Soul Search: A Zackie Story

by Reyna Favis

  “The more duress experienced by the dead, the more anxious she becomes to rescue them,” Cam offered. “She does not abide their suffering.”

  We eventually reached a depression in the ground about a hundred yards from the house. As I leaned over to take a look, the depression became a pit and I was struck by a sense of double vision. It was making me dizzy and I quickly sat down before I fell.

  “Cam, I’m seeing two things at the same time. There’s a slight depression in the ground and there’s also a pretty deep pit. I can’t tell which one is real,” I said as I rubbed my eyes.

  “All right, keep a grip on your reality. Concentrate first on the slight depression. See only that when you look straight on. Only allow the pit into your vision if you look peripherally,” Cam advised. I did as I was told and was soon able to discern a body lying face down at the bottom of the pit. “The pit is from the past and what the dead man remembers.”

  “Oh, no… he’s hurt!” I said. Zackie had leaped down into the pit and was gently nosing the man who lay in the earth. I could hear him moan and saw blood ooze from various gashes. The back of his head had been crushed by a heavy blow and there was little of it left. He was unable to see and was in horrible pain, but he kept trying to push himself up. “My wife… my child…my wife, my child,” I repeated, compelled to convey his thoughts as his distress crystallized in my mind.

  “Poor man….he’s been struck multiple times by a hatchet,” Cam said. Zackie was working hard to nose her way under the man to try to lift him or to get him to hold on to her. We watched to see if the man could get himself up by clinging to Zackie, but he soon collapsed back into the pit.

  “Maria and Mary need help,” I repeated as the man moaned and tried again to get up. “What can we do, Cam?”

  Cam climbed down into the pit, somehow mastering the contradiction in perception between our time and what the dead man perceived. I could only watch him out of the corner of my vision. I felt useless, but I could not make the images diverge if I looked at them straight on. It was as if I existed in both times simultaneously and the sensation was akin to a fast drop on a roller coaster. I was really starting to feel nauseous with this constant shift in perspective. Breathing deeply, I kept my eyes trained on the horizon, only peeking to the side as my roiling gut would permit. I watched as Cam tried to turn the man over. His ruined face had one eye that was still intact and it was pleading with us to help Maria and Mary.

  “Maria and Mary have gone over,” Cam said as he held the man. “You need to follow them. Zackie can take you to them.”

  “No, still here…need help… save them…” I intoned, repeating the man’s thoughts. His mind burned with the need to save them. If his body were whole, he would have walked from this grave to find them, but his spirit perceived the damage his body had taken and it could not rise from where he died. He was condemned to lie here, repeating his dying thoughts over and over again. We had to do something. Tears of frustration were running down my face and I needed his pain to end.

  “Can Zackie take him?” I pleaded with Cam.

  “He won’t go,” Cam answered. “He is adamant that Maria and Mary are still here.”

  “What can we do?” I repeated.

  “Nothing right now,” Cam said. “I need to figure this out. This will not be an easy one.” Cam climbed out of the pit and I felt the weight of the man’s despair as Cam left him. Zackie stared hard at us and stayed by the side of the man. I could hear her barking loudly and incessantly from the pit, clearly frustrated by our failure.

  “I’m sorry,” Cam said to Zackie. “There is nothing I can do here and there is still at least one more out there,” he said as he pointed across the field. “Please be reasonable!”

  Zackie continued to grumble, but she touched the man once more gently on his shoulder to let him know that this was not over before leaping from the pit. Leading the way across the field, she did not make eye contact with either of us. I wiped my face and exchanged a look with Cam before stating the obvious. “She is really pissed.” He just nodded as we both followed Zackie across the field.

  We walked silently for almost a mile until we reached the road. At the crossroads where McCullough and Changewater Road intersected the Asbury – Anderson Road, we came to a halt. All was quiet, but we could sense a disturbance. It was full dark now and I reached into the side pocket of my cargo pants to pull out a small, but powerful flashlight. This was one of the perks of being SAR – ready for anything and I had the equipment to prove it. The flashlight beam cut through the darkness like a fine, steel blade and I was able to quickly survey the roadside. Cam had put on a headlamp and was doing the same.

