by Bryan, JL
“Okay, sorry,” I said. “We’ll just heap ghost riders onto the ever-growing lore of the island. Did they get a good look at them? Any clue what era they were from? Swords? Guns? Hats?”
Darika shook her head. “They just said shadows. And hoofbeats.”
“Maybe we can get more out of them if you send us their contact information. The ghost riders could be Old West people wronged or even killed by Grolman, or they could be connected to his hunting parties here on the island. Do you know if the information your researchers collected included that list of people who’ve died on the island?”
“I don’t know. That’s the sort of thing you can check for yourself by looking through what I sent you.” Darika was not in a patient mood today.
“Sure. What about burial records for the island cemetery?”
“Honestly, there wasn’t much in this office that predated the state-park era beginning in the 1950s,” Darika said. “Any files before that, the Grolman family took with them or destroyed before handing the keys over to the Satilla Island Park Authority.” Darika raised her voice and looked past me. “Can I help you?”
I turned to see Gary edging into view, wearing a fresh Hawaiian shirt and a seashell necklace, carefully pushing the strands of his comb-over into place with his fingers as he smiled at Stacey. “Morning. I had an appointment to take these ladies on a tour of the island.”
“And you thought you’d just slink around the doorway eavesdropping until then?” Darika asked.
“I wasn’t…” Gary blushed. “I didn’t know it was a private meeting. The door’s open wide.”
“It isn’t private.” Darika looked to me. “I believe we are done for now. Unless there’s anything else?”
“Eh, nope. We’ll be in touch as soon as…well, as soon as we figure out anything,” I said, finishing my sentence rather lamely.
“Enjoy your tour.” She cut a look in Gary’s direction, and he stepped out of sight as if afraid that her look would indeed cut him.
Chapter Twelve
We stopped in the card room to make sure our little network server had indeed downloaded the heap of files sent by Darika and her nameless team of off-site researchers. Digital scans of newspaper articles, obituaries, and fine-print legal documents provided what looked like hours of mildly blurry reading.
“Anything interesting?” Gary asked, leaning over my shoulder as I glanced through the data.
“Let’s hope so. How about that graveyard tour?”
“I'd still say the beach is much nicer. Graveyard's not much.”
“We're not looking for nice. We're looking for unhappy dead people.”
Gary fell silent, gaping and stepping back from me.
Outside, Stacey and I again piled into the back of his security cart. If there were dangerous animals roaming the island, better to view them from inside the mesh, with Gary up front wielding the TASER.
Gary took us down the main road farther than we’d traveled before, past the muddy turn-off to our cottage.
“They’ve already removed about half the stables, believe it or not,” Gary told us as we rounded a bend and saw crumbling stables and the remnants of corral fences. An open space scattered with remnants of rotten wood indicated where even more structures had been. “Everything used to be powered by steam or horse. Mostly horse. Wagons for the workers, carriages for the rich folks.”
“Aren’t they going to restore any stables?” Stacey asked. “What fun is an island retreat with no horses?”
“Oh, I’m with you on that. Used to ride all the time, before I moved to California and became Lance Leopard. But no, Wyatt Lanigan’s not a horse man. His fiancée likes ’em, so I hear, so they’ll probably fix some up for her.”
“Yeah, because I’d definitely want horses—wait, who’s he marrying?” Stacey asked.
“That’s, uh…” Gary cleared his throat. “All this falls under my NDA. I only know ’cause I overheard from Darika when she was on the phone, and I wasn’t supposed to. Nobody’s supposed to, ’cause there’d be so much attention from the media and tabloids and all.”
“Then maybe we overheard from Darika while she was on the phone.” Stacey waggled her eyebrows at Gary, but he was too busy driving to notice. “Right, Gary? What do you say?”
“If you ask me,” he said, “they ought to just leave this island alone, keep it a nice park. Well, nice to look at. Between the wild boars and feral dogs and the…well, you know, the things that come out at night…this whole situation’s nothing but a big Grandma-sized quilt of red flags. Some places ought to be left alone. Like the house where I grew up, next to the boneyard. Nobody lives there now. Last I heard, it was all boarded up. Probably for the best.”
