest thing of all was that the voice wasn’t his.

Still, it told him two things, both of which stopped his feet dead in their tracks and stopped his blood cold in his veins.

The first: All of these houses were built for something. Not someone. Something.

The second: Whatever thing these houses are for? It’s coming back. You do not want to be here when it does.

Chills shot up Taehyung’s spine so violently that he thought he might throw up right there on the side of the road. From somewhere behind him came the sound of buzzing. It was though someone had unleashed thousands of bees. The buzzing wasn’t natural and complacent, but hostile, almost violent. It was loud, louder than any bugs Taehyung had ever heard, and it was exactly the thing to spur him from his thoughts.

He didn’t know where it was coming from or what was causing it, but he knew enough to run away. In dire situations, it was all about fight or flight. How could he fight something he couldn’t see?

He pedaled so fast that he had to stand up, his shaking knees needing more weight to help keep his feet on the pedals. His heartbeat pounded away in his ears, his vision seeming to blur slightly with each beat. He wanted to turn around, wanted to commit this place to memory, but the buzzing was growing louder. Was he being chased? The noise seemed to be coming from everywhere, nowhere, threatening to swallow him. If he was being chased, wouldn’t it only be coming from behind him?

He saw the woods and rode harder. He couldn’t see the path from the road, something that filled him with heavy, all-consuming dread. Was he stuck here? Had he truly gone too far this time?

When he hit the edge of the forest, Taehyung hit the brakes so hard he nearly went over the handlebars. He needed the path. Something inside himself told him that trying to cut through these woods using anything but the path was a death sentence. Was it possible the path had moved? Had he gotten so disoriented and turned around that he’d gone back the wrong way?

He was at the fork in the road so the path should have been exactly where he was standing.

Taehyung was seconds away from crawling on his hands and knees, digging through branches and shrubbery until he found it, when his eyes caught the lighter color of the sandy trail. It was about eight feet away from where he swore he’d left it and swarming with those beet-red bugs.

He didn’t give a . He could focus on sharpening his sense of direction later. As fast as his legs would carry him, Taehyung lugged his bike through the bushes and down the path. He emerged from the greenery with an exhausted whimper and found himself with both feet on Birch Way.

But it wasn’t good enough for him. It wasn’t far enough from the path.

Clamoring back on his bike, he sped home. When he reached his front lawn, he realized he couldn’t remember any of the ride back. Working on auto-pilot, the details of the journey home escaped him. It didn’t matter. He let his bike fall to the grass of his front yard and fell beside it, gasping harder from fear than exertion. His breath came in painful busts, each pant a struggle. He was dizzy and reeling and on the verge of inexplicable tears but he was alive.

He figured that counted for something.

It took him twenty minutes to calm down and eventually he forced himself to go inside and get a glass of water, his brother’s energy drink suddenly not sitting well in his otherwise empty stomach. He pinched himself three times, each harder than the last, determined to make sure this was all happening in the waking world.

His head was spinning. It was as though everything he’d ever known to be true had been pulled out from under him. He was the cutlery and flower vase set for a magician’s tablecloth trick. Only this time, the tablecloth didn’t slide away so easily. It snagged, sending everything flying and causing Taehyung’s sense of perception to splinter and shatter against the floor.

His family would never believe him. Not in a million years. They already thought he was nuttier than a fruitcake, his mother already worried that he was slipping into old habits. He could show them the path and they still wouldn’t buy it. He could hear them now, pity and embarrassment thick in their voices.

Oh, Taehyung. Oh, my son. You’re so tired. So, so tired…

No, they wouldn’t believe him. They didn’t even remember Jongin and Dino. Whatever was happening here, however the wool was being pulled over people’s eyes, they were susceptible to it. No, they’d be no help. He needed someone smarter, someone more open-minded, someone clever and realistic.

Jihoon.

He needed Jihoon.

Taehyung checked the clock.

If he hauled , he could make it to school before Jihoon’s study hall period ended. Jihoon spent every study hall period in the school library.

Taehyung pedaled so fast that his legs started to cramp. He was already sore from the frantic departure from Birch Way but now his muscles were screaming for mercy, lactic acid seizing his limbs and rendering them far less useful than they’d been that morning.

He parked his bike at the rack closest to the gym, not bothering to lock it. He burst through the gym doors, sweaty and frenzied, and snuck past the teachers who would’ve noticed he was out of place. Legs still trembling, Taehyung moved quietly down the northernmost corridor and up the stairs to the library.

Jihoon was there, sitting at the table closest to the wall, writing something in a purple notebook. When Taehyung approached, Jihoon was visibly surprised.

