Something is happening in Tombstone. I wrote a book about it.
Students Against Spooky Stuff is my upcoming book, and before it goes out into the world, I want to put it in the hands of 100 readers first.
Here's the deal: you get a free copy of the book. You read it. You tell me what you think. That's it. No formal review required, no pressure. Just honest feedback from real people before this thing officially launches.
There's also a bonus in it for you. Everyone who participates gets an exclusive discount for the game adaptation. Which, yes, is in the works! More on that soon. If you're in, request your copy.
The prologue and the first chapter are below, so you can see what you're getting into before you commit. Fair warning: it starts with a haunted slushie machine, and it does not slow down from there.
PROLOGUE
Before
Tombstone has a sign at the edge of town that says TOMBSTONE: A GREAT PLACE TO LIVE! and has said this since 1987. The exclamation mark was not in the original brief. The artist added it free of charge. Nobody has ever asked why.
The sign is technically accurate. Tombstone is a fine place to live. The schools are decent. The crime rate is low. It has good luck, a persistent, unremarkable kind that nobody notices because it has always been there. Like those green lights at the right moment. The thing you were worried about not being as bad as you feared.
Three stories of dark Victorian brick, est. 1887. DEDICATED TO THE PRESERVATION OF WHAT WAS, says the carved lintel above the door. The front steps are granite, worn smooth at the center from a century of visitors arriving at a particular angle, at a particular pace, that has not varied in a hundred and thirty years.
If you stand across the street from it on a Tuesday afternoon, when it is technically open and if you are the kind of person who pays attention to the way spaces hold themselves, you will notice something.
The building is working on something.
You won't know what. You'll just know the feeling: the low hum of a machine operating, continuous and patient and much older than the building that houses it. You'll think it's the air conditioner and you'll go about your day.
Most people do.
Cassie Ferraro was eleven years old when she first stood across the street from the Tombstone Historical Society and noticed the feeling. She was on her way to the library. She stopped. She stood there for approximately four minutes. She looked at the building. The building did not look back, because it was a building, except that it very slightly did.
She went to the library. She checked out two books: one on local history and one on electrical infrastructure, because she was eleven and she had decided the feeling was probably the air conditioner.
She was wrong.
She would spend five years figuring out how wrong.
This is the story of what she figured out, and what she did about it, and the three people she did it with, and the cat who followed them into the dark and always watched the door on the way out.
There will be spooky happenings. There will be a machine. There will be a building that has been doing something it should not have been doing for a hundred and thirty years, and four teenagers who decide to do something about it, and a town that was a little luckier than it deserved to be and will now have to get by on its own.
There will also, because this is S.A.S.S. and we do not do things by halves, be a second jar on the desk at the end.
It already has something in it.
But that comes later.
For now: Tombstone. A great place to live!
Ask anyone.
CHAPTER ONE: The Slushie Specter of Stop-N-Sip
They say Dale Pruitt died the way he lived: on the clock.
It was a Tuesday in October, which is the worst kind because it was cold enough to remind you that summer is gone, yet warm enough to make you angry about it. Dale had been working the overnight shift at the Stop-N-Sip on Route 9 for eleven years. Eleven years of mopping floors, watching hot dogs rotate in warmth, arguing with the slushie machine, and observing Tombstone's nightlife shuffle in and out for cigarettes and scratch tickets and the specific kind of shame that only arrives at 2 a.m. when you're buying a family-size bag of cheese puffs alone.
He was good at his job. He was patient. He had memorized every regular's order and never once judged a single one of them, and that is a kind of sainthood that does not get enough credit.
The night he died, the slushie machine was acting up again.
The blue raspberry line had been dripping not dispensing, dripping and Dale had pulled out the maintenance manual he'd laminated himself and was following the procedure for the fourteenth time that year when his left foot hit a puddle of the stuff that had been spreading quietly across the linoleum like a small cold conspiracy.
He went down fast.
His head caught the corner of the hotdog warmer, which also has taquitos on it too.
The coroner said it was instantaneous. The regulars who knew Dale said that was the only good thing about it. The Stop-N-Sip corporate office sent a fruit basket to his sister and replaced the linoleum within the week, because liability moves faster than grief.
But Dale Pruitt, the story goes, never quite left.
On cold nights, specifically on cold Tuesday nights, when the blue raspberry slushie machine is running low. The lights at the Stop-N-Sip flicker. The temperature drops about six degrees in the snack aisle. And if you're very unlucky, or very curious, or very stupid, you might hear a sound from somewhere near the hotdog warmer.