I nodded. He wasn’t necessarily wrong. The scale of paranormal activity here was daunting, and Stacey and I weren’t miracle workers. Not every haunted location could be cleared. Sometimes the dead win.
“That trail leads to the pheasant house, about half a mile down. They’d stand on the roof to shoot.” Gary indicated a barely visible break in the woods. “There’s deer stands and shooting platforms scattered all through the woods. There’s a duck house over by the marsh, but the road’s still busted up and overgrown.”
“It must be hard to find a road crew that doesn’t mind creepy figures watching from the woods,” Stacey said.
“Exactly right. There’s my place, the old gamekeeper’s cabin.” Gary pointed to a long, narrow, ramshackle building where a few windows were boarded up. It had a large porch and a crumbling brick chimney. “I know it looks bad on the outside, but the inside...” He shrugged. “Anyhow, there’s the old kennel.”
The area where he pointed was mostly obscured by a tall, badly rotten fence overgrown with vines. Chunks of the fence near the ground were missing, as if very large animals had chewed and clawed their way out.
“Up here’s the old coal-fired power plant,” Gary said as a soot-stained brick wall with multiple chimneys appeared on our left. The wilderness had reclaimed most of this building, too, with spindly trees sprouting through the remnants of the floor. “Of course, the Boy Wonder is trying to make it all renewable. Solar, then later some wind turbines, if they can ever get anybody to work on the island long enough to finish anything.” He chuckled. “Good luck on that.”
Gary grew quiet as we parked at the cemetery. The main road grew visibly rougher ahead, broken and cracked, mostly swallowed by the humid, fast-growing wilderness, littered with fallen limbs that made it impassable.
A brick wall with a black steel gate surrounded the island cemetery. A brick arch spanned over the gate, imitating the style of the big gate above the wharf. Here, too, the wilderness had grown up around and through the fence, on its way to consuming the cemetery, as if trying to break down and devour any sign of civilization.
Gary unlocked the gate, and we passed under the archway into the cemetery. I felt chills and crossed my arms. Stacey did the same.
“I guess the landscapers quit, too,” Stacey said. The cemetery looked like it had been recently cleared, the wild growth hacked back from the graves and the central path, leaving only the big old oak trees to shade the graves. The debris had simply been piled in a towering heap of brush trees and chainsawed limbs and left to rot in a back corner, though, as if the landscapers had quit before finishing the clean-up.
“You can probably guess which one belongs to the original Mr. Grolman,” Gary said.
I could. On the right-hand side of the path lay a scattering of small headstones, perhaps two dozen of them, no bigger than shoeboxes.
On the left-hand side, though, rose a single black marble obelisk, easily nine feet tall, with Heinrich Grolman’s name inscribed on the base. Behind it was a matching marble chapel about the size of a one-room cabin, its stained-glass windows depicting figures holding fruit, grain, and olives.
The chapel’s low, narrow door was made of dark cedar, set deep in a recessed archway, out of the reach of all but the most extreme
weather. A wagon-wheel design was engraved in the door, maybe a nod to Grolman’s history out west, though it seemed like an odd place for it.
I stepped into the recessed alcove and explored the door’s ornate lock with my fingertips. It had once been embossed and gilded, but most of the gold had flaked off over time, exposing sharply edged steel beneath. There was no handle or doorknob, just the keyhole.
“What in the devil’s dealings are you up to, lady?” Gary snapped, and it took a moment for me to realize he was snapping at me. “That’s kinda private, don’t you think?”
“Is it?” I stepped back. “It’s a chapel, not a crypt. Aren’t people supposed to go inside a chapel?”
“Family members, maybe, if they’re paying respects,” Gary said. “It just doesn’t seem right for us to go poking in there. Sorry if I jumped at you about it. I didn’t mean to do that. I guess I’m touchy because, well, I told you I grew up next to a graveyard. And sometimes people would mess around in there, teenagers usually. And that’d stir up the dead, and I’d have an extra week of hearing them moaning or creeping around more than usual. Have to make sure my curtains were tight so their dead faces didn’t look in at me.”
