by John Everson
“What are you doing?” he chided himself, once he was alone again. “These girls can’t be interested in you, but you’re acting like a college kid.”
He shook his head and zipped up, then took a deep breath before stepping back around the corner. He needed to wrap this up and head home. It was weird to realize, but he had to work again in the morning.
The girls were gone. The deck was empty, except for a bunch of empty beer cans that lay strewn about.
“Well, there ya go,” he whispered, and then picked up the empties. He grabbed one that still felt full, from the spot where Katie had been sitting. He drained a few gulps into his mouth, and then upended the rest, throwing that and the other empty cans into his now-empty cooler.
The air felt like his head…warm and buzzy, with the hum of summer locusts.
It was getting dark, and time to get out of the cemetery. His eyes were swimming, and he already knew that there was a headache in store for the morning.
“Damnit,” he mumbled, and looked once more inside the old house, before closing the place up, and walking back to his truck.
“I bet she wasn’t twenty-three,” he mumbled to himself, as he walked down the dark trail toward the turnpike. “Lucky if she was over eighteen. Probably just wanted free beer.”
He shook his head and tossed the cooler in the back of the truck bed. “Gullible,” he accused himself. “With a capital G.”
He started the truck and signaled to pull out onto Midlothian Turnpike. There was almost no traffic, and a moment later, the truck lurched onto the road. But even as it did, he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching him.
Someone from the old house.
Maybe through that attic window.
He shivered and refused to look in the rearview mirror, focusing on the yellow lines in the center of the road.
Chapter Five
“Seems like a strange place to hunt for ghosts,” Ted said, slipping into the chair across from Jillie Melton.
“That’s because I’m not hunting,” Jillie said. She raised a paper cup with a large M on it and took a sip. “I do have a life when I’m not out with you at midnight, you know.”
“Uh-huh,” he said. “And that’s why you’re having breakfast in a McDonald’s across from a cemetery.”
“The cemetery has nothing to do with it,” she said. “It’s all about the hash browns.” Jillie wrinkled one pale blond eyebrow and shook her head. “I am only here for fat.”
“I hope you mean in the food,” Ted said. “Because I don’t think you’re ever going to actually put on any. You’re too twitchy to gain weight.”
She laughed. “And you’re too fond of burritos to lose any.”
“Ouch,” Ted said. “I’d be offended except….”
He reached into his bag and pulled out two breakfast burritos. And a hash brown.
“I’ll take that if you’re not eating it,” she offered.
The idea that he wasn’t eating it was somewhat ludicrous. Ted weighed in at over 220 pounds, while she might have just been able to nudge the scale over 130…if she rocked up and down on it.
“Listen,” he said. “Are you doing anything right now?”
She shrugged. “Other than eating?”
“I have something I want to show you.”
“You didn’t just stumble on me here, did you?” she said.
He shook his head. “I saw your Facebook.”
Jillie frowned. If he was stalking her to run her down….
“Okay,” she said. “Care to tell me what?”
“It’s at Bachelor’s Grove,” he said. Ted’s eyebrows raised precipitously.
“Yeah…what about it?” she said. “We’ve recorded there a half dozen times.”
He nodded so fast, the flesh of his jowls seemed to flap like wings. “I know,” he said. “But I think…. Listen, I just think you need to see this.”
“What?” she asked again, but he only shook his head.
“I’ll take you there.”
Jillie shoved a hash brown in her mouth and chewed, considering the expression on Ted’s face. They’d worked together for a long time, both out of respect and love for what they did. They believed. Which was a lot more than could be said for most of the people who filed into buildings with crosses on top of them on Sundays.
Ted believed, just as she did. And he looked about ready to burst with whatever it was he had to say. But she knew he wasn’t just going to give it up. She respected that he had a reason, and stuffed the rest of the hash brown into her mouth all at once. Before she finished chewing, she stood and mumbled, “Let’s go then!”
Ted looked surprised, still working on his burrito, but he didn’t hesitate. Two minutes later, they were driving in his car north on Harlem Avenue.
“You’re kind of creeping me out now,” Jillie said, as they sat at the stoplight of 143rd Street, waiting to turn left onto Midlothian Turnpike. The Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery was just a few blocks away. She’d been there dozens of times over the years. It was one of the most celebrated ‘haunted places’ in Illinois, and so she’d taken her cameras and equipment there in daytime, at dusk, and at night. Ted had been there for most of those outings.
The light changed, and they finally moved down the turnpike, following an old rusted red Ford pickup. Jillie found herself leaning forward, mentally pushing the old vehicle down the road. And then finally Ted pulled over at the familiar bridge that presaged the entry to the old cemetery.
“I didn’t want to just tell you this,” he said, pulling the keys from the ignition. “You had to see it for yourself.”
Jillie opened her door and stepped out onto the gravel. She heard the sounds of a saw echoing through the forest. And then the repetitive pound of a hammer.
