THE PRESENT

By the morning, Liv had done what Liv did best, sifting out memories like an Instagram model filters out cellulite and laugh lines. The night before, she'd gotten high with Graham, they'd shared some laughs, he'd become agitated, she'd called it a night. No deep dive needed, and as for introspection, it could go fuck itself.

She opened her bedroom door, nearly colliding with a blurry-eyed Graham. He held out a wicker tray loaded with an assortment of bakery and a cup of steaming black coffee.

"Holy shit, come in," she said sliding the door open wide. "Bring the caffeine and carbs with you."

"I didn't know what you like so I gave you choices." He placed the tray on the sideboard near the door and took a seat on the edge of her bed. "There's a chocolate croissant, a blueberry scone, and several kinds of fruit-filled Danishes."

Liv picked up the croissant and coffee cup, alternating between bites and swigs several times before speaking. "Thanks, this is perfect."

"Sure." He ran his fingers through a tangle of curls. His eyes darted around the room, gaze landing anywhere but on Liv. "Um... about last night."

"Last night I was pretty trashed," Liv said before he could elaborate, wiping powdered sugar from her chin with the sleeve of her shirt. "My memory tends to be selective. Did we sleep together?"

"Of course not!" He jumped off the bed like he'd developed a deadly allergy to it. "Why would you think that?"

"Maybe because you're acting weird and awkward."

"By bringing you breakfast?"

"By bringing up last night." Liv punctuated each word. "Some things should be chalked up to drug consumption. That's it. No need to analyze them, or think about them at all, especially given what we need to deal with today. We have Helina to find, right?"

He seemed to catch her drift. "I... guess? For the record, though, if we had slept together, it's not something you'd forget."

"See what I mean?" Liv took another bite of the croissant. Warm chocolate coated her throat. "Totally awkward."

A full cup of coffee downed and a second pastry consumed, Liv and Graham performed the herculean task of crossing the hallway and opening an unlocked door.

Once they were in, the room wasn't entirely what she expected.

To the left of the entryway, a closet without a door contained an exploding pile of half folded laundry. Behind the clothing, square cardboard storage boxes had been stacked to the ceiling. Beyond the closet was Helina's bed, which had been shoved into a corner to provide more floor space. A teal yoga mat leaned up against the wall. Unlike the mess of a closet, her bed had been neatly made, with corners of a beige comforter neatly tucked, and forest green accent pillows stacked in a neat row against a rattan headboard.

None of this felt jarring to Liv—Helina had always embraced a chaotic mix of organized and messy. One day, she'd brought home a label maker and labeled every drawer and cabinet with a list of their contents. A week later, she pulled out from under her bed a years' worth of school papers and notebooks, piled them up in the hallway, and declared them to be too much for her to deal with. She proceeded to ignore them for the next three months until Liv finally scooped them up and deposited them in the recycling bin.

The uncontrolled laundry situation and the tidy bed—none of it stood out to Liv as out of character, but when she brought her attention to the opposite side of the room, she had to step back just to take it all in.

"Holy shit," she said. That wall looked as though Tesla and one of the Fox sisters from the Spiritualist movement time-traveled to the twenty-first century and gave birth to a haunted techno-hoarder love baby.

The entire length of the room had been taken over with electronics—computer, laptops and spare parts, monitors, the subwoofer Liv remembered from when they'd lived in the dormitory, plus several newer, more expensive varieties. Several plastic crates filled with thermal meters, digital thermometers, EMF gauges, EVP recorders, and flashlights sat stacked next to a wobbly desk, which looked like it might collapse if one more piece of equipment as much as thought about grazing its surface. Not one bit of real estate on that half of the room had been left unoccupied.

"It's overwhelming, I know," Graham said while examining an empty Faraday bag hanging on a hook near Helina's largest monitor.

"Not sure where to begin," Liv said.

He pulled a chair out from the desk and motioned for her to sit. "Thankfully, I've already done a bit of the leg work. Hold on, I'm going to go grab another chair."

While she waited for Graham to return, Liv pressed on Helina's workstation and waited for it to boot up. A fan purred to life as the processer began working. Graham came back with one of the chairs from her room and took a seat next to her.

He typed a password into Helina's login page and her home screen appeared, a picture of the two smiling siblings as teenagers standing in front of the house she now occupied serving as the background. A file icon covered Helina's right eye, but there was no mistaking it was her, a lighter-complected, softer featured version of her brother, both of them with curly hair blown about in the wind.

"She shared her passcode with you?" Liv asked.

"Not a chance. I figured it out. Took me almost a whole day."

He had typed too fast for her to track it. "What is it?"

His hand froze on the mouse, mid click. "I don't know if I should say."

"What am I going to do with it, Graham? I'm here to figure out what happened to your sister. I might need access to her computer even if you're not here."

