The more I stared at the shape, the darker it became. And then, nothing. There was a wall of black around the tiki hut, the fake bamboo and straw silent. An optical illusion.

I turned back, taking my share of the weight from the wagon again. “Nothing. I thought I saw something. Let’s go.”

The lawn crunched under our feet. I could feel the moisture from the ground soaking into my running shoes. “Careful,” I warned my friends as we reached the back of the lawn, peppered with raised roots and unseen divots. The worst possible thing that could happen was one of us falling into the pit.

Then I saw it in the corner. Dirt was still piled around it, construction still paused. As we got closer, I motioned for Jess to start lowering the wagon. I bent down at the waist, feeling my back strain, and I knew I would spend the next day becoming very acquainted with my heating pad. Jess bent her legs and kept her back straight, her backside moving expertly like a hinge, in a perfect squat. Melissa hovered behind us, her phone in her hand, ready to make a run for it.

In my peripheral vision, I saw a light turn on in Emily’s room. My heart began to pound as I thought of the last time I was in the backyard, when Liz pushed me. Emily’s light had turned on then, too.

We had to hurry.

I forced myself to look down into the pit, at the hole where everything had begun. I was surprised to find that I could see the bottom of it. From my memories of trauma and terror, it was dark, bottomless. In my nightmares, the mist rose again.

At the bottom, nestled in the mud, were white shapes. I silently pointed to them, and Jess turned her head. I leaned closer.

I blinked and looked again, but there was no mistaking what they were.

They were bones.

As my eyes adjusted to the darkness, I saw that the bottom was scattered with them. White bones dotting the mud, like dust blowing over a surface.

I don’t know how I knew, but I did: they were human bones.

And then we heard it. A scraping sound that ripped into the night air. It wasn’t loud, but the jagged edges of the noise peppered us like razor-sharp confetti. We froze, the wagon between us. I looked at Jess, and her eyes were wide.

Get down, she mouthed to me as she looked over my shoulders.

The hairs on the back of my neck stood at attention but I didn’t dare turn around. I mirrored Jess’s actions and put a knee on the ground, slowly lowering the wagon, as I saw Melissa side-shimmy behind a large tree trunk.