by JL Bryan
“Looks like this gate was a handy shortcut for the creepy swamp people of olden days,” Stacey said. “They could slither in here, bury their dead by moonlight, hold their dark moon-worshipping funeral rites—”
I spun back toward Stacey to snap at her for her disrespect of the dead around us—okay, maybe I just wanted her to stop trying to scare me—and something caught me around the ankle and dragged me down into the muddy earth.
I heard my voice cry out as my hip splatted into the wet soil, and that wasn't the end of it. I kept dropping, the wet cemetery seeming to open up just enough to swallow me whole, red mud slurping me down like a giant's mouth lined with quicksand. Sharp points jabbed into my arms and legs.
Something long and stiff broke my slide into the darkness below the cemetery. I screamed, slapping at what looked like a bony arm seizing me across the chest. A thick tree root, I finally realized, not a hungry corpse trying to pull me underground and eat my brain.
“Ellie?” Stacey stood over me, looking worried.
Now that I'd stopped sliding, I could catch my bearings. I was facing the underside of the fallen cypress near the back gate. Some of the huge old roots jutted out above the ground, while others, like the one that had caught me, remained submerged beneath the soil.
I wasn't lying flat on my back, but slantwise in the mud, my boots well ahead of my shoulders. It looked like I'd tangled in a clump of ground ivy that had concealed a deep pit left by the roots of the toppled tree. Now my feet were at the watery bottom, and there was mud all over me.
“Are you hurt?” Stacey asked.
“Mostly embarrassed,” I said.
Stacey helped me up, and we looked down into the muddy pit, half-expecting to see bones and skulls revealed by my little slide. I'd just taken an unlucky step into a big hole. Nothing undead had attempted to draw me down into the depths.
Still, it was a little unsettling, walking into an open, watery pit in a cemetery. It certainly made the place feel hostile.
“Okay, I think we've seen enough back here,” I said. “We could spend all day exploring those trails and creeks, and I don't want to. Let's get cleaned up. We still have a lot of area to cover before nightfall.”
“I don't need to get cleaned up,” Stacey said. “I'm fine. I didn't fall in the mud and get filthy like some of us.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said, annoyed. “That's more time you can spend setting up cameras and microphones. Let's get moving.”
On our way back, we tried to close the front gate of the cemetery, working it back and forth in the mud in an attempt to free it, but it didn't budge. We'd have to return later with some tools and try again. For now, the spirits were still free to come and go. After all these years, I wasn't sure the rusty old gate would hold them in again, even if we could close it. The ghosts had long since grown accustomed to ignoring the boundaries of the cemetery.
Hopefully, we'd get a clearer picture of the haunting after night fell, as we watched and listened in the darkness.
Chapter Four
Getting mud off oneself is typically a simple operation, but here there were a couple of problems. I didn't want to ask a brand-new client I'd just met about borrowing her shower so I could stain it red with mud, but it wasn't exactly convenient to zip back home, which would take at least an hour each way. We could have found a motel in the nearest town, but that would have wasted time. I'd been planning on sleeping on the drop-down cots in the van if necessary. They were narrow and uncomfortable, but they were free.
Anyway, I'm embarrassed to relate that I ended up hosing myself off behind the stable, out of sight of everyone except the red-speckled Appaloosa named Hector, who watched me curiously, snorting occasionally. The snorts sounded a little derisive to me.
Stacey stood guard at one corner of the stable while I quick-changed into fresh clothes from my overnight bag. The horse kept looking at me, blinking, but other than that it was a successful covert mission.
By the time we returned to the house, things were much louder because the kids were home from school. The thirteen-year-old boy Castor, wiry and dressed in a Deadpool t-shirt, was attempting to ride away on his bicycle, heading for the highway and not the woods. The girl, six-year-old Maya, was running after him, screaming, disheveled ribbons trailing at the tips of her disheveled red hair. It was easy to imagine her mother carefully arranging the hair into orderly braids in the morning, only to have the girl destroy it all in the course of the day at school.
