The Taw Ridge Haunting

by Austin, Robin G.

  “Now what?” he asks.

  “I have to finish it.”

  He starts to say something then shakes his head and looks past me. “I never would have guessed him. Do you think it’s true? Abner Tollison killed my mother?” A little boy’s eyes look into mine. “Don’t go back down there Jack. The place needs to be bulldozed to the ground. I can arrange to have that done.”

  “It wouldn’t help anything. It has to be finished. A portal’s been open. He just needs to be pushed through.” I decline his offer to come back after making sure Boshears gets home. He looks guilty, but relieved.

  “You’re either the bravest or the dumbest woman I’ve ever met. No offense intended.”

  “None taken,” I say.

  Carol gives me a hug and thanks me. “It was the bow ties that threw me. I didn’t know murderers wore them. I don’t know if I believe it yet. I trusted that man. He held my hand and comforted me. He tried to get me to stay in the hotel.” She shivers then hurries to her car.

  I watch until I can’t see them anymore then I go back inside. Alex looks worried. “Everything’s fine,” I say. “Just need to clean things up down there.” He doesn’t say a word and I almost laugh.

  I open the basement door and Mojo runs down the stairs. He’s anxious to get back to work. I take my smudge stick and one of the chairs and sit next to the bottom step. Then I brush the smoke with my fingers and pray for Tollison’s spirit and the women he killed– and maybe others.

  When I open my eyes, there’s a shadow on the steps. It’s more light and fluid than smoke. Mojo’s in ghost pose. I can barely hear his soft growl.

  “Your truth is known Abner Tollison. You can’t stay any longer.”

  “Diabolus in me et ego natus sum.” The whispered words float through the room.

  “Speak so I can understand you.”

  My chair scrapes on the cement floor, and I press my feet down. “What you did can’t be forgotten or forgiven. It can’t be repeated either. Your time is done on this earth. Better luck next time– if you get a next time.”

  My chair moves back, and I stand and wave the sage smoke as I pray for a soul that is forever lost. The shadow moves in and out of the wall and slides between the steps. “It’s over Abner Tollison. Speak any final words. Then by the power of good over evil, be gone.”

  The shadow grows darker and in it, I see a young man. He’s tall and thin and very happy. He’s running and dancing in an endless hallway. He’s laughing and opening one door after another. When he gets to the last door at the end of the hall, he opens it. I can’t see anything before he leaps. His endless screams are shrill, and I have to put my hands over my ears.

  When I look back, the shadow is wavering. “What happened?” I ask. I have tears in my eyes, but they aren’t my own. I hear his words in my head.

  One step in bliss, two in melancholy, three in revenge.

  “All steps in ego end in disaster. You are forever free of your earthly emotions. They were never more than illusions of living.”

  My throat is tight. I feel like I’m falling out that door then I’m coughing and gasping for air. There’s a pool of bright red liquid forming around me that smells like copper. I’m trying to back up, but I can’t move. The shadow is laughing.

  I don’t recognize my voice when I speak. “Abner Tollison. You are released from this earth by the power of the Great Spirit and God Almighty.”

  Waves of laughter echo from every direction. Flames shoot from the bloody liquid that surrounds me. I try not to panic since I know it isn’t really happening, but it seems all too real.

  “Your final words have been spoken. Your power is vanquished by all the gods of the universe. May they have mercy on your soul.”

  The shadow sweeps through me. I fall backwards and hit my head on the cement. The last thing I hear is the sound of an old man wailing.

  A tongue facial brings me back. I sit up and grab my head and see an old man sitting on the bottom step. He’s eating a sandwich.

  “I thought you was dead,” he says and laughs.

  “Mac?”

  “Mac the Night at your service. Though after locking me out of my home, I shouldn’t be so generous.”

  I’m trying to get up off the floor, but I’m dizzy. I grab the chair and pull myself up. “How long have you been down here?”

  “Going on fifteen some years now.”

  “I mean tonight.”

