this is the complete piece i wrote for @thezinezone ‘s STRANGE CONSTELLATIONS, a trc zine all about the gangsey. i loved writing for it - keeping under the max word count was the hardest part! the final zine is beautiful so consider getting a copy and supporting a great cause
It’s Gansey’s yearning for ostensibly normal post-graduation rites of passage that’s to blame. Well, that, and Henry’s need to encourage every bad idea any of them have ever had.
“You’re already going on a road trip,” Ronan bitches, slinging an oddly malformed duffle bag into the trunk of his car. “This is a waste of time.”
“Your oh-so-valuable time,” Blue says, with slightly less bite than she might have used a year previous. So, no actual hate, but a decent seeming of it. She is wearing knee-length khaki shorts, like a spectacularly unsexy version of Indiana Jones, and an oversized ACDC t-shirt with the sleeves ripped off.
Gansey is currently unloading a bargain box of twelve white candles into the Pig. Watching this, Adam says, “Isn’t the point of camping having a campfire?”
“The point of camping is pissing in the woods,” Henry chirps from the front seat of the BMW. He claimed it upon arrival, with a grand cry of ‘shotgun!’ despite that none of them cared to compete with him for it, and has been doing something with his phone ever since. Selfies, Adam suspects.
“These aren’t intended to replace a campfire,” Gansey explains. “They’re for the seance.”
There’s a brief moment of silence. Even Henry looks up, expression shifting from ‘smize’.
“You lived with a dead guy once,” Ronan says eventually. He doesn’t continue, but he doesn’t really need to.
Gansey looks perturbed by their reactions, almost affronted. “It’s a thing.”
“Ineloquent,” Henry comments. Whether it’s a criticism is debatable, considering the growing delight on his face.
“Camping in the woods, marshmallows, figuring out which tent Henry is going to sleep in, amateurish communication with spirits - they’re all part of the experience.”
“Obviously, I’ll be sleeping in your tent,” Henry says. He’s not wrong - it is obvious. “Blue requires my body heat, and Ronan might dream a murderer or attempt to hold my hand in his sleep.”
“In your dreams,” Ronan replies from where he’s retreated to the driver’s seat of the BMW. There’s the distinct sound of someone being hit, and a squawk.
“Yes, it is a thing. From Cabin in the Woods,” Blue tells Gansey.
“Wrong Turn,” Ronan contributes.
“Blair Witch Project.”
“Cabin Fever.”
“Do all those movies contain seances?” Adam interjects.
“Don’t ask me,” Ronan replies. Adam can’t hear the shrug, but he knows it happens anyway. “I haven’t seen any of them.”
“My point is that you should not base your ideas of typical teenage experiences on films where most of the teenagers involved end up brutally murdered,” Blue continues. “Plus, you know. Our lives thus far.”
“This is not like that,” Gansey says. “That was magic. This is teenage incompetence, and the worst that will come of it is irresponsible fire management involving the candles.”
Even Adam makes a disgusted sound at that. There’s rustling from the front of the BMW, and then Gansey is at once attacked with a still-laced sneaker and a hat last seen perched on Henry’s hair. The hat falls short, but the shoe bounces off Gansey’s left thigh when he moves into its path trying to evade it.
“When we get murdered in the woods, it’s your fault,” Blue intones, for a moment sounding just like Maura.
The fact of the matter is that most of the area within a few hours drive of Henrietta has felt the imprint of, at the very least, Gansey’s feet in his previous explorations. Instead of putting him off of his idea of camping, this has just imbued him with the impression that he knows of all the best camping areas, even if he has never personally stayed at one.
Adam sleeps most of the drive once he’s tuned out the sound of Henry and Ronan’s bickering, stretched awkwardly across the back seat of the BMW, and only wakes when the engine turns off.
“C’mon Parrish,” Ronan chides, twisted around so that he can shake Adam’s ankle. Like most things about him, it’s a study in contrasts - brisk voice, soft expression. “Wakey wakey.”
