by Bryan, JL
I found myself drifting in a fog through the second-floor corridor of the main lodge. At first I thought I was formless, a transparent eyeball like Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote about, a pure observer.
Then I entered one of the bedrooms and found I had a form after all. I carried a cloth in one hand and found myself wiping the furniture and fixtures, the bed posters and the lamps, surfaces that already gleamed from recent cleaning. The only dust I could see was the particles dancing in the sunbeams from the narrow windows framed by heavy curtains.
I wiped down the dressing mirror, seeing myself there—braided blonde hair tucked under my cap, white apron over my black working dress—and that was when I saw him.
He’d slipped in through the open door behind me. His long white shirt was rumpled and untucked, spilling out around his suspenders. His graying blond hair was unkempt, his sideburns overgrown. He smiled, and it was all cruelty.
His smile frightened me, and I shuddered with revulsion as his arm slipped around my waist.
His other hand, springing out from the other side like a magician’s trick, covered my face with a cloth that smelled oddly sweet. The world went blurry.
I found myself lying in dirt, the sweet scent in my nostrils replaced by a stinging ammonia smell. My breath sounded too loud in my ears. Something was over my face, making it a little harder to breathe, a little harder to see. A mask.
I sat up, coughing at the burning stench in my nostrils.
A man in a hooded robe stood over me, illuminated by moonlight. The bad ammonia smell emanated from him; he must have roused me with smelling salt.
We were in a clearing in the woods. Nobody else was there, just me, the hooded man, and his horse.
I asked him what was going on, though my words were definitely not in English.
He replied in English, though, in a voice hard and with no hint of sympathy.
“Tonight we hunt and sacrifice in honor of our god,” he said. “You have the honor of serving as our sacrifice, little fox. Your death will be worth more than your life ever was. Now, amuse the gods with a spirited chase.”
A distant note blew, a hunter’s horn, low and long. Somewhere far away, voices shouted and dogs barked.
“The hunt begins,” he said, then mounted his horse and rode away, leaving me alone.
Soon I was running, my heart pounding like a drum in my ears, my breath hot inside the mask. Soft moccasins—not a sort of footwear I’d ever worn before—padded my feet, silencing my running. I crashed through low-lying branches, battering aside long, thin saw palmetto leaves the size of butcher knives. I tripped over live oak roots that arched above the ground, cracking my knees and shins with bruising force as I tried to run.
Each time I fell, I got up again and kept running.
The men on horseback were closing in on me. The dogs were closer. I could hear them crashing through the limbs, huffing fast and loud, hot on my scent.
Farther back was the steady clomping of horses and the voices of men. They made no effort to stay quiet and had little reason to try. They were masters of this island, and no matter how fast or far I might run, there was nowhere to escape. A high, spiked wall encircled most of the island. I knew where the gates were, but surely those were being watched.
I went another way.
I’d seen the tree before, on occasional afternoons and early mornings when I’d been able to walk in the wild parts of the island. I remembered how a thin upper branch grew out over a wall.
The dogs found me before I reached the tree. The giant snarling monsters burst out from the woods all around me.
I jumped as high as I could and caught a limb of the live oak. I scrabbled my feet up along the mossy trunk to avoid getting my legs torn off.
They barked and clawed at the tree, shredding the bark, announcing their find to their masters.
I climbed up, limb by limb, as the men arrived on their horses. The dogs kept snapping and clawing at the trunk below, just in case they hadn’t made their point clear enough.
Seeing me up in the tree, in danger of making an actual escape over the wall, the men tossed aside any sense of leisurely sport hunting and drew their rifles. Bullets bit and tore into the tree around me. The gnarled, winding, curved live oak limbs created a cage-like environment that provided some protection against their shots, but I couldn’t remain there, clinging to the shadows of the trunk. Sooner or later a bullet would find me, or the hunters would get me some other way.
I had no choice but to run far out on the limb, which looked thinner and more slender up close than it had from the ground, not much wider than a rope.
The slender tree limb creaked and sagged under my weight. It only grew thinner as I approached the point where it reached out over the high wall. The iron spikes topping the wall glittered darkly in the moonlight, waiting to rip into my flesh and impale me if I slipped and fell, or if the creaking limb snapped.
A bullet crossed the air in front of my masked face, hot and screaming like a winged demon. If I’d been just a little faster, it would have killed me.
Another struck behind my feet, hitting the limb that supported me. I caught splinters in my calf muscle and staggered. The limb let out a sickening crack and swung downward. I plummeted toward the wall and closed my eyes as the row of spikes rushed up toward me.
I kept falling.
When I opened my eyes, I was dropping through darkness. I thought I’d fallen on the inside of the wall, that I was rushing toward the ground and the waiting hunting party, who would finish me off if I survived the fall.
The fall ended at last in a sudden, painful impact, but not on the brick wall or the hard ground.
Instead, I smacked into water with such force that I plunged all the way to the muddy bottom. The soft, silty mud was far from the worst thing to break my fall, but it was also like quicksand, not just catching me but embracing me, sucking me down, inviting me to join it permanently.
