by Bryan, JL
“We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” Stacey asked, reviewing her notes. “Can we ever clear a place like this? And what would cause a place to become so haunted?”
“All good questions.” I pulled on my leather jacket and reached for my utility belt. “Let’s take a walk.”
“Ooh, yeah, ghost tour, I’m definitely up for that.” Stacey grabbed a portable night vision camera as we left the card room.
She took some video of the Indian-style lounge, adorned with colorful tapestries on the walls and a stuffed Bengal tiger crouched in one corner, teeth bared, ready to spring. Cobras and vipers in a glass display case had gone dry and flaky with age, gradually shedding their skins for the last time.
An elephant occupied the center of the room, its trunk raised as if trumpeting. It was a pretty sad sight. Time had worn holes into the trunk and ears, which were pinned open to make the largest possible display. The tip of one tusk was missing, possibly cut away for the ivory, possibly just broken through carelessness.
There was certainly no hint of a hidden trap door visible beneath the elephant, and Gary had assured us that a new floor had been built over the trap door before the island was donated to the state. Sliding the elephant away to check the floor beneath it wasn’t exactly practical. Even dead, the elephant remained a formidable guard.
We eventually reached the lodge's second floor by way of a narrow, dim back staircase with a low ceiling, clearly meant for servants.
“Where are the main stairs?” I whispered to Stacey. “There’s nothing in the entrance hall except a gallery where people upstairs can look down on new arrivals.”
“Maybe the upstairs was VIP only,” Stacey said. “Unless you worked here. VIPs and employees.”
We emerged into the wide upstairs hall, where rotten fragments of a red carpet runner clung to the floorboards.
Gary had brought us to the area earlier, but we’d focused on the master bedroom where the shadow figure had frightened the workers. Now we took our time nosing around.
Every other door seemed to open on a servants’ nook of some kind—a linen closet, a sewing room, a narrow hall shortcutting to some other area of the second floor.
In between were spacious bedrooms, some with a significant amount of antique furniture remaining or perhaps recently replaced, fancy beds with bedcurtains, armchairs by the fireplace. Each bedroom featured a large, preserved bird mounted on branches in an upper corner as if preparing to swoop down on guests—a falcon, a kite, an osprey.
The master bedroom, where we had already set up the camera, featured a California condor suspended from the ceiling, its fleshy vulture head glaring down with unnatural red-glass eyes.
More California redwood accented the walls there, as if to remind everyone that elements of the house had traveled thousands of miles across the country on Hank Grolman’s whim.
The master bedroom was noticeably cooler, and my EMF meter detected higher electromagnetic activity along with the colder temperature. Stacey panned the room with her camera. I watched the shadows to make sure none of them stepped forward and attacked us. It can happen.
We waited quietly in the master bedroom and continued to pick up readings of possible activity. Nothing manifested, so eventually I tried for a voice session, recorded with a very sensitive microphone.
“Hello?” I said, my voice wavering as I looked at the weird, red-eyed condor above. I decided to stop looking at it. Instead, I focused on the bed and wardrobe shoved together in the corner, creating a large, dark, shadowy area that I didn’t especially trust. Someone, dead or otherwise, could easily hide behind the wardrobe and tall headboard. I pointed my microphone that way. “Is anyone here? Can you tell us your name? Do you have a message? We are here to listen.”
No obvious response came, but the readings on my EMF meter flickered upward. I continued to have the impression of someone in that dark corner.
“We can help you.” I tiptoed that way, since I didn’t want to startle the entity into fleeing before I got close.
The headboard’s corner posts were pillars of polished wood that could have held up a cathedral roof or two. The headboard itself was a thick, heavy slab of wood between them. I tensed as I stepped around the headboard to look into the cold, dark corner behind it, where I thought I sensed a presence, though I’m not exactly psychic.
Something moved in that narrow, dim space, pale filaments in the air, gossamer thin.
Cobwebs, stirred up by my approach and my breath. Nothing more.
