by Barry Napier
When he picked the object up, he was rocked by surprise and the sense of having come full circle in some odd way.
It was the flashlight battery that he had dropped down through hole in the side of the black rock two nights ago.
He gripped it tightly in his hand, as if making sure it was real.
He was here. The end of the line. He could go nowhere else from here except back the way he had come.
He swept the flashlight beam upwards and then saw why everything in the chamber had a golden cast to it. Halfway across the chamber, positioned almost at the very top of the ceiling, was a hole that was roughly the size of a soccer ball. Murky rays of sunlight trickled in through it. Cooper imagined that during high tide, ocean water would also come in through it, adding to the collected water that filled the drop-off to his right.
Cooper looked back to the right, getting down on his hands and knees to look into the water. There was debris and foam collected along the top of most of it. The space between the firm rock on which Cooper was crouched and the wall across from him was roughly twelve feet. Water lapped gently against the far wall, tipped with gritty foam. Cooper could see the wall gently angling down into the water.
But he also saw something else that made his heart freeze.
He saw three bones scattered along the edge of the wall. The last of the group, he was sad to see, was a skull. It was hard to tell from the darkness and the limits of the flashlight’s power, but he thought he saw others further back into the opening that lead back out to the ocean.
He trained the beam of light in that direction and focused. He counted what was certainly at least eight more bones, one of which was a nearly complete right arm connected to a shoulder.
He traced the area slowly with the flashlight beam, coming back towards the lapping water directly across from him. He looked to the first three bones he had spotted and noticed that one of them was clearly a portion of spine. Beneath this broken spine, a fragment of cloth hung, trapped forever to the vertebrae along the curve of spine.
The cloth was blue in color and although the cloth was faded and slightly decayed by time, Cooper could clearly see what it was.
A pair of swim trunks. From Cooper’s vantage point, he could only see a portion of a cartoon shark giving a thumbs-up.
Henry Blackstock.
“Oh my God,” Cooper breathed.
He stood up, looking quickly around the room. He glanced around at the water, the light darting back and forth as he searched.
Then he saw something else, but only for a moment. Pressed against the portion of ground that he was standing on, ebbing up and down to the pulse of the water, he saw a body. It wasn’t small, per se, but not big, either. It was the body of a pre-teen or teen. Its flesh was bloated and white but showed no signs of decay.
Kevin Owens.
Cooper used his shovel to reach out, intending to push the body away from the side of the cavern floor.
From behind him, something grunted.
Cooper wheeled around, nearly losing his balance and falling into the dark water behind him. The cavern grew ice cold and even the ocean seemed to hold its breath as he found himself staring face to face with the thing that he had seen on the black rocks two nights ago.
This time, it was somehow more terrifying now that Cooper knew its name.
Douglass Pickman.
28
Even in the face of absolute terror, Cooper was able to draw everything he knew about the supernatural quickly to the center of his mind. There were many facts that instantly came to him, but one was more important than all of the others.
In his current ethereal form, Pickman could not kill him.
If he was powerful enough, he could possibly strike Cooper, perhaps pushing him into the water. Depending on the kind of entity Pickman had become, he could maybe even possess Cooper.
It was this knowledge that allowed Cooper to block the first attack that Pickman attempted. It was predictable and, thankfully, weak. As he had done in the Blackstock’s living room, Pickman tried to force himself into and through Cooper, hoping to either suck some of his energy out or to push him back into the dark water that had claimed so many lives.
But Cooper had been ready for it and, as a result, Pickman’s form went sailing harmlessly through him. All Cooper felt was a brief sense of being cold, and nothing more. He felt rather than heard a slight roar of frustration from Pickman as his spirit began to dwindle. In the glow of the flashlight, it was easily one of the best examples Cooper had ever seen of a full bodied apparition disappearing before his eyes.
Why now? Why did he wait to try to attack me now?
With this thought, Cooper dropped the shovel. He slung his backpack around to his chest and opened the front pouch. He took out the item he had been uneasy about form the moment he had picked it up from the grocery aisles. Now that he had it in the darkness with him, Cooper thought that it might actually save him from further attacks while also getting rid of Douglass Pickman.
He had no idea if his plan would work or not, but it all came down to the blue box he was removing from his book bag.
A box of table salt.
As he fumbled with the lid while also trying to hold the flashlight steady, Cooper scanned the remainder of the chamber. Ahead of him, the ground dipped a bit and narrowed. It was literally like a walkway leading out into more of the dark water as the walls pressed outward, allowing more room for the water to collect.
He quickly walked in that direction, well aware that Pickman could choose any moment to draw all of his power together and attack. Even something as slight as a budge in the wrong direction could send Cooper into the water. And while he had no problem swimming (even in water where the remains of countless children resided) he didn’t think his plan would work if the salt got wet.
As Cooper neared the end of the rocky terrain, he saw another scattering of bones and the mostly deteriorated fabric of clothes. He saw the stained and faded white cotton of a shirt along with black pants that had a tear in left leg. Next to this, there was another small pair of black pants and what looked to be some form of a miniature dress.
