by Ron Ripley
George took a deep breath, stuffed his hands deeper into his pockets, put on an air of nonchalance, and stepped out like he was cutting through the yard to get to the beach.
And there was no one.
The voices continued.
Laughter rang out.
A child let out a happy, shrill laugh.
And someone shoved George in the back with enough force to launch him forward. He tripped over his own feet and landed in the soft sand on his hands and knees. George struggled to stand, and someone kicked him in the ribs with enough force to knock the breath out of him.
A second blow to the back of his head caused his limbs to go rubbery, and he fell face first. He tried to turn away from the sand and succeeded, for the briefest of moments. Then someone grabbed him by the hair and pushed him down.
He couldn’t breathe.
He flailed his arms and reached back. He tried to grab hold of the hand of his murderer, and he found nothing.
Sand was ground into his eyes, packed into his nose.
Finally, he was forced to take a breath, and he inhaled nothing save dry, brutal sand.
The voices continued, as did the laughter.
George kicked out.
“We know what you wanted,” a woman’s voice said suddenly in his ear. “You’re not welcome here. We won’t even let you stay once you’re dead.”
“The dunes await, you charry man,” a much younger female voice said in a thick Irish brogue. “The dunes await.”
George couldn’t answer.
He couldn’t even breathe.
He was drowning slowly in the sand.
Preview of The Dunewalkers Chapter 2: William Moves In
William Engberg sat in his truck and finished his cigarette.
He exhaled and then he stubbed out the cigarette in the ashtray and pulled the key out of the ignition. He got out of his truck, stuffed his keys in a back pocket and looked at the house before him.
The building was small, painted white with dark green trim with the Atlantic behind it. The ocean was gray and harsh, whitecaps breaking upon dark sands while a cold, northern wind battered at the dunes and seagrass.
William smiled at the dark clouds. Behind them, the sun had begun its slow descent, and soon William would be alone with the ocean and his thoughts.
Closing the truck’s door, he walked around to the side, reached into the bed and pulled out his sea-bag. He threw it over his shoulder and walked up to the house. He bent down and moved aside a loose paving stone to find the key to the house, as Jeremy’s mother had said.
The key was old, a perfect match for the worn lock in the door.
In a moment he was inside and the world beyond hidden from view. The house was dim, the poor light of the stormy sky coming in through the small windows. William found the light switch and flipped it up. A lamp flickered into life and offered up a view of the room.
The house was really nothing more than a large studio apartment, equipped with a small kitchenette and the peace and quiet William so desperately needed.
A few pieces of furniture occupied the house. A sofa that William knew to have a pull-out bed was in the room’s center. On the left wall stood a tall bookshelf, flanked by a pair of small, worn leather club chairs. A mirrored sconce was secured above each chair and a low coffee table sat between the two.
The right wall was dominated by a large, stone fireplace. A bucket for ashes stood to the left and a large wood-box, already filled with a good supply of split, seasoned wood, filled the space between the right of the hearth and a small bathroom.
William walked to the sofa, dropped his sea-bag on it and went to the kitchen. He opened the few cabinet doors and found that Jeremy’s mother had stocked them with dry goods.
William smiled and turned his attention to the refrigerator. Inside he found bottled water and a small cake.
Welcome, William, We’re Happy You’re Home, was written in blue across the white frosting.
William closed the refrigerator.
Home. He looked around. He fought back tears and a thousand unbidden memories. I have a home.
With a long sigh, William shook the thoughts away and went to his sea-bag, opened it and unloaded his belongings onto the sofa. From a small box, he took out his coffee press and carried it to the kitchen. William found a kettle and filled it from the tap. After setting it down on a burner William went back to the sofa. He bent down to sort out his belongings and then he stopped.
He straightened up, the hair on his neck standing up.
Someone had walked past the window.
William looked at the door and waited.
No one knocked.
No one passed by the other window.
William’s entire body tensed and he moved cautiously to the left window, where he had seen the fleeting shadow.
He tried to review the memory of the image.
Nothing. A shape. No definitive features.
Yet it had been a person. An adult from the size of the shape.
It couldn’t be a neighbor, Jeremy’s mother owned the strip of beach a quarter of a mile on either side. Nor could it be a thief. There was nothing to steal.
Except for the truck.
William reached the window and looked out.
His truck stood in the crushed stone driveway.
The dunes spread out to the left and the right. The wind rippled through the grass with the same ferocity of the of the tide’s pull upon the waves.
And a man was walking away.
From what William could see, the man had on a knit cap and a pea coat, both of dark, navy blue. The man’s collar was turned up against the wind, and he walked with his shoulders hunched.
“What is it, love?”
William spun around so quickly that he stumbled into the window.
A woman in a night-dress stood behind the sofa.
Her long brown hair hung down past her shoulders, and she was pretty, her features strong and her eyes green. She smiled at him, and William realized two things. First, she was probably only in her early thirties. Second, she was dead.
William could see the kettle and the red glow of the burner through her.
