Sync: A Halloween Story

"I don't want to have sex with her," Jax said, stepping over a low fence with a sign on it that read KEEP OFF THE GRASS. "I don't want to talk like her. I don't want to match outfits and share our deepest secrets. I want to literally be her."

Nobody answered right away. Fog from a rented machine by the front gate crawled across the gravel and swallowed the first row of headstones. Somewhere behind them, a girl dressed as a slutty Nemo screamed with joy at something.

Jax was broad-shouldered and gelled, in a quarter-zip with the Calloway crest on the chest.

"That is so unhinged," Rox said, without looking up from her phone, where three group chats were pinging at once. She was tall and blonde, crossing the gravel in four-inch boots the way other people crossed a living room. It was the kind of poise that made strangers hate her on sight.

Zeke ambled along behind them, lanky and curly-haired under a slouchy beanie, beaded bracelets stacked up both wrists, smelling like weed.

"It's not unhinged. It's profound."

Chloe took up the rear, a small girl with a black fringe of bangs and eyeliner she'd slept in, hands jammed in the pockets of her thrifted leather jacket.

Ashgrove Cemetery sat on the back edge of Calloway University like an afterthought the school had never found the money to fix. Tonight, the student council had turned it into the Dead Presidents Scavenger Hunt: forty teams, one clue sheet each, racing through the old stones with their phones out. Every path was crowded with costumes. Vampires. A whole squad of Taylor Swifts.

Their group had not dressed up. They never did. When people asked Chloe what she was going to be for Halloween, she joked that everyone was in costume three hundred and sixty-four days a year.

"Okay, say it again," Maya said. She was small and precise in a cardigan, her dark hair pulled into a tight ponytail. "What is Sync, actually?"

Zeke lit up the way he always did when he talked about drugs.

"It's a psychedelic, but it's not like the others. It's the first of its kind. With acid or mushrooms, you go into yourself. With Sync, you get to experience someone else. You give the dealer a sample of their DNA, spit, hair, whatever, and he mixes it with the drug. Whoever takes it can get that person's thoughts for hours. Their feelings. Their memories."

"I've heard of it. It's getting popular," Maya said automatically.

"I saw it at Burning Man last year." Zeke's voice dropped, the way it did when he told the true stories. "There was a guy on the playa who took way too much and just never came back. He kept asking where his kids were. He didn't have kids. So, you know. Do not take too much."

"There's a guy on TikTok who took it with his best friend's DNA." Maya chimed in. "He posts these videos where he's sobbing in a grocery store because he suddenly misses his best friend's grandmother's kitchen."

"Great," Rox said, checking her lip gloss in her phone's camera. "Love that for us."

Chloe bumped her shoulder against Zeke's.

"All year you've been chasing this."

"A year, and dozens of dark web boards, and dealing with shady plugs." He grinned, but there was something hungry under it. "I finally have a real dealer. Local. He says the window is tomorrow night, and he needs all five of our samples by morning."

"We need a trip sitter," Maya said, her pragmatism kicking in like a reflex. "A real one. A professional, or I'm not doing it."

"I know one," Chloe said.

"Okay," Maya muttered, slightly appeased. "Fine."

"Question," Maya added a few steps later, because Maya always had one. "When it happens, is it two voices in your head? Or one voice? You know what I mean?"

Zeke opened his mouth, then closed it.

"I don't know. Honestly. People say it's different for everybody. Some say it's like having a roommate in your skull. Some say you wake up in a house that isn't yours and you just know where all the light switches are."

They had done trips together before. The good ones: ayahuasca in a yurt, all five of them crying and laughing in a ring while a woman named Sunny sang at the ceiling. Mushrooms in a rented cabin where Jax lay in the snow and announced that he forgave his father.

"Here's my real question," Jax said, leaning in. "If a guy takes it and becomes a girl, is that too dangerous? Is it like the no sex on Molly rule? Should a happy person never be a depressed person? Is it taboo?"

"I've had sex on Molly," Chloe said. "A lot."

"I'm just asking what's the etiquette."

"There's no etiquette," Zeke said. "It's brand new. We are the etiquette. So let's decide who takes who."

He turned to Chloe, who had dropped onto a headstone to retie her boot.

"Chloe."

She looked up.

"Excuse me?"

"I'd pick you."

Rox laughed. She glanced toward the distant mausoleum, then back at Chloe.

Zeke shrugged.

"I'm curious. You spend all day acting like nothing matters. You make jokes when people are being serious. You deliberately say the stupidest thing in any given situation, even when you clearly know better. I want to know whether that's all there is, or whether there's an actual person buried under the performance."

"Okay, but seriously," Rox said. "You'd let Zeke inside your head?"

"Why not?" Chloe said. "Maybe he'll come out with a personality."

She pointed at him.

"You couldn't be me. You'd need to build a tolerance. It's unmitigated insanity in there. You'd last ten minutes and then kill someone."

Chloe turned to Rox, who had perched herself on the broad base of an angel statue, her neon-green top practically glowing in the beam of someone's flashlight.

"Then I pick you," Chloe said. "I want to know what's under all the lip gloss."

Rox leaned back against the stone wings, smiling.

"You think I'm hiding some dark, tortured little soul underneath all this? Wow. And here I thought you liked me."

"I do like you. That's why I'm curious."

For a moment, Rox's smile softened. Beyond her, a row of old family graves sloped toward a stand of trees. Their headstones were so weathered that most of the names had disappeared.

