All right. All right. Everybody pay attention!” Natalie spung from her place on the sunken couch to the center of the room. Everyone obeyed. Even Alexis and I, who were elbows deep in our anatomy textbook. We were in one of those old, but poorly maintained houses they rent to upperclassmen on the edge of campus, so the floorboards groaned under her feet.

            It’d been a comfortable night in a comfortable place. Drooping tapestries in electric colors covered the living room windows, but we could still hear foot traffic through the screens. The only light came from some folk album playing over the TV, a couple strands of Christmas lights pinned to the ceiling, and a musty old lamp in the corner that had been there when we moved in.

            “Samurai used to play this game to strengthen their nerve before battle.” Natalie couldn’t talk without her hands. She came dangerously close to spilling the White Claw in her left hand while she read from her phone in the right. Dylan leaned in and took it from her. She flipped him off with a smile.

            “Basically, you light a bunch of candles, and you go around telling scary stories.” True to form, her now empty hand began to swish in time to the instructions. “When you finish a story, you blow out a candle. So like, as you go, you build up this creepy energy, and the more stories you tell, the darker it gets. And then the energy just builds and builds and builds, until you blow out the last candle and it goes totally dark.”

            “Then what?” There was genuine curiosity in Alexis’ voice. Normally, she said as little to Natalie as possible, not that they didn’t like each other. Alexis was a transfer student away from home for the first time, and I think it was all a little too much for her. She barely talked to anyone, even me.

            “Then….that’s when they get you, I guess.”

Alexis didn’t say anything, but she sunk a little deeper into the couch. I was afraid she mistook Nat’s sing-song-ey tone as making fun of her. Natalie didn’t seen to notice.

            “So long as we don’t have to go anywhere.” Dylan hit his vape pen for emphasis. He leaned back with Nat’s drink balanced on one of his knees, which were splayed so far apart, I couldn’t help be a little impressed by his flexibility.

            “That’s it?” Jake, the last of our quintet, looked dubious.

            “Don’t underestimate the power of simplicity.” She said with a light tone, but she held Jake’s gaze until he looked away. “Now let’s get some ambience going. Dylan, turn off the TV. Maddie, get the storm candles.”

            Alexis gave me a look when I nestled out of our blanket puddle, like she didn’t want me to leave her. I probably should’ve asked her to help me, but Natalie was on her way upstairs and I wanted didn’t want a tag-along.

            We kept the emergency supplies in a little closet at the end of the hall. Being on the edge of town, and not in the affluent, get-away-from-it-all part of town, we were always the last neighborhood to be serviced when the power went out. We’d made more than our fair share of candlelight s’mores, but being trapped in the bad weather without internet were the only times I didn’t have to compete for Nat’s attention.

            “So, do you have a guy waiting in the closet?” I asked when she came out of her room with a lighter.

            She sighed. “Leave it to your generation, expecting the instant gratification of a jump scare.” I got a sad smile, and really wanted to think of something clever. Nothing came to mind, and after a beat, she sprung back downstairs. When I joined her, the coffee table had been cleared, text books put away, and even Dylan was sitting up. Everything but the musty corner lamp was off.

            We stood up the candles on the coffee table. The master of ceremonies lit them one by one. “You can talk about anything,” she explained. “Things that happened to you, Reddit stories, conspiracy theories, so long as you stay on theme. And no videos.” There were ten candles in all. Two each, and when they all glowed, the lamp went off.

            Natalie looked at Dylan as she grabbed her drink. “You start,” she commanded. He tried to pull her down beside him, but she twisted away to lounge at the opposite end of the couch. Looking at her with her legs crossed and boots precariously close to the fire hazards on the coffee table, I realized that I’d never felt that secure in my life.

            Dylan took a theatrically deep breath. “Um…okay. You know the Pine Barrens, in New Jersey?”

            The general response was sort of?

            “It’s this huge stretch of woods in New Jersey. And it’s, like, super haunted. Like haunted haunted. And my brother and I went there. It used to be like a big mining, timber area, but now you can’t really do any of that, so there are these ghost towns everywhere.”

            “Isn’t it right up against the city?” I asked.

Dylan started to answer, but Jake broke in. “Which city? Do you actually know where he’s talking about?”

            I could never snap back in the moment, but Dylan came to the rescue. “I mean it’s only about an hour from Philadelphia. And New York’s also close. That’s part of what makes it so creepy. It’s like you can start an album on the highway and when it’s over, you’re in the middle of nowhere. Like, you can feel it go quiet, and you’re totally surrounded by trees. And then your signal cuts out, and then you’re just…on your own. I mean, people live there, but…it’s got this energy.

