by Sam Witt
Liz turned in her seat again, chin perched on the headrest. “It was, like, I dunno. A seance or something. A bunch of people that were part of this bad news religion set up shop at the farm. They were prayin’ to their god, you know, for it to answer their prayers. They did their thing, and eventually, somethin’ answered their prayers. It killed a shit ton of ‘em. Would’ve killed more, except—”
Nancy shot her sister an evil glare then finished the story. “Except sometimes, when somethin’ hears your prayers, it ain’ what you thought it was. Something came through that night, crawled into a world it shoulda never set foot in. It went crazy, killed most of them people.”
Dick smirked. He’d heard variations on this theme all over the country. A swamp rat voodoo renegade once claimed he’d called up an alligator god during Hurricane Katrina. Dick had spent a week crawling through the bayou with that crazy fuck and never saw anything weird except for a herd of albino deer that no gator would touch. Weird, but not spooky weird. A Baptist preacher had even lured Dick out to the deserts of West Texas with a promise that he had a real angel on tap, said it came right down out of the sky and blessed his congregation with holy manna for their sacrament. Another week wasted on that trip, and Dick didn’t even get to see a single white deer. “Nothing answers prayers. There’s no god or devil, no heaven or hell. It’s all lies people tell themselves to make sense of whatever scares them.”
Nancy smirked right back. “I guess we’ll see, city boy. I hope you’re right.”
Dick rolled his eyes.
Nancy turned off on a gravel farm road. “But I know you’re wrong, you stupid fucker.”
6
The van’s headlights blazed over the wide bowl of a desolate valley. The van faced an irregular rectangle of scorched earth covered by blackened soil rimed with a hint of frost. Off to the left, Dick saw the skeletal remnants of a few trees and beyond that he thought he saw the scorched shell of a barn. There was no house here, much less a haunted one. He drew the hammer back on the pistol. “What the fuck, Nancy? I thought you understood how serious I was.”
She ducked her head away from the gun. “Put the gun away, fucker. This is where it happened.”
“There’s nothing here.” Dick forced the words through clenched teeth.
Nancy sighed. “Get out of the van. I’ll show you.”
Dick grumbled and got out of his seat. He leaned back at Amy as he left the van and whispered, “Get everyone ready to roll. If this isn’t a bust, I want to get the footage and get out of here.”
The truth was, Dick didn’t feel great about the place. There was something off about the whole county and this patch of blackened ground, in particular. It was like a bad smell he couldn’t identify, clinging to the back of his throat like the remnants of a bad hangover. Nancy hopped out of the van and walked toward the center of the patch of scorched ground, shivering and rubbing her arms. Dick didn’t blame her—it was getting colder than expected and he didn’t have a coat. The sooner they wrapped this shit up, the better off they’d all be.
He followed Nancy onto the scorched earth and grimaced at the low clouds of black ash they stirred up. It was fine as baby powder and greasy; with every step it painted his tennis shoes and the bottoms of his jeans with grungy black. He didn’t think he’d even try to clean this shit off, he’d just replace his pants and sneakers and burn the old ones. He didn’t want to bring home anything from this county if he could help it.
Nancy stopped and spread her arms. “Here we are.”
Dick stopped, looked around. They were twenty feet out into the ash, and it all looked the same to him. “I’m going to be really sad if we came all this way and I have to shoot you for jerking my chain.”
Nancy pointed at the ground in front of her. “Watch where you’re walking.”
Dick took an involuntary step back. There was a hole in the ground, its edge hidden by the ash. A cold chill settled in his gut when he realized how close he’d come to death. Nancy could have led him over here and given him a shove, she could have killed him if she wanted. That she hadn’t made Dick wonder what she was up to. “Great. How do we get down there?”
She shrugged. “I don’t think we should. I think we should all get back into the van and drive out of here before it’s too late. Can’t you feel that?”