  He laughs and offers Mojo a bite of his sandwich. The wolfdog glares. He does not take bites from strangers. “Just got down here a couple of minutes ago. Thought you was dead.”

  “You said that already. Did you come in through the front door?”

  “Nope. Picked the kitchen lock. Made myself a sandwich then I came down the chute.”

  “The chute? What chute?”

  Mac finishes his sandwich and opens a can of soda. “Now that I know you ain’t dead, I’ll be on my way before you call the police on me.”

  “Fifteen years?” My bruised brain is starting to function again. “You’ve been sneaking in the hotel that long?”

  “Yep. Figure I have myself squatter’s rights. Figure the new owner won’t agree with me.”

  “You’re probably right about that last one. Were you here the night Abner Tollison killed the three women?” He doesn’t answer. “Did he use this chute you mentioned? Is that how he pulled it off?”

  He drinks his soda and retrieves a pastry from the pocket of his jacket. He looks it over while I wait. “Nothing I could do about that,” he finally says.

  “You let an innocent man go to trial and almost go to prison. You left three families to wonder and suffer.”

  “Don’t be blaming none of that on me. Tollison was what he was. The devil himself. Crazy as crazy is, that was him. Nobody would have believed an old raggedy black man like me.” He stops to eat his pastry. When he looks back at me, he looks angry then he lowers his eyes. When he speaks, his voice is soft and slow.

  “Wasn’t it enough that I had to smell his flesh as it rotted from his corpse? Takes a long time for that to happen. Takes even longer for that smell to leave a place. Doesn’t it count none that I looked at his wormy brain to see if that man had a conscience? Don’t it count some that I checked inside his chest to see if he had a heart before the maggots ate it all up?”

  “Did he?”

  Mac leans back and laughs then he finishes his pastry. “Don’t blame me that nobody would have listened. Even if I’d tried to stop the man, nobody would have done nothing. He had his mind set on things. I did the things I did to survive. I’m not making up excuses for myself. I didn’t brush one of those maggots off that man. Think what you will. That’s good enough for me.”

  He stands up and looks around. “You leaving town now?”

  “Another day,” I say, but I’m not sure about that.

  “Guess I better make myself scarce before you call those cops on me.”

  “Wait. I need proof that Tollison was the murderer.”

  Mac smiles. “What’s in it for me?”

  I smile back. “The gift of silence.”

  ∞

  It was nearly two o’clock when I fell into a fitful sleep last night. I didn’t bother to set my alarm. I hadn’t believed Boshears would go ahead with the reopening celebration after Aubrey’s arrest. I seriously doubted she would after last night’s events.

  One of the hotel staff is banging on my door. She tells me Ms. Boshears needs me downstairs a-sap. I start to tell her I don’t do a-sap, but she’s got a large mug of coffee in her hand that she wants to give me, and I’d rather take it than talk.

  I get ready and pack my bags. I have a ghost-free certification performance to give in a couple of hours. Then before I hit the road, I have to talk to Detective Radford. I expect the reopening will be a total bust, and that I’ll be out of Taw Ridge no later than four o’clock. Normally, I’d wait to leave in the morning, but I’m done with the Herman Hotel. Herman, right. I should h
ave guessed.

  “Well?” Boshears says as soon as I step off the elevator.

  “Good morning to you too.” The woman left me two voice messages and a text asking if I was going to fulfill the terms of our agreement. I ignored them. “Well? Are they serving breakfast this morning?”

  Boshears stomps her foot. “You know what I’m talking about. Please answer my question.”

  “Yes, I’ll sign the certificate. I’ll smile and tell the press that your hotel is ghost-free.”

  “After that little production last night, it better be.” Boshears sees an employee who is trying hard not to be seen. She’s off in his direction. I was right in thinking she knew she didn’t fall asleep during the séance.

  I go outside to sit at the fountain and call Radford. He says I can come by the station at three-thirty. He’s curious about what I have to give him, but he doesn’t ask.