I sighed. “Looks like a dead end.”
“This room still weirds me out. Do we really have to be here? We already have the camera recording.” Stacey nodded at the tripod just inside the doorway.
“I was thinking you could spend the rest of the night in here alone. An entity’s more likely to approach a lone person, you know?”
“Seriously?” She frowned at the large, dusty bed.
“No, of course not. But you’re probably feeling better about staying in the chambermaids’ cottage now, aren’t you?”
“Ugh. You’re mean, Ellie.” Stacey didn’t wait for me as she headed to the hall.
On the third floor, servants had been housed in small cells with sloping ceilings that left little standing room. The tiny windows were nailed shut, the nail heads gone to rust.
“It’s stuffy up here,” Stacey said. The air was thick and stale, difficult to breathe, the ventilation poor. Maybe nailing the windows shut hadn’t been such a great idea. “Let’s leave,” Stacey added, and I agreed.
Escaping the vast lodge was not easy. A narrow staircase from the third floor led down to a laundry closet on the second but ended there. We had to search around for stairs to the main level.
Finally reaching the first floor, we found the doors to the rear veranda and stepped outside, overlooking muddy chaos where the construction equipment rested like sleeping dinosaurs. The salty breeze off the ocean was refreshing after the confined rooms upstairs.
We picked our way around the exterior of the house, over uneven ground, past the occasional recessed doorway, along paths through overgrown copses of trees adorned with marble statues. A quite muscular, quite naked, definitely male statue with a very long sword overlooked a crater of churned-up earth. Stacey and I couldn’t determine which specific character from myth or history this might be, even after spending some time carefully looking it over and discussing it.
Eventually, we reached the porte-cochère out front, where our van slumbered under cover of the roof. We grabbed snacks—bottled water, Stacey’s tooth-chipping Stoneground granola bars. Having learned my lesson about those, I’d brought myself trail mix.
“This place could be nice,” Stacey said, leaning back against the van’s front grill. “If you got rid of all the big dead animals and the antler chandeliers. I mean, one or two of those is really enough. And you could turn the basement taxidermy shop into a…well, pretty much anything would be an improvement.”
“I see the appeal of having a whole island to yourself,” I said, “but if I had a billion dollars, I’d probably want a house that was a little less like a medieval dungeon. I'd want big windows and balconies. Why have a house on the crest of an island and no balconies? I’ll never understand some people.” I tossed trail mix in my mouth and crunched down on the sweet and salty combo. It was just nuts and raisins, nothing too crazy and fun like M&Ms.
“Yeah, they didn’t take advantage of the great balcony potential at all.” Stacey bit into her walnut-pistachio Stoneground bar with an audible crack that made me wince but didn’t seem to bother her at all. “Mmmm,” she hummed, somehow enjoying it.
“I guess we should head back inside,” I said, but I felt reluctant about it.
“Yeah, probably.” Stacey didn’t sound too thrilled to go back into the lodge, either. As colossal as the building was, it had a stuffy, cloistered feeling on the inside. The slow decay of the countless dead creatures, preserved but not perfectly, and certainly not forever, o
nly made the stagnant air more foul and unpleasant.
We started toward the front door, snacks in hand, ready to finally return to our monitors and relax.
A scream tore through the night, shattering the peaceful soundscape of marsh frogs and chirping insects. Unseen movement rustled through the woods by the driveway.
Stacey and I shared a wide-eyed look. That scream hadn’t sounded like an auditory apparition at all. Those were usually faint, or distant, or oddly flat, as the voices of the dead tended to be.
This sounded so clear and loud that it was very possibly a living person. If so, it had to be Darika, the only other woman on the island.
We dropped our snacks, grabbed our flashlights, and chased the scream.
Chapter Eight
The scream had come from the forest, so we searched along the edge of the road for a break in the vegetation. It wasn’t easy getting past the dense undergrowth.
