The Midnight Ground

by Eric Dontigney

  “God, that man is a moron.”

  I laughed. Lil, maybe looking to join in, made a little noise. Patty’s head jerked to one side to look past me. She eyed Lil and then me. “You kept that cat.”

  “She kept me, I think. She’s good company.”

  Patty stepped around me and held out her hand toward Lil. She stayed far enough back that the gesture wasn’t a threat, just an offer. Lil regarded Patty’s hand with curiosity. The little gray cat stood, did one of those impossible arched stretches that cats do, and stepped over to sniff at Patty’s hand. Patty slowly reached her hand up and scratched under Lil’s chin. The cat let out a soft purr, rubbed the side of her head against Patty’s palm, and then retreated to curl up again.

  “Huh,” said Patty. “Guess she doesn’t hate everyone anymore.”

  “Maybe she just likes you,” I said.

  Patty raised an eyebrow at me, but didn’t comment on it. “I wouldn’t go mentioning you’ve got her in here to anyone. They don’t allow pets.”

  “Heh,” I chuckled. “Listen to you. Pet. Like I actually have any kind of control over her.”

  Patty went over to the door and threw me a serious look over her shoulder. “I mean it. You find something out, you tell me.”

  “Like I said, I find a person, I’ll tell you.”

  Patty rolled her eyes, shook her head, and closed the door behind her.

  Chapter 26

  The library was a tiny building guarded by two elderly librarians. One was a surly, pinched-face man. The other was a soft-spoken woman who turned out to be his wife. The man eyed me with suspicion when I came through the door. I wondered if he looked at everyone like that or if it was just for me. I smiled and nodded at the man.

  “Can I help you?” the librarian asked in high, nasal voice.

  “I hope so. I’m looking for some information on local history. The school in particular. I understand it used to be a church.”

  The man wrinkled his nose in a manner that suggested he found me, the fact that my parents elected to procreate, that queries were part of the English language, my specific query, and possibly the existence of the school, distasteful. With an attitude like that, it was no wonder the library remained an afterthought in the town. Though, I admitted, the Internet had also probably played a role.

  “Will you be taking anything out? If you plan to take anything out, you’ll need to get a library card.”

  That was said in a tone that implied that the man would rather pour gasoline on his face and spark a match than give me a library card. I started losing patience, but I kept my cool.

  “No, I won’t need to take anything out,” I said through only slightly clenched teeth. “Just indulging my curiosity.”

  “Hmph,” said the man.

  “Edgar,” chided the man’s wife, “stop being such a grump.”

  Edgar gave his wife an annoyed look. “You know how these kids are today. No real respect for the books. It’s all Google this and Wikipedia that.”

  That took me off guard. It had been a very long time since anyone had lumped me into the category of “these kids.” Then again, Edgar appeared close to eighty. Maybe, to someone that age, I really did look like a teenager. The woman appraised me with filmy, brown eyes. She shook her head and smiled.

  “Edgar, this man has to be nearly forty years old. I doubt he’s planning on vandalizing the library or the books. Are you a vandal, young man?”

  “No, ma’am. I’m fairly confident that I’d recall sacking Rome.”

  Edgar gave me a calculated look. “I believe you’re thinking of the Visigoths.”

  “They did it first, but the Vandals took their turn about 40 or 50 years later,” I said, recognizing the ploy. “Although, if we’re being technical, the Senones were the first to sack Rome.”

  “You know your history, son,” said Edgar, his voice still high and nasal, but with an undercurrent of grudging respect.

  “We can’t know who we are without knowing where we come from, or avoid the mistakes of the past without studying them.”

  “I told you he wasn’t a vandal,” said the old woman.

  “You were right, Mary Beth,” said Edgar.

  The admission sounded like an often-repeated ritual to me. The old man inclined his head to me.

  “Mary Beth handles the local history. Why don’t you show him around, dear?”

  Mary Beth gave Edgar a pleased smile and patted his arm with her liver-spotted hand. “Come with me, young man.”

  The old woman came out from the behind the—I frowned at the piece of furniture. It was too small to be a counter, too solid to be a table, and too high to be a desk. I dubbed it the descountable. The old woman came out from behind the descountable. She moved quite well for someone her age. I fell into step beside her, consciously shortening my stride and slowing my pace. She noticed and gave me a little nod. She led me toward the back of the building, past shelves stuffed with fiction of every description, a rack with some new releases displayed face out, and the countless varieties of non-fiction.

  “Don’t think too badly of Edgar,” said Mary Beth. “The last time a man in a suit came into the library, it was to say the library’s budget was getting cut. We had a girl working here part-time. Edgar had to fire the poor dear. I don’t know who was more upset, him or her.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” I said.

  “Seems as though everyone in government thinks libraries are just books. Most of the time, I think books are the least thing we offer here.”

  The old woman shook her head, as if to dislodge the thoughts. She led me through a door into a small room dominated by a large wooden table. Generations of careless pens and intentional teenage defacement scarred the tabletop. Bookshelves lined the walls, though only half the shelves contained actual books. The rest were filled by plastic bins, each labeled to indicate a year or years, which held a variety of files and papers. The labels were chronological and stretched back to what had to be the founding of the town.

