Gene had run like a gut-shot buck. They all had. Their injury wasn’t physical; the pain wasn’t from severed nerves or blunt-force trauma. The pain, the anguish, was invisible. The shot was fired; their lives and their minds were the exit wounds. Gene was both hunter and hunted – wed to his own death from the moment he squeezed the trigger. Like a decent hunter, he did the right thing and put himself out of his misery.
The liquor swirled in Jonathan’s mind. He turned the nine millimeter over in his hand. Somewhere upstairs Jacob screamed; his mind saw terrors the world couldn’t imagine.
Chapter Six
The days shortened and nights grew longer in the weeks between Gene’s wake and the trip. Time flew in a blur and crawled with maddening torpidity. The weather turned like leaves before a storm. Nights came early, and Jonathan found himself avoiding the dark, making sure he was indoors with the lights on and the curtains drawn. A strange, childlike fear drove him – some unknown chaos out there in the dark, in the trees. It was in the forest of the night that his life took its most chaotic lurch, and now he tried to hide from it – for now. He would be back in that place soon enough.
The boy in the box had festered in the back of Jonathan’s mind, but he hadn’t actively searched for answers for at least five years. Now he felt the need to search through the online lists of missing children again to find the answer, to place a name with that broken face, that ghost that haunted his life. He scrolled through the lists of names, the grainy, pixilated photos of lives that disappeared like a pair of yellow eyes blinking into nothingness. He began in the Adirondack area, Upstate New York and Vermont. One boy went missing four years ago, still unaccounted for, last seen playing outside his home in the town of Malta. He was only four years old, his glistening eyes and tiny-toothed grin glimpsing out from the computer screen. Far too young.
Another boy, aged fifteen, disappeared from Alexandria on the northern edge of Lake Champlain. He was believed to be a runaway, but no one was sure. Still, he was too old and disappeared several months after their night in Coombs’ Gulch. Most of the missing were adolescents. Most had been found at some point. There were a number of missing black children from cities like Albany or Buffalo who seemed to disappear with little media attention and even less police interest. But there was nothing, no one like the boy they buried in the box that night, no one missing from anywhere near Coombs’ Gulch or the town of Pasternak.
The month of October birthed Halloween-themed ghost stories, spooky accounts of eerie, unexplained incidents and folklore that fueled the morbid imagination of autumn. It was happenstance that he found a faux-news article out of Texas with the clickbait headline ‘Mysterious Ghost Girl Captured on Hunting Camera’. The image was of a girl, dressed in a jacket, knitted wool hat and boots, kicking her leg up in the darkness of the forest as if she were in the middle of a childish game with her friends. It was captured on a motion-activated camera a hunter attached to a tree in Upstate New York. It was in the Catskills, far south of Coombs’ Gulch, but, still, Jonathan saw something in it, sensed a similarity. That the girl was captured on this camera was especially strange because the hunting area was so far away from any town or home where the child – who looked about nine or ten – could have wandered from. Also, the picture was snapped in the middle of the night, her image blue and ghostly, bordered by tree trunks glowing like Roman pillars in the background. Some speculated she was a ghost – it was the reason the story became popular. Others said that it was clearly a living child and police were investigating, trying to find out who she was and what she was doing in the forest at that time of night. Most believed it to be a clever hoax.
But something caught Jonathan’s eye: a few paragraphs down, it noted the girl resembled a child who disappeared from the area nearly forty years ago. It was, of course, impossible, but the image on the hunter’s camera did truly resemble the missing girl from 1975. She was even dressed the same – third-hand clothes, probably from Goodwill, outdated by decades. The resemblance fueled the ghost speculations. The parents were long lost to history and couldn’t be found for the article, probably old and senile, lost to the tangling complexity of life.
Why had no one ever searched for that boy they buried in Coombs’ Gulch? Why was there no record of anyone remotely resembling him posted? Where were the news articles, the school pictures, the haunted, weary parents pleading for help and mercy? It was all too mysterious to ignore. For lack of anything better, he started a new search.
He found images, some clearly staged or faked, others with tales to accompany them, a few with tabloid or blog articles published online. The ghost child of Cannock Chase woods was a video that purported to show the ghost of a child walking through a dark British forest. It was filmed for one of those ghost-hunting programs where a bunch of idiots wander around in the night, yelling, asking questions into the silence, pointing their fingers at nothing and scaring themselves. The image was blurry, barely visible, but the ghost hunters seemed pleased with themselves. Another video from Cannock Chase was shot with a drone in the middle of the day. It showed a girl – clear as the day itself – standing in a night dress at the shadowed edge between the rolling moor and dense trees.
He found other images captured on camera from around the world, sometimes by unsuspecting campers or vacationers who only realized what their photos contained after they’d returned home and scrolled through their digital pictures. An overweight husband and wife smiling for the camera; in the background a child peeked out from behind a tree, his face blurry but recognizable, eyes shadowed and dark. Still others showed a child’s face buried in the foliage or underbrush so deep it was difficult to tell if it was an actual child or the human brain piecing together a recognizable form out of disparate parts. But the faces, real or imagined – or perhaps a little of both – were there in the background, a part of the landscape, watching, as if drawn to people, seeking them out or, perhaps, trying to be found.
