by P. S. Power
“Sorry, things here keep trying to grab my ankles. More exactly, some ghost keeps grabbing me. You know Daniel, you have some pretty active ancestors here. The sarcophagus in the other room had its lid half off when we came in. Jerald and I put it on correctly, but I doubt that will last. There’s just a sense of energy around that one. Dark energy. Like an angry soul is trying to get out and do something to the interlopers.” Her voice didn’t get spooky when she spoke, it sounded a little scared, but was mainly matter of fact.
Dr. Milford touched my arm.
“Focus. Don’t let the new situation distract you from the reality you seek.” The words were almost nonsense to me, but I nodded anyway. It meant I had to concentrate, the sense of things around me getting stronger, closing in as I did. The light was intense after the long ride in near dark and the walk into the space through the small tunnel. It was like a metaphor for birth, going through the narrow mouth of the crypt into the greater land of the dead. A different world, one with different, more deadly, rules. The ceiling inside wasn’t high, low enough that I could have reached up and touched them without trying, if I’d had the time to spare on things like that.
I didn’t, my mind being consumed with the feelings of the space around me. The main one was a breathless oppression, a stifling feeling that made me wonder if there was enough air in the place for all of us. My throat started to close, a feeling of the air being choked off right at the hollow of my throat. I didn’t wheeze, but it wasn’t fun. It was just a feeling, I understood. One that seemed real, but wasn’t. I could still breath. There was air around me. I was fine.
It just didn’t feel like it.
Daniel spoke as he moved to the lantern beside him to turn it off.
“Jerald? Do you want to start in there or in here with the rest of us?” His voice was a little too loud, jarring and out of place, since it felt like everything should be done in whispers here, but the muffled voice that came back made it clear that sound didn’t travel from room to room well in the crypt. It was good sized in this portion, about forty by forty, but the hallways were tiny and constrictive lines linking the spaces, if what I could see with the small bit of light was enough to judge by.
The slightly younger man was wearing a sweater, the pullover kind that I always associated with Christmas and fun things, but it lacked reindeer being woven in, just being some dark color I couldn’t really make out. He called to Jerald again, his voice low and relaxed. At least I thought he did. I was too busy noticing how I felt and how strange the whole thing was. Why were we in a crypt at night? I knew that it had something to do with learning to experience the supernatural, supposedly, but it probably wouldn’t bring me Alex, would it? I’d have been better off at home. I realized suddenly that it wasn’t true. I’d already felt and seen things there, strange and bizarre things I had no way to handle. There was no safe place for me anymore.
The thought was correct, but I was distracted by the man who walked in from the other room, the description of him in my mind on the page before he stepped past the door. Old, about seventy, and wearing a white beard that shone slightly in the lamp light. It was fuller and less pointed than Milford’s and was offset by round glasses that made his eyes look like blank disks in the glare. From what the words on the page said, he seemed thin and hard for his age. The voice was a bit crusty as well.
“So, that’s the place your Great Grandmother Ethyl died? I can see why she’s a little upset. Who murders a person in a crypt? Efficient, but a bit too workmanlike for my taste.”
The words got my attention, until I felt a hand on my shoulder. It was heavier than anything I’d noticed yet, hard and physical. I looked over at my left shoulder slowly, expecting to not see anything at all, but there was a pale hand in the lamp light. A small female hand. I turned to see if Toni had walked up behind me, but she was still on the other side of the room. When I finished the half turn, toward the light, there was nothing there.
Except a single words in my mind, brilliant and poignant at the same time.
“Flee.”
I froze, not saying anything out loud, unable to move my legs to run. I wasn’t allowed to run. The words and the trance trapped me, leaving the fear and the impulse to get away, but not the ability. That meant the fear that started through me was intense, having nowhere to go or sensible outlet, and my heart began to beat just a little faster as my breath became even shorter. I felt my stomach tense, then my sphincter. The walls and ceiling starting to close in on me in the dark. For a moment I wondered if they were actually moving, the sense of being trapped was so powerful. Captured in a web, like a giant spider was coming for me. There was no new sound though, so I tried to hold it together even as I felt like I was about to be crushed.
