Chapter 1: Ghosts of the Future



July 11th, 2286

I woke up to the sound of dishes and pans crashing downstairs. It sounded like my mother was on another rampage. I groaned to myself and rolled off the bed. I could feel the summer heat already pooling in the upper areas of my bedroom, the floor was a blissful few degrees cooler.

I had turned 18 a few weeks ago. I could legally buy cigarettes and join the navy. I suppose in the grand scheme of humans, the fact that I’d lived this long was probably something of an accomplishment. I tried to hold onto that as I shrugged on an oversized t-shirt and made myself human. Skipping a bra and trading sweats for my trusty military surplus pants, the image that I presented to the outside world was of the classic grunge rock garage kid. I would have gone for a leather jacket but it was August and I had plans for the day that didn’t involve heat exhaustion. I didn’t really think much of my ‘style’ if you could call it that. I tied my auburn hair back in a functional ponytail and hid my grey eyes behind my pair of huge ugly trucker sunglasses. I wasn’t one of those prim girls from high school with the perfect makeup and the perfect hair. I wore old band t-shirts and thrift store specials. Fucks given: not a one.

My mother would be coming upstairs looking for me before too much time passed. She’d pound on the door with a list of demands including chores, job applications, and daily prayer. I didn’t particularly want to take part in any of that, and so the next step in my routine took me out my bedroom window onto the rooftop.

I shut the window behind myself and stuffed my wireless headphone buds into my ears. I hit play on my phone and All along the Watchtower flooded into my ears on repeat.

Despite the lack of air conditioning in my house, the heat still hit me hard as I exited onto the roof. The black tiles shimmered in the morning light. I had a feeling if I stayed up there too long, my sneakers would start sticking to the shingles. The rooftop gave a commanding view of the colony, spreading out in all directions, fading out to blue in the gathering haze. I could feel the warmth radiating upwards from the surface as I crossed the roof and lept over onto the roof of the shed. Once I was on the shed I just climbed down the back trellis, putting me safely in the neighbor’s yard. This was a method of coming and going I had perfected over the years. Avoiding my parents had become something of an artform to me. The more distant I got from them, the more they tried to rein me in.

I crossed the rooftops quickly and got down out of sight. The shade was marginally cooler, but the humidity leaked into every crevice and permeated every corner, leaving everything feeling sticky, the air thick and dense. Once I was on the street behind my house, I made a beeline for the local charging station to pick up cigarettes and energy drinks.

I thought often in those days about leaving home for good. I was 18, I could move out, join the navy, get an apartment, or get on a shuttle and just run away. I hadn’t done that yet, because I had quite a lot of shit, and it would be a pain to move any of it. Plus, all those things required money which required a job. I’d managed to studiously avoid that so far.

The blissful cold of the convenience store billowed out of the door as I wandered in. I took a few moments just basking in the glory of the AC.

Our father, who art in air condititioning

HVAC be thy name…,

I chuckled to myself as I grabbed a drink from the cooler. I pulled one earbud out and changed over to the Valleys of Neptune, assaulting my ears with Hendrix; I then strolled up to the counter, asking for a pack of cigarettes. The cashier gave my matted down blonde hair a look and scrutinized my identification. I vaguely wondered if the pimply faced twenty-something was working up the courage to talk to me, but he just handed me the cigarettes with a nod and told me to have a nice day.



Going out into the heat a second time was like walking into a brick wall. Warmth radiated up off the pavement in a haze of distortions and humidity, giving the parking lot an oppressive depth. I lit my cigarette and hurried across the pavement, hoping my shoes weren’t about to start melting into the hot black surface.

The commercial section of town was an oasis of concrete and metal, and was easily ten degrees warmer than the surrounding area. I didn’t linger there for long, cutting down back alleys and side streets, wandering down the middle of quiet roads. At some point along the walk I switched over from Hendrix to Jefferson Airplane. White Rabbit seemed to fit the midday haze in its lazy character. I stayed away from the main streets and invariably ended up on the run down cul-de-sac that Seth, my partner in crime, lived on.

