Now Entering Addamsville

by Francesca Zappia

  Artemis shrugged. “People like to be scared. They like to be creeped out by things they don’t understand. That’s why they tune out when I talk about history. Once you know the truth of something, it loses its power over you. Well. Usually.”

  “Usually?”

  “You know the story about Gilly Strefford?”

  “The girl who was kidnapped and murdered in the house by the funeral home? Yeah, it’s stupid. It’s like someone thought of all the worst things that could happen to a person and put them in one story. It’s tourist bait.”

  “That one isn’t made up,” Artemis said. I glanced at her, and she wasn’t laughing. “Gilly Strefford lived in New Valley in the sixties, which got renamed Harrisburg a decade later. Her parents went out of town and left her with her aunt, Mary Hemmings, who lived on Bolt Cross Road near the funeral home. During the two months Gilly’s parents were gone, her aunt and cousins tortured Gilly to within an inch of her life. She died of infection in her injuries. I can’t even explain the details of what they did to her—it was the worst thing I’ve ever read. People play it off now as an overblown murder story, but Gilly was a real girl and she really died.”

  I’d seen a girl lurking around Bolt Cross Road, but I’d never been able to figure out who she was. Ghosts didn’t show the signs of how they died, so I’d assumed it had been some disease, or a car accident.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  “What other stories are real?” I knew a lot of them, but apparently not all.

  “You’d be surpris—”

  I slammed on the breaks. Artemis jerked forward, caught by the seat belt and her bag. A boy jogged across the street in front of us, arms out. A girl on the sidewalk screamed. A group of people materialized behind her, laughing. Noise. Not ghosts. The boy, who looked old enough to be a college student, came around and mimed rolling down my window.

  I growled, already counting down from ten. “Let’s see what these interlopers want.”

  The boy leaned into my window before I had it all the way down.

  “Hey, we’re trying to get to the Dead Men Walking location, where they’re filming tonight. The, uh—”

  “Hillcroft,” one girl called.

  “The Hillcroft coal mine,” said the boy.

  “Ah, okay,” I said in my best congenial suburban Hoosier voice. “You’re gonna wanna head west here. Straight through the field; don’t take the streets or you’ll miss it. If you reach the Royal Six, you’ve gone too far.”

  “Hey, thanks.”

  “No problem! Have a great night and stay safe!”

  He jogged back to his friends. I rolled up the window and kept driving; in the rearview mirror, the college kids crossed the street and started into the ditch on the other side. Artemis watched them go, then said, “The Royal Six is on the other side of town.”

  “The DMW crew should pay me for crowd control.”

  “You aren’t worried they’ll get hurt or lost walking around the fields in the dark?”

  “Better than them getting killed by a firestarter. Besides, I owe them nothing. If anything, they owe me for not running them over while they’re stumbling around in the street.”

  “If you say so.”

  I felt judged, but I always felt judged around Artemis.

  We passed the trailer park on our way back to the bluffs. Lights shone through some of the trailer windows. A dog on a chain barked at the Chevelle as it passed. Artemis watched as we went by.

  “You know what’s weird?” she said. “The Coalmine doesn’t have any ghost stories.”

  “The Coalmine” was what most people called the trailer park. Even people who lived in the trailer park used the name, but when they said it, it was with a much different tone than the people who didn’t live there.

  “My place has stories,” I said.

  “Your place has stories because your trailer sits where Aberdeen House used to be. There aren’t any here. For all the stories we have in the rest of the Addamsville, the Coalmine doesn’t have any.”

  I frowned. “Are you sure about that?”

  “I’ve looked at almost everything in town. I’m pretty positive—”

  “You don’t know about Daisy?”

  She looked at me. “Who’s Daisy?”

  “Hold on.” I put a hand up. “You don’t know trailer park stories? Daisy is, like, the ghost on the east side.” I’d never seen her, but that didn’t mean the stories didn’t exist. “She’s a white pit bull with a brown spot over one eye and a notch out of her ear. She wanders the edges of the trailer park, or on the fringes of the trees. She keeps little kids from going places they shouldn’t and leads them back home when they get lost.”