“What’s going on?” she said as Ted stepped around the bumper.
“Take a look,” he said, and led the way down the gravel path past the cemetery. When they passed the stones and reached the clearing, she began to shake her head.
“No, no, no!” she said. “What are they doing?”
Ted made a face. “They’re building a haunted house.”
Jillie’s eyes nearly popped out of her head. “They’re doing what?”
“They are rehabbing the old Bremen House, and turning it into a haunted house for Halloween.”
“But…they can’t do that,” she breathed. “This is county property. It’s protected.”
“Apparently the county felt otherwise,” Ted said. “They’ve decided to sell tickets to the cemetery…and the house. I read about it in the Daily Southtown this morning. They’re turning Bachelor’s Grove into an attraction.”
Jillie’s face turned grim. “They can’t,” she said. “They mustn’t. The souls that rest here…don’t rest easy. You know…you’ve seen them.”
He nodded.
“There is already too much anger here,” she whispered. “You know what happened to those kids that broke into the house and woke the spirit of the witch. If they do this….”
“Something bad is going to happen, isn’t it?” Ted asked.
She nodded. And then took a breath and steeled her jaw.
She began to march toward the house. “We have to stop it,” she said, “before someone else dies.”
Chapter Six
Mike stopped swinging the hammer for a minute and just listened. The calls of forest birds filled the resulting silence. He waited a moment, then shrugged, and swung the tool again.
And again he heard the sound that had stopped him before.
A scuttling. He pressed his ear to the wall and listened.
And this time he heard it. Feet moving. It had to be feet, right? Something inside the wall was shuffling across the boards.
Mike shook his head. Just what he needed. He had visions of pun
ching through a wall to find a raccoon family enraged and ready to pounce.
“I’m a carpenter, not an exterminator, Jim,” he murmured.
Something in the wall thumped, right near his face.
Mike jumped back, shaking his head. “Not what I signed up for,” he complained.
He moved a few feet to the right. Maybe if he put the braces up elsewhere, whatever was in the walls would move away. Maybe he’d trapped it in the space he had been working in.
He raised the hammer to start a new anchor 2x4. Before he could hit the wood, something slammed against it from the other side. Right where he was about to hammer. As if it knew.
He jumped backward, holding the hammer out above his head. Ready to brain anything that came through the wall.
And what, exactly, was really going to come through a wall?
He didn’t want to find out. Mike decided that this would be a good time for a scene change. He needed to shore up a couple pilings in the basement. Maybe whatever it was in the wall would find an exit while he went below.
Mike picked up his thermos and walked through the house to the now unhidden room that led to the basement. He’d already fixed the rotten stairway down, and installed guardrails so that a parade of people could safely walk down them come fall. Now he needed to make sure the ceiling wouldn’t cave in on them if they did.
The atmosphere changed as soon as he stepped down the first two steps. It went from musty, moldy to cool, wet, and rank.
Mike wrinkled his mouth and shook his head. They would have to do something to air this place out before people came in. Creepy was one thing, stinky was another.
He picked up a board from the stack he’d brought down earlier, turned on the string of bare-bulb lights he’d strung across the center span of the basement and went to work on one of the wooden joists. Some of the wood was solid, but he’d felt spongy patches in parts. Best to double any of the support wood and just make sure nothing was going to start sagging once a parade of people started putting weight on the floors upstairs. If this was going to be a house people lived in for the next thirty years, he would have taken a different course. But for a short-term haunted house? Reinforcement, not reconstruction.
He started nailing in one board, and wrinkled his nose. The mix of mold and…decay…was palpable. It smelled like something had died in here. He tried to block it out and focused on setting the board. He should be using his electric gun for this but sometimes he just felt like being old school. His shoulders would thank him later. Not.
He followed the beam down into the dark reaches of the basement. With every foot, the smell grew more rank. Then he stepped on something that squished.
“What the….”
The mud beneath his foot was a darker shade of black. Because a coil of something reddish black twisted out from beneath his shoe. He pulled the flashlight from his belt and shone it at the ground.
His first thought was that he’d stepped on a large dead snake.
But then he realized that there were no scales. And the flesh had ridges.
It wasn’t a snake.
It lay in a loose circle, and at the center was a fist-sized lump of blackened flesh. It glistened on one side in the light of the flash.
“Holy Jesus,” Mike said.
It looked like a heart, surrounded by a halo of intestines.
The flies that suddenly swarmed at his face when he spoke forced him to back away.
He choked and moved quickly toward the exit, trying not to vomit. Once outside, he pulled out his phone and dialed his friend’s number through bleary eyes.
Perry laughed at him.
“It’s a raccoon or something that brought a tasty little dinner down there last night,” he said.“Roadkill takeout. Get a shovel. You can even expense it. Look, I gotta go. We have actual problems here.”