A low, mournful groaning.
Two words, repeated.
Taquito. Tuesday.
The story had been in Tombstone for three years. It had seventeen reviews on a paranormal sightings website, four of which included blurry photographs of what was either an apparition or a reflection of a beef jerky display. It had been covered in the school paper twice. It had its own Reddit thread, pinned.
Cassie Ferraro had printed out every single piece of it and was currently using it as evidence of collective human stupidity.
"Okay," she said, dropping the folder on the table with the specific velocity of someone who finds this personally offensive. "Let's talk about everything wrong with this."
The S.A.S.S. The clubroom, officially Storage Closet B-7, unofficially the only place in Tombstone High where Marcus Chen could run three different electromagnetic frequency scanners without someone calling the fire department, smelled like it always did. Old mop water. Ozone. Whatever Lena had been burning last Thursday that she described as "cleansing" and Marcus described as "a Class B respiratory hazard."
The whiteboards were full. They were always full. Cassie kept the left one for active cases written in sharp red marker. Marcus kept the right one for technical schematics drawn in mechanical pencil with a precision that bordered on aggression. The middle whiteboard, by unspoken agreement, was Lena's which meant it currently had a chalk circle, three symbols that may or may not have been load-bearing, and a drawing of a cat wearing a sheriff's badge that was either magical notation or just a drawing of a cat wearing a sheriff's badge. With Lena, the line was not always clear.
Lena Park was cross-legged on the floor with her tote bag in her lap, feeding something small and white from a bag of Goldfish crackers. Something small and white was Lunaria, her cat, who should not have been here, who was technically banned from school property, and who sat in Lena's lap with the serene authority of a creature that had decided rules were a fascinating concept that applied to other people. Lunaria was white from nose to tail except for her eyes, which were two different colors one green, one a pale gold that occasionally seemed, in certain lights, to be looking at something that wasn't there.
Lena's relationship to magic was a family matter, in the sense that it had arrived through the family and the family had opinions about it. Three of her aunts, the ones she didn't visit, the ones her mother referred to as the situation on that side, had been doing something that looked like what Lena did for as long as anyone could remember. They sent cards on her birthday. They had not visited in four years. The cards always included a note in the specific shorthand she was still learning to read, and the most recent one, arriving last October, had said something that she had folded into the cedar box and not shown to anyone: your sixteenth year is when it opens properly. Be careful what you let through.
She was fifteen. She had approximately eleven months to figure out what "it" meant.
She was mostly sure she already knew.
Marcus was looking at something that wasn't there right now.
Marcus was seated at his workstation in the corner, which he had constructed himself from two card tables, a surge protector, and what appeared to be a small server rack built from repurposed router parts. He was wearing his vest olive green, seventeen pockets, all of them full over a gray long-sleeve shirt, over what Cassie knew from three years of observation was a layer of clothing that had been carefully, methodically lined with aluminum foil along the inside seams. She had asked about this exactly once. Marcus had given her a twenty-minute explanation involving Fermi estimation, the Drake Equation, and a statistically nonzero probability of extraterrestrial surveillance that he did not want to make easier. She had not asked again. She did, privately, respect the commitment.
Jay Ortega was sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, eating a sandwich he had definitely not been eating a minute ago and looking at the ceiling like it owed him something. He was wearing the thrift store letterman jacket TOMBSTONE on the back, which was either fate or irony, Cassie hadn't decided over a faded t-shirt, and he had the expression of someone who had meant to leave twenty minutes ago and couldn't quite figure out where the exit had gone.
"Okay," said Jay, to the ceiling. "How long is this gonna take?"
"Seventeen minutes, based on precedent," said Marcus, without looking up from his screen. "She did the Miller's Pond Merman in sixteen but that one had obvious tells."
"The Mill Pond Merman was a guy in a wetsuit, Marcus."
"I know. I'm just saying, this one might take longer."
Cassie ignored both of them with the ease of long practice. She uncapped her red marker, turned to the left whiteboard, and wrote: STOP-N-SIP "SLUSHIE SPECTER" and beneath it, two columns: FAKE and REAL, because she believed in intellectual honesty even when she was about to demolish something.
The FAKE column already had five bullet points. The REAL column was empty.
"Let's start with the incident itself," she said. "Dale Pruitt, real person, real death, November 2019, verified in the county records. That part checks out. Everything after that is a game of telephone played by people who've been watching too many paranormal videos at two in the morning."
"I watch paranormal videos at two in the morning," Lena said, without looking up from Lunaria.
"I know."
"Some of them are really good."
"Lena. The case."