“You’re here,” he said. “What, did you skip the first four periods?”

“I need to talk to you,” Taehyung wheezed, bending slightly at the waist so he could rest his hands on his knees. “Right now, Jihoon. It’s important.”

“Okay,” said Jihoon, looking genuinely concerned. “Did you run here? You look like you’re going to die. Jesus. Sit down, man.” He pushed out the closest chair with his foot but Taehyung shook his head and waved it off.

“I need to talk to you,” he repeated. “Right now. There’s something going on in Canon Bay, Jihoon. Something bad. First Dino, then Jongin. There’s this path in my neighborhood and it leads somewhere. Somewhere bad, Jihoon. Somewhere real bad. I think that–”

“Stop,” Jihoon said, his voice cold as ice. Taehyung had never heard him sound like that before. He stood up straighter, an involuntary response to his tone, and looked closely at his friend. Jihoon’s expression had changed. Gone was the concern. Instead, he looked angry, totally void of any warmth. It was true that Jihoon was thoughtful and stoic, but he wasn’t cruel. In all the years he’d known him, Taehyung had never seen Jihoon wear an expression like that.

“You’re not listening,” Taehyung said, nearly whining. “There’s something not right in that neighborhood. Jihoon, there’s these houses–”

“Stop!” Jihoon roared, something that got the attention of all the students within earshot. Rather than smile and crack a joke to smooth things over (something he’d normally do in a situation like this), Jihoon stood up abruptly, nearly sending his chair flying across the room. He grabbed Taehyung by the arm, his fingers pressing hard enough into Taehyung’s flesh that bruising seemed likely.

He dragged him through rows of books until they reached the historical non-fiction, a corner of the library almost guaranteed to be empty. Once there, Jihoon released Taehyung’s arm. He took a few steps and rubbed his hands roughly over his face. Then he ran them through his white blonde hair.

“Jihoon,” Taehyung said, unusually persistent, “I know you probably don’t believe me but I can prove it. I’ve seen things. I saw these houses. They’re big. Too big. They–”

Jihoon was on him in a matter of seconds. He was deceptively strong for his size. In an instant, he’d thrown Taehyung against a shelf, his right forearm pressed viciously against Taehyung’s chest, nearly cutting off his air. With that same hand, he covered Taehyung’s mouth, silencing him in the most abrupt and invasive way possible.

“You need to stop talking,” Jihoon said lowly, his voice barely a growl. He was sneering, something that chilled Taehyung almost as much as what he’d seen in that neighborhood. He lowered his voice to a hissing whisper, something Taehyung never wanted to hear again in his lifetime. “Taehyung, if you’re smart, if you care about yourself at all, if you value being alive, you need to stop ing talking. I’m warning you. Not a word. Not about the light, not about the bugs, not about the houses. None of it. You shut your mouth and you forget about it. Do you understand me?”

Taehyung couldn’t speak, not with Jihoon’s arm across his chest and his hand over his mouth, but Jihoon must’ve seen agreement in his eyes because a moment later, he let him go. He stepped back, ran his fingers through his hair again and took a shaky breath. Taehyung rubbed the sore spot on his chest and watched Jihoon very carefully. The words that left his mouth did so of their own volition.

“You know,” he said quietly, a sad fact that seemed to sting him from the inside as he spoke it. “You know about everything.”

Jihoon’s normal range of expressions had returned. For a split second, Taehyung saw it – regret, pain. There was a deep, deep remorse in Jihoon’s eyes. He stared at Taehyung from over his shoulder, his body slouching in on itself. A moment later, it was gone, replaced with that cold, hard apathy he’d seen from the beginning.

“I know,” Jihoon said, a harsh, mournful whisper. “And the only reason I’m still walking around is because I’ve chosen to ing forget.” He looked Taehyung up and down and shook his head, the lugubrious look in his eyes enough to stir something inside Taehyung. “Please, Taehyung, for the love of God, I am begging you to do the same.”

Taehyung blinked. He searched his brain for words the way a kid searched a beach for sand crabs, but he came away empty-handed. There was no word, not in English or in Korean, to describe what he was feeling. The closest he could come, and he wasn’t sure if the word even did it justice, was simply betrayal.

“You know,” Taehyung repeated, his base of his palm still ghosting over the future bruise on his collarbone. “You knew this whole time? You’ve known longer than me?” He blinked again, slower, and realized he felt the way he had while looking at those monstrous structures in that terrible neighborhood. He was dumbfounded, a boy torn from his home and dropped onto an alien planet where down was up and water was dry. “Jihoon, how long have you known?”