“You can't go!” Maya shouted at her brother as she chased him up the dirt road away from the house.
“You can't come!” he shouted back over his shoulder, his long bangs fluttering in his face. “Go inside and play with Corrine.”
“She never plays with me.” Maya threw a pine cone, hitting her brother square in the lower back. Castor scowled in response but didn't slow down.
“Maya, get out of the road!” Amber emerged onto the front porch with a slam of the screen door, covering her cell phone with one hand as she screamed at her daughter. “You're not allowed in the road.”
“But Castor's in the road—”
“He's allowed.”
“But I don't want to be by myself! And Corrine locked her door!” Maya screamed. I remembered Maya was the one who'd seen the bloody-girl apparition inside the house. I could see why she might not want to be alone at home.
“I'm right here, Maya. You won't be by yourself. Now get out of that road this second!” Amber gave Stacey and me a frazzled shake of her head as we approached the porch. She quickly ended her phone call.
“Who are they?” Maya asked her mother, pointing at me.
“They're detectives,” Amber said. “They're here to help.”
“Help with what?” Maya stopped at the foot of the porch steps and gave us a suspicious look, narrowing her green eyes.
“The problems we've had around here,” Amber said.
“You mean the ghost?” Maya looked at me. “She comes inside at night. Sometimes you can't hear her or see her, but she's there.”
“What do you think she wants?” I asked. “Any ideas?”
“I don't know. She's all covered in blood and she shows her teeth.”
“Like she's smiling?” I asked.
“No,” Maya said. “Like she's biting.”
“You don't have to talk about this if it scares you, Maya,” Amber said.
“Talking doesn't scare me.” Maya clambered up the steps toward us. “It felt cold.” She shuddered, drawing her arms in close. She wore a sleeveless black dress printed with scores of tiny white bird shapes. Goose bumps were rising on her bare arms. Amber stepped over and hugged the girl's shoulders. Maya asked, “Why is it bothering me? Can it hurt me?”
“Kids are usually better at seeing ghosts than adults are,” I said. “It's normal that you're the first person to see the ghost. We don't know what it wants or why it's here yet, but we're going to figure that out. And then we're going to get rid of it for you. That's what we do.”
“That's right, Maya. That's what they're supposed to do.” Amber gave me a look that was difficult to read—a little angry, a little suspicious, and very tired. I could see how stressed she was, and now she had to worry about whether we were legitimately going to help or just some kind of scammers. It's good to be cautious, since there are definitely some shady types around the fringes of the ghost business. One such company, fairly shady if you asked me, but definitely not small, was in the process of buying the little hometown detective agency where Stacey and I worked.
“And then everything will be okay?” Maya asked.
“We can usually improve things,” I told her. “Right now we need to get set up.” I quickly explained the drill to Amber, while Maya listened intently. We would need cameras and microphones inside her house as well as around the property. “I'll need to spend the night in your front room to watch for the apparition that's getting into your house.”
Amber nodded. “You may as well get star
ted. And I'd better get supper ready so I can feed Jeremy while explaining I already hired y'all. The news will go down easier with mashed potatoes and blueberry pie. He'll be too stuffed to complain. Maybe you two should join us. There's plenty. ”
I was about to turn her down—better to retreat to the nearest Waffle House for food rather than sit in the middle of family drama and a potential big argument—but Stacey was faster and graciously accepted the invitation. I would have poked her in the ribs as punishment if I could have done it out of the client's sight.
Then we got to work. Our first priority was to wire the front stairs and upstairs hall with the works—thermal, night vision, motion detectors, microphones. In Maya's room, we set up a high-sensitivity microphone and remote sensors for electromagnetism and temperature. Maya had reported the bloody-girl apparition crawling right up to her bed, so we wanted to monitor her room as she slept.
