Country dark was total and complete. So dark, it was impossible for Tori to tell if her eyes were still open. Not like the city dark that was always half-awake, pink and twinkling around the edges. She’d stumbled most of the way. Even with the flashlight, the trail to the cemetery still felt vague and unfamiliar at night. She missed home. She missed the bustle of the sidewalks and the honking horns on M Street, the hum and sway of the Metrorail and the flashing lights as it rushed underground. She missed living in a place so flooded with people—with so many faces coming and going, it was impossible to focus on one. Where everyone was so different, it was hard to tell who didn’t belong.

On the surface, it seemed like Chaptico, Maryland, should’ve been just as easy to get lost in—a wisp of a nothing town insulated in endless acres of soybeans and cornfields. But even after four long weeks here, the grocery baggers and bank tellers in town seemed to stare at Tori’s family sideways, and all the busybody neighbors still wanted to peel back the Burnses’ thin curtains and peek inside their lives as if they were some kind of spectacle.

Tori shivered in her hoodie. She couldn’t shake off the dream. Couldn’t shake off the near-constant feeling that she was being watched. Her mother (and the therapist she’d hauled Tori off to before they’d left the city) thought Tori hadn’t gotten over the fact that her father was gone. They thought maybe Tori was imagining him. That this feeling she had of being haunted was just her own wishful thinking, grief conjuring memories of him from the grave. But Tori knew better. She used to feel her father’s presence in every room of their apartment. The smell of him clung to every surface, and her memories of him were so clear and alive, sometimes she imagined she could pull back the comforter from his side of her parents’ bed and the sheets would still be warm and rumpled where he’d been. That had all stopped the day she and her mother and little brother, Kyle, left their apartment in DC for an old farmhouse in Chaptico. And if they were all being honest about it, it was also probably one of the reasons why the Burns left their home in the city. Because if there was one thing Tori was certain of, it was that her father sure wasn’t here.

When she finally reached the huge white oak near the edge of their field, she sank to the ground between the headstones, staring up into the starless black sky and cranking the volume on her music loud enough to drown out the ceaseless barking from next door and the chorus of crickets in the brush. She traced her fingers over the tree’s gnarled roots. In the daylight, the ground was barren here, a perfect circle of dirt and brown, straw-like grass surrounding the tree’s craggy, sun-bleached trunk. Beneath its long, twisted branches, a cluster of grave markers leaned, forgotten and tangled in the brittle weeds. The field just past it was left unplanted, overgrown with high green grass and fenced by a thick strand of maple and pine. It was almost as if no one—not even the grass in the field—wanted to get too close.

This place had always felt strange to Tori. When her mother had asked about it, the neighbors had joked that the tree was cursed. But their smiles were thin and tight when they spoke about it, like maybe somewhere down deep, they believed it was true.

Maybe that’s why Tori felt drawn to it. This weird tree no one wanted to come close to, surrounded by dead people no one seemed to want to talk about. To her, it felt like the only place in this town with a lock on its door.

Her fingers closed over a fallen branch. She peeled away the loose bark with her fingernails, picking the tip into a jagged point. Then she drew up the sleeve of her sweatshirt, bit down hard, and pressed it into her skin. Tori’s breath hissed between her teeth with the rush of pain as she dragged it across her forearm, careful to control it. Careful not to cut too deep.

Then she shut her eyes, letting the pain drown out everything else. Warm blood pooled in the crease of her arm, dripping from her elbow. Her heart rate slowed and her muscles unwound. She took a deep, trembling breath.

A cold, wet wind carried the reek of river silt and decaying fish over the field. Lightning sparked in the distance and she counted through the roll of thunder the way her father had taught her when she was little, back when she’d thought the echo of thunder off apartment buildings was the worst thing she would ever be afraid of—one-Mississippi—two-Mississippi—three-Mississippi.

Another fork of lightning struck beyond the field, and she closed her eyes, letting it flash against the inside of her lids until she could almost pretend she was somewhere else—someplace with streetlamps and neon signs and traffic lights….One-Washington, DC—two-Washington, DC…Closer now, the ground rumbled, deep enough to rattle her bones.