            Dylan scratched the back of his head. “Anyway, that’s where the Jersey Devil comes from. It’s like a goat demon, and it’s also where the mob dumped a bunch of bodies, and I think pilgrims are involved somehow…”

            “Did you see anything?” Alexis and I had de-huddled, and she was leaning toward the coffee table.

            Dylan shrugged and pointed to the candles. “So I just blow one out?”

            Natalie gave him a weird look. He threw up his hands. “What? I was the first one. You think I can just throw down a ghost story out of nowhere?” He picked up a vanilla scented pillar candle and blew it out.

            “Alright, well, I can see we need some further instruction, so I’ll go next.” Natalie’s boots went off the table and she adjusted her seat on top of the armrest, just high enough that we all we were all looking up at her. “Lucky for us, we’re all going to school at one of the most haunted colleges in the country, which also happens to be one of the oldest outside of the east coast. Now we all know about the old hospital, and the woman who escaped and then died in the tower?”

            Everyone nodded. Nat and I had lived across the state, and we’d been hearing about the Ridges since middle school.

            “Well apparently, her body left a stain on the floor, at least according to the student doc that get’s remade literally every year. And before they tore it down, kids used to break in all the time and try to go find it.”

            “They started arresting kids for trespassing the year my sister started,” Jake interjected. “They brought it up at orientation.”

            “Sounds slightly more interesting than your average orientation.”

            Jake snorted. “Do they do those at community college?” As if weren’t all going to the same in-state school with a 90% acceptance rate. Look, I don’t know who said what to Jake when he was little, but it was like he only felt comfortable if he had someone else’s head to push underwater. Maybe it was because Alexis was too nice, Dylan was almost pathologically unaffected by things, and Natalie would eat him for breakfast, but I seemed to be his chosen head.

            “Moving on, legend has it that when one of these groups found the tower where the woman died, a girl went over and touched the stain. Supposedly, the woman’s ghost followed her back to her dorm room and started haunting her. She said she was having these nightmares, and it felt someone was always watching her, and she just got more and more depressed. And then, that winter, she hung herself in her dorm room. Now, Slowin Hall is haunted by two ghosts.” Natalie picked up the vanilla candle’s twin and blew it out.

            Alexis leaned in close to my ear. “This is fun,” she whispered. We beamed at each other. Usually, I had to beg her to come hang out.

             I can’t say I was upset to set the glare that Natalie sent Jake’s way. “It seems like you’re ready to share. You want to tell a scary story?”

            He crossed his arms over his chest. “Well, there are multiple nuclear bombs that no one has any idea where they are. Russia probably has enough freeze-dried smallpox to kill the entire plant. We’re long overdue for a solar flare that’ll be bad enough to destroy all technology on earth, which would be good, because most of the bats, bees, and frogs are already dead. Do you want me to keep going? There’s a lot more where that came from, if you want me to keep going.”

            Dylan leaned toward us past the coffee table. “I heard the ozone layer is growing back,” he yell-whispered.

            “Thank you Jake,” Nat announced as he blew out a tealight. Her eyes softened as she looked at Alexis. “Wanna give it a try?”

            “I do.” Alexis perched on the very edge of the loveseat. She took a deep breath and smiled. How did I not know this was her thing? I glanced at Natalie through the candlelight. She seemed intrigued, and I felt a weird pang in the pit of my stomach.

            “So, I’m from Millsfield, and if you don’t know where there that is, think middle of nowhere. We basically have two bars, a gas station, and a Dollar General. But, there’s another town even further in the middle of nowhere.” Alexis’s voice had dropped an octave. She sat up straight, with her shoulders relaxed, and for the life of me, it was the first time I’d ever seen her look comfortable as the center of attention.

“It used to be this really lively place back in the 1900’s, you know, when we had the last oil boom. But then the boom busted, and the town basically collapsed with it. It’s a ghost town now, and there’s a bike trail that runs right through it. Think of yourself as riding through miles and miles of this dense, overgrown stretch of woods, and then you hit a clearing with the skeletons of a bunch of buildings, and then it’s back to woods, just like that.

            “So, naturally, our school has a tradition that during your senior year, you’re supposed to camp out in one of the abandoned houses. The school’s library has a book that mentions Cairo, and you’re supposed to tape a picture from the trip on the inside, to prove that you did it. It’s not technically illegal, so nobody cares.”