Many held their mouths open to impossible dark lengths, as if screaming louder than any living thing could possibly scream.
Then there were still other photographs taken from hunting cameras. Pictures that made shivers run down his spine and caused his stomach to drop – the pallid night vision coloring, the wrongness of the scene, the misplacement. It was the most terrifying aspect of those photos, and now, it occurred to him, it was the most terrifying aspect of that night in Coombs’ Gulch. Those children didn’t belong there. Their presence in those photos meant something was intrinsically wrong. Whether they had been misplaced by God, man or computer graphics, Jonathan couldn’t tell and didn’t care. It caused him to recoil. A young girl wearing a nightgown caught in a photograph of two deer in the night, her eyes glowing from the camera shot. A boy of four or five years old at the periphery of a night-vision shot, frightening off a large buck. A figure standing at the edge of the camera’s range, whose eyes were deep holes, mouth open in a scream, a pale, white face like the one they had buried ten years ago. Jonathan stared at that photo for a long time, wondering, debating himself, fighting credulity, conceding points about everything that could not be known and trying to hold on to his sanity.
This last image came from a game camera in East Texas. Jonathan followed the digital trail of links back to the original source: an online video with the poster’s contact information. He said he posted the video because he thought the child might be in trouble and the local authorities had come up with nothing. He was looking for anyone who might have information. Jonathan looked up his profile on different sites. He wasn’t a ghost hunter; he was just a regular guy, a mechanic during the week, a hunter on the weekends – someone not unlike himself before the incident in Coombs’ Gulch. His name was Daniel Degan of East Amarillo.
When Jonathan called, Degan’s voice was packed with southern twang and an ethos of ‘leave me the fuck alone’. Jonathan told him briefly that he was a fellow hunter in the Northeast so Degan wouldn’t hang
up the phone on him too quickly.
“I wanted to ask you about the video and photo you posted online. The one that shows the boy in it? At the very edge of the camera’s range?”
Degan sighed, and, for a moment, he seemed defeated, as if he were about to beg and plead to be left alone. “Look. I know y’all interested in that picture. I can’t tell you how many nutjobs have called me up and wanted me to take them out to that hunting ground to look for some ‘ghost kid’ or whatever, but I ain’t doing it. All you fuckers are just wasting my time. I searched those woods myself; got nothing. I contacted the police; they got nothing. So I finally posted it online to see if someone out there knew something and got a whole lotta shit for it. You know what? Now, I don’t even know what it is in that picture. Maybe it is just a fucked-up lens on the camera or something like all these online camera wizards say. I don’t know. Camera don’t fuck up any other times I use it. Even that same night, got plenty of other photos that are just fine. But it damn sure looked to me like some kid lost in the woods in the middle of the night, and I wanted to figure it out, and all I got was grief for my trouble. So no thanks. I just want to let it alone.”
“I’m not looking for anything like that,” Jonathan said. “I guess, I’m just… I think maybe I’ve had a similar experience and I just wanted to talk to you, to see if your picture is real – if you were real – and not one of these made-up internet pictures that are all over the place.”
“As real as your mother,” he said. “I don’t just go around putting this shit up ’cause I think it’s fun. It was fucking weird, you know? Spooked me out! Let me tell you, that hunting area was way out there. Can’t no kid just accidentally wander out there, especially at night. And no kid should be out there! Place is filled with razorbacks that would tear him up something awful. Nah. That picture’s real. What it’s a picture of, I’m not sure anymore.”
Jonathan kept his explanation vague, that he’d been hunting at night and thought he saw a kid running around and so he started researching it. Degan’s voice rolled off the phone: “Fuck. If I’d been out there that night I damn well coulda put a bullet in him; then I’d be on the hook for murder or somethin’.”
Jonathan hung up the phone, and waited in the silence of the evening. He tried to listen. He tried to find a voice inside himself – the voice that sits on the periphery of self-made illusion and whispers the truth, but all he could hear was the blood pumping through his heart, and all he could think of was a question he’d once asked a fellow hunter.
Richard was an old neighbor who’d lived two doors down when Jonathan was growing up. He was an avid hunter – bow, single-shot, black powder. It didn’t matter what part of the hunting season it was, Rich was out there in the early-morning hours. He was an older man with skin leathered by the elements, a thick mustache and sandy hair. He had always been quiet, but when he saw Jonathan and the boys unloading their gear from the truck one Saturday afternoon, he wandered over and struck up a conversation. After that, Jonathan, Gene, Michael and Conner looked up to him as a kind of hunting guru. He knew literally everything about it, no matter the species, no matter the location, no matter the tool. They would bring him beer sometimes and pick his brain. Rich drank Coors Lite and sat on the porch in the evening, talking with them. He wasn’t married. He had no kids they knew of; it was just him in this small ranch-style house with a small arsenal and a seemingly endless supply of hunting knowledge born out of past military experience in the Arctic Circle. During the Eighties he became a guide for various hunting safari networks throughout the world, tracking and locating top game for wealthy clients who showered wildlife preserves with six-figure donations in exchange for a hunting trip – guaranteed by Rich, of course.