The street was named 'Maple’ which I thought was funny because all the maple trees that had been planted along the street had died and their withered husks were now all that provided shade on the quiet lane.

Seth’s house was a beat up ranch style that hadn’t been repainted since the turn of the century. The front yard was a jungle of overgrown weeds, dead grass, and discarded and damaged toys owned by Seth’s younger brother Caleb.

I pounded on the door, feeling slightly silly having not called in advance before I made my way over, but figuring Seth probably had about as little life as I did.

It was Caleb who answered the door, still wearing his pajamas, wireless game controller in his hand. I pulled my earbuds out and left them hanging by their necklace.

“Hey Regan, “ The twelve year old said, clearly trying to resist the urge to pick his nose in front of me, “Looking for Seth?”

I nodded mutely, taking a drag of my cigarette. Caleb was a cute kid, I liked him, he was smart for his age. I followed him inside, not bothering to put my cigarette out. It wasn’t like anyone else in the household bothered with that; the top sides of rooms had all acquired a permanent yellow stain from years of smoking, and the place reeked of ash and cat pee.

“I don’t think Seth is awake yet.” Caleb said. He looked nervously at me and glanced at the kitchen table. Despite having been friends with Seth for over a decade, Caleb always seemed somewhat intimidated by me. I peered at the collection of snack food piled up on the kitchen table that appeared to have been opened by twelve year old hands. I snatched a cookie from a half eaten packet of them.

“Go play your game,” I said, motioning to the controller still in his hand, “I’ll go bug him.” Caleb gave me about a third of a second to finish my dismissal before vanishing in the direction of the gaming console. I put out my cigarette in the ashtray on the kitchen counter, and descended into Seth’s lair.

Seth’s father had formerly been a heavy drinker, and had turned the basement into a 'for the guys’ chill out space. Then, when he’d remarried, his new wife Helen had forced him to clean up. I’d been there for all of that. The end result was that the basement ended up unoccupied, and it didn’t take long for Seth to abandon his bedroom and take it over. He said he liked the ambiance, I thought it smelled like mildew. Still, it was the coolest place that I wouldn’t get trouble for loitering around in.

I pounded on the door at the bottom of the stairs, but when Seth didn’t answer, I didn’t let that stop me. He’d hidden an emergency key to his room ages ago and forgotten about it. I felt around the top of the doorframe until I found it. The lock was new, I’d been there when he switched it out, and with a rather self satisfied grin, I unlocked the door, strolled inside, and locked the door behind myself.

The windows of the basement were all high up and blocked out with blackout curtains besides. I felt my way carefully down the stairs, running my hands along the low ceiling until I found the set of plugs that controlled 'red alert,’ the system of red Christmas lights that Seth had run throughout the basement. I powered up the lights and the space was thrown into the dim relief of red light and shadow that characterized the area.

Seth was a lump under a pile of blankets, his mattress sitting on the floor amidst piles of clothes and other more questionable things. It was a pretty large space. He had the whole basement to himself and he’d luxuriously filled up the entire volume of it with trash and dirty laundry, in the true tradition of every seventeen year old boy in the universe.

I picked my way over to his aging computer, careful to tiptoe around the more suspicious looking articles of clothing, and started up his tunes. The Seth-blanket-mattress creature mumbled something unintelligible from the other side of the room as the bass started thumping out trance music into the concrete floor. I picked up a small wooden box from his desk and wandered over to the mattress.

“Seth, it’s two in the afternoon.” I said flatly.

From within the blankets I heard “It’s not morning until I say it is.” My response was to drop heavily onto the mattress beside him and lounge against the blanket lump, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just have to smoke this bowl by myself.” I took a baggie of weed out of the box and loaded it into his well used glass pipe. He mumbled a string of profanities but it took until the smoke started to spread out into the air around the mattress that I finally managed to stir him from his cocoon.

“Regan?” He mumbled, “You know how early it is?”

