by JL Bryan
He grew more visible as he rode toward us, feeding on the heat unleashed by Anton's fires. Stacey gasped at the sight of his decayed, shriveled black mount. Corrine's horse shied away from the specter, but overall seemed calmer as the wave of cold rushed out from the newly arrived ghost.
I pulled my face away from Michael's. With my one free hand, I drew the necklace over my head and down to my throat.
Then I pushed against Michael's chest—not very effective against his powerful grip, but at least I was putting up a struggle. And I screamed.
“Josef!” I shouted at the advancing shadowy horseman. “Save me!”
“Josef?” Anton turned Michael's head and looked. He glowered at the apparition that was sucking up a big swath of his fire and becoming more solid by the moment.
Anton turned to face the horseman, but he still gripped my hand tightly. In his other hand, he summoned a tall gout of flame. He smiled as the horseman bore down on him. With any luck, Josef would see me wearing Mildred's necklace and it would stop him from hurting me, maybe even motivate him to protect me.
Josef raised his sword—he looked very solid now, freshly fed on so much heat—and Anton raised his free hand, the fire floating above it like the flame of a candle.
Even as the horseman reached us, there was no telling whether he intended to attack Anton, or me, or just kill both of us as well as Stacey and Corrine.
Corrine, for her part, was making good use of the temporary rollback of the all-consuming deadly corn inferno. She'd gotten down off her horse and was freeing Stacey from her bonds, with help from the pocket knife I'd carelessly left behind.
Good. They had a chance of escaping. I wasn't so sure about me.
I did my best to push away from Anton/Michael as the horseman reached us. Between these two ghosts, my chances of survival didn't seem high at all. I sent up a sort of prayer, aimed generally in the direction of my parents, just kind of letting them know I might be joining them soon. And sorry again about that last fight.
The sword gleamed in the firelight. It swept down toward us, lightning-fast, almost too quick for my eye to follow.
I braced myself for the deathblow.
The tongue of fire hovering above Michael's hand, drifting close to his head like a mockery of the Pentecost, snuffed out all at once.
Michael's mouth opened and let out a horrible sound, somewhere between a shriek and a gurgling choke. I didn't know who was truly suffering in there, Anton or Michael. Maybe both.
The front of Michael's blousy pirate shirt ruptured in half as the ghostly sword sliced through him. The shirt fell open, revealing not a fresh, bloody wound, but a brand-new black scar that ran from his left shoulder, over his heart and across his chest, and down to his right hip. It looked as if it had always been there, but it definitely had not.
Michael fell to his knees. His eyes were no longer glowing and fiery red—and, in fact, the eyes and the face looked just like Michael again.
He gave me a look of hurt and pain as he fell to the ground. He looked at me as if I'd betrayed him, and I had. I had betrayed Michael. I'd been willing to sacrifice him to save Stacey, Corrine, and anyone else that Anton Clay might have killed.
What would bother me later, though, was knowing that I'd also saved my own skin by choosing to sacrifice him. Even if that hadn't been foremost in my mind, it was true, and there was nothing noble about that.
Michael landed in the dirt without a sound, and he lay there without moving.
The great walls of fire lowered immediately. The corn was flammable, but it also burned up quickly, and Anton's spirit didn't seem to be feeding the flames with his power anymore. The fires lowered, revealing a maze of glowing red ashes outlined all around, though we couldn't see far because of the smoke.
The smell of charred plants and ash filled the air, stirring terrible memories of the night my parents had died in the fire. Now Michael lay at my feet, unmoving, one more person that I cared about, taken from me by the ghost of Anton Clay.
I dropped to my knees and checked Michael's neck for a pulse, my fingers exploring only inches from his sudden new scar. He was feverishly hot, but I was having trouble finding any heartbeat.
At the burning edge of the clearing, the dead horseman twisted around and turned back toward me. For a moment, about halfway through his turn, he and his horse seemed impossibly thin, like looking at a slice of black construction paper edge-on.
Then he approached me at a trot, his eyeless horse sniffing in my direction.
