Cricket Hunters

by Jeremy Hepler

  Confident she had connected with Parker’s lingering aura and now had a grasp on his true intentions for coming out here, Cel made a beeline for Table Rock. She powered through low limbs and tangles of thorny vines that clawed at the tops of her feet and lower legs, and, within a few minutes, reached the game trail she wanted to find, the one that wound its way to the sweet-scented water source slicing through the center of Hunter’s Haven.

  On top of Table Rock with Mesquite Creek moseying along in front of her, she closed her eyes and reached out with her feelings again. She stood motionless, face angled upward, arms out at her sides shoulder-high, breathing slow and deep, focusing, but this time no hopeful thought came. No matter how many times she repeated the spell and pled with Parker to find her, no connection was made. Eventually, she pushed out an exasperated sigh. “Where are you?” she whispered. Why hadn’t he gone back to his car? Where else could he have—

  She snapped her eyes open when a startling rustle drifted across the creek. Her heart rate jumped up five notches. She flicked on her phone’s light and brushed the glow back and forth over the dense foliage. The longer she scanned, the faster her heart raced.

  She understood that the last twenty-four hours of her life had turned her into a frazzled, sleep-deprived, mess of tender nerves, and she also knew that Hunter’s Haven was named and known for its abundant wildlife, most of which was active at night, but she still couldn’t shake the eerie feeling that she was being watched by something other than an animal. She sensed a human presence. An aura. Keeping her light and eyes aimed over the water, she stepped off Table Rock, picked up a stick, and hurled it, hoping against hope to see a deer or rabbit bound away when it slapped the ground, but nothing fled.

  “Hello,” she called out.

  When a soft giggle answered, she was the one who fled.

  She backpedaled a couple of steps, then turned and hurried down the same game trail she’d followed to the creek. Her light swooped up and down with the swing of her arm as she navigated the narrow path as quickly as she could in chanclas. Sections of the cricket choir hushed in her wake, allowing her to hear rustling in the brush on the right side of the trail. Every instinct she had warned her she was not only being followed but chased. Hunted.

  She moved faster, not slowing when one of her chanclas flew off. When she chanced a glance back over her right shoulder, the tip of the other chancla caught on an exposed tree root, causing her to tip forward and fall to her hands and knees. She sprung to her feet and pointed her phone’s light to the right, toward the rustle, holding it with both hands as though it were a loaded pistol.

  “Who’s there?’ she asked.

  Her breath caught in her chest when the farthest reaches of the light’s glow hit on what looked like a pale face peeking out from behind a tree.

  “What do you want?”

  The face didn’t budge.

  Cel remained still, kept vigil. The longer she stared, the more she doubted. Was it really a face, or were her eyes playing tricks on her? Night time and forests and fear did that. The moment stretched. But then the face turned, and the blur of a body ran from behind the tree to behind another directly to the left. Cel chased the blur with her light. The face emerged again, and she quickly switched her phone to camera mode and held down the picture button.

  In the darkness after the first flash, she heard rustling again. Maybe a giggle, too. She wasn’t certain. Her heightened senses made the smallest sensations grand. She could feel her pulse pounding in her ears. Each inhale and exhale sounded like a gust of stiff wind. Each flash seemed pure white. After the sixth picture click, she let go of the button and held her breath, listening. Only the songs of distant crickets remained. She flicked her flashlight app back on, but rather than aim it where the person had been, she aimed it at the game trail and ran.

  By the time she reached her abuela’s back porch, she was slick with sweat. She’d traveled more than five miles roundtrip. Her mouth was as dry as sandpaper. The soles of her feet tender and scraped from pounding uneven ground. Her legs and arms and cheeks stung where whip-thin branches had caught her. She needed to catch her breath. She needed water. She needed to rinse off. But she needed to look at the pictures more. She sat down on the top step and opened her phone’s photo gallery.

  The first picture revealed a pale face peeking around the trunk, just like she’d seen. The flash hadn’t reached any farther into the thicket than the flashlight, making details of the face, anything that might help determine age or gender or ethnicity, undiscernible.

