FSE

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Sam dropped them both off at the rest stop closest to where route 93 turned off the interstate. According to Chase this 'shoot' came with a van better equipped to handle potholes and washout, they'd ride out in that. "Which," Sam grumbled, "is fine by me. Wouldn't be caught dead out in some remnant of a place in the desert."

In fact, they beat them there.

Leo had been surprised, but very pleased, when Will had said he'd come with. That had all made sense when the coyote had revealed he was the 'local private investigator' as well. "It's not like I dunno the kinda thing, pup." Will had chuckled while he fiddled with Leo's phone, which was potentially concerning. "I did lookup work for a couple of those cold-case nonsense things, you know. You didn't think I bought a place like this off following cheating husbands to strip clubs did you?"

Leo had had to admit he had no idea what private investigating paid.

When Will passed back the phone, he'd apparently been texting Chase.

> This is Leo's owner.

> don't you let him use his own phone?

> I don't expose him to things that have hurt him.

Chase hadn't tried answering that one.

> So, funny coincidence, but I was already aware of your project.

> wat

> Because I'm the private investigator

> ...i see

> Given that I'll be on site already, I'd say Leo is more than capable of being your on-camera local flavor.

> And I know you think he looks good.

> wtf

> Let him know where and when we'll meet you.

> He'll pass on your info to me when he sees it.

> Leo, when you read this? Then you have your orders.

Leo had caught himself halfway through typing 'yes sir' before he realized the only one who'd see it was Chase.

They weren't waiting very long before a camper van pulled up. Behind the wheel was a young bear, out of the passenger seat came a younger coyote, slender and a little distracted-looking, and out of the back came Chase.

"...really? Him?" Sam said, flatly.

"Uh, yeah sir." Leo bit his lip and looked away.

"Like, I get that it was a small town'n you two," the puma's normally flat voice had gone downright sepulchral, "probly thought the other was the only other gay you were ever gonna meet, we've discussed this, but-"

"Uh, actually," Couldn't they just make him suck more guys off in the back of a bar? It'd be less embarrassing. "No sir, more of the guys I knew in high school turned out to be, well, not-straight, than straight."

"...him, though. THIS guy."

Leo scuffed at the gravel with a couple toe claws. "Yessir."

"THIS is the guy you were gonna fuckin... attach yourself to forever?"

Leo shot a helpless look at Will.

"Don't ask me to explain it!" he shrugged .

Chase was deep in conversation with the bear and coyote, no doubt cameras and mics and other pre-production matters. Sam kissed both Will and Leo goodbye. The puma seemed to be making a point of holding the kisses longer than needed, making a show of their obvious unchastity.

When Leo came up for air the preproduction conversation had gone silent.

"Morning, boys," Will put on his best smirk, "Will Adler, and I guess you know Leo here. So what's the plan?"

"Between 1850 and 1852, prospectors discovered gold in the hills surrounding what is now known as Echo Canyon." The bear's recitation was slow, methodical, and his enunciation inhumanly clear.

"You don't have to actually do the voice now, you know." The coyote turned around and faced the camera. "We'll ADR it in after."

"It's for timing!" the bear protested from next to Chase, who swung the camera around to catch him. "If I use the voice now, then when I rerecord it'll still take the same amount of time to say."

"Except now," the coyote whistled innocently, "this is all going in the edit."

"You can't put this in the edit!" the bear insisted.

"Ok, ok, I won't!" The coyote turned to camera and silently mouthed 'I definitely will.'

The hosts, it turned out, were named Devon and Cameron. Leo didn't understand how it was possible to make a career out of going to haunted places and then arguing about whether hauntings even existed, like who wanted to watch this? But if it worked for them, fine.

They were obviously a couple, though it was in the agreements that Will and himself had signed that they weren't allowed to tell the internet that.

"Between 1850 and 1852, prospectors discovered gold in the hills surrounding what is now known as Echo Canyon," repeated Devon, "A boom town arose, and a gold rush into the area began. However, within twenty years the area was nearly abandoned, with only a handful of inhabitants, slowly dwindling over the years. Today the area is fully a ghost town. Why? And did the haunting, according to local legend, of the condemned mines by some unspeakable entity have anything to do with the town's unexplained collapse?"

Leo restrained himself from saying anything about how ridiculous this sounded.

