by JL Bryan
Returning outdoors was a relief.
“Where have you seen the troubling things you mentioned?” I asked Amber. We walked past a garden protected by a scarecrow in an old flannel shirt. A cheap straw hat stapled to his head shaded his blank, cloth-bag face.
“I've felt people watching me in the gardens and the orchard, but it gets worse closer to the woods. More than once I've felt like someone was following me in the corn maze while I was cleaning it up—visitors leave trash in there every night we're open. Once I turned and thought I saw something like a shadow of a person slipping away through a row of corn, but when I stepped closer there was nothing there. It gave me some pretty bad chills.”
We drew closer to the maze. The scarecrow by the entrance held a sign with corn maze rules, displayed in a dialogue balloon spoken by a cartoony ear of corn with eyes and a mouth: no picking the corn, no cutting between rows or damaging the plastic netting that ran between them, no drinking or smoking, no littering, no kids under twelve without an adult. Sounded reasonable to me.
“You'd better let me show you around the maze,” Amber said. “It can take more than an hour if you don't know your way.”
“That's one impressive arch,” Stacey said. She actually whistled at the huge archway over the entrance, made of old shovels, pitchforks, and other farm implements twisted and braided together. “Did you make that in your metal shop in the garage, Amber?”
“I actually did, yeah,” Amber said, blushing. “I'd never sculpted with a blowtorch before. It was fun. I have ideas for more things I want to make.”
We followed her under the arch and into the corn. The high golden stalks immediately walled off the world outside, closing off everything but a narrow path leading away to the left and the right. An earthy vegetable smell hung in the air.
“How many people come out here on a typical day?” I asked Amber.
“Sometimes we get a few hundred on Saturdays.”
“Wow, sounds busy.” I wondered if the influx of visitors had stirred up spirits unhappy about the invasion of their territory. A farm this old could have quite a collection of restless ghosts.
I took more readings as we walked. The electromagnetic activity seemed to kick up when we walked north, towards the dense pine woods beyond the maze, and slacked off whenever we moved south, away from them.
Amber led us through one turn of the maze after another. We passed a gazebo with a bench where people could rest. Artificial spiderwebs and black plastic spiders hung underneath the slanted roof.
At a big clearing near the center, where several paths came together, a row of three scarecrows stood mounted on wooden frames, elevated off the ground a few feet so they seemed to tower above us.
“The butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker,” Amber said, as if introducing us to them. The scarecrows definitely followed the theme. The butcher's hands, made from old gardening gloves, grasped a plastic butcher knife and a fake meat cleaver, and he wore an apron stained with fake blood. His face was a simple cloth bag that would have been less creepy with some eyes. The baker wore a tall, jaunty chef's hat and had oven mitts for hands. The candlestick-maker grasped a pair of electric candles, and another fire-safe battery candle burned inside his grinning plastic jack-o'-lantern face. Tiny birthday-sized electric candles glowed on the brim of his straw hat.
We continued through the twists and turns of the maze. As we approached the back again, near the woods beyond, I knew something was happening because my Mel-Meter ticked up by several milligaus.
“What is that?” Amber whispered as we turned a corner. We stopped, looking at the scene ahead of us.
“Is this one of your staged hauntings?” I asked Amber. “Something you set up?”
She shook her head, her eyes wide. “No, no. Not at all.”
A few feet away, there were hoof prints in the dirt path ahead of us. They ran from the back wall of the maze, where the corn stalks had been trampled. The orange plastic netting barrier, which marked the paths of the maze and kept people from wandering outside of it, had ruptured open to reveal the pine woods beyond. It looked as though someone had ridden a large, strong horse right out of the woods, breaking through the mesh-plastic barrier and into the corn maze, and then the horse and rider had inexplicably vanished a couple of yards along the path. Broken corn cobs were strewn all over.
“Any chance your daughter crashed through here on her horse?” I asked, approaching the ripped netting. “Or a neighbor?”