“Shhh!” Jihoon hissed, his voice as coarse as the path that had led an unwitting Taehyung into a foreign and horrifying layer of hell. “Keep your voice down, Taehyung.”

“Why?” Taehyung asked dumbly, still leaning heavily against the bookcase. He was sure it was the only thing keeping him standing. Jihoon stared back at him like that was the dumbest question anyone had ever asked and when Taehyung didn’t laugh or follow it up with something witty, Jihoon reached out and grabbed his sleeve. He pulled Taehyung to the window, the latter barely making it to the sill on his jelly legs, but stopped just before they could see outside.

“See yourself,” Jihoon said helplessly. There was something weak in the shrug of his shoulders, something that made Taehyung suddenly very keenly aware of the stress his friend was under. How long had those bags been under his eyes? How long had his shoulders slouched like that?

Tentatively, grudgingly, Taehyung peered out the window. At first, he saw very little of interest through the dirty glass. This particular window looked out over the teacher’s parking lot. To the east, beyond the cars, was a tennis court.

“Keep looking,” Jiyong said. “Back to the skyline. You’ll see it.” He shook his head, a humorless smile turning up the corners of his mouth. Correcting himself, he amended, “Him. Them.”

He squinted, then he saw it. Him. Them.

Dark figure. Long, black trench coat. Standing. Waiting. Watching.

“Who…” Taehyung’s voice shook as he realized he didn’t want to ask the rest of that question.

“I don’t know,” Jihoon answered, pulling Taehyung away from the window. “I’ve never seen him up close. Only in the distance, only just like that. I open the window, he’s there. I go to get the mail, he’s there. He’s watching. Always. You’ve never seen someone like that before?”

Taehyung remembered the train tracks, remembered the neighborhood.

“Yeah,” he said. “I have. What’s the point? What does he do? Why is he watching us?”

“I don’t know,” Jihoon repeated, sounding agitated. “I don’t know a whole lot more than you do, Taehyung.” He started pacing again and Taehyung took a breath to steady himself. Jihoon was always the calm one. Jihoon was always the level one. If they lost the only truly clear-headed member of their duo, they were both doomed.

He closed his eyes and counted backwards from five, nice and slow. It was something his grandmother used to tell him to do when he was getting out of control.

“You remember Dino and Jongin?” Taehyung asked, something in his mangled mind telling him that he needed to begin at the beginning.

Leaning against the wall and slinking down so that he was sitting in a crumpled heap on the floor, Jihoon said, “Of course I do.” That was something. That was a start.

“And you’ve seen the bugs?”

“Yeah.”

“What about the houses?” Taehyung asked. “Have you seen the houses?” There was something in his tone, something almost hopeful. If he wasn’t the only one who knew about them, it wasn’t so bad. If he wasn’t the only person in the world that had seen them, it wasn’t so isolating.

“I don’t want to talk about the houses,” Jihoon whispered, staring down at his hands. The pain in his voice made Taehyung need to sit down, too, right beside him.

“Jihoon,” he said after a long silence, “why do we remember them when no one else does?”

Jihoon pointed at nothing in particular, something he tended to do when he got especially philosophical, and said, “You know, Taehyung, I think it has to do with the lights.” He bit the inside of his cheek and then turned to face his friend, a strange, otherworldly camaraderie in the look they exchanged. “I think those lights make people forget. It made them forget Dino and it made them forget Jongin. I think it makes them forget other stuff, too. Smaller stuff. Anything that they don’t want us to remember.”

“Who’s they?”

“I don’t know,” Jihoon said. “I don’t know who they are and I don’t know why some of us remember when most people forget.”

“Have you tried?” Taehyung asked. “To find out, I mean. Have you asked other people? Have you looked online? Read books? Anything?”

There was a beat, a split second of silence where Jihoon looked at Taehyung in utter disbelief, and then he burst out laughing. It was a dry, hysterical guffaw that made tears spring from the corner of his eyes. Taehyung watched him quietly, confused, and didn’t say a word until Jihoon was totally finished.

“Are you kidding?” he said, looking Taehyung in the eye. The look was deep, meaningful, almost pleading. “Taehyung, the only reason I’m sitting here with you right now is because I haven’t talked about it. I’m only here right now because I made the choice to shut the up about the things I remember. It’s why you need to do the same.”

The truth hit Taehyung like a bolt of lightning, a realization that seemed to strike him dead in the chest and shock him through his limbs.

“Jongin disappeared because he knew too much,” he said slowly, hesitantly. He studied Jihoon’s face for confirmation but his friend merely forced a smiley in response. “They made him disappear. Did… did Dino know, too? Is that what happened?”

Jihoon shrugged his narrow shoulders.