They had pulled up in front of what used to be his home, because why not. Cameron had a list of places that were supposed to have "sightings"--the woods under Carl's old place, the derelict school, this one stretch of route 65--and while he and Devon planned a shooting schedule Leo said to Chase, "What are they talking about? I've never heard any of these legends. Where'd people get the idea that there was ghosts here?"

"I dunno," the otter was more interested in rummaging through his camera bag. "I don't read the comment sections, man."

"Paranormal urban myths tend to pop around places like this, is all." Will was right behind them. Chase jumped but Leo just turned. "A place that's abandoned but not torn down, obviously meant for people but doesn't have any, it gets people's imaginations going. There's lots of stories about this place on the internet."

"Like what, sir?"

Leo saw Chase raise his eyebrows, and ignored it.

"Don't worry about them," Will said. "Just tell them about what you saw growing up here."

"But sir," Leo frowned, "I didn't see anything!"

"I'm sure the patrons'll go wild," Chase grumbled "for half an hour of you being asked if you ever saw such-and-such, you answering no, and so on down till we finish the list."

"Maybe you didn't see any ghosts," Will ignored that remark, "but that doesn't mean you didn't see anything."

"We're ready to get going!" Devon called. "Let's use daylight while we've got it!"

They got shots of what remained of the town. Jasmyn street. The remains of the old school. The boarded up and graffitied-over motel. The skeleton of the diner that had gone out of business right before the Alvarezes arrived, Leo had never himself been inside before. Chase's old house, though the hosts didn't seem to know their cameraman had once lived here, and Chase himself said nothing, so neither did Leo.

Every place the two of them tried some gadget or technique that was supposed to contact whatever being was purported to be here: a little meter of wildly fluctuating nothing, a small box that was supposed to beep when something disturbed it's electromagnetic field, a flashlight partially unscrewed so it would flicker, even a pack of tarot cards. They had an easy and well-practiced humorously argumentative rapport--Devon was the scientist but also the one who believed every legend he'd ever heard, Cameron was the spiritualist but also deeply skeptical. It was easy to see why they had fans. It was almost impossible to see how those fans didn't already know they were partners.

Sometimes Will would deliver a few lines about the history of this location he'd discovered.

And sometimes Leo would be asked about his experiences.

Instead of saying he didn't have any--even though he'd never seen or even heard of whatever phantasm they were trying to detect here--he would talk about his memories here. The fight he'd gotten into. The friend who used to run and hide from her abusive parents at his family's house. Going swimming at the lake shore. All the things that would remind people that this wasn't a theme park attraction, this was the remnants of real people's real lives.

Maybe they weren't what Cameron and Devon were here looking for, but they were ghosts all the same.

Carl's house was the biggest shock. Apparently Cameron and Devon had gotten permission from whoever owned the place now (probably Carl, had Chase gotten in touch with him?) to go inside. The place was fully and methodically empty: furniture, light fixtures, even the hardwood floors had been painstakingly removed.

Most of the footage in here was Cam and Dev sitting in what had used to be the living room, doing something with a radio that kept loudly switching stations every fraction of a second. Apart from a 'weird hum' Cameron finally said he'd heard nothing unusual. Devon looked disappointed.

"The founder of the boom town built his house on this site," they filmed Will explaining in front of where the sliding doors had been. "Supposedly there were a number of grisly murders, of children according to some accounts, and the man executed for them was his friend and co-founder of the mine, so the founder took his fortune, abandoned the town, and never looked back."

"You think," Cameron tended to play the 'interviewer,' he clearly had the more ability to connect with people, "he was partially guilty?"

"At this point," Will shrugged, "it's impossible to say. The man hanged was indigenous, so maybe he was just a scapegoat. Maybe afterward the town was just too unfriendly to stay. Or maybe he just saw an excuse to leave and took it while he could."

"Or maybe," Devon spoke up, "like the stories say, the house was haunted as fuck!"

Leo couldn't help noticing the way everyone avoided saying the name 'Hendricks.' A condition of being allowed to film inside, maybe.

"Puchica..." Leo whispered when they opened the door to what had once been Carl's room. Just like everywhere else, there was literal nothing left, but the nothing in this room, where he'd spent so much time on video games and pizza and sleepovers, was sharper and more personal nothing. "Well, I mean... I knew, uh, a friend lived here, when I was a kid. Just... seeing this place through the memories of when it was an actual house, that makes it feel a lot more haunted than those gadgets or the history."

"We maybe shouldn't film," Chase spoke up, "Carl's room."

