A trio of graduate students stood outside the gate to the abandoned farm, huddled together against the cold. They were early. None of them had been able to agree on a departure time—Aryana's watch disagreed with Scops's phone, and Valerie had left their phone in the lab and so couldn't be tiebreaker, and it was Scops's car anyway so it was easier to go along with his insistence than to take the risk that he might make one of them drive.
Of course, Scops had only recently returned from a trip to see his family in Nssylai and his phone was still in the wrong time zone, but nobody had noticed that until they'd been on the road for half an hour, and at that point all they could do was find a Starbucks and waste some time there before continuing on their way. It hadn't been enough, and they still had a good twenty minutes until the agreed meeting time—in practice only ten minutes of waiting, probably, but you never knew—but they'd all rather stand out here in the cold than listen to one more second of Christmas radio, which was the only station they'd been able to pick up out here.
"Please explain to me again," Aryana said, "why we're going to a haunted house for Christmas.""It's not a—"
"So they have an excuse to squeal and leap into Marcus's arms," Scops interrupted. "Obviously."
"I can do that whenever I want," Valerie snapped. "Anyway, it's not a haunted house, it was Marcus's idea and not mine, and none of us even celebrates Christmas so I really don't see why you have to make such a big thing out of it. If you didn't want to go maybe you should have said something before we drove 70 miles to Sekudui."
"Someone's in a mood," Aryana said, and sipped her cappuccino.
"Sorry. I don't like being early to things."
She patted their shoulder. "Val," she said, "what I need you to understand is that when you and Marcus invited us to this place, you specifically told us it was not a haunted house, and that's not something anybody was worried about until you mentioned it."
"Also," Scops said, "I respect that you have more information about this than we do, but it does look pretty fucking haunted."
They all fell silent again as they looked across the snowy expanse of farmland. It was December, and very cold, but there was something about the space beyond the gate that looked even colder somehow. Thicker snow. Bigger icicles on that distant barn than any they'd seen in the last town they'd passed through. That eerie, watchful forest, which looked basically like a regular forest in winter but nevertheless had something off about it. Or possibly that was just how forests were. Valerie had never actually been in a forest of any meaningful size, and they were willing to bet their friends hadn't either.
"I see your point," they said.
[Section 1: The Front Gate - 1]
