EJ06 - Maze of Souls

by JL Bryan

  “But it is their own family living here,” Stacey said. “Isn't it?”

  “I don't know, but these guys are extremely territorial. The only good news is they're kind of stuck in there for now.”

  “There's salt in my backpack,” I said. “I was thinking of salting the place to encourage them to stay inside.”

  “Do that. Do anything that might help keep them in there.”

  “Not now,” Stacey said. “We have to at least get you bandaged up, Jacob.”

  “I won't bleed to death in the next hour,” he said. “We don't want these ghosts creeping out and wandering around. Salt the little monsters.”

  I surveyed the perimeter of the cemetery, at least as far as I could see before the walls on either side vanished among trees, fog, and darkness. Tromping around the muddy creeks behind the cemetery in the middle of the night sounded somewhat hazardous, especially with all the angry spirits bottled up inside the walls.

  At the same time, I needed them to see us putting down the salt. Salt is traditionally believed to have protective properties against wicked spirits and other evils. I don't know if this has any actual chemical basis, so it was best for the ghosts to see it for symbolic reasons. Even if the salt didn't provide a true barrier in an electromagnetic sense, it might provide a psychological barrier.

  “We'll just do this front wall for now and see how it goes,” I said. Stacey and Jacob nodded. Nobody rushed to insist that we walk the entire perimeter of the cemetery right away.

  “Let's make it quick,” Stacey said, sounding resigned. She was still eyeing Jacob's injured fingers.

  I plonked down my backpack and opened it, relieved to be free of the pressing weight. I'd been lugging two heavy things in there: my thermal goggles and a five-pound bag of Dead Sea salt. Aside from the body of water's location in the Holy Land, the mineral content of the Dead Sea was a rich, dense mix of exotic salts like magnesium chloride, not just the tasty sodium chloride you find in most seawater or in a glass shaker on your table. If you're trying to salt restless ghosts into place, you might as well go big on both the symbolism and the physical reality.

  “We can come back at first light, when it's safer,” Stacey suggested.

  “I need them to watch,” I said, nodding toward the cemetery. I couldn't see anything but shadows, twisted limbs, headstones and fog, but I couldn't deny the deep chill in the air, or the feeling of being watched. I could imagine old Hiram lingering behind the fence, just at the spot where Stacey had broken his contact with Jacob, his dry skull of a face regarding us from underneath a crumbling wig and tricorner hat.

  Stacey, Jacob, and I all stood together. I passed Stacey the thermal goggles. “Watch out for any creepers creeping up on us,” I told her. “You, too, Jacob.”

  “I don't feel anything out here with us,” he said.

  “Good.” I approached the cemetery gate with the big bag of salt open in one hand. The darkness beyond the gate was silent except for the distant, soft sound of slow-moving creek water.

  I crossed the ditch to the gate, tense. When nothing jumped out at me, I dipped my hand into the bag, scooped up salt, and sifted it along the ground in front of the gate. Emboldened by the lack of violent supernatural response, I moved even closer to the gate so I could salt the rusty points and cross-bars, the broken nub of an old latch, and the new padlock I'd added, just for good measure. You can't oversalt a gate, as they say. Okay, nobody says that, but the gate was clearly the weak point here, the portal through which the ghosts had been coming and going for years, so I wanted to lay it down nice and thick.

  “That's stirring them up,” Jacob said from somewhere behind me.

  “I can see a lot of cold spots on thermal,” Stacey added. “They're clustering in close to you, just on the other side of the fence. Don't let them grab you.”

  “You're making them angry,” Jacob said.

  “Good. That means it's working.” I scattered another handful of salt over the gate. The feeling of being watched had grown stronger, though that could have been the effect of what Stacey and Jacob were reporting to me. The air was certainly cold along the fence, and growing colder, creating fog along the bottom rail.

  I spread more salt as I walked alongside the fence. It felt like a glacier had parked itself on the other side, with a palpable cold leaking out between the gaps in the iron spikes. The lower portion, the brick wall that supported the iron fence, looked even more buckled and broken than I remembered. Either it had developed an alarming number of new cracks over the past two days, or I was just much more aware of them now that I had some idea of the awful things within the walls.