  “You said you were interested in the school, yes?”

  I nodded my head. The old woman didn’t hesitate before she went to one of the shelves and picked out a half-dozen books. Most of the books were slender little volumes that looked self-published. I guessed there was limited demand for such books beyond the county border. No big, or for that matter, regional publisher would show much interest, no matter how well-written they were. Mary Beth set the books on the table.

  “All of these reference the old church. You know, it was still a church when I was a girl.”

  “Oh? Were you part of the congregation?”

  “Me? Heavens no. I was inside the church lots of times, of course. It was the only building big enough for community events for years. The congregation was small, tiny even, for a little town like this. I never understood why they built such a large church. It must have been fearsome expensive. Though, I suppose only Mr. Cavanaugh knew for sure.”

  “E.J. Cavanaugh?”

  She gave me a surprised look.

  I shrugged. “Saw the name out at the graveyard.”

  “The graveyard? What an odd place to visit.”

  “Morbid curiosity, I suppose.” The lie rolled off my tongue with an ease that shocked me. “The state of the local graveyard can tell you a lot about the people who live somewhere.”

  She mulled that notion for a moment. “I suppose it probably can tell you something, at that. As to your question, not E.J. Cavanaugh. I suppose he must have known, since he paid for it, but he was dead before I came along. I was thinking of his son, James. He was a nice man, but sad. He moved away when I was, oh, seven or so.”

  “Anyone know what became of him?”

  “There were rumors that he ran off to all sorts of places, Brazil, Morocco, and even post-war Germany, though why he’d have gone there was never clear. No one really knows, not for sure. I think he just went to live somewhere where no one knew him. Probably a place that didn’t remind him so
much of his father. Old E.J. was an institution here. But listen to me blathering on. I’ll leave you to your books.”

  “Not at all. I appreciate you taking the time.”

  “If you’re especially keen on the subject, there’s information about the church in some of those plastic bins,” said Mary Beth, gesturing to the plastic containers. “Old documents and the like, though it’s an acre of work to find anything in them.”

  I eyed the bins with some doubt. “Hopefully, it won’t come to that.”

  Mary Beth gave me a grandmotherly smile. “If you change your mind, I know someone who might be able to help you with the bins.”

  At that, Mary Beth turned and left the room. I had a suspicion that she was going to tell Edgar that I was a very nice young man and that he shouldn’t think so poorly of people. That wasn’t true, but who was I to try to dissuade her? I spread the small pile of books out in front of me. I started with the oldest two, since they were written closer to the time of the church’s construction. I was less than impressed with the content. One had a single page that discussed, in the driest possible tones, how a church was constructed using a list of materials that I skipped entirely and completed sometime in early 1894.

  The other book was slightly more helpful. It specified that the church was built “at the behest of one E.J. Cavanaugh.” It said that the church was erected prior to the establishment of the town as a legal entity, which happened sometime around 1910. It also noted that Cavanaugh took a hand in the design of the church and singled out the oddity of the building compared with other churches found in the region. I sighed. I could have guessed all that without stopping by the library. I pushed the two older books aside and turned my attention to the handful of self-published tracts.

  While none of the small books were devoted specifically to the church, they were all shockingly well-written. More important to me, they were all useful. I learned that E.J. Cavanaugh hadn’t just built the church. He purchased miles of land in every direction, had a road built, and then had a couple dozen homes constructed. He sold most of those homes at negligible profit to a select group of families. The other homes, more like boarding houses, were used to house the crews of men hired to first build the houses and then the church. Two of the small books mentioned an unspecified tragedy that occurred late in the church’s construction.

  What caught my attention, though, was the subtext. I’d done enough reading over the years to fill in the gaps. There were hints everywhere at the oddness of Cavanaugh, his church, and the families he brought to the little community he built. The word cult never turned up in any of the little books, but it might as well have been written in giant neon letters. I leaned back in the chair, trying to imagine what the unspecified tragedy had been, when Mary Beth poked her head into the room.

  “You’ve been in here a while. Thought I’d see if I could help you with anything.”

  I turned and blinked at the woman, as my brain tried to configure the jigsaw puzzle of information into a solution. I shook myself out of the thought haze and smiled at her.

  “Oh, well that was very thoughtful of you,” I said.

  An idea occurred to me and I gave Mary Beth a considering look. She was the right age to have heard the stories from people who were there at the time. She also struck me as someone who liked to tell a tale or two. Not gossip, as she’d surely be offended by such an idea, but telling an old story from her childhood would just be good fun. My expression must have been a little too intense for Mary Beth’s comfort, because she got a nervous look and started to shuffle a little. I cut her a break.

  “You know,” I said, “Maybe there is something you can help me with.”

  Chapter 27

  It took a moment for her brain to transition from “he’s giving me a creepy look” to “oh, he was just thinking real hard.” Once she made the transition, though, Mary Beth perked up and smiled. She came over to the table and sat down across from me.

  She sighed in evident relief. “I hope you don’t mind if I sit. Legs aren’t what they used to be.”

  “Not at all, ma’am.”