The hand had been real, but no one was near me. I wanted to deny it, to claim it was just imagination, but it had been too real for that. The image tried to fade from my mind, like a dream after waking, but I remembered it having been there. I still felt the phantom weight of it on my skin, tingling ever so faintly.
No one seemed to notice that I was starting to pant a little, since I tried to do it quietly. I didn’t want to deny what was happening, but I also didn’t want to seem like a coward or someone too easily scared.
Daniel looked around and smiled, as if he'd missed everything that had happened.
“Great. Well, I need to get the cameras ready, once the lights are off. Then I’ll fill everyone in on this place. You don’t know the whole story, I don’t think, except Dr. Milford. It’s… Less than charming. Well, you’ll see. One sec.” He leaned toward the electric lamp and hit a button, plunging us into darkness. It was so black that nothing could be seen at all. It felt like the space had shrunk around my shoulders again, this time excluding everyone and everything else, except the presence that tried to ride me and just possibly some woman that could act on the physical level, touching me with her icy hands. Some dead woman. I wanted to take her advice and flee, but my legs wouldn’t move at all still, locked into place for some reason, like I was living in a dream or a spell had been cast over me. In a way Dr. Milford had kind of done that, hadn’t he? His technique was powerful, I had to give him that. Even trying to struggle internally just made it harder to do, setting the whole idea deeper into my mind, making the fear worse.
It took a few minutes, Daniel leaving the room through each of the doors in turn, muttering to himself as he did. When he got back the darkness hadn’t lifted at all and the only thing I could hear, other than people breathing and the beat of my own heart which was starting to pound again, was a soft click. A chattering sound. Probably mice or rats, I thought.
Then I realized I didn’t know that. Why would I assume that it would be animals here? What was there for rats in a place like this? There was no food, except the dried remains of people who died so long ago they were probably mainly dust now. Dry dust that I was breathing into my lungs as we waited. It was creepy to think about, but no worse than the fact that everything we ate probably contained bits and pieces of people living and dead, cells from factory workers and molecules that had once been part of someone that had died a long time ago. For some reason thinking that didn’t help much and I started to feel my chest tighten again. More than it had before. I could feel the passages in my lungs getting swollen and smaller as we waited for something to happen.
When Daniel spoke I jumped, almost shaking in place. The sudden sound made my thoughts go white for a while, a half second, before the page in front of me lit up, showing what was being said. It got all my attention, burning in my mind, and felt important. A lot more than anything else I ever read had. I didn’t know why that was, but I felt it, the sense of weight and power growing with each word. I tried to imagine it more clearly, liking the feeling of the words as they tickled my mind.
“There are actually four rooms to this crypt. We’re only going into three of them tonight, because I’ve sealed the last one off for now. Each person that’s gone into that one ha
s died within three weeks. Usually coming back here to do it. That pretty much has the police thinking that I’m killing them all, but it’s my great, great, great grand-uncle that’s in there. From the stories he was an evil and tyrannical man in life, into the occult and worse things, of course, who was offered a chance at immortality by a demon if the story I was told wasn’t just meant to frighten me. He turned it down, for a chance to keep killing people after he was dead.” The voice was soft, barely heard in the space at all.
“So, yes, he was about as bad as you’d imagine, or worse than any of us can. We should probably try not to think about him too much. After all, what you think about and dwell on is called to you. Especially things already dead. I won’t even say his name anymore. There have been… Well…” He shifted in the inky black, I could tell by the slight hint of moving air and dust being ground against cool stone under the bottoms of his shoes.
“The other rooms, including this one, have each had a single murder take place in them. This… This room is where my mother was strangled by my father, fifteen years ago. He went into the sealed off room and blew his brains out after that. I was away at the time, with relatives.”
I felt something close to me, a sense of warmth, the scent of moist breath in the air. Slightly fetid breath, once I paid attention to it. I reached out, not wanting too, but needing to know if someone was just standing in front of me and needed a second tooth brushing for the day. I was shocked to find my hand moving and really didn’t know if it had. I expected to find something physical, to notice that someone had accidently gotten directly in front of me.
No one was there.
“Other than… Him… My great grandmother Ethyl is the noisiest of the ghosts here. She flips the lid off her box a few times per year, even though the things heavy, weighing nearly two hundred pounds. She likes to grab people too. In the other room, to the right, behind me… That one is where a serving girl at the house was raped and murdered in the nineteen-fifties. She was black, but treated a bit like a slave, if the diaries of the people living here are honest, and really, who’d lie about things like that? My family hasn’t always been filled with good people, as you all might be getting a sense of. That time though it was some kind of random thing, the man that did it was caught and hung, but he claimed that something had possessed him and forced him to do it. No one bought it at the time. No one outside of my family I mean. Of course, they were the ones that hung him, so not a lot of other people heard the story.”
The presence I felt, one of them, was female. The one with the slightly bad breath. I didn’t notice that part as much, since I thought I could feel something on my left cheek. Something that reminded me of when Alex used to come up behind me, resting against my back, holding me close. It was like that, only this presence was too short, the scent of dust and rot was too raw and unfamiliar for comfort.
“OK… I’m getting an orb right next to our newcomer, on the camera. Anyone else?” Daniel spoke with a bit of awe in his voice, but it was Milford that answered from across the room.
“Indeed. I’m seeing it as a female form, not simply a light. Given the style of dress, my guess would be your mother, Daniel.” He sounded very certain of what he saw, and the presence, who might have been the ghost of Daniel’s mother it seemed, slowly pushed sharp fingernails into the right side of my throat.
At first it was just a sense of movement, fingertips I thought, but then I felt the smallest pinpricks digging in, three of them, right over the major veins and arteries on the side of my neck. Not hard enough to draw blood, but the threat was clear. In an instant I could die If I didn’t flee. Isn’t that what it had said to me earlier? If this was the same form at all. I could see the word hanging in front of me again, hearing it, as if it came from within my own head. Right in the center of it, the voice so similar to my own.
“Flee.”
Then, instead of killing me, or even properly attacking, it vanished. So did the other presence that I’d felt earlier, the feeder. At first I wondered if they’d gotten inside of me somehow, digging in so far that I’d never be rid of them, but it was a relief, not a feeling of being trapped. I took a single deep breath and exhaled slowly, but didn’t say anything. I wasn’t supposed to talk, my task being all about paying attention and trying to sense the world around me. Thinking of that made me feel a bit weird, almost stuck in place, but then I realized I really was. I didn’t have a car here, or even know where I was for certain. I had only my trust in Dr. Milford… and he was more than a bit creepy. Good at his job though. I could tell that much even if I didn’t know anything about the supernatural. Not the real kind. Movies were so much different and much less frightening than what I was going through. Reality was scarier than fiction and this was all so very real.
I’d seen and felt things in the last two days that people went their whole lives without ever experiencing. More, I knew that it was going to continue. Once you started to walk the path, you had to finish it. I could feel that now, the idea was powerful within me. After a moment I felt another hand. This time on my back. I wanted to jump, but I didn’t, frozen in place still. The voice that spoke wasn’t spectral though, not inside my head or only in print, it was deep and resonant.
Milford.
“Eclipse. Go deeper now. You’re doing wonderfully. Everyone, say it with me, help drive this home now. Quickly, we mustn’t lose the moment.” There was a single firm pat on my back and I took a breath.
“Eclipse. Eclipse. Eclipse.” Each time the words flashed in my head, I went into a deeper state, sinking into the dark around me, until, after a few moments, I felt myself coming through the other side. I looked at the page and felt the chair under me, the tablet in my hand. Like I was just reading from a screen and imagining the real world, instead of the other way around. Everything I had poured into those lines on the page. They were my life after all. For this moment.
