Preview Night

The hallway looked right.

That was the first thing. Not old, exactly. Wrong in a familiar way. Trophy cases with tarnished plaques. Lockers with dented vents and combination locks. Institutional beige trying and failing to survive under fluorescent tubes that buzzed at the edge of hearing. Retro signage on the walls, the kind nobody made anymore, the kind that assumed you’d just know which way the library was. It all added up to Sunnydale High. The original.

Which, unless local marketing had gone all in on historical trauma, should have been impossible.

The corridor held itself in a listening kind of silence. Somewhere farther down, metal gave a soft settling tick, like a building cooling after a fire that should have been decades gone. The floor still carried that old-school smell of wax and dust and trapped heat, the kind schools seemed to keep no matter how many times they were scrubbed, renovated, or remembered wrong.

A girl moved through the shadows with the kind of confidence that only really worked if somebody was watching. Her skirt swished. Her boots made almost no sound. She eased a wooden stake down from inside her coat sleeve and settled it into her palm like she’d done this before.

“Are we playing hard to get?” she said softly, to the dark. “Don’t make a girl beg for it.”

Nothing answered.

She took another step. Lifted her chin. Listened.

A full-length locker door swung open behind her.

She stopped. Smiled to herself. Stepped into a shaft of light, and the old shock of recognition slipped.

Blonde, yes. But younger than that. Softer round the edges, glossier somehow, determination set carefully across her face like something she’d studied rather than felt.

Stacy.

“Another day,” she murmured, “another slay.”

She spun toward the locker.

Something dropped from the ceiling.

Wrong direction. Stacy’s stake clattered to the floor and skittered away across the linoleum. She backpedalled, found it at her feet, hooked it up with the toe of her boot, caught it one-handed, and drove it forward with a grunt of triumph.

“Ow!” the vampire yelped. “Security! She freaking stabbed me—”

The lights slammed on.

The hallway died all at once. What had been Sunnydale High a second ago became plywood, paint, and cables. False walls. Painted flats. Hidden gaps where costumed actors waited to leap from the shadows. A haunted maze done up as the old school, complete with scorch marks and a sense of loss most people here were too young to remember. Two security guards came jogging in, already exhausted by the shape of the night.

“Hey! No hard weapons in the maze.”

“It’s just plastic,” Stacy snapped.

“Plastic is hard.”

A manager in an old-school Dracula getup rounded the corner and bore down on them. High collar, widow’s peak, the whole Lugosi catastrophe. He had the compressed fury of a man who had been waiting all year for a reason to hate somebody in particular.

“We have a zero-tolerance policy,” he announced. “I’m revoking your pass.”

Stacy stared at him. “But it’s only preview night.”

“And I won’t be responsible for another larping lawsuit. Not again.”

She peeled off her festival lanyard with all the dignity a person could manage while being expelled from fake Sunnydale by a man in a cape. Her boyfriend was waiting just beyond the maze entrance, leather-strapped in a Blade costume that made him look very pleased with himself.

“What?” Chris said, before she’d even opened her mouth. “I toldja not to do it—”

They were escorted through the square with all the ceremony of petty banishment.

Vampire Weekend had taken over Old Sunnydale for the night, if taken over was the right term for a place that had clearly leaned into being consumed. The town square had become a counterculture carnival: part Ren Faire, part horror convention, part seasonal excuse for adults to dress like the undead and buy overpriced cocktails from a truck. Booths sold replica stakes and blood-bag drinks. Horror tourists drifted beside local goths, influencers, soft-launch occultists, and several groups of people dressed as if they’d lost a custody battle with Hot Topic in 2003. There were Bellas. There were Edwards. There was a Lost Boys pack so aggressively period-accurate it had to be deliberate. There were Slayers too, but the sort designed by committee after being given three notes: sexier, sadder, more midriff.

“You could’ve at least defended me,” Stacy said.

Chris spread his hands. “I didn’t want to take away your agency, babe. You hate it when I dim your light.”

She turned and looked at him with a disgust that had clearly been marinating for longer than tonight. “That is so you. Trying to weaponize my feminism against me. I’m going home.”

“Okay, well, I’m staying.” Then, because apparently cowardice wasn’t enough without footnotes: “It’s only preview night!”

Stacy left him there.

At the gate, one of the security guards watched her go and sighed with the deep weariness of a man trapped inside a seasonal curse. “Every year,” he muttered. “Every goddamn year these nuts show up. This town…”

Stacy cut across the construction site toward New Sunnydale Estates, heels crunching over loose grit and unfinished walkways. Behind her, the festival still throbbed faintly: music, laughter, somebody shrieking for fun instead of fear. But the sound fell away fast once she left the lights. Out here it was all open dark, half-poured concrete, raw turf, and the dry mineral smell of disturbed ground. Somewhere deeper in the development, a sprinkler head gave a lonely metallic tick before the system kicked on elsewhere.

The signs promised luxury homes, golf, community, clean living. All of it rendered in soft aspirational fonts beside artist impressions of families who had clearly never known inconvenience. She found herself on a half-built golf course, the turf still raw, the bunkers carved but empty of everything except sand and ambition.

“So much for freakin’ allies,” she said.

Her phone buzzed.

I’m sorry. I couldn’t stay. #Solidarity.

That got a small, satisfied huff out of her. She was still looking at the text when the heel of one boot sank into freshly laid turf.

“Ugh. Goddamn short cut—”

She bent to yank herself free.

A hand shot out of the earth and seized her wrist.

It was desiccated. Grey. The fingers closed with a strength that had nothing to do with muscle.

Stacy screamed. Another hand thrust up from the ground and clamped around her ankle. The turf gave way beneath her and she dropped hard into the sand trap, clawing at the edge. Behind her, a second figure hauled itself out of the earth on all fours. Its skin was stretched tight across the bone like something dead that had forgotten to stop moving. Stringy hair. Clothes rotted into suggestion. It skittered toward her, too low, too fast, too hungry.

Stacy kicked. Clawed. Saw teeth, real teeth, long and animal-white, and the scream that came out of her had no words left in it.

They dragged her under.

The sand convulsed. Violent movement just below the surface.

Then it stilled.

A dark bloom of blood spread slowly across the pale grit.

Her phone lay half-buried a few feet away, screen lighting up over and over.

Babe? You still mad?
Come on, answer.
Whatever.

A moment later the sprinklers clicked on, hissing across the new turf, washing the sand from red to pink and pink to nothing. Beyond the shining spray stood the development sign, cheerful as a threat:

WELCOME TO NEW SUNNYDALE!