Under the Influence

"I thought for a ghost town, there'd be more of a...town," Liz said.

Their destination wasn't much to look at- just a standard clearing around which she could see the crumbling stone of old foundations. To top it off, there was no signal on her old phone, which was already dying by degrees, and the bugs were hell out here in the middle of the woods.

"It's been hundreds of years, silly,” Sarai said, walking to one of the trees on the edge of the sizable clearing and stroking something cut into its bark. She was wearing something thoroughly impractical and somehow getting away with it completely, as always: a boho-looking skirt, a cropped denim jacket and a white top underneath that hugged her body perfectly.

Liz looked hard at the image in the bark: a strange x with a circle around it, like a bullseye.

"What is that?”

"I think it was their symbol. The people who lived here first. The rightful owners."

“Rightful owners?”

"An ancient clan,” Sarai’s latest acquisition said. Clive was a ghost-hunter. He was also British, or Australian, or South African...who knew. Liz wasn't good with accents, but she bet that was part of the appeal for Sarai. That and her new ghost phase, which she seemed sure would get her the long-sought-after attention on social media that she craved as an ‘influencer’. "Legend has it people just started disappearing and being found in the forest nearby, split down the middle. Gutted like animals, hanging from trees."

"It was because they didn't respect the forest," Sarai said, leaning in towards her. Typically the closer you got, the more cracks started to show. That was how humans worked. But the closer you got to Sarai, all she saw were invisible pores and the decorative makeup freckles she'd artfully sprinkled across her dusky cheeks. "The settlers took the forest from the natives, and the forest didn't want to be taken. It has a spirit of its own, you know."

"Spirits don't hang people from trees. People hang people from trees,” Liz couldn’t keep from saying.

Clive chuckled like he found her amusingly ill-educated. He was fiddling obsessively with a black box of some sort.

"EVP recorder,” he said, seeing her looking. "Electronic Voice Phenomenon. This little baby will pick up on anything beyond the human ear, including potential spirit communications."

Liz hated him already.

.

If you’d asked Liz earlier, this wasn’t how she’d pictured her last few days of college going. Yet as soon as Sarai had proposed this latest harebrained scheme, she’d agreed as reflexively as she’d always agreed to anything Sarai suggested. Fuck her final exams, right?

The descending night found them all hunkered around a modest fire of Clive’s craftsmanship. Sarai was sitting crossed-legged on one side, Clive beside her, while Liz held her camera at the ready. It was a ridiculous sight: Sarai had her hands held loosely on her knees, palms up like a yogi or sage, and after signalling Liz to start filming, she shut her eyes, tilting her head back to face the starry sky.

"Spirits," she intoned. "We come in peace. I reach out to you now to give of myself, an open channel. Come into us (Clive stifled a laugh here), use us to rely your message.”

Everyone was silent, standing awkwardly about the fire; the wood popped suddenly, a crack that made Liz jump a little despite herself. Sarai furrowed her brow, mouthing something under her breath.

"I think..." she said, "...I'm getting something."

Yeah. Okay. Liz had to hold back from rolling her eyes.

"There's someone here. What is your name? I mean no harm."

A rustling noise sounded from behind Liz, and she turned at once, her heart jumping a little despite herself. It sounded close. Nothing was there. Of course nothing was there, but when she turned back, Sarai had opened her dark eyes wide and was pointing to the place the sound had come from.

"There!" she said. "I saw something. The shape of something, just there."

"Can you see a spirit?" Liz asked a moment later, as they sat around a fire Clive had built, eating hot dogs and beans.

"Yes, sometimes manifestations occur," Clive said. Know-it-all.

"It takes a lot of energy for a spirit to manifest itself as a person,” Sarai told her, the weight of knowledge in her tone as if she hadn’t just got into this stuff a month ago. “Appearing to us, moving things- these all take up a lot of bandwidth. It can be easier for a spirit to make itself known by working through a person, using their eyes and hands and tongue instead.”

"Yes," Clive said. "What you did was actually very insightful, Sarai. You have a gift; I knew it from the moment we met."

There followed a truly gross moment where Sarai and Clive exchanged an intimate look. Liz huffed softly and stabbed at her hot dog with a vengeance that was especially uncalled for seeing as she was using a spoon.

When bedtime came, Liz lay wide awake in her sleeping bag, listening to the sounds of the forest. Sarai lay on the opposite side of their tent, her dark hair splayed across her pillow, snoring just slightly. God, even the way she snored was cute. Clive was still outside; she could hear the sound of his feet walking around in the leaves, accompanied by occasional inaudible muttering. He'd claimed he wanted to get some 'readings', whatever that meant. Gradually, the soft rustling of his feet paired with Sarai’s soft snoring slowly lulled her off to sleep. The night was cool and crisp, and Liz had to admit, ghost bullshit aside, it was actually kind of peaceful.

