Chasing the Sandman

by Meyers, Brandon

  I have never experienced an apparent haunting of this severity, of that I will admit. However, I remain unconvinced that human factors are not at work behind the scenes. In which case, what, it becomes a matter of murder? It is both unsettling and unrealistic to me, somehow. But, I cannot allow myself to jump to any spectral conclusions without having yet done any actual physical investigation. I will share more of the subtleties of my craft as the days progress.

  I do not wish to worry you, my dearest Ana. In fact, I considered not sending this letter at all. But, something tells me that you will appreciate my honesty, and that we will be better for it in the future. You may rest assured knowing that I will keep my door locked for the duration of the night. An unnecessary precaution, no doubt.

  Perhaps I can coerce the housekeeper to take this letter to be posted tomorrow.

  Until next time…

  My love is yours,

  Cadmus

  February 01, 1910

  My darling Ana,

  It is now again just after nightfall as I am writing this, and I am feeling nothing short of exhausted and relieved to be back in my quarters.

  After I last left you, my night was quiet and calm as a midnight cemetery, affording me the sleep of the dead. And no, it was not due simply to the alcohol. Following my peaceful evening and a solitary breakfast this morning, I was unprepared for the disastrous events that awaited my day shortly after.

  No sooner had I finished my boiled egg than was I summoned to be given the tour of the estate by the groundskeeper, Paul Vance. He is a kindly, slow-speaking man, who seems to be the precise opposite of Mr. Leetsdale’s butler, Vassar.

  We began outdoors, starting first with the stables and making our way to the pens where the prize-winning Labrador retrievers were kept.

  “They come from the Canadian Grand Champion bloodline.” Paul Vance keyed the lock on the sprawling outdoor pen and let us in. “First generation, all of them.”

  The remaining hounds, of which there were six, seemed to have long-forgotten the nighttime disappearance of their now dead comrades. Like any Labrador I have ever encountered, they were painfully excited to see the presence of a human, and nearly toppled me with squirming licks. Their heavy breath filled the frosty air, and I was glad to see that there was a squat indoor garage attached to the kennel, which they could pass freely into and escape the cold.

  “Four females,” Vance said. “Mr. Leetsdale called them his peaches.”

  “And the two that were found in the woods?”

  “Male,” he said with a grimace. In breeding terms, this meant that two of the most profitable dogs had been lost. “But they’re all damn good pups.”

  I reached into my hip pouch and produced a few tools.

  “What’s that?”

  I slowly walked the inner perimeter of the cage with the small black box in hand. “It’s actually a device of my own creation. It detects spiritual residue in the form of trace energy signatures.”

  Vance looked at me with a blank expression.

  “In short, it detects ghosts.”

  Vance could not suppress a shake of his head. He quickly blushed. “I’m sorry Mr. Eyers. It’s just that…”

  “You’re not a believer in the spirit world?”

  “No, no. It’s not that at all.” He kicked aside a chunk of ice and stared at his feet. “It’s just that, well, if you’d seen them…When I found the dogs, it was terrible. I mean, there’s no way some kind of spirit could have drug them all the way up there.” He actually looked to be on the verge of tears and bent to scratch the ears of the nearest canine. “But, you didn’t see them.”

  “I intend to.”

  Vance’s face blanched above his heavy coat. His voice dropped to a whisper. “Very well.”

  It took me another fifteen minutes to get through the rest of my testing. The soil was clear of electromagnetic discharge. The gates were clean, and in properly functioning order, with Mr. Vance claiming to possess the sole key to the locks. There was no sign of forced entry and based on the claims relayed to Mr. Leetsdale by his former employee, the animals had been hoisted clear over the gates. This, while looking to be an increasingly likely possibility, still did not seem a probable one. Certainly, I had read of multiple encounters with poltergeists and telekinesis, but nothing to the extent of lifting two ninety-pound, living dogs over a ten-foot fence and carrying them off into the woods.

  In short, at the scene of this first abduction, there appeared to be no continued spectral presence, had there indeed been any to begin with. If a haunt had visited this kennel, it had not returned.

  I needed to see the second part of this crime scene.

  After returning to the main house for a few minutes to get warmed by the fire, we set out again into the winter morning armed with shovels. Vance was exceptionally quiet during the walk. He shrugged off most of my questions with feigned ignorance, and dodged others with monosyllabic answers.

  We walked for ten minutes into the depths of the woods, which were comprised heavily of aspens whose bare branches drooped under the burden of wet snow like shrugging spiders. A few evergreens were mixed infrequently about, but for the most part, the sun was visible through the canopy to guide us. It was a beautifully scenic walk, and left me wishing that my circumstances for being there were more enjoyable.

  “This is it,” Vance said.

  I took note of the two thick aspen stumps protruding from the ground and looked upward, imagining what a grisly scene the man with me must have stumbled upon.

  “Tell me everything,” I said simply.

  “I found them because of the birds. The crows. They were cawing and calling and making a racket that I could hear all the way back at the kennel. By then, I’d given up any hope that we’d ever see those dogs again. Mr. Leetsdale never came out and said so, but I knew he didn’t expect me to keep looking for them.”

