by Bryan, JL
“Poor Miss Invisible,” Stacey said. “I wonder why they were chasing her.”
“The lodge being a male-only club should help us narrow that down.” I pulled up one of the few surviving pictures of the lodge’s interior in its heyday. They were scanned from the Ryland family collection in their library archive and focused on the preparations for the 1899 wedding that never occurred. “Look at the maids in the deep background here. They’re dressed like the one I saw in our cottage.”
Stacey squinted at three servant women being directed by a butler as they hung what looked like miles of white bunting and ribbons. “Could any of them be Foxy Chambermaid?” she asked.
“Yes, literally any of them. They’re all blonde and dressed the same.”
“They look pretty young, too.”
“Right. Remember those names in the cemetery?” I pulled up the cemetery pictures on my phone and looked up the names, glad that Silicon Valley denizens Darika and Wyatt had prioritized internet access with a powerful satellite dish atop the main house. “Walentyna, Nadzieja, Katarzyna. Polish names, all female.”
“So…why? And what did they all die of? Isn’t that suspicious when they were all so young?”
“We don’t know when they died. This picture was taken in 1899, and the Grolman family maintained some level of staff here until they donated the island to the state in 1955. Some of them might have grown old here, keeping up the place.”
“Ugh, this is exactly why people should not cheap out on headstones,” Stacey said. “You never know when some historian or paranormal investigator might really need that information. So why so many Polish girls?”
It didn’t take me long to find a possible explanation. “The Ostflucht. They could have been Ruhrpolen.”
“Oh, sure,” Stacey said. “That’s just what I was thinking. Come on, Ellie, translate that to informal English.”
“Poland was part of the German Empire, but the rural western part. Lots of Polish people migrated eastward in the late 1800s for factory jobs in the cities.”
“Basically, you’re saying these ladies were hired as cheap immigrant labor,” Stacey said.
“From the cemetery, it looked like he may have brought all his servants over from one part of the German Empire or another.”
“Not a fan of hiring local workers from Georgia, I guess.”
I sank back into research, and Stacey resumed checking over the previous night’s data, looking for anomalies, anything from audio spikes to motion detector activation.
With headphones, I listened to my attempted EVP session from the master bedroom, when I’d tried to get in touch with the big, shadowy presence there, but there was nothing. The entity hadn’t returned my calls.
When it was almost an hour past midnight, I nudged Stacey, and we got moving without a word. If Gary was listening in on us, I didn’t want to alert him that we were about to do anything of any particular importance.
We headed outside and set out some of our new, more rugged gear, pointed it toward the woods where we’d entered in pursuit of the voices. This was partly an exercise in seeing whether Gary might pop out of the woodwork for a closer look at our nighttime activities.
Though we took our time setting up outdoor gear around the estate, Gary never turned up, so we felt a little more comfortable climbing into the van and driving down the road. I turned out the headlights as we passed the gamekeeper’s cottage and the boarded-up dog kennel, hoping to avoid alerting him that we were on the move. We also remained silent as we drove past, not that he would have been able to hear us talking inside the van. Too bad we didn't have a quiet golf cart of our own.
The moonlight was barely enough to light the way. I was happy to flip my lights back on as we eased on down the road out of sight from Gary’s cottage.
The headlights did little to illuminate the wilderness alongside the road, though, with its canopy of gnarled oak limbs and the gloomy undergrowth, like the dark forest in the bad part of a fairy tale, with wolves watching through the trees.
I slowed to a crawl as we approached the brick and steel fence of the cemetery, but I didn’t park by the gate like Gary had. I continued onward as the road became broken and uneven, jarring us brutally despite my low speed. We stopped when I reached heavy limbs blocking our way.
“Looks like the end of the road,” Stacey said.
“I want to park around the bend, where Gary can’t see the van if he comes by. Come on, let’s do some yard work.”
Stacey groaned as we got out. We spent a few minutes moving fallen limbs out of the path, then replaced them after I drove the van out of sight and parked it.
We hiked the short distance back to the cemetery. Even if Gary drove to the very end of the restored part of the road, he wouldn’t see our van.
At the cemetery gate, Stacey held her flashlight while I picked the lock. The gate’s hinges shrieked like startled loons when we opened it. I couldn’t remember if they’d made that sound when we’d visited earlier, but perhaps it just hadn’t seemed so loud or important at the time.
We stepped inside the starkly class-divided cemetery, with the servants on the right and the lone towering Grolman marker on the left, the chapel behind it to really adorn his afterlife.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” Stacey whispered as we passed the black marble obelisk and approached the chapel.
“No, but we need to understand more about Hank Grolman and his family. And there’s something off about this, isn’t there?” I circled the chapel, shining my flashlight onto the narrow stained-glass windows. “Look at the images. Olives, grapes, wheat, apples. Sheep, goats, cattle.”
“Mmm. A farm theme. I like the animals.”
“But not a religious theme,” I said. “As one generally finds with a chapel.”
“Oh, yeah, good point. I mean, there’s sheep, but…if it’s not a chapel, what is it?” Stacey shined her light at the deeply sunken front door. “Now I kinda want to look inside, too.”