  Jacob and Stacey kept pace behind me, staying on the road across the weedy ditch, since there wasn't a lot of room on this side. I didn't want anyone crowding the narrow, crumbling dirt ledge where I walked.

  When I reached the sunken brick corner of the fence, I hopped out onto the road and walked the opposite way. All indications were that the ghosts were hovering close, watching with resentment as I further sealed them into their proper resting place. I didn't get the feeling they'd be resting peacefully anytime soon, but at least we had made the farm a safer place by locking them in. They wouldn't be free to menace the living at night.

  Chapter Twelve

  Stacey grabbed the first-aid kit from the van, and we crept quietly into the house so we could clean and wrap his wounds until the nearest urgent-care place (a twenty-five-minute drive) opened up in the morning. We used the filtered water spigot at the kitchen sink to rinse Jacob's wounds. The farm drew its water from a well, and my confidence in the hygienics of the outdoor spigots was low.

  While Stacey helped Jacob, I walked into the foyer to check our gear at the front stairs. The family had already come home and gone to bed while we wandered the farm.

  According to our instruments, the 'ghost burglar alarm' we'd set up had not fired while we were away. The motion detector, thermometer, and EMF meter hadn't sensed enough combined activity to activate the white spotlights and holy sounds.

  “Did you stop her?” a voice whispered behind me, making me jump. I turned and was happy to see a live, flesh-and-blood human being instead of something dead tiptoeing up behind me.

  It's a little crazy, having a job where this is a major problem. I usually deal with only the worst ghosts, too. Things have to progress pretty far before people will even admit to themselves that their house is haunted. They have to get even worse, truly scary or dangerous, before they're willing to call in outside experts. Nobody likes to be thought crazy, after all.

  This time, it wasn't a cold fog or a pale girl in a blood-soaked gown. Maya, the six-year-old, stood in her pajamas, which followed a fuzzy pink bunny theme right down to the puffy slippers. She stared up at me, her hair in thick red clumps around her face, a small box of apple juice in one hand.

  “I'm not sure yet,” I said. “We may have helped.”

  “She didn't come tonight,” Maya said. “I can tell.”

  “We didn't detect any visits from her tonight, either,” I said.

  “Is she gone forever?”

  “We can't be sure yet, but I think it will stay quiet tonight. Even if it doesn't, we're standing guard.”

  “Will you tell Lucy there's no ghosts?” Maya whispered. “She's scared of them.”

  “Who's Lucy?”

  Maya raised one fuzzy bunny slipper. The fake pink fur around the bottom of it was worn, frayed, and dusty. The bunny's plastic googly eyes bounced as Maya waved her foot back and forth.

  “Lucy's the scaredy one,” Maya said. She pointed to her other foot, where the fuzzy bunny slipper sat quietly. “Lucky is not scared.”

  “It's going be okay...Lucy,” I said. “We'll watch out for you.”

  “Thank you,” Maya replied in a high, squeaky voice while bobbing the bunny slipper up and down. Its eyes bounced crazily again. Then Maya turned and ran away down the hall. I heard her footsteps thump away up the back stairs.

  �
��Who was that?” Stacey asked, emerging from the kitchen. “Were you talking to somebody?”

  “Just a small pink rabbit,” I said. “Looks like no ghosts bothered the family tonight.”

  “Does that mean Bloody Betty is trapped inside the graveyard, too?” Stacey asked.

  “Could be,” I said. “We don't want to jump to any conclusions, but we can be cautiously optimistic.”

  We rounded up Jacob, with his hand wrapped in thick, fresh gauze, and headed out to the van before we could disturb any more family members. I didn't want to be forced to apologize to any more items of footwear, not that night.

  The farm stayed quiet for hours, thankfully. Stacey and I even took turns napping. Jacob, drained from his rough encounter of the supernatural kind, slept on one of the van's drop-down cots as soundly as if the painfully thin mattress were a princess's bed made of silk and goose feathers.