I kicked and thrashed, pushing free and trying to find my way to the surface, to desperately needed air. Marsh grass tangled around me like fishing nets, blocking me.
Finally, I broke up out of the brackish water and took a deep breath of briny air.
I’d survived, but I was far from safe. The men and dogs were in an uproar, their shouts and howls blending together like a chorus of devils in the night.
Closer by, snakes and alligators inhabited the marsh waters on the island’s western side. Beyond that lay a particularly deep patch of ocean brimming with sharks.
Beyond that, though, lay the mainland, and survival, perhaps even freedom, if I could only make it there.
They’d done this to others before me, hunting us for sport, importing peasants who had no family for thousands of miles and no knowledge of the strange new country where they’d arrived. They terrorized us with stories of alligators and sharks in the waters. Few of us could swim, anyway, and that skill certainly wasn’t encouraged.
But I could. To our masters, we were all the same, just rural villagers from nowhere, disposable, servile beasts of no individual importance.
I wasn’t like the other girls, though. I’d grown up in a fishing village on the Baltic Sea, and my grandfather had taught me to swim. And if the sharks ate me, it would be a more honorable death than what the rich men on the island had planned for me.
I whispered a prayer to Jadwiga, the deceased child queen of Poland, believed to hold a special place in heaven, begging for intercession to keep me safe from the beasts of the water.
The mask fell from my face, perhaps loosened by the impact after the long fall, or perhaps removed by the saint's intercession.
I began swimming through the dense marsh grass, doing my best to watch for alligators, though it was impossible to tell them apart from all the floating sticks and logs that had tumbled from the bluff above.
For now, at least, the high wall that had imprisoned me was my protector. The hunting party could not climb it, could not even see me because of it. They
would have to circle around to the gate, then all the way back to the marsh.
By then, I wouldn’t be in the marsh at all.
I swam, thinking only of speed and nothing else. There was no need to stay quiet.
At last, I broke free of the grasses and the salt marsh and reached open water.
I swam through water so dark and deep it looked black even on the sunniest days, water where enormous sharks were known to gather, perhaps to breed. I would be a small, crunchy morsel for them, a single bite of meat.
The smell of salt filled my nose, and seemingly all the space behind us, reaching my eyes, almost burning—
I awoke to the smell of salt in the air. Lying there in the chambermaids’ cottage, I first felt a pang of regret. I’d nearly escaped the island, yet here I was, somehow back here in this cottage, trapped, expected to serve once again.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
When I saw Stacey on the next bed over, snoring softly with a blonde lock of hair curled around her nose, my sense of identity began to return. So did the pain from the scratches and bite on my back.
Someone was behind me in the bedroom, standing over me, their presence ice cold and radiating a thin, pale glow. I knew that when I turned, I would see a dead person who’d been standing over me while I slept, perhaps feeding on my energy—I certainly felt exhausted—and infecting me with her own, mingling our memories, as can happen when entities want to communicate, often as a precursor to oppressing and then possessing you.
While not exactly eager to turn and face the dead, I was even less eager to leave my injured back exposed, so I reluctantly and gingerly rolled over.
She was pale, not fully formed, her dress and body fading to nothing somewhere around her hips. She held a candle that gave off a thin glow. Her face and hair were like transparent sketches at the outer edge of that glow, no clear features at all.
“Marzena?” I whispered, my breath frosty and white because the ghost was sucking every drop of heat out of the room to create this apparition.
Perhaps in response to her name, her candle grew a bit brighter, her face clearer. I’d seen her face in the mirror in my dream, just before she’d been grabbed by the man with the sweet-smelling handkerchief. That sweet smell was likely chloroform, my now-awake brain understood, to knock out the victims before they were masked and placed in the woods for the hunt.
The face in the mirror had been young and rosy, though, while the girl before me looked like she’d been through some awful years. Her hair was tangled and dirty and shaved well back from her forehead to reveal her scalp. Stitches ran from her temples to the crown of her head, like zippers built into her skin and skull.
“Look what they did to you,” I whispered. “I’m so sorry.”
Marzena's candlelight dimmed to a bare pale spot, which floated over toward the door. I could barely see the translucent outline of her torso.
I grabbed Stacey’s shoulder and shook it hard, but she didn’t respond.
The weak, ghostly light drifted over the threshold and out into the hall. Marzena was leaving.
“Stacey!” I hissed, but she didn’t respond. Finally, I grabbed a pillow and smacked it across Stacey’s snoring face.
“Huh!” Stacey started awake, looking around. I touched a finger over her lips to silence her, then pointed.
With bleary, unfocused eyes, Stacey turned her head toward the pale orb of Marzena’s light. Stacey blinked several times, getting the importance even as she struggled to awaken and sit up.
The orb drifted out of sight, up the hall, leaving barely a glow behind it.
“Keep an eye on that,” I whispered, removing my finger from her lips.
Stacey nodded and grabbed her boots. She’d otherwise slept in full gear, just as I would have done when sleeping in a haunted cottage near a haunted mansion on a haunted island, had it not been for my injuries.
As it was, I needed Stacey to go chase the orb while I dressed and strapped on my belt.