“That’s okay, I get that completely.” I pushed against the chapel door, gently at first, then with a little more force, but it was locked.
“Come on, now,” Gary said, looking uncomfortable.
“Do you know if Darika has the key?” I asked.
“I can ask her, but I wouldn’t bank on it. Why would you want to go in there, anyway?” Gary shuffled back from the chapel, glancing around like he expected the dead to come crawling out all around us, zombie-horde style. “Let’s leave him in peace.”
“Okay.” I stepped away from the chapel, with its tantalizing ornate lock, and crossed the main path to look at the array of small headstones, wanting to see more before Gary ushered us out the gate.
The smaller headstones offered little more than names. Some were German, like Klaus and Gunter. Others near the back looked a bit different: Walentyna, Nadzieja, Katarzyna.
Puzzled, I raised my phone to take pictures of them. “Stacey, what do these names sound like to you?”
“Umm…Russian?” she guessed.
“Please, do we really have to bother the dead like this?” Gary asked.
“If the dead would stop bothering the living, we wouldn’t have a problem. Stacey and I wouldn’t even be here.” I didn’t stop snapping pictures. “We need to find out who these people are and how they died.”
“How can you do that after all this time?” Gary was edging toward the gate now. “It sounds hopeless to me. Are we done here?”
“Almost.” I stepped around one of the old, moss-draped oaks and froze at what I saw. “Stacey, look.”
Stacey drew up beside me. “Oh. Yeah. That’s something.”
Hidden among the thick, gnarled oak roots of the old tree, positioned where someone could pass right by a hundred times and never notice, was a statue so small I could have fit it in my laptop bag.
It was a fox, made of stone, seeming to peer at the little graves with the Eastern European names, its big triangular eyes raised and alert.
“What does this mean?” Stacey asked. “It must have something to do with the chambermaid in the fox mask. Doesn’t it?”
“I would think so.” I knelt in the dirt and searched the fox for any inscription or symbol, anything that might tell me something about why it was there, but it was unadorned, just a fairly realistic-looking stone animal. I hooked my fingers under it and pulled, trying to pry its sunken feet from the dirt.
“What are you desecrating now?” Gary circled around the tree to watch me as I knelt and pried. I wasn’t entirely sure where his eyes were going as he looked me over, but I wasn’t really comfortable with his gaze, or his attitude.
“We’re just trying to figure out what’s going on,” I said, forcing some patience into my tone. “Have you heard anything about foxes on this island? Or masquerade parties?”
Gary’s forehead wrinkled. “Not that I know of. Sounds kind of weird to me. And no foxes live on this island as far as I’ve heard or seen. Now, let’s leave these dead folks in peace, and we can, uh…”
He fell quiet, staring at the sky.
The world around us grew dark fast. It had been an average early summer day, a little overcast, but the sudden darkness fell on us like a freak thunderstorm had arrived, or maybe the moon had swallowed the sun in an unexpected eclipse.
We gaped wordlessly as the shadow fell over the cemetery, turning day to night, like the gates of the underworld had opened to flood the upper world with darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
It was late morning, approaching noon, when the deep darkness fell on us.
“I think that’s a…?” Stacey looked up at the shadowy underbelly of the body above us, which my brain first tried to process as some sort of low, huge, metallic storm cloud.
Then my brain straightened up and told me I was looking at something that, while large and metallic and cloud-shaped, was actually quite solid, like a giant aluminum balloon with a shiny red trolley bus attached underneath. Helicopter-sized rotary blades jutted out all over the metallic cloud’s surface, pointing at every angle.
“It’s a blimp,” I said aloud, stumbling my way into finishing Stacey’s thought. “Isn’t it?”
It wasn’t quite what I’d envisioned, which was the Goodyear blimp, a titanic flying machine shaped like a big, round fish. I’d seen that at some sporting event or other with my dad. This one was smaller and had a more compact design.
As it drifted over us, I saw the big cartoon loon on the side, made entirely of black solar panels, except for the red part of its huge eye. It seemed to watch us all like the Eye of Sauron, or the Eye of Providence on the dollar bill.