“It’s two in the afternoon Seth.” He groaned and rubbed his eyes, “Damnit, I was supposed to get up at nine to watch Caleb.” he swiped the pipe from me and took a long drag from it, sighing out a cloud of smoke.

“Nine has long come and gone I’m afraid. Were you also supposed to make sure he ate? Because it’s two hours past lunch and I’m pretty sure he got into the junk food.”

He handed me back the pipe, rubbing his face. I hit the piece while he answered, “Yeah I was. Did he let you in?”

I nodded silently, smoke curling out of my nose and lips as I studied him in the dimly lit space. Seth was easily my best friend. We had dated for a bit back when we’d turned sixteen, but after a few awkward sexual encounters, we’d gone back to being friends. He was scruffy, not unattractive but he did the grunge thing more strongly than anyone really needed to. More importantly, my sexuality was a terrifying knot of self loathing and repressed desires, and that particular time-bomb was one I was hoping to dodge until at least my twenties.

Seth twisted out of the blanket cocoon he’d slept in and shrugged into a pair of jeans. I’d seen him naked before, so I wasn’t particularly fussed in seeing him in his boxers. He hit the pipe and handed it back to me, then fished a t-shirt from what I hoped was a clean clothes pile.

“I am so done with this town,” I said before taking another hit off the bowl. I followed him over to the desk and leaned against his shoulders while he browsed news online.

“I hear that.” Seth said, taking the pipe back from me, “Dad’s started drinking again. Helen doesn’t like it.” He rolls his eyes and takes a hit off the pipe and knocks the ash from it out across the back of his hand, “I give the marriage another year or two at most.” I take the pipe from him and return it to its home before lighting up two cigarettes and handing him one.

“You gonna stick around for the fireworks?” I chuckle bitterly.

He snorts, “Yeah, I doubt it. I’m gonna buy a car and go up the valley at the very least, maybe even cross the glass sea, you up for that?”

“You know it.” I drop into the chair next to his that I always sit in.

“Helen’s gonna be home soon, wanna help me hide the evidence of Caleb’s rampage?”

“Not really. He’s your brother. I’ll lurk around and keep you company though.”

He grunted in affirmation and turns up his music to the earsplitting volume required to shake the floors of the entire house. “Once more unto the breach!” He shouted with a grin, and waded back towards the stairs.

I followed him upstairs, traveling through his wake until we’ve cleared the sea of stuff that is the basement floor. Then, the two of us went charging up the stairs.

I mostly just hung around the kitchen, perched on the edge of the counter smoking with the ashtray in hand. Seth convinced Caleb that if the two of them got the house cleaned before Helen got home at four, that he could run around doing whatever he wanted again tomorrow. I’m fairly certain this was the standard routine. At some point I migrated to the living room and started merging with the sofa. I don’t know exactly how much time passed before I drifted onto the news. The anchor was droning on some public interest story about an abandoned government building that was caught in some sort of legal dispute.

It was an old building on the edge of town. Big. I wasn’t sure what it was, but I’d biked past it dozens of times. It turned out from the news that it was abandoned, and had been for some time, but that it had been a retirement home. I roused my mind out of its stupor and started listening to the anchor, it wasn’t often our town actually had news.

The jist of the place was, the Joy Rodgers Home, as it had been called, was built as a navigator’s home and office back around the turn of the century. The town had acquired it in the thirties when it was gifted by the widow of the original builder, and they’d put various things in it throughout the years but it wasn’t particularly useful for anything. Only its value as a historical building had saved it from demolition, but with the fire damage it had received a few months ago, it was unlikely anything would ever be done with it.

“Hey Seth, check this out!” I shouted into the other room. He poked his head in and looked at the screen

“Oh shit, that place.”

“You’ve heard of it? It looks awesome as hell, we should get Harper and Lily and go look around in there.”

“I dunno Regan.” He scratched his scraggly beard. “You know about that fire a few months ago? I heard that some guys chained a dog up in there and set it on fire. I don’t think that’s the sort of place we should go messing around.”