By the time I caught up with her, she was following the pale glow out the back door, which I’d actually never used before. It opened onto a weedy yard area with the remnants of a fence and the rotten, tilted posts of a laundry-drying line.
Like a phantasmic firefly, the chambermaid’s feeble light wound its way into the woods behind the house, following the slightest of trails through the thick growth.
I took a breath and followed the light into there, letting Stacey cover me from behind. We had to keep our flashlights sheathed to avoid drowning the pale light of Marzena’s candle or chasing the fragile ghost away.
It was hard enough to follow her through the forest, but occasionally her light would swell, and I’d see her face looking back at us like a mask floating in the shadows, impatiently waiting for us.
At other times, I’d think I’d lost her altogether.
It was like following a will o’ the wisp, more commonly called a jack o’ lantern on the sea islands, the glowing light that would lead you astray into wild places, only to leave you stranded and exhausted, alone and confused.
Maybe we were following a jack o’ lantern here, a harmful spirit leading us into danger, while I naively believed it was trying to help. I was tired already and had the distinct feeling she had been feeding on me while I slept. Maybe it wasn’t even Marzena at all, but something evil wearing her form, as powerful ghosts sometimes do, wearing a previous victim’s appearance and identity like a mask.
It was not easy to trudge through the muddy soil while avoiding the low, twisting live oak limbs that arched up from the ground. I repeatedly whacked my shins and knees along the way, since I couldn’t use my flashlight. Of course, these things did not slow the ghost at all.
Whispers arose in the darkness around me, so low I could barely hear them. If I’d been a different person in a different line of work, I would have told myself that it was probably in my mind. But being myself in my particular situation, I doubted it was imaginary.
This wasn’t the rough shouting of the huntsmen, thankfully. The voices were soft, shaking, whispering to each other. These were female voices, maybe servant girls. Maybe Marzena had brought some friends along.
I was glad she did, because with each whispering voice came a weak, flickering, glowing orb, winking in and out of sight as we meandered through the thick island wilderness. While none of them provided much light individually, together they lifted the woods from nearly pitch black to a deep gloom, enough to help Stacey and me see our way a little better.
We emerged among the statue groves, passing a muscular Apollo whose tunic didn’t leave much to the imagination.
Then we had to cross the exposed open space of the lawn, darting from one piece of construction equipment to the next, trying to use machines’ shadows for cover. I didn’t want Gary, Renoir, or anyone else to see us out here. I wasn’t going to let a little thing like getting fired stop me from doing the job.
Normally, we help the living against the dead, but now I had no living client—in fact, I was directly cutting against my client’s stated wishes by continuing the investigation. So, who was I serving?
Marzena, maybe, and these other frail ghosts with their weak candlelight, the innocent victims of the lodge’s original owner. They were the ones I served now.
I supposed I was serving the dead against the living. But surely even the modern-day Grolman family descendants would eventually be happy to have their old ghosts exorcised, if possible. They just didn’t want any publicity about it, and to their credit, they’d taken steps to protect the living against the dangers of the island, after finding themselves helpless against the ghosts.
The flickering white spots of candlelight did not lead us to the tall rear veranda doors, facing the churned-up earth of the staging area where hunting parties had once mustered before hunting deer or boar or servants, now bare earth waiting for something new to be planted.
Nor, happily, did the maids' ghosts lead us around to the front door, where we’d last see
n Gary standing guard, though it was possible he’d gone out on patrol or back home since then.
Instead, the little lights brought Stacey and me to a recessed servant’s door on the side of the kitchen, near the overgrown remnants of an herb garden. Hopefully, the maids’ ghosts knew the best route to wherever we were going.
Marzena vanished in front of the door, her light snuffed out.
I took the knob and turned it.
Locked. I sighed and reached for my lock picks.
A dusty windowpane nearby glowed with thin, spectral light. Marzena stared out at me, watching expectantly, waiting for me to join her inside, like I was taking too long to pass through the doorway.
“Yeah, easy for you to say,” I muttered, dropping to my knees. I signaled Stacey to keep her flashlight off this time.
I popped the lock and eased the door open. The door wasn’t particularly creaky or loud, but it certainly sounded that way as we stepped into the silent, dark house where we were not supposed to be.
Marzena’s apparition was stronger inside the lodge, but she was still transparent. As we followed her, I could see right through her ribs to the candle she carried. Her dress was ripped and torn from her ordeals in life, spattered with blood.
She led us up narrow servants’ steps to the main second-floor hallway. I thought I could hear other footsteps padding softly around us, other voices whispering just below my range of hearing. Maybe the other maids had continued with us to the house.
The door to the master bedroom, where the tall shadow figure had been seen, and where we’d removed our cameras hours earlier, creaked open as if pushed by a breeze.
I looked inside.
A man stood there, not Wyatt, but taller and larger. I knew him from the few pictures I’d seen of him; here he wore bristly sideburns and a suit and tie. Large holes in his neck, arms, chest, stomach, and legs oozed thick, congealed black blood. He stared at us with flat, hard eyes.
I took Stacey’s arm and drew her back and away from the apparition. We grabbed our flashlights but held back on actually blasting him.