Static blasted over Gary’s walkie-talkie, followed by Darika’s panicked voice. “Gary!”
“Yes, ma’am, I see it,” Gary said. “Looks like the big boss man just rolled into town.”
“He’s not going to land, is he?” Stacey asked. “Where will he park that thing?”
“Drop whatever you’re doing and come to the lodge,” Darika instructed.
“You got it, ma’am,” Gary said. “Did you have any idea he was coming?”
“I did not.”
He put away the walkie and nodded at us. “We’d better move.”
“What’s happening? What does Wyatt showing up like that mean?” I asked, while we all ran to the security cart, stopping only to close the cemetery gate.
“I doubt he’s come to celebrate the lack of progress on the restoration,” Gary said. “I’d say there’s a good chance we all end up on the chopping block today. But if so, good luck finding anyone else willing to stick it out around here. That’s what I’ll tell ’em, too, if anybody asks my opinion. Which they won’t.”
Gary drove back the way we’d come. The plump, curvy blimp floated ahead of us, turning slightly, revealing another giant black LookyLoon bird on another round aluminum flank.
“Uh, that thing’s dropping lower,” Stacey said. “Again…he does know the lawn’s a wreck full of debris, right? That he can’t possibly land a blimp here?”
“If not, let’s hope his pilot can see that,” I said.
Gary floored his golf cart, zipping us along as fast as its quiet tires could carry us. The drive to the lodge only took a few minutes, but seemed to stretch out longer and longer, as if the oyster-shell road were somehow lengthening, adding coils like a growing snake, even as the airship loomed ever lower and closer.
Finally we reached the lodge, and Gary charged toward the front door. He barely had time to stop before his walkie crackled again.
“Wyatt's landing on the beach,” Darika’s staticky voice said. “Meet me there.”
“Gotcha.” Gary stomped the accelerator.
“He can’t land on the beach, though,” Stacey said. “Can he?”
“I hate the be
ach road,” Gary grumbled.
We soon saw why. We drove out a side gate, beyond which a bumpy, unassuming-looking spur road took us through a patch of forest and out to the bluff over the beach. The road down was steep and crude, barely wide enough for the golf cart’s wheels to fit, with nothing remotely resembling a guardrail on the crumbling edge. It felt like we were perpetually on the cusp of tumbling off the side and crashing the rest of our way down. I was already dreading the ride back up even as we descended. I gripped the door handle, white-knuckling it.
“This is actually kind of fun,” Stacey said. I kept my disagreement to myself.
We finally reached the blissfully flat hard-packed sand of the beach.
Darika had already parked her cart and stepped out. She scowled as we joined her.
“Why did you bring them?” she asked Gary, like Stacey and I weren’t standing right there.
“You said to drop what we were doing—” Gary began.
“You. I meant for you to drop what you were doing, including the two of them, and come meet me. Why can you not follow a simple instruction? Wyatt doesn’t know I’ve hired paranormal investigators. Now I have to explain why they're here.”
“Do you want me to drive them back real quick?” Gary asked, and my stomach dropped nervously at the thought of riding back up the narrow, steep road, especially in a hurry.
“It’s too late for that now!” Darika gestured at the cloud-shaped blimp as it drifted over us, ever lower as it cleared the edge of the bluff.
The blimp descended slowly to the wet sand ahead, landing on multiple giant circular pads that seemed to grip the beach, actively sucking themselves into place with giant fans.
The gondola on the bottom of the blimp was all sleek curves, cheerful red metal, brass fixtures, and enormous windows, a touring trolley for the sky.
A long staircase dropped slowly from the gondola to the ground. The staircase structure was mostly clear, with curved red steps that seemed to float.
The first person to emerge from the gondola was a tall, broad-shouldered, dark-skinned man in a black suit and tie, the tie nearly invisible against his black shirt. Round sunglasses hid his eyes, and the rest of his face was locked into a mildly stern expression. He looked like a textbook security guy, other than the fairly stylish shades.