Now I could see the horseman's eyes. They were gray and pale like the rest of him.
He pointed the sword at my throat, indicating the necklace.
“No, I'm not Mildred.” I lifted the necklace up and over my head.
The horseman turned and eased his mount closer to Corrine instead. Stacey moved to block his way. Corrine looked up at him with some fear, but she didn't cower.
“She is not Mildred, either,” I said. “Leave her be, Josef. You want Mildred, I'll show you where to find her. I'll try to help.” Please don't cut through me with that sword, I wanted to add. Me or anybody else. I didn't want to say that aloud and risk putting the idea in his head, though.
The horseman stood in place, and Stacey tried not to tremble as she held her ground between the horseman and Corrine. The fires burned down low around us now, acres of maze paths etched out in glowing red stubble across scorched, sandy earth. It was a bizarre, hellish landscape, the air still full of heat and smoke.
Michael shivered under my fingers. His pulse returned, low and weak. His eyes did not open.
I stood and walked toward the north end of the maze, the section closest to the woods and the cemetery within them. I clicked together beads on the necklace, hoping that would keep the horseman's attention.
Slowly, the apparition shambled after me. The necklace would have made good bait for the horseman, had we gotten around to setting a trap for him.
“Stacey,” I said. “Check on Michael. And tie him up.”
Stacey nodded and went to his side, while Corrine stepped away from all of us to pat her nervous horse.
“Wait here.” I told them. I continued walking toward the woods, stepping directly over the smoldering outlines of the maze. The corn and plastic netting had all burned down to the dirt, so we could move pretty freely, as long we avoided major fires like the one consuming the gazebo.
“Ellie?” Stacey called after me, clearly concerned about me heading into the haunted woods with Josef the Dead Horseman just behind me.
“I'll be fine,” I said. I couldn't be sure of that, but after what I'd just survived, I was almost too shell-shocked to care. I just wanted to lead the horseman away from Stacey and Corrine before he turned violent.
I walked over fire and smoldering earth until I reached the pitch darkness of the woods. The horseman was close—a shadowy figure now, so dim I might not have seen him at all if I hadn't been looking for him. I could hear an occasional hoofbeat, but not a steady rhythm of them. I could feel him, though.
We entered the dark wilderness together, his cold presence making my flesh crawl.
Chapter Twenty
Within the woods, his presence remained inconstant, sometimes a shadow, sometimes a cold spot, sometimes a visible apparition.
“We're taking the long way around, going to the back gate,” I whispered. I didn't know if I needed to explain anything to him, but I wanted him to stay focused, or at least remember that we were together and I wasn't some enemy he needed to strike down. “It's been closed so long that I doubt those who dwell inside give it much attention. And her grave, Mildred's grave, is near that back gate.”
I seemed to be alone as I moved out into the marshy creek islands behind the cemetery. I had to use my flashlight to avoid slipping and falling into the creeks, but I kept it on the lowest, dimmest setting to avoid drawing attention.
Rumbles sounded in the distance, deep in the swampy woods. A light flared and faded in the distance,
then another. They weren't exactly fireworks. I could smell gunpowder on the wind, and then I heard distant moans, the squish of boots tromping in muddy earth. Cries of pain echoed far away.
The battlefield. If we'd continued onward through the marsh, we would find the swampy intersection of Brier Creek and the Savannah River, where hundreds had died in the bloody battle, many of them drowned and lost while crawling away from the massacre, their bodies vanished into the marshy water.
Now, in the early-morning dark of Halloween, I could hear and see evidence of that long-ago fight. I wondered if Virgil, our helpful local history buff, knew that he could observe ghostly glimpses of it late at night, at least at the time of year when the veil between life and death was at its thinnest. They say you can see or hear ghosts almost any night at some battle sites, like Gettysburg.
As long as the restless dead soldiers didn't make their way over and interfere with us, I was glad they were out and active. Their noise and activity could help provide some distraction from the horseman and me making our way to the back gate of the cemetery. It would have been harder to sneak through a completely silent swamp.