Seth was superstitious. I had done the Standard Middle Class Protestant Christian thing and then ditched religion first chance I got, but he had skipped church and God, and instead believed in spirits and ghosts and all of that. Fortunately for me, that usually made him rather inquisitive, and it was pretty easy to drag him into my irresponsible teenage adventures.

“We’ll take Lily and Harper, safety in numbers.” I shrug. I was more concerned with humans then with ghosts, but with four of us, we’d probably be fine. And we’d have our phones on us. It wasn’t like this would be anywhere near the first time we broke onto government property.

“Place just creeps me out. I don’t know what’s up with it, but it sure gives me the jeebies.”

“Ooh the jeebies. Such fear.” I tease, lighting another cigarette. All I really had to do was appeal to his bravado and he’d do it. If he thought I’d do it, he’d come too to prove he could do it if I could, male ego and all that. I idly wondered if I could drag him into a girl’s bathroom like that as an experiment.

“I’m not scared, but we should still be careful.”

“Of course we’ll be careful, when are we not?” I say, taking another drag of my smoke. “I’ll message Harper and Lily.”

“I can start going down the list if you’d like?” Seth said with a laugh, and headed off to finish cleaning the house.

I sat on the couch for the next forty five minutes texting, and managed to get everyone onboard with the plan, though not any definitive time frame for it. Not that I cared, I had five glorious weeks of freedom left before school started back up, plenty of time to figure something out.

Seth finished getting the house cleaned up and we retreated to the basement shortly before Helen got home from her teaching job. We smoked and drank soda from the mini-fridge Seth had in his basement. We could hear the footsteps increase in frequency upstairs when Seth’s dad got home, and we heard the dull shouts that meant he’d come home drunk again. Seth turned up his music and we browsed the internet. I felt pretty bad for Seth, he didn’t deserve the shit he got from his parents, neither did Caleb. Around seven, Seth had had enough and asked me if I wanted to get some fresh air. There was still shouting coming from upstairs. I suggested we take the kit and go meet Lily and Harper at the water tower. He grunted in approval and grabbed the bag with all our supplies.

One of the nice things about Seth’s basement is that it has a back door, via the storm doors which open into the backyard. We went out that way, quietly, and stole across the backyard into the next yard over to the street behind Seth’s. It was a route we’d taken dozens of times, that we managed with the practised ease of two experienced troublemakers.

Seth was quiet on the trip across town. I could tell he had a lot on his mind. Normally he’s pretty talkative, but my attempts to communicate got nothing but a few grunts. The central tower’s lighting was dimming as day smoothly began to wane into night, and I knew that with it came the curfew I had no plans to pay attention to. As we left the downtown air and climbed the valley’s wall, we could begin to see the walls of the colony floor arcing upwards before disappearing into the summer haze. I was used to the view and it failed to impress me. I spent most of the trip texting Lily, only putting my phone away to creep under the overgrown brush and japanese knotweed to get to the hole in the fence of the municipal water tower.

Surrounded by brush, the tower was a two hundred-some foot tall construction of rusted iron and corrugated steel built sometime during the late fifties. Multiple water pipes fed down from the central tower, but their terminal was lost into the evening humidity. We’d used this place as a hangout for years, and was pretty much our go-to hideout. No one had bothered us there in all the time we’d gone there, and despite the no trespassing signs, we felt pretty secure.

I perched in my usual spot atop one of the giant raised concrete feet of the tower and lit a cigarette, waiting for Lily and Harper to show up. It was summer and the light would stay bright for a long time, even if I had planned on trying to make my curfew, which for the record, I had no intentions of doing.

The metal legs of the tower, the concrete platforms, and the smooth concrete pad beneath the tower were all covered in layers and layers of graffiti. Some of it was my own handiwork, the sloppier stuff, but the large, beautiful murals of swirling colours and detailed scenes were all Lily’s work. She was an amazing artist, it was too bad most of her art was illegal.

“So shit isn’t going well with Helen it looks like.” I said after getting tired of sitting in silence. The afternoon sun still hung high in the sky, baking the air into a humid fog. I took another drag of my smoke, when Seth didn’t say anything in response, I continued “What are you going to do about it, like, really?”

