How I’ve Been Dying {Chapter One}
This is the first chapter of my novel about a small town with a big, twisted soul publishing on Medium and my Substack newsletter. Wherever you read it, you can support me on Patreon to help bring this story to life.
Catch up on the story {Prologue}
Thanks for being here.
As Adrian shot down I-97 in a stolen car, the late evening sun sank into the horizon, smothering the world in a haze of heat and steam. Sweat pooled in the crook of his upper lip; behind his ears; inside the trenches of his furrowed brow. Outside, sprawling suburbs melted like plastic under a blowtorch, leaving streaks of residue on the windows. The city clung with sticky, sweaty hands.
But the road stretched farther and soon a new moon had swallowed the sun. Heat gave way to a chill that came like blankets, sweet enough to choke on. In the night, Baltimore became a shadow receding rapidly into nothing and Adrian’s world was reduced to the shifting patch of asphalt his headlights preserved.
And then that was gone, too.
The car died a mile out from the bridge that connected Perch Island to the mainland. Without gas, and closer to a marina than a gas station, the decades-old sedan gasped dramatically before sputtering to a stop, its front end buried unceremoniously in the shallow ditch separating the road from marsh.
Dead headlights made the darkness absolute. Only the sound of his feet, dragging along the rest of his aching body, announced Adrian’s existence to a rural hush so still it had to be listening.
Not far enough from Baltimore, Adrian waded on through the darkness. The canvas duffel bag clutched in his hand had become heavier, as if his vitality was leaking through and weighing the tiresome thing down. It longed to be laid gingerly in the soft earth, to feed the damned soil.
Adrian stopped; those weren’t his thoughts.
Damn, I’m just taking advice from everyone now, he thought, a little too worn out to worry about ghosts in the marsh. A full day on, its breathing was still there — right on the back of his neck, like it could come bearing down on him at any moment. Whatever old souls waited in the low grass couldn’t hold a candle to what Adrian carried with him. Perhaps, later, he would introduce them to each other. There was enough death in this wilderness for it to gorge itself for weeks.
“You’re hungry, little boy,” it said from just behind him, spitting harshly into his mutilated ear. “So soon? You just ate.”
The dead man splayed out on the asphalt was not real, so Adrian stepped over him. He’d left him there, whimpering in the dirt.
“Since when has that ever worked on me?” Adrian scoffed.
The sound of shuffling feet reached him as a cold breeze rolled in from the marsh. His suspicions were quickly validated — the man was following him, cradling his entrails and sobbing. Adrian had to laugh.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t realize I was still nine years old,” he said. “We’ve got places to be. I don’t mind if you bring your friend, just tell him to be quiet.”
The man’s weeping grew to a deafening pitch, a wail that mixed poorly with the wet jangling of his tangled innards. Blood trickled down his sleeve, spilling out from deepening marks around his shoulder. The breeze from the marsh blew in again, reeking of corpses; they thrashed in the shadows, brandishing rotting limbs and peeling off their skin in fear. The night had come alive around him, and the dark was loose with shrieking terrors.
Adrian’s clouded eye opened and peeled the night apart. There was a bridge, just at the edge of sight.
Over the bridge now, can’t rest until the island. Don’t stop moving, don’t listen, just get where you need to go. Like any normal person walking alone through the middle of absolutely nowhere at night.
The noise would not have bothered him nearly as much, if he weren’t exhausted. He hadn’t slept all week, only shifted through shades of red and pain. There had been just one moment of clarity, which came when he was chained to a pipe in the basement of a dive bar straddling Baltimore’s southern border.
That was three days ago, if his memory served, which it seldom did. An offer had come in — as Dion always put it — from a small island community down the Tangier. Adrian had first seen it months back, before the red started, and chosen to stay in the city, where the howling of the night was muted and distant.
Now, barely conscious and unbelievably hungry, he’d been given a purpose and a place to stay. It was far. There was a place for him, separate from the town, lonely and haunted. No one ever went there. No one could ever find him.
All he had to do was deal with the ghosts. And this town was choking on them.
At the end of the bridge, where a sign officially welcomed Adrian to Perch Island and let him know that he was still a few miles out from Heron’s Call, the townsfolk were waiting. The dead ones, at least. Where the streetlight’s glare gave way to darkness, they had crowded in to watch him arrive. Their bodies ate the light, forming a wall of black deeper than the new moon above them, and they never moved. No sound, either; just pure stillness and the intense weight of their gaze.
This many ghosts, this many eyes in the dark… everyone in this town must feel watched. Dead filled the landscape, pressing in from all directions. Fearful ghosts, receding as he approached. The end had come to them with pain and it had never left, only settled around their souls in the chains they rattled so pitifully.
So much fear. Just one town and this much fear. I don’t know how anyone makes it through a day here without drowning in it.