On the other hand, I was not at all prepared to fend off hundreds of dead men if they decided I was the enemy, so I also had to keep a wary eye in that direction. I was in the company of a Hessian mercenary, after all, so the ghosts of hundreds of American militiamen would probably not look kindly on us.
“I understand Mildred loved you,” I whispered. The horseman was nowhere in sight, and I hoped he was still with me. “I read her journal. Why was it hidden there in the wall? I'm guessing some relative who cared about Mildred kept them after her death, but hid them because of the scandal. Mildred having an affair with a runaway German mercenary. I'm sure her family didn't approve of that. Am I right?”
The night grew colder. The horseman was visible again, though he was only a thin, transparent shadow that followed just behind me. I didn't entirely trust him. I needed to keep watch on the horseman, on the distant hints of battle, and on the cemetery, too, but sadly I don't have eyes on all sides of my head.
“The real question is how you felt about Mildred, and what you did,” I said. “We don't know enough. Did you love her? Did she die giving birth to your child? Or did you kill her? Because that's what everyone says—”
A groan sounded from him, not quite a human voice, like a tuneless echo from deep inside a cave or a well.
His apparition was much clearer now, so that I could see his bone-white lips and chin under his hat. His sword was out, pointed in my direction. Maybe I'd touched a nerve.
“Why are you still here, riding the roads for two hundred years?” I asked. “Are you pursuing her? Is she running from you when she crawls into the house at night? Is that why Hiram and the men of her family patrol the road by the cemetery? Are they trying to protect Mildred from you?”
The highwayman drew closer. I could smell the rotten-leather stink of the dried horseflesh that slowly crumbled from his steed's bones at every step.
“Or is she seeking refuge in her old home?” I asked. “That's not really her house, of course, but it's on the same site. Someone—I'm guessing a mother or a sister—kept Mildred's diary and necklace in that jewelry box and hid it inside the walls when the house was rebuilt. Someone who couldn't bear to destroy the girl's property, but wanted to keep it secret.”
The horseman backed off a little, but kept his sword tilted at me.
“The other possibility is that you loved her, too,” I said. “Her family wanted to keep you apart. Maybe she died in childbirth, or from miscarriage, and the trauma of that keeps her ghost here. You're trying to reconnect with her, but the men of her family won't allow it. Now that they're penned up in the cemetery, you're free to move around the farm...but now she is trapped inside with them, too. Mildred can't do her crawl from the cemetery to the farmhouse now that the gate's locked. If all this is true, then you're trying to rescue her spirit from this farm, and her dead relatives are standing in your way. Is that right?”
He was more fully formed now, to the point that I could see the brass buttons in his heavy coat glinting in the faint moonlight. He sat up straight, his posture less threatening, his sword fading from visibility altogether.
“That's what you wanted to do in life,” I said. “You wanted to gather her up and take her away from here. But her family killed you instead, and they blamed you for her death. Is that right?”
The horseman was a solid apparition now, as solid as life, and the air around me was so cold that my ears and nose started to go numb.
“I'm betting on you,” I said. “Based on what Mildred wrote. Don't disappoint me.”
Having gone the very long and muddy way around, I finally approached the last leg of our journey. The rotten posts and other remnants of the footbridge spanned the last little creek on the way to the rear gate of the cemetery, the one that looked like it hadn't been opened in a hundred years or more.
I didn't trust the bridge one bit, so I took a running start and leaped across the creek to the slippery, weedy bank on the other side. I landed awkwardly, but managed to regain my balance without grabbing onto the fence. I didn't want to alert the ghosts within to my presence if I could avoid it.
Though the bridge was little more than a memory of rotten wood, held together by nothing but habit, the horseman crossed it easily. The hooves that had crushed floorboards and broken down a wall made no sound as they stepped over the old bridge.
The inside of the cemetery lay calm and silent. I didn't see the kind of heavy, cold fog I'd seen before, or glimpse any shadowy figures among the sunken headstones and mossy old trees. They might have been lying low, or they might have been slumbering altogether, resigned to their fate, but I wasn't ready to bet on the second option, especially not on Halloween.