  I dreamed of Anton Clay again, pursuing me into the dark basement of Michael's building, toward the furnace room where the old well served as a portal, a thin spot where spirits can easily cross back and forth. Demonic spirits had come and gone there for thousands of years. It had been known as a place of cursed water.

  In real life, we'd sealed it off with lead and steel, and a dash of unauthorized magic from an ex-Jesuit, after dealing with a particularly dangerous entity in Michael's building. There was always a danger of something breaking out.

  In my dream, though, fire billowed up and out from the well. Anton held me in the basement as the house burned down around us.

  I awoke sweaty and trembling, and found myself lying in the shotgun seat of the van, the back of the seat reclined as far as it would go. All my muscles felt stiff, and I was still panicky from the nightmare.

  Stacey and Jacob were both asleep on the cots. I'd dozed off during my watch, but now it was well past sunrise anyway, and the van's cab was full of light.

  I grabbed the thick bag of salt and climbed out of the van, eager to stretch my legs, move around, and get some distance from the bad dream. My brain felt exhausted, but I was restless. Salting the cemetery wasn't a task I wanted to leave half-finished, and I'd had obsessive thoughts all night about the need to go back and wrap it up.

  Since there was plenty of daylight and I wasn't going down into any dark, claustrophobia-inducing basements, I didn't bother waking the others. I wanted some fresh air and a chance to walk off my nightmares.

  My last big non-dream encounter with Anton Clay hadn't been with the ghost himself, but with a fearfeeder or “boogeyman” ghost living in Michael's building. That ghost could take on the form of a living person's worst fear—in my case, that was good old Anton. It made sense that I would dream of encountering him in Michael's building again.

  I checked my phone as I walked. I'd texted Michael earlier to remind him about the Halloween ball at the Lathrop Grand, but the message still hadn't gone through. No signal. I would have to borrow Amber's landline or wait until we returned a bit closer to civilization.

  Only small spills of early-morning light trickled into the woods, burning holes in the low ground fog. The air felt warmer than it had for the past two days, and my Mel-Meter confirmed that the temperature in the shady woods was at the highest I'd seen it, no different from the temperature outside of them.

  I braced myself for anything strange as I approached the cemetery. The gate remained closed, the little spills of salt on and around it completely undisturbed. Again, there was no shift in temperature or spike in electromagnetic readings. I let myself relax a little. The spirits really did seem locked up, and now that it was daytime, I didn't even sense them watching me from within the walls.

  With my trusty bag of Dead Sea salt in hand, I crossed the weedy ditch at a front corner of the cemetery and began walking along the side wall. Like the rest of the cemetery's perimeter, it was a low brick wall topped with rusty spikes, as though designed to keep out medieval invaders.

  I salted the uneven bricks and the muddy earth outside the fence. My walking space narrowed as I approached a creek, and soon I was walking carefully along a muddy ledge overhanging slow, dark water a few feet below. It was precarious, but it held my weight, and nothing scary lunged through the fence trying to grab my ankles, so overall it went fine.

  The back side of the cemetery offered no more trouble. I spread salt along the high bank overlooking the creek, and I had a closer look at the rotten foot bridge that spanned from the back gate of the cemetery to the next marshy, tree-filled creek island. The bridge looked even less sturdy on closer examination, all the boards rotten or missing. It would probably collapse if anyone heavier than a child tried to cross. A small, thin child who hadn't eaten in a few hours.

  Across the bridge lay marshlands. Tromping through them in a northern direction, you'd eventually reach the swampy battlefield where hundreds had died, many of their bodies lost forever to the deep mud. I didn't have any direct sign that spirits from that old battle were part of the problem on the clients' farm, but surely such violence had left restless ghosts or residual hauntings behind, helping to create the haunted atmosphere.

  I turned away from the creek and gave the back gate some special salty attention, especially the latch and hinges. Despite its thick layers of rust, the old iron gate had held firm for many decades, but it couldn't hurt to reinforce it.

  Through the iron spikes, I saw the fallen tree and the pit into which I'd stumbled. With the temperature higher and the fog depleted, a few more of the mossy old headstones were visible. One of them tilted near the spot where I'd fallen. I'd been lucky not to crack my head on it.