“I am awake,” Adam replies, which is at least seventy percent true. “We here?”
“No, we’re on the side of the road, I just had to make a quick stop to bury Cheng’s body. Yeah, we’re here.”
“You can’t kill him. Can you imagine how much Blue and Gansey would bitch about it?” Adam peels his face off of the interior of the car. He might have drooled on it, but if so it’s not the first time.
“It truly hurts me that that is your only concern,” Henry says from somewhere outside the car.
“Yeah, I bet your heart is breaking, you annoying fucker,” Ronan replies, which means that his irritation has crossed over from his normal levels to whichever Henry seems capable of inciting. Adam deals with this by pushing himself out of the car and into the great outdoors, ignoring it entirely.
Blue is allowing Gansey to help her into her backpack over by the Pig. The gracious nature of it is new, but when he watches it Adam can just about imagine Blue in her thirties acting just the same way. Occasionally, anyway. He doubts she’ll ever change that much.
“Cute,” Ronan commentates, seemingly oblivious to the fact he is putting Adam’s pack over one of his shoulders even as he says it. “We walking, or what?”
“It’s an hour hike,” Gansey says, shouldering his own pack, as though he hasn’t already told them it’s an hour hike multiple times. They’ve walked far further without half as much organisation, which Adam assumes is ‘part of the experience’ also. Gansey is, as ever, a gleaming example to hikers everywhere, down to his well-broken-in boots and his precise understanding of hike planning. “Is everyone ready?”
“Yes mother,” Blue replies, elbowing him in the ribs and ignoring that Henry is still fighting with his own pack over by the BMW. “Lead the way.”
The area Gansey has selected for them to camp in is, admittedly, quite lovely. It’s not Cabeswater - nothing else is - but the grass is long and rich-smelling, and there’s a tiny stream curving around the edge of the clearing on three sides, murmuring sweetly to itself.
The tents are quickly raised side-by-side and then abandoned in favour of establishing a fire pit. By the time they’ve collectively gathered stones, wood and Ronan’s obviously-dreamed lighter, the shadows are stretching long. Blue is allowed the honour of lighting the fire, though Adam is the one who nurses it into something other than a pathetic smoke trail.
“Dinner,” Gansey announces with obvious relish once they’re seated, and produces five packages of freeze-dried meals. “Would you like beef stroganoff or beef stroganoff?”
“Were they having a sale?” Henry asks, accepting his gingerly.
“I thought it would be the one least likely to look edible,” Gansey replies. “I was curious.”
“Not curious enough to investigate the multitude of other options, I suppose.”
“Mostly I thought it would be easier to prepare them together,” Gansey admits. “Blue?”
Blue was apparently in charge of carrying the cooker, and Henry the metal pot. True to Gansey’s prediction, the resultant brown sludge they cook looks utterly disgusting, though the smell is surprisingly inviting. It’s only when they go to serve it that they find that, while Adam brought the tin bowls, Ronan didn’t bring the cutlery. They eat with their fingers instead, Adam’s turning pink with the heat of it and his mouth.
Gansey also has all the necessary ingredients for s’mores, which they blacken in the fire a few times before Adam gives up and uses the cooker instead. Gansey eschews that in favour of sugar-charcoal, even when Henry Googles and recites statistics of charcoal as a carcinogen. Blue puts him in a chocolate-smeared headlock to stop him, and his phone nearly falls into the fire.
It’s full dark when Gansey, his contacts exchanged for glasses glinting in the light, starts to drift a bit. There’s a quietude in him now that isn’t emptiness, but instead something bigger. Like Cabeswater is living inside of him, a complicated and immense kind of peace, and even as that calls to the like in each of them, the rest of them have to act as the anchors to hold Gansey here.
It’s not so bad, really. All it takes is Henry elbowing him and passing him a candle to bring him back.