So they went downstairs and Leo repeated his observations in what had been the kitchen. They felt less impactful the second time.

"Hey, wait up," Will stopped by the side of the road. "So, maybe get a shot of this, then."

"An abandoned car?" Devon headed over. "Why?"

"Well look at the license plate though."

Chase focused the camera where Will was pointing.

"What about it?" Devon sounded even more confused.

"It was issued in 2019," Will explained. "Hey, Leo, when did you finally move out of this place?"

"Uh, 2016 sir." They had given up asking Leo not to call Will 'sir,' on camera. He could've done it if Will had told him to, but he had smirked and said nothing.

"And was there anyone left behind after you?"

"I..." had there been? "I don't think so, sir."

"So who," Will jotted down the license plate number in his notebook, "is abandoning cars out here at least three years after the town was completely empty?"

"Supposedly, this is where you're mostly likely to see..." Devon raised his hands dramatically in front of the sealed-off entrance to the old mine, "the Socketface Man!"

Leo bit back the urge to say 'the what?'

"The what?" Cameron said.

But as Devon explained, supposedly to Cameron, but really to the camera, what this cryptid was supposed to be Leo started feeling oddly cold.

Because this sounded eerily like something he had thought he'd dreamed. One of the nightmares, the night he'd driven back here alone.

Should he...?

But they didn't bother putting the camera on him here, so he never brought it up. It had just been a dream, anyway.

"That's all the big ones," Devon said once Chase stopped rolling, "except the canyon. Supposedly if you shout up there the echo comes back different!"

"That'd be pretty amazing IF we could record it..." Cameron allowed.

"It's like half a day's hike, though. And another half day back." Chase pointed out. "We don't have the time."

So the supposedly haunted canyon remained uninvestigated.

The sun was going down when they returned to what had once been the Alvarez house.

It occurred to Leo that he had finally kept that old discarded promise, to bring Chase back here after he finished college. But it was a promise no longer to anyone. Neither Chase or himself had any use for keeping it.

Cameron and Devon had no more experiments to perform, so for once the segment started with the wolf saying, "Well... this is where I grew up."

He didn't say anything, but the camera followed him inside, and found he didn't need to. It just watched him look around the empty kitchen, size his hand next to a dent in the drywall, pick up a shard of glass from a broken window. It was, Chase would later admit, the most haunting footage they'd gotten all day.

Sunset was in full force when he trudged out to the abandoned train tracks behind what had used to be the backyard.

"This was where I had my first kiss." Leo explained.

If the cameraman wavered a little, the steadicam corrected for it.

"He came out to me at a party, in high school. We'd stayed up all night together, talking mostly. He was afraid to tell his parents. I think we were just..." the wolf walked a few steps along the tracks, hesitated to a stop, "somewhere around here." It occurred to Leo that, as far as he knew, Devon and Cameron had no idea he was anything to Chase but a childhood friend. "We kissed, he called his parents, and just like that I had a boyfriend."

Leo didn't know it, but from the camera's point of view his fur was outlined with orange and gold light from the setting sun, highlighting it like a halo.

"It didn't last. I don't think this is the kind of place where things last, yeah? There were a couple years where I was crying myself to sleep every night thinking about him. But that didn't last either. Eventually... it stopped. I stopped thinking about him every hour. Stopped thinking about whether he was thinking of me. I moved on, yeah? If he's out there," Leo looked at the camera, smiled sadly, "if by some chance he's watching this, I guess that's what I'd want to say: I really did love you, I know whatever anyone says you loved me, but just cause I was your first, doesn't mean I have to be the only one. Wherever you are... I hope you found someone else, like I did."

The camera zoomed out a little, took him in for a moment, but Leo was no longer looking into the camera, he was looking just behind it, at Will. "But maybe I'll see him again someday. You never know."

After a long silence, Devon said quietly "this is the best episode we've ever done."

The sun was down when they finished packing up.

The other three were around the side of the van, Leo alone on the side facing the mountains, when he finally actually saw a ghost.

A grizzly bear, flesh rotting grotesquely, sweatpants and dirty white A-shirt, like some kind of redneck zombie, was standing in the woods, staring at him. It almost seemed like it didn't understand what it was looking at.

Leo very carefully didn't move.

After a couple seconds, the ghost turned and broke into a limping jog, hampered by the way it seemed to be trying to stay out of sight, away toward the foothills.

A moment later they were done packing and ready to go, so Leo put the sighting, whatever that thing had been, out of his mind.