While testing and checking our gear upstairs, we finally met the other daughter, Corrine, when she emerged from her room and stared at us. Her hair was dark like her mother's, but cut short, and she had the same glaring green eyes as her younger sister.
“Hi,” I said, after she'd stared at us for a few seconds. “I'm Ellie.”
“Mom!” Corrine shouted, rather than replying to me. “Why is there a camera crew up here? Mom! Tell me this isn't a stupid intervention!”
“It's not an intervention, Corrine,” Amber said, appearing at the bottom of the steps. Maya stayed close by her mother's hip, close enough to create a serious tripping hazard. “It's an example of why you shouldn't huff off to your room without speaking to me when you get home.”
“Would you just tell me what's going on?” Corrine snapped.
“We're paranormal investigators,” I said, hoping to defuse the situation. “We're here about the problems you've been having. In fact, I'd really like to hear about your experience with the horseman—”
“Oh...no.” Corrine covered her mouth with one hand and backed away like she was a vampire and Stacey and I were huge bales of garlic. “You don't have a show on TV, do you?”
“No—” I began.
“Oh, you just have an internet show? That's even worse.”
“We don't have a show at all,” I said, trying not to sound as annoyed as I felt. “We're just here to identify and remove the ghosts.”
“This is so weird.” Corrine took a backward step toward her room.
“It gets a lot weirder than this,” Stacey said. “This is the calm part. Wait until things are creeping out of the walls and attacking everybody.”
“You want to see a ghost, just go out riding in the woods at night,” Corrine said. “Don't take Pixie. She scares easy. In fact, don't take any of our horses. I don't want them getting hurt.”
“We don't want to risk any harm to your animals,” I said. “Have you seen strange things anywhere besides the woods?”
“I've been seeing strange things since we moved here,” Corrine said, crossing her arms. “Like boys who wear hunting clothes to school. I mean, do they think we can't see them because they're dressed in camouflage? And what's the point of wearing camouflage and a bright orange jacket together? This town is so stupid. Not that there's actually much of a town...”
“I'm guessing you didn't want to move here from Augusta,” I said.
“No, I wanted to lose all my friends and spend my weekends cleaning up pig poop,” she said. “That's exactly what I wanted my life to be. Totally. Now I can't even ride my horse very far because...” She cut herself off and shook her head. “You know why.”
“I'd really like to hear more about—” I began, but she backed into her room and closed the door. “—that ghost you saw,” I said, finishing my sentence for the benefit of no one in particular.
Back downstairs, the house smelled of Amber's cooking. The strongest scent was the baking of homemade bread, a simple yet somehow rare luxury, at least for me. My own cooking usually involves opening a box or can, dumping it out, and heating the contents. Hey, it takes skill to microwave macaroni just right. Amateurs have to boil it on the stove.
As we grabbed armloads of our most weather-resistant gear from the van, a beige Toyota Corolla, about ten years old and with a deep dent in one side, rolled down the road and pulled into the Neville's driveway. It parked next to the big Suburban, which was much newer and apparently Amber's vehicle. Farther along the drive, near the barn, sat an old pick-up with rust all over its shell, and it wasn't clear whether it was still operational or just a decorative heap of junk.
Amber's husband Jeremy drove the Corolla. I recognized him from the family pictures in the house—unkempt red hair, thick glasses, tie slightly askew, coffee stain on his white shirt. It wasn't hard to see him as a frazzled and overworked high school teacher.
Jeremy climbed out of the car, dragging with him a cracked vintage attaché case that could have been used for handing off Cold War secrets in some 1960's espionage film. It was decorated with a score of travel stickers, indicating that the briefcase had visited London, Alaska, Mars, the desert planet Arrakis, and Gotham City. I strongly doubted it had actually gone to some of those destinations.
He looked over at us, two strange women standing next to a big blue cargo van with armfuls of assorted electronic gear. There was an awkward, quiet moment, during which his wife failed to materialize from the house to assure him we were supposed to be there.
