Chapter 26
“Despite the most recent headlines, Entity is not in the business of ghostbusting. We are a largely research-based company that strives to protect humanity from the ever-growing population of, for lack of a better word, monsters that have started appearing over the last few decades.”
Frontline News interview with Drew Harlowe (Entity CEO)
When Alexys was certain she wasn’t being followed, she slowed her pace, not quite running from Silas but not stopping either.
She walked for several hours, unsure of where she was going and even less sure she would find Elliot.
Her leg muscles protested the endless cardio, and with a quick look around to be sure she was alone, she sat on the ground and put her head between her knees.
Wheezing words out between heavy breaths, she gasped, “What is going on? Where are you, Elliot?”
“Are ya lost?”
Her head snapped up, and once the world stopped spinning, she was relieved not to see Silas, but a young boy, standing a short distance away.
He was leaned up against a tree, a stick hanging from his hand, lazily tapping the ground in front of him.
His overalls were a dusty denim that must have been handed down through several generations before they reached him.
His feet were bare and covered in thick mud.
There was a scrape on his chin that was clearly fresh, but it didn’t keep him from smiling at her.
He was a total mess, but much to Alexys’s delight, he appeared absolutely harmless.
“I might be a little lost,” Alexys finally admitted, pushing herself back up to her feet. “You’re not lost too, are you?”
The boy laughed. He couldn’t have been older than eight or nine.
“Naw, I’m never lost in these woods.” His accent was thicker than any she’d heard so far. He waved his stick, like a king gesturing to his kingdom and proclaimed, “Been playin’ here every day since I could walk.”
Alexys perked up a bit at that, but she was still breathing a bit too heavily to feel very hopeful. “Have you seen anyone else out here? I’m looking for someone, he’s older than you, likely wearing the same backpack?” Alexys turned sideways to show him. The boy didn’t show much interest.
“What’s your name?” he asked instead, as if he hadn’t even heard her question. His attention drifted to a rock a few feet away from her. “Mine’s Waylan.”
She exhaled. “Hi, Waylan,” she said, taking a step toward him. “I’m Alexys.”
Waylan flashed her a bright smile, but he turned right back to the rock. It was too big for him to pick up, about the size of a bicycle tire, but that didn’t prevent him from pulling on it with all his might. After watching him struggle for a few moments, she offered to help.
Alexys ended up holding up one side of the rock while Waylan dug underneath it with his stick.
“Waylan, what are you looking for?”
He looked up at her like that was the silliest question he’d ever been asked and, with a matter-of-fact tone, said, “Roly poly, ’course!”
She frowned down at the ground and tried to see what he was talking about. “A what?”
“A roly poly.” His sigh was full of frustration, and he shoved a closed fist up toward her face. She barely had time to rear back as he nearly knocked her nose. Opening his fingers, he held up a palm full of pill bugs.
“Ah.” Alexys grimaced and gently pushed his hand away from her face. “Interesting.”
Waylan stared down at the bugs in his hand and muttered, “I wish I was a roly poly.”
Thinking to herself that she did as well, the urgency of her situation settled over her.
Alexys was supposed to be looking for her lost (read: potentially dead) employee.
Instead, she was playing with a wayward mountain urchin and his pill bugs.
Her ability to get distracted was genuinely astounding.
And lest she forget the suit-wearing psychopath who had followed her into the woods.
With the most elegant of segues, Alexys said, “My friend kind of looks like a roly poly.” It was impossibly desperate, but it worked.
Pill bugs quickly forgotten, Waylan sidestepped the rock and stood toe-to-toe with her. He tipped his head with a look of excitement on his dirt-smudged face. “Does he really?”
“Sure does.” Another apology owed to Elliot, but it got the conversation moving in the right direction. Alexys dropped the rock back in its spot in the dirt and brushed the dirt off her hands onto her jeans. “Have you seen him? We were playing hide-and-seek, and I think he got lost.”
The look of genuine worry that creased his brow was the cutest thing she’d ever seen. But he just shook his head.
“I don’t think I’ve seen him, but I only play around here. Mama always tells me to stay close to home so I can make it home for supper. Says I’m a growin’ boy, can’t miss my supper.”
“She’s right. That’s a good rule to have.”
“You could come back with me if ya want?” Alexys was reluctant to immediately agree, but she could ask the boy’s mother about Elliot, or even use a landline if they had one to call Nic or someone at the office.
“Are you sure your mom won’t mind?”
He shook his head emphatically, a wide grin spreading across his face. “Nah, Mama loves visitors. Gets ’em all the time!” Waylan took off through the trees, not looking back even once to see if she followed.
Alexys hesitated, like any person with common sense would.
She looked back over her shoulder in the direction she thought Opal’s house might be and frowned.
The odds of finding her way back weren’t great to begin with, and the thought of spending a night alone in those woods, in the dark, was not what Alexys had in mind when she first heard about the in-field evaluations.
“Come on!” Waylan’s voice echoed through the woods, and she could barely make out his silhouette through the dense kudzu crawling over the trees.
Her stomach growled, so Alexys gave in and set off after the barefoot boy.
She immediately wished she hadn’t.
Waylan led her through bushes and brambles for what had to have been hours. Their path meandered this way and that, every so often merging with a deer trail that was blessedly gentler on her poor office-accustomed feet.
“Close by, my ass. This is so how I get murdered.” Alexys ducked under another low-hanging tree branch and tried to keep her eyes on Waylan as she struggled through thick underbrush.
“Natalie is going to kill me for this. I’m going to die in these woods, and then she’s going to resurrect me just to kill me herself.
