by JL Bryan
Contents
The Trailwalker
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Also by J. L. Bryan
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
The Trailwalker
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper,
Book Thirteen
by
J.L. Bryan
Copyright 2020 J. L. Bryan
All rights reserved
All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to my wife Christina and my father-in-law John, without whom I would be a full-time parent struggling to write at odd hours.
I appreciate everyone who helped with this book, including beta readers Robert Duperre and Apryl Baker (both talented authors themselves). Thanks also to copy editor Jason Sizemore of Apex Book Company and proofreaders Thelia Kelly, Andrea van der Westhuizen, and Barb Ferrante. Thanks to my cover artist Claudia from PhatPuppy Art, and her daughter Catie, who does the lettering on the covers. The cover model for this is Joslyn; her DeviantArt page is https://www.deviantart.com/twilitesmuse.
Thanks also to the book bloggers who have supported the series, including Heather from Bewitched Bookworms; Mandy from I Read Indie; Michelle from Much Loved Books; Shirley from Creative Deeds; Lori from Contagious Reads; Kelly from Reading the Paranormal; Lili from Lili Lost in a Book; Heidi from Rainy Day Ramblings; Kelsey from Kelsey’s Cluttered Bookshelf; and Ali from My Guilty Obsession.
Most of all, thanks to the readers who have supported this series! There are more paranormal mysteries to come.
Also by J.L. Bryan:
The Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper series
Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper
Cold Shadows
The Crawling Darkness
Terminal
House of Whispers
Maze of Souls
Lullaby
The Keeper
The Tower
The Monster Museum
Fire Devil
The Necromancer’s Library
The Trailwalker
Midnight Movie
Urban Fantasy/Horror
The Unseen
Inferno Park
Time Travel/Dystopian
Nomad
The Jenny Pox series (supernatural/horror)
Jenny Pox
Tommy Nightmare
Alexander Death
Jenny Plague-Bringer
Chapter One
“Guard rails should not be optional this high up,” I said, palms sweaty as I white-knuckled the clunky, reluctant old van up the steep mountain road.
To our right, a high wall of overhanging boulders and massive, steeply leaning old trees threatened to kill us all, as the Watch for Falling Rocks signs helpfully reminded us.
To our left, just beyond the occasional oncoming car, lay a steep drop, hundreds of feet down to the forest below.
Did I mention the rain? Because it was definitely raining, making the road slippery and blurring my view of the many forms of death lurking all around. Not even bothering to lurk, really, just standing out in plain view on both sides, waiting for me to make a wrong move.
I'm not a big fan of heights. It's not my greatest fear—I mean, fire still exists—but it makes the VIP list, especially since that one poltergeist nearly threw me off that balcony.
“You want me to drive?” Stacey asked.
“I'm fine,” I lied, steering around another tight, blind curve, doing my best not to scrape the van against a protruding boulder.
“This is why I was saying my car might have been—”
“Yes,” I said. Stacey had indeed offered to drive her Ford Escape, a hybrid SUV actually designed for rugged mountain driving, but I had turned her down. Back home, it hadn't seemed worth the trouble of transferring all our standard gear from the van to a vehicle that wasn't designed for securely transporting a lot of sensitive cameras and such.
I was starting to regret that decision.
We were hours from home, high in the Appalachian Mountains. Vistas of early spring green surrounded us, views that took my breath away, partly owing to my mild panic attacks at the sight of enormous drops over the edge of the slippery blacktop.
“Have you ever been up here before?” I asked Stacey, mostly by way of distracting myself from my anxiety regarding the steep and slippery road.
“Kinda. I've kayaked the Toccoa, which is a few miles thataway.” She pointed vaguely. “But that's about it. This area looks like it might have neat hiking, though. If the case doesn't pan out, we could still enjoy a couple days of camping.”
“Yeah, I suppose,” I said, with no real intention of doing that. Stacey had packed the van with an abnormal amount of camping supplies because of where we were going, but this didn't mean I would agree to engage in recreational use of it. Though sleeping in a tent can be preferable to sleeping in a house where an entity is feeding on the energy of the living, as evil entities tend to do.
People pretty much only call us about the evil ones.
“Here's the turn-off,” Stacey said, and I slowed.
The crumbling wooden sign was barely legible, its support posts lost in overgrown brambles. Years of weather had nearly erased the words carved into the sign: Camp Stony Owl. The arrow pointing up the dirt road was equally worn and hard to see.
More legible was the plastic No Trespassing sign, red letters on black, stapled above the words and the arrow.
“Looks welcoming,” I commented. It didn't, really, but I was relieved to turn away from the long drop on the other side of the road.