  “I have never heard that.”

  “How many people have you talked to who live in the trailer park?”

  She went oddly quiet.

  “Well, there’s your answer,” I said. “It’s not that they don’t have stories. It’s that you don’t talk to the people who know them.”

  The DMW crew would use the north entrance to the mine, which was close enough to see the junkyard’s floodlights. They would come down the same road George Masrell’s house was on. The entrance was in a clearing, fenced off, with signs warning about fines for trespassing and the danger of cave-ins. Plenty of room for their SUV and van, even with all the ghosts stuffed in there.

  Artemis and I would go through the south entrance. I pulled the Chevelle off to the side of the dirt road up the bluffs, in the shadow of the trees. Evergreens covered the entire hill up to the bluffs, nowhere near as dense as Black Creek Woods, but dense enough to hide the Chevelle.

  “You’re not going to need any of that,” I said as Artemis hoisted her backpack over her shoulder. “At least leave the clothes behind.”

  “I never go to a location unprepared.”

  “Fine, but if we’re late, it’s your fault. I’m assuming they’re going to set up and do some shots outside before they go in, so we have maybe ten, fifteen minutes to get there. Follow me.”

  “How far is it?”

  “Ten or fifteen minutes. Pay attention.” My flashlight beam skimmed the underbrush. Tree roots bubbled from the ground. Plant skeletons loomed from the darkness, catching on my jacket and pants. Our breaths came out in clouds. “Watch your step. The ground is going to slope. Stay behind me, unless you start to fall, then fall to the side. I don’t want to die from a broken neck.”

  “You are the most sensitive person I know,” Artemis said.

  “Like a bed of nails,” I replied.

  It’s helpful to know ghosts exist and how they present themselves when you’re walking through the woods at night. There are a thousand noises, all of them unexplained. Wings in the dark. The crunching of leaves. A cry that is probably an animal but sounds an awful lot like a person. Ghosts didn’t make noise. When they loomed out of the darkness, their edges wavered, like a TV with a bad connection. It was still creepy, but at least I expected it, so I kept myself quiet. Artemis could feel them but not see them, which meant she was weaving out of their way every few minutes, stepping on my heels and nearly toppling me over. Once she startled at an owl hooting and grabbed my shoulders. My toe lodged in a tree root as I stumbled forward.

  “Fu—dge meringue, Artemis!”

  “Oh, sorry—”

  “I think I twisted my ankle.”

  “Are you going to be okay?”

  “Just stop jumping on me. If there’s something coming for us out here, I’m going to save my own butt before I save yours.”

  I was limping by the time we reached the south entrance of the mine. I knew it by the neon yellow shoelaces I’d tied around a nearby tree branch. Ten paces straight past the branch, turn left after passing between two pine trees. The ground had leveled out and sloped upward again, and the top of a wooden frame came into view in the underbrush. It would have looked like part of a tree if I didn’t know where to look for it. I handed Artemis my flashlight and
began clearing away the brush and branches I’d stacked in front of the entrance to hide it almost a year ago.

  “Are you sure this is safe?” Artemis asked.

  “I’ve been in here plenty of times and I never got hurt.”

  “You’re sure there won’t be animals inside? And it’s not going to collapse on us?”

  “It’s, like, a hundred and fifty years old. If it hasn’t collapsed yet, it’s not going to now. If you’re so worried about it, don’t touch anything while we’re inside.” I kicked the last of the leaves out of the way and motioned for my flashlight back. The mouth of the tunnel had been narrowed by a cave-in, but past that it became wide enough for three or four people to walk in side by side, standing up. An old mine cart track ran along the ground. The tunnel dipped slowly downward, and my flashlight beam couldn’t see past the curve in the floor.