“Are you...here about the cable?” he asked, looking at the van.
“No—” I began.
“That's too bad. Because we don't have any out here. I mean there are literally no cables in the ground. And the dish cuts out all the time.”
“How's your cell reception?” Stacey asked.
“About what you'd guess.”
“Your wife contacted us.” I said, stowing my gear back into the van so I could introduce myself and hand him a business card.
“Private detectives?” he asked, looking at the card.
“We specialize in the paranormal.”
“Okay. I'm just going to head inside, then.” He gave us a look like he was trying to back away from a couple of escaped homicidal maniacs. “Has she already paid you any money?”
“Nope.” I didn't like the sound of that question or the general direction in which it pointed. “We were about to head over to the maze and the woods to set up for an observation tonight. If you like, though, I can come in with you and explain more about—”
“Oh, no, go sit out in that old graveyard all you want. Don't say we didn't warn you.” He walked up the steps and away into the house without a backward glance.
“That went surprisingly well,” Stacey said. “I thought it was going to take a bad turn.”
“It still might. Come on, it'll be dark soon.”
We set up our observation gear at some of the more obvious places, like the outer edge of the corn maze that had been shattered by the Amazing Disappearing Horse. By the time we reached the cemetery, the sun was so low that it was completely blocked by the thick woods around us. I kept both of my tactical flashlights set to “flood” mode while Stacey set up the gear that would enable us to watch and listen for the dead.
I wanted to urge her to hurry, but I didn't want to distract her. I was sure she wanted to get out of those dark woods as much as I did. It grew colder and colder as the minutes crawled past. I heard the crunching of dried leaves and old pine straw, indistinct noises that could have been human footfalls or small animals emerging from their burrows for the night.
There was a strong feeling of being watched by invisible eyes, a sensation I never enjoy, as you could probably guess. We hadn't collected a blip of hard data yet, but my gut was telling me the place was severely haunted and quite dangerous, and the most reasonable course of action was to run away screaming until I reached a well-lit patch of civilization.
I didn't do that, since I was supposed to be the professional ghost hunter here, but I definitely imagined in great detail how nice i
t would be to get away from that place.
In time, we were finally ready, with multiple microphones prepared to catch any voices of the dead that might choose to speak. I was glad to have Stacey around to analyze the hours of ambient noises our recorders would collect. It would be her job to separate the specters from squirrels, to find anything resembling a human voice.
We made our way back to the rusty gate, which was still mired in the layers of dirt that had probably held it open for decades. I stopped and looked back at the cemetery, which now looked like a dark jungle. The feeling of being watched was more intense than ever, and I could feel a kind of cold seething in the air, as if shapes or monsters were ready to spill out from behind the crooked tree trunk and old headstones.
“We're listening,” I said out loud, addressing the unseen and restless spirits that I could easily imagine gathering to watch us. “If you have anything to say, any message for the living, go ahead. We'll be listening even after we're gone.”
We stood there, quiet and tense, the darkness growing colder. Then we moved on, back up the shadowy dirt road, shining our flashlights into the gloom.
Chapter Five
“So do you catch a lot of these ghosts?” Jeremy asked us from the head of the old picnic-style table on their back porch. This was the setting of the dinner into which I'd been roped. It was a pleasant enough environment, with herb and flower gardens in smelling distance and swarms of fireflies blinking in the nearby woods.
The food was appealing—fried chicken, potatoes, cole slaw, and the afore-smelled homemade bread, which was soft and heavenly. Sweat tea. The family situation was awkward, though. Family dinners are not great environments for me, anyway, putting me in mind of my own lost family. Even with Michael and his sister Melissa, just sitting around a table with a prepared meal puts me in an uncomfortable place.
Tonight, at the Neville family table, Amber was extra-upbeat, or pretending to be so, while Corrine played the sullen teenager, Maya stared at us and barely ate, and Castor focused on his phone, as if having a couple of paranormal investigators at dinner was totally normal.