Standing next to the hole and looking into its midnight depths, Dick could feel it. There was a darkness rising from that hole, the breath of something wicked and dangerous. Real fear stiffened Dick’s spine and triggered his fight-or-flight response, and it took everything he had to stand his ground. “This is what I came for. We’re going down.”
Dick kept the gun trained on Nancy while he fumbled his cell phone out of his pants pocket. There was no service, but he was only after the flashlight. He flicked the icon with his thumb and shone the light into the depths before him. The hole was straight sided and lined with heavy, smooth stones. It reminded Dick of an old, dry well he’d once seen on his grandfather’s farm. It shot down into the earth well beyond the range of his light, but he saw what he needed. A rope ladder swung from a pair of spikes driven into the side of the well, and black footprints marred the pale stones. “Looks like someone has been out here since this place burned down.”
Nancy shrugged. “It’s not anyone you want to meet. I hope to hell they aren’t down there, right now.”
Dick grinned. “I guess we’re about to find out.”
He flashed his phone’s light at the van. While the crew unpacked their gear, he stomped his feet against the chill and counted heads. Mickey was the first member of the crew to reach Dick. She eyeballed the gun in his hand but didn’t say anything else as she got him mic’d up. Randall, their cameraman, shuffled around in the ashes, mounting an assortment of GoPro cameras on spindly tripods. He was too invested in getting his gear set up to worry about what Dick was doing.
Troy, their gadget wrangler, wasn’t quite as laid back about the whole experience. He stopped dead in his tracks when he saw Dick’s weapon, and his eyes widened. He waved the thin wand of the EMF detector in Dick’s direction. “What the fuck, man? That some kind of joke?”
Dick shrugged. “Settle down. Our guide needed some convincing.”
Troy paced, kicking up little clouds of black ash with every step. “You can’t do that kind of shit, man. You know where we are, right? This is fucking Deliverance territory, man. Someone catches you pulling a gun on a local, a local woman, we’re going to end up with the whole county pulling a train on our asses.”
Nancy cleared her throat. “He’s right. The local law finds out what you’re up to, they’re going to string the lot of you up.”
Dick raised the gun to Nancy’s face. “Shut. The fuck. Up.”
Troy stopped his pacing and jabbed the EMF detector at Dick. “You have lost it, man. You are fucking around the goddamned bend. This is crazy.”
Dick’s breath stuck in his throat. He was doing this for all of them, couldn’t they see that? They were in this deep now, they had to get onboard and see this through to the end. He had to make Troy see. “Look, I know this seems extreme—”
Troy stepped back, eyes widening even further. His voice went up three octaves and cut through the cold knife like a siren. “Don’t you point that fucking gun at me.”
Every eye turned in Dick’s direction. His whole crew stared at him, and he realized with horror that the gun was pointed in Troy’s general direction. He wasn’t pointing it at the gadget man, but it was definitely pointing toward him. “Shit, Troy, look—”
Randall hefted one of his camera tripods, an industrial model with a five-pound aluminum stabilizing head. His panic was buried under a thick layer of fat boy stoner indifference, but Dick could sense the violence beginning to surface. “We gonna have a problem here?”
Silence hung thick over the scorched earth, deafening in its intensity. Dick could see the betrayal on the faces of his crew. They were freaking out, losing their nerve. He could feel e
verything unraveling; his plan to salvage their careers, their lives, was coming apart at the seams. Dick knew if he didn’t get them headed in the right direction in the next few seconds, he was going to have a mutiny on his hands.
He tried to catch Amy’s eye, get her to pitch in on this, but she looked away. It was just like her to wait to see where the coin was going to land before she picked a side. Dick brushed his hair out of his eyes, smearing cold sweat across his forehead. “Listen, just listen. We need this, you guys. This is our big chance. I couldn’t let these two,” he waved the gun at Nancy and Liz, “wreck everything we’ve worked for so hard. There’s something here. I can feel it. I know you can feel it.”
As if to lend credence to his words, a cold wind moaned over the hills and swept around their ankles. It carried whorls of ash with it, like dirty shadows. “We can do this, guys. We can fucking nail this piece and make our careers. Right here, right now.”
Amy was smacking her gum, and Dick could see the light in her eyes. He was winning her over. “I get it, the gun is pretty extreme. But we need this, you guys. I did this for all of us.”
Troy fidgeted with the EMF detector and adjusted the pack full of electronic ghost-hunting gear on his shoulder. “It’s just—fuck, man, you can’t pull this kind of crazy shit on us. We need to discuss our plans, right?”
Dick grinned. He’d hauled the rabbit out of the hat and turned the whole mess around. “I get it, I fucked up. Won’t happen again.”
The gadget wrangler stepped up to Dick and peered over the edge of the hole. “Fuck me. We’re really going down there?”
It took all the self-control Dick could muster to keep from punching the air in victory. “Yeah, it looks like we are.”
7
Dick pointed the gun at Nancy. “Nancy, climb on down. You’re the first contestant on Get in the Fucking Hole.”
She stared at Dick, her eyes narrowed to mean slits. “I’m not going down there.”
He sighed and swung the pistol at Liz. “Then I guess your sister gets a new belly button.”
Nancy stared at Dick long enough for him to worry that she’d called his bluff and he really was going to have shoot her sister. His finger tightened on the trigger. Nancy ducked her head and headed to the hole. “I hope they kill you first,” she whispered to Dick.
As she perched on the edge of the hole and got her feet on the ladder’s rope rungs, Dick thought about giving Nancy a shove. If he turned his back on her, she’d try to kill him. He wasn’t even sure his crew would back him up if shit really got messy. He’d convinced them to do the job, but it wouldn’t take much to knock them off the fence again. Then he’d be staring down six angry assholes instead of just the sisters. Dick let her go, deciding the danger she posed was offset by the freak out killing her right now would cause. “Throw a couple of those glow sticks down the hole, Troy.”
The gadget wrangler dug around in his pack and came up with with a pair of plastic straws. He cracked them over his knuckles and shook them until they glowed with an electric green fluorescence. He tossed them over the edge and the lights dwindled as they fell past Nancy.
Dick counted as the lights fell. One one thousand, two one thousand, three one thousand.
Troy must have been counting, as well, because he piped up before Dick could do the math in his head. “A buck fifty. That’s a deep hole, man.”
It took them most of the next hour to navigate the rope ladder and get their equipment to the bottom of the hole. Dick knew he had to be the last to go down, because someone had to keep folks from losing their nerve. By the time everyone got to the bottom of the pit, they were covered in sweat and grime. Dick stared around at his team, their faces lit by Randall’s camera light, and had to stifle a laugh. “We look like we’re filming a coal mining documentary.”
Randall, invisible behind the glowing white eye of the camera’s light, whistled, “It’ll look badass. When we do the wrap-up topside, you’ll like you crawled through hell. And what is that smell?”
Dick looked at the floor, which was covered in a thick layer of greasy black that reeked of ammonia and something earthy and foul. “No idea. Stinks like shit.”
Liz smirked at him. “Because it is shit. Bat shit. They crap on their way out to hunt.”
Dick nodded. “That was very informative, Ms. ‘National Geographic.’”
Amy threw an arm over Dick’s shoulder. “What are we gonna do with the locals?”
Nancy and Liz watched the ghost hunters, anger replaced by a weary resignation.
Dick waved the gun in their direction. “You two are going to mind your manners, right? Once we get our footage, we’ll cut you loose.”
Nancy rolled her eyes. “Neither of us wants to get shot. Let’s just get this shit over with.”
Dick nodded. “Stay with Troy. Troy, either of these two gets squirrelly, just give a shout. I don’t care if we’re in the middle of a shot, you let me know.”
Troy threw a mock salute at Dick, and forked his fingers at Nancy and Liz. “I’m watching, ladies.”
Dick shoved the pistol into the back of his waistband and covered it with the long tail of his flannel shirt. “Let’s see what we’re working with.”
Randall turned the camera away from the crew, rotating in a slow circle. They were standing at the bottom of a deep pit with a single tunnel leading away from it. But the tunnel wasn’t what snatched the breath from everyone at the bottom of the pit.
The stone walls were crosshatched by a storm of words, some scrawled with markers, others smeared in the colors of blood and shit. Still others were crudely hacked into the wall, chipping their way across the words that had come before. The words Dick could read were a wild melange of nonsense. He saw help smeared across what appeared to be a snatch of “Jabberwocky” written in tiny, cramped letters. There were other words in languages he didn’t recognize, and looking at those filled his head with an arrhythmic pounding. “What the fuck is this?” he asked Nancy.
She huddled next to her sister and stared at the floor. “I told you there were bad things down here. We need to leave.”
He shook his head. “Randy, get a lot of footage of all this shit, okay?”
Nancy glanced at Dick then back at the floor. “You shouldn’t film it. No one needs to see this crazy shit.”
“People may not need to see this crazy shit, but they sure want to.”
Nancy did have a point though. The longer Dick looked at the words on the wall, the more he felt a calling. Something in the darkest parts of his lizard brain responded to what he saw there and wanted him to add his own scrawled curses to the mass.
Randy lowered the camera. “Got it. We heading into the tunnel?”
Dick nodded and whistled to the get the attention of his crew. He took the lead, lighting the way into the tunnel with a compact LED headlamp strapped across his forehead. “Just keep the camera on me and Amy. You reading us, Mickey?”
From the back of the group, Mickey piped up. “Loud and clear. Don’t get too far ahead, not sure what being underground’ll do to the wireless signal.”
The tunnel was wider than Dick expected. After a few steps, he and Amy were able to walk side by side, adopting their habitual posture. The audience wanted to see them both and their different reactions. Amy tended to go pale and shaky when things got weird, Dick became animated and flushed with excitement. “This place looks almost man-made,” Dick noted. The walls of the tunnel were smooth and straight, but he could make out the scalloped impressions of tools in places. He played his light over the wall as he walked. Amy walked alongside him, her breath coming in short little gasps as adrenaline dumped into her system. There was something about this place, a fearsome pressure.
Amy’s hand clenched on Dick’s arm. She jabbed the index finger of her free hand into the darkness ahead of them. “What was that?”
Dick swung his light in the direction she was pointing and picked up some sort of jumbled pile. They advanced on it, with Di
ck pulling against Amy who dragged her feet. “Let’s find out.”
The tunnel widened into a low-ceilinged oval chamber, twenty feet end to end and ten feet across the middle. In the center of the crude room, someone had stacked twenty or thirty big round stones. Dick walked up to it, his light flashing over the pile. It reached almost to his waist; as he approached it, he could see thin sticks jutting from its sides.
Amy pulled on his arm. Her voice was high pitched and tight with fear. “Leave it alone. Let’s just go.”
Dick motioned for Randall to get the camera in closer to the pile. Under the brighter light, the stone’s dark colors resolved into a patchwork pattern of deep-red splotches and pale-white stone beneath. There were faint carvings visible in the rocks, a repeating pattern of three divots in the center of a circle. Dick could feel his breath hitching in his chest, rebelling against the stench rising from the pile of stones. The stink of rot clawed at his nostrils and had his stomach rolling before he could back away. He remembered he was on camera and did his best to compose himself. “These stones are amazing. They’re covered with carvings, and these stains, I think they’re blood.”
Randall moved in close to the stones, and Dick knew he was zooming in tight to pick up the details. He didn’t know who’d put them there, but they were creepy as fuck. Lonny was going to eat this up with a spoon. “And there’s a smell,” Dick waited for the camera to turn back to him before he continued. “Something rotten, like roadkill in the summer.”
Amy squeezed into the shot, turning to the camera for comfort. “I think it’s safe to say there are no roads down here, so it’s just ‘kill,’ I think.”
Dick pointed to the tunnel across from where they’d entered. “Let’s keep on moving. I get a feeling there’s a lot to see.”