  Slightly pulled back from the road and within a stone’s throw of a residential area, our lights hit upon a low marker. We soon discovered an identical marker only a short distance from the first. Walking to the objects, we shone our lights down to get a good look. Both markers were roughly rectangular with a gentle arc near the top that softened the shape. The inscription on the first marker read Peter W. Parke 1813 – 1845. A smudged shadow sat between the years. Cam shrugged his shoulders and we walked closer to the second marker to have a look. This one read Joseph Carter Jr. 1813 – 1845 and where the first marker bore a smudge, this one showed a small metal wreath.

  “What are these graves doing here on the side of the road?” I asked. “Maybe there used to be a family farm here? But the dead men aren’t related – they have different last names.” I looked around with my flashlight. “And where is the rest of the family buried? These are the only markers.”

  “If it’s not a family graveyard, what is this?” Cam said as he looked back and forth between the markers.

  As we stood there trying to figure out the meaning of the graves’ location, we both heard a loud and emphatic No! emanating from some point behind us. Whirling around at the sound, we saw Zackie standing in the middle of the road. She was poking her nose first left and then right at something. I immediately thought she had found some road kill, but that did not jive with the sound we had heard. Jogging to her location, the flashlight’s beam bounced around erratically in front of me and I was thankful that there was no traffic. Cam arrived seconds later and we both stared at what Zackie had found.

  Two dead men lay side by side. As Zackie urged them with light touches of her nose to stand and leave this place, we again heard the word No!and this time it was certain where the noise had come from.

  “Peter and Joseph?” Cam asked. I could feel the acknowledgement and a certain relief that they were recognized and not forgotten. Cam looked from the dead men to the markers and then said, “They moved the markers, but left the bodies when the road changed. These men are buried beneath the road.”

  “And they won’t listen to Zackie because they need us to right this situation?” I asked, but just as the words left my mouth, I knew this was not the source of their anguish. “Okay, so it’s not about proper burial…” I concentrated, but only got a jumble of emotions, from regret to fury and rebellion, but lacing through it all, there was a deep sense of injustice. I could not make sense of what I was feeling from them and I shook my head to clear their emotions from my mind. I looked helplessly at Cam and said, “I’m not getting anything that I can understand. I don’t know how to help them.”

  Cam edged closer to the dead men and closed his eyes. Glancing at me, he gave a small shake of his head to let me know that he was also baffled by what he read from them. Staring intently at the dead men, he studied them closely for several minutes. Finally, he looked back up and said, “These men were hanged. I can see rope burns on their necks and the cant of the head is wrong on both of them.”

  “That would explain why they are buried at a crossroads,” I said. “The people of their time would not allow someone who was executed to be buried in hallowed ground. They were kind of vindictive, as if execution were not punishment enough. Burial at a crossroads would also bring constant disturbance from travelers and not
allow those executed to rest in peace.”

  Cam nodded and added, “And perhaps they weren’t guilty of whatever crime brought them to the gallows. If that’s the case, then I can understand why they would feel such a strong sense of injustice.” Tilting his head as he thought, he continued, “But what are we supposed to do about this? The crime took place so long ago that there is really no hope of justice at this late hour. We can’t un-do the hanging and realistically, we’re not going to be able to name the true guilty party. How are we going to get them to move on? They are hell-bent on staying.”

  Zackie began to whine anxiously as she walked in agitated circles around the dead men. Cam stared at his feet and his shoulders slumped. I relied on him as my mentor and if he didn’t have a solution, I didn’t know if one could ever be found to remedy this situation. Feeling defeated, I hung my head.