And William found himself answering her in a low, rough voice.
“Someone was walking through the grass, past the house.”
The woman’s smile broadened.
“You’ll get used to them,” she said. “There are lots of dune walkers here.”
William started to reply, but the woman vanished.
His body dumped its adrenaline a moment later, and he found himself shaking as badly as he ever had in Afghanistan after a firefight.
He walked to the sofa, sat down amongst his few possessions and waited for calm to return. It took a few minutes, but William soon found himself breathing normally, the shaking gone. He thought hard about what he had seen, both the walker and the woman in the house.
The woman had been undeniably dead, and the walker too, from what she had said.
How the hell do you deal with a ghost? William thought. What if there’s more than one?
The kettle whistled, and William stood up to turn the burner off.
What do I do about the dead?
Preview of The Dunewalkers Chapter 3: In Leo’s Library
Even after a month, Brian was still amazed at the size of Leo’s library.
Initially, after Leo’s death, there had been some difficulty at Brian and Jenny’s house. Brian had called the paramedics in regards to not only the bodies of Leo and Sam but for his own heart issues as well. He had been forced, however, to put in another phone call prior to that, to Lee Parker.
Leo and Sam had essentially died of natural causes.
The cabbie, a man, named Frank Figueroa, had not.
Paul had used Frank as a door knocker and left a lot of the man’s skull and fluids on the front porch. Explaining the cabbie’s body, and its condition would have been a little difficult.
Lee Parker was
a bad man.
There was no other way to describe him.
But he was family, a cousin on Brian’s mother’s side. Both Lee and Brian had been a little wild, but Brian had never been caught at his misdeeds and eventually he had stopped. The possibility of prison had weighed a little too heavily on him, and while he loved his cousin dearly, Brian didn’t want to experience the horrors of time behind bars.
Lee had never thought that far ahead, and, he didn’t seem to care either. He did some time in the maximum security prison in Concord, got out, and then did a little more. The most recent stretch, ten years, had just ended, and Brian had met up with Lee before everything had happened in Mont Vernon.
When Lee was in prison, Brian always made sure there was money in his cousin’s prison account. Not a lot, but enough to make sure Lee was comfortable.
Lee didn’t forget what Brian had done and so he was more than willing to help when Brian called. Lee was living in Milford, down the road from Mont Vernon, and since the man was once more fresh out of prison Lee needed some cash. For several thousand dollars Lee showed up quickly with a flatbed tow truck, some tarps, and another gentleman whose name Brian didn’t bother to ask or want to know.
Forty-three minutes later the cab was gone, the cabbie was gone, and the porch was cleaned up. The worst had been picking bits of skull out of the wood of the door.
Brian felt bad about Frank disappearing, but he also didn’t want to explain it to the authorities. More than likely, the whole “A ghost killed him” defense wouldn’t hold up in court.
Brian pushed those thoughts out of his mind and looked at the first floor of the library. Leo, at some point in his short life, had purchased an old office building. The building wasn’t anything special, a concrete and steel structure slapped together in the seventies when the city of Nashua had seen a slight commercial boom.
Leo had retrofitted the structure, so only support walls remained. All of the open space which had been created held tall metal shelves, and the shelves were packed with books.
Each shelf system had a number, each shelf, in turn, had both a letter and a Roman numeral. Luckily Jenny had found a card catalog hidden beneath empty cardboard boxes. Hand-written index cards populated the narrow drawers, each one giving not only the book’s information but where it might be found.
Brian sat at a folding table and looked at the books in their harsh fluorescent lighting. He tried to imagine how Leo, who had such abysmal social skills, could have acquired so many volumes. Leo, who took each and every statement literally. The man’s inability to read body language and facial cues had to be seen to be believed.
Behind him the elevator ‘dinged’ and Brian turned around in time to see Sylvia and Jenny step out as the doors opened. The two women, while only a few months apart in age, couldn’t be more different in appearance and shape. Sylvia was tall and willowy with her curious and eclectic clothes. Meanwhile Jenny was shorter, stockier, inked up with old-school tattoos and dark hair.
Brian smiled at the pair as they walked in.
“Hey Babe,” Jenny said, walking to him and returning the smile. She gave him a kiss on the head and looked down at his laptop. “How’s it going?”
“Okay, I guess,” Brian said with a sigh. “Still working on setting the site up and putting it through its paces. How about you two?”
“Good,” Jenny said.
Sylvia nodded. She had lost a lot of her distracted, bemused appearance after Leo’s death.
Either that, Brian thought, or I’m not judging her anymore.
“We just finished up everything with the lawyer,” Sylvia said. “I still can’t believe he left all of this to me.”
“You were his friend,” Jenny said.
Sylvia nodded and then she said, “Oh, the lawyer gave this to me.”
Brian watched as she reached into her purse and took out a thick, leather bound journal. Several rubber bands were wrapped around it.
“What is it?” Brian asked.
“Leo’s journal,” Sylvia said. “I didn’t even know he kept a journal.”