  Moving as quickly as I dared on the slippery weeds and mud overhanging the creek, I spread the salt along the back of the cemetery and then up the other side. I breathed a sigh of relief as I reached the corner. The entire perimeter of the cemetery was now salted, reinforcing the power of the cemetery walls to contain the ghosts.

  The ground was clear of any lingering fog, and the sunlight was brighter than the past two days, as if a heavy shadow had lifted from the cemetery. The crickets and birds weren't shy about filling the air with their music anymore.

  I hesitated in front of the gate, then drew out my key to the new padlock. With the spirits gone to ground for the day, it seemed safe to have another look around. The family's encounters with these ghosts had happened at night, at sunset or later, never in the morning. It's rare to find a ghost who's a morning person.

  The plan for the day was to get Jacob some stitches if needed, then head back to Savannah, sleep in our own beds, attend the Lathrop Grand Halloween ball with the guys, then spend a night at our own homes. We'd collected a lot of data, and the troublesome ghosts seemed to be contained. There wasn't much need to run up our motel bill—which would be passed on to our clients—while we reviewed what we'd learned and planned our next move. The stale-perfume air of The Old Walnut Inn was starting to bother my sinuses, anyway.

  Before we went home, I wanted to see if I could corroborate some of the things Virgil had said. It would only take a few minutes inside the cemetery.

  I unlocked the gate, slipped inside, and quickly latched it behind me. I didn't sense anything strange—no sudden drop in temperature, no feeling of being watched. My Mel-Meter picked up nothing. Still, I left the shiny new padlock open in case I needed to leave in a hurry.

  The area seemed momentarily safe to me, though I wouldn't have set foot inside the cemetery at night. Even going in the day might have seemed foolish, when Hiram had just possessed Jacob the previous night, but I wasn't a psychic medium with my feelers out, just a cynical girl with my guard up. I've developed a thick emotional shell. It's handy.

  Hiram's granite obelisk was one I'd already identified in our first survey of the cemetery. I stepped close to it now so I could read the faded inscription. It was deep in the shadow of an old cypress tree, so I clicked on my flashlight and leaned close.

  1736-1823. Beloved father, Patriot, deacon, servant of God and liberty.

>   “I guess that answers what side you took during the Revolution,” I murmured. Several feet below my boots lay the bones of the spirit who'd accosted me and briefly possessed Jacob. I shivered to think of his decayed face, his dead eyes staring from beneath his wig.

  I wasn't there to see him, though, so I moved on, checking for headstones that I'd missed earlier, or inscriptions that had been too faded to read on their own, but might suggest the name I was trying to find.

  I found it near the pit below the fallen tree, the same stone I'd just noticed from outside the back gate, the one on which I could have bashed my brains out if I'd fallen a little differently. I remembered the roots digging into my legs and back like skeletal hands.

  Mildred Neville, 1764-1781. I couldn't have read the badly faded inscription the first time I'd been here, but now that I knew what name I was looking for, it was clear enough.

  “There you are,” I said. “Are you the one who's been crawling over to the house at night?”

  I imagined the girl—seventeen at the time, by her headstone—lying in the wagon, belly and legs slick with blood, just as I'd seen her in the vision. And the hard-faced man walking alongside the wagon, in his waistcoat and powdered wig, carrying a sizzling pitch torch—had that been her father Hiram?

  The haunting was starting to make a little more sense. The poor girl had been killed by an ex-Hessian vagabond on the highway, according to Virgil, with either a sword or a crude eighteenth-century pistol. I imagined the father seeing his daughter that way, her lower half soaked in blood, dying as she lay in the wagon.

  The girl's tragic and violent death could have stuck her here all these years. If the ghost of the horseman still traveled up and down the old dirt road, that could have caused Hiram to stick around as well, trying to protect his daughter's spirit against that of the Hessian horseman. All of them could still be caught up in the drama—murderer, victim, victim's family. Once the farm was so deeply haunted, it would have begun to accumulate more ghosts over the generations.