“I didn’t know Dino,” he said. “He was older than us. But you know, Tae, it’s the only damn thing that makes any sense and it’s the best explanation I can come up with.”

“Other people have to know about this,” Taehyung said hastily, his frustrations getting the best of him. “People have to know. It can’t just be us.”

“It won’t even be us if you don’t shut up about it,” Jihoon huffed. “Taehyung, listen to me. I like to think of myself as a pretty smart guy. I read a lot. I study philosophy and mythology. I keep up with world events. I’m not dumb. It is borderline ridiculous to think that humans are the only intelligent lifeforms out there. It’s irresponsible and narcissistic to think that it’s just us, that there’s nothing more than this life. There’s more, Taehyung. Mathematically speaking, there has to be more than just this species on this planet in this galaxy in this universe. Do you understand?”

“You think it’s, what, alien? Demon? Something from another dimension?”

Jihoon stared at him very, very seriously and said in his quietest whisper, “You saw those houses, Taehyung. Do you think anything from our world could have made them?”

Silence.

The chills that shot up Taehyung’s spine were violent in nature, intense enough to have him double over and shift the way he was sitting. He closed his eyes and saw them all over again, the geometric perfection, the unfinished wood, the enormous openings, the movement.

He remembered something important and opened his mouth to share it with the only person in the world he knew would be able to understand.

“Jihoon, those houses–”

But Jihoon cut him off.

“There are some things,” Jihoon said with an uncharacteristic sternness and clarity, “that we just aren’t supposed to know about. There are some secrets too deep, some tragedies too great, some abominations too ing dark. Those houses? Those bugs? The lights? Whatever happened to Dino and Jongin? We aren’t supposed to know, Taehyung. We haven’t earned it. We’re not built for it. We’re not supposed to ing know about it so just forget it.”

“I think I saw Dino in one of those houses,” Taehyung blurted, the words exploding from his mouth before his brain could register where they were going. “I saw things moving in the windows, people. And one of them was wearing a lime green jersey just like Dino’s. I think he’s there. And if he’s there, Jongin’s probably there too.” He turned his entire body so that he was facing Jihoon and that was when he noticed his friend’s condition. Jihoon had pulled his knees to his chest, his eyes squeezed shut like he was getting ready to take a punch or trying to stop himself from weeping.

“Forget it, Taehyung,” he begged quietly. “Please just forget what you saw.”

“There’s people there,” Taehyung went on. “Lots of them. Who knows what they’re doing to them? We don’t even know who they are, let alone what they’re capable of. You’re the most noble guy I know. How can you just sit idly by and let people get hurt?”

Jihoon’s eyes sprang open and he turned his head oh-so-slowly to look at his friend. The pain his eyes was unmatched by anything Taehyung had ever seen in another person.

“Because I want to live, Taehyung. Because I am one human teenager who found himself mixed up in some dark, supernatural bull that’s going to kill me if I let it.” He pointed to the window and Taehyung could see how hard he was struggling to keep his voice low and his emotions in check. “There’s a ing guy in a cloak watching my every move, waiting for me to slip up so that he can take me to the neighborhood of death and make everyone I ever loved forget that I exist.” He grabbed the front of Taehyung’s shirt and pulled him close, close enough that Taehyung could smell the gum he’d been chewing. “I am not willing to die for this, Taehyung. I’m a smart guy. Smart enough to get into a good college far, far away from Canon Bay and whatever evil happens to live here. One day, I’ll be far enough away that none of this will have ever mattered, and I’d really like it if you were there with me.”

Just as suddenly as he’d grabbed him, Jihoon let Taehyung, and Taehyung dropped back against the wall with a sad thump. Immediately, Jihoon balled his fist and tapped it lightly against his forehead, his eyes shut and his hands shaking.

“Jihoon,” Taehyung said, the emotion squeezing his throat causing him to stammer his own best friend’s name. “I didn’t… I don’t know how… I…”

“There are just some things we shouldn’t know,” Jihoon said, not opening his eyes. “Please let it go, Taehyung. Please just forget any of this ever happened. Before you end up like Jongin and Dino and whoever else, please just ing forget.”

He didn’t say anything after that. Not a word. He didn’t move from where he sat, he didn’t lower his hand, he didn’t open his eyes. He stayed just like that, even after the bell rang and ended his study hall period.

Feeling like he’d done enough already and not wanting to upset him further, Taehyung stood and exited the library. His hands were shaking so much that he had trouble turning the door handle and with the way his stomach was churning, he fully expected to see his brother’s energy drink again.

