Wesley Joyner

Radio Static

Novel extract

Chapter 26

Indy
Tuesday, December 4^th, 2007
12:31 AM

I’m muddy.

Yet another pair of expensive shoes and yet another finely embroidered shirt have become victims of the swamp, which is apparently starving for secrets, bodies, cameras, and nice clothes.

This time, it’s all my own doing. I walked out into the reserve and down the boardwalk of my own accord. Flashlight sweeping side to side, steps slow and deliberate as I search the area around the sign that denotes entry into the reserve. There comes a point where I have to step off the boardwalk, and I wince as the mud seeps into my shoes, but I keep trekking. The branches snag my shirt, and attempting to keep them from fraying the threads is a hopeless endeavor.

It feels like the trees are trying to hold me back, like a warning. A few days ago, the idea would have seemed absurd. Now, every flicker of movement in the corner of my vision looks like a ghost. Then I shine my flashlight and see that it’s just an owl, a bat, a bush, the trunk of a cypress tree. It’s not cold out, but there’s goosebumps shivering down my arms.

I’ve done a lot of investigations in my life. I’ve investigated the sites of witch trials, chupacabra sightings, gruesome ax murders, abandoned prisons, asylums, catacombs. Never, not once, have I been afraid.

Now, I’m afraid. I don’t know what lurks in this place anymore. I’m not scared of alligators, I’m scared of urban legends and lost spirits. I should have waited for daylight to do this, but I was going crazy sitting alone in my room with that diary.

I scan until I can see the trunk of a cypress protruding up from the water, pointed and splintered, scorched by the lightning that struck it down. It’s definitely the place Levi wrote about filming in the diary. If his camera is still out here, it’ll be buried in the muddy swamp bed. I’m knee-deep in murky water. There’s no point, but I roll my sleeves up, anyways, before I bend down to begin rummaging through the sludge.

Oh, I feel like I’m going to vomit. The mud is loose and my fingers plunge right into it, and every time they brush something, I jump. A rock, a twig, something slimy that slips between my fingers and makes me yelp, stumbling backwards, yanking my hands back. My folded sleeves are soaked and I’m panting for breath, barely holding onto my lunch. “Please tell me that wasn’t a frog,” I mumble to myself. “I’m going to pretend that definitely wasn’t a frog. I did not just touch a frog.”

“It was probably a pig frog.”

I whip around, eyes bigger than the full moon overhead, heart launching itself into the stratosphere. For a moment, I’m horrified to find that I’m not alone, and then, squinting through the harsh light, I see who has arrived to keep me company. In a canoe. Of-goddamn-course. “What are you freaks doing out here?”

Ashley snorts. She has to physically restrain Teo from bailing over the side of the canoe they’re paddling in, I assume for a repeat of our skirmish in the forest by the Cunningham’s new place. “You’re one to talk!” he snaps. “What the fuck are you doing out here?”

Trying to help, I realize. I came out here to help. Talking to Teo makes me feel infinitely less generous, but I grit my teeth. It’s not about him, it’s about Levi. “The same thing you’re doing, believe it or not,” I snap. “Trying to figure this out before Hollis does.”

Teo looks unmoved. I’m not convinced he even processed what I said. Ashley, on the other hand, is watching me thoughtfully. “Is this a coup, or are you tergiversating?”

“Second.” I’m not stealing the podcast from Hollis. I’m not going to murder him and take over his glory in secret, with his body stuffed in my closet. It’s a defection to the enemy side, not a takeover.

“He says he’s on our side now,” Ashley says, turning to Teo like a translator of a foreign language. Teo doesn’t look like he buys it. He’s glaring at me like I’m the one who killed Levi.

“Look,” I say—I reach into my bag, producing the diary. “I haven’t given it to Hollis, see? This—“ I gesture vaguely at our surroundings, and quite pointedly at the canoe. Where the hell did they even get a canoe? “—has gone too far. I’m finished with Hollis. I’m living in a brave new world where ghosts are real and I don’t think I want to piss off the first one I’ve ever met, he’s violent.” And scared, and hurt, and deserving of more than a cheap story that boils his loss down to sensationalist slop. “I figured if I solved this, I could send Hollis running the opposite direction. So while you guys are busy telling people I’m a child-sacrificing satanist, I’ll actually do something useful.”