  Vance pulled a tobacco pouch from his pocket and plucked out a rolled cigarette. He struck a match and offered me the bag. I declined, instead rooting through my own tool bag for a measuring stick and my electromagnometer.

  “So I came out here to see what the commotion was…”

  “It’s alright, Mr. Vance. Please, go on.”

  “At first, I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, because they were so high up. And, their heads weren’t on. The birds were all over them. And little bits of fur had fallen to the ground.”

  I frowned at the thought and scanned the area for any month-old remains. The scavengers had been thorough. “How were they affixed to the tree?”

  Vance rubbed a hand across his forehead. Even in this cold, nervous sweat slicked his brows. He was afraid. “They were stabbed through the branches, like skewers.”

  “And when you cut the trees down, did you notice anything peculiar about the bodies, aside from being decapitated?”

  He shook his head silently, now wiping away a few tears. Clearly, while Leetsdale may have recognized the monetary value of his pet collection, this man, Vance, actually cared for the animals. He loved them.

  I clicked on the electromagnometer and watched the bulb sit dark on the end.

  “And those are the bodies, I presume?” I gestured toward two tiny bumps in the ground, each with a twine-and-twig cross planted at its head.

  “Yes. The ground’s cold. They’re not deep.”

  When I approached the shallow canine graves, my handheld spectral detector burst to life. The filament of the device’s encased bulb glowed a fiery yellow, the brightest I’d ever seen it since my very first case, six months prior.

  “Mr. Eyers…”

  Vance had witnessed the instrument’s action, as well, for his face was a mess of worry lines and disbelief. I took a shovel from him and beckoned for his assistance.

  He paused before taking the first bite of dirt with his spade. “Is it safe?”

  “You buried them, didn’t you?”

  The groundskeeper nodded warily and helped me begin to dig.
A part of me felt badly about making this man dig up animals which he had clearly cared for, but exhilaration had caught me like a fever, and I was beyond the moment for emotional sensitivity.

  Vance shivered visibly when his spade bit dirt.

  In retrospect, human intuition is often one of the best indicators for paranormal presence. And I, having grown so reliant on my tools and my persistence, perhaps dismissed that chill warning that Mr. Vance seemed to be so keenly attuned to. Or, maybe I was simply so excited that the electromagnometer had detected something, that I mistook the reading for residue and not actual presence.

  Therefore, it is safe to say that when the grave exploded outward in a cloud of dirt and snow, I was anything but prepared.

  My dear, I hope that you do not think my mind unhinged for recounting the following events in what I can assure you is their most accurate detail. I fear that this is truly the point past which I must plead for you to abandon reading. In fact, I’ve considered keeping this strictly to my personal journal, but feel that it is important to catalogue the following events of the remainder of this investigation in total, and by way of post, for my own peace of mind. I beg you to cease reading this transcription.

  Please…

  If you must, read onward, my dear. I cannot stop you. But know that events have taken a turn for the worst here at Leetsdale Manor, and that the last thing I intend to do is heap worry upon you.

  I have heard of physical reanimation among corpses, mostly in the accounts of drunken anthropologists exploring Haitian villages. But, never did I expect to find myself in such immediate proximity of reanimated cadavers, let alone those of prize-winning Labrador retrievers.

  Vance, although a big man, whimpered like a bruised schoolgirl and nearly trampled me as he fled the scene. I found myself tossed into a tree, which proved far more resilient than I, and cast me to the ground.

  A flurry of snow still littered the air, and in my dazed state, I pawed at its sparkling brilliance. The sound of escalating, sharp snarls brought me out of my stunned wonderment.

  I became aware of two hunched and broken figures limping in a sort of gruesome circle around me. The air was rank with the smell of rotted flesh, and something else…something like the pungency of primal pheromone. Harsh, erratic growls mirrored one another as the dogs stepped forward through the blinding snowy haze.

  “Impossible.”

  The animals had mangy, bloodied coats, and their heads hung at crooked angles. Their eyes were black, soulless pits, and with teeth bared, they might well have been wayward hounds of hell. For that brief moment I knew a terror that I had never known before. I could not tear my eyes from the demonic carrion, such abhorrent impossibilities to nature, and any thought of self-preservation was swallowed by utter, piercing dread.

  It was a scream from the woods behind that stirred my body into survival instinct. I stumbled back a step and literally fell into a run. Once in motion, my legs refused to stop.

  I could hear their footfalls behind me on the snowpack.

  The terrain was irregular and I nearly lost my footing as I charged through the trees. Fierce, throaty snarls propelled me onward. No daring a glance back. Had I given a moment to inspection, fear would have collapsed my will once again. My lungs were aflame, due in part to the painfully icy air.

  I dodged a knot of wilted pines and shrieked when I found myself barreling toward the lip of a ravine. There was no chance of stopping. As if the forward momentum were not enough of a damnation, a snare of gnarled undergrowth robbed me of my balance. The tumble downhill was relatively painless, until the very end, where my knee was split open on a sharp stone.

  Fiery tendrils exploded like dynamite in my joint and raced upward through my body. The pain was agonizing. And before I’d had a moment to examine my rather serious wound, I saw the shambling beasts loping down the boulder-studded hill with ease.