Jihoon knew, too. He wasn’t going crazy and he wasn’t making it up. He wasn’t backsliding and regressing into old mental lapses and he wasn’t having a series of vivid dreams or imaginative episodes.

There was a darkness in Canon Bay, something very dangerous and very real. Taehyung wasn’t sure if he was hurt because Jihoon hadn’t told him, comforted by the fact that he wasn’t alone, or scared less by the threat that lurked so close.

As he climbed on his bike, he looked back towards the teachers’ parking lot. In the distance, he could still see the figure – the man, the thing in the cloak. He (it?) was still there, motionless. Just looking in his direction sent an incomparable dread through Taehyung’s body. Was it the man himself that scared Taehyung, or all he represented? Was it his presence, or simply the fact that he acted as the eyes and ears of some nameless, faceless evil that lived within his hometown?

Shuddering from a bone-deep feeling he couldn’t quite identify and climbing back onto his bike, Taehyung simply turned back rode off in the other direction.

Jihoon’s words had been… profound. Disturbing. Thought-provoking. Unfortunately, they did absolutely nothing to change Taehyung’s mind. He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he had to go back to that neighborhood, but suddenly, it was growing increasingly difficult to find the time.

He took a few days to clear his head. He needed to make peace with what he’d seen, with what Jihoon had said. He needed the time to somehow parse those impossibilities, to convince himself that everything that had happened, everything from Dino Lee’s disappearance to what lay beyond that path on Birch Way, wasn’t just some vivid, year-long hallucination.

The wound was too fresh to even think about returning the next day, though the opportunity did present itself. The flesh of his soul was just too raw. He’d give it a few days, let the dust settle, then he’d go back. This time, he’d take pictures, or bring someone with him. Then, he’d have proof. With proof came help. Maybe if he had help, he could get Dino and Jongin back.

He even considered skipping school again the next day, sure that he’d be able to milk another sick day from his worried mother. He wasn’t all that tired, but he was worried about facing Jihoon after their little talk. Luckily, Jihoon seemed to have the very same idea. He was inexplicably absent the following day, something rare (this was the kid who’d gotten the Perfect Attendance award the last five years) but something for which Taehyung was extremely grateful.

It would’ve been a very awkward gym period.

For the next few days, he ate his dinner in silence, nodding along to whatever unimportant nonsense his family was talking about, and excused himself to bed at a reasonable hour. He started doing his homework at lunch and used all the extra time to gather his thoughts.

He went over it all in his head, from start to finish, over and over again, until it settled in like a fact. The sky was blue, water was wet, fire was hot, there was a dark force in Canon Bay that few people seemed to know anything about.

Soon, he set a date in his head and planned his return, emotionally preparing himself to face an unknown evil for the second time in a week. He’d come to this conclusion while walking home from school, enjoying the way the early November air had finally begun to carry a chill. The breeze picked up and blew his hair forward, covering the skin of his neck in gooseflesh and flushing his ears, and it was around this time that he came to his decision.

Tomorrow, he thought, I’m going back.

But life was rarely that kind, and rarely that linear.

He knew something was wrong when he saw his mother’s car in the driveway. It was barely two o’clock. His mind jumped to several immediate and outlandish conclusions before settling into a concerned quiet and he opened his front door with a certain reluctance.

Seokjin was already at the table with his mother, having beaten Taehyung home. Though Seokjin had his own car, a beat-up Honda that backfired like an assault rifle, he usually got rides to school from his friends. (More than once, they’d driven by Taehyung, honking and waving. Especially if it was raining or snowing.)

His mother was on the phone, crying quietly and speaking in sad, hasty Korean, and Seokjin had his arm around her the way eldest sons were supposed to when their mothers were upset.

“What happened?” Taehyung asked quietly, speaking in English. Sometimes, when his mother was feeling full-blown Korean, speaking to his brother in English felt like a secret language that only they could understand. If they sounded white enough, they were completely invisible to her.

“Mom lost her job,” Seokjin said back.

Taehyung’s immediate thoughts were all reasonable and pragmatic. It that his mother had gotten fired. She loved her job and she was good at it. It also that they were now without a second income. He knew that his family was comfortable financially but how long would that last with just his father’s paycheck?

Then, he became positive. His mother was very smart and very good at networking. She’d find a new job, possibly a better job, and things would be fine again. Maybe she’d be happier at her new job and maybe she’d work less hours.

Then, later, after Seokjin had done his favorite-child duties and cheered their mother up, and after their father had made them all a healthy Korean dinner and spoke positive, fatherly wisdom on the subject, Taehyung realized how this was going to affect him.