“It’s time,” he says, all delight, as Henry gives the rest of them candles too. “Should I refer to the WikiHow page for seances, do you think?”
“Please do,” Henry replies, passing Adam his candle. It’s a chunky, inelegant thing with a crooked wick, and it smells like a caricature of vanilla.
Blue squints at Adam for a moment, and then snatches the candle from his hands. “Not you.”
“Excuse me?”
“She’s right,” Gansey mutters after a moment, brow furrowing. “We don’t any of your actual magic involved in our pseudo-magical ritual. Scram.”
“By that logic, Ronan shouldn’t be involved either,” Adam points out, though he does scram.
“He’s awake, it’s fine,” Henry replies. “Lynch, no magic for the next ten minutes.”
“No problem,” Ronan says lazily, still lying beside the fire. “I’m not holding any candles.”
“They go at the cardinal points,” Gansey says, and then produces a compass so he can place them correctly. Then he extracts a large bag of salt from his bag, holding it aloft. “Henry, pour this in a circle around us, if you will. Be careful not to leave any gaps.”
“This is beginning to sound suspiciously like one of movies you mentioned earlier,” Henry says to Ronan, though he does as bid anyway.
Once the salt is poured in a vague oval shape, the candles are placed and lit, and the others sit in their Gansey-assigned places, the ceremony can apparently begin. Adam settles in the mouth of one of the tents, watching them thrown into relief by the campfire in the centre of the circle, Blue’s face painted gold and the line of Ronan’s spine a silhouette.
“Oh! We need an offering,” Gansey says. “I hope you all brought something suitable?”
Thus begins a ten minute debate on what can be classified as suitable. In the end, they have a handful of wildflowers (Gansey), a collection of pennies (Henry), a tin cup of water from the stream (Blue), and a stick of gum as well as an empty wrapper (Ronan, obviously). His assertion that Noah would have loved it is the only thing that stops Gansey from sending him out of the circle to hunt for something ghosts would like better.
They deposits the offerings in the stream-washed pot, and then resettle, reaching out to join hands. Gansey prompts, “Henry?”
Henry takes over without pause, all ringmaster-grandeur. “Welcome, kind spirits, inside our circle. We’ve gathered here to commune with you in the hope that you’ll show us a sign of your presence. Please, speak with us.”
In the following silence, there’s an unmistakable sense of actual expectancy from the four of them in their flesh-and-salt circle. Even when you’re performing a WikiHow seance, it’s hard to remove the idea that it really might work when you’ve seen real magic.
There’s nothing. Adam listens, hears nothing, and then looks into the fire to the things he can always see if he looks long enough.
“Is anyone with us?” Blue asks. The shapes in the flames brighten in response to her voice, but Adam blinks them away.
“That was boring,” Ronan says after approximately two minutes of absolutely nothing happening.
“That was perfect,” Gansey crows.
“We really should have brought an Ouija board,” Henry muses. “For maximum effect.”
“The maximum effect of nothing fucking happening?”
“Let’s end the ritual,” Blue says sternly. “In case.”
“Thank you for your presence,” Gansey says. “Go in peace.”
It’s probably Adam’s imagination that the fire ripples just a little bit with Gansey’s words, like someone has just moved past it. No one else notices it, anyway.
Adam jerks awake because Ronan does, because it’s impossible not to pressed this close and because by now it’s habit.
“It’s okay,” Adam is already mumbling, and then jerks again when Ronan, sounding much more alert than he does, demands, “Did you hear that?”
Adam listens. There’s a rustling outside of the suddenly-very-flimsy tent walls, and for a moment he enters the pleasant fantasy that it might just be the wind before he realises that there is no wind. Instead, it’s the sound of something moving nearby - something large.
“It’s probably just a bear,” he says, though quietly.
There’s not much light in the tent, but he can see that Ronan’s eyes are wide as he hisses, “I can’t believe you can say ‘just a bear’.”