“If somebody did, they didn't mention it to me,” Amber said. “It's a long way to the nearest neighbor's house. About a mile. Anyway, I think a horse would have tangled in that plastic netting, not broken through.”
“The hoof prints just end right here,” Stacey said. She checked the rows of corn on either side of the path. “Either that horse disappeared into thin air, or somebody lifted it away with a choppa.”
“With a what?” I asked.
“A choppa,” Stacey said. “You know, a helicopter? I was doing Schwarzenegger from Predator. 'Get to da choppa!'”
Sometimes I wish Stacey would stay quiet when we're meeting new clients.
“I'm sure Amber would have noticed a helicopter airlifting a horse from her yard.” I looked closely at the torn edge of the orange netting. It was ragged, with a lot of stretching and ripping of the plastic. “It doesn't look like anybody cut it with a blade, either. Something bashed right through here. Amber, any idea when this might have happened? When was the last time you saw this portion of the maze intact?”
“I suppose it could have been anytime in the last two days,” she said.
I stepped through the ruptured fence and over low weeds toward the woods beyond. Poison ivy curled up the trunks of the trees, and brambles and thorny vines blocked access between the trees. There was a lot of wild blackberry, which is an awfully pleasant name for a fast-growing invasive vine with thorns like fangs.
Some of the undergrowth had been ripped and trampled, right in line with the break in the outer wall of the corn maze. I motioned for Stacey to take pictures.
“That's weird,” Stacey said. “The undergrowth damage stops a few feet back. Like the horse just popped in here out of nowhere.”
“Then popped right back into nowhere after it crashed into the maze,” I said. My Mel-Meter indicated the woods were several degrees cooler than the maze—not surprising, with all the shade from the tree canopy above—and the electromagnetic reading ticked up as I approached the weed-choked pines.
“Watch out,” Amber cautioned as I inspected the edge of the woods. “Those are some pretty hostile plants right there.”
“Where can we go deeper into the woods?” I asked.
“There are a few paths. You'll see some as you walk down the road.” Amber wrapped her arms around herself, as though just the idea of following that road into the woods made her cold.
We finished the corn maze, which didn't take very long with the owner leading the way, and then Stacey and I returned to the dirt road. Amber accompanied us until we reached the place where the shadow of the woods fell across the road, as though to divide the dark land of the dead from the sunny land of the living.
“I'm sorry, I just can't go any farther,” Amber said, remaining in the sunlight as we stepped into the shade. “And my kids'll be home from school soon, and I should get back to the store...”
“That's fine, Mrs. Neville,” I said. “We'll just have a look around. How far away is that old cemetery?”
“It's a little hike, but you won't miss it.”
“Okay. Thank you.”
“Be careful in there,” Amber said. She backed away a few paces, looking between me and the shaded dirt road that curved away into the woods, as if reluctant to leave us.
“We'll be fine,” I told her. “We've faced some challenging ghosts in our time.” Challenging seemed like a more polite word than other options like murderous and insane. “What about traffic? Will there be cars and trucks on the road?�
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“Oh, no. It just runs out and gets swallowed by the marshes alongside the river. You don't need to worry about anybody running into you back there.” Amber tried to smile, but she still looked worried as Stacey and I walked along the dirt road into the shadowy woods. We lost sight of Amber and the farm buildings as we followed the road.
The woods were quiet. The pines soared above us, walling in the dirt road as surely as the rows of corn and plastic netting walled in the dirt paths of the corn maze, as if the woods were just a larger, wilder labyrinth. Leafy oaks stood scattered among the pines, their foliage the colors of sunset.
Weeds and pine needles filled the ditches on either side of the road. The road itself seemed narrower now. If two vehicles came along from opposite directions, it would take quite a bit of awkward maneuvering for them to pass each other.
“Don't you love fall?” Stacey asked. “All the little festivals, the changing leaves, kids in Halloween costumes, the dead spewing up out of their graves to haunt the living...”
