by Jim McKenna
And what appeared to be bruises in the shape of two little hands on my chest.
Looking back on it now, I think I was close to letting it all slip away, and there was a real chance I could have had my life return to normal. As the days, then weeks, went by and my body healed, the stark horror of what I had seen in the woods faded into a murky background in my brain. The recollection of all those horrible sights lost some clarity, and details began to wobble, so as the cuts and scrapes scabbed over and healed into little pink lines on my skin so too my mind was knitting itself together and moving on.
Autumn settled in, cool and crisp. My walks down the tree lined streets were easy and pleasant, replete with the smoky scents of new fires in the hearths and dead leaves burning in piles. It was a wet season and there was talk everywhere of corn blight and the troubles the farmers were having getting the crops out of the field. And there was sadness and concern at the news of a little boy gone missing just over the nearby in Indiana, accompanied by sad, unknowing wags of the head at what this world was coming to in that fearful place just beyond the borders of Grogan Mills. After consulting with my doctor I had set the end of my Cardiac Exile and return to work at December first. This gave me some decent recovery time remaining to strengthen my heart, but also a goal close enough to be realistic and attainable.
The Grogan Mills Historical Society was housed in the old courthouse a few blocks from my home, a three-story Second Empire structure with a high Mansard roofed clock tower proudly overlooking the city. I had been in the building a few times when visiting some of the local craft fairs that took place on the lawns and walkways surrounding the old courthouse. The inside had been converted into a museum of sorts, with each room dedicated loosely to some theme. What the museum amounted to was a clearinghouse for residents who had a few neat things in their attics like old photos and war souvenirs they were happy to see on display.
A few days after Halloween I walked to the museum and had a look around. The place was staffed by a trio of old ladies who seemed rather put off at the idea that anyone might come to the Historical Society with the nerve of asking about, you know, history. To them the natty displays of stuffed wildlife and local rocks, apparently far too delicate to even dust, or the fine collection of World War II loot should be more than enough for any visitor.
I’d once come to the courthouse and asked if there were any old photographs of Grogan Mills other than the ones that had been reprinted poster-size and framed in the hallways. Back then I had the idea of researching the history of my house. I was led to a room that had once been the county records office. Old style filing cabinets were mounted behind a counter, and each one was stuffed with family photos donated to the museum. Most of these were reddish-hued photos from the seventies and eighties, and there was not any manner of a filing system in sight. I gave up on researching my house then and there.
This time I did nothing more than stroll the interior of the building and take in the simple exhibits. One lady, smartly dressed and smelling of a weird mix of stripper perfume and talcum powder, seemed determined to keep a weather eye on me as I walked. I tried to ignore the feeling of being watched, but it reminded me of the feeling of unease I had been experiencing ever since my hike to the woods. It felt to me as if there was always someone watching me, or sizing me up as I walked, or ate at a restaurant, or had a beer at the Elks. I was having a lot of problems trusting my own intuition, and so I let that issue roll over me as best as I could. But still there was a sense of unease, a slight dissonance in all my conversations with friends. I was thinking of this, and also of potentially seeing a therapist to deal with the problem as I walked through the museum, the old floorboards creaking beneath my feet.
On my own and without thinking of it at all, I wandered into what is called The Tanner Room. This exhibit was dedicated to a founding family of Grogan Mills, and contained relics and photographs of their lives. At once I recognized the Tanner House as being a large brick mansion set upon a low hill some three blocks from my own home. The room was decorated with old furniture, a baby carriage, and like items. I spent some time admiring a black Victorian style dress mounted on a mannequin. On the wall behind it was a photo of a stern but attractive woman wearing the same dress (I think). I admired the contours and simple lines of the old garment, and stood staring at it for some time before my perfumed ghost swept past down the hall, casting a watchful eye upon me as if she read my thoughts of donning the dress and swanning about the neighborhood, or even raping the mannequin. I nodded politely to her and turned to the other photos on the wall.
She wore a pinafore dress and was posed demurely, her hands on her lap. Her dark hair was brushed back from her face and pinned in a long ponytail. Her head was turned in three-quarter profile, away from the camera. I stared at the picture, taking in the smoothness of her face, and the shape of her bright eyes over the thin, aquiline nose and full lips. A cameo covered her throat, held in place by a black ribbon. The air grew stuffy, and my heart thumped in my chest. I swallowed drily and looked at the card beneath the picture, which simply read “Betsy Tanner, 1880”. My mind went back to the woods, and the girl. I saw her marble white flesh, her thin limbs, her agonized face close to mine, and heard the buzzing pleas of a little girl in my head.
We are lost. All of us. Take us home.
I knew then this was the girl I encountered in the wood. Not only could I see it clearly in the old photograph, but I could feel it in my heart. I knew with unerring certainty that this was the girl lost in the cold depths of that horrid grotto. Betsy Tanner.
My heart was hammering in my chest so loud I was sure it could be heard all over the old building, in every dusty room, the echo rebounding off the glass cases and the papered walls. I shut my eyes tight and clasped my hands over my face. My hands were cold as ice, my face burning. I opened my eyes and quickly looked for the perfume lady, and breathed a shuddering sigh of relief at seeing the empty hall. My shoes seemed glued to the floor and I lifted each leg to get some circulation going again. I turned back to the picture.
Betsy was staring right at me now, eyes wide with terror, her dressed ragged and torn, her hair hanging down and tangled, her lips drawn back in a silent scream. Her body heaving with gasps of raw fear.
Heaving… moving in a photograph.
I screamed, a hoarse deep howl of fear. Stumbling back, I fell into the hallway, and heard the approach of feet on the creaking boards. All the old ladies rushed towards me, eyes wide with concern. “Sir? Sir? Are you alright?” I scrambled clumsily to my feet, muttering some sort of apology from my dry, clotted mouth though lips that seemed not to work. I turned and shambled to the door, still muