Shepherd's Warning

by Cailyn Lloyd

  At the rear of the cemetery she found an area cordoned off with small white boulders. MacKenzie Corner was carved into a boulder at the entrance. It was a lovely little plot.

  The tightly bunched tombstones were identical, a simple design with rounded crowns. Over thirty stones crowded the small patch and, indeed, every one of them was a MacKenzie. As Laura stepped in among them, the air grew cooler and clouds obscured the sun, sending a chill down her spine. Sensing rain nearby, Laura tried to hurry but couldn’t change the breezy pace she adopted walking into the cemetery. Onward she walked, past MacKenzie after MacKenzie, feeling irrationally calm, wondering why Reverend Drew hadn’t mentioned this place. Surely he knew it was here?

  Suddenly, she stopped, sobered and puzzled by an odd contradiction on the headstones. Some of the people buried here were older than the church. The stone before her bore the simple inscription:

  Peleg MacKenzie

  1775-1804

  How could that be? She clearly remembered a date of 1858 on the church cornerstone. The next stone was barely legible, the marble eroded by years of wind, rain, and snow:

  Jeremiah MacKenzie

  1713-1751

  It wasn’t possible. Laura felt certain no settlers had traveled this far west before the nineteenth century. Why were these people here? The absurd image of some ancient MacKenzie dragging all these festering ancestors west with him popped into her head. It was ridiculous, yet she sensed it might be true.

  One stone sat alone at the rear of the little plot. Glowing a faint iridescent green, the chiseled lettering was fresh, showing no sign of age or weathering.

  Anna Flecher

  1481-1516

  Laura felt frightened as an unnerving sensation washed through her. This Flecher woman wasn’t a MacKenzie. Why was she here? Why did she find that name so disturbing?

  The sky darkened to deeper shades of purple. The air was still, but the trees swayed with a slow rhythm, the creaking of the ancient branches growing more insistent. Panic swept through Laura when she realized night was falling. She had to get out!

  She hated cemeteries. Why had she come here?

  She looked for the gate, but it was now hidden. The graveyard looked the same in every direction, the stone fences far away, the distance growing longer; the cemetery multiplying into endless rows of tombstones. Her hopeless sense of direction, normally just a frustrating nuisance, had become a life-threatening handicap. It felt like a dream, but she couldn’t wake herself, couldn’t escape the terror of this place.

  In the twilight gloom, the tree branches looked like arms waving above gnarled faces carved into the corrugated bark of the trunks. Something small and hard hit her on the back of the head. As she swiveled and raised her arms for protection, two more nuts struck her on the back.

  Acorns! The oaks were throwing acorns!

  Laura ran aimlessly as the nuts rained down upon her. Her fear became a finely-honed terror when she realized the fence and gate were receding faster than she could run and stumble toward them. She looked down, horrified to find that she was wearing heels. What? Why had she come here? Why couldn’t she see the church? Why was she so stupid? She wanted to beam out of this nightmare, but wishing it didn’t make it so.

  The why, why, why in her head intensified into a roar as the trees moved in on her, threatening harm and death. Clumsy in the spiky heels, Laura tripped on a fallen stone hidden in the grass. Opened her mouth to scream, a scream choked off when her head struck an unyielding chunk of granite. She blacked out with the thought she would wake in bed like Dorothy returning from Oz.

  * * *

  When she awoke, it was dark.

  The sky as black as coal, the stars hard gleaming crystals. Her head throbbed. Checking with tentative fingers, Laura felt a swollen gash over her right eye, a crust of dried blood in her hair.

  She lay dazed for a moment as the world came back into focus. The lights of the town shone in the distance, silhouetting the rounded tops of the tombstones before her. Laura turned her head, horrified to see tombstones fading into the darkness in every direction. It was so silent, so still.

  Oh God! I’m still in the cemetery!