“Why’d you stop doing it?” they’d once asked him, but he just shook his head and drank his beer like they would never understand.
“It ain’t what it seems,” he finally said. “It’s not true. I don’t think there is much that’s true anymore.”
His last few years before coming to this quiet hamlet were spent back in the Arctic Circle, working for an oil company and doing side work tracking wildlife movements for the Environmental Protection Agency.
Jonathan once asked him which animal was the most dangerous to hunt. Naturally, Jonathan’s mind drifted to the Big Five – lions, elephants, those exotic, dangerous and massive African animals – but Rich’s answer was instantaneous: polar bears.
“Everything is white up there. So white it can blind you. And they’re white. They’re like ghosts, just appear out of nothing. You don’t see them coming, but they can see you. You’re out there and you think you’re hunting them, but you’re not. You’re just trying to catch sight of them before they kill you. The truth of it is they’re hunting you as soon as you step on the ice. If you’re lucky, you get a shot off before they take you down. There’s a story I can tell you about that someday. ’Bout work I did in Alaska. But that’ll have to wait for another time, another place. I can’t tell you about it today.”
Jonathan hadn’t seen Rich in years, but he suddenly wanted to find him and ask him to tell that story. For some reason, it seemed important right then, the idea of being stalked by something sinister that blends in so well with the world around that it’s invisible. It follows, it waits, it watches every day, and by the time most people notice, it’s too late.
Chapter Seven
On the eve of Halloween, just one week before he would leave, Jonathan and Mary took Jacob to the traditional Halloween parade down the streets of neighboring Collinsville. Originally begun as a small event for Collinsville residents only, with a smattering of children and adults feigning celebrity as they marched down the center of town, it became such a draw that the board of selectmen finally opened the parade to kids from all over, knowing full well their parents would spend money like fiends getting liquored up in the trendy, little outdoor cafés that lined the parade route. Now it was an event that drew easily two thousand people each year. Collinsville was the perfect town square for a Halloween event. It was set beneath a cemetery on the slopes of a hill so steep it boggled the mind as to how the corpses and coffins remained in place and didn’t slide down the mountain and break open on Main Street. Abandoned factories with broken windows and brick facades lined a slow, dark river, which became deep just before a subsurface dam, and then gracefully gushed over, flowing beneath a walking bridge connecting the town to a paved river-walk path that stretched miles downstream. Collinsville had previously specialized in blade-making – axes, saws, knives and any sort of industrial cutting tool. The new restaurants and cafés decorated their walls with old Collinsville creations – crude, bladed steel instruments that seemed vaguely menacing but quaint at the same time. The factories were slowly being converted to apartments, antique shops and art galleries in a small-town version of gentrification.
Jacob, like any boy his age, was excited to dress up, to run through the night, to collect candy from neighbors. He was dressed as a mad scientist, an easy enough costume, which, thankfully, cost very little to create – a simple white jacket, some iron-on lettering, blood spatter, gloves and goggles. His naturally messy hair was trussed up into spikes, jutting out in different directions. Some fake glasses gave him the look of intelligence gone awry. He was picture-worthy even for people who didn’t consider him the center of their world.
Jonathan and Mary were never desperate or organized enough to arrive at Collinsville ridiculously early in order to park in the center of town. Conner and Madison would probably have the finest parking spot available. They also attended every year, parading their children, taking pictures, telling everyone that everything was wonderful. Jonathan recognized he was here to do the same thing, and somehow it seemed a bigger lie.
They parked along the river walk outside of town and joined other families who walked beneath the looming trees beside the river. It was dusk and quickly growing dark. The warmth of t
he sun faded off, and a mist rose from the black waters and drifted through the trees. As they approached the town, Jonathan could hear the laughter, the voices of revelry just beyond the walking bridge and behind the old brick buildings. The other families shuffled along, their children jumped and ran, and their parents called them back. Jacob walked quietly and calmly and Jonathan wondered to himself if something was wrong. The fear every parent secretly harbors that their son or daughter is somehow different – that they were not playing properly with other kids, not behaving like normal kids – crept into his mind. Jacob, at times, seemed morose and isolated. He had no brothers or sisters, and there was no best friend up the street with whom he played. And with that concern came guilt. How could any child come out ‘normal’ with a father like him?
But it wasn’t just Jacob’s quiet manner at a time when he should be a bounding barrel of excitement and joy; the whole evening seemed off. Jonathan knew he had been avoiding the night, hiding inside with the lights on, but now his open-air presence in the darkness couldn’t be helped and he felt an insane sense that something stalked through the trees between the walking path and the deep river. He couldn’t describe it exactly; it was like knowing a song on the radio but being unable to remember the name until hours later. Perhaps it was just a memory, a key revelation sneaking up in slow and horrific fashion. The tops of the trees rustled in an unfelt wind; their brittle orange-and-brown leaves brushed together in a whispering dirge and then floated to the earth like confetti.
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