Chardi followed on Billy's heels as he shot down the hallway and through the pair of heavy double doors. They found themselves in an overgrown courtyard surrounded on all four sides by tall brick walls with banks of dirty broken windows. Brambles, shrubs and young trees reached out of the neglected flower beds, vying for any little bit of sunlight they could reach. In the center of the courtyard was a cracked and dilapidated statue of a woman with a round face and a peaceful expression. She was wrapped in ivy and missing one outstretched hand.

  Billy slowed his jog toward the center of the courtyard and spun in a nervous circle, running his free hand through his hair roughly.

  "We both really saw that, right?" he asked breathlessly.

  Chardi nodded, bracing his hands on his knees and trying to catch his breath. His heart was still pounding, though they really hadn't ran that far.

  "Did you see her before? Is that why you were going off in the school?" Billy asked.

  "Yeah," Chardi rasped. "I saw her disappear into the classroom. And, I saw her near the campsite before that." He still felt a little stunned. He wasn't knowledgeable about visual tricks and illusions, but he wasn't sure how someone could fake a person disappearing into thin air. Though, he supposed it was possible? Maybe with mirrors or something? Maybe, Billy was in on it. But, if he was, he was one hell of an actor.

  Billy's face looked pale, even paler than his already pale skin, his freckles standing out stark and darker than they had before. He had put down his camera down and was pacing back and forth in the small space in front of the statue, running his hands back and forth through his short hair, making the pale hair stand straight up on end. When he turned to Chardi, his eyes were big, his pupils tiny pinpricks.

  "This can't be real," he said, looking at Chardi desperately. "Ghosts aren't real. I've been to all kinds of creepy haunted places and we've never caught anything real!"

  "Could it have been faked?" Chardi asked uncertainly. He pushed himself to stand straight even though his instinct was to make himself as small as possible. But, he couldn't let himself look that weak in front of a relative stranger.

  Billy frowned and rubbed the tips of his fingers across his forehead. He looked down at his shoes and seemed to really think about it.

  "Maybe you could with mirrors? Or a really well painted background? But, you walked from one side of that room to the other. Those kind of tricks only work if you can get the audience to stand in one specific spot," Billy muttered to himself.

  "So, it couldn't be faked," Chardi said with a frown of his own.

  Billy's head popped up and he regarded Chardi with big frightened eyes. "Ghost aren't real," he reiterated.

  "I fucking agree," Chardi grumbled. "But then what the did we just see?"

  Billy cussed and started pacing again. Chardi was feeling exhausted. He couldn't take much more and it was barely noon. He cast around for somewhere to sit and noticed a small stone bench under a blanket of ivy. He considered pushing the ivy aside, but decided to just sit on it instead. He curled over his knees and hugged his stomach.

  He hated this. What the fuck was going on?

  "I've seen her too," Billy said quietly, almost to himself, after a few more minutes of pacing.

  "What?" Chardi grunted, looking up from contemplating the tips of his shoes.

  "Ever since we got here and did the initial walk through, I've felt like I've been seeing people out of the corner of my eye. Like, every time I turn around I just miss someone running around a corner or moving back behind me. And then, before you got here, I could have swore I saw her through the windshield of the van. But, I thought- I don't know what I thought," Billy shook his head and crouched down where he stood, groaning miserably into his knees.

  Chardi watched Billy for a while, but it didn't look like he was going to stand up any time soon. Chardi wasn't much of a fan of Billy, but it was hard not to feel bad for the guy. At least Chardi had gone through something like this before. It sounded like Billy had never experienced anything before that day. And, worst of all, the girl was seemed to be following Billy around.

  What was the sense in that? If the girl was supposed to scare Chardi for the camera, why would Derek tell her to follow Billy around? Or, did she just like Billy? He was pretty conventionally handsome, except for all the scars. Maybe she was just a normal preteen girl and was gravitating toward Billy despite being advised to scare Chardi.

  "Do you think Derek would be likely to set up something like this?" Chardi asked. He had been spinning in circles in his own head for a while and needed to bounce some of his ideas off of someone and Billy was still sitting there. He had plopped down to sit criss-crossed on the weed choked walk some time ago and looked up with a miserable expression when Chardi spoke.