Lena looked up. She had orange-to-yellow dye at the ends of her hair "because I'm on fire, Cassie, it's thematic" and was wearing a denim jacket so comprehensively patched that the original jacket was more of a philosophical concept than a physical reality. "Sorry. Go ahead. Tear it apart."
"Gladly." Cassie tapped the folder. "Sightings cluster on Tuesday nights in October and November cold snap months, when the Stop-N-Sip runs the slushie machine on a maintenance cycle that causes irregular pressure buildup in the blue raspberry line. Irregular pressure buildup means intermittent machine activation. Machine activates on its own: people think ghost. Temperature drop in the snack aisle is caused by Marcus?"
Marcus pulled up something on his screen. "air conditioner vent directly above the beef jerkydisplay. Maintenance records show it's been mis-calibrated since 2021. Blows directly down. Average localized temperature differential of approximately five to seven degrees."
"Five to seven degrees," Cassie confirmed. "Which the human body, primed by a creepy story it already believes, interprets as supernatural cold. The lights flicker because the Stop-N-Sip is on the same grid segment as the Tombstone water pumping station, which cycles at irregular intervals after eleven p.m. and has done so since the infrastructure upgrade three years ago exactly when the sightings started."
"You know I don't understand like half of those words, right?" Jay said.
"The lights flicker because of the power grid. Not a ghost."
"That I got." He paused. "So there's no ghost."
"There is absolutely no ghost."
"Cool." He stood up, stretching. "Are we done?"
"We're going tonight," Cassie said.
Jay stopped mid-stretch. "...We're going tonight."
"The investigation requires on-site verification. We've done the theoretical work. Now we confirm."
Jay looked at Marcus. Marcus looked at Jay. A conversation passed between them in the way that only happens between people who have been friends since third grade: a full exchange of information, resignation, and a jointly held awareness that this was going to be a whole thing, conducted entirely in a glance.
"I've already packed," Marcus said. He patted his bag, which clinked.
"I hate this club so much," Jay said, with great feeling and zero intention of leaving.
From Lena's lap, Lunaria turned his two-colored eyes away from the wall, looked directly at the Stop-N-Sip entry on the whiteboard, and made a sound that was not quite a meow. It was lower than that. More considered.
"Yeah," Lena said quietly, looking at the board. "Me too, buddy."
Cassie capped her marker. "Eleven-thirty. Dress for the cold. Marcus, bring the EMF gear." She paused. "And the burrito shield."
Marcus had already put the burrito shield in his bag. It was a shield that rolls up like a burrito for ease of use. He had built it three weeks ago, on general principle. He would not explain why until the moment it became relevant, because that was how contingency planning worked.
Tombstone at eleven-thirty on a Tuesday night was the kind of quiet that felt slightly too deliberate, like a held breath. The Stop-N-Sip sat at the corner of Route 9 and Marsh Road, a squat, fluorescent-lit monument to late capitalism and midnight craving. Two gas pumps. A neon sign missing the second S, TOP-N-SIP glowing orange against the dark. A handwritten placard advertising taquito Tuesdays, three dollars for two, limited time. Limited time had been printed in October of 2019 and never updated.
They came in from the side, through the gap in the chain-link fence behind the dumpsters, which Marcus had identified via satellite imagery as the least-surveilled approach. The back door was unlocked. It was always unlocked on Tuesdays; the produce delivery came at five a.m. and the night manager kept forgetting to check, a fact that had appeared on a Yelp review three years ago and had never been addressed.
The storage room was exactly what storage rooms in gas stations were: a cathedral of discount merchandise, cases of energy drinks stacked to the ceiling, boxes of promotional items for deals that had ended during a different presidential administration.
Lena paused at the threshold, one hand on the doorframe.
"What?" Cassie murmured.
"Just checking."
"Checking what?"
"If it felt different inside."
"Does it?"
Lena stepped through. "A little."
Cassie wrote something in her composition notebook. Six months ago she would have challenged it. She was learning, very slowly and against her will, that Lena’s little theory had a track record her own skepticism could not entirely dismiss.
The Stop-N-Sip after hours was a different animal. Without customers, without the ambient noise of a transaction in progress, it had a strange, suspended quality, the lights still on, everything in its place, the hot dog warmer still turning with two hot dogs on it that had been there long enough to have their own complex inner lives. The neon sign out front painted the windows in orange and red and made everything look slightly more apocalyptic than the situation probably warranted.
Probably.