“It's a nice time of year,” I agreed. “So you and Jacob are definitely attending the Lathrop Grand Halloween ball, right? Madeline Colt insists we come, and it was nice of her to invite us. Don't strand me there with no one to talk to.”
“Oh we're definitely going. I still can't believe Madeline would ever want to see us again after we trashed the place. And then all those news stories about the bones we found.”
“Apparently the publicity's been good for the hotel, and Madeline already has a crew working double-time to renovate the fourth floor, now that the ghosts aren't making it impossible.”
“Good. I hope we billed like crazy.”
“We did. Is it getting colder?” I checked my Mel-Meter and confirmed a small temperature drop of five degrees since we'd started down the shady portion of the road into the woods.
“Feels like it. There's our first haunted house.” Stacey pointed at a decrepit shack overgrown with ivy, its remaining boards gray, warped, and weather-beaten. Thorny vines snaked in and out of the dark gaps in the walls. An empty doorway invited us inside. Well, it wasn't exactly inviting—it slanted to one side on the crumbling wooden foundation, a weird cavelike mouth leading into a pitch-black interior. Colorful Halloween decorations, including a cardboard jack o' lantern and a string of miniature green skeletons like evil Christmas lights, had been tacked to the front of the old building, along with a hand-painted sign that warned BEWARE THE HAUNTED WOODS!
“How old do you think this shed is?” I asked Stacey, while drawing my flashlight and pointing it into the dark doorway.
“I don't know. Probably long enough for thousands of generations of spiders to come and go, leaving only their webs behind. If you listen closely, you can almost hear the whisper of their little feet and fangs...”
“Very funny. You've got a point about the cobwebs.” My flashlight beam found thick curtains of webs and gray dust, but not much else beyond some crumbling remnants of furniture at the back. The place looked like a deadly sneeze attack waiting to happen. “I guess nobody's gone inside in a while. Not even those drama-club kids who pretend to be ghosts and monsters.”
“They probably just jump out from behind the shed,” Stacey said. “Why go in there and get your nice ghost costume all filthy? Or, let's say, the clothes you and I are wearing right now. Those would be pretty filthy if we went poking around in there...”
I checked the doorway with my Mel-Meter, but there was nothing suspicious, no weird energy that didn't belong. I smelled animal droppings—maybe raccoons, squirrels, or rats nested somewhere inside.
“I'm with you, Stacey. Let's keep our boots free of rat poop if we can.”
“That's all I ask.”
The cemetery lay farther along the dirt road, its outer wall so shrouded in wild ivy that I could barely discern the bricks and rusty iron beneath the green growth. Portions of the wall tilted forward over the drainage ditch alongside the dirt road, as though waiting for a good hard shake to send them crashing down. Good thing we aren't prone to earthquakes in this part of the country. Orange and black crepe-paper ribbons decorated the old walls, along with cardboard cutouts of jack-o'-lanterns and witches, though this added Party City décor actually made the cemetery a bit less scary.
The old cemetery gate stood open at the side of the road. The area of the drainage ditch just below it was partially filled with weedy gravel, as if there had once been a kind of mini-causeway across the ditch, from the dirt road to the front gate. The footing looked unstable there now.
I stepped over the ditch and touched the rusty wrought-iron gate. It was rooted in place, left open so long that the gate's lower edge had submerged into the reddish earth below it.
“Looks like it's been stuck open for years,” I said. “That's not good.”
“A leaky cemetery?” Stacey asked.
“The worst kind. Ghosts will respect the cemetery walls even if they've deteriorated over time. But leaving a gate permanently open?” I shook my head. “Most people would know better than that, even just subconsciously.”
“So we could be looking at a lot of comers and goers,” Stacey said. “Spirits wandering freely every night. Does that mean all we need to do is close up the gate? Or is that like closing the barn door after the horse gets out? I mean, the haunted barn, and the ghost horse, obviously.” Her voice was fast and chatty, a sign that the eerie woods and old cemetery were getting to her.
“We'll try it, but I doubt it will be that simple,” I said. “Always observe carefully before acting. Let's have a look inside.”