His mother tended to climb the walls when she was out of work. It had happened a few times, once when she had gotten surgery and needed to be home for a month, and another time when her boss had forced her to take vacation days that were set to expire. She was restless, fidgety, reminding Taehyung of the time he’d caught a hummingbird in a sand bucket when he was six. She got agitated and tried to force productivity, taking up scrapbooking or gardening and then abandoning them when she wasn’t immediately successful.

Then she turned her extra attention onto her sons.

Seokjin had an easy out – he had a girlfriend, a job, a bunch of social commitments.

But Taehyung?  Taehyung the loner with no homework, no friends and fleeting mental health?

As Baekhyun liked to say so eloquently, she was going to be on him like cheese on cheese fries.

He showered and considered his options while he washed his hair, his frustrations causing him to scrub his scalp too hard. For about three seconds, he thought about telling his mother what was going on, but then he remembered her face when she mentioned Jongin and that idea, along with his shampoo bubbles, went right down the drain.

That wouldn’t work.

He went to bed that night feeling vaguely hopeless and dreamt of the blood-red cockroaches from Birch Way. He awoke in the middle of the night, scratching like a madman, momentarily convinced that those vermin had somehow made it away from the trail, into his neighborhood and into his bed. He didn’t wake up in his bed, but instead on the other side of his room, one hand on the light switch and the other inside his shirt, swatting invisible pests. His heart was pounding, his breath coming in ragged hacks, and he’d kicked all of his sheets clean off.

Of course, there were no bugs. It was just his mind playing tricks on him.

He ran a hand through his sweat-matted hair and breathed slowly.

In this one particular instance, those bugs were all in his head. But, at the same time, they were very, very real. How could he trust his own mind if it was going to be like this? How could he be sure what was real – like the houses and the trench coats – and what wasn’t?

He checked his bed thoroughly, shaking out his blankets before putting them back, and turned off the light. Satisfied that there was no sudden infestation of potentially demonic bugs anywhere in his room, he slept. When he awoke again, it was morning and Taehyung was somehow sure that he wouldn’t be able to return to Birch Way.

Was it a premonition, or wishful thinking? Was he disappointed or relieved? Was he upset about the impending interruption or was he thankful to be spared?

He dressed quickly and went downstairs, bracing himself for an onslaught of questions from his mother. He was three bites into a toaster pastry when they started.

“What time are you leaving? Are you taking your bike? Are you taking the bus? Do you need a ride? Did you do your homework? What are your plans after school? How’s Jihoon? What did you get on your biology test?”

All in rapid Korean, all asked far too quickly to allow for any real response. Meekly, he did his best to satisfy her curiosity and then snuck out the door as she shouted at him to zip up his coat. Not wanting to risk his bike being stolen or damaged (there really were that many people in his grade willing to with him), Taehyung usually walked to school. The brisk morning air cleared his head and puffed up his chest. He thought of autumn, but then drifted back to summer, remembering that day at the boardwalk when he first realized something was horribly wrong with his town.

That was how it tended to be those days.

In his mind, all roads led back to one – Birch Way.

He rolled through the school day on auto-pilot, letting muscle memory guide the way. He played dodgeball, did a biology lab, took a pop-quiz in English and had tacos for lunch. His fraction-friends talked to him () and he faked a laugh. All the while, he was thinking of that neighborhood.

This was supposed to be the day he went back. He’d already accepted it. How was he supposed to make it happen?

He’d zoned out during lunch, his mind thick with uncertainty, and Mark took that as an opportunity to with him. He walked his hand rapidly up Taehyung’s back with a feather lightness and shouted, “Taehyung, bugs on your back!”

Taehyung jumped up like he was on fire, his hands slapping across his torso and back to try and extinguish the flames. Mark and Baekhyun laughed and laughed and laughed. Jihoon looked up from his sandwich and faked a laugh but Taehyung could see it in his eyes that their minds were in the very same place – those godforsaken bugs.

Not wanting to draw any undue attention, Taehyung laughed weakly along with them.

“Good one, Mark,” he said, his voice shaking as much as his hands. “You got me.”

He took the long way home that day.

Normally, he’d have at least three hours between his return from school and his mother’s return from work. That day, though, he had an inkling she’d be waiting. No way around it, no way to stop it. He’d grown up completely starved of her attention – it figured that she’d get laid off when he finally and deeply desired privacy.

He shoved his hands into his pockets and trekked on, shooting a wayward glance down the street that would have ultimately led him to Edgewater if he’d been able to take it.

His mother was waiting on the porch when he stepped into the driveway.

And she was wearing her gardening hat.

“Oh, Jesus, help me,” he mumbled.

