Haunt Me Like You Mean It

-- Mei POV

The window glass is cold against my forehead even though it is the middle of summer.

Four hours. We have been in this car for four hours and my legs stopped working somewhere around the second hour. I shift against the seat and check my phone: 4:47 PM. Outside, the trees are thinning and the last of the afternoon light is cutting sideways through the gaps. Upstate felt far from Chinatown the moment we crossed the bridge. Hollow Crest feels like another planet entirely.

"Sign back there said one mile," Declan announces from the driver's seat. He rolls his shoulders like a big dog shaking off water. "We are almost there, people. Try to look alive."

A collective exhale moves through the car. Even Sonja, who has been dramatically suffering in the front passenger seat for the last hour, lets out a breath that sounds almost grateful.

I stretch my legs as much as the space allows, which is not much. Next to me Xiao Shen does the same, precise and unbothered, like even cramped muscles are beneath her notice. Her silk blouse looks freshly pressed. Her hair is still perfect. I glance down at my own tank top, wrinkled beyond saving, my jacket balled up in my lap with a soy sauce stain on the sleeve from the lunch stop where Declan hit a pothole at exactly the wrong moment.

Great. Really great.

I sneak a look at Sonja too. Her fitted top is somehow immaculate. Her hair is smooth. I do not understand how either of them do it.

Behind me Emeka shifts around the luggage wall that Sonja and Xiao Shen built in the back seat area. His one bag sits at his feet like a polite guest. I catch his eye and he gives me a small sympathetic smile, the kind that says he noticed the jacket situation and is too kind to mention it.

I mouth "thank you" at him. He nods once.

The trees break.

Hollow Crest opens up in front of us all at once, the way small towns do, like someone pulled a curtain. Little houses scattered across wide land, dirt roads winding between them, a few kids chasing each other between storefronts that look like they have not changed since before any of us were born. The whole place sits quiet under the wide summer sky, far enough from the city that the air probably tastes different here.

And then I see it.

"There," Declan says, already slowing down, craning forward over the wheel. "The Miyuki Theater."

It rises above everything else in Hollow Crest like it belongs to a different town entirely. Clean lines, polished windows catching the last of the light, flower beds along the entrance so well kept they look almost defiant against the sleepy street around them. For a haunted building it looks remarkably alive.

"I have always wanted to visit a Miyuki theater house," Sonja says, sitting forward now, her earlier suffering apparently forgotten.

Xiao Shen makes a small sound of agreement beside me. I nod without thinking about it because honestly, same. The Miyuki chain is old, older than any of us, known for the kind of theater experience that does not exist much anymore.

Declan pulls in next to Cal's van and cuts the engine. I climb out and stand on stiff legs, grateful for solid ground, and look up at the building properly.

Even with the sun going down behind it, it feels peaceful. Settled. Like it has been here long enough to stop trying to prove anything.

"Mei."

I spin around too fast and nearly lose my footing.

Cal is already looking at me, which is somehow worse than being startled. He does not repeat himself. He just shifts that steady gaze just past my shoulder.

I turn.

Xiao Shen has materialized at my side without a sound, which is a thing she does that I will never fully get used to. Her eyes move slowly across the theater front, the flower beds, the windows, the roofline. She takes her time. Then she gives a small, composed shake of her head at Cal.

He nods once and turns back to Ren, the two of them already talking quietly over something on a tablet.

I stand there for exactly one second too long.

He was asking her. He walked past me and asked her first without even pausing to wonder if I might have picked up on something. And the worst part, the genuinely infuriating part, is that I was so busy staring at the building that I was not even trying to read it. I was just standing here like a tourist.

Xiao Shen drifts away from me without a word, moving along the flower beds in that slow deliberate way she has, head slightly tilted.

I close my eyes for exactly three seconds and try to feel something from the building.

There is something. Faint and layered, like old paper. Not threatening. Not yet.

When I open my eyes Cal and Ren have moved toward the entrance and Declan is at my elbow, squinting up at the theater with his hands in his pockets.

"What do you think?" he asks.

"I think we will find out," I say.

He nods slowly like that is a reasonable answer. Behind us Emeka has stopped a few feet back, his gaze moving carefully up the face of the building, calm and quiet, doing what he always does which is notice everything without announcing it.

The summer light is almost gone now. The Miyuki Theater sits in front of us, patient as anything.

Whatever is in there has been waiting a long time already.

A little longer will not matter.