  Cel’s finger had blocked the lower two-thirds of the second picture, but above that there appeared to be a thick mane of blurry hair flowing behind the profile of a blurry face.

  In the third image, the smear of a person had their back fully to the camera. The hair fell below the shoulders. The dark ground foliage covered their legs up to knees. Above the knees was a dress that extended all the way up the back. A dress with the slightest hues of blue and yellow swirled in the blur.

  The fourth, fifth, and sixth images were too dark and unfocused to make out much more than a general body shape as it dissolved into the forest background.

  Cel flipped through the photos again and again, searching for answers that wouldn’t come. Not until she went inside and was showing them to Yesenia did she make the connection. The location. The hair. The dress color. The giggle.

  Abby.

  Chapter 23 - Yesenia

  Yesenia brewed a kettle of yerba buena while Cel washed her wounds in a hot shower. Yesenia had felt a stirring in her chest before Cel had left for Hunter’s Haven and tried to convince Cel to wait until morning to venture into the woods. She had lectured Cel about being in peak emotional and spiritual health to attempt the finding spell, told her how darkness can be unforgiving for the weak, but terca como una mula like her mother sometimes, Cel had insisted she go. Now look.

  After leaving a glob of homemade salve on the bathroom counter for Cel, Yesenia returned to the kitchen, filled two mugs with tea, and waited at the table. She briefly watched the steam dance out of the two mugs before picking up Cel’s phone and examining the pictures again.

  Yesenia had no doubts that under the right circumstances; spirits could be seen, felt, communicated with, and even occasionally captured on audio devices or photographed. She’d experienced the phenomenon in all forms. In fact, tucked away inside one of her grimoires, she had two convincing Polaroids of a ghost boy named Gabino that Dolores had taken in Matamoros in the mid-seventies. So the question circling her mind wasn’t whether or not the girl in the images was a spiritual or physical being, but why the spirit, in particular Abby Powell’s spirit, had reached out to Cel.

  She set down the phone when she heard the hall floorboards creak under Cel’s approaching feet. Cel entered the room, sat across from Yesenia, and picked up her mug. The dim oven hood light stretched just far enough across the room to illuminate Cel’s face. Her wet hair was tucked behind her ears. The salve on the two short parallel scratches on her left cheek glistened like pond water in the glow.

  “I see you found your old robe,” Yesenia said.

  “I can’t believe you kept this thing.” A faint smile tickled Cel’s lips as she glanced down and ran her hand through the shaggy purple fabric, but when she looked up, her eyes landed on her cell phone, and the trace of happiness vanished. “I feel cursed.” She lightly shook her head, chewed on her bottom lip. “First all the stuff with Parker and Lauren…then Parker disappears…then the picture thing with Abby and the crickets…and now…” She gestured at her phone. “That.” She shook her head again.

  “Que picture? Crickets?”

  Cel met eyes with Yesenia, and Yesenia raised her eyebrows, imploring Cel to elaborate.

  Yesenia listened and nodded as Cel explained how on the night Parker didn’t come home, she’d heard noises in her house, like someone else were there, but when she investigated, all she found was Parker’s books knocked off a shelf in the co
mputer room closet and a picture of Abby on Table Rock sticking out of his copy of The Illustrated Man. A picture she’d never seen before. Then she explained how a day later, she’d found crickets in all three sinks and both bathtubs in the house in the morning after Natalie left. In all the years she’d lived in the house, that had never happened. Maybe a roach or water bug every now and then after a big rain, but never a cricket apocalypse.

  Concern gripped Yesenia’s chest as memories of Dolores’s final months scraped her thoughts. “Did the cricket’s songs sound—”

  Cel waved her hand, cutting Yesenia off. “No. Nothing like that.”

  Yesenia nodded, the pressure on her chest subsiding. “Maybe Abby’s reaching out to you,” she suggested. “Trying to tell you something. Darte un mensaje.”

  Cel immediately shook her head, as though she’d contemplated and rejected that idea years ago.

  “Maybe her disappearance has something to do with Parker’s.”