We found a narrow, winding path through the live oaks, whose heavy limbs sometimes snaked like malevolent tentacles across the ground, threatening to trip us up. Overhead, the limbs curled around and through each other like the spiraling bars of an ornate birdcage, letting little moonlight pass through their leaves.
Stacey and I plunged ahead, not shy about using our blazing white flashlights now, listening for another scream among the trees.
We eventually slowed, having no idea whether the twisting path was taking us closer to the person who’d screamed or not.
“Darika!” I shouted. “Are you out there?”
“Darika!” Stacey swept her light among the thick, mossy trunks of the ancient oaks.
We reached something of a clearing, a weedy pit near the exposed roots of a fallen oak. The oak roots were as thick and serpentine as the branches, creating an impenetrable wall.
“Darika!” I shouted again, pivoting slowly, my flashlight iris opened to full floodlight mode, turning the tree bark in front of us bone-white like the bleached dead oaks of Jekyll Island.
“Did you hear that?” Stacey asked.
I shook my head and fell silent, listening.
A twig snapped, leaves crunched, undergrowth rustled.
Something was out there.
More than one something, because they walked on both sides of the clearing, quietly encircling us.
“Ellie?” Stacey’s whispering voice trembled. Our lights weren’t showing us anything, our view blocked by the thick subtropical foliage. “Do you...smell that?”
I nodded. It was like rotten meat, the stench of death radiating from the woods, conjuring memories of a bloated, flyblown possum carcass I'd once walked past on the road.
The sounds came gradually, almost too low to hear at first, like whispers in the woods.
These weren’t whispers, though.
They were growls and snarls, slowly getting louder and clearer and closer, from the forest all around us. We were surrounded. It sounded like the island’s wild dogs, often heard but rarely seen, had tracked us down.
I grabbed Gary’s airhorn from where I’d stuck it in my utility belt and pulled the trigger, turning in a quick circle as I unleashed the loud, irritating blast. The cheerful cartoon gator on the side gave me a thumbs up.
Stacey drew out pepper spray and watched the underbrush, waiting for the unseen beasts to emerge.
A hush fell when I finally released the airhorn trigger. The underbrush had ceased its shaking, and the unseen creatures had fallen silent. Perhaps they’d left.
“Guess the horn worked,” Stacey whispered. “Probably really hurt those dogs’ little ears.”
“As long as it teaches them to stay away from us,” I said. “They sounded vicious.”
“Probably just hungry, the poor pups.”
The snarls and growls rose in the woods not far away, and we went tense and silent again, readying ourselves for a fight, but the sounds receded into the distance.
“Good thing that’s over.” Stacey sighed and sagged, touching her chest as if to still her racing heart. “Whew.”
Another high-pitched scream shattered the silence, off in the direction where the beasts had gone.
“It’s not over,” I said, and we ran as fast as we could, through vines and low limbs that seemed determined to hold us back, lashing our faces, arms, and legs, as if the island itself were our enemy. We called for Darika, but the scream didn’t return. The silence worried me even more than another scream would have.
Breaking through from the underbrush, I saw the starry night sky spread open before me as we reached a wide-open space.
Too wide-open. My foot landed on nothing at all, and I toppled forward until I sprawled face-first across a steep, weedy slope overlooking empty darkness that smelled like the ocean.
The edge of the cliff had eroded away, leaving treacherous open space. The wall above the eroded point had a vertical crack almost all the way up; the strain of losing its footing was breaking it, slowly, year by year.
“Ellie!” Stacey called out somewhere above as I slid down the slope, grabbing wildly at passing weeds that tore out by their roots, not nearly strong enough to hold me. The slope only grew steeper and muddier. I was heading toward a straight drop to the moonlit rocks on the beach far below.
I finally caught a thicker branch and ended my rolling crash before it could become a bone-breaking plummet to the rocks. The isolated island would be a terrible spot to suffer a serious injury. A boat or medivac helicopter would take a long time to arrange, and the bill would surely be as catastrophic as the injury.
