by Brian Harmon
A terrible shriek filled the air and the woman turned away from the shore, desperately crawling away from the deadly forest. Eric could feel her broken bones grinding together as she struggled. More than just her ankle, he could feel something terribly wrong with her entire leg, as if she’d shattered all of the bones in that limb. She was in terrible pain and yet her terror was so great that she continued to claw her way farther and farther out onto the frozen lake, desperately trying to get away, regardless of her suffering.
He could hear the ice cracking beneath her. Already compromised by her fall, it was threatening to give way beneath her shifting weight and send her plummeting to a watery grave. But this didn’t concern her. Her only thought was to flee the giant in the woods.
Something crashed onto the lake behind her. The ice lurched. Freezing water sprayed over her, raining down around her. The whole world seemed to churn.
Terror like he’d never known erupted from the woman as something vile closed around her body.
Indescribable agony filled Eric’s brain. From inside this woman’s body, he howled for help.
Don’t let it take me!
His eyes opened. He gasped. He lifted his arms to defend himself. But he was alone. He was on his knees, staring wide-eyed into the empty forest, a scream hovering just behind his lips.
The bloody woman was gone.
The vision was over.
The dream was behind him once more.
But more than ever, he had the distinct feeling that the dying woman’s last words had always been meant for him, as if in those final seconds of her ill-fated life, she’d somehow sensed him and begged him to help her.
Don’t let it take me!
He shivered hard and stumbled to his feet. He was already reaching for his cell phone when it began ringing, but his hands were shaking so badly that it took until the fourth ring for him to wrestle it free of his pocket.
“Can I go home now?” he asked when he finally lifted it to his ear.
“I wish…” replied Isabelle. “I’m sorry, but that whole thing totally gave me the creeps!”
“Yeah, I got that, too. Oddly enough.”
“I mean, the dreams were bad, but that was… Ugh!”
Eric turned and looked around, scanning all of his surroundings, making sure nothing else was sneaking up on him. “It did seem a bit more vivid.”
“It was a lot more vivid. Your dreams, when you have them, come through a little compressed, like I’m seeing them in fast-forward. And they skip ahead sometimes, too. But this was much more real. I was almost convinced you were actually there.”
Eric ran a hand through his hair. “Yeah. Me too.” His heart was still racing. He couldn’t seem to make himself calm down. He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Then he asked the question that he wasn’t sure he wanted to hear the answer to: “Do you think that was her? The bloody woman? Was she the woman from my dream?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible, I guess. But that would mean…”
“It would mean I’m not here to save her.”
“Yeah.”
“She’s already dead. I can’t save her.”
“Yeah.”
“So why did I have to live through that? What’s she trying to tell me? That the things out here are dangerous? I already know that!”
“There must be a reason.”
“But what?” Eric turned in a slow circle, scanning the area again. He felt nervous, on edge. “That was horrifying.”
“I know it was. Are you okay? You’re really tense.”
He forced himself to stop and take a breath. “Yeah. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Just relax. You need to be thinking clearly.”
She was right, of course. She was almost always right. He willed himself to relax. Then he said, “It’s not like it hadn’t occurred to me that she might already be dead. I wondered if the dream was showing me the past or the future. But I really thought I might be here to save her.”
“That would’ve been an easy explanation,” she agreed. “Save the woman. Not at all confusing, unlike this whole ghost, alien and monster mashup thing that’s going on out there.”
“No kidding…” Eric rubbed at his eyes. His heart was still thumping from that awful vision. “What’s going on, anyway? Why is everything so messed up? It’s way worse than usual.”
“Well, for starters, you’re in a triangle.”
The Hedge Lake Triangle. He recalled her saying something about it when he first met Owen and Pete. She told him that if he really was dealing with a triangle, things could get complicated. And things had definitely gotten complicated. “What do you know about triangles?”
“They tend to be associated with a wide range of claims.”
“That’s a check.”
“Most are actually just fissures, I think. Someone wanders in and disappears, a strange creature wanders out, rumors start to fly. People tend to make things up when they don’t understand something.”
“Makes sense,” agreed Eric.
“But some really do defy explanation.”
“And this one?”
“Jury’s still out, but so far it’s not making any sense to me. It’s obviously not a fissure. I’m sure I’d know if it was. But I can’t explain it, either. Something’s going on out there.”
Again, Eric scanned his surroundings. “So what should I do?”
“Personally, I’d go back to Specter Ten and see if you can learn anything else about the area. There must be more history. Didn’t Owen say that Pete could give you all the details of all ten disappearances?”
He sighed. “Yeah. He did say that.” But he really didn’t want to have to deal with those two again.
“Or…”
“Yes?” said Eric, eager to hear another option.
“Don’t you have a friend who’s a UFO nut?”
He thought about this for a moment. “You mean Gerry Nesby?”
“Yeah. Him.”
“What about him?”
“You could always call him.”