“Have you looked at it yet?” Brian asked.
Sylvia and Jenny shook their heads.
“We figured the three of us could look at it together,” Jenny said.
“Sounds good,” Brian said.
The two women pulled out the other folding chairs while Brian shut down his laptop. As he finished closing it up and putting it away, Sylvia removed the rubber bands from the book. The leather covers nearly sprang apart, and Brian saw newspaper clippings and photographs stuffed between the pages.
“Wow,” he said.
“Right,” Jenny agreed. “What’s in there?”
Sylvia opened the journal and removed the first item.
An obituary for Leo’s grandmother.
Silence fell heavily over the three of them. Leo’s grandmother had been a force, and she had eventually dealt the strange man his death blow.
“On September nineteenth,” Sylvia said, reading aloud from the book, “Denise Nadeau drowned in her tub. Grandmother hated Denise. We buried Grandmother on the first of August. I must visit her grave to see what is going on. I am afraid.”
Preview of The Dunewalkers Chapter 4: Leo’s Journal: September, 20th, 1998
Leo walked down Cushing Avenue, his hands in his pockets as he made his way towards Edgewood Cemetery. Occasionally he saw people.
Some of them were even alive.
Most of them who were this close to a cemetery, however, were dead.
Some of them knew it. Others did not. Those who did not tended to be younger. Fresher. Some had been buried as recently as the month before. A few ghosts had even been there since the cemetery’s founding. Many knew they were dead. They knew they were dead, and they were quite pleased with the fact.
Some of them even knew Leo could see them.
Thankfully they were rather benign, more curious than aggressive.
“Hello, Leo,” a young woman said as he entered the gates of the cemetery.
Leo paused, flanked on either side by the large granite pillars of the entrance. Black, wrought iron fencing stretched around the perimeter of Edgewood.
The young woman, or rather the ghost of the young woman, sat by her headstone. She wore a simple outfit of black and white, her bonnet on.
Patience Burchinal.
Dead at sixteen from consumption.
Born November 14th, 1774.
Died November 1oth, 1791.
Leo smiled at her. “Good morning, Miss Burchinal.”
The young, narrow faced ghost smiled at him in return. “Where are you going? To see your grandmother again?”
“I am.”
“You are devoted.”
He bowed his head slightly. “I hope you will have a good day, Miss Burchinal.”
“I will,” Patience replied, and Leo left her.
He saw others as he walked, some who recognized him, as Patience had, and others who weren’t sure if he was real or not. He waited for them to address him. He felt no need to interrupt them, or confuse them if they continued to remain in the cemetery. It was their business, not his.
Keeping to himself Leo walked to where the new graves were situated, in the far right corner and behind the keeper’s brown house. Here he saw quite a few of the dead. None of them seeming to know quite what the world was about. Part of him wanted to help them, yet the other part knew he didn’t know how.
Leo focused on his grandmother’s grave. The headstone had been put in a few weeks earlier and fresh sod placed.
Warm temperatures and plenty of rain had caused the grass to leap up around the markers and the stones.
Leo came to a stop.
There was indeed fresh grass growing upon her grave. Except for one place. Exactly where his grandmother’s heart should have been.
I do not think she is even here, he thought. She could have killed Denise Nadeau.
Leo turned around and started walking back the w
ay he had come. He put his hands behind his back and clasped them. He kept his head bent as focused more at the chipped and cracked asphalt of the cemetery road than at anything around him.
“Leo?”
He looked up at the sound of Patience’s voice.
She wore a look of concern.
“Yes?” he asked pleasantly.
“Is all well?”
“I am not sure,” Leo answered.
“Is it with your Grandmother’s grave?”
“Yes.”
“Will you tell me?” she asked.
Leo told her of the bare patch of earth. The absence of grass.
Patience shook her head, making a warding sign with one hand. “Your grandmother walks.”
“Where?” Leo asked. “And how? She is dead.”
“She is full of spite, Leo,” Patience said softly. “She will walk until she has slain those she must.”
Confirmation. “How might I find her?”
“You need to remember whom she despised,” Patience replied. “You need to remember those she might wish to harm.”
Leo nodded. “Thank you, Patience.”
“You are welcome, Leo,” Patience said. “Will I see you again?”
“Yes,” Leo answered. “I will be back.”
Leo turned his attention from the young woman and left the cemetery.
He needed to find out who it was his grandmother might wish to harm.
Preview of The Dunewalkers Chapter 5: Brian Takes a Trip
Jenny was at work, and Sylvia was helping a young couple with the loss of a child. The child wouldn’t move on.
Brian was alone at the house, most of the damage from the former dead inhabitants having been repaired. He was enjoying a cigar, wondering if any more ghosts lurked in the woods around the property when the ‘Ghost Phone’ rang.
He liked to call it the ghost phone, although Jenny had rolled her eyes at the name.
The ghost phone was dedicated to the website and their new mission, which had been Leo’s old mission, to help people with the dead.