  It’s going to be yet another day in the nineties. Aubrey Marks is still sitting in a jail cell. The curious and the morbid will soon be eating chips and dips in the lobby and looking for blood stains. Boshears is going to be spending money she shouldn’t and holding up a certificate for the local news cameras with a fake smile, for entertainment purposes.

  And no one will be talking about any of those things after I give the detective Abner Tollison’s journal, and tell him what really happened to the man.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  §

  It’s almost nine when I pull off the interstate outside Taw Ridge and into a Quality Inn parking lot. I significantly underestimated my departure time after my meeting with Radford. He had insisted that I return to the hotel to show him the chute I found in the basement that is hidden behind the furnace.

  Since I was up late last night reading Tollison’s journal, I’m too tired to drive any farther. The Herman Hotel is closed. Staying there wasn’t an option even if I’d wanted to, even if I’d been welcome to stay. Neither was the case.

  It turns out that Tollison was crazy long before spending a year in the psych ward. Besides being a murderer, Tollison was also a petty criminal. Somehow he found his way to Taw Ridge where he conned the hotel’s original owner into selling him the place. According to his journal, the man’s bones are in the garden. I was right in telling Mojo not to dig back there.

  Tollison renamed the hotel after the notorious H.H. Holmes aka Herman Mudgett who owns the title of America’s first serial killer. In the late eighteen hundreds, Holmes opened his home to visitors of the Chicago World’s Fair. Those visitors did not fare well in his house of horrors, which had been constructed with trapdoors, prison rooms, and a chute that led to the basement.

  Tollison only managed to get a chute installed, but it helped him cover his tracks from the basement to the thirteenth floor and back. If his journal, which Mac retrieved from the man’s coat pocket after he was dead, is more than mere boasting, there are dozens of tracks to uncover.

  The hotel’s temporary closure by the police while they investigate will likely be its final closure, which is why Boshears is planning on suing me.

  Detective Radford said he would be happy to close an old cold case, and he promised to call Kyle and Carol. He wasn’t happy about what he knew I wasn’t telling him, but a promise is a promise– even when it’s made to someone who isn’t exactly innocent.

  Since I never mentioned Mac and didn’t give many details about what he saw in that basement two years ago, Radford is going to have to piece it all together with DNA evidence and Tollison’s own words. Turns out the man was an avid journaler, and not just about the demons in his soul.

  I had to read his last entry twice before it sunk in. He said he was writing it from the nut house as he waited for his granddaughter to pick him up. She wanted to take him to the hotel to discuss reopening the place. He was looking forward to seeing her again, but wrote he knew that wouldn’t turn out well.

  He also wrote that he knew she would again try to talk him into putting the hotel in her name. The girl’s too young and foolish and as crazy as me, he’d written. He wasn’t changing his will, and he hoped Aubrey didn’t kill him when he told her that. He drew a happy face at the end of the entry. A crazy looking one. It was his last entry.

  Boshears told Radford that she learned she and Aubrey were related shortly after she came to Taw Ridge. If she learned anything else about the woman or just why the uncle she never met was determined to leave her the hotel, no one may ever know. She’s only talking through her attorney now.

  Instead of getting a few years for attacking Nicole, Aubrey Marks may be serving life in prison. If her attorney is smart, he’ll claim self-defense or insanity. I hope he isn’t that smart, but a few of Tollison’s words are enough to get her a reduced sentence.

  Diabolus in me et ego natus sum. I’d searched for the words in his journal, the same one’s he’d said to me last night. I was born with the devil in me. Funny, that was H.H. Holmes’ explanation too.

  I call Levi and tell him I’ll be home late tomorrow. I want to make sure that he’s not sitting on my sofa watching TV when I get there. He says he has bad news. The Roswell airport key belongs to my new neighbor, one that I didn’t even know I have. The delivery guy claimed he put it in the wrong mailbox. Since mine is the only house down that long dirt road, I find that hard to believe. Maybelle refuses to give the guy the key until I’m back.