.

She woke to the sound of screaming.

Liz stumbled to the tent flap just in time to see Sarai running towards her.

"Liz, come here, come here now."

She looked manic, her eyes the size of modest dinner plates. Liz followed her to the edge of the clearing; just as they passed into the woods beyond, she saw it. All her fatigue disappeared fast in the face of horror, her brain scrambling to process what she was looking at.

Clive hung from one of the lower branches of a pine, suspended by his ankles. He was clearly dead, his eyes blank and staring, one high-boned cheek smudged with a streak of his own blood. But that wasn't the worst of it; someone had removed his shirt and an incision had been made, clean and expert, from his neck to his belly button. A smell of copper and sweat and something much worse pervaded the air around him. For a moment, all Liz could do was stare, deprived of speech. Then she turned to Sarai, who was paler than she'd ever seen her.

"What...what is this? God, what happened?"

"Liz, I think the spirits heard," Sarai said, so soft and so ridiculous at first Liz thought she'd misheard. Sarai raised an arm and pointed, and Liz turned back and saw it: just above where Clive hung, eerily rotating just the slightest bit, ropes groaning in the lightest breeze, was that symbol again, the bullseye of the cross within the circle. Except this time it was fresh, the wood underneath bleeding sap.

"It's not spirits," Liz managed in a strangled voice. "For fuck's sake, Sarai. Spirits don't do that."

"That's their symbol, though," Sarai snapped. "You know that. Get your camera. We need to-"

"What we need to do is go home," Liz said. "We need to get somewhere with signal, we need to call 911, and we need to leave."

She turned back for the tent, walking fast to outpace Sarai as she followed. "You’re insane. I shouldn't have followed you in the first place; I don't know what the hell I was thinking."

This wasn’t entirely honest. She knew exactly what she was thinking. The same thing she was always thinking when she followed Sarai into all her dumb influencer schemes like a wooden lackey, hoping for the barest hint of a smile reserved only for her, a whisper, a…

No. She reached the tent and began to shove the few items she'd brought into her bag, throwing her camera and sleeping pack over her shoulder and turning to go. Sarai stood in the tent opening, blocking her.

"So you're just going to leave now?" she asked, her dark eyes flaring.

"Yes, Sarai. Someone was just murdered. Your boyfriend, though you wouldn’t know to look at you. It’s like you’re some kind of psychopath. Come on.”

She started off, choosing a direction at random- Sarai huffed and shoved past her without warning, headed for the tent again. She came back with a full bottle of some dusky golden liquid.

"Here," she said, uncorking it. “This will make it easier. Just hear me out, Liz. It chose us," she said. "I can feel it in my bones. We are to document its righteous fury. It won't hurt us. Survivors are necessary to tell the tale. And I didn’t even know Clive that long. To be honest, I only hooked up with him because of his ghost equipment.”

Liz stared at her. The scent of the whiskey was enticing, even this early in the morning.

"This is wrong," she said, reaching for the bottle anyway. But she hadn’t cared for Clive either. And Sarai had used the word ‘we’.

Sarai smiled.

.

The rest of the day passed in a surreal blur. Liz snapped pictures and filmed video of Sarai at the foot of the tree, forced tears running from her eyes, keening. Then of her walking around, talking to the supposed spirits, stroking the trees. More and more crazy footage, gradually growing more unhinged as the alcohol content built up in their blood.

By night, Liz laid in the comfort of the tent, eyes half-closed as Sarai put out their paltry fire and came in, throwing a blanket over the both of them. She was extremely drunk now, too drunk to stand, and she tried to remember if she’d seen Sarai take anything past the first sip at all. She had the terrible feeling they’d done something bad today, in not reporting the death, in not going for help, and that they would pay for it tonight.

“Are you sure you’re okay about Clive?” she asked, not because she cared, but because it was what a good person would do.

Sarai looked at her, her dark eyes reflecting nothing. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I told you I didn’t love him.”

"Do you love anyone?" She wasn’t sure why she’d asked, except that there was something terrifying about Sarai right now, something she felt she’d somehow underestimated the past three years.

Sarai curled her mouth into a half-smile. "I love you, Liz. Isn't that what you've always wanted me to say?"