Pickman and his daughter, Cooper thought.
He ran towards the remains, very much aware of how narrow the ground was getting. He had maybe a foot or so of leeway on either side before he would go sprawling into the water.
As he neared the remains, he felt Pickman drawing near. The air grew heavy and he felt as if there were particles of ice forming on the back of his neck.
“Forget it,” he said into the cavern. “Save your energy. I’m not some gullible little child. You won’t scare me as easily.”
There was another frustrated moan, this one more audible and real than the last. A small part of Cooper pitied Pickman when he heard the sorrow in it.
Cooper reached the remains and dropped to his knees. When he did, he felt something hot along his back. It briefly felt like a bee sting and then throbbed with an icy sort of feeling that he had never experienced before. Pickman was trying to strike him, trying to shove him away from his earthly remains.
Cooper finally pried the box of salt open, ignoring the little triangular flexible spout and tearing the top away. When he did, he felt another stinging sensation on the side of his face.
“I’d suggest that you relax,” Cooper said. “You won’t be here much longer and you should enjoy your last moments. Don’t waste them hating me.”
Cooper could feel the hate like a living, physical thing in the cavern with him. He could also feel Pickman’s presence filling the place, his dead eyes set intently on Cooper.
Cooper leaned to his right and started pouring the salt out onto the ground. As he started making a circle around himself and the remains of Pickman and his daughter, he recalled the first time he had used this approach. It had been a poltergeist case where a teenager was being thrown from his bed every night. To test a theory, Cooper had drawn a circle of salt around the boy’s bed and had found
that the poltergeist had been unable to break the circle. Cooper had picked the trick up from an old-school paranormal investigator and had always been fascinated with how such primitive tools could work as well and advanced technological ones. The belief behind the effectiveness of the salt was that it was a pure element that unpure spirits could not encroach upon.
Pickman was apparently aware of what was happening because he let loose a frustrated wail. Cooper glanced to his right and saw that Pickman’s ghost had again re-established itself in an almost full bodied form. His rotten face stared at Cooper, his bared teeth in a grimace of anguish and eternal hatred.
Cooper closed the circle of salt behind him, eyeing it to make sure there were no breaks in it. He rattled the box and found that it was a bit less than half full.
“Let me ask you something,” Cooper asked as he removed the book bag from his shoulders. “All those kids you lured out into the water…all those children you caused to drown…did any of that bring your daughter back?”
The apparition flared for a moment, almost crystal clear and then nearly transparent. It came rushing at Cooper but stopped when it hit the circle of salt. It was as if Pickman’s ghost had hit some sort of phantom concrete wall. He let out a roar that Cooper felt in his bones. He could actually see some of the salt stir from the force, but the ring around him remained absolute.
Cooper took the box of garbage bags out of the backpack and pulled one out.
“Here’s to your health, asshole,” Cooper said.
He reached out and picked up the first bone. He was pretty sure it was a femur. He put it into the bottom of the trash bag and then did the same thing with the next bone. And the next.
Some of the bones had withered so much that they splintered and fell apart at his touch. Yet when he was eight bones in and grabbed the ninth, he felt something like a sharp jolt of electric current pass through him.
The vision came with the speed and grace of a fast ball that strikes a batter in the shoulder.
Pickman and his daughter (Victoria Cooper discovered with blinding clarity. Her name is Victoria) came into this chamber. Victoria was bleeding and gasping for breath. Every breath she took spewed out a thick string of blood from her mouth. Her eyes were vacant, blank. Pickman was shuddering with anger and fear, not wanting to lose his daughter. He did not care what happened to him and as he sat her down on the floor, looking at the water all around him, he wondered if he should have just given himself up. Maybe if he had have handed himself over to the locals—knowing for sure that he’d be thrown into prison or hanged—they could have taken Victoria to a doctor and saved her life.
But instead, his anger had won over control of his body and this was where he had ended up. In the dark, with a dying daughter and no hope.
He let out a roar of anger that, before it ended, became a wail of grief.
“I just need to rest, Papa,” Victoria said. “Please, just let me sleep.”
Pickman held her close. His right hand still held his pistol. He could still smell the burning scent of the last shot, the one he had put into the guts of one of the locals that had followed him in.
He looked around for any other means of escape, but there was only the water…the damned dark water that seemed to laugh at him, to let him know that he and his daughter would forever be lost down here.
He listened to the silence and was fairly sure that no one else had followed him.
“I’m sorry, precious,” Pickman said in his daughter’s ear. He smelled her blood as he kissed her on the cheek.
He felt her breathing softly, a rattle in her chest and something that sounded like mucus in her throat. She then gave a shudder and expelled her last breath…
…and then sometime later, Pickman held her body close to him. The grief was immeasurable and the hatred he felt towards the men that had so carelessly fired towards her flared through him like a demon. He was starving, he had gone half mad down here, and his sight came and went. He looked into the dark water and smiled. He leaned over and placed his hand in the stagnant water, making little circles in it. His blood trickled into it, ebbing out like oil.
