By: Elaine Lennon

They had watched A Nightmare on Elm Street on a television that belonged to Steve’s parents, which meant the television was large and the carpet was thick and the room smelled faintly of furniture polish and whatever casserole Steve’s mother had frozen and forgotten. It was late summer on Long Island, the season when time loosens and everything feels provisional, as if it could be erased by September. The movie ended the way those movies always did, with a promise that whatever had been vanquished was not, in fact, vanquished, and they stood up too quickly, laughing too loudly, relieved by motion.

They went to a house party because house parties were what you did after horror movies, because being together was supposed to blunt the edge of fear. Steve’s house sat on a street of careful lawns and low hedges, the kind of street where nothing was supposed to happen and where therefore everything did. Music leaked out of an open basement window. Someone had dragged a keg down the steps. The night was humid in a way that made you feel watched by your own skin.

Karl leaned against the kitchen counter and asked Tara how she was so brave, going into the city on the LIRR like that, late at night, alone. He asked this while snorting cocaine off a mirror he had brought with him for reasons that were not explained and did not need to be. Tara looked at him the way people look at men who confuse recklessness with courage.

“It’s less dangerous than what you’re putting up your nose,” she said.

Karl laughed, offended but pleased to be noticed. “But the crack houses,” he said, as if the phrase itself carried explanatory power.

“There’s one behind my cousin’s apartment, for God’s sake,” she said, laughing.

“Never bring God into conversation,” Karl said. “We don’t do that here.”

“And Jimmy Swaggart’s all over the television you never watch,” she said, which felt like a point even if no one was entirely sure what it was.

The night moved the way nights do when adults are not present. Rooms filled and emptied. Someone cried in a bathroom. Someone else kissed someone they were not supposed to kiss. The air took on the smell of beer and cigarettes and something electrical, like a storm waiting offshore.

“Come on, Tara,” said Bibi, her third cousin’s fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, who had attached herself to the group with the confidence of someone who had learned early how to be older than she was. “We’ve got another party to go to.”

They left in Ronnie’s Studebaker, which was a car that announced itself before it arrived and continued announcing itself after it was gone. Ronnie liked the sound of it, liked the way it made him feel like someone in a story. The radio didn’t quite work, so the music came and went, and the road unspooled ahead of them, dark and familiar and not at all comforting.

They pulled into a gas station because they always did, because that was part of the ritual, because there were fluorescent lights and bathrooms and the illusion of safety. Ronnie filled the tank. Someone leaned against the hood. Someone else argued about cigarettes.

Ashley sat up in the back seat and told them the story about the guy in the back seat of the car who frightens the girl when she comes back from paying at the gas station. She told it carefully, pausing in the right places, letting the silence do some of the work. The story was old even then, worn smooth by repetition, but it still landed the way it always did, with a tightening in the chest and a sudden awareness of how exposed glass can be.

“That’s not funny,” said Bibi, who was young enough to still believe that saying something wasn’t funny might make it less real.

Lindsay agreed, nodding emphatically, as if agreement itself were a shield.

Frankie roared his head off, the way boys did when they wanted to demonstrate immunity.

They drove on. The road narrowed. Trees closed in. The night took on a density that felt deliberate.

They pulled into a liquor store and sent Tara inside to buy a keg because she looked older than them, because she was Irish, because she didn’t have a tan. On Long Island, not having a tan could read as authority. She came back with the keg and a look that suggested she had been judged and found acceptable.

They drove past the Amityville house and tooted the horn, because that was also part of the ritual, because daring something to happen felt like control. The Alsatian roared to the gate, a sound that cut through the night, and they shrieked, half in fear, half in laughter, the way you do when the line between the two has blurred beyond usefulness.

They turned off onto a road that led to a parking lot by the woods, a place where everyone went because there was space and because no one had yet been arrested there. Other cars were already there, headlights off, radios on low. They took off their shoes and danced on the asphalt, beer bottles warm in their hands, the music tinny and distorted and perfect. The stars were visible in a way they never were closer to the houses.

It was then that they saw the shadow in the woods.

It was nothing at first, just an absence of light, a place where the trees seemed to lean together. Someone screamed as a joke and then did not stop screaming. Others joined in, the sound rising and falling, feeding on itself. Someone dropped a bottle. Someone said stop. Someone said run.

The shadow moved.

This was the part that would change in the retelling. Sometimes it was a man. Sometimes it was more than one. Sometimes it had red eyes. Sometimes it was just the idea of eyes. Sometimes the story ended with police lights and explanations. Sometimes it ended with nothing at all.

What they remembered later, or said they remembered, was confusion. Cars starting at the same time. Doors slamming. Gravel kicking up. Someone falling and being pulled back to their feet. The sense that they were being watched, not by something specific but by the night itself, by the accumulation of stories that had settled into the trees and the asphalt and the air.

They did not remember how they left, only that they did. They did not remember the drive home, only that they were home. In the morning, the parking lot was empty, the woods ordinary. No one found footprints. No one found blood. No one found anything that could be pointed to and named.

What remained was the story, which began to circulate with variations, as stories do. It attached itself to other nights, other cars, other gas stations. It became a warning and a joke and a test. It became something parents mentioned obliquely and teenagers repeated with relish. It became a way of talking about fear without admitting it was fear.

Years later, Tara would remember the night as a series of images that did not quite connect: the mirror on the counter, the smell of gasoline, the sound of the dog at the gate. Karl would remember the way the woods seemed to breathe. Bibi would remember being told it wasn’t funny and deciding that it was. Ashley would remember telling the story and feeling, briefly, powerful.

And sometimes, when the night is humid and the road is empty and the radio cuts out, someone will remember the shadow in the woods and feel a tightening in the chest, a sense that there are things we invite by naming them and things we invite by pretending they are not there.