Teo snorts derisively. “If you think Levi is violent, you don’t know the first fucking thing about him, so don’t talk to me like you’re the bigger person here. You’re the one who—“

Whatever Teo intends to accuse me of—breaking and entering, disturbing Levi’s peace, stealing from him, or all of the above—he never gets around to. Because there’s someone else with us in the swamp. The man of the hour, the dead kid we’re bickering over.

Levi.

Levi, however, isn’t paying attention to any of us. He’s walking in a straight line, between me and the canoe that holds his friends. When all this is over, I’ll tell him he should keep better company, even though I’m the last person in the world he’s likely to want advice from. For now, he doesn’t glance at me, or the diary, or Teo and Ashley. There’s this dazed, faraway look in his eyes. I’d say it seems like he’s just wandering, but there is a definite purpose to his motion that’s not present in his gaze.

We watch, all three of us. But Teo and Ashley don’t look half as confused as I feel. Ashley is simply observing, and Teo looks worried. I swallow before I speak. “Levi?” No response. No evidence that he heard me. I turn to the canoe twins. “Okay, what’s going on?”

There’s a beat of silence that causes me to suspect that they don’t know what’s going on, themselves, but then Teo speaks. Too solemn, for who he is. “He’s looping.”

I sigh, irritation spiking. “Am I supposed to know what that means?” I ask, terse.

Teo spares me another glare. “Use context clues, genius.”

Ashley’s black-lipstick coated mouth turns into a smirk. I suspect that line originates with her.

Begrudgingly, I try to think. He’s looping. I know what the word means, in theory. In the audio library for Radio Static, there’s plenty of songs that loop, which just means they basically never end. Even if the audio is only thirty seconds long, it ends exactly where it begins, so it can be stitched together endlessly with no seam. In terms of what I’m seeing, I guess looping probably means that Levi’s actions are repetitive. Maybe he’s doing the same thing over and over, and it always ends in the same place it began. But that still feels like a vague definition. It doesn’t tell me why he didn’t hear me calling his name. Why he doesn’t seem aware that anyone is around him.

While I stand there thinking, Teo and Ashley start to paddle the canoe after Levi. “Hey!” I shout—my voice pitches up in shock, echoing off the trees. “Where are you going?”

“We’re following him, duh,” Teo says, rolling his eyes.

“Well—you can’t just leave me out here.”

“You got yourself out here, you can get yourself back.”

“I’m not going back, I’m going where he’s going.”

“Okay, so enjoy walking, loser. Should’ve brought a boat.”

Forgive me, Levi, but Jesus Christ.

Teo and Ashley are paddling slowly along after Levi. I’m left to walk. I swallow thickly, apprehension and pride going down rough, and begin to trudge after them, still waist-deep in a fifty-fifty mix of water and mud. Soon enough, I’m walking alongside the canoe, keeping pace from several feet to the right of it. I jump every time a plant brushes my leg, silently begging it not to be a fish.

“So,” Ashley says without glancing towards me, “I don’t know if you read a lot, but usually if you’re thinking of undergoing a redemption arc, you have to tell everyone else about your motivation.”

“What?”

Ashley sighs. No words, but it screams I’m surrounded by idiots. “You want us to let you work with us. Right?”

“I—yeah, I guess.”

“Okay, and since you got to town, the way you feel about the case has changed. Right?”

“Yeah.”

“And now you want to be on our side.”

“… Yeah.”

“So make a case for yourself.”

Teo chimes in at last. “Levi says in movies, you have to give the bad guy a sympathetic background. Do you have a sad backstory?”

“Actually, yeah, but I’m not telling it to you.”

Teo scoffs. “Okay, so how are we supposed to, like, relate to you then? It’s like you’re not even trying.”

I choose not to dignify that with an answer. I’m trudging through the swamp, caked in mud, my fingers still tingling where they touched the slimy, disgusting back of a frog, and Teo and Ashley are bone dry in their little boat, asking me to prove my commitment to their side.

“Where’s he going?” I ask.

“You’re changing the subject.” Teo’s tone is accusatory, but it’s not really an accusation, it’s just a statement of fact.