  In her abject terror, time crawled and her arms and legs denied her fervent need to move and escape. Her mind raced on. Must get out of here. Must get out of here. Must get out of here. She struggled to get up—

  There was a sound behind her, like a shovel biting into soft dirt. Laura dared not look around. Her only instinct was to run, but her arms were leaden and barely budged. The sounds of shovels breaking ground grew louder, spreading across the cemetery in a malevolent wave.

  The ground was moving! All around her, the dirt came alive as the turf buckled and churned. Gravestones wobbled and fell into widening crevices in the earth. Faults ran every which way, ripping the ground asunder as tremors freed the dead, imprisoned below. Laura sat rigid, unable to close her eyes, unable to scream, unable to run.

  Paralyzed.

  Skeletal hands streaked with rotting flesh reached skyward from the soil. Lifeless heads surfaced, hideous shapes without eyes or faces, strips of bloated flesh on their chalky white skulls. They climbed and struggled from their earthen confines, wheezing, filling the air with the smell of death and decay. Together, they walked and staggered like drunks, though they were neither drunk nor human. The decomposing family of corpses closed in, surrounding her, moaning a low throaty chant, “Leave us be, Laura. Leave us be.”

  Oh God, she wanted to leave them be, wanted to escape but remained frozen in place—an ice sculpture of terror. Cold lifeless hands touched her arms, slimy like rotting fruit.

  Tried to scream, but no sound came.

  Tossed and turned and struggled to no avail.

  Firmer hands grasped her shoulders.

  Laura tensed for the killing blow she knew was coming.

  Thirteen

  “Laura, wake up! Wake up! Laura, wake up!”

  Laura opened her eyes, feeling anxious and disoriented. The bedroom came into focus, dimly lit by moonlight streaming through the windows. A hand—Lucas’s hand—was on her shoulder, shaking her gently. The dead faded away, back into her subconscious.

  It had been a dream, a nightmare. She fought back tears in the face of Lucas’s sleepy concerned expression.

  “You okay?” He took her hand gently.

  She nodded. “Yep. Yep, bad dream, that’s all.”

  Laura blinked, trying to clear her head but the cemetery and dead people lurked in the shadows. Closing her eyes made it worse.

  “You want to talk about it?” Lucas asked.

  “No…no, I’m okay.”

  Lucas nodded and turned over. Laura rolled onto her side and stared at the wall, heart still pounding, trying to slow her breathing, her body covered in a thin film of cold sweat. What could she say? Lucas would murmur something soothing and that would be the end of it. She didn’t want to talk about it, anyway.

  Sleep eluded her. Closing her eyes brought the cemetery and hideous corpses back from the dead as vivid as a Wes Craven movie. Laura wanted the creatures to disappear, so she lay there, eyes open, working a relaxation exercise, concentrating on her breathing, her heart gradually slowing to normal. She didn’t question the dream. She knew where it had come from. Asking questions about the house, the church, the cemetery—these things had returned to her in the night, gift-wrapped in a technicolor nightmare.

  Sometimes her rich imagination was a curse.

  Instead, she thought about Leah. Walking in the woods, walking the beach on Lake Michigan. Now and then a dead body would intrude and she pushed it away. Slowly, she relaxed. Perhaps she would sleep after all.

  * * *

  Lucas slid from bed and mumbled that he had to pee. He wandered into the bathroom, pushed the door shut, reached for and missed the light switch.

  “Fuck it,” he muttered.

  He stood, eyes closed, thinking of little but sleep. Nearby, an owl called out. Lucas felt a cold dra
ft from the window, visible as a faint grey square when he opened his eyes. Why was the window open? It was cold outside.

  That open window bothered Lucas. Made him feel uneasy, wary. He reached out to close it—

  The hand that grabbed him closed about his face so tightly, no sound was possible—at least he thought it was a hand in his blind terror, the feel of it soft and fleshy but cold, as cold as the night air from the window—his mind locked in a silent scream from the shock of being torn from a sleepy state.