Eric drew an unpleasant face. Call Gerry Nesby? To ask about UFOs? On purpose? Gerry was a raving alien conspiracy fanatic and an old friend from back in his high school days. They had almost nothing in common anymore, but for some reason he still called every now and then just to catch up. He hadn’t heard from him in a while. The last time they talked, Gerry’s timing had been…unfortunate. It was during one of these weird journeys, actually, that business with Aiden Chadwick in Creek Bend. He’d been literally treed by a pack of monstrous black creatures and Gerry was tying up the line with his usual, pointless chattering and ultimately caused him to drop the phone so that he couldn’t talk to Isabelle when he desperately needed her. He was still a little sore about that, to tell the truth.
“You have his number on your phone, don’t you?”
“I think so. But he’s always called me. I’ve never actually wanted to talk to him…”
“I’m just saying,” said Isabelle, “that he might be able to tell you something useful about these aliens.”
“Or I might spend the next few hours listening to Gerry talk crazy at me. The guy’s no scientist.”
“True,” agreed Isabelle. “But most scientists don’t believe in hellhounds, either.”
“Valid point.” Gerry was a firm believer in more than just UFOs. If allowed, he’d go on and on about sinister alien plots and evil Men in Black and government cover-ups. He really didn’t want to open that can of worms.
“Okay. Then I guess you’ll talk to Specter Ten again.”
Eric groaned.
“Unless you want to go see what Fester Sweater wants to discuss,” she reminded him.
“Right. No thank you.” He hung up the phone and continued walking back toward Owen’s cameras. Isabelle was correct, as usual. He didn’t dare go nosing around Fettarsetter’s house until he had a better idea of what was going on. And there was no one else here, except for Jordan, who he
hoped had gone home for the day and stayed out of these dangerous woods.
He brought up the directory on his phone. There was Gerry’s number, all right. Maybe he would end up calling him, just as Isabelle suggested. The guy was crazy, but so was this whole triangle thing. With all the UFO trivia that man had in his head, maybe he knew something that would actually be helpful.
But he wasn’t doing it yet. He was still mad about the apple tree incident.
He shook his head. Triangles. Fissures. Unseen. Nameless agents. Witches. Ghosts. He remembered back when he was grown up enough to not believe in all this nonsense…
Chapter Fifteen
Not surprisingly, Specter Ten had left the vicinity of camera two by now. They were either back at their van or investigating elsewhere in the woods. His best chance to catch them was to try base camp. Assuming they hadn’t been eaten by monsters since he last saw them.
He looked out at the lake once more, making sure that nothing was sneaking up on him again, and then began to trudge back through the woods, his eyes wide open for any sign of more paranormal activity. But as he made his way deeper into the forest, nothing more happened. The bloody woman seemed to have made her point for the time being. The hellhound was otherwise occupied. The silver spacecraft had perhaps found a cornfield to doodle in. Even the ghostly boy and shadow man didn’t reveal themselves.
Perhaps they were all steering clear of the poorly-concealed cameras.
He passed one that looked like they’d attempted to camouflage it by taping a small pile of leaves to the top. It now looked exactly like a camera on a shiny, metal tripod with a pile of leaves and duct tape stuck to it. He couldn’t decide which was more ridiculous, the fact that they’d done such a terrible job at it or that they’d even bothered.
Personally, if he were a Hedge Lake monster, he’d wait for a more respectable investigation team, too. This was probably downright insulting.
He located the fire trail and followed it to the clearing where Specter Ten’s ugly-mobile was parked. It was quiet. He didn’t think anyone was around, but when he walked behind the vehicle and peered inside, he found Mandy right where he’d last seen her, still playing with her cell phone. Pete was with her, sprawled on the floor of the van behind her, a tablet in his lap, a set of headphones on his head, intently studying the screen.
And Jordan was here, too, he saw. She was sitting cross-legged between them, playing with one of the team’s meters. Apparently this was where she ran off to when he became too boring for her.
Mandy glanced up at him, acknowledging that she saw him with only that one look, and then silently returned to her cell phone.
“You guys find any monsters yet?” he asked.
Pete looked up from his screen, surprised, and pulled off his headphones. “What?”
“I asked if you found anything yet.”
He glanced down at the tablet and gave a bored sigh. “Nope.”
Eric wanted to ask how the hell they could possibly miss them. They were everywhere. He felt like he hadn’t been able to take two steps without tripping over something monstrous. These guys had to be the worst paranormal investigation team on the planet. But he bit his tongue and simply asked, “Are you busy?”
“Owen decided I should start going through our footage, since Fettarsetter’s getting impatient,” he replied. “Said I was better at seeing things. But he just hates doing it himself.”
Eric wasn’t surprised. Owen didn’t strike him as someone with a lot of patience. “Didn’t find anything interesting?”
He shook his head. “A lot of what you’d expect to be out in the woods.”
Eric guessed that didn’t include hellhounds and lightning-spewing spaceships. “You don’t sound very optimistic.”
He shrugged his broad shoulders. “It’s not whether a place is haunted or if something exists, it’s all about capturing evidence. And solid evidence is hard to come by. Most days there just isn’t any.”
“Maybe ghosts don’t like getting their picture taken,” suggested Jordan as she scanned herself with the EMF detector. She scrunched her face up as she tried to make sense of the reading it gave her. She even tried turning it over and looking at it upside-down.