The dead scattered when Adrian began to feed, spilling into the shadows like blood from a severed vein. On the bridge, the man collapsed in a pile of his own flesh, sobbing quietly as life left him in rhythm with the breeze.
If dreams were easier to remember, no one would stay for long in Heron’s Call.
The town, which began near the mouth of Perch Island and slowly bled into the resort neighborhoods that dominated the island’s southern half, was plagued by nightmares. Every night, its barely-four-hundred residents slept uncomfortably, tossing about. Every morning, they woke in a sweat, waited for the gaunt figure in their doorway to fade, and forgot all about it before breakfast.
When asked about their trip to the scenic island, vacationers always hesitated, catching those horribly silent nights in the dead space between a haunting and a memory. It was necessary to let Heron’s Call haunt you, as letting it live with you was a death sentence. Either way, visitors and residents all knew it was impossible to leave Heron’s Call without taking those long nights with you.
While very few in the town struggled with their sleep — a catch-22 if there’s ever been one — no one slept the night Adrian arrived. All over town people sat up in their beds, overcome by sudden and inescapable fear. Dread had smothered the town as completely as a storm that rolled in from the Sound, crushing hundreds of frightened minds under its awful weight.
Not one soul slept. But the nightmares came anyway.
In the largest house on this half of the island, the most powerful man in Heron’s Call lay awake, watching the starlight reflect off his ceiling. He was crying. Down the hall, his son had the wall at his back, a hunting rifle trained on the open door he’d never touched. Too many nights had gone by just like this.
On the other side of town, where the water constantly threatened to pull the cliffs and houses out with the waves, something whispered to a girl with once-curly hair now straightened to that of a corpse. She was desperately seeking the source of the voice, but it never came from anywhere except directly behind her.
Two houses down from the girl and her whisperer, a family had put the lights on and accepted their long night. Huddled together in the living room, they knew there was one more person on the couch than there should be. None spoke of it. And the hours ticked by as they pressed tightly against each other.
By the morning, hundreds of memories like these would fade and become shapeless in the light of day, leaving only a vague haunting that waited until night fell to find its edges. But now, in this darkness, everything was so terribly real, a whole town gripped by a fear that denied sleep. Something had come to their eerie corner of the world, something that had chased the ghosts out of the night and into their homes.
Millie’s mom had loved horror movies. Maybe too much, given the level of gore and terror she’d gleefully shared with her daughter well before the age most parents would have considered appropriate. But she loved horror movies, and she wanted Millie to love them as much as she did. So, every Friday evening, Millie had snuggled beside her on the couch and gotten the absolute shit scared out of her. And every Friday night, they had huddled around a laptop and watched behind-the-scenes footage.
That was her mom’s antidote to fear — the truth.
No matter how terrifying the monster, there was a man behind the mask, and he was probably sweaty. There was the truth that Millie learned to smash her fears against, that she could only be scared of what she didn’t understand. What she couldn’t name.
Names were a favorite for her mom, as well. She taught Millie the names of all the actors typecast for playing monsters — a short list, as being horrifying is a hard business — and they relished shouting them out together. “There’s Robert Englund!” “There’s Lon Chaney!” There was an earnest belief that, if you could name your monster, if you could see it sweat, you had a power no fear could take away.
As she watched her father through his bedroom window, tracking the murky outline that paced about at two in the morning, Millie wondered if her mom had ever truly known him before she died; if he had hidden his truth, his sweat, so that she would still lie awake in fear of the man sleeping next to her. That question found Millie often, and she hated that she would never know the answer.
He’s gotta be waiting for something, she thought. No way he’d just be up right now. He sleeps like a rock. A stupid rock that any reasonable person would’ve taken a pickaxe to by now.
Millie wished desperately for a pickaxe, or — better yet — a shotgun. A sudden urge to scream at him gripped her throat, almost compelling her to let go of all the tension and howl like her rage was the only sound in the world, like she could shatter the window and strangle him with her own two wrathful hands.
Instead, she swallowed the rage, flipped him off where he’d never see her, and slipped through the darkness, down the street where the waves waited.
Millie lived on a nocturnal schedule, coming to life between the hours of one and five, dead to the world at any other point in time. Most nights were spent in her room, watching horror movies or studying for a test, or out in the total darkness unique to her section of town. ‘Neighborhood’ was a strong word for any part of Heron’s Call, but Millie’s, for reasons that were not entirely clear to anyone, had always been called the Dean’s Quarter. Either way, the streetlights had been out in the Dean’s Quarter for close to ten years now, with no word besides ‘soon’ on when they’d be fixed.
When she slipped out quietly through her broken window, the only light to walk by until she got out of Dean’s was the moonlight reflecting off the ocean. When the water was calm and the moon swollen, they made the whole little collection of run-down prefabs look like it was underwater.