  Cel shook her head again, with more certainty this time. “No. That was so long ago. There’s no way.”

  Yesenia surveyed Cel over the top of her mug as she took a sip of tea. Cel looked upset, on the verge of tears. Yesenia knew dredging up particulars about Abby’s disappearance would upset her even more, but she had to pose the question. The question Cel had refused to contemplate or discuss since the first day Abby went missing, and even more so after she was officially declared dead years later. The question that Yesenia had debated in her own mind time and again. “What if Parker had something to do with Abby’s disappearance?”

  The corners of Cel’s eyes tightened. “Don’t even.”

  “La policia said he was the last person to be seen with her that night.”

  “Yeah, they did,” Cel said with an edge to her tone. “But he said when he last saw her, she was fine and headed back inside her house. He would never have hurt her.”

  Yesenia paused, set down her cup, took a deep breath. “It would be an answer as to why you found that picture in his favorite book. And the crickets. And why she appeared while you were looking for him. Presenting herself in the same colors she was last seen in. Con el.”

  Cel swallowed hard, began nervously gnawing on her bottom lip, dropped her gaze to the table top.

  “Maybe Abby appeared to Parker the afternoon he went out there, too,” Yesenia added.

  “What are you saying?” A disbelieving, airy chuckle popped out of Cel’s mouth, and she looked up. “That Abby’s ghost kidnapped Parker?”

  Yesenia gave her granddaughter a look that screamed sincerity. “I don’t know what happened to him. But maybe Abby does.”

  “Maybe Lauren does,” Cel shot back like a rebellious teen.

  Yesenia shrugged. “Maybe. You’ve already discovered more than a few secrets he carried when it comes to her. But I still think that if Abby’s spirit is reaching out to you right now, it’s for a reason. Whether Lauren has anything to do with it or not.”

  “How am I supposed to…I can’t…I can’t…” Tears fell down Cel’s cheeks. “There was so much going on back then. And now…” She lowered her head onto her arms on the table and softly cried. Yesenia hated seeing Cel hurt, but knew accepting the pain of the situation was necessary if Cel wanted to grow strong enough to face whatever answers were coming her way. Yesenia moved to other side of the table, sat in the chair next to Cel, and whispered a soothing spell as she rubbed her back.

  A couple of minutes passed before Cel sat upright and wiped her eyes with her fuzzy purple sleeve.

  “I’m just trying to help,” Yesenia said.

  Cel nodded, and her mouth opened but no words tumbled out. The weary expression on her face and her despondent eyes told Yesenia that she had emotionally and mentally checked out. The mounting stress had finally tripped a breaker inside her, temporarily shutting down the communication line. Yesenia took Cel by the hand and stood. “Come on, mija. You need sleep.”

  Cel allowed Yesenia to guide her down the hall to her childhood bedroom. Like Dolores’s room at the end of the hall, and the kitchen, and the living room, and Yesenia’s own bedroom for that matter, Cel’s hadn’t changed much in fifteen years. Yesenia trailed Cel to the wire-framed daybed nestled in the far corner of the room—the same daybed she'd bought at garage sale on Cel's seventh birthday—and waited for Cel to lay down. Then she tucked Cel in, kissed her on the head, and told her she loved her, like she had every night for the first ten years Cel had lived with her, until Cel hit her teenage years and refused the efforts.

  On her way out, she whispered a soothing spell, and then closed the door only halfway so the nightlight in the hall would touch the carpet, the way Cel had liked it when she first moved in and was scared of the dark. The old nighttime routine felt natural, seamless, as though she’d just done it the night before, and the previous thousand nights before that.

  In her bedroom, she turned on the overhead light, lit an incense stick, and after retrieving the key from the Band-Aid tin in her nightstand drawer, slid the wooden chest out of her closet and unlocked it. She leaned forward when she lifted the lid and inhaled slow and steady. The scent of aged paper and ancient herbs the chest concealed possessed its own magic. The magic of time travel.

  Every tattered grimoire and yellowed scrap of paper and hand-drawn image carried a piece of Yesenia’s past. Her story. Her most cherished memories. And every time the scent hit her nose, her memory floodgates opened.