  All I would have liked to do at the moment was collapse. I cried out, somehow willing myself to limp onward, away from the monstrous canines who were inevitable seconds away from mauling me to pieces.

  When I could again hear the guttural wheeze of the filthy animals, I grabbed and lashed out, using the trees to propel me. With all the internal will I could muster, I forced my feet to continue their motions.

  It may have been mere seconds, but after what felt an eternity, I broke into a clearing where a small stone platform sat. I collapsed at its base. I was utterly lost in the middle of nowhere, perhaps a mile from the Leetsdale Manor, and without the aid of the only man who could accurately navigate these woods. And those hideous things had cornered me.

  I hammered at the circular brick platform, cursing to the sky at my pending terrible fate.

  The hounds slowed, sensing my defeat. How those eyeless horrors were able to see me was unknowable, but less perplexing, I suppose, when considering the very fact of their reanimation.

  I clambered atop the wall, struggling to savor what would be my last breaths. It was at least possible that this slightest bit of elevation would enable me to better defend myself.

  “You filthy mongrels,” I wheezed. “Come and get me.”

  The nearest hound snarled and bared its rotting teeth at me. Its brother, whose head now dangled half-torn from its body, was the first to charge.

  In retrospect, had I known precisely what it was that I’d climbed atop, I am not sure I would have had the courage to act the same. By the time the rotted wooden platform underfoot began to crack, I realized too late that I might be a bit overdue to shed a few pounds. I had not discovered an oddly-shaped and uselessly placed wall, but rather a water well.

  The soggy planks gave way beneath me, and I plummeted into the depths of the well, where impact immediately rendered me unconscious.

  I recall awakening somewhat to the sound of shouting, vaguely aware of a large shadow making its way toward me down a vertical tunnel.

  Apparently, Mr. Vance had not abandoned me completely. With the assistance of his son and one of the kitchen boys, they returned to track me to my blundering tomb, where they kindly hoisted me free. I recall none of it, but to hear it told, the reanimated hounds were once again quite dead, their corpses resting at the edge of the well. Mr. Vance’s son and the kitchen boy rendered the animals into many small un-revivable pieces.

  And that brings us up to date, I believe.

  If you are still reading, my dear—and I highly suspect that you are—I assure you of my well-being. No lasting damage was done. I am resilient as rubber. The split knee was the worst of it, and the resident nurse had me stitched and patched up in no time.

  It was also good fortune that I did not suffer either hypothermia or frostbite, thanks to both my insulated clothing and the fact that the well had long since run dry. My knee hurts something incredible, but my generous host, being an accomplished chemist, has supplied me with a handsome amount of pain medication. I actually prefer his private whisky stock. Fortunately, I have worked an inexpensive bargain with Lillian, the housekeeper, for her silent assistance in both acquiring me a bottle and dropping these letters in the post.

  The stakes have been raised. Make no mistake of that. Highly powerful supernatural forces are, without doubt, at work here. And it would seem that they are aware of my presence. Deducing their motivations is my next goal.

  Until next time…

  My love is yours,

  Cadmus

  February 02, 1910

  My darling Ana,

  This morning, sunlight was a welcome intruder to my dreams. During the night, I was visited by terrible nightmares of being chased through the endless, echoing halls of this grandiose Manor by the walking canine corpses of yesterday. As you know, night visions of the unconscious do not typically frighten me, but these were an altogether too realistic sort.

  I suppose that should have been signal enough for the strangeness that awaited me during the rest of the day…

  “If I can’t persuade you to rest that knee of yours, Mr. Eyers, I
insist that you eat a little bacon before you go hobbling around the house like a bull-headed old tomcat.” Joyce Bindle was the middle-aged resident nurse who attended to Mr. Leetsdale, and she took her job quite seriously. When she was not caring for my sickly employer, it appeared that she also took up slack where the currently shrunken staff needed her. And likely where they didn’t, too.

  I could tell by the hard look in her eye that few people, man or woman, had the foolish ambition of questioning her word. She was thick in frame, and quite tall, which made her an imposing figure. Her square jaw looked fit for cracking ball bearings.

  “I suppose an egg would be appreciated.” I offered my most gracious smile and hoped that she would not order me back to bed.

  She gave a stiff smirk and returned to the kitchen to fetch me a pair of boiled eggs and sliced ham. Since the pain relievers had also deadened my hunger the night before, I actually finished the whole plate.

  “There’s a healthy boy,” she said with an almost-approving nod.

  I took advantage of the opportunity to glean what information I could from this observant and discerning woman. “Can you tell me, Mrs. Bindle, what you know about the situation concerning Mr. Leetsdale’s prized dogs?”

  “I hear they were strung like tinsel in the woods.”

  I frowned at her callous description. Her tone was cold and indifferent, but to her defense, I had yet to witness it in any other state.

  “What I mean is, do you think you might have any sort of insight into the matter that other, less observant members of the household may have overlooked?” At times, it is beneficial to stroke the vanity of those who consider themselves wiser than their company.

  “None at all,” she said and began to busy herself with tidying up the table.