But, tonight, the moon had disappeared, leaving nothing behind but the sound of waves breaking against the shore. Millie headed toward that sound, making a path that leap-frogged from doorstep to doorstep, surviving off the slim semi-circles of light her neighbors’ porch lights afforded her.
I swear the mayor said he was gonna replace the streetlights this year, Millie griped. I bet he busts his balls whenever anyone in Quenon needs a new lightbulb.
Every summer spent getting spat on by the vacationers who supported Heron’s Call’s entire shitty infrastructure still boiled her blood.
When the porch lights ran out, Millie felt her way through the absolute nothing. Grass underneath her feet gave way to sand and pebbles, placing her a few steps away from the rocky descent that, once carefully conquered, took her to the Dean’s Quarter beach — a pebbly strip of land cut into the steep cliff-sides that dominated this half of the island.
The shape of the beach was almost conical, tapering back into a series of coves that wormed deeper into the rock, eventually becoming a network of caves often the focus of local horror stories. Most nights, the moonlight contrasted with the heavy emptiness of the cave-mouth and gave it an awful presence like hot breath on the back of the neck. Tonight, though, the new moon made all the darkness feel the same. Millie wouldn’t even know where the beach ended and the cave began.
She waited on the beach for what felt like hours, accompanied only by the sensation of pebbles digging into her feet and the sound of the waves lapping gently over the sand.
I should’ve texted them, she thought. It really only happens, like, once every two months that we all show up here unexpectedly. It’s so cool, though. If anyone comes, it’ll be Isa. Fulton always gets scared. Like there’s anything in this town to get scared of.
Why her mom had chosen to settle here would never make sense. A cold place, even in the summer, buffeted by ocean winds and storms that never seemed to hit anywhere else in the area. The people were cold, too; always tired and unwelcoming, unless you had money or good gossip.
At least there was plenty to talk about, though too much of the gossip concerned her and her friends for Millie to find joy in it. If just one of them hadn’t found their way to this terrible island, she wasn’t sure that she would have made it this far.
Thinking of them — the way Isa rolled over the other girls during rugby, or how Fulton lit up literally every time he saw a plant — made this cold beach a little warmer.
Her mom had taught her to name her angels along with her demons. Over and over, she had said, “When we name our fear we destroy it, but when we name our joy, we preserve it.”
“I’m happy,” Millie said, letting the words linger in the air and become true. “I’m happy!” This time, they came with energy. “I’M HAPPY!” she shouted, thinking only of her friends and how they made her heart lighter.
“Happy…” a trembling voice echoed from behind her.
The world stopped and Millie could barely hear the waves over the drum of her heart between her ears. The voice was only a few feet behind her, where the coves and caves began.
“You’re… happy…” again, with the same thin falsetto.
Millie spun around to confront… nothing.
“Fulton?” she offered, giving the darkness a chance to be reasonable, though Fulton would never pull a prank like this. Her words faded rapidly and the silence flooded back, waiting.
“Happy…” the voice returned.
That same urge to move crawled up Millie’s spine, tempting her to pursue the voice, to toss whoever was taunting her like this down into the sand and wait for Isa to come kick their ass. The only thing that stopped her was the realization that the voice had gotten further away, moving into the caves.
“See… me…” it came, retreating audibly deeper into the island’s unseen heart. “Name… me…”
Millie was halfway back to her house before she stopped to catch her breath. There were eyes on her back the whole way, she was sure of it. Just as she was sure that there was no name for what she felt besides terror, and that she had to go back there as soon as there was light.
I’ll take Fulton and Isa. We’ll go back and look the whole place over, she thought frantically, stumbling between porch lights. There’s gonna be footprints or a wrapper, something from some asshole who just wanted the beach to themselves. It’ll be there and we’ll know and we’ll move on.
She almost walked face-first into her own door, catching herself moments before collision. Nervous thoughts slowly spun to a stop as she circled around the back to where her window was still slightly ajar, waiting for her to gingerly pull it open and crawl though.
Returned to the safety of her own room, with its now-locked window and always-locked door, Millie collapsed into her bed. But she couldn’t sleep. Her father still paced. Lewis had left the TV on when he’d passed out on the couch, as usual, and those words on the beach kept bouncing around her head.
Her mind repeated the words until they seemed to become real again, like they were in the room with her, leaking out of the closet, or from down the hallway. They followed every attempted dream, every nod-off, pursuing sleep until it became impossible and sitting on the edge of the bed, replaying those few minutes of terror, was the only option.
Morning came eventually and Millie, along with the rest of Heron’s Call, awoke groggily from a non-sleep, unsure of what had happened the night before. She knew she had walked to the beach, but her memory of that was only snapshots of porch lights, water, and a pervading dread. She did not remember the voice, only how it had made her feel, how it still made her feel.
She did not see the woman peeking over her windowsill in the night. She could not name this fear.