He shook his head. “I dunno Regan. With custody and everything…” Custody of Caleb was the elephant in the room. Caleb was Helen’s, while Seth had been a product of his father’s prior marriage. If Helen divorced Seth’s dad, chances were that she’d get custody of Caleb.

“You could always go with Helen. She’d probably let you, right?”

“I’m not sure if I want to go with Helen.” He laughs somewhat bitterly, “You know, the truth is, my dad’s an asshole, but at least he’s honest about it. Helen’s constantly on this high horse where she thinks we’re this perfect middle class family. And like, anything that makes us deviate from that must be someone’s fault. Someone other than her that is.”

“If it makes you feel any better, my parents are kinda the same, except that I’m the hate sponge for all their disappointments.”

“Yeah but you’re the hate sponge for everyone’s disappointments Regan.” A voice called from above me with a laugh. I looked up, Harper was hanging from the ladder leading to the top of the tower, feet planted, leaning against the metal cage that enclosed the ladder at the bottom.

“Very funny, how’d you get up there without us seeing you?”

“I beat you here and went up top.” He shrugged and climbed onto the chain link cage, lifting himself over it and dropping to the ground with a thump. “Give me one of those.” He stole a cigarette from my pack. “Why didn’t you text when you got here?”

“I figured we were the first ones. Is Lily here already too?”

“Nah, I haven’t seen her.” He lit the cigarette he stole from me. Harper was something of a nerd. He tried constantly to come off as really cool and suave, but all he managed for was kinda dorky most of the time. “So you wanna break into a retirement home, you have something against the elderly I should know about?”

That managed to get a laugh out of Seth. “Its abandoned, I told you that.” I said quickly.

“I’m just messing with you Regan. This is that place out on Jones Pond Road right? The one with all the barbed wire around it?”

“Yeah that’s the one. We think it might be haunted.” I didn’t really believe in ghosts or anything like that. But it made for a fun time, it added an element of strangeness that was absent in our constantly normal little city. Part of me wanted to believe in stuff like that, but the rational parts of me wouldn’t allow it, on some level, I knew, I just knew, that ghosts didn’t really exist, however much I might wish otherwise.

“Spooky. I’m texting Lily and seeing where she’s at.” Harper pulled out his phone and poked at the screen with one finger.

“You wanna get subway or some shit? I don’t really wanna go home and deal with my parents for a while.” I said to Seth. I didn’t really want him to have to go home to get food either.

“Yeah sure. Why don’t we just meet Lily at that Deli up on Meadow Street. I think you can get sandwiches there?”

“Yeah you can.” Harper said. “Also Lily is stuck at home. We should probably go bust her out.”

“Ugh, is her mom drunk again?” I said taking a drag of my smoke.

“She hasn’t said it, but probably.” Harper sighed.

“Well its gonna be dark soon, so why don’t we go rescue Lily, get something to eat, then check out that abandoned place?” Seth said. The light from the central tower was by now dim enough to begin to make out the tangled mechanical structures lurking beneath the light fixtures. Through the haze of evening air, the lights of Mt. Washington were coming on like distant fireflies across the vast gulf of air above our heads.

“Yeah, sounds good to me.” I nodded.

We slipped out of the bolthole the same way we came in.

Lily lived near the top of the valley in the supposedly nice part of town. The houses here were larger, but equally rundown. Lanes were lined with ancient willows, their fronds overgrown and draping into the street. The streetlamps cast areas of shadow and light around the thick branches.

Lily’s parents had divorced when she was ten, and her father had turned gay and gone off to pursue his dream of becoming a navigator. In his absence, her mother simply collapsed in on herself. She worked from home, drank furiously, and took up religion. Never a good mixture.

Lily herself had weathered it all like a champion. She was certainly more well balanced as a person then I was, though I knew it was at least partly a brave front. She was an artist, and a talented one at that.

I pounded on the door of their two-storey home. “Mrs. Emmerson open up!” I hit the door with my fist, knocking like a police officer would.