I turned, and the trouble started. The van had a difficult time slogging its way up the muddy dirt road, steeper than the paved one we'd just left.
“Did you ever go to camp as a kid?” Stacey asked me.
“I went to softball camp for a week one summer.”
“But I mean real camp,” Stacey said. “With canoes and archery and campfire singalongs—”
“Since my first response was 'softball camp' you can probably guess that I never went to that kind of—”
“I did! Camp Mizpah. They had everything. Hiking, arts and crafts, wildlife studies, photography. I was even in the chorus.”
“Sounds like a busy summer,” I mumbled, mostly concentrating on the muddy canal of a road. It finally evened out a bit, and the van made some progress through the woods.
“'Oh, Camp Mizpah, my friends so dear to me,'” Stacey began.
“Are you really singing—”
“'Oh, Camp Mizpah, faithful land and trees—'”
“How can land be—”
“'—good manners and loyaltyyyy—'”
Another wooden, hand-carved sign stood past the bend in the road. It depicted a simple cartoonish boy and girl, their hands raised in a wave, the boy slinging a fishing pole over his shoulder like Opie in an Andy Griffith rerun. The characters were crudely etched, and might have been borderline cute in their day, but erosion had rotted off most of the boy's face and filled the smiling girl's eyes with moss. Welcome Campers! read the words above the creepy child figures.
“Seriously?” Stacey said. “So creepy.”
“What, that doesn't give you happy childhood flashbacks?” I asked. “You didn't have moss-covered zombie kids at Camp Mizpah?”
“The closest thing was construction-paper monster masks. During craft time, obviously.”
The mud track snaked through deeper, thicker woods with older trees.
We reached a tall, wooden stockade fence made of rough logs, like a fort from the 1700s, blocking any view of what lay within. A stockade gate blocked the road, with faded No Trespassing signs stapled to it.
A six-foot wooden owl loomed beside the road, carved in the same rough fashion as the other signs we'd seen. Badly deteriorated, perhaps gnawed by wild animals, its face and wings half rotted away, the giant horned owl looked like it had recently crawled out of its own grave. Faded letters were etched into its stomach: Camp Stony Owl.
“He doesn't look stony to me,” Stacey said. “More woody. And corpsey.”
I honked, as the client had instructed.
We sat quietly for a while, soaking up the silence. I cracked my window to listen for any response. The air smelled like wet earth after the recent rain. Water droplets from soaked tree limbs overhead tapped the roof of the van like fingertips.
Water also dripped from the big dead owl, who regarded us with hollow, termite-eaten eyes.
The rain tapered off and finally stopped as we waited.
I honked again.
“Maybe they're gone,” Stacey said after a minute. “Maybe they decided, hey, you know, this place is just too creepy-crawly even if you get rid of the ghosts, and we really shouldn't be having kids out here at all anyway, let's just shut it down.”
“I doubt it,” I said, honking a third time after another decent interval.
I was about ready to make my intervals a little shorter and less decent when the big wooden gate began to move, creaking and groaning as it swung inward.
More muddy road lay inside, leading through a foggy, gloomy forest tunnel of overarching limbs.
“Who opened the gate?” Stacey whispered.
I pulled ahead, my high beams doing little to dispel the shadows in the woods.
Chapter Two
Inside the gate, I stopped the van and looked back.
A woman closed the palisade-style gate behind us, latching it with a wooden board. Our prospective new client was tall, maybe in her mid-to-late thirties, her platinum hair tied in a ponytail under her cap. Her jeans and boots looked fairly new. Her baseball cap featured the blue Viking logo of Berry College. She waved as she walked over to us.
I lowered my window. “Hi there, I'm Ellie Jordan. Are you Allison?”
“Yep, I'm the one you talked to on the phone.” She gestured down the road. “Just pull on ahead, park at the main lodge.”
“Thank you.”
The lady touched the brim of her ballcap and walked to her black Lexus SUV, a machine that likely handled the mountain roads better than our van.
I pulled ahead through the dark tunnel of trees, which widened into a gravel parking area at what I assumed to be the main lodge. We parked and got out, Stacey and I taking a minute to stretch and walk around after the five-hour drive.
Allison parked nearby and joined us. “Thanks for coming out. I know we're way off the beaten path. And the paved road.”
“We're happy to come,” I replied.
“It's a great place you've got here!” Stacey blurted out, looking around.
“Really?” Allison looked puzzled. “It's kind of a hideous wreck.”
“Oh,” Stacey replied, thrown off.
From what I saw, I had to agree with Allison's assessment. The main lodge was a wide two-story building, made of wood so heavy and dark it seemed to absorb the light around it. A sagging wraparound porch encircled the first floor.