  “Maybe we should – CAR!” I said as I spotted headlights in the distance. Moving quickly, Cam and I made our way back to the side of the road and stood next to the markers. Zackie took off to the other side of the road and I sensed that debilitating flash of light that signaled her departure. “She left us?” I asked Cam.

  “I think she’s feeling pretty lousy after tonight’s work and she needs to lick her wounds,” he said to me. “I wouldn’t worry about her. She’ll come back in her own time.”

  Staring at the inscriptions again, I commented, “Both men died in the same year and were buried next to each other. I think it’s obvious that whatever happened to them involved both of them. They were probably both hanged for the same reason. Something this exceptional should be easy to find in the historical record.”

  Cam nodded and scrubbed his face with his hands. “This is at least a starting point… Look, it’s getting late and so far tonight, we’ve been pretty useless. Let’s call it a night and reconvene tomorrow. I think we need to start fresh.”

  “You’re right. Let’s go home,” I said. I turned back towards the field and walked along slowly with Cam, trying to shake off the stink of defeat. Tomorrow was another day and maybe if we understood more about what happened to the two men buried at the crossroads, we could at least help them to find rest. There was nothing solid in my thinking and I felt pretty unsettled by the lack of anything definitive. Just as I was about to ask Cam about doing some library research tomorrow, a sound roared through my head. Falling to my knees, I clapped my hands protectively over my ears. Cam was still standing, but he also held his hands over his ears.

  “BLOODY HELL! It’s coming back,” he screamed over the noise. As I felt it whip back toward us, the roar increased in volume and both Cam and I were knocked flat to the ground with the impact of its presence. “Fight it!” he screamed at me. “Get up and fight!”

  He did not have to tell me twice. Every nerve was on edge and I was itching for a fight after being thrown to the ground. It was frighteningly easy to revert back to my old ways. I gathered the force in my hands and feeling for the presence, I slammed it with everything I had been repressing since I started working with Cam. I could feel it stagger back, but I still could not see it. When Cam hit it, I felt it totter. On the heels of this strike, I immediately sent out another bolus and hit it again as hard as I could and I could feel it go down and then, just as quickly as it had come, it was gone.

  Panting and bending forward with his hands on his knees, Cam said, “You are so much better at that than I.” I tried to smile, but the adrenaline was still rushing through my body, so the best I could do was grimace. Sitting on the ground sweating and panting with my head between my knees, I tried to recover.

  After a moment, I finally gasped, “I’ve had a lot of practice.”

  “We need to get out of here. Whatever that was could come back,” Cam panted. He straightened and began to walk stiffly toward the house. Staggering upright, I caught up to him and we limped back together, both of us with our guard up and breathing heavily.

  “What the hell was that all about?” I whined at him when I at last caught my breath. “What happened to the gentle approach? I thought it was all about singing Kumbaya and holding their hand and then they’d go away.” Unfairly, I was blaming him for the feelings of cognitive dissonance that were swamping me.

  “I never said that,” Cam said quietly. He was subdued and seemed deeply disturbed by everything that had transpired during the night, so I did not press him. In all honesty, as confused as I was by how we dealt with that last entity, I had used up my reserves and I was done for the night. Exhausted from the confrontation, my only thought was that I needed to get home. Conversation right now would help no one.

  When we reached the house, everything was dark and quiet. The red Nissan and the crew cars remained nearby, so I assumed that the lock down was still in progress and nothing of significance was happening. “Not my monkeys, not my circus,” I again muttered to myself. Apparently, floating around in my tired mind, this was the catch phrase associated with Lucas. I mumbled a quick goodnight to Cam, fished the keys out of my pocket and walked to my car.

  # # #

  The next morning, I managed to deliver the newspapers, but I was still a mess from the previous night’s fiasco with the entity in the field. I had a killer headache and generally felt weak, so I called in sick to the restaurant. Crossing my fingers that someone else could cover for me, I said a quick prayer that I would be able to manage without the day’s pay. That done, I immediately fell back into bed and went to sleep.