  Her mother reading to her and Dolores while they sat side-by-side under a single blanket on cold nights as toddlers. Her and Dolores sitting opposite one another on their shared mattress on the floor as kids, practicing reciting basic spells, quizzing one another, laughing. Her mom having her and Dolores copy down bits of information from the books to aid neighbors in need. Her and Dolores poring over the books as teens, experimenting with the ability to manipulate matters of hurt and revenge, desire and joy, as they traveled through the haze of adolescent curiosity. All the times she gained help and comfort from the books as she entered adulthood and had to navigate jobs and ownership, hatred and racism, passions and men. The times she and Dolores communicated with their mom’s spirit. The times she summoned Dolores’s. Her excitement when passing along the knowledge to her own daughter, Rebecca, keeping the family traditions alive. Then again with Cel. It was all there, every moment of her past, every emotion, her heart, in the chest, in the smell.

  As she picked through the stacks, Yesenia looked at each grimoire longer than needed, read small snippets, handwritten notes, allowing the memories to filter though her slow and easy. She found the spirit board and two books she needed about halfway in but continued rifling and reminiscing until she reached the splintered bottom of the chest. The older she got, the more she tended to do this each time she lifted the lid.

  It was after four in the morning by the time she shoved the chest back in the closet and headed to the kitchen with the board and two books under her arm. She prepared another batch of tea, gathered a pencil and notepad from the junk drawer, sat down, and began copying. She wanted to be ready to help whether Cel decided to contact Abby or not. The choice would have to be hers.

  First, she copied the spirit talk ritual, including the pre-spells and conditions the primary summoner should adhere to in order to have the best chance at getting a response, from the grimoire that had the word ESPIRITU written on it in her mother’s handwriting. Then she copied a rejection spell, cleansing spell, and steps to perform a spirit cast off ritual, all from a grimoire with a large X stitched on the cloth cover.

  After rechecking her work and returning the books to the chest, she peeked in on Cel before heading out to the back porch. Tired but wise enough to know sleep wouldn’t come, she gently swayed in a rocking chair with a warm mug of tea between her thighs, watching the horizon, drifting in and out of the past, waiting for the sun to rise and Hunter’s Haven to awaken.

  Chapter 24 - Cel

  Cel woke to the smell of migas, bright sunlight, and
Mila’s weight and warmth on her ankles. She shot up right, realizing, remembering, she was at her abuela’s, not home. She looked at the clock. It was almost ten, four hours past her typical wake up time. Before she took three breaths, the previous day’s and night’s events—Lauren, her kid, Parker’s car, the search warrant, the ghost girl—burst into the forefront of her mind, bringing with them a sense of urgency and anxiety.

  She hopped up, threw on her robe, and headed for the kitchen. She froze mid-step in the hallway when a deep voice, a man’s voice, touched her ears. She couldn’t make out what he was saying, or who he was, but she knew it couldn’t be too serious by her abuela’s throaty laughter that followed. She cinched her robe’s belt, tucked her disheveled hair behind her ears, and continued.

  Her anxiety receded when she entered the kitchen. A genuine smile born from the relief threading through her spread across her face. Yesenia was manning the stove, spooning diced potatoes and onions into a sizzling pan of eggs. She wore the same white dress she’d had on the night before, the same single braid down her back as always. Her greenish-gray eyes were bloodshot-tired but happy. Natalie and Omar sat on either side of the table in the center of the room, remnants of migas on plates in front of them. They both looked radiant, put together. The opposite of how Cel felt.

  Since graduating from the University of Texas, Omar had traded in his over-sized hand-me-downs for standard accountant attire. He wore a white long sleeve button-up, black slacks, and shiny black shoes. He had shaved his beard since Cel had last seen him six months earlier, but his hair was still stubble-length with hints of gray brushed into the temples. Natalie wore a red skirt, black sleeveless top, and black heels. Her hair was damp and scalloped into tight curls, her face highlighted in all the right areas with makeup. All three returned Cel’s smile, and Natalie and Omar rose to greet and hug her.