"What if you get in there and find out there's nothing underneath?" Rox asked.

Chloe shrugged.

"Then at least I'll finally understand why you spend forty-five minutes getting dressed to go to a gas station."

Rox turned toward Maya.

"And I pick you. Look at you. You probably alphabetize your medications. You make your bed. Your emails have punctuation. I bet you apologize to waiters when they spill something."

"I do not alphabetize my medications."

"See? You didn't deny the other stuff."

"There's nothing to find out. I'm a normal person."

"That's exactly what I want to know. Is it nice in there? Being you? Does everything line up in little rows? Or is it exhausting, constantly having to be the most competent person in every room?"

"Well, we all know who Jax wishes he could be," Chloe said, laughing.

Jax pointed across the fog without a single ounce of shame.

Under the string lights by the Finch mausoleum, a girl in a gold Cleopatra headdress was taking a selfie with six people who were barely allowed in the frame.

Sloane Whitaker. Junior. Sorority president. A million followers and a face like a filter she didn't need.

"I need her DNA."

"You need a therapist."

"The dealer needs a sample from everyone we're taking, Maya. Those are the rules, and we already agreed to hand over ours." Jax lowered his voice. "I'm getting hers tonight. I'll offer her a drink, wait till she sets the cup down, and bag it."

"That is a crime," Chloe said.

"It's a very small crime."

***

Clue seven on the scavenger hunt sheet read: Find the resting place of President Aldous Finch, then take a photo with someone who knows his secret.

They followed the sound of a crowd toward the back corner of Ashgrove, where the lawn sloped down to a black wall of hemlocks. Twenty or thirty students sat on the cold grass in a ring, hushed in a way drunk college kids almost never were.

Near the edge of it, a vampire in a velvet cape held a phone on a stick, a small ring light glowing white against his face. In the center of the ring, a theater senior in a Victorian coat held an iron lantern under his chin.

"...and this is the section the university leaves off the campus map," he was saying. "They call it the dark plot."

Chloe sat on the edge of a flat tombstone and pulled her jacket tight.

"October thirty-first, 1926. Two students. Silas Crane and Edmund Voss. Roommates. Brilliant. Rich. The golden boys of Calloway. On Halloween night, they stopped being students."

A girl near the front shivered and leaned into her boyfriend.

"They started at the dance in Hollis Hall. The first girl vanished from the dance floor, and nobody noticed until the band stopped playing. They'd left her in the stairwell with a lit lantern beside her. That became their signature. A lantern beside every body, like they wanted the school to watch them work."

He let the flame flicker.

"By midnight, five. By two in the morning, seven. A professor in the library. A night janitor in the boiler room. A girl from the choir who stayed late to practice. The police followed the lanterns from building to building, and every time they found one, another had already been lit somewhere else."

"Jesus," Jax muttered, though one eye was still on Sloane across the lawn.

"But it was the last one that made them legends. Augustus Whitlock. The university's biggest benefactor, a man who hoarded black-market antiquities in his house on Linden Street. Crane and Voss let themselves in at three in the morning and took their time. When the police arrived at dawn, what was left of Whitlock had been arranged in his study in the shape of a bell."

The crowd made a small, collective sound.

"And they took something from his vault. The Veil of Anhur. A funeral mask, carved from a single piece of black jade. Three thousand years old. Priceless. Cursed, if you believe the old newspapers."

Zeke sat up straighter.

"What happened to it?"

"Nobody knows. A mob caught the boys at sunrise and hanged them from the bell tower of Hollis Hall, and both of them were smiling when the rope went tight. The mask was never found. Some say they hid it. Some say it went into the ground with them, right here in Ashgrove."

"Where are their graves?" Chloe heard herself ask.

The lantern swung toward her, and his shadow stretched huge across a headstone.

"That's the best part. Nobody knows. Vandals kept wrecking the plots, and people kept leaving things on them, so the school got scared. In the nineties, they dug both boys up, moved them somewhere secret in this graveyard, and buried them under other people's names. No stones. No records in the office. The location was sealed in an envelope, and it gets passed down from one dean to the next."

He shrugged inside the coat.

"As far as anyone else is concerned, you could be standing on a serial killer right now."

A wind came through the hemlocks and rattled the dry leaves like applause.

Chloe looked at Zeke. Zeke was staring at the ground between his boots. On the far side of the ring, the vampire's little white light moved over her face, held there a beat too long, and slid on.

And then a flashlight beam cut through the fog and hit the back of the crowd like a slap.

"All right, that's it. Closing time. Everybody out."

The groundskeeper was a small woman in her sixties with a ring of keys on her belt that jangled like wind chimes, and she did not look afraid of one single person in costume.

"Gates lock in ten minutes. If you're on my grass in fifteen, I call campus police, and then I call your mothers."

The crowd groaned and scattered.

Jax went the other way. He walked straight up to her with his wallet already out.

"Ma'am. Quick question. Where are Crane and Voss buried? I'll give you two hundred dollars."

"I don't know, honey."

"Five hundred."

"I don't know."

"A thousand dollars. Cash. Right now."

The groundskeeper looked at him the way you look at a dog that has wandered into a restaurant.

"I have worked here twenty-six years, and I have never seen those records. Dean Hale is the only person alive who knows. You want your answer, you go ask her."

She jingled the keys at the gate.

"Out."

They went, shuffled toward the gate with everyone else.