Nathaniel is off recording ambient sound. They have some time to kill before four minutes after midnight, so he has ventured off, chasing crickets or something silly like that. Lord only knows what. She almost feels sorry for him. Almost. But Amber understands now that there always needs to be a storyteller. Someone to tell the tale. Keep it spinning. Spinning.
Spinning.
Spinning.
Spinning.
Amber hesitates. She pauses long enough to take in the sight before her. Nathaniel is busy with his little recorder, not paying attention to what is happening along Jessica’s grave.
The soil. It’s…
Spinning.
Swelling. Something under the ground budges its way up until the dirt itself corkscrews outward.
Whatever it is, it’s certainly small. Too small to be a finger. More like a worm wriggling up from the earth. Amber wouldn’t have noticed it at all if she hadn’t been so focused on her grave in the first place, if she hadn’t been staring, waiting, for the page to turn and begin the next chapter of this story.
The soil puckers and cracks, peeling back to release a white filament.
A pale, slender sapling. The ghostly kudzu fans back and forth, unfurling itself even further.
Growing.
Then it bifurcates. The tendril branches out into two segments.
Amber squints. Strains to see what it can be. It certainly isn’t a worm. It’s too long to be that.
These look like roots. They have the slightest sheen. Almost like porcelain. Some kind of enamel.
Like a tooth.
A tooth.
Amber’s tooth. She had planted it right here, right in the ground, over forty years ago. That exact spot. She lost her tooth during the shoot in ’71 and she buried it in the soil directly above Jessica Ford’s grave. She promptly forgot all about it but now—
Now—
Now it’s growing. The roots of her upside-down tooth reach into the air, growing as fast as Jack’s beanstalk, branching and segmenting and branching out again, each division uncurling itself, a phantasmal fern fanning through the air. She’s looking at a picture of a circulatory system, like one of those images from science class, where you break down the body into its various systems. The nervous, the circulatory, the muscular, the digestive, and on and on…
Here—here is the phantasmal. The spectral system.
The palest veins.
The stalk of the tooth swells to a thicker girth, into a trunk. The first pair of fernlike tendrils to branch at the top now sway at their own pace, flexing and tensing through the air.
Arms. The thing that was once her tooth is now sprouting arms.
Sprouting legs.
Fingers.
Toes.
Before long, before reason kicks in and takes over and submits Amber to such notions as calling out for Nathaniel, for help, or running, or screaming bloody murder—she finds herself staring into the hollow cavities of Jessica’s eye sockets. The fanning enamel forms into thicker sections, webbing themselves into a human form. Amber is looking at a skull.
Jessica is coming together.
Becoming whole.
How can Nathaniel not see this? Where has he gone? Does Jessica do this every night? Is this a part of her haunting? Or is this all for Amber’s sake? It’s so hard to tell, to know any of these answers. To know what’s real anymore…But Amber doesn’t mind. She could care less. What she finds most surprising is that she isn’t afraid. Not a bit. She knew this moment would come. One day. And now that it’s here, finally here, the clock closing in on four past midnight, tick-tick-tick the pine needles all whisper, where the ghost of Jessica will wander along the confines of her grave, Amber feels at peace.
The truth shall set you free…
And there she is.
All of her.
Jessica drifts along the circumference of her fence. She paces around the inside of her grave, stepping over the teddy bears staring blankly back at her with their marble eyes. The stuffed animals at her feet all turn their heads as she sashays by. She holds her hands behind her back, chin dipped to her chest. She walks like a child. Holds her body like a child. Playful. Dainty. Floating on a cloud. She seems unaware of what time it is or how cold it is, even where she is, blissfully ignorant to the notion that this is her own grave.
Does she even know she’s dead?
Jessica glances up to Amber. It happens so quickly, it catches Amber off guard. She gasps as the air sticks in her throat. Jessica must have sensed the presence of people nearby.
Jessica stares at Amber.
And smiles.
She holds out her hand. Her palm faces up, her porcelain fingers fanning out. Amber suspects that this is what must have happened to Danielle, all those years ago. She must have seen Jessica wandering along her grave, just waiting for someone to come play with her. Danielle must have walked right up, and when nobody was looking, she must have taken Jessica’s hand.
She’s waiting.
Jessica is waiting for Amber to take her hand.
Waiting.
Waiting.
Yearning.
Amber takes a deep breath and does just what all the ghost stories warn people not to do.
Whatever you do…
She reaches her hand out to Jessica’s.
Don’t you ever…
She takes the ghost girl’s hand into her own. She holds on. Holds on to the cold.
Never ever…
And just like that…
Don’t!
Jessica is gone. Amber’s hand remains held up in the air. Holding nothing now.
SEVEN
“Woods ambience. October 16, 2016. 12:10 a.m.”
The battery life on my Olympus is thirty-six hours, so I’ve got plenty of digital space to record every last footstep, every crackling branch, during our little sojourn through the woods.
