ghosting

ACT I: PART VI

ACT I PART VI
chapter six: clawing at my throat (and clawing at yours)

Xavier's stomach growled as he sat up against Nancy's closet, his injured leg outstretched, and waited for Jonathan to wake up. Nancy had taken to start writing down notes recounting last night's events.

"Xavier?" she called out.

The younger boy looked up to see her looking at him.

"Yesterday," she said, gripping her pencil. "Were you... bleeding somewhere?"

Xavier's eyebrows furrowed together and before he could speak, Jonathan woke up. The older boy turned to the pair in front of him.

"Hey," he said. "Couldn't sleep?"

They both shook their heads. Nancy was the first one of the pair to speak.

"Everytime I close my eyes I just..." she pressed her lips together. "Keep seeing that... thing. Whatever that was that... place. I think it lives there." the young girl took in a shaky breath. "It was feeding there. Feeding on that dear," her voice cracked. "That means that if Will or if Barbra..." she trailed off.

Jonathan quickly scooted up the bed to get closer to Nancy. "Hey," he said. "My mom said she talked to Will."

Xavier moved to sit closer to the pair.

"Like Xavi said," the older boy continued. "If he's alive, there's a chance Barbra is too,"

Nancy however, took zero comfort in that. "That means that she's trapped... in that place." a moment of silence passed through the pair before she spoke again. "We have to find it again." She turned to look at the older boy.

"You wanna go back out there?" Jonathan asked. "Xavier won't be able to-"

"Hey-" he replied.

Nancy looked away from him, a moment of realization passing through her face. "Maybe we won't have to. When I saw it, it was feeding on that deer. Meaning it's a predator, right?"

"Right," both boys replied.

"And it hunts at night, like a lion or a coyote," she said. "It might also hunt in packs like them..." she trailed off once more.

Xavier raised an eyebrow. "Because one of them got me."

She nodded her head. "And Jonathan, remember at Steve's when Barbra cut herself and then last night with the deer and..." she turned to Xavier. "You."

Xavier's eyebrows furrowed together.

"The deer was bleeding," Jonathan said. "Xavi were you..."

Xavier hummed and nodded his head slowly. "I pricked myself on some tree bark," he said. "It wasn't like... bleeding a lot though. Maybe some dried blood but..." the younger boy trailed off.

Nancy continued to flip through the book before landing on a photo of a shark and pointing to it. "Sharks can detect blood in one part per million, that's one drop of blood in a million and they can smell it from a quarter mile away."

"So you're saying it can detect blood?" Jonathan asked.

The two of them turned to look at each other.

"It's just a theory," she replied.

"We could test it," Xavier said.

Nancy nodded.

Jonathan turned to look at the younger boy on the floor. "But if it works..."

"At least we know it's coming," the girl says softly.