"It's not that. Look—" He bit his lip and then seemed to reconsider. "I tried a bunch of dates. Her birthday. Mine. Even yours."

"What is it then?"

"0513."

He looked down; Liv looked up.

She found a spot on the ceiling where a leak in the roof must have at one point caused a stain. It had been plastered over so that it wasn't as smooth as the rest of the ceiling. She fixated on it, waiting, waiting, waiting, so that when she did speak, she would sound human rather than like a miserable, croaking frog.

0513. That fucking bitch.

"All right," she said, sounding almost calm. "Now I know. Let's see what we've got here. Walk me through what you've found."

"You sure you're okay?"

Her skin heated. Rage would destroy her or those around her if she let it. "Show me or step aside and so I can do my own research."

"Fine. There're files over on the right. You should probably go through the one titled GF Notes. I tried, but... I don't know. I'm hoping you can make more sense of it than I could."

"All right, let's start with that then."

"Wait. I wanted to show you something else first." He opened a web browser and clicked on a site saved to the bookmark bar called PSN.

"Helina was obsessed with this forum. Paranormal Spirits United. You ever hear of it?"

The forum page loaded, with a variety of topics ranging from Sasquatch sightings to alien encounters to psychic visions. "Sure. It's been around since Helina and I... Anyways, it's been a while. Lots of LARPers, as I recall. Unserious people."

"Well, LARPers aside, it's time to reacquaint yourself. Some of the stuff I saw Helina posting—it's not unserious. I tracked you down and called you largely because if it. You... you need to read for yourself."

Liv clicked onto Helina's activity, finding a topic discussion she'd started five days prior to her disappearance. The title of the thread read:

What if you found a doorway to the spirit realm. Would you walk through it?

That topic had resulted in hundreds of replies; Helina, using the handle Freakuency1898 had interacted with nearly all of them.

MisterShifter: No, I'd be too scared.

Freakuency1898: It would be scary! But also exciting.

DaughterOfNyx: Of course, it's why we all study this shit, right? You have to go for it!

Freakuency1898: Haha, maybe I will, if I ever have the opportunity.

DaughterOfNyx: 😉

Liv scrolled through a bunch of similar replies until she got to the most recent. Helina had sent a message intended for everyone in the discussion.

Freakuency1898: Thanks, everyone for the encouragement and feedback. You may not hear from me for a while, but don't worry. If they succeed and I can't get back, I'll find a way to haunt you instead! Much love!

Liv tapped the screen. "What does she mean, 'if they succeed?' Succeed at what?"

"At exactly what happened. Taking her. That's the last thing she wrote on here," Graham said. "Later that same day, I came to check on her to see if she wanted to go grab dinner. But she was gone."

Liv nodded. That may have been the last entry on the public forum, but in the upper right corner was an icon for direct messages. Had Graham seen these? Liv closed out the browser. She would examine them when he wasn't around.

"Did you see your sister leave?"

"No. I was at work all day. She took her phone, but it's turned off."

"What about her car?"

"Gone."

"But no one's seen it or called it in as abandoned somewhere?"

"Not yet. That's why my parents think she went to the ocean."

"Did she tell anyone that? Did she text any of you or leave a note?"

Shaking his head, Graham rubbed at his eyes like doing so would make him see some truth that had so far eluded him. "I keep thinking there's something here. And I'm missing it."

"Well, that's why you brought me."

"It's a lot to ask of you, Liv."

He hunched his shoulders. Liv imagined walking behind him, laying hands on him, pressing into him, soothing, comforting. She inched her chair away to avoid temptation, but she kept this fantasy in her back pocket—she could make him forget if she needed him to. "Take a break, Graham. Make us another pot of coffee. I'll be a new set of eyes here."

For the first time that morning, he seemed to work up the courage to look at her directly, but this of course, was what Liv herself had been avoiding. "Go on now." She stood and shooed him from the room.

Once she was alone, she turned back to the wall of electronics and sighed. She had never expected to be here, invading a disappeared woman's belongings as though her claim to privacy had evaporated along with her.

In the sea of grey and black, a red book resting atop Helina's old subwoofer popped out as being so obvious, she had to wonder if Graham had already taken note of it and had left it there for her to discover. She opened it to a blank white page. A sketchbook, unused. No wonder he hadn't mentioned it to her.

Flipping through it, a dark page among the light caught her attention. A sheet near the back had been drawn on. She cracked open the book.

In the sketch, turbulent ocean waves drawn with thick swirling lines of charcoal met a rocky coastline. An ominous cloud hung over the scene, promising the continuation of a tempestuous storm. Squinting, Liv held the drawing up to the light. Hidden under the crest of the largest wave was a door.

A trip to the ocean—Graham's parents may not have been as wrong about what happened to Helina after all.

Carefully tearing the drawing from the book, Liv folded it and placed it in her shirt pocket for safekeeping, then returned the sketchbook to its position on the speaker as though it had never been touched.