Marcus moved immediately to the slushie machine, pulling his EMF detector from the left side of the vest. "Baseline readings," he murmured. "Elevated but within the range you'd expect from the electrical infrastructure. The air conditioner is yeah, there's the cold spot." He pointed at the snack aisle. "Exactly where the vent is."
Jay was standing in the middle of the main aisle, doing a slow rotation like a compass trying to find north. He wasn't looking at anything specific. He was paying attention with his whole body instead of his eyes, which should not have been an effective investigative technique and kept producing results Cassie couldn't explain.
"It's cold," he said. "Like actually cold, not just the air conditioning cold. Also the hot dogs have been on that warmer for at least a week. That's not a ghost thing, I just think someone should know."
Lena had drifted to the back of the store, near the hotdog warmer. She was standing in front of it with her head slightly tilted, her hand in her tote bag, fingers wrapped around the black tourmaline she used for reading a room.
"Lena," Cassie said. "Report."
"There's something here."
"Residual energy from a death on the premises. Psychic impression. Completely explainable in terms of."
"Cassie." Lena looked over her shoulder. "It's not residual. It's present."
The slushie machine made a sound.
Not a mechanical sound. Not a pressure-release sound. It was lower than that. More like a voice that had forgotten it needed a throat to work with a sound that started somewhere inside the machine and moved through the air the way cold moves, not traveling so much as arriving.
Tuuuuuuuesday.
The temperature dropped. Not the air conditioner vent this cold was coming from everywhere at once, from the floor and the ceiling and the space between the refrigerator doors and specifically, distinctly, with focused intention, from the vicinity of the hotdog warmer.
The lights flickered.
Then a display rack of sunglasses near the window fell over, and everyone spun around, and Jay made a sound that was approximately HGHK and grabbed the nearest shelf for support, and a possum looked back at them from the middle of the aisle with the expression of an animal that had not anticipated an audience.
"Possum," Jay breathed. "That's a possum. I knew that. I was stabilizing it."
Cassie had not moved. She was watching the hotdog warmer. The air around it was moving against the ambient current, forming slow, irregular spirals that caught the light wrong. The kind of thing that, in a photograph, would look like a smear.
"Marcus," she said quietly.
"I see it."
"Reading?"
"Off the charts. I have a new chart. It's also off that." He stepped back, hand going to the right side of his vest. "I'm pulling out the ZAPPER-7."
The shape of the ghost was resolved.
It didn't appear all at once. It assembled itself the way a memory assembles itself, from the edges inward, details arriving in the wrong order: first the uniform blue polo, STOP-N-SIP embroidered on the chest, name tag reading DALE then the general shape of a person, then the face. Round, tired, kind, and absolutely saturated with blue raspberry slushie from the crown of his head to the toes of his sensible non-slip work shoes.
He was dripping. The drips hit the floor and vanished before they landed.
He looked at them. They looked at him. He opened his mouth.
"Two-for-one," said the ghost of Dale Pruitt, in a voice like a recording played slightly too slow. "Taquito. Tuesday. Two. For. One."
Jay said: "Oh that's that's real. That's a real one."
Cassie said: "I see that."
Marcus said: "I have eleven contingency plans," and then opened his bag and stared into it for a long moment. "This is scenario twelve."
Lena said: "Hi, Dale." She held up one hand in a small wave. "We're sorry about the hotdog warmer."
The ghost of Dale Pruitt turned his slow gaze toward Lena. Something shifted in his expression not recognition exactly, but the awareness that she was addressing him rather than running from him.
"Two-for-one," he said again, but quieter. More automatic. Like a machine running a routine because it didn't know how to stop.
"He's repeating," Cassie said. "Same phrase. Same cadence."
"Compulsion loop," Lena said. "He's stuck in it." She was moving slowly, carefully. "Dale. Dale, can you hear me?"
"Taquito," said Dale.
"Yeah. Taquitos. Two for one." Lena reached the counter and pulled out a stub of white chalk, the black tourmaline, and her spiral notebook. "Cassie, what do we know about him? Things he cared about."
"Eleven years on the job. No write-ups. Regulars liked him. His sister told the paper he was proud of his work. He memorized every regular's order."
"He cared about doing it right." Lena was already writing something in chalk on the counter. "Does anyone have a pen?"
Three pens appeared immediately. Jay had produced one from his jacket pocket, a gas station pen, half the cap chewed off. Lena took it.
"His employee file said he had a punch card," Lena said. "Loyalty program. Free taquitos after ten purchases. It was in his pocket when he died." She was drawing a rectangle on a blank notebook page, segmented into boxes. "They found it during the."