These endless woods.
How long have we been walking? I check my watch again. Only five minutes have passed since the last time I looked.
That’s odd. I thought it would’ve been longer.
These woods are throwing off my sense of direction. My sense of timing. I’m losing track of everything out here. Chalk it up to nervous energy. The excitement is really seeping in.
We’re close to Ella Louise. So close. I can feel it.
I sling my headphones around my neck, pulling them up to my ear every so often to double-check the sound quality. The recorder’s audio isolation is absolutely flawless. I could aim my Olympus at a bird from yards away and practically capture its heartbeat.
When I slip these headphones on, I feel as if I’ve suddenly removed myself from the moment. The actual walking in the woods. Like I’m now outside listening in.
Listening to myself.
This version of myself. Whatever my body is doing, it feels separate from my sense of hearing.
I’m all ears out here. Nothing else matters.
I might as well be at home, listening in. Listening to myself. My footsteps. The crackle of dried leaves under my feet. The snapping of a fallen branch.
It’s all so crisp in here.
The sound in my head.
Much clearer than out there, in real life, the real world. I prefer the sound of it all. Far more than my other sensations. I wish I could mute my sense of sight, of smell, of everything else—and just lose myself to the sound of the buckling pines bending in the breeze, the bristle of their needles, faint but persistent, like the smallest waves rolling over sand.
I can hear Amber’s footsteps.
That has to be her feet. For a moment, it almost sounds as if there is a third person walking alongside us—but no, that’s just an auditory trick.
Rather than turn to look at her, I simply listen to her strides fr
om within my noise-canceling over-the-ear headphones. Her gentle strides. Swish-swish. She never hesitates with her steps, not one misstep, forging ahead of me with an unnerving determination. Like she knows exactly where she’s going.
Just who’s leading who here?
“When did you become such a power walker?” I joke. “Can we—can we slow down?”
No response from Amber.
I had researched the Pilot’s Creek woodlands. The vast expanse of conifers stretches on for miles in either direction. Google Maps wasn’t much help. When I clicked around online, all I found was a digital carpet of pines. If Amber wasn’t careful, she could end up getting both of us lost. She doesn’t seem to be gauging her surroundings at all, simply plowing through the pines without looking where she’s even going.
Ella Louise’s unmarked grave has to be within walking distance of their cottage. Where it had once stood. For Wayne Reynolds and his co-conspirators to have dragged both her and Jessica out into the woods, they probably wouldn’t have gone too far. They had their fair share of pines to pick and choose from. Cut its branches. Tie Ella Louise up and strike a match.
Let them both burn.
It’s been debated online where the exact spot of their cabin had been. Considering there’s nothing left of it, no foundation, I feel like it’s pretty pointless to try tracking it down.
No, I want Ella Louise’s grave.
That’s the sweet spot. Those superstitious idiots were so frightened of the Fords, even after they murdered them, disposing of Ella’s body in the middle of the woods while dropping Jessica in the Fort Knox of all coffins.
I have a few potential hotspots for their burning. But even that’s speculation. For an event that happened eighty-five years ago, there’s hardly any physical evidence left behind. No scorched earth. No seared stake still rooted to the ground. No singed tree limbs. Nothing.
Ella Louise has to be buried out here.
Somewhere.
I’m going to find it. Find her. Before anyone else. I can just imagine it. Taste it.
A cold case. Solved. By me.
Justice.
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Amber won’t slow down.
I’ve got to pick up my stride just to keep up with the biddy. I can hear myself breathing heavily through the cans. My wheezing is picked up by the Olympus and filters through my headphones. The air has grown much colder now. My throat feels like it’s coated in ice. My lung tissue crystalizes with every bitter breath.
Not Amber. She’s been acting strange ever since we left the cemetery. Which is saying something. I had softballed a few questions her way and she hadn’t answered a single goddamn one. Wouldn’t dignify me with so much as a grunt. I might as well have been talking to myself.
Enough time has elapsed since my last stab. Time to try again.
“Tell me…” I cough. Clear my throat. The phlegm’s building in my chest. The cold air is really going to aggravate my asthma if I stay out here all night. Not that Amber notices.
“Tell me,” I try again. “Back in ’95. The night when Danielle Strode went missing…”
I pause, just for a moment, just to see how she reacts. If she’ll buck at the question. Resist. Turn around. Shut me down. But nothing. Nothing at all. She doesn’t flinch or huff or puff.
Amber just keeps on walking. Striding. Cutting through these trees with such a sense of purpose. With such a sense of…direction.
“The news reports all mentioned that the police found you after they discovered Danielle’s body. They said you were in some sort of fugue state. Like sleepwalking, one officer said. It took several hours before you even acknowledged anyone. You just woke up all of a sudden.”
Nothing from Amber. No response. Jesus, is she even listening?
