Andy

Tying my converse laces and standing up, I faced the woods in determination. Andy groaned from the ground beside me.

"Are you coming or not?" I asked him, scooping up my journal, looking down at him. He sighed and rubbed his face, setting his sunglasses crooked. "Can't you be one of those girls who want to walk in pretty gardens, not creepy forests behind their house?"

"Nope. Sorry." I snickered, setting off on foot towards the dark shadows that reached across the lawn. Andy scurried off the ground to catch up.

"Can we at least eat lunch first?"

"You don't eat." I reminded him, then changing my tone into a forced, deep male voice like his, quoting him directly. "I don't have to eat, piss, sleep... Well, kinda, but most of those things are just routine. A routine I don't have to follow anymore."

He scowled at me, but didn't protest anymore as we set foot into the woods.

The birds, for the most part, were silent. Aside from the occasional one that would screetch out from the branches above.

"You're a lot weirder than I originally gave you credit for." Andy grumbled in his deep voice, hands buried in his jean pockets, he kept looking over his shoulders, seeming to forget that if there was trouble, nothing could hurt him.

"I accept that as a compliment."

"You should. Too many wanna be bitches out there."

I paused to look at him in amusement. "I never know what to think of your creative vocabulary. Sometimes 'bitch' is a compliment, and sometimes it's a rude statement."

"It's only a compliment if I say it to you, bitch queen." He nudged my arm with his elbow as he walked onward, dry twigs snapping beneath our feet.

"Emo bitch queen." I corrected. "Jackass."

He grinned at me. "Challenge accepted."

The sunlight thinned as the branches grew thicker above, woven together like a giant spiderweb, casting fantastic shadow patterns across the forest floor.

"Any real reason we're out here?..." Andy wondered after a few minutes of silent walking, following the invisible ribbon trail deeper into the woods. I shrugged. "Aprture isn't the only outdoor place I like to go... I haven't been here in a while, though..."

"Where?" He asked, preoccupied with swatting off a spiderweb he'd walked into, grabbing onto the sticky netting, tossing it aside, wiping his hands on the trees we passed when he thought I wasn't looking.

"It has no name, no feeling... It's just a place." I replied, remembering the dark bank of shadows that surrounding the riverbed ahead. A far cry from Apture's sunny, open fields, with the peeling floral wallpaper and wildlife darting between the floorboards. This place always felt sinister to me... Maybe that's why it'd almost been eleven months since I'd last visited.

It was just a spot in the woods, where you could sit in absolute, petrifying silence. There were no birds in the branches, deer drinking from the stream, no numb buzz of insects by the muddy banks. It was like a land trapped in time. Even the trees there, all wore thick coats of dead leaves. Leaves that never shed in the fall, they always clung on, shifting and clattering against each other in the wind.

I'd brought Elizabeth out here a year and a half ago, we were studying and got bored, so we went for a walk. When we got there, Elizabeth got paranoid, joking that the place felt hexed.

I shook off her comment at the time, but the closer we got to the stream, I could feel the looming shadows, and darkness growing, even though the sun was trying it's best to penetrate the thick web of branches.

"Uh... It's kind of creepy out here don't you think?"

"It is." I agreed quietly, as though someone might overhear.

"I think it's haunted." Andy blurted out, looking behind us.

"Yeah, by you." I reminded him sarcastically, stepping over a fallen tree carefully.

"We're almost there, right?"

"We're here." I stopped walking, feeling the same uneasy chill I always did when I came here. There was the dark stream, black as oil in the deep shadows cast by the thick branches, splinters of sunlight cutting through the darkness like a knife, lighting up patches of the forest floor, illuminating dry leaves, twigs and bracken.

Absolute silence took over, even the stream, which should have bubbled and trickled as it moved west, made now sound. It was as though someone had hit mute, everything silent, yet branches still drifted in the breeze, water still moved, and shadows shifted as the sun moved. Nothing changed.

"Okay... So why are we here? Are we going to sacrifice a black cat or something? This place doesn't feel right."

He stood close to me, his shoulder almost touching mine, as he looked around, hanging his sunglasses on the neck of his shirt again. "It's weird..." He said absently after a few moments, "It feels familiar."

I scoffed at his comment. "Familiar how?"

"I'm serious." He said, looking up at the big, blackened oak tree that stretched towards the heavens in front of us. "I don't know... The shadows and everything."

"Is this where you ascended from Hell?"

He shot me a 'knock it off' glare over his shoulder, "Noooo," He drug out his reply dramatically. "There's just something here... I can't put my finger on it."

He almost looked mystified by it, which was odd. I found the place dark and unnerving. Part of the reason I did not visit frequently, and tended to choose Apture over the creek. He was finding some weird level of comfort being there.

"Like what? An otherworld portal?" I laughed. Not because I actually found it funny, but because of all the things I'd seen recently that defied the laws of reality, it wouldn't be so hard to believe such things existed.