  “Such a polite young man,” she said, giving me an approving smile. “Now then, what can I help you with?”

  I weighed the best way to frame the question. Whoever wrote those books went out of their way to avoid saying anything outright. That probably meant it was still considered a taboo topic. I decided there wasn’t a good, innocuous way to maneuver the conversation that way. That only left the direct approach.

  “These books all reference some kind of vague tragedy, but there aren’t any details. I was hoping you might be able to fill in some of the gaps.”

  The grandmotherly friendliness was replaced with deep wariness as Mary Beth gave me a long, considering look. That wasn’t a good sign.

  “Do you mind if I ask why you’re so interested in the old church?”

  I shrugged. “Intellectual curiosity. It’s weird architecture to see outside of Eastern Europe or a big city, especially given its vintage.”

  She didn’t look like she believed me, but Mary Beth let it go without comment. She puffed out a troubled breath and fixed me with a stern glare.

  “You aren’t from a small town, are you?”

  I shook my head.

  “I thought not. You’d have the good sense not to ask about that, if you were.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Things hang on in small towns. Old rivalries, old tragedies, they never lose currency. There’s one poor girl, people still talk about the scandal when she got pregnant in high school.”

  “Not that uncommon,” I offered.

  “That was twenty years ago.”

  “Seriously? Don’t people have better things to do?”

  “I told you, things hang on. Still, I don’t see any real harm in telling you the truth.”

  Despite her words, she kept looking at the door as if she expected some kind of goose-stepping thought police to crash through it the second she opened her mouth. She studied her hands for the better part of a minute. “People died. Supposedly, it was an accident.”

  “Supposedly? You don’t think so?”

  “I know it wasn’t. They were murdered.”

  My brain tried to follow the implications of her statement. Murdered. On the one hand, it might explain how a demon took up residence in a freaking church. Murder left a spiritual stain on the places it happened. The unwilling loss of life, the pain, the fear, the wrongness of it took a very long time to wash away. That was if it ever could be washed clean. More often than not, the stain drove away exactly the kind of people and behaviors that would rectify the wrongness. It’s why houses and neighborhoods where awful things happened tended to decay and attract a bad element.

  On the other hand, I was quite certain that the church had been used as a church. I wasn’t sure why I held the certainty, but I believed it. The act of worship, the accumulation of prayer, and the community of belief were precisely the kinds of things that could heal the spiritual damage done by murder. If it had been a church, then the foul aftereffects of the murder should have been largely ameliorated and made the place inhospitable to a demon. It just didn’t make any damn sense.

  Mary Beth was giving me a concerned frown. I noticed my mouth was hanging open and shut it. I was still missing something.

  “Why are you so sure it was murder?”

  “Alex Burman, God rest him, investigated at the time.”

  “Alex Burman?”

  “Sheriff in those days. I think he was the hardest man that ever lived. Lived to be over a hundred years old. Wore the badge until he was seventy.”

  “That’s pretty hardcore,” I said, impressed.

  “Hardcore,” repeated Mary Beth, who probably wasn’t used to the slang. “Yes, I suppose he was pretty hardcore. Anyway, the whole awful business got covered up because E.J. Cavanaugh was richer than God.”

  “If it got covered up, then how do you know?”
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br />   “Burman kept a journal. The woman who wrote those books found it and showed it to me. He wrote about the investigation,” she said in the absent way of someone who’s lost in thought. “Hard to imagine a time when thirteen deaths could be swept under the rug.”

  I jerked forward in my chair. “Thirteen? You’re sure it was thirteen?”

  Mary Beth leaned back and gave me a disapproving look, but she nodded. “Yes. Thirteen people died that day. Based on Burman’s description, it sounded like they were given some kind of drug and had their wrists cut.”

  I felt a chill go through me. I had an idea what had happened and it made me a little ill to think about it. Mary Beth and old Sheriff Burman had entirely the wrong picture of what those bodies represented. Their mistake was understandable, since they were processing the information with a complete ignorance of magic. If I was right, though, I was pretty sure that Abby was doomed. There wouldn’t be anything that Helena, or me, or anyone else could do to help her in the long run.

  “Are you all right, Mister…” Mary Beth paused. “I never caught your name.”

  “Adrian,” I said automatically.

  “Mr. Adrian?”

  “What?” I asked, jarred by the incongruity of her words.

  “Your name is Mr. Adrian?”

  “Oh, no. Hartworth. Adrian Hartworth.”

  “Ah, that makes more sense. Are you all right, Mr. Hartworth?”

  No, I was not all right. I was mortified by my intuition and what it might mean for Abby. What in the hell had E.J. Cavanaugh been mixed up in? If I was right, he’d engaged in nothing short of naked insanity. If I was right, the demon hadn’t taken up residence in the church. The church itself had been built and thirteen people had sacrificed themselves to contain the damned thing. Someone must have screwed up somewhere along the line, though, because the containment had failed. No, I reconsidered. It hadn’t failed entirely, but some portion of it had failed. It was the only explanation for why that inky black monstrosity could reach into the world.

  “I’m fine. Just a little shocked by the whole thing. Like you said, hard to imagine.”