Harper and Seth stood a safe distance back from the door, arms crossed.

I kept pounding even as the door open and nearly fell inside when Lily’s mother flung the door open.

“Regan?” She aped, “What do you want?” Her voice turned instantly bitter and accusatory.

“I want to hang out with Lily, can she come with us?” I offered, shrinking from the shorter woman.

I just about managed to step back far enough to avoid when she puked on the carpet. I groaned and shouted upstairs to Lily. Then I helped Mrs. Emmerson onto the couch and covered her with a blanket.

Lily came down and by the time we’d finished cleaning up the puke, her mother had fallen asleep on the sofa. We washed our hands and slipped quietly out the door.

By the time we rescued Lily, the evening darkness had settled in fully. The sky was still a bruised purple, the lighting equipment glowed dull red with leftover heat radiating off, and the shape of the cylindrical colony became apparent as the light dimmed. The street lights had begun blinking on, drowning out the glow of the distant city across the interior cavern.

“So we just gonna stay out all night then?” Lily asked as we wandered down the middle of a deserted suburban street.

“I think thats the plan. I definitely don’t wanna go home.” I shrugged, lighting another cigarette from my pack, “And it’s a nice night out.” And it was. We could see all the lamps along the distant country roads as the ground curved upwards to arch above our heads. The streetlights an ocean of glass away twinkled far above us, the central tower was a dark smear across the sky, and the temperature had fallen to that perfectly comfortable summer night level.

“I wish it was like this all the time, I might never go home.” Seth said with a laugh.

“Yeah, that’d go great until around November.” Harper responded. Despite living in an artificial colony, there were still mechanically generated seasons. It was thought to be better on the human body or some such nonsense. Winters were bitter and miserable, when the snow settled heavily onto the ground like a thick white rug.

“I’ll hide in Lily’s basement after that.” Seth answered. Lily chuckled.

“You’d probably get away with it. I don’t think my Mom’s been down there in like, six months at least. I hope you like spiders though.”

The deli loomed up out of the evening darkness as we approached, its brightly lit interior shining out into the night. I snubbed out my half smoked cigarette and we strolled inside.

We each ordered our food, then sat down in a corner booth to wait for it to be prepared. Besides us and the kid working the counter, the place was empty.

My phone started blowing up before too much more time passed, my mother incessantly texting asking where I was and telling me I was violating curfew and had to come home right this minute. I turned my phone off before she started calling. I knew I would get an earful for it eventually, but I wanted to put it off as long as possible.

“I’m going to be grounded to hell and back.” I said with a snort as I turned my phone off and shoved it back in my pocket.

“I think you actually have to pay attention to your parents for that to actually have an effect. Its not like they’d physically stop you from leaving.” Seth said, leaning against the counter waiting for the food.

“Nah, but they’ll take my phone and my computer, make it a pain in the ass to do anything.” I shrugged. “Its whatever, I’ll just use your computer.”

“Your respect for my property is truly astounding.” He said with a chuckle. The food came out a few minutes later, and we set off again into the twilight. The street was quiet save for the humming of the street lights and the quiet, ceaseless chirping of a million crickets. I lit another cigarette as we strolled off into the darkness.

“You know, I’m really pretty sick of this shitty little town.” I said after a long while of quiet, taking a drag of my smoke. “Its okay right now, at night, with you guys, but like…I really kinda hate this place.”

“I know what you mean.” Lily answered. “Nothing ever happens here, its like this place is in stasis. Its 2021 here, forever.” When the colony we lived in had been designed, it was built like an exotic cruise ship, designed to keep its inhabitants happy. In our colony’s case, the three strips of land that constituted the main habitat space of the O’neil Cylinder were modeled after Mars.

And then an American town was unceremoniously dropped on top of all of it, burying the red rocks in cities and forests. We lived in scale model of the Valles Marineris. Separated from us and each other by three giant seas of glass, were Olympus, and Acidalia.

“This place didn’t even exist in 2021.” Harper responded with a laugh, “It was just modeled after..” He held up his fingers like quotation marks, “Late modern american living.”