“This campground has been closed for years,” Allison said. “It wasn't my favorite of the sites we considered buying—not at all—but I guess it could be worse. My husband was set on it.”
“Your husband Josh, right?” I pulled out my pocket notebook.
“Right. He's taken the kids to town for a shopping day. It's a long drive. That should give you some time to look around.”
“Sounds good. So when did the trouble start? What was your first experience?”
“I never felt good about the place.” She led us toward the dark lodge, moving more slowly and reluctantly the closer she got.
As if changing her mind at the last second, she didn't lead us inside the lodge, but instead around to the back, following a gravel trail.
Behind the lodge was a sunken, sandy area with a fire pit large enough to barbecue a mammoth, ringed by tree-trunk benches and boulders for seating.
“Ooh, nice,” Stacey said, nodding in approval. “You can fit a lot of happy campers around that. It reminds me of when we used to gather and sing our song at my own summer camp.” She looked ready to break into song again, but I shot her a warning look.
“That's the idea,” Allison said, sounding doubtful as she frowned at the fire pit. “The renovations aren't going as quickly as we'd hoped. New problems always come up. It's like building on quicksand.”
“How long have you been working on restoring the camp?” I asked.
Allison trudged toward the back doors of the lodge like she was still reluctant to go inside. She stopped and looked off down one of the trails leading away from the fire pit and into the woods; maybe she'd heard something, maybe she was just thinking. “We closed on it about six months ago, after a year of shopping possible sites. I don't know why we bothered looking so long. Josh had his heart set on this one from the beginning. Personally, I was envisioning something a little more... not this.”
“What were you hoping for?” I asked, since she'd fallen silent, still gazing down the trail, perhaps thinking about how life was an unpredictable twisting, turning path through a forest of uncertainty, perhaps not.
“I really connected with another place,” she finally answered. “A farm with an amazing large brick house and some other nice buildings we could have expanded. I was imagining a performing arts center. Yoga. Maybe a science lab. Computer coding. Plus traditional activities, of course. There were apple groves, some gardens. The lake was nicer. The whole place was sunny and open. Not like...” She glanced down the trail again, a shadowy path under a dense, low cover of dripping tree limbs.
“Not so rustic?” I asked.
Allison gave a resigned laugh. “But Josh specifically wanted something rustic. And he's right about the old owl being a draw for the site. It gives us a real history and connection to the land, as long as we do our part to care for it.”
“The old owl?” I asked.
“Nobody knows who made it. It's a neglected cultural treasure, thousands of years old.”
Stacey and I shared a look. The big wooden owl out front, rotten as it was, couldn't have been thousands of years old. She must have meant something else.
“The old owl does give the camp a greater sense of mission, Josh is right about that. And this is all about the mission,” she said.
“What mission?” I asked.
“To mold character. To give kids a place like earlier generations had. Get them away from their screen time and out into the wild, learning traditional skills. Playing with each other instead of video game
characters. Building things with their hands. Making them into more confident and capable people.”
“Wow,” Stacey said.
“That's quite a mission,” I agreed.
“My plan was to build a nice place where we could charge a lot, but offer scholarships,” Allison said. “Let the high-income families subsidize some low-income ones. But Josh thought a more rustic environment was better for the mission. And he wanted to apply that hands-on character-building philosophy to our family, too. So we're all out here, Josh and me and the kids, doing hard labor to get this place open by June. I don't see it happening.”
“It does seem like a big job,” I said.
Allison stepped up onto the old porch of the lodge. “I suppose we should go inside,” she said, as if she'd been sentenced to it as a punishment.
We followed her across the creaky boards of the porch, through a screen door, and into the darkness.
Chapter Three
“They call this Great Owl Lodge,” Allison said. The walls had been freshly painted a rustic brown color that matched their original wooden hue; the tang of paint still hung in the air. The warped old hardwood floors had been recently scrubbed and polished.
A stone fireplace dominated one side of the room, with a life-sized owl carved into one end of the fireplace's tree-trunk mantle as if perching there. A semicircle of completely mismatched old sofas and armchairs faced the currently empty, cold fireplace.
“We brought in the furniture ourselves. This place was a wreck. I know it still looks like a wreck, but it's actually a big improvement.”
“I like it!” Stacey said, glancing up at the heavy beams bolstering the ceiling. “It's got... character.”
“Just about everything on the first floor had been broken or chewed to shreds when we bought it,” Allison said. “Some windows were wide open, and all kinds of animals had been through here. Maybe bears, by the size of the claw marks. The furniture, the walls, everything was torn up.”