“She's just inside the gate,” I whispered. “We'll have to move fast.”
The horse and its rider remained unnaturally still, as only the dead can be.
I took a deep breath, then grasped the latch on the cemetery's back gate. The latch was ice-cold, which could only indicate that at least some of the spirits were up and around.
I raised the latch, then pushed the gate. Unlike the front gate, it opened inward. The hinges squealed loudly, and I winced at the sound.
Carefully avoiding the big hole where I'd fallen on my first visit, I approached the sunken remnants of Mildred's headstone. Nothing immediately lunged out from the shadows to grab me, but the environment felt threatening and hostile. That wasn't surprising considering our past experiences here.
I clacked the beads of the coral necklace back and forth as I touched it to Mildred's headstone. We had a connection from the time she'd touched me and I'd seen her memory. I could feel her rousing in the swampy earth beneath my feet.
Her apparition was faint, and her back was turned to me. She was pale, as they usually are, dressed in lace petticoats, her upper body held rigid by whalebone stays. I expected her clothes to be soaked in blood when she turned to face me, but they weren't.
Previously, I'd looked out through her eyes. Now, I finally saw her face, a girl of seventeen, frightened, eyes large and dark. She resembled Corrine quite a bit, probably enough to explain why the horseman had once pursued Corrine in the woods.
What caught me a little off-guard was the infant in her arms. It was wrapped in simple linen—a small burial shroud, I realized, not a cutesy baby blanket. The baby wasn't moving at all.
“Mildred,” I whispered.
The horseman eased past me to stand over her. Mildred looked up at him, then she quietly wept. The tears were blood-red on her cheeks.
A shot sounded out, startling me. It wasn't a distant echo from the swampy battlefield this time, but close by, enough to make my ears ring. The horseman had a rusty pistol on his belt, but he hadn't touched it, as far as I could see.
Mildred looked at me. I saw the bright red bloodstain spread across the front of her white petticoat, cent
ered on her stomach. The baby also had a bright bloodstain at the center of its blanket, as though it, too, had been shot through the stomach. For the first time, the dead baby stirred and let out a cry.
Shadows gathered behind Mildred. At the head of them stood a filmy apparition of Hiram Neville, face decayed beneath his own tricorner hat. He opened his hands, and they were stained in blood. Gunsmoke rolled from his finger tips.
“Oh,” I said. I was shocked, and I hadn't seen this part coming, but I forced myself to hold steady. Hiram and his family members were rough ghosts. I was fighting down panic. I didn't want them to smell fear on me.
Hiram's shape became clearer as he moved toward his daughter, while Josef held out one gloved hand toward her. It was the same basic conflict they'd all been reenacting for years, but I'd rearranged things a bit, in search of a different outcome.
I let Hiram have it with both barrels, dual tactical flashlight beams, narrow and concentrated, searing white.
“You killed your daughter?” I said, still putting it together. “Because she slept with the enemy. You killed her for what? Immorality? Impropriety? Simple disobedience? The shame and embarrassment of her having a baby out of wedlock with a foreigner? You killed her, and the baby, too, either just before or just after it was born. And then you blamed Josef. You gathered up your slave-patrol buddies and hunted him down. You killed and dropped his bagged body at the town Ebenezer for burial...but that didn't quite work out for you, did it? Because Josef was buried outside the churchyard wall, leaving him free to roam the roads. To make his way back and try to rejoin Mildred after death. But you wouldn't allow that, either.”
The shades of Hiram's heirs were growing darker and more distinct, as well as closer. Despite the intense light of my beams, they advanced toward me. I resisted the urge to turn and run. Letting the fear overtake me would just make me even more vulnerable to their attacks.
I heard a baby cry.
Mildred and the infant sat on top of the horse, just ahead of the pale horseman. The dead horse creaked as it turned, its beef-jerky muscles and tendons stretching over its dry bones. The family was together now, the horse taking them slowly back toward the open gate and the rotten old foot bridge beyond.