I walked through the open gate. The air was much colder inside the cemetery walls, and my meter confirmed a ten-degree decline as I entered. I didn't need any instruments to tell me about the little bumps that formed on the back of my neck and spread along my back, or the shiver that passed through my body. Stacey shivered, too.
“Chilly,” she whispered, then panned her video camera around.
The cemetery possessed a wider variety of trees than the pine woods around it, with ornamental trees planted to beautify the burial ground sometime in the distant past. Curtains of Spanish moss hung from thick, curling oak limbs overhead. Crepe myrtles sprawled nearby, their leaves gone the color of dried blood for the autumn and slowly dripping to the thick pine-needle carpet below. Dark cypress trees loomed farther back, also shrouded in moss, and I could hear gurgling water somewhere in that direction.
“It's really quiet,” Stacey said, breaking the silence by commenting on it. The surround-sound chirping of cicadas, so common that I'd barely noticed them as we walked through the woods, was now distant, as if none wanted to come sing to the dead buried here.
“I'm getting three to four milligaus on the Mel-Meter,” I said. “I'm guessing we're not standing near any electrical lines, so that's pretty high.”
“You'd think a haunted cemetery would have more graves,” Stacey said.
“They're all around us. You're standing on one.” I pointed to a chunk of stone behind her, mostly swallowed by ivy, the faint traces of eroded inscription still visible near the bottom.
Stacey gave a sort of yeep! sound and hopped away from the old headstone, swinging her video camera around in front of her like a talisman for warding off the dead.
“There are more back here. Everything's overgrown.” I drew my flashlight to help us find some more badly worn headstones.
The cemetery was in deep disrepair, but had never been fancy. I discovered more stones, many of the names lost to erosion. The most prominent grave marker, a granite obelisk, stood about waist-high and belonged to a Hiram Neville, buried in 1823. Most of the markers were smaller, many of them sunken almost entirely out of sight. Cracked granite slabs weighed down grave sites, with weeds growing up through them like fingers reaching up from below the earth.
The cicadas and birds might have avoided the cemetery, but flies seemed perfectly happy there, growing thicker and more noticeable as we trudged deeper in among the moss-dr
aped trees and sunken headstones. I batted some of the peskier insects away from my face.
If there had ever been footpaths, or any regular rows or organization to the cemetery, those had long since vanished. It had the air of a swamp graveyard, and it looked as though the dead had been tossed here and there over the generations without much planning, like thoughtlessly scattered seeds.
After stepping around a massive fallen cypress, we finally reached the back fence, made of a low brick wall topped with rusty-spike fencing that would not have looked out of place enclosing the entrance to some medieval dungeon. Chunks of the fence had buckled inward or outward over the years, as if the spongy soil beneath them had been unable to support the weight of the bricks and iron.
The fence overlooked a drop-off to a wide, shallow creek that ran behind the cemetery. Across the creek, heavy old pines cast their shadows onto thick weeds that covered the ground.
“It's like a chain of islands back there,” Stacey said, taking video as she nudged her way into place between me and a nearby half-sunken headstone. “This creek connects to another one back there. See?”
“It looks as complicated as that corn maze,” I said. A few small creeks split apart and rejoined here and there in the areas of the woods we could see, slicing the land into a swampy patchwork. The soil of the tree-filled islands would be soft and spongy like that in the cemetery. It was probably just wet, slippery mud all year round, with the canopy above keeping the sun away.
Tearing ivy from the fence, I discovered the iron gate, which barely looked wide enough for a human being to pass. This one, at least, was solidly closed and latched. Beyond the gate lay an old wooden footbridge over the creek, most of its floorboards missing, connecting the back of the cemetery to the marshy island behind it.
“I dare you to walk across that bridge out there,” Stacey said.
“Maybe not today,” I said. I stepped closer to the gate, toward the fallen carcass of the old cypress tree, checking the area around it for electromagnetic activity. The readings clicked upward.