            “That’s insane,” Nat leaned back with her hand over her mouth. If we’d had anything that fun going on at our high school, I definitely didn’t know about it. And if Nat did, she definitely hadn’t let me in on the secret. She had been a little bit of a terror in high school, when we were all cramped and bored and had to ask permission to go to the bathroom. Of course, knowing that didn’t stop the butterflies when she started talking to me freshman year of college, even though it was pretty obvious that mine was the only face she recognized. Spread rumors and snide remarks aside, her charisma had gotten me like it got everybody else.

            “About halfway through my sophomore year, there was a senior that got into a really bad car accident. She was going to miss the rest of the year, so the yearbook committee wanted to do a big spread for her. Someone thought it would be cool to use her picture from Cairo, so the entire school saw it. That was when people started to notice this weird thing in the background. It was really dark and really blurry, but the general consensus was that it looked like a guy hiding up against one of the old buildings.”

            “So what, like he was stalking her?”

            “Well, no, not exactly. As soon as that got spread around, we starting looking at the rest of the photos, and we think it happened two more times. The first kid’s mom had died later that year. And the second kid overdosed at her graduation party.”

            “Holy shit,” Dylan yelled. “It’s the Cairo Mothman!”

            Everybody laughed the tension away, and Nat stood up. “Alright everyone, that is a scary story.” She started clapping, and everyone joined in. Alexis tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help it. Natalie picked up the biggest candle, some gaudy carved thing from the 80’s, and held it out to her herself. You would’ve thought she was blowing out a birthday candle.

            When the excitement died down, Nat turned to me. “Are you ready?”

No, I wasn’t ready. I felt sick, actually. It hadn’t occurred to me to think ahead, and now that everyone looked my way, I couldn’t remember a single thing that’d ever happened to me. Maybe if I started.

            “Um…” Nothing came to me. God, it was mortifying, and how was I supposed to go after Alexis anyway? “Shit. I’m actually not really good at this.”

            And of course Jake couldn’t resist when he smelled blood in the water. “Aww, how quirky,” he cooed, and it wasn’t meant as a compliment.

            “God, Jake, you sound like one of those thirty year old grad students that tries to neg the eighteen-year-olds into sleeping with them.”

            And that’s why we love her. Jake sprung to his feet, and when she didn’t flinch, he bent over and dumped his books into a patch covered backpack.

            “Here’s a scary story. How about everyone fails anatomy, because Jake stops letting them all copy his homework?” He stormed out the door, floorboards groaning at the drama. Natalie glared after him, and Dylan leaned forward to blow out his candle. With half of them gone, it was noticeably darker. It was also starting to smell like cedar embers and veviter.

            There was a tense moment.

            “Okay, okay okay.” Dylan hooked an arm around Natalie’s elbow and tried to pull her down. “Everybody put the knives away. I’ll go again.” She let herself come down, but sat as far away from Dylan as possible, digging her feet into his thigh for good measure. I was so relieved that someone had done something, literally anything, that I wasn’t even pissed.

            “Surprise folks, the first story was a two-parter.” He paused to take another drag. We were all surprised to see him close his eyes and take a deep breath, and we waited for several seconds for the joke to land, or for him to deliver a punchline, but he continued on. “So. The whole reason we were out there was because my brother was obsessed with cryptids, you know, like Bigfoot and all that shit. So he knows, like, everything there is to know about the Jersey Devil. So we get there, and we’re renting out this little cabin, and the guy who owns it meets us out there to give us the keys, and Finn’s just going on and on and on about the Jersey Devil to this guy. And the guy looks, well you can imagine.

            “So around, like two or three in the morning, we get woken up by this sound outside. It was like someone was dragging their feet through the leaves, and leaning up against the side of the cabin, just like snooping around and not trying to be sneaky about it. I thought it was a bear, but Finn was 100% convinced that it was the Jersey Devil. So he starts filming, and, you know, going around to look out all the windows, trying to see what was going on.”

            Alexis had snuggled back into the loveseat, but she wasn’t leaning on me like before. I glanced at Natalie. She frowned at Dylan, but not with the usual annoyance. I wondered if she’d heard this story before.

            “Of course, right when we start talking to each other, there was this banging on the walls, the windows – we thought they were gonna break. It was insane. And Finn, who was totally out of his mind, just ran out the front door trying to get it on film, just runs out to whatever was trying to break into the fucking cabin. Turns out, it’s the fucking owner. He thought we were a bunch of dipshits, and was trying to play a prank on us.”