  It pushed him backwards. Lucas resisted, neck and back muscles straining, his arms flailing to find and strike his assailant. His hands found nothing, and the assailant shoved him into the vanity, his kidneys crashing into the unyielding marble edge. The blow stunned him, but his panic was intense, and his hand found purchase behind, on the sink. He lunged forward and threw a roundhouse punch, but whoever, or whatever it was, had such a long reach that his fist found only thin air.

  Losing ground again, he was being pushed slowly backwards toward the door, his neck straining and bobbing against the force upon his head. His hands groped in the darkness, searching for anything he could jerk from the wall and use as a weapon. There had to be something; Laura had hung enough junk on the walls of this place. The fingers of his left hand found the light switch. Lucas flipped the switch as he shifted his balance in readiness to strike.

  The room was empty.

  Lucas stared wide-eyed for a moment, seeing only a rustling of the curtains before he fell against the wall, wheezing and panting from the struggle, and slid to the floor.

  For the longest time, he stared at the empty room in a mindless shock.

  Slowly, his breathing and heart rate returned to normal. He pushed away from the wall and shuffled to the sink, washing his face with cold water. Looking into the mirror, he saw pressure marks on his cheeks, marks that were fading rapidly.

  A swirl of apprehension tightened in his stomach.

  What the hell was that?

  There was no rational explanation for it. None.

  He sat on the toilet and looked around. Nothing was out of place. Nothing amiss. Had he imagined it?

  He looked into the mirror again, but the marks were gone.

  Laura called, “Lucas, you okay?”

  “Yep, I’m fine.”

  He wasn’t.

  He didn’t know what to say, what to think. He got up slowly, closed the window, and walked back to bed, flicking the light off with a brief nervous glance over his shoulder. He slid into bed and tried to rationalize the moment in the bathroom with little success.

  A waking nightmare? Sounded like a stupid idea. He inhabited a real, tangible world, a world devoid of the inexplicable. He didn’t believe in psychics, the paranormal, ghosts, hauntings. Science and logic ruled his world view, which left room for little else.

  A strange thought intruded, forced its way to the forefront, pushed everything aside.

  Laura.

  Laura did it. She was responsible. She caused the attack in the bathroom.

  That was illogical, irrational. The idea felt like it came from somewhere outside his head. Insistent, but senseless. Crazier than the idea of a ghost in the room.

  A waking nightmare? Stupid or not, it made more sense than the supernatural, even if it was a reach. Either way, it was unsettling. Haunted house? Or losing his mind?

  Maybe it hadn’t happened at all.

  That he even considered the supernatural fell squarely on his mother. Her secrecy about this house gnawed at him because it didn’t fit the woman he knew. He was still angry with her for the perceived dishonesty. Now he was seeing things, imagining things, having weird waking dreams…

  He turned over, reached out, and ran his hand over Laura’s slender waist and hip. She turned without warning, embracing and pulling his mouth to hers with passion.

  They kissed and mauled each other with their hands, tearing nightclothes away. Lucas rolled on and into her, led by Laura’s clutching arms. They pushed bodies together in ever stronger thrusts, rushing to mutual climax, then lay breathless in a tangle of arms and legs. They stroked and cuddled each other for a while, without words, before he fell into a deep but uneasy sleep.

  Fourteen

  Shepherd closed his laptop for the night and poured a small glass of Port. After a full day of classes and an evening spent hacking and crashing the computer network of a Syrian terror cell, he felt weary. More and more, the move to Milwaukee felt like a mistake. He’d come, motivated by a potent premonition, a warning that a significant threat existed here. A situation he was uniquely qualified to handle.

  Problem was, after the initial premonition and a few vague hints, the trail had gone cold. He began to wonder if he’d misunderstood, or had somehow misinterpreted the clues and moved here for no discernible reason. He needed to leave Rome, had enjoyed the summer in Milwaukee, but he wasn’t looking forward to a harsh northern winter or another relocation. Shepherd slipped into a frustrating round of second-guessing.

  Why would a threat from his old life be here in the New World? Was one of the Aeldo playing a game with him? The group occasionally engaged in pranks and tomfoolery. Perhaps he should have been more skeptical, waited for more information before moving. He may have foolishly allowed his intuition to trump common logic, an illogical turn from the rational philosophy he now followed. Still, such thinking wasn’t helpful or mindful.