A fat raindrop plunked down on Tori’s cheek and she wiped it away. Her fingers were warm and sticky. Blood smeared her hands. Her entire arm was drenched in it. She prodded the broken skin. The cut was deep—too deep.

She plucked out her earbuds and swore under her breath. Bending her elbow and raising it over her head, she held the skin together and waited for the bleeding to slow. The stick had been a stupid substitute, too hard to control. Next time, she’d be more careful. Tori checked the cut one more time, but it was still bleeding faster than it should be. There shouldn’t be a next time at all.

A slow, steady rain was beginning to fall, and she shut her eyes, listening to the patter of drops against the headstones. To the steady trickle of blood, falling from the crook of her arm. She looked up through the trees toward the house. Her mother’s bedroom window was still dark. If she was quiet, her mother wouldn’t have to know.

She stood up, careful to keep pressure on the wound. Her head swam, woozy and light, and she focused on the trunk of the tree and waited for the feeling to pass. Slowly, like a curtain being drawn wide, the sky drenched the field in a cold, hard rain, and she hunkered down, waiting for this to pass too. Her clothes were heavy, plastered to her skin, and the farmhouse felt a million miles away. The bleeding would stop, eventually. It always did. It was just taking longer than usual. Too long, a voice in her head whispered as she considered curling up on the ground to wait.

But the ground seemed to move. Not in her head. More like a rolling pressure under her feet. She sank to her knees, feeling queasy and weak.

The dirt crumbled under her hands, a mound of it rising up through her fingers.

She crept back from the newly formed hole, cradling her arm and waiting for some furry country animal to slink out of it—for the yellow night-eyes of a groundhog or gopher to find her and scuttle off into the woods.

The dirt shifted again.

“Be a good little critter and go away,” she whispered.

Lightning flashed and Tori froze, blinking against the afterimage of something that had begun to surface from the ground.

She scrambled backward, tripping over the earbuds hanging loose from her pocket.

Whatever it was, it stilled at the sound of her voice. Tori inched closer on all fours to see. A twig snapped under her knee and she held her breath, recalling something her father had said once—something about the squirrels and pigeons she’d been scared of when she was a child being more afraid of her—and wondered if it was true. She skimmed a tentative hand over the ground.

Dirt erupted in a sudden spray. Something clamped around her wrist. She yelped, pain shooting through her arm as cold fingers dug in and pulled. She pushed herself to her knees and leaned away, groping for a headstone, for anything solid to hold on to, but the nearest one was too far to reach. Her wrist strained. Her skin stretched painfully. The hand was strong, calloused, struggling to hold on as Tori wrenched against it.

An arm emerged.

Tori faltered, breath held. This…this thing inside the ground wasn’t trying to pull her down. It was using her to pull itself out.

She stopped fighting. Stopped pulling. Her flashlight…it was somewhere behind her. If she could just reach it…

Lightning struck close. She twisted, fumbling blindly for the handle, struggling to stay upright as the hand gave a sudden hard tug. A shoulder breached the hole.

Shaking, her fingers closed around the flashlight. She flicked it on and swung the beam at the ground.

At the face coming out of it.

The man’s long hair clung to pale, muddy cheeks and eyes caked shut with red clay. His mouth opened, gasping for air, as he shook the dirt from his eyes. Tori struggled to pull away, but he only gripped her wrist tighter, blinking against the flashlight with green, bloodshot eyes.

Tori’s scream stuck in her throat. She jerked back hard, feeling the edges of her cut tear. Half out of the ground, the man gritted his teeth, leveraging her weight to work the rest of himself free. Frantic, Tori swung the light at his head. He dodged the blow, knocking it from her hand. It landed beside the hole, casting shadows as he climbed out of it and stood over her, raining dirt and breathing hard, clutching her wrist so tightly she couldn’t feel her fingers.

Sparks burst at the edge of her vision. She felt herself sway. He turned her wrist, making the cut gape open, and Tori cried out with pain as her arm finally slipped from his cold grasp. She staggered back, and as he reached to grab her, the world, the field, the cemetery, his face, dissolved into a kind of darkness she’d never known before.