Instead of continuing that...potential argument, Adam pushes himself up, rustling free of the sleeping back and groping for the flashlight by the tent door.
“Adam.”
It’s said in his ear, breathless and half-whispered. Literally breathless - there’s no warmth of exhaled air.
Also, it’s his deaf ear.
The strangeness of it is compounded when Gansey says from outside the tent, the kind of calm that just barely covers for alarm, “Ronan, Adam. Get up. Slowly.”
Adam unzips the tent door and slides free, feeling the intensity of Ronan’s movement behind him as he follows. It’s black outside besides the very faint glow of a few embers and the stars overhead, and Adam can only tell where Gansey is because of the sound of his quickened breath.
“Look,” Gansey whispers, and Adam nearly says at what when he sees what Gansey means.
It’s dark. There’s no explanation behind the two matching pinpricks of red-orange light at a edge of the clearing just beyond the edge of the trees. Eyes, set higher that they would be on any normal-height human.
Ronan mutters a curse, clearly seeing it too. Henry, despite having seen Cabeswater bleed to death, says, “Mothman?” in a voice that trembles but still has a tracery of humour in it, because that’s just who he is.
“What do we do?” Blue asks. Adam can’t tell where she is in the dark.
“Running water,” the voice in his ear whispers again. There’s a echo of command there, and also sudden and welcome familiarity.
“Across the stream,” Adam tells the others. “Backwards. No sudden movements.”
It’s only the star-shine that means they can find the stream at all, nevermind backwards and too frightened to look away from the eyes. There’s no doubting that’s what they are, despite the fact they don’t blink - behind them, there’s intent, alien and only barely readable as that at all. Adam’s bare feet slip in carefully, the water surprisingly deep but the bottom firm enough to hold his weight. The other four do the same, hissing at the cold of it.
“Now what?” Ronan asks, his hand finding Adam’s.
“Cross it. Get to the other side,” Adam says, with sudden surety. “I don’t think it can follow-”
It happens very quickly. Blue, off to Adam’s left, draws in a quick breath and stumbles over something on the streambed, falling backwards in the stream with a splash and a sharp, “Fuck!” There’s a soundless moment where nothing happens, and then there’s a long lowing noise like a big animal dying.
“Fuck,” Ronan echoes, and jerks in Blue’s direction to pull her free of the water even as he shoves Gansey up onto the bank.
Adam, torch in hand, flips the switch. The beam of it falls directly on the - thing as it bounds across the clearing, strides too long and shambling, like the body can’t quite keep up with the intent of whatever is inside of it. It’s all fur and stench, the awful smell of death. Henry makes a low, sick sound, dragging Adam back over the stones along with him. They fall back onto the bank together, scrabbling up onto the grass.
For a moment, Adam doubts. The thing is so tall it looks like it could simply step across the water. There’s no explanation for the way it halts at the far edge of the stream and looks down at the water, close enough they can see every falling-apart inch of its hide. It looks like it crawled from a grave. Maybe it did.
It makes that noise again, a gentle and carrying threat. Adam’s heart is beating so hard he thinks he could drop dead, half-tangled in Henry and aware there’s no outrunning the thing if the voice is wrong.
His flashlight goes out. Blue shrieks, and there’s a flash of bright white like lightning from their side of the stream to the other, illuminating the thing for a split second before it makes impact. There’s a rush of noise and movement, retreating, and then the flashlight comes back to life. There’s nothing there.
“...is it gone?” Henry hisses, pushing himself up from his elbows. “What did you do, Parrish?”
“Nothing,” Adam replies, distracted by covering each inch of darkness with the beam of his flashlight looking for movement. There’s nothing, besides what looks like a few gobbets of meat on the ground and impressions of distorted footprints. “It wasn’t me.”
“Christ fucking alive,” Ronan says. “Was that…?”
“Noah?” Blue whispers.
