Chapter 3 The Past #2
He thumped his head back on the seat, a grim laugh rattling loose. "You know, you act like I’m some kind of monster. But I’ve seen real monsters. You wouldn’t last a minute in my house."
I wanted to fire back, tell him what he already knew: that my own house was a graveyard, and I’d slept in enough empty beds to know every inch of the dark.
But I didn’t. I just closed my eyes and let his words chill me.
The bus rolled on. Every pothole rattled my bones.
My hands were cold and damp, the skin along my wrist burning from where I’d picked it raw the night before.
I curled my fingers, digging my nails into palm, and counted the seconds until we arrived.
The fort hunched on the hill like a decaying tooth, all weathered wood and bristling fences. The bus hissed and shuddered like a dying animal as Mrs. Grant’s shoes clacked down the aisle.
“Pair up with your buddy, please, and stay together for the tour!” she trilled, her breath a fog on the air. “This place is like a maze if you’re not careful.”
I rose, hoping to melt into the tide of bodies clogging the aisle, but Caiden blocked me, one broad hand gripping my shoulder with a pressure just shy of pain.
“What are you doing?” I spat, part of me bracing for him to shove me into the seat again, to snap something in me that hadn’t already splintered.
“Not like you have any friends here,” he sneered. “If I don’t stick with you, you’ll vanish in five seconds flat. Think of it as a mercy.”
I twisted under his grip, but he didn’t let go, just marched me down the steps and into the raw wind.
The chill cut through my layers, needling my bones. I hunched up, arms crossed, wishing I could shed my skin and leave it behind.
The rest of the class milled around the entrance, snapping photos or huddling in cliques. Caiden steered us toward the far edge of the group, his grip loosening only after he was sure I wouldn’t bolt.
A faint dusting of snow crusted the ground, shushing our footsteps as we crossed the courtyard. The fort loomed overhead, log walls blackened by age, windows like gouged-out eyes.
I could almost hear the echo of old violence, musket fire and shouted orders, men shivering in the picket line before being ordered forward to their deaths.
Inside, the fort reeked of varnished pine and something older, a sour musk that seemed to leach from the floorboards themselves.
Our class funneled into the first chamber where a guide in period garb waited.
The words were meant to impress, but nobody cared. Half the class drifted to their phones, the glow of screens brighter than candle lanterns mounted to the wall.
Caiden trailed behind me, sometimes so close I could feel the heat of him. Other times, he vanished into the blind spots only to materialize at my shoulder, breath ghosting against my ear.
I hated how my skin tightened every time. I hated that he could still make me feel anything at all.
He followed me through narrow hallways, into the belly of the barracks. The ceiling pressed low, trapping the air between us, forcing us into proximity.
I traced the grain of the wood with my fingertips, counting old knife marks, wondering which were scars from battle and which were just bored boys carving up history.
“Bet you feel right at home,” Caiden sneered, voice low enough for only me to hear. “Place reeks of loss. Suicide vibes, you know?”
“Yeah, actually,” I shot back, “I was just thinking about how much this place reminds me of you. All the ghosts, the endless hunger for more pain.”
He snorted, a harsh puff of air, but he didn’t flee. For a blink, his gaze flickered, hurt, maybe, or just the surprise of finding himself a punchline for once.
He grabbed for the next insult and found nothing, and that empty beat between us swelled until I could hardly breathe.
I drifted to the back of the group, where Mrs. Grant’s voice dissolved into static and the tour guide prattled on about “harsh discipline” and “a culture of obedience.” The words bled into the walls, into my bones.
I trailed my fingers along the splinter-gouged banister of a spiral stair, wondering if the stains in the wood were blood or just the slow seep of rain through the centuries.
When I looked back, Caiden was two paces behind, hands in pockets, eyes fixed on the floor.
He looked like a statue, carved from anger and cold. I thought about all the times I’d fantasized about shoving him down a flight of stairs, watching him crumble, and felt the old giddy pulse of vengeance.
But the longer I looked, the more I saw the animal gravity in his slouch.
He was so alone he didn’t even realize how alone he truly was.
“You gonna keep following me?” I asked, not turning.
“Not much else to do,” he said, voice drained of venom. “You’re all I’ve got for this damn field trip.”
We shuffled after the group, through narrow passages where the low ceilings threatened to break our skulls.
The tour guide, a reedy grad student in a secondhand blazer, corralled us into a cramped meeting hall and fired up a projector.