  Inside was warmer than outside. I shook myself and scanned the space while Artemis followed me in. Remnants of my last visit still littered the floor. Matchboxes. A burn mark on the rock where I’d lit papers, sticks, shreds of clothing, and plastic spoons. Anything I could get my hands on. My hand began to itch. Then the right side of my head. It still smelled like fire here, even after all this time. The scent made my skin crawl. My heart began beating too fast.

  I remembered these things, but they didn’t feel like mine anymore. They belonged to the old Zora.

  Artemis had zeroed in on the litter. “Did you use to—? You came here to set fires?”

  “Good job, detective.” I brushed past her.

  “I thought you didn’t like fire?”

  “I don’t. I was testing something.”

  “What?”

  “Mom always said we couldn’t be burned by firestarters. Like the Chevelle. I wondered if we could be burned by regular fire. Doesn’t work.” I’d come here plenty after Mom disappeared, testing matches on my hands and arms. Burning paper and plastic, trying to see if any of that had an effect. I always came away unblemished.

  Artemis squinted into my flashlight beam. “Do you think—my mom never brought it up—do you think it would hurt me?”

  “Let’s hope there’s no reason we need to find out,” I said. “Come on—we still have a ways to go.”

  10

  “This mine was built in 1870.” Artemis’s voice echoed softly in the dark as we followed the old cart track. Talking had calmed her, so I let her ramble. “Salem Hillcroft was around five years old then. There was a record of poor labor conditions and abuse among the miners. The mine made Salem’s father very rich, and according to journals from the locals, it made Salem very entitled. As he got older, he went with his father to oversee mining operations, and when he was eighteen, he went by himself. He disappeared, and the stories say he fell into one of the caves inside the mine.”

  I’d seen the miners—adults and children—but not Salem Hillcroft.

  “Why’d he go all the way to the caves?” I asked.

  “That’s not even the point,” Artemis said. “Why did he go into the mine at all? Why did he go so far? And he happened to slip at a place where the miners often wouldn’t even go? Into a cave where they couldn’t find his body? A cave the miners would know the location of very well?”

  “You’re saying the abused miners kidnapped Salem and tossed him down a hole in the mines.”

  “I’m saying it’s a lot more likely than Salem suddenly becoming a klutz at exactly the wrong spot.”

  “Haven’t you ever heard of Occam’s razor?”

  Artemis paused. “I’m surprised you even know what Occam’s razor is.”

  I gave her the middle finger over my shoulder. “I read books.”

  The uneven mine floor was doing nothing good for my ankle, but we were already here and we were probably late. The route through the mine to the north entrance was direct, though I’d figured out early on that whoever planned the mine, while smart enough to leave supports for the ceiling, had not bothered to leave any directions or signs to let you know which way you were going. You’d think it would be easy to navigate a big grid, but when every tunnel looks exactly the same and you’re not great at remembering how many left turns you took, you start running in circles pretty fast. I had explored this part of the mine before, but after I got lost the second time, I stuck to the south entrance.

  “Okay, be quiet,” I whispered. “I heard something.”

  We came around a bend in the tunnel. Several routes led to the north entrance, and most were still crowded with rubble, old supplies, or broken equipment, as if the day the mine closed down, all the miners dropped everything where they stood and left. A little boy in a dirty shirt huddled next to a broken crate, unblinking eyes tracking us as we moved past him. No sign of any firestarter yet, thankfully. A trickle of voices echoed off the walls. I waved a hand for Artemis to stay behind me and kneel down. We huddled behind a stack of rotted crates.

  “No wonder people think this place is haunted,” a man said. A flashlight swept across the wall farther up the tunnel. “It feels like there are still people here.”

  “Seriously, Mike?” Tad Thompson. What a dick.

  “I didn’t mean ghosts; I meant—look at this.” Wood skidded on stone, then clattered to the floor. “Everything’s still here.”

  “Can we hurry?” A feminine voice. Leila. “It’s cold out, and I’m already on so much Sudafed I can’t walk straight.”

  “Eric, you have the infrared?” Tad.

  “Yeah, hold on.” Probably the tech guy.

  “Grant?”