There’s no wind, no voice murmuring in either of Adam’s ears. But on the other side of the stream, the fire, just embers, flickers back to life.
Final piece for @thezinezone‘s Strange Constellations!
[Image description: Richard Gansey III, Blue Sargent, Noah Czerny, Adam Parrish, Ronan Lynch, and Henry Cheng as overlapping constellations. Above them is a bird-shaped nebula.]
oh yall i wrote a piece for the strange constellations zine, which is a trc ot6/gangsey zine! @thezinezone thanks for organizing! it’s called corpse road. here’s a preview.
They hadn’t been at the churchyard for ten minutes before Henry started complaining.
Adam had expected the drive out to be an agony, but it wasn’t one. At least, not much. He had been expecting Henry to drive — it was his car, after all — but Blue had been in the driver’s seat when the Fisker trundled into the St. Agnes lot to pick him up, with Henry cheerful in shotgun.
It was a better start to this whole endeavor than Adam had expected, and it left him strangely wrong-footed.
Adam wasn’t completely sure why Henry was there. Blue, he understood: closure, or tradition, or both. She had done this every year. He wasn’t sure whether Blue’s mother just wasn’t up to it, or hadn’t wanted to go, but she had volunteered him to come along, and Adam had agreed.
At the churchyard, Henry had taken one look at the wall Blue and Adam were leaning against, and flatly refused to join them.
"Look at it," Henry said. "There's no way that's stable."
"It's lasted this long," Adam said.
"It's overgrown," Henry said. Admittedly, there were a few green tufts clinging to the stone, but they were mostly moss.
Adam said as much.
"No way," Henry said. He pointed past Blue, where some determined grass stalks had in fact found a foothold. "Those are weeds. All weeds turn into poison oak when it gets dark and then you've got a rash. No thank you."
"I've got calamine in my bag," Blue said. She was struggling into a coat with the sleeves cuffed at least twice; it was — or perhaps had been — Gansey's.
Adam finished fiddling with the flowers in his hands. They had pulled over at a gas station, despite the fact that the Fisker was well over half full, and Adam had felt the ley line buzzing, faintly, under his skin. Blue and Henry had gone inside, but Adam had waded into the overgrown lot behind the station shop, and past that into the woods looming past the edge of the lot, until he could feel the ley line bubbling up through his feet.
Then he had picked a few wildflowers. He hadn’t been sure why. It had just felt like the thing to do.
Henry and Blue were waiting for him in the car by the time he reemerged with a fistful of flowers, and neither of them had commented. But now that they had arrived, Adam knew why he’d picked the flowers.
He was trying to arrange them into something like a bouquet. He didn’t have any string with him, to tie them together. Blue gravely handed him a very tiny and sparkly hairclip: a hinged butterfly, with grasping claws.
Adam stared at it, feeling scraped raw. “Thank you,” he said as he fastened the clip around the stalks.
“He always liked those,” Blue said. She sounded gruff, the way she always did when ambushed by unexpected emotion. “I already said hello,” she said, and gestured towards the ruins where they’d buried Noah’s bones.
Adam turned his back towards her, and went inside the ruined church. There wasn’t a marker on the grave, but it wasn’t as though he could forget where they’d buried him. He stood above what was left of Noah, and knelt to put the flowers down. He didn’t know what to say.
He pressed two fingertips into the dirt, next to the tiny spray of wildflowers. The line murmured in his head.
A short preview of my piece for the upcoming “Strange Constellations” Zine put on by the fabulous @thezinezone !
It was so much fun writing this and I can’t wait to see everyone’s finished pieces! Preorders open July 8th for both digital and physical copies, so keep an eye out
I’m BACK and I’ve brought a preview! I’ve been working on the cover for the Strange Constellations raven cycle zine, and I’m super excited to finally be able to show you guys! I can only post cropped images now, but be sure to check back at @thezinezone for updates! (Preorders open July 1!!)