"No... No I don't think so." He replied after a thoughtful pause.

"Can you hear voices or something?" I wondered, his dreamy expression was beginning to worry me.

His forehead creased in thought, but he wasn't really concentrating on me. "No... Not exactly. I can see the shadows moving, though..."

A strike of fear ran down my spine, and I wondered what exactly he meant by that.

"Are we alone?" My voice shook. If he was right here, in front of me, there could very well be others like him. He'd said as much the night of his funeral.

"That's why there's so many ghosts, haunted houses, Ash... Those ghosts missed their deadlines, and they couldn't cross over then... They ran out of time to make a decision, so the afterlife made one for them."

His voice came back chilling and defensive. "No."

I couldn't speak for a moment, I was just electrically aware of how many pairs of eyes were on me, how many hands brushed against me and how many whispers were in my ears.

"I have to tell you something..." Andy sighed after a few still, silent moments.

"...What?"

"I don't want to scare you." He looked pained when he faced me again.

"You can't." I whispered, meaning for it to come out fearless, but it was a frightened whisper.

"They're all around us." He told me in a low voice, "Always. I'm not trying to make this into some mythical thing or whatever, but that's how it is, there's just.... People like me everywhere, all the time. They rarely make their presence known. It was hard for me to adjust to at first, and I found a way to turn it off... My ghost GPS or whatever you want to call it. It made me feel halfway normal again, not to see spirits from every era, and every possible death, roaming the streets of Pendant. It's bizarre as hell to grasp." He shook his head and looked down.

"There's a lot of them here." His forehead scrunched up in concentration again. "An unusual amount. Murder grounds, maybe. Or, is there a cemetery somewhere nearby?"

I shrugged, too numb to summon actual words, since there were a hundred other pairs of ears listening in. It made me regret every time I'd come out into the woods alone as a child to skip stones in the creek, searching for frogs and fish that weren't there...

"It's a deadzone." I whispered in surprise. He nodded slowly. "A large collection of spirits without direction or reason. They're jealous."

"Why?" I choked out, yanking my hand back when I was certain I'd felt a hand brush lightly against it.

"Because I found a reason, and they can't."

I looked at him in confusion.

"A reason to stay... It's like I said, not everyone gets to choose their fate. For whatever reason it was they were late to their funerals, or they never got one at all, they are easily angered by those who choose this fate."

I wasn't thinking about any of them as I spoke then. "Is this really a fate?" I wondered.

A small, stressed crooked smile slowly emerged on his face. "It's a curse not without it's causes. And perks. I wouldn't call it a fate."

I looked around us again, the sun struggling just to light the section of the forest floor we stood in.

"Can we go back?" I whispered, shaken by the idea of so many angered spirits watching us. The idea seemed absolutely ridiculous. The works of a fiction novel. I found it impossible to believe any of what he was saying was true, and I was just waiting for him to start laughing, slap his knee and shout April Fools or something ridiculous like that, but instead, he looked around in concern, looked squarely to his right, nodding once as something, or someone I couldn't see.

"Yes. Let's go."

He grabbed onto my hand tightly, pulling me with him through the trees, his hand like cold stone.

"Promise me you will never go back there..." He murmured urgently the farther we got from the stream. I couldn't summon words, so I nodded.

"It's dangerous. You've seen what I can do when I'm invisible, and I don't even want to hurt you. Tired old spirits just want a reason to go to Hell, because at this point, they'd rather be burning than spend another decade here."

"They'd try to kill me?" I wondered in surprise.

"In a sense... I don't know. I'm still a newbie to the whole thing, and to tell you the truth, I'm not interested in learning the laws. Just promise me you'll stay out of the woods?"

He stopped walking, and turned to face me, gripping my hand tightly, he looked at me patiently with his grey/blue eyes. I nodded at last, "I promise." I agreed. After what I knew, I had no intentions of ever stepping beyond my backyard again.

"Okay." He sighed, running a hand through his hair, messing it up. "It was a nice walk while it lasted, I guess." He laughed, "But you'd better get back before your Mom loses her shit, thinking you've been abducted or something."

Nudging me forward, we continued towards my house in silence. The distance we put down, the more sun reached us on the forest floor, and the less I felt like I was being watched. I could tell we'd stepped out of the 'deadzone' when I could hear the birds singing above, loud and clear, the chirps and swirl of movement in the branches.

Notes

I really hope this didn't come off and cliche/cheesy/overused. I just figured it was high time we establish a few of the flaws in Andy's world, and clarify he isn't the only ghost on the planet.

Chapter also inspired by New World Coming
and, Drown by Bring Me The Horizon.

Shoutouts:

- anathema
- Jess_BVBARMY2639

Thank you both so much! I love reading your comments hahaha. It's actually those comments, that made me stay up another hour writing this update. It's more of a filler for now, but I'm really excited for the stuff that's coming up!