Pete shrugged. “Maybe they don’t,” he agreed.
“Well, if it was easy,” reasoned Eric, “anyone could do it and it’d already be done.”
Pete grinned. “That’s true.”
“So where is Owen?”
“Investigating.”
“On his own?”
“Says one person makes a lot less noise than two.”
“Is he right?”
“Probably. But I’m sure he’s just screwing around. Like I said, he hates reviewing tapes.”
Eric didn’t think he’d like it, either, to be honest. It looked excruciatingly boring.
“I don’t think he takes this as seriously as he should,” agreed Jordan.
“He’s probably not far away if you want to talk to him,” said Pete. “I could radio him.”
“Actually, I was hoping to talk to you.”
Pete’s eyebrows floated upward on his pudgy face. “Me?”
“You’re the researcher, right? You know all the stories about the triangle?”
He managed to look genuinely modest. “I’ve dug up a few things. Probably not everything.”
“Like all of the disappearances?”
“All ten of them, starting with Robert Kapper in ‘thirty-seven.”
“Right. In the summer.”
“Tenth of July,” he specified.
“You’re good.”
“It helps to have facts. Gives you names and dates to use when looking for EVPs.”
Eric nodded. That did seem like a good strategy. Make it personal to the ghost. Engage them with familiar talk.
Pete opened the side door of the van and stepped out.
Jordan remained where she was. She put the EMF detector down and started digging through the nearest duffel bag for something else to play with.
Mandy seemed to have completely tuned the three of them out. It was difficult to tell if she even knew that they were there. Typical cell phone addict. People like her always drove Eric nuts. Especially when they were his students. If he had it his way, he’d happily take a hammer to any device that turned up in his classroom.
Stupid things.
And yes, he grasped the irony of the fact that he kept finding himself in situations where he relied on his own cell phone to keep in touch with Isabelle, Karen and Holly. He didn’t care. He still hated cell phones.
(Karen wasn’t the only one who could be impossibly stubborn about things.)
“Robbert Kapper was only nine, you said?”
Pete nodded. “Real sad story.”
“It was. You didn’t happen to find any pictures of him, did you?”
He shook his head. “That would’ve been cool. But I couldn’t even find any original news articles. He might not have been real, honestly. It’s possible someone made it up. Sometimes that happens.”
“I’ll bet it does.” But he had a sneaking suspicion that Robert Kapper and his tragic fate were perfectly real. He couldn’t quite get the blond-headed boy’s frightened face out of his mind. “Who was next?”
“Grover Storning. Local hunter. ‘Forty-nine. I was able to confirm that one. In fact, I’ve been able to confirm all of them except Robert Kapper.” He swiped at his tablet and brought up a series of photographs, most of which had been taken directly from old news clippings. Literally. Many of them were pictures of the actual newspapers taken with the tablet. He talked Eric through each of the remaining eight victims supposedly claimed by the triangle, showing him pictures of each as he went.
Agnes Rickel, age fifty-seven, mysteriously disappeared in 1956. She was last seen in her own garden. She left behind her trowel and two very baffled, grown sons. Her picture revealed her to be a husky woman with a stern face and a prim bun in her hair.
In 1961, s
isters Irene and Cora Quetter, ages sixteen and eighteen, went out for a swim and never returned. They were both tall and skinny, with larger-than-average noses and wispy-looking blonde hair.
Then three different men, William Tinet, Marshal Candol and Chester Swaine, all went missing on separate occasions in 1967, 1974 and 1981, respectively. In each case, their empty fishing boats were found abandoned and adrift along the shore. Their pictures revealed little in common. They were of different ages, builds and backgrounds. They weren’t even all of the same race. The only thing they seemed to have in common was that they enjoyed fishing alone, something Eric found without surprise that he had no pressing desire to do while he was here.
In 1992, John and Ruth Badrey decided to hike around the lake. But after exploring only a third of the shore, Ruth began feeling ill, so John left her at one of the docks and promised to bring the car around for her. But when he returned, she’d vanished. She was a very pretty woman in her early thirties, with long, brown hair, a brilliant smile and dimpled cheeks.
“The last was in 2009,” Pete explained. “Eleanor Loday was waiting in her car while her husband snapped some pictures of the lake. He was some kind of photographer. He claimed he was only out of sight for a few minutes, but when he came back, she was gone.” There was a picture of a middle-aged woman with dark, curly hair, pronounced cheekbones and an endearing smile. “This one made headlines for a while, I guess.”
“And they never found any sign of any of these people?”
“Not a trace.”
Eric had seated himself in the same uncomfortable chair where he sat the last time he was here and listened with growing unease. Each eerie detail made him a little more anxious. So much tragedy in this one little area. It was a lot to process.
“Creepy stuff, huh?”
“Very. Where did all these people live? There aren’t many houses around here.”
“There’re a lot more houses over on the other side of Fettarsetter’s place,” replied Pete. “It’s a long walk between houses on this side, but there are places all around here. Most of these people, though, weren’t local. Some were from the surrounding towns. A few were from pretty far away.”