“It was built in 2049 right?” I asked, I had always sort of half paid attention to history. “Because of that war on earth?”

“Something like that.” Seth nodded. “It used to be better here.”

“Dude, this place was born shitty.” I snorted. “It was engineered to be shitty from the start.”

“You’re too cynical Regan. No, back before the carbon mill shut down?” Seth asked, “I dunno, I think it might have actually been pretty nice here back then. There were all sorts of little shops and things. Like that place the McGuires live now? Pretty sure that was a barbershop back in the day.”

“Yeah, back when people shopped at local stores instead of just sending drones to the distribution warehouse themselves?” I’d heard Seth’s pro-localization arguments before, about how central distribution stagnated the economy, how it was terrible for the community, how it took away jobs and forced businesses to close, but I didn’t shop there anyway. It was all the way on the other side of the highway, and without a car or a drone that might as well have been back in the solar system, racing away from us at 100,000 kilometers an hour.

Our conversation ground abruptly to a halt as the ineffectively fenced in home loomed out ahead of us. I say ineffective, because while there were barbed wire tipped chainlinks, they failed to entirely enclose the place. We walked right in the front door.

“Spooky.” Harper said as he shut the door behind him, the last one inside. A tangle of hallways and rooms seemed to lead off in all directions. According to a faded map in the foyer, there were two floors, a basement, and a sub-basement. There were also three wings. One central wing, and one wing off to each side. I focused on committing the map to memory.

Lily climbed up the stairs and peered up and down the hallways. “I can see the place where the fire was, let’s go check that out.” She beckoned.

We followed her upstairs and found out quickly that an entire wing of the building had been burnt down to the stonework. It was the skeleton of a building, not actually a building proper. The floor collapsed into the basement far below. After Seth managed to intentionally dislodge part of the flooring and send it loudly skittering into the wreckage, we withdrew down the stairs.

I turned my phone back on and started snapping pictures with it’s camera. The flash captured the graffiti-covered walls, ivy clinging from broken windows. Something about the shape of the damage stood out as odd to me. It was as if part of the ground beneath the building had caved in.

“I wanna see the basement, there’s something weird here.” I said finally, the flash of my camera revealing the room in freeze-frame.

“I thought you didn’t believe in ghosts Regan?” Seth teased.

“No I think Regan’s right.” Harper said quietly. “Something does seem weird about this place. Does it feel colder to anyone?”

Now that he mentioned it, yes it did. I pulled out the thermostat app on my phone and the temperature was indeed fifteen degrees cooler than it was outside. “Weird.” I said simply, eyeing the results on my phone suspiciously.

The basement door was locked. Our kit includes bolt cutters and lockpicks. It didn’t stay locked. The basement was even colder than above: I could see my breath in the dim light, and frost was accumulating on the surfaces in layers.

“Have you ever seen anything like this?” Lily asked, snapping her own pictures of the frosted corridors.

“I heard ghosts will lower the temperature of the air as they draw heat out to manifest.” Seth said.

I didn’t believe in ghosts, but the place was measurably cold. It was like a freezer in there, despite there being no obvious equipment at work to cool the air. The airs on the back of my neck rose, and I could feel the goosebumps slowly spreading down my back.

We practically stumbled onto it, though it was hard to miss once we got into the basement. A great misshapen lump of metal sat amidst the twisted girders of the building and huge cracked pieces of pavement. It looked like it had crashed through the floor from beneath our feet, lost all of its inertia in the impact, and crashed back down onto the basement floor. Next to it was the hole it made. The hole was wider than a person stretched out toes to fingertips, and reached deep into the earth beneath us.

“What’s down there? Where’d this come from?” Harper asked the question on all of our minds.

My mind regurgitated the evidence into my head and the answer came to me before I entirely realised what I was saying.

“Its an asteroid. It came from outside, from space.” I peered down into the hole, where a thick tarp was flapping as air raced through its many holes. The air whispered down the tunnel like a spirit, and was sucked out into the darkness below our feet.

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