            “Of course he was,” Alexis laughed.

Natalie flashed him a sad smile. Maybe there was more to the story than what Dylan was saying, something he’d only shared with his girlfriend. Between them and Jake, and Alexis bringing the fucking house down out of nowhere, I felt pointless. Like a pity invite.

Once again, the room got darker. Nat swung her long legs over the flaming coffee table and planted them in front of her. She scooted forward and leaned even further so that half her face was in shadow, and half was swimming in gold light.

            “Alright, I was going to do a different one, but it seems like we’ve got a theme going on here.” She winked at Alexis. It felt like a worm was crawling up inside my guts and writhing around. “When Maddie and I were in middle school, we had this campus that was like, three or four different buildings that surrounded one huge main building in the center. All the other buildings were built in like, the last fifty years, but the main one was way, way older. So, obviously, every said that it was haunted, and that there were all these secret rooms, and tunnels, and like a Cold War bunker, but nobody knew for sure.”

            Her personal sign language made the candle flames dance. “And my friend group was always super into all that stuff, so we were like, obsessed with finding out if any of it was true. We even had these maps we made up of all the hallways, and we marked and labeled all the doors that we knew where they went. And it turned out that when we had it all laid out in front of us, there were a bunch of doors that were just like a mystery. And, as you can imagine, we spent the entire eighth grade trying to figure out where they all went.”

            “And?”

            “And, we got closer than you’d probably guess. Most of it was just paying attention to the janitors, because most of the doors just led to utility closets. And then when our friend Maisy got to be an office assistant, she figured out some of the others, which were also nothing, but there was one door we found – ” She held up one finger. “It was so weird because there was door on the outside of the building, but not the inside. There was just a blank wall at the end of a hallway.”

            Natalie let that sink in. “We tried the handle every time we went past, and it was always locked, until one day, it just wasn’t. We think a janitor went down there and just forgot to lock the door when he left.

            “Wait, down there?” Alexis leaned forward, pulling the blanket we shared off my lap. Dylan had a smirk on his face, like he’d heard the story more than once.

            “Oh yeah. It opened on a stairwell. It turns out, the entire building had a basement that none of us knew about. No lights, dirt floors, it was the scariest fucking thing.” She laughed. “We went down, explored, took all the pictures. The whole time, there was a boiler going somewhere, and all the pipes would shake like every time someone flushed a toilet. No cave people, but it was definitely worth the effort.”

            “That’s insane!”

            “Here.” Natalie fished out her phone and scrolled through her gallery. When she landed on a series of grainy photos, she passed it over to the loveseat. Alexis went through them as Natalie blew out another candle. “Can you beat that, darling?” Before tonight, a comment like that might’ve scared Alexis off for good. But she smiled instead. I couldn’t tell if it was the flickering light or some awakened mischievous streak, but her eyes glinted.

            “Well, did you guys hear about what they found in the Zeta Delta house?”

            I had to force myself not to ask her when the hell she interacted with sorority girls.

            Nat got comfortable beside Dylan. “Oh, a local mystery. I love it. Are they the house at the end of Levitt Street?”

            Alexis shrugged. “I don’t actually know. I sort of overheard them at the coffee shop the other day.”

            She hadn’t mentioned it to me.

            “There were a couple of girls at a table in the corner. I think they thought they were being quiet, but it’s a small room. There were three of them, and I guess they didn’t notice me? Anyway, there are things going missing in their house. Things like notebooks, and photos, and spices. Things no one would have any use for, unless it was being taken out of spite. They don’t know if it’s one of the house employees, or someone from another sorority, or just a random person off the street trying to screw with them. They were trying to come up with a plan when I overheard them.”

            “And the plan is?”

            “They didn’t seem to come to any conclusions. They talked about telling the campus police, but figured the thefts were to minor to report. They also talked about changing the locks, but you have to get special permission to do something like that to school property. And if that’s true, it probably hasn’t been done in a long time, which means that people have been using the same keys forever. There could be dozens of copies.”

            “Oh shit, that is scary. Good job, Nancy Drew.”

            Alexis beamed as another tiny flame disappeared. My insides twisted, especially when Natalie turned to me again. Oh god, just think of something. Anything.

            “Wanna go?” she asked me.

            “Um..yeah.” I sat up, begging the universe to take away my stage fright. The night was turning into a complete disaster. If I didn’t pull something out of the air, Natalie was going to remember why she never talked to me before fall semester freshman year.