She came at him hard, loaded with questions and forcing trowels at him. She’d decided that she – they – were going to get the garden started again. They’d plant garlic, beans, peas and asparagus and now, with all this time off, she’d be able to improve her cooking. The boys always complained that she cooked too much Korean food. This was an amazing opportunity to try new things, and cook with fresh produce! And while they readied the soil, they’d talk about Taehyung.

How was school? Were any kids giving him trouble? Did he have his eye on any girls? Was he still getting overwhelmed? Was he still getting those headaches? Was he sleeping better? Had he had any episodes lately? What was his favorite subject? What was his worst? Did they teach Korean in public school the way they taught English in Korea? Why didn’t he and Seokjin speak Korean more often? Why didn’t they hang out more often? Seokjin was a good role model. Taehyung needed to spend more time with him.

Inside, Taehyung was screaming.

Mother, I cannot sit here and plant arugula with you. There’s something going on in Canon Bay. Something big and something bad. I can’t tell you what it is because you’ll try to have me committed again but I promise it’s real and we’re all in danger. You need to take back your potting soil and let me go. No one is safe.

He went to bed that night with dirt under his fingernails and a knot of anxiety in his chest.

As he’d been going up the stairs to take a shower and retire for the night, his mother had shouted to him, in perfect English, “Can’t wait til tomorrow! Another afternoon with my gardening buddy!”

Of all the times for his mother to decide she liked her youngest son.

He fell asleep, dreamt of bugs, woke up scratching and forced himself back to sleep. That next day at school, the same routine. Read, write, dodge balls, eat school food, deal with fraction-friends, walk home. When he got home that afternoon, he found that his mother had purchased him his own pair of gardening gloves.

“Now we match,” she announced brightly.

Taehyung literally bit his tongue has he dug rows for tomatoes.

Growing up, he would have killed for this sort of mother-son bonding, this sort of attention. But now? In the midst of everything that was going on? His desire to get up and run from his mother was nearly tangible, starting at the bottom of his spine and spreading up and out, making his limbs tingle with restlessness.

Still, away he toiled.

The irony wasn’t wasted on him.

This went on for two weeks. He lived his life in a sort of cruise-control, going through the motions at school and enduring his mother’s every whim at home. All the while, he dreamt of bugs. When he stopped dreaming of discolored roaches, when the phantom crawling sensation was no longer enough to wake him, he dreamed of giant, deformed houses. Rather than seeing them from the outside, Taehyung dreamt he was inside, looking out at the world through those huge rectangles, dozens of stories in the air.

Every time, without fail, he’d fall from one of those windows and wake up on the way down.

What could he do?

His father had started to work later at the office, his head-of-the-household attempt at supplementing more income. Even Seokjin had picked up more shifts at the diner, claiming he wanted to “help the family.” (Taehyung had a creeping suspicion that all that extra money would go to his girlfriend and that Jin just didn’t want to be Mom’s new gardening partner.)

Taehyung was all his mother had. She’d given birth to him, raised him, fed him, clothed him, patched up his scraped knees and wiped his boogers. He figured, at the very least, he owed her this. Perhaps she hadn’t always been the warmest or most maternal woman (he saw memes about Asian moms on the internet and he’d always related) and she’d definitely always favored Seokjin but it was still his mom. His mother. His mommy. His eomma.

If she needed a gardening buddy (and a knitting buddy, and a yoga buddy), Taehyung could be that for her.

That was what it meant to be a family, his figured.

Somewhere towards the end of November, he actually started caring about the garden. He’d even found himself reading about winter gardening on his own time, printing articles in the school library and highlighting the relevant parts so his mother could read them easily.

He and Jihoon weren’t talking as much. Apparently, the burden of a shared secret was sometimes too much for two fifteen-year-old boys to handle. It was easier to avoid each other than to avoid talking about Edgewater, and about Dino and Jongin, and so that was what they did. They still sat together at lunch, still emailed each other the history notes and English slides, but it wasn’t the same

Jihoon wanted to forget and Taehyung was beginning to get distracted.

Maybe, Taehyung decided, they both needed some space.

It was getting colder, but not cold enough to snow. Taehyung wondered if the world realized it was nearly December. The temperature had yet to dip below 45 degrees, meaning that Taehyung could still sport his slightly-out-of-style-but-characteristically-him jacket with the denim body and black sleeves. His mother still shouted at him for not buttoning it up and not wearing a hat but he felt like they were growing closer.

He was surprisingly grateful for it. He’d always loved his mother, despite her shortcomings, and getting to know her as a person instead of just as a mom was kind of nice. He’d certainly never expected such a silver lining to come from her losing her job.