“I’m trying to solve this before Hollis catches on,” I snap, nonetheless. “So why don’t you quit running your mouth and tell me what’s actually going on?” I know you catch more flies with honey. It’s another of my mom’s favorite phrases. Especially with prickly, temperamental people like Teo. But I just want this to be over. I want to help Levi, and then I want to never bother him ever again, except maybe to check that he’s having a peaceful afterlife.

The snap is a mistake, of course. Teo reaches down and splashes a bunch of nasty swamp water into my face, which makes me feel like my skin might actually be melting, because I can’t wipe it off when my hands and my clothes are soaked with the same water. I try to take a deep breath through my nose, ignoring the way it just makes the revolting scent of nature all the more potent. “Fine,” I say. My voice is steady and modulated, but it would be too generous to describe it as calm. “You want to know the truth?” I pause, but I don’t look at him. “My mother was killed by the ghost of a kid from the eighties, and I’m on a grueling, cross-country quest to find her killer.”

Teo splashes me again. This time, I probably deserve it.

“You’re just making shit up!”

I snort. “Figure that out all on your own? I’m surprised you didn’t have to wait for your friend here to explain it to you.”

It’s the final straw. “Teo, no!” Ashley cries, but she’s powerless to keep Teo from clamoring out of the canoe, nearly tipping it over in the process. The next thing I know, the world goes deathly quiet, and I can’t breath—I’m underwater, and Teo is having a second go at punching me in the face. The effort is rendered useless by the fact that I’ve dragged him underwater with me, so he can’t see what he’s doing and his fist is arrested by the water and lands weakly against my shoulder, instead.

We surface together, gasping, and I shove him back. Soaking wet, clothes sticking to skin and curls heavy and flattened, he looks a lot smaller than he did before. Not so threatening. “There,” I huff, trying to ignore the rivulets of water streaming down my face, “now we’re on equal footing.”

The only person still dry as a bone is Ashley, who rolls her eyes and mutters “boys” under her breath.

“You did that on purpose!” Again, a simple observation of facts that Teo is shouting as an accusation.

“I was lonely in the water all by myself,” I say, smirking. Maybe if I keep winding him up, he’ll explode, and then I won’t have to deal with him anymore. Although I doubt Levi would thank me for causing his best friend to spontaneously combust.

“See?” Teo spits out a clump of algae, and I try to pretend the idea that I could have gotten algae in my mouth doesn’t make my stomach churn. Ew, ew, ew. “You’re not serious! Ash, I think he’s just trying to distract us. How do we know you’re not just buying time for Hollis to catch up? If you cared about Levi, you’d give me the diary and tell Hollis he ran away to California!”

Ah, of course. The theory they were trying to plant in my head with the movies. Clumsy work.

But Teo has a point. Hollis trusts me. If I presented him with the evidence that Teo and Ashley falsified, I could convince him of its validity. The problem is, he’d insist on traveling to California for more investigation. The whole no open case files mentality. And I don’t want to follow Hollis to California. I want to run my story. I don’t want to leave without knowing that whatever is going on with Levi right now gets fixed, because I’m pretty sure its my fault.

I’m just really bad at helping, obviously.

“Fine, you can have the diary.” I throw it. Hard. It smacks Teo in the chest and he scrambles to catch it. “There, happy? I’m not stalling you, I just want you to let me help him—” I gesture sharply in the direction Levi has disappeared into. “—and I don’t want to tell you my whole sob story just so you’ll listen to me. We don’t have to like each other to work together for one night, you just have to figure out how to be civil. Think you can manage that?”

Teo is looking down at the diary like he thinks it might be a trick. He opens it, letting the pages zip past the pad of his thumb. He looks up, tension in his jaw that suggests his teeth are digging into his lower lip. Finally, he grates out: “Fine. But you’re still an asshole.”

“Yeah, so are you.”

He tosses the diary angrily into the canoe, then reaches out to grab the side like he intends to climb in. Ashley slaps his hand away, an action that I’m not sure justifies the degree of recoil it receives. “As if! You’re soaking wet. You two imbeciles can walk together.” Teo looks like a wounded, betrayed puppy. I almost (almost!) feel bad for goading him into the water with me. He trudges around to the other side of the canoe so that he doesn’t have to look at me while we keep walking after Levi, though Levi doesn’t come back into view right away. Instead, the first thing that begins to appear through the trees is a dilapidated building clad in peeling, white paint, with a steeple protruding from the front that slices the full moon in two.