            Come on, literally anything.

            “Okay,” I stated before someone could come to the rescue. “I thought of one. I don’t know if this is really even…anything. I don’t know.” Did my voice always sound so annoying? “When I was like, twelve, I lived in this two story house with my mom. And I grew up there, and there was never anything wrong with it before, and my mom never mentioned anything weird the whole time we lived there, but –” Alright, no one was looking at their phone. No one was rolling their eyes. Maybe I could pull this off. “One day, I was just so scared to be upstairs alone. I mean terrified. I was afraid to face away from the door, because it always felt like something was just about to come through. And I basically had to run down the hall to get to the stairs, because it always felt like something was right behind me.

            “I didn’t feel anything if my mom was upstairs. It was only when I was alone, only when it was dark, and it was only upstairs. I would be fine, and then I’d get to the top and all the hair would stand up on the back of my neck. And it felt like any second, something was just going to reach out and grab me. It was just like this heavy, heavy thing.”

            “So what, did you do an exorcism or something?” Natalie looked genuinely freaked out, which gave me a little surge of confidence.

            “No. I never said anything out loud. You guys are the first people I’ve even told. It went away after about a year or so, so I figured it was just like, the remnants of a bad dream, or a scary movie I didn’t remember watching. It was just so intense. I would get up an hour earlier for school so that I could shower in the morning instead of at night.”

            “Just came and went, huh?” Dylan shifted in his spot on the couch.

I shrugged, trying to play it cool, and blew out the second to last candle. It was a colossal relief to finally participate. The room didn’t go completely dark though. We’d forgotten about Jake’s second candle. Before I could wonder how we were going to do, Natalie flipped on the lamp.

            “Ok, well I’d call that a success.” She stood up, Dylan with her. “Are you guys coming out tomorrow? Maybe we can crash a Zeta Delta party.”

            “For sure,” Alexis decided. I bet at this point, she’d go out with or without me for moral support.

            Nat flashed her a conspiratory smile. “Can you do a booze run before Weber’s closes,” she asked Dylan. “We ran out here, so if you want to pregame.”

            He checked his watch. “Yeah, I can do that.”

            “I’ll go with you,” I spoke up. The only thing worse than missing something was being demoted to third wheel while my two best friends bonded.

            The night was warmer than I expected. Throngs of drunken college kids still roamed the streets. They’d still be there long after last call.

            “Hey, that was really creepy. You did a good job.”

            The embarrassment almost made me gag. “Thanks,” I said, for the pity compliment. “Yours was good too. Does your brother have a real job now, or is he still hunting monsters?”

            I was trying to set him up for a joke, but if fell flat. Dylan grimaced and rubbed his neck. “Oh, well, he’s not – he died.”

            “Oh shit, I’m sorry.” I grabbed his arm, and he gave me a pained smile. “When – when did he die?”

            “Um…” He tilted his head. “He was actually sick when we went to New Jersey.”

            Of course, I couldn’t think of anything to say, just kept on walking with my mouth hanging open.

            Luckily, Dylan let me off the hook. “It’s okay. He’d had cancer for like a decade. It still took a few more years after that trip. We got to do a lot of stuff together in the meantime.” We walked for a few minutes in silence, taking in the slurred arguments and whirring insects around us.

            After a while, he said, “no really, that was a good story. Did you ever try to talk to it or anything, like on the shows?”

I shook my head. “No, never. I just ignored it. I never even told my mom about it. I thought I was just, psyching myself out.”

            “Huh. So you refused to acknowledge it’s existence, and eventually it went away?”

            “Basically.”

            Dylan laughed. “So it gave up on you?”

            I pushed him into the empty street. “Don’t be a dick,” I shouted, and he laughed again. We made to the grocery store and back before it closed, and when we got it the front door, I saw that Alexis was gone. Good, I thought, and then felt really guilty.

            Natalie was tidying up the kitchen. She raised her eyebrows at her boyfriend, who mirrored the look, and then she looked at me. “Hey, we’re going to go smoke on the porch.” Want to join us? “Can you put the candles away?”

            My heart sank, but I didn’t show it. “Yeah, sure.” They vanished out the back door, and I was alone. It’d been a weird night. Could they tell? Was there an energy? Or was I about to fixate on it until I drove myself crazy?

            Whatever. I cleaned up Natalie’s game, and took the basket upstairs to return to our storm supplies. When I got there, I paused. The light only stretched a couple of feet before the whole space collapsed a heavy darkness. I shuddered.