Dyre is going to give my eulogy, and he’s going to say I told her so at least twelve times. ”
“Are you coming or what?” Waylan was standing on a fallen log and looking every bit the part of an Appalachian Peter Pan.
Alexys didn’t want to take her frustration out on him, but the sweat trickling down her back and sticking her hair to her neck was wearing her patience extremely thin. She shouted back, “I’m not used to hiking like this!”
“Hiking?” He hopped off the log and jogged up to stand beside her. Shoving his hands into the pockets of his overalls, he said, “This isn’t even close to the hiking I do with my Papaw. Say, where are you from?”
“Nowhere you would know.” The words slipped out before she thought them through, and Alexys winced at the bite behind them.
Waylan, bless him, looked blissfully unaware of her jab.
“I’m from Georgia,” she amended, “but I’ve lived in a big city for a long time.”
Waylan waited for her to catch up and patted her on the arm, his expression full of concern.
“That sounds awful.” Before she could argue the merits of living in a city, he turned and bounded off into the trees.
“Like a damn baby deer,” Alexys muttered to herself. “Must be nice.”
They hiked—or in Waylan’s case, effortlessly dashed—through the woods until the sun began to dip between the treetops.
The world around them was bathed in a beautiful display of green and gold that she was sure couldn’t be seen anywhere else.
A cold breeze picked up, and the sound of crickets began their pre-dusk chorus.
At several points, Alexys considered turning back, but her chances of finding her way back grew less likely the farther they walked, and her only hope of getting back looked like it might rest in the hands of this strange boy’s family.
Finally, when she was beginning to think her legs would give out from under her, they arrived at Waylan’s house.
Any hope Alexys had of a warm meal or welcome vanished.
The house, if you could even call it that, was derelict.
Pieces of wood, tin roofing, and other debris littered the ground around the skeletal remains of the structure.
The stairs that once led up to the front porch had caved in.
If she were to hazard a guess, the house had been empty for a very, very long time.
Alexys turned to ask Waylan where they were, but the boy was no longer standing beside her. Her gaze swept the trees looking for his dusty overalls and blond curls, but she saw no trace of him.
“Waylan?” Alexys spun a full circle. Fear took hold of her heart in a vice-grip.
“Waylan,” she called again. “This isn’t funny!”
Only the singing crickets and screaming cicadas replied.
Her breathing kicked up, and a rushing sound began to fill her ears. She had followed him for hours, hours, and now she didn’t know where she was. Alexys reached into her pocket. She held the phone up and out, watching as the compass spun round and round.
“Oh, no,” Alexys moaned. The odds of her being able to find her way back to Opal’s were zero, and God only knew what might be stalking her in those woods.
Alexys pressed her hands against the sides of her head and squatted low to the ground.
“Oh God. Oh God, oh God, nonono. I’m such an idiot! Waylan!” Alexys cried. “Elliot!”
Whether Waylan was hiding or had abandoned her altogether hardly mattered.
The sun was setting, and she would have to spend the night out there.
No tent, no sleeping bag, no way of keeping warm or camping out for the night.
She was so woefully unprepared for the trip it was almost laughable.
Nic had been right. She was useless in the field, and rather than find Elliot, she had managed to put herself in just as much danger.
How stupid she’d been to think she didn’t need Nic.
Alexys squeezed her eyes shut and tried to slow her now frantic breathing. Her heartbeat thundered against her chest, and the world around her tilted.
“Miss Alexys?”
Her head snapped up, and she saw Waylan standing before her.
He looked uncertain as he shifted from foot to foot, the image of a child that knew he was about to get chastised but almost believed he deserved it. He smiled apologetically and held a hand out to help her up. “Sorry ’bout that. I tend to wander off sometimes. Mama hates it when I do that.”
“Waylan … But …” Alexys accepted his hand and her voice trailed off. Had she been crying? She couldn’t be mad at him, she was too relieved to see him. And besides, he was only a child.
“Don’t worry, I’m not upset.” She smiled at him and hoped her panic didn’t show on her face. “But are you sure that’s your house?”
“The house?” Waylan looked past her toward the dilapidated structure, and his smile vanished. A look of confused horror came over his freckled face. “What?”
He stepped past her to stand before the ruined steps of the porch and stared. He looked so small, so helpless.
Alexys frowned. “Waylan? Is everything alright?”
He stood quietly for several moments before she realized he was muttering to himself. She stepped closer.
“Uh, Waylan? You okay?”
“Mama said to get home before dark. I shoulda come home. I was out too late. I shoulda made it home for dinner.” He took another hesitant step toward the house. “Mama?”
The soft question, and the plaintive tone of his voice, nearly shattered her heart. Surely that house wasn’t his. It’d been abandoned for years.
As Alexys watched, right before her very eyes, Waylan began to flicker.
It was like a video game glitch, or the way a hologram image tends to stutter in a movie. Waylan was still there, but there were moments where he vanished from view, and others where he was nearly transparent, the house and the trees beyond visible through his form.
Oh. No.
Alexys took a step back.
“Waylan.” She needed to get out of there. “I think I better get going.”
“I was too late,” he said, voice rising in volume. His misery was palpable. “I shoulda been home before dark like Mama said!”
He continued to flicker, fading in and out of view with increasing speed as she backed away another step.
The darkness of the setting sun crept in around them, the shadowed fingers of trees reaching out toward the little boy.
A half-formed thing, neither here nor gone but trapped between two places.
Alexys squeezed the straps of her backpack between trembling fingers, her legs poised to run. She had never seen a Haint in person, but she’d heard enough stories to know that Waylan was no ordinary boy, oh no. And she was a fool for following him into those woods.
Waylan let out a tortured howl before his form disappeared, and Alexys ran.