  "Normally, I would say no," Billy said slowly. "Yes, he absolutely fakes evidence and yes he's probably clever enough to set something up. But, he's never bothered trying to trick crew or guests before. There was no point. But, ever since started planning the shoot for this place he's been ... different."

  "Different how?" Chardi asked with a frown.

  "Like secretive. And, manic," Billy explained, scowling down at some weeds. He nervously yanked them up and started to shred them in his hands. "I'm his camera man on all his YouTube stuff, you know? I've been helping him do investigations for years. And, like, he's not the most open person, I know that. Ever since I was a kid, there were always things he held back from me. But, lately, it's like he won't talk to me about anything. Everything about this investigation was a secret, a big secret. Fucking Cooper knows everything about it, but he bites my head off if I so much as ask a question."

  "Why would he be secretive about it?" Chardi asked.

  "Fuck if I know," Billy grumbled.

  "Why would he tell Cooper but not you?" Chardi asked.

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  Billy frowned down at the bits of shredded grass in his lap and reached out to pull up another long stem. "Cooper is super sketchy," he explained, after thinking for a second. "The obvious explanation is that Derek is up to some fuck shit and knows that I wouldn't go for it. But, Cooper is down for anything that will make him money or that he thinks is 'fun'," Billy included finger quotes and everything.

  "Like fooling some stranger into thinking he's having a mental breakdown?" Chardi asked with a scowl.

  Billy looked up again at that, concern drawn bold across his handsome features. "You said my brother was stalking you before, right?"

  It was Chardi's turn to look away. There was a pretty purple flower blossoming to his right, but he had no idea what it was. It gave him something to look at other than Billy's face.

  "He showed up at my college campus and cornered me at a coffee shop. He told me some stuff about myself that I never told anyone and my name shouldn't be in any official records about it either. I almost punched him in the face, but he offered me a lot of money and I was on the verge of being homeless. It all seems a little too convenient, don't you think?" Chardi shot the last part at Billy, expecting him to defend Derek and wanting to get the first shot in.

  But, Billy looked upset rather than defensive. His brow and mouth were crumpled and as soon as Chardi made eye contact, he looked away.

  "I'm really sorry," Billy said after a while, his voice sounding raspy. "I had no idea he was doing anything like that. I really wouldn't have been okay with that."

  "It's okay," Chardi grumbled. "I mean, it's not okay. He's an asshole. But, at least I was able to make rent."

  "I'm sorry for snapping at you before too," Billy added. "This whole investigation has been a shitstorm since it started. Derek isn't talking to me, Cooper is being a smug asshole and Brad and Elijah are being their normal annoying selves. At least the new grip seems fine. But, I still shouldn't have snapped at you. It wasn't your fault."

  Chardi relaxed a little at that . It shouldn't have meant much, but he almost never got apologies. He knew he was loud and abrasive. Even if he was in the right, most people assumed he was the asshole just because of how loud he was. He could count the number of sincere apologies he had received in his life since going into foster care on one hand.

  "Apology accepted," Chardi mumbled. "I can understand being stressed. I was too."

  "Yeah, I bet," Billy sighed. "What was the thing that Derek dug up anyway?" he asked. Chardi threw him a warning glare and Billy immediately backpedaled, "Not that you have to tell me! It's not important. I was just curious."

  Chardi glared at Billy and he looked back uncertainly. A little voice in the back of his head asked him what he really had to lose by sharing with Billy. Obviously, Derek already knew about what happened with the Faultons. Based on what Billy had just said and his weird interaction with Cooper when they were introduced, this Cooper guy likely also knew about it. How much longer until the rest of the crew knew? Until everyone knew? And, Billy seemed like he was in a rough spot. Though, of course, maybe it was all a set up and Billy was just a very talented actor. But, Chardi's gut didn't think so.

  "I've, uh, been in foster care since I was thirteen. I was raised by just my dad before that, but he was murdered," Chardi said haltingly, staring at his shoes.

  "Jesus," Billy breathed. "I'm really sorry."

  "Yeah," Chardi agreed. "I was shuffled around a lot. I wasn't dealing well with my dad's death. I was seeing a therapist, but I was struggling. I was having night terrors and hallucinations and acting out and-" he cut himself off, not sure what he meant to say anything. "A lot was going on," he settled on.