  A few hours later, I woke up feeling slightly better, but still a bit woozy. The headache continued to pound away and I rubbed my temples. Dehydration and calorie deprivation, I thought, and so went about trying to fill my belly. I was fortunate to find some eggs and cheese in my refrigerator, so I fixed an omelet and made some coffee. Feeling much better after eating, I picked up my phone and was about to call Cam when feelings of uncertainty from the previous night began whispering in my ear. I put the phone down again. Had he been withholding information about the true nature of the lingering dead? If so, for what purpose? Another possibility was that he just had things wrong, he was not the expert I took him for and it would be dangerous for me to continue learning from him. I pressed my fingers on my eyelids as I thought. My head continued to throb, but blocking the light helped a little. It was clear that we needed to meet to figure out the mess from last night. It was also clear that my interactions with the dead were significantly more controlled under his tutelage, so despite my current misgivings, my gut feeling was that I should continue working with Cam. What was not clear to me was why I was led to believe that my actions in the past took completely the wrong approach, only to be encouraged to regress to this behavior last night. Perhaps I was being too simplistic, thinking that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was the lesson Cam was trying to teach. Sighing, I hit the speed dial to call Cam.

  “Hmmmph,” he said when he answered. I was not the only one feeling under the weather.

  “Don’t go anywhere. I’ll be right over,” I told him.

  Twenty minutes later, I pulled into his driveway. The house was small and non-descript with white vinyl siding that looked crisp and clean in the late morning sun. Tempering the sterile white, blue-gray shutters surrounded the windows and a matching door completed the look of a tidy, well-kept house. Just as I was about to lean on the doorbell, Cam pulled the door open and stepped aside to give me entrance. His eyes were bloodshot and his face had a sickly pallor. I could faintly smell the fumes of alcohol leaching from his skin. Zackie stood at his side and was also not herself. Her head hung down and her tail drooped noticeably.

  “You’re drunk,” I accused Cam as I entered the house. The rooms I could see contained the bare necessities and were absent of both decoration and the normal clutter expected in a home. It was so much like my own rooms that I could not help but notice.

  “Nonsense. I was drunk last night. Today, I am hung-over,” he mumbled as he closed the door and headed left into his kitchen. “Coffee? You can have the ne
xt pot. This one is mine,” he said as he poured a huge white mug full with the steaming liquid. While he perched on a stool at the counter and cautiously sipped the coffee, I started the next pot brewing and hunted through his cabinets for another mug. Zackie lay on her belly nearby with her chin on the floor and looked up dolefully at us. No one does that mournful look like a hound.

  “Is that your coping mechanism? Drinking?” I asked while I searched.

  “Very rarely, but it tends to be a good start,” he replied.

  I grabbed another white mug and sat on the stool next to Cam. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye. “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m not going to lecture you for something done ‘very rarely.’ Whatever gets you through the night…”

  “And what got you through the night?” he asked.

  “Plain and simple exhaustion,” I said rubbing my temples. “I can’t stay awake long enough to do anything that might help alter my consciousness.” I folded my arms around myself and leaned forward. With my heels planted on a rung of the stool, I slumped into what must have resembled a fetal position. The stool felt hard and not quite uncomfortable under me, but I felt secure that at least I would not fall back to sleep. When I saw the carafe had finally filled with the dark liquid, I got up, poured myself a cup and took a moment to swallow a healthy mouthful before sitting again. Cam’s coffee was excellent. I sat there inhaling the aroma and getting a caffeine buzz.

  “You have some coffee…” Cam said and pointed to his upper lip. He handed me a paper napkin from the countertop and continued while I wiped absently at my face. “I think the events from last night took a toll on each of us,” he said. “She probably had a worse night than either of us,” he mumbled, thrusting his chin toward Zackie. “In addition to the expected wear and tear following an encounter, you seemed pissed off before driving away. Would you care to enlighten me?” He looked at me with concern and waited for me to respond.