“Are you okay?” Stacey scooted carefully down the slope in a seated position, inching toward me.
“Stay back,” I warned her. “The view of the beach gets a little too good down here.”
“Take this.” She extended a long branch in my direction. I grabbed it and hauled myself up from the edge until I felt secure enough to crawl on my hands and knees.
We climbed back up the slope to flat, stable ground away from the erosion and the cracked wall.
“I haven’t heard the scream again,” Stacey said. “Should we head back to the house?”
A low growl rose in the undergrowth nearby, along with that awful rotten-meat smell. I’d dropped the air horn in my scramble to not topple off the bluff, so I drew my flashlight instead.
More growls joined in, as if we’d been corralled to the edge of the bluff, tricked into a trap where we couldn’t move forward and couldn’t retreat.
I stabbed my flashlight at the undergrowth like a weapon, hoping it would bother the creatures into leaving. A thicket of long, sharp saw-palm fronds twitched at my blast of light. Something crouched behind it.
Then a horn trumpeted somewhere in the woods, blasting out a bold, powerful tone like the opening note of an imperial march. It blew three times, then stopped.
The woods fell silent. No growls, nothing threatening us from the underbrush. After a minute, the smaller, softer night noises resumed, the chirping of insects and the scratching of critters in search of snacks.
“They’re gone,” Stacey whispered. “Aren’t they?”
I picked up the long branch Stacey had used to help me up the slope. With the far end, I pushed aside the undergrowth where the unseen beast had been growling at me.
Behind it was nothing, just muddy earth and vegetation.
“They didn’t run away,” I murmured. “They’re just gone. Do you see any dog prints in that mud?”
“Not one,” she said.
We didn’t need to say much more out loud. A pack of large dogs didn’t just disappear without a trace. Not even Houdini’s dog could have pulled off that trick.
Once we were sure the beasts were gone, we backtracked through the woods as quickly as we could toward the lodge, hoping our new employer hadn’t just been mauled by the local diablo dogs.
Chapter Nine
“Gary?” I shouted into the walkie-talkie as we raced back through the wilderness. “Gary, check on Darika! Gary, do you read? Copy? Hear? H
ello? Gary!”
He didn’t respond by the time we emerged onto the oyster-shell road. Stacey and I ran at top speed—which was maybe a little faster for her than me, but okay, that’s fine—directly toward the guest house where Darika stayed.
All her lights were out. As we sprinted toward the house, I looked over the front door and the windows for any sign of forced entry. Nothing seemed out of place, but there was a back door and other windows I couldn’t see. We clambered up onto the front porch and rang the doorbell. No response. I couldn’t hear any ringing inside the house; maybe the doorbell didn't even work. I pounded the door with my fist instead.
“Let’s check around back,” I told Stacey. We ran along the wraparound porch to the back door and knocked there instead.
The barn-style door to a shed beside the house stood open, and Darika’s personal golf cart sat inside, quietly charging for the night. If Darika had gone anywhere, she had traveled on foot.
“What now?” Stacey asked. “Break down the door? Or can you pick the lock?”
“I’d rather not do either.” I raised the walkie-talkie. “Gary! Wake up!”
“Huh?” he replied, drowsily. “Whatcher doin’?”
“We heard a woman screaming in the woods,” I said. “Now we’re at Darika’s, and she’s not answering the door.”
“I’m on my way.” His voice wasn’t exactly brimming with urgency as he said it.
“Please hurry.”
“Yeah, yep. Hurrying.”
I knocked on the back door again while we waited. I called Darika’s phone, using the island’s spotty satellite WiFi since I had no cell service, but it went to voicemail.
“Are you thinking about that landscaper, Ernesto, who got dragged into the woods and mauled?” Stacey asked. “Because I am.”
“Darika’s not answering.” I traded my phone for my lock picks and knelt in front of the door. Stacey lit the keyhole for me with her flashlight. The lock was nothing special and popped open with a little effort.