  Time to meditate.

  He tapped Chopin Nocturnes on his playlist, sat in a fat comfortable recliner in the study, and sipped on his nightcap. Closed his eyes and drifted, enjoying the music and the pleasant vibe from the alcohol. Shut out doubts and concerns, focused only on the present moment, slipping into a mindful state, accepting the tinge of melancholy in his mood. That was the concept, in theory. In practice, it was too easy to drift back to worry and trivia—the natural background noise of the brain. He was feeling old. Feeling he’d allowed some of his old life into the present day. Worried he’d come here because age and senility were creeping up on him. Thus the inner battle went until he slowly soothed the anxieties, returned to the present, stayed focused, stopped second-guessing himself.

  Peace.

  He drank the remaining splash of Port. Set the glass down, relaxed, and drifted into the first realm of sleep.

  He stood near a house, in the woods, by a lake. A grand structure, an old Tudor mansion. He had been feeling homesick; it had to be England.

  No, it was much closer. In the light sleep dream state, he couldn’t pull a connection until three letters appeared:

  B F E

  The house existed in B F E.

  There was something odd about the house. A man wandered the halls of the Tudor manse, a farmer dressed in bib overalls and a dirty cap. Only he wasn’t a man but a revenant of some sort. Something darker dwelt there too but remained hidden from view.

  Somewhat later, he stood in a cemetery, watching the faceless blonde woman being assailed by an army of zombies. He viewed the scene dispassionately. It was dream imagery, not the least bit frightening. A clue of some sort.

  Shepherd slept in that comfortable chair all night, the woman, the house, the farmer, and the letters playing in a dreamy loop. His process at work. Bit by bit, piece by piece, a three-dimensional scenario would emerge, and he would fully understand. It couldn’t be hurried, couldn’t be prodded.

  The house in the woods. The man. The woman. Some hidden entity. They were the reason he was here.

  Only one question remained.

  Where?

  Fifteen

  Laura stared out the back window of the Hall, coffee in hand, lost in thought. Autumn had come, bringing the first omens of the cold winter ahead. At first subtle—a scattering of crimson splotches in the maples—the colors soon multiplied and spread in an explosion of reds and yellows as the poplars, birches, elms, and ashes joined the party. The oaks resisted but soon succumbed to the shorter days and cooler nights and the coming seasonal death of winter. On the lak
e, geese flocked together in anticipation of the day when they would all fly south.

  The house was almost finished. The big projects were complete, and the house was fully habitable. It was a grand house in this restored state, a big country mansion that looked at home among the trees and the lake. The yard had been tamed and they had planted a lawn. Lucas was still working around the edges, cutting out deadwood and overgrowth. For now, the film crew and photographers were gone until the house was fully finished.

  Laura had just laid Leah down for a nap after a rough morning of crabbing, crying, and clinging. She loved the child, but these moments were tiring. Now forty-seven, she had raised two children to adulthood. It seemed easier then. She had more energy, more patience. Thank God Leah still took naps. Still, she felt guilty when she struggled with the responsibility. Leah was the only tangible piece of Jacob that remained. Even here, she would occasionally hear his laugh or remember a random moment from his childhood. She would wander off in tears, trying to make sense of his death, knowing there was no sense to be made of it. She felt lost, unable to heal the wounds left by his passing. The move hadn’t changed much; there was no escape from the memories. She didn’t regret it though. Things were a little better here.

  Lucas was part of the problem. He had helped when Dana and Jacob were young but now he did nothing but hunt and fish, work in the yard, and disappear most afternoons on unspecified errands. Laura knew he was working through his grief, they both were. He acted as though his grief was greater and she resented his lackadaisical attitude.

  She poured a small glass of wine, plopped down by her laptop at the kitchen table, and logged into Ancestry. Sighed. No new hints today. None for several days now. Her efforts to investigate the house and family tree floundered, starved of information.