“When the police questioned you, you said you had no recollection of going out into the woods in the first place. That the last thing you remembered was being on set, filming your scene for I Know What You Did on Jessica’s Grave. You said you remembered Danielle’s mother, Janet Strode, running on set, beside herself, asking if anyone had seen her daughter.”
Nothing from Amber.
Nothing at all.
“You said you remembered joining the search party. You took a flashlight along with everybody else on set and started walking through the woods…”
I point the Olympus at Amber’s back, as if aiming a pistol.
Say something, I think. Come on, come on, come on…
“But then you separated yourself from the rest of the crew. Several witnesses went on record to say they saw you waltz off on your own. Like you knew where you were going.”
I strain to hear any fluctuation in Amber’s breathing through my headphones. If my directional mics pick up the slightest shift in her demeanor.
Anything.
“For somebody who said they didn’t know where they were going or what had happened, it sure seemed to a lot of people like you knew exactly what you were doing.”
Is her breathing deepening? Is she crying? Is she panicking at all?
What the hell’s going on with her?
“You want to tell me where we’re going, Miss Pendleton? Is this the way you took Danielle Strode? Did you lead her through these woods? Did you take her by the hand? What did you do with her? Were you two pretending to be Jessica and Ella Louise Ford together? Only Danielle didn’t want to play? Did you leave her body out here, then head back to the set, film your scene like nothing happened? Only, when Mrs. Strode rushed in and started shrieking about her lost daughter…you panicked. You knew you’d gotten caught. You knew you had to do something.”
My voice is escalating now. Growing louder. I can hear the echo of it in the surrounding woods. Reverberating off the pines and bouncing back through my headphones.
“You rushed back into the woods. Where you had hidden her. You thought you could bury her. Simply dig a grave for her and hide her body out here where no one could find her.”
What is Amber doing? Is she hyperventilating?
Is she breathing at all?
Where’s the air?
“But when you realized that wasn’t going to work, you did the next best thing. You made up a story about it. A ghost story. Lucky for you, there was one right here. Just waiting for you. The Little Witch Girl did it, right? Not me. No, not innocent Amber Lee Pendleton. Not—”
There’s an intake of air.
Amber gasps.
Finally.
I would’ve been relieved, would have thought I had finally gotten to her, if it hadn’t been for the fact that the breath had come from my side.
Amber is directly in front of me.
Not at my left.
I halt midstride and turn, aiming the Olympus at the enveloping pines.
Nothing. Nothing at all.
Just the wind, as they say.
Amber hasn’t stopped walking. I have to run to catch up. As soon as my feet clomp over the dead leaves, that slight brittle crackle right under my heels, I swear I hear someone whisper just over my shoulder. I don’t hear it in my headphones this time, though.
I feel their breath.
On my neck.
Whoever it is stands close enough to whisper their sweet nothings right at my back, the exhale of their words sprawling across my shoulder. My neck.
I didn’t hear the words at all. I just felt them.
Whispers.
Exhales.
Breath.
The woods. The woods are whispering.
T
hese woods whisper, the old man at the diner had said.
I can hear them all around.
Their voices.
I don’t stop this time. No, this time, I pick up my pace. Walking fast. Real fast. Then running. Running, running, running to catch up with Amber.
But Amber has stopped. Stopped walking altogether.
She’s now standing before a ring of pines. Their trunks are so close to one another, it almost appears as if they’re a wall. A protective barrier. Hiding something.
Amber glances over her shoulder at me, like she wants to make sure I’m still there. Still following her. It’s too dark to tell for certain, but I swear she’s smiling.
And just like that, Amber turns back, facing the ring of trees, and steps through.
EIGHT
The clearing has a cerulean tinge to it. The moon casts a cool indigo glow over the brush, as if this hidden glade is filtered through a blue lens. It’s too blue, if such a thing is even possible. If this were a movie, I think, you’d think it was shot day-for-night.
Even my breath takes on a blue tint once I pass through the barrier of pines, entering this stretch of barren soil.
No trees grow here. Only weeds. The earth itself appears to darken, as if something has spilled, some pollutant soaking into the dirt and fouling the ground.
Amber stands in the center of the clearing. Her back is turned to me, her head bent down so that her gray hair—blue out here now—falls into her face.
I can’t see her face.
“Miss Pendleton…?” I didn’t realize I still had my headphones on. When I hear my own voice, I give a start. It doesn’t sound like me. My mind lapses back to recording my voice on my father’s tape player for the first time, back when I was a kid, replaying it and marveling at how different my voice sounded. That couldn’t be me, could it? Whose voice is this on the tape?
Here it is, years later, happening all over again.
Whose voice had that been?
Did I just say that?
Who else could it have been, if not me?
It strikes me, out here, in the woods, how removed I am from the present situation. I can distance myself from everything happening because I am so focused on the sound.
The Remaking Page 24