“Victoria,” he said. “Daddy’s here. I’ll always be here with you. I’ll make them pay, darling. I’ll make them pay.”
The vision dissipated after that.
Cooper remained frozen in place, catching his breath from the force of it. He sensed that Pickman had died shortly after uttering that last dark promise to his daughter.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper said. “It sucks. It wasn’t right. But taking other people’s kids is a lame and pointless revenge.”
With that, he continued stuffing the bones into the garbage bag. He filled the first one, tied it off, and started on the second. After placing a few bones inside of the second bag, he came to the smaller ones.
Another vision came to him, this one timid and without much force. Cooper shut his eyes against it and flung the bone into the bag as quickly as he could. Pickman’s recollection had been bad enough; Cooper was pretty sure he’d lost a piece of his soul in just having seen it. He had no interest in seeing Victoria Pickman’s last memories of being down here in the dark with her desperate father.
He sensed a settling of the atmosphere in the chamber. He knew Pickman was still there, but he had given up.
“I’ll take good care of her,” Cooper said. “I give you my word.”
He wasn’t sure what Pickman thought of that comment. His ghost had either exhausted itself or was watching his daughter’s remains as they were moved by human hands with a sorrow that extended even beyond the afterlife.
29
Cooper didn’t hear from Pickman again.
Even when the last of the bones were packed into the second garbage bag to the point that it was hard to tie shut, Cooper was left alone. He knew that there was no way that he had gotten every single speck of the Pickman’s remains, but the ring of salt should serve as a failsafe. Besides, even if the water in the chamber rose to a level that would disrupt the circle (which he doubted, seeing as how the bones had been undisturbed for almost three hundred years), the next step in his plan should take care of it all.
Cooper stepped out of the circle of salt, waiting to see if Pickman had one last fight in him. He gave one final look back to the remains he had seen in the water, particularly to the two bodies in the water—the decayed body of Henry Blackstock and the fresh remains of Kevin Owens. He wished he could do something for them but there was nothing to be done. He didn’t have the time or the energy.
He turned back towards the way he had come in and started walking into the darkness. He couldn’t ever remember wanting to see sunlight so badly in his life.
He wore the backpack over both shoulders, gripping a garbage bag in each hand. The bags were flung over the shoulder straps of the backpack. He felt like some deranged Santa, trudging through the dark with bags full of morbid goodies.
The garbage bags weren’t too heavy…not yet. He had read somewhere that the average human skeleton weighed about fifteen percent of the human’s body weight at death. He didn’t know if it was true or not, but he kept that nugget at the front of his mind, trying to convince himself that his load wasn’t so bad when his arms began to tremble.
He saw evidence of this trembling in the shaking of the flashlight beam ahead of him before he felt it in his muscles. He had to switch the flashlight between hands every few minutes, as it was almost impossible to grip it and the bunched tops of the garbage bags. His wrists were aching within five minutes of leaving the chamber and he had no idea how he was going to get out…if he was going to get out.
He did his best to focus on nothing more than the area directly ahead of him. His back started to ache and his wrists were on fire. Sweat was trickling into his eyes and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia was starting to sink in. The eerie clinking of bones inside the garbage bags wasn’t helping at all.
When he finally allowed himself a break, he wasted no time in gett
ing the bottle of water out of his pack. He took several slow swallows, restraining himself from downing the entire thing. He checked his phone and saw that it was 9:49. He honestly didn’t care when he made it out, but he’d prefer that it still be daylight. He felt confident that he could make it, but thinking of everything he had left to do made him feel more exhausted than he already was.
Before beginning his walk again, he tried carrying both garbage bags in one hand but it was evident within only a few yards that it wasn’t going to work. He was just going to have to carry on with one bag slung over each shoulder. Meanwhile, the shovel was in his backpack, zipped up with the handle sticking out. On more than one occasion, he wanted to just pitch the flashlight down a tunnel somewhere just to be rid of the extra item he had to carry in his already full hands.
He retraced his steps, doing what he could to slog through the pain. Even when he had just entered the bureau, when he had been in the absolute best shape of his life, this little hike would have been daunting. His knees started to hurt, his back ached, and his wrists were cramping.
He didn’t stop again until he came to the passage that had forced him to crawl through when he had entered. Here, he re-checked the knots at the tops of the garbage bags and very carefully pushed them through the tunnel. He had to stop twice as the ceiling height dropped. With the black garbage bags in front of him and the ceiling no more than a foot over his crouched body, he felt like he was suffocating.
Then he came to the area within the passage that had been a treat coming in—the declining passages that rounded out in curbs in the rock. But now he was having to trudge up them with the bags. In the dark. With a variety of aches and pains already tearing through him.
I can’t do this, he thought.
Sweat was causing his clothes to stick to him and every muscle in his body was sore. And the entire cavern system felt like it was slowly squeezing in, trying to crush him.