She tried to speak but her eyes were slipping shut. God, was that stuff one hundred proof? When she came to again briefly, the space around her was lightly spinning, and Sarai laid a hand on her back.

"Go to sleep, Liz," she said. "I'll watch over you."

.

Liz woke with her mouth dry and her head pounding. She peered uselessly at her now-dead phone, receiving exactly zero intel. It was light out, the last pink of the dawn not yet faded from the sky. She looked around blearily, but she didn’t see Sarai. What she did see was Clive's EVP recorder, lying under some discarded clothes. She pulled it forward on instinct, and after some fumbling, pressed replay. There was a lot of rustling and some cursing as Clive fumbled through the woods.

"Would anyone here like to speak tonight?" he asked in that clipped, posh accent.

No answer.

"What is your name?"

Nothing but static. Now Clive seemed to be standing still; his voice came across more clearly.

"How many of you are there?"

There was a sound, as of a branch snapping, and Liz pictured him turning, startled. And then: "Hey. What are you doing out of b-"

He didn’t finish. There was a loud sound as the recorder hit the ground and then it clicked off.

Liz remained lying on her side a moment, EVP reader still loosely clutched in one hand. Then she sat up, feeling a little like she was going to hurl from the whiskey the night before. But there was a stronger sensation taking over, one of danger. Fear. Because all of a sudden, she understood.

Clive hadn't sounded surprised or scared at all. Which only meant one thing.

As if in answer to that thought, a twig snapped outside the tent. Liz froze, thinking of Sarai's dark eyes, living yet empty, and of her fearless conviction that they wouldn't be hurt. Or she wouldn't, anyway, and what else had ever mattered to Sarai? More importantly, what wouldn't she do for fame? Liz began to draw things to her: her camera, Clive’s car keys, the EVP reader, her knife, and slid it all silently into her bag. When she left the tent, she almost expected to be attacked on sight, but as her darting eyes scanned the clearing, there was no one there.

"Sarai?" Liz croaked, low, shaky, barely audible. There was a sound like a footstep in leaves, or maybe just a squirrel. She didn’t wait around to find out. She ran, full-steam through the woods, sliding and nearly tripping multiple times, head spinning, throat aching with panic and dehydration. She ran. And ran. And ran.

When she burst out onto the trail and saw Clive’s car, she gasped with relief. A sound came from behind her; maybe a pinecone falling, maybe someone silently taking aim. She ran to the car and shoved herself in the door, keys shaking in her hand, and jammed her finger into the ignition, slamming the gas pedal down. And then Liz drove, like she’d never driven before.

.

It was 10 am when she got home, a surreal, mundane time of day. She stood in the middle of her dorm room, blinking, and flinched when a garbage truck screeched to a halt outside.

She slumped on the bed only after making double sure the door was locked, and pulled items out of her bag with trembling hands. The EVP reader. The camera. Then, on an impulse, she began to watch her recorded video back, breath tight in her throat.

The first video was the one of Sarai sitting in front of the fire, appealing to the spirits. She fast-forwarded a little, expecting the tape to skip to the next day, but it didn’t. Instead, when she paused and hit play, the camera was moving through the forest that same night, with an eerie silence that shouldn’t have been possible. A voice could be heard murmuring close by, and the camera moved to it, eventually revealing Clive, his face lit up by the slight glow from his recorder, facing away into the woods, his voice pitched as a question.

"How many of you are there?"

And then the camera moved closer. She’d seen this before- or heard it, at any rate. A branch snapped and Clive turned, his face puzzled but not alarmed.

"Hey," he said. "What are you doing out of b-"

The person holding the camera lunged forward, and Clive dropped the EVP reader. As the camera closed in, Liz heard a language she didn’t understand, a guttural, ancient tongue. It gave her chills, not because of the tone of it, but because she knew the voice speaking the strange words.

It was her own.

.

"Come into us", Sarai had said.

Liz thought of her words as scorching hot water flowed over her, turning the water muddy and brown- with just a hint of rust- as it spiralled down the drain. Sarai had invited a possession. She just hadn't anticipated that her beloved spirits wouldn't pick her. That anyone wouldn't pick her probably seemed inconceivable.

She'd destroyed the camera and the EVP reader, but the images would be burned into her mind forever. The blood. The screams. The calm, surgical washing afterwards, the tape clicking off. And the last image, the one she knew she’d revisit again and again when she closed her eyes to sleep: Sarai's blank, dark eyes, staring back at her for once with no mockery or mischief, no life, as she hung upside down from her own branded tree. Those eyes seemed to say, for once, You have my attention now. I’m all yours.