“Then let’s go.” I knelt at the chapel door, looking over the braided metal design around the lock, still ornate even though the golden top layer had flaked away.
The lock was surprisingly difficult. Soon my face was sweaty, from the effort of concentration as much as the humid Georgia summer air. The buzzing insects attracted by face sweat were an unwelcome addition, too.
“I think someone’s coming.” Stacey swung her flashlight away from me and looked among the servants’ gravestones. “Huh. Never mind.”
“Keep an eye out. I don’t want any graveyard ghouls sliding up on us.”
“Yeah, okay,” Stacey said, her voice just a little higher than a moment earlier. “I’ll do that.”
Finally, I set the last pin and felt the lock loosen.
I pressed my hand against the wagon-wheel design in the door. The door budged, but it was so heavy that it seemed determined to push itself shut again. I was determined not to allow that, though, because I was not going to get stuck re-picking the lock.
“Stacey, help me push!” I said.
“Aw, it’s like you’re giving birth. And I’m here at your side.”
“It kind of feels that way, yes,” I grunted, using all my strength just keeping the thing propped open.
Stacey leaned against the door, putting her back into it, and together we swung it open.
The air inside was…stale. Very stale. It was more like opening a crypt than a chapel.
“Ugh! I can’t.” Stacey backed off and turned away, taking gulps of air from the opposite direction.
I kept the door propped open with my boot and pulled my jacket over my nose while I waited for the initial reek to pass. Stacey returned with the stone fox statue and used it to prop the door open.
We pointed our lights inside, revealing a life-size statue of a woman holding an infant.
“That’s…interesting.” Stacey snapped pictures. “At first it looks like a classic Madonna and child, but it’s not, is it? The baby has
a cornucopia. And the mother’s holding a wheel like the one on the chapel door.”
“And her crown looks like a city full of towers. This looks pagan to me.” I stepped through the narrow arch into the small chapel, holding my breath against the stink.
There were a few benches facing the statue, too low for sitting, probably for kneeling, lined with stiff, crumbling material that had once been soft velvet.
In front of the statue was a deep depression like a baptismal pool, but unlike most baptismal pools, it was lined with thick, dark gunk.
I stepped forward for a closer look into the gunk pit.
“Oh, no,” Stacey whispered. “Tell me it’s not full of people’s bodies or dead animals or something.”
“It doesn’t smell great.” I pinched my nose as I looked into the filth. “Whatever it was rotted away a long time ago. But I think…do you have a stick or something I can stir this with?”
Stacey blanched. “Of course not. But I will be happy to step outside and find you one. And maybe pass it to you without stepping in here again.” She wasted no time leaving, but quickly returned and extended a long, thin oak branch to me through the doorway.
I took it, then held my breath as I gave the filth pit a good stir with the branch. The awful smell erupted anew. Small objects clinked down in there. Bones, I thought, and readied myself as I looked more closely.
“They aren’t bones.” I sighed with a little relief at the small round objects glinting in my flashlight’s focused high beam. “They’re just coins. Stacey?”
I looked over to where she stood just outside the doorway. She held a finger over her lips and pointed. She’d turned off her light.
Taking my cue from her, I clicked off my light before I stepped closer to her and looked out.
On the other side of the cemetery’s single central path, a shadowy figure of a man hobbled among the small servant headstones, heading for the cemetery’s open front gate. For a second, I worried it was Gary, busting our illicit late-night chapel invasion.
It wasn’t Gary, though, unless he’d died and become a ghost in the past few hours. The man was just a shadow, no features, not even really fully formed, and was much quieter than Gary could ever have been.
The shadow-man’s movements seemed hesitant to me, slowing as he lurched closer to the cemetery gate that we’d left open, like he wasn’t sure whether he wanted to go there or not.
Stacey looked at me and widened her eyes emphatically, twice. I knew she was wondering whether we should react, maybe hurry to close the gate before we inadvertently unleashed yet another restless spirit onto our client’s estate.
I responded with a double-palms-up shrug worthy of Larry David. What was one more ghost around here? Then I walked my fingers across my palm and pointed after the entity. Let’s follow, I was trying to say, with an unknown degree of success. Then I pointed to my eye, and she understood that one and drew out her camera.
She fell into step behind me as I tiptoed across the grass of the posh side of the cemetery, with its one VIP resident, wincing each time the weedy grass rasped against my boots and jeans.
These little sounds didn’t seem to draw the shadow-man’s attention, fortunately, as far as I could tell. He stopped right at the threshold of the open gate, as if pondering whether crossing over was a good idea or not.
Then he stepped through.
Once outside, he became sharper and clearer. Not fully solid, but from a sufficient distance, he might have been mistaken for a living person. His shadowy, indistinct body had sharpened into a black suit, tattered and dirty like it hadn’t fared well through the process of him digging his way up and out of his grave.
We trailed him at a distance, moving as quietly as we could.
By the time we reached the cemetery gate, he was several paces up the road, shuffling in the direction of the main lodge, though not very quickly.