  I tell Levi it’s good news that the Roswell box has nothing to do with me. I don’t tell him that I learned too many things on this last job that I never wanted to know, and that I can do without uncovering any other mysteries, for now anyway.

  Then he asks me if I want to move to Silicon Valley. He’s hyper and nervous. I assure him I do not want to move to California. He tells me he does, for awhile anyway. He says he wasn’t telling anyone until he knew for sure, but he’s accepted a position at a tech firm he interviewed with last month. We’re both too quiet before I think to congratulate him. We’re both too quiet before we disconnect.

  After we get in our hotel room, I open her box and set Rita on the dresser then I tell her not to go anywhere. I’d ask Mac if he was the one who kidnapped my rat doll and brought her back. At the time, I was interested in why he might have done both. He wouldn’t tell me one way or the other, but said I would have been a good match for Tollison. I told him I hoped that would have been the case.

  I ask Rita what really happened. She just stares at me. The doll’s possessed, and she was no protection at all on this job. I don’t plan on telling her that though.

  ∞

  Two nights later, I cross the New Mexico border without another car in sight. I roll down my window after I’m past the dairy farms to inhale the fresh scent of rain from the creosote bushes and listen to the frantic yelps of prairie dogs and the howls of coyotes.

  It’s close to one when I stop at Agustina’s home. I set the plastic container on her front porch and wish Rita good luck.

  When I get about a hundred feet from my home, flood lights blind me. Cameras watch me as I unload the jeep. I admit that I’m still angry at Tollison for thinking anyone was a pawn in his sadistic game. I don’t buy his reason of madness for a second or maybe I just don’t want to let it be an excuse.

  I turn off the security system when I walk in the door. Tomorrow, I plan on having it removed.

  “Anna,” I say walking through the house. “I admit that I’m tired and not in the best of moods, but enough is enough. I’ll give you a few days while I unwind, but then you’re going to have to come clean. Otherwise, you’re going to have to leave without my help. I’m not running a hotel here.”

  The next morning I sleep in. I ignore my messages except to text that I got back in town late last night. Mojo isn’t impressed. My superpowers are lost on the dog. He waits at the door to go for our daily walk in the Las Trebol mountains, even after I tell him we’re taking the day off.

  What I am going to do is remove the post on my website about going to Taw Ridge. I always post s
omething before and after a job, but this one is best forgotten. I can’t bring myself to write about Tollison or Aubrey or my pending lawsuit. The curious can read about it in the news feeds.

  Mojo is still waiting at the door. As soon as we step outside, thunder rumbles. It’s in the upper eighties and I’m anxious to get caught in a desert storm that won’t last long enough. I stop at the mailbox and flip through a bunch of junk mail before tossing it back in the box. Mojo is already taking off.

  “Hey, lady.”

  I turn and see a kid a few yards away. I look around and don’t see anyone else. He’s maybe ten and rough around the edges.

  “Hey, kid. What are you doing all the way out here by yourself?”

  “I’m exploring. That your dog over there?”

  “Yep. Where are your parents? There are rattlesnakes and coyotes out here. It’s not safe to be on your own.”

  “I’m not afraid of nothing. You know what else is out here?” He’s kicking rocks.

  “What’s that?”

  “You ever hear of skunk pigs?”

  The End

  ∞

  For her next job, Jack travels to Kexport, Pennsylvania, to investigate a haunting in an antique shop after the owner is found dead on the floor by a customer.

  Sherman Ballard owned Sherman’s Treasures for forty seven years. The police think his death is suspicious. They soon learn two people had everything to gain by his death, and one had cause to seek revenge.

  Bingwen Jeng was Sherman’s business partner for thirty years. He insists that an evil spirit who is in a mirror that Sherman purchased six months before is responsible for the man’s death. Bing claims he put the mirror in storage the day before Sherman died because it spoke to him.

  When he returned to the shop the next morning, the mirror was back in the shop. He admitted to police that he and Sherman argued that morning because he believed Sherman had brought the mirror back. The customer who found Sherman first saw his body reflected in the mirror, but she isn’t telling what else she saw.