  “We’re ready to go whenever you guys are.” That had to be the producer. His voice was farther away, maybe still outside.

  The voices faded, replaced by scuffling feet and the flickering of lights. Artemis tapped my arm.

  “Shouldn’t we move?” she said. “What if they come this way?”

  I didn’t think they would. Flashlights threw shadows on the walls and highlights in the wrong places. The tunnel we were in was camouflaged. The tunnel directly ahead of them was the one that would take them deeper inside.

  “It won’t hurt to get ahead of them,” I whispered back. “Get up, go.”

  As quietly as possible, we turned and headed back the way we’d come. After a few minutes, I pulled Artemis to a stop and redirected her down another tunnel that went deeper into the mine. It smelled of damp earth, and our flashlights made the shadows hard-edged and intense. Artemis scraped and stumbled over the uneven floor, her backpack rattling softly.

  Voices echoed again down the tunnels. It sounded like Tad, but I couldn’t make out his words.

  “They must have started filming,” I said. We reached a larger passageway. Two miners stood there, looking lost. I pulled Artemis past them, heading back to the north. She was huffing a little bit now. “I told you not to bring that backpack.”

  She grunted at me.

  Footsteps echoed. My ankle throbbed as I kneeled at the mouth of the tunnel. We waited a few minutes, until a flashlight beam came around a bend up ahead.

  “. . . get the KII and the EVP recorders out and see if we can capture anything in here while Leila and Eric head south.” Tad, with his TV voice now. He and Mike stopped. Mike, the sidekick, who had his hair neatly dreadlocked and tied into a ponytail, stood pointing a camera down the tunnel. Tad, beside him in a black beanie and sweatshirt, stared at a KII meter. Behind them was another cameraman with a larger, bulky TV camera mounted on his shoulder.

  “Is there anyone here who would like to communicate with us?” Tad’s voice faded. It was quiet for a few moments. “If you are here, we would like to speak with you.” Another pause.

  In the long stretch of silence, I cupped my hands around my mouth and hissed nonsense. Tad’s head whipped up; Mike straightened and focused the camera down the tunnel.

  “You heard that, right?” Mike said.

  “Is someone here with us?” Tad repeated, still in TV voice. I had to hand it to the guy; he did not break character.

&nb
sp; I nudged Artemis. We got up and started back again, into the long tunnel parallel to Tad and Mike’s, that ran deeper into the mine. We passed two cross tunnels this time, ghosts flickering in my peripheral, trying to follow the echoing shuffle of footsteps, then stepped carefully down the third cross tunnel to intercept Tad and Mike once again.

  I let out another loud whisper.

  “There it is again!”

  “We’re following it. Or chasing it.”

  Both Tad and Mike stared down the tunnel, frozen. Their lights didn’t reach this far.

  “Can you give us some sign?” Tad called. “A noise? Anything?”

  I was about to whisper again when Artemis grabbed a rock beside my foot and tossed it out the tunnel mouth. It clattered into the darkness. I gave Artemis a surprised thumbs-up.

  “I thought we told the assistants not to bother in here,” Mike said. “Did Grant send them in?”

  “Who cares. Keep the cameras on.” Tad held out the KII meter and went back into TV voice. “I have in my hand a device with lights on it. If you come near, you can make these lights change.”

  We must have been lucky, because not a second after he said it, two lights along the top of the meter came on, flickering, then went down. The nearest ghost stood several feet behind him, impervious to the darkness of the tunnel. Tad looked back at the camera. Either he thought this was real, or he was damn good at playing off coincidences like supernatural fact.

  “We’re going to ask you a series of yes or no questions,” he said. “If the answer is—oh—” The device had lit up again. All the lights this time. The hairs on my arms stood up, and I had to grip my forearms to make them go back down. More ghosts came to the ends of their tunnels, casting no shadows. They all looked at me.

  I turned, expecting a sheet-white Artemis, and found her instead looking through the viewfinder of her own camera. She had the night vision turned on.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered.

  “There are so many dead down here!” She barely made noise.