I heard the word again.
“Eclipse.”
It was being said in my own internal voice. Like what I sounded like in my mind when I read or thought. The dark was all around me, but I went deeper again, sinking, until the tomb was solid and well formed in my mind’s eye, even though I couldn’t see it physically. I could feel the walls around me, about twenty feet away and the stone ceiling and floor, cold and smooth, without even touching them. I could feel how gray they were, unpolished and unwelcoming.
Suddenly a woman’s voice screamed in my left ear, loud and almost too clear not to be real.
“They’ll kill you. Run!” It was panicked and frightened enough that I tried to move, to flee, even not knowing where to go in the dark.
But I couldn’t. My feet wouldn’t move at all, my body was stuck in place, and I felt almost like I was sitting again, even as I stood there. Then I realized I could only hear one thing, not even the sound of my own heart, or my breathing.
A group of people chanting a single word.
“Eclipse.”
Chapter four
My chest felt tight, it was hard to breathe, like a giant snake made of night, was squeezing me, letting in just enough air to keep me from blacking out. I focused on my heart, feeling it thump faster and even felt the blood pushing itself through my veins and arteries in places. Fear tickled my stomach, and I tensed, muscles locking in place as I felt the rest of my word shrink to a single point, a single word in my head.
“Eclipse.”
I couldn’t tell if anyone else was still chanting or not. For that matter I wasn’t absolutely certain that they had been at all. The voice that had screamed, the woman that may be Daniel's dead mother, had said they’d kill me. But did that mean me, personally, or did it mean someone else? In that moment I felt like it was me. I didn’t even know if I was alive anymore, feeling so far away from everything else now. I got a description in writing of the scene, and the feelings from it which I felt acutely, but it was different than anything I'd ever experienced before. Someone touched my arm and there was a sense of being
moved around, but that was all. I thought I heard more screaming, or possibly shouting, but the words didn’t play inside my head like they should have for some reason. It was almost like something was being hidden from me. As if some message had infiltrated my mind in the past, to make me see and hear things, but also to hide things from me on command. What those issues were I wasn’t certain, but I kind of thought it might have to do with this place. The voice I’d heard.
Either it was some spirit trying to get in touch with me and I needed to focus harder to hear it, or it was one of the others and I needed to try and fight to understand them. It occurred to me that I was only supposed to listen to one of them though. Dr. Milford. It was the agreement we'd made, the original one. For the moment I needed to listen for his voice then, to get what he was telling me to do, if anything. I heard something as I strained to make it out, but I still couldn’t make sense of it. I realized that my eyes had been closed and look down to see a snake at my feet. I couldn’t have really seen it in the true blackness of the crypt, but it was there anyway, glowing in a faint blue color. I couldn’t tell what kind it was at first, until I heard the familiar rattle.
It would explain all the yelling. Hopefully the rattle snake wouldn’t strike at something not moving, because I still didn’t think I could. I was too deep into a trance state. I would have thought a real trance would be calm and peaceful, but this one wasn’t. I felt death coming for me, getting closer with each second. Finally, just as I thought I couldn’t take it anymore, I heard a voice. His voice.
The Doctor’s.
“Relax. The snake isn’t here and is only a snake even if it was. The fear you feel is primal and good, but this particular being isn’t going to harm you. It’s only here to try and give us a warning. Here to tell us that things are about to become dangerous, in a very real way. Don’t let go of your fear, embrace it now. Do it. Feel the fear as it curls inside you and makes you tense... and listen to what I’m saying. We’re all going to move past the snake and go into Ethyl’s area. The room to the left. Step past the snake now. It cannot physically harm you.” He sounded calm and focused, relaxed and like nothing was really wrong, so I listened to him, stepping forward around the glowing ghost serpent I couldn’t have really been seeing.