The line went dead.
Mike considered his options. He could shovel entrails out of the basement, or fight with a raccoon or opossum or whatever the hell creature was in the upstairs wall.
After a minute, he went to his truck to find a shovel and a plastic garbage bag.
Guts didn’t bite.
* * *
But no sooner did he step outside than he was faced with another problem.
A witchy-looking woman was marching across the grass toward the house. She was all pointy – bony elbows and legs, and a long beak of a nose. Blond hair sprayed away from her face like a shower of kinks and curls. She looked birdlike and fierce. And driven.
A man who couldn’t have been more her opposite strode along behind her, clearly struggling to match her pace. He carried a camera in his hands, the strap hung loose around his neck. Mike stepped back on the porch.
“You have to leave this place,” she announced when she put a foot on the stair to his new porch.
Mike frowned, then shook his head.
“No, I don’t think so,” he said. “I work here.”
“Is it true then, that you’re turning this place into a haunted house attraction? Something that will bring gawkers instead of reverence?”
He shrugged. “If you mean that I’m rehabbing it so they can use it as a haunted house this fall, then yeah.”
“You have to stop it,” she said. “Don’t you understand that this whole place is a graveyard? People who come here need to do so with the proper respect that the dead deserve. This isn’t the place for a carnival. There are spirits here that are better left undisturbed and unprovoked. You can’t turn this place into a parade of people.”
“Look,” Mike said. “I’m just the carpenter. If you have a problem with the business aspect of the house, you should call the county. I can’t help you.”
“Well, I can help you,” she said. “I can help you understand that what you’re doing is akin to grave robbing.”
Mike laughed. “I’m not digging up graves,” he said.
“No,” she said. “But you’re disturbing the dead. They are everywhere here. I know you’ve seen the stones over there,” she pointed. “But this whole clearing is an old graveyard. It should be left in peace. This is not the place for a party. The spirits get angry.”
“Good thing the spirits can’t throw stones then,” Mike said. “Because there are going to be plenty of people here this October.”
“They can do much worse than throwing stones,” she said. Then she stopped talking for a moment, as if she was reassessing the situation and realizing that she was not going to get anywhere with him. Which was the truth. “Please, you have to listen to me. Stop what you’re doing here. It will only lead to something…horrible.”
She started to step up onto the porch and Mike put his hand up.
“Look, lady, I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I really don’t care. I’ve got a job to do here, and you’re trespassing. If you don’t leave now, I’m calling the police.”
The fat guy behind her put his hand on her shoulder, clearly trying to convince her to hold back.
“I want to see the inside of this house first,” she said. “I want to see what sacrilege you’ve already committed.”
She pulled away from the man’s hand and stepped toward Mike on the porch.
He only shook his head and pulled out his phone.
“Two more steps, and I call the police, lady.”
“Just a look inside?” she begged.
He shook his head. “I don’t care about you, or your spirits or ghosts or whatever. I’ve got a job to do, and you’re stopping it. If you want to complain, call the people who can answer you. They’re at the Cook County Forest Preserve offices. And they’re going to get on my ass if I don’t get back to work.”
She stopped, and the big guy put a hand on her shoulder again. Mike could see him squeezing his fingers, giving her a silent message.
She considered,
and then nodded.
“All right,” she said. “But I’ll be back. And I know it sounds all dramatic and everything, but seriously, if you value your soul, you won’t keep doing this. The dead aren’t going to call the county. They’re going to come to you.”
She looked at him with a raised eyebrow. “Do you understand what I’m saying to you?”
“Sure,” Mike said.
She turned and began to walk away, when he couldn’t restrain himself.
“But ghosts don’t pay my paycheck and my rent.”
She looked back over her shoulder and her gaze was deadly serious.
“They don’t now,” she said. “But if you continue this…you might find that things turn out differently.”
The big guy turned and shot a photo of the house, and then quickly put a hand back on her shoulder to push her away. This time, she left without protesting.
* * *
The afternoon went better.
After disposing of the entrails of…whatever it was…behind the cemetery pond, Mike used up a good stack of 2x4s and completed his reinforcement project. At the end, he stood with hands on hips and reviewed the work. The dark gray wood ceiling of the basement was now striped with blond fresh wood. It was a jarring juxtaposition, but they were probably going to spray a coat of industrial black or dark gray paint over the whole thing anyway. Nobody would see the difference between new and old wood.
He walked over to the spot where he’d found the intestines, and was greeted with a buzz of flies. Mike swatted them away from his face and shook his head. This was not going to do. He needed to get rid of the remnants of the blood that had soaked into the earth, or he was going to be plagued with flies. And probably, in a couple days, maggots. He grimaced and his whole body shivered.
He hated maggots.
“Nope, nope, nope,” he said, and walked out of the basement to retrieve the shovel. He would just have to turn over some of the earth and nip this one in the bud.