"The autopsy report mentioned it," Cassie said, her voice careful. "Personal effects. One punch card, seven of ten stamps complete. They listed it as unclaimed."
"They listed it as unclaimed," Lena repeated. "And he's been coming back every Tuesday for taquito Tuesday because."
"Unfinished business," Cassie said. She heard her own voice say it and she heard it land wrong not debunking, not dismissing, just stating. Flat. Factual. "He needed to complete the card."
The ghost of Dale Pruitt turned back from the slushie machine. He was looking at Lena's hands. At the card she was making.
His expression was, for a moment, entirely human.
"Jay," Lena said. "There's a stamp on the counter, the little star stamp, near the register."
Jay was already there. He moved with clean economical action and produced a small star-shaped rubber stamp that had been there since 2019.
He looked at Cassie.
Cassie looked at the ghost of Dale Pruitt, standing in his blue polo in a pool of light that wasn't quite light, three years into eternity and still trying to finish his shift.
"Complete the card," she said.
Lena pressed the stamp to the card. Once. Twice. Three times filling the remaining boxes, each thunk landing in the quiet like a small, definitive thing. Then she signed the bottom with a looping signature, the date, and the words REDEEMED TWO (2) FREE TAQUITOS WITH THANKS and she held it out.
Not to any of them.
To Dale.
He looked at it for a long moment. The slushie machine went quiet, not the mechanical quiet of a cycle completing, but the other kind. The kind that came from a thing no longer running because it no longer had to.
Dale Pruitt reached out. His hand passed through the card and through Lena's and through the counter, and where it passed the air went very still, and then very warm briefly, unexpectedly warm, the way a room got warm when a window you didn't know was open finally got closed.
"Good shift," said the ghost of Dale Pruitt.
And he was gone.
The lights steadied. The temperature normalized. The air conditioner vent continued its indifferent blowing over the snack aisle, achieving nothing supernatural whatsoever.
Marcus lowered the ZAPPER-7. Jay set the stamp back on the counter with great care. Lena folded the punch card and put it in her tote bag. For a moment she held her hand against the outside of the bag, feeling the shape of it. Lunaria poked his white head out of the tote and surveyed the room with the serenity of a creature that had expected this outcome.
Cassie was writing in her composition notebook. She wrote for a long time. She crossed something out. She wrote it differently.
"Well," she said.
"That still doesn't make it not dumb," she said.
"You were scared," Jay said, who was eating another sandwich.
"I was recalibrating my hypothesis in real time."
"You were scared," he said, with enormous, uncomplicated warmth. "It's okay. First one's always the worst."
"...Second one's probably the worst," Cassie said. "Statistically."
"The gym legend is number three," Marcus said, looking at his phone.
"Don't."
"It might be more real."
There was silence.
"Okay," said Cassie Ferraro, who had started this evening with a folder of debunking evidence and was ending it with a ghost encounter she couldn't explain away and a cold, specific feeling in her chest she would later label as the beginning of something. "Okay."
She turned off the composition notebook light. "We should go. And nobody tells anyone about this."
"I'm definitely telling my Reddit," said Lena.
"You don't have a Reddit."
"I'll make one."
Lunaria chirped. A single, satisfied sound. His gold eye caught the light from the window as they filed out holding it for just a moment longer than physics quite explained, watching the room, watching the warmer, watching something that might have been a final shimmer of slushie-blue light near the machine that dispersed before anyone else turned around.
Just him. Just watching. Just making sure.
From Cassie Ferraro's composition notebook, under the heading STOP-N-SIP: CASE 001, the final entry reads:
Outcome: Resolved.
Classification: [REAL written, crossed out, written again more firmly]
Notes: Dale Pruitt. 11 years. Good employee. Deserved better than the hotdog warmer.
Recommendation: Update the FAKE column header.
Her father would have recognized what Dale was immediately. Nico Ferraro had spent ten years traveling the Pacific Northwest in a van with a laminated spreadsheet of what he called haunted novelties objects and locations that had absorbed something they shouldn't have, that were worth cataloguing if not always worth keeping. He had found a mirror that showed people their last ordinary Tuesday. A tea cup that was always warm. A set of encyclopedias in a Medford estate sale that every subsequent owner had independently decided to donate, always on a Thursday, always to the same library.
He had taught Cassie that objects held things. That places held things. That the trick was not to be frightened by the holding but to ask what was being held, and why, and whether it wanted to stay.
She had not believed him, at the time. She was beginning to revise this position.
The jar on the S.A.S.S. table received its first black slip that night. Lena put it in.
End of Chapter One.
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