  "Then, when I was fifteen, I was placed with this couple. The Faultons. They seemed weird, but nice. They had a lot of rules, but I was settled down a little by then. But, I started having really..." Chardi choked, old memories shuffling around behind his eyes. He squeezed his eyes shut and tried to push the rest of the words out. "I had these really vivid paranoid delusions. I dreamed that I would see other kids in the house, in my bedroom."

  Images flashed in his mind's eye, like a horrific slideshow. Laura in her blood spattered nightgown staring at him from the side of his bed. Davon in a dirty ripped dinosaur t-shirt with the side of his head dented in. Mindie and her twisted broken legs pulling herself across his floor. Bile flooded up Chardi's throat. He swallowed it back down.

  "I believed so strongly that the things I was seeing were real kids and that they had really been murdered in that house, that I sneaked out one night and started digging in the backyard. And, I found something."

  He had struggled with the heavy shovel he had pulled from the garden shed. At fifteen he was the same height he was at twenty, but significantly thinner. He had dug and dug as hard as he dared, glancing back up at the dark windows of the house with every shovel full of dirt.

  He barely had to dig two feet down before he uncovered a single dirty decaying hand, much too small to belong to an adult.

  "So, I went to the police."

  He walked there in his pajamas, covered in dirt, his feet cut up and blistered from running barefoot through quiet neighborhood streets until he finally reached the police station that served their small town. He banged on the door frantically until a startled police deputy let him in. What happened next was a blur. He knew he had been talking a mile a minute, but he was never able to remember exactly what he said. But, he remembered the concerned face of the middle aged woman who answered the door for him, the scratchy wool blanket she wrapped around his shoulders and the watery hot chocolate in a waxed cup that she had handed him. He remembered sitting there shaking while she called what seemed like a million people on her desk phone, shooting him reassuring smiles every few minutes.

  "Somehow, I turned out to be right. The police who showed up went to the backyard first and what I saw was real. There really were missing kids buried in their backyard," Chardi rasped.

  It was all a lot more horrific than what he was saying. It was months of him seeing weird things in the hallways of that house, visions of dead kids in his room at night, the pervasive paranoia that followed him all throughout the day. And afterward Chardi was such a nervous mess that he had to be admitted to an inpatient mental hospital clear across the state to recover. The doctors theorized that he must have subconsciously realized what his foster parents were doing and the hallucinations and night terrors were his own mind trying to warn him about what he sensed in his gut had happened. He had experienced similar hallucinations after his father's murder and the stress of living with the Faultons must have caused a relapse in his severe PTSD. That's what they said, anyway.

  And afterward nobody wanted him. Every foster kid was damaged goods in some way, but he must have developed some kind of reputation. No foster family would take him, so he was stuck in Juvenile Detention for months only to be punted to a big children's home where it seemed like every kid knew the story about him seeing the ghosts of dead foster kids at his last home. Most of the kids avoided him like the plague and the ones who didn't just wanted to pick and poke at him until he snapped. He beat the shit out of three kids there and it didn't matter that they had broken two of his ribs, four of his fingers and knocked out two of his teeth. He got sent back to Juvenile Detention and it took almost a year before he got placed again afterward.

  "Jesus," Billy croaked. "That's-"

  "I'm not psychic," Chardi said fiercely. He could feel a sheen of tears glimmering in his eyes from the wash of bad memories, but he didn't care to hide them. He fixed Billy with a glare. "I've been through some terrible shit. Sometimes my mind fills in the blanks for me when I don't want to see bad things. But, your brother believes the rumors about me. He believes I really see things. Or, so he says."

  Billy rubbed his hand over his mouth roughly. "You think-? I mean, Derek wouldn't- Derek's a dick, but he wouldn't fuck with someone's mental health." Billy looked away with a heart broken expression. "At least, I don't think he would."

  "I don't know what the fuck is going on here, but your brother took my meds and I can't afford a ride out of here even if I was willing to leave without them."

  Billy turned back to Chardi, his face smoothed out to determination. "Let me help you. If Derek really did this, he's totally out of line."