Things That Go Bump

(A New) Prologue

The sand gave way easier than usual, almost cooperative, like it had been waiting for him. Jasper's fingernails—bitten down to nubs from a habit he couldn't shake—scraped against something after only a few inches. That was weird. Normally he had to dig a foot, sometimes two, before hitting anything worth keeping.
    Could be a rock. Probably just another stupid rock.
    But his sternum disagreed. That dull ache intensified, spreading outward like ripples in a pond. Whatever this was, it wanted to be found.
He brushed away more sand, working methodically the way Claire had talked about being methodical with thoughts. Acknowledge it, examine it, let it pass. Only he wasn't letting this pass. He was excavating it, one handful at a time, the grit working its way under his nails and settling into the creases of his palms.
    The object revealed itself in fragments. Dark. Smooth. Not a rock—too uniform for that. Some kind of... casing? Like a shell, but wrong somehow. The color kept shifting in his peripheral vision, that deep purple-black you see in an oil slick or a bruise just starting to heal. When he looked directly at it, though, it seemed to settle into something more mundane. Just dark.           Just a thing in the ground.
    Jasper's throat tightened. He should probably leave it alone. Take a picture with his phone—if the thing wasn't dead again, which it probably was since it only held a charge for like three hours anymore—and show his dad.
    I’ll do one better. I’ll take it to him.
But his hands kept moving. The shell—he was thinking of it as a shell now—was roughly the size of a deflated football, oblong and slightly flattened on one side. He worked his fingers around its edges, feeling the strange resistance of the sand, like the earth was reluctant to release its prize even as it had guided him here.
    This is mine, he thought, surprising himself with the fierceness of it. I found it.
The shell came free with a soft sucking sound that made Jasper's stomach flip. He held it up to the light, squinting against the afternoon glare. Up close, the surface wasn't smooth at all. It was textured—thousands of tiny ridges spiraling inward toward a point he couldn't quite focus on. Looking at it made his eyes water.
    A bird screamed somewhere behind him, sharp and startled, and Jasper nearly dropped the thing. He clutched it to his chest instead, feeling its weird warmth seep through his t-shirt. Too warm for something that had been buried. Way too warm.
    Okay. Okay, so it's... what, radioactive or something?
He should put it back. He should absolutely put it back and walk away and forget about it and tell someone, tell an adult, tell—
But Claire's voice echoed through his head, soft and certain: Trust what your body tells you. It knows things your mind hasn't figured out yet.
    His body was telling him to keep it.
Jasper tucked the shell into his backpack, nestling it between his crumpled math homework and the granola bar he'd been saving for the walk home. The weight of it felt right against his spine. Grounding, somehow. Like an anchor.
    The bus ride home was forty-three minutes on a good day. He had time to figure out what he'd found. Time to research, maybe. Or just sit with it, the way Claire talked about sitting with uncomfortable feelings.
He thought of her now. The twenty something Yoga teacher his school had conscripted to teach them how to stretch their bodies. And, it turns out, their minds too. Claire was beautiful. Blonde hair and blue eyes—tattoos and piercings. Just thinking about her made his groin swell.
Jasper shook his head. No. I need to get back with this—this thing. Find my dad.
    He started walking back toward the highway, the setting sun throwing his shadow long and thin across the desert floor. Behind him, in the hole he'd left, something that might have been the sand shifting in the wind—or might have been something else entirely—whispered against itself in the growing dark.
    Jasper didn't look back.