He may not have been moving fast, but he was focused, walking in a straight line along the center of the road. With each shambling step away from the cemetery, his back straightened a little, and his limp grew slightly less pronounced. He had pulled himself out of his grave, crossed back to the land of the living, and now seemed to have places to be and things to do.
Stacey and I continued following at a distance, watching him become more solid and clearer with each step.
When the eerie horn sounded from the woods, I first thought it was a powerful wind blowing in from the ocean, the harbinger of a storm.
I wasn’t entirely wrong.
They came crashing through the forest with hurricane force. We saw them only through their effects, tree branches and undergrowth thrashing as a maelstrom ripped through the forest, moving in our direction.
As the storm-like forces approached, I could hear more individual sounds within the roaring cacophony. Howling and snarling, the same entities that had dogged us the night before. Thunderous clomping sounds, horse hooves striking the earth. The shouts of men, exuberant and barbaric.
The chaos ripped through the woods alongside the road, a mass of sound and motion like a freight train, and still we couldn’t see the cause of it, only the lashing treetops.
I tore my gaze away to see how our wandering spirit was reacting to the approaching sound and fury, if at all.
That was the only reason I saw him rushing toward us.
He moved in a blur directly toward Stacey. She was oblivious to his approach, absorbed in taking video of the paranormal storm, with its occasional flashes of unnatural light, lashing its way through the dark woods.
“Look out!” I shouted, pushing Stacey out of the dead guy’s path.
Unfortunately, this planted me squarely into his path.
When he arrived a second later, it was like getting smacked with a wall of solid ice. The impact launched me off my feet and sent me sprawling across the ground. I managed to avoid landing on my neck, but slammed painfully down on my shoulder instead.
The wandering ghost wasn’t done with me yet.
He stepped on my chest, crushing my heart and lung region under a patent leather shoe that buttoned up the side. I got a close look at that shoe as it crushed my cardiovascular system. His black suit and tie were tattered, full of holes, his face hideously misshapen.
No, not misshapen. He wore a mask with dark eye holes, and tusks like a boar.
His other foot came down on my face. The sole of his shoe smelled like mud and rotten leather.
“Ellie!” Stacey, my hero, flooded him with white light as she recovered from my pushing her aside.
He was gone in an instant—ghosts really hate that flood of full-spectrum light. He seemed to be done toying with us for the moment.
“Are you okay?” Stacey dropped to her knees beside me. I covered her flashlight with one gloved hand and looked around to make sure the apparition was gone.
“I’m great, thanks,” I said. “Switch it off.”
“You sure?”
“Yep.”
Stacey snuffed out her flashlight.
We walked slowly down the road toward the cemetery gate again, watching the hurricane of movement in the forest. It encircled the cemetery, where the wilderness grew right up to the old fence on three sides.
The whirling disturbance grew quieter, the shouting and howling reduced to the grunts and grumbles of horses, dogs, and men.
Our friend the face stomper stood inside the gate, once again reverted to a slumped, featureless shadow. He faded away as unseen beasts snorted and sniffed around the cemetery, drawing closer to him.
A couple of times, I thought I glimpsed a shadowy rider moving along the outside of the cemetery fence, but it would always melt back into the darkness of the woods when I looked right at it.
Then I finally got a look at one of them, and I couldn’t help wishing I hadn’t.
The rider emerged from beneath the sprawling shadow of an ancient oak. I saw the horse first, a skeletal creature with few remnants of skin or muscle, its head a long,
smooth skull sheathed in a polished leather bridle.
The horse was bad, the rider worse. The hands gripping the reins were withered and pale. The rider’s form was mostly hidden by a hooded coat or cloak that mingled with the darkness of the forest. I could see his face, though, pale and stern, unblinking.
I was glad his dead-white eyes weren’t looking my way. They were fixed instead on the gate to the cemetery, left open by us. No trace remained of the shadow man now. It looked like he’d gone to ground. I guess, on some nights, it’s best to just give up and head back to your grave early.
Looking back at the pale rider, I realized his head was rotating, slowly but surely, from the open gate toward Stacey and me, the only people around.
His eyes, chalk-white except for the black pupils, found my face. His gaze was cold and unflinching.
He raised something long and curved from the inner folds of his loose black garment. I thought it was a blade at first, but it was an ivory hunting horn, decorated with little spirals of gold, and it very much resembled the tip of an elephant’s tusk.
He raised it to his lips and blew a long, deep note. Then another, and a third.
Stacey and I tensed, reaching for our flashlights again. The horde of entities was positioned to charge out from both sides of the cemetery, swarming around us. From the way they had ripped through the forest, there wasn’t much chance of us outrunning them.
The sounds rose again in a horrible wave from the shadows of the woods. Hoofbeats. Shouts. Snarls. All converging on the spot where Stacey and I stood on the road in front of the cemetery.
Then it stopped.
The night was unnaturally quiet and still. Many seconds passed before the katydids resumed their chirping, many more before the frogs returned to croaking and the night birds called again.
“Are they gone?” Stacey whispered.
Lights erupted from around the next curve in the road, coming from the direction of the lodge.
Flashing blue lights.