The first slide was a sepia photograph of men in ragged uniforms, faces ghostly and hard. “This,” he intoned, “is where the Regiment made their last stand in 1777. You can almost feel the memory of suffering in the air.”
He wasn’t wrong. Every inch of that place felt haunted.
Caiden folded his arms and leaned against the splintered wall, eyes hooded as he scanned the room.
When the guide gestured for everyone to break into pairs and explore, Caiden slid in front of me so fast I nearly tripped into his back.
“You don’t have to stalk me,” I said. “I can find my own way.”
“Yeah, sure.” He didn’t even look at me. “Just don’t want to explain to the cops when they find you curled up in a supply closet. Again.”
I bristled, memory stinging my scalp. “That was one time. And you’re the one who locked me in, jackass.”
He shrugged, not even pretending to care. “You were pissing me off.”
We trailed the group through narrow, echoing corridors. Half the class dissolved into the museum gift shop, but Caiden herded me toward the back stairs, away from the slouching chaperones.
“If you’re gonna murder me, at least do it somewhere scenic,” I muttered. My sneakers scuffed over warped floorboards, each groan of wood a complaint.
Caiden said nothing, just kept a pace a step behind, herding me up the narrow stairwell. The air at each landing grew colder, closing in hard.
At the top, a low door opened to a catwalk strung with icicles, the sky above gray as a spent shell casing. Wind whipped over the parapet, slicing my cheekbones.
He followed me out, lighting a cigarette with hands that shook slightly.
“For real?” I gestured to the ‘No Smoking’ sign staked in frosted mud. “Don’t you ever get tired of rules you’re going to break?”
He squinted into the wind, exhaled smoke that spun away in ribbons. “Only if they’re boring.”
The lighter clicked shut, metal on metal.
We stared out over the old battlefield: a patchwork of dying grass and rust-stitched mud, the memory of slaughter covered thinly in frost.
I half-expected to see spectral uniforms crawl from the trenches, bayonets and bones. Instead, I saw a murder of crows rocket up from the trees.
He sat on the edge of the catwalk, feet dangling, cigarette balanced between two fingers. I stayed standing, arms wrapped tight, wishing the cold could reach in and hush every muscle.
“You know,” he said finally, “I expected you to try harder to get away from me.”
I laughed, the sound torn raw by the wind. “I don’t give you the satisfaction if I don’t have to.”
He peeled his eyes off the horizon, settled them on me. “Why are you so obsessed with not letting anyone see you scared?”
I flinched. “Because you’d sniff it out and eat me alive.”
He grinned, a slow, leeching thing. “You’re not wrong.”
“Look, you can go back down. Smoke your cigarette in peace. I’ll wait five minutes before I go in, so we don’t have to pretend to be on speaking terms.”
I shifted my weight to the balls of my feet, ready to spring away the moment he loosened his attention.
But he just watched me, eyes narrowed like a predator testing the fence.
He looked over the bay, cigarette ash falling onto frozen dirt below. “My old man says people like you, people who break easy, are why the world’s a joke. Maybe I just wanted to see if you’d prove him wrong.”
I clenched my fists. “I’m not broken.”
“Sure.”
He stubbed the cigarette out, flicked the butt over the rail.
I trailed after him, down another set of shuddering stairs into the bowels of the fort.
Past the ropes and plexiglass that guarded the “authentic” rooms, down a corridor that shivered with the cold breath of history.
The air was darker here, denser. The only light came from a distant exit sign, bleeding red against the stone.
A trickle of other students moved through, their voices echoing from the next chamber, but Caiden led me the opposite way, into a hall bricked off from both ends.
He stopped, one hand drifting along the rotten timbers as if searching for a secret panel. He found a door—unmarked, uncurtained, slightly ajar—and nudged it open with his boot.
The room beyond was pitch black, the kind of dark that eats sound and reason.
I hesitated, every primal instinct screaming to turn back, but Caiden’s silhouette filled the threshold.
He stepped inside, then waited, daring me.
I followed, because I couldn’t let him have the last word.
He let the door fall shut.
The blackness was absolute, the kind that presses in on your bones and makes you doubt the shape of your own limbs.
I reached out, groped for the wall, and found only a chill that ran straight to the marrow.
I could hear him breathing, slow and deliberate. Then he laughed, low and cruel, the sound bouncing crazy off the stone.
“Freaked out yet?” he whispered.