He was sleeping easier. The nightmares hadn’t stopped completely but they’d faded. They were like bad memories now, scars rather than jagged, oozing flesh wounds, and he’d stopped waking up in the middle of the night, wracked with irrational fear.

Until one night when he did.

The day leading up to it had been completely inconsequential. He went to school, took a test, worked on a research paper, played flag-football, then come home to do homework and play chess with his father. (Now that he was working so much, any time with his dad was something to be treasured.)

It had been borderline mundane, nothing remotely interesting or out-of-the-ordinary to be reported.

That was what made what happened next so much more sinister.

He didn’t awake with a start.  He opened his eyes as slowly and as peacefully as one fell asleep. It was a graceful awakening, one that hadn’t been caused by any noise or disruption. He simply awoke, his eyes opening easily and finding nothing but the dark ceiling above.

His lungs filled with air, a deep, slow breath that happened completely of its own volition, as though he’d been hooked up to a ventilator while he slept. A strange calm washed over him, but it felt nothing like relaxation or serenity. Instead, it simply felt empty, completely void of… everything. Anything.

A noise ripped through his room like a freight train, an impossible scream that came from nothing and nowhere. Somehow, he knew it was inside of his own head. Like that afternoon in Edgewater, someone, or something, was speaking to him from the inside of his own brain.

Only this time, they were screaming.

TAEHYUNG, COME HOME.

YOU NEED TO COME HOME.

TAEHYUNG, IT’S TIME TO COME HOME.

TAEHYUNG, COME HOME.

It was so loud. Taehyung covered his ears even though he knew that it wouldn’t do any good. The inside of his head pulsed, a piercing siren from the middle of his skull. This voice wasn’t just foreign – it was inhuman. Taehyung wasn’t sure how he was able to understand it, wasn’t sure how he could make out the words when there weren’t any words to be made out.

But it wouldn’t stop.

The harder he squeezed his head, the more it hurt. It was an involuntary, almost childlike response. What do you do when there’s a loud noise you don’t like? You cover your ears, you hide from it.

His body flailed, moving around the bed in a blind bid to get away. The covers twisted, tangling him up. His pillows were kicked to the floor.

His eyes watered.

It felt like his head was being flayed from the inside, parts of his brain sloughing away. He squeezed his eyes as tightly shut as he could, sure that if he opened them he’d see blood and brain matter spraying all over his room and ruining his sheets and walls. His head was splitting open. It had to. This voice, whatever it was, was too loud. It was tearing him apart, turning him inside out.

TAEHYUNG, COME HOME.

YOU MUST COME BACK HOME.

COME HOME. COME HOME. COMEHOMECOMEHOMECHOMECHOME.

He passed out.

He must have. He opened his eyes and the sun was up. His bed was still a wreck, his pillows on the floor, and his body was still twisted and reeling, his hands weakly covering both ears. He sat up slowly, half-worried that something worse was waiting for him.

He felt something between the bottom of his nostril and the top of his lip, and moved so that he could see his reflection in the mirror beside his closet.

Blood. He’d had a nosebleed at some point during the… Jesus, what even would he call that? He reached up and touched it but found it was dry. Working backwards, he decided he must’ve started bleeding right before or right after he passed out. Idly, he reached down and touched the spot of blood that now stained his sheets.

He’d need to launder those when his mother wasn’t home.

His mother.

He took a deep breath and headed to the bathroom. She’d be downstairs, drinking coffee and reading the paper, leaving him completely out-of-sight and free from what would be a very aggressive and concerned line of questioning.

He grabbed a washcloth from the closet and shut the bathroom door behind him. His hand twisted the faucet knob and he watched a warm stream of water flow from the tap. He wet the washcloth while he stared at himself in the mirror.

His bangs were unruly, his eyes so lifeless, they were almost dead. He was nearly a man now. A changed man. A man who’d lost sight of what he was supposed to be doing. A stupid man, maybe. Reckless, even. He’d let himself get complacent. He’d let himself get so comfortable that he’d almost let himself forget.

He wiped the blood from his nose with a practiced ease. This wasn’t his first bloody nose, and he knew it wouldn’t be his last.

His mother would have to tend to the garden by herself that afternoon. He’d think of a good enough excuse that she wouldn’t be mad.

Besides, his mother’s disappointment was the least of his problems.

The beginnings of a new headache throbbed in the corners of Taehyung’s eyes as he wiped the remaining blood from his skin.

As soon as school let out, Taehyung would return to Edgewater.

And he wasn’t leaving emptyhanded.

Not this time.

Not again.

Author's Note: That's all for now! Please come back on Halloween to see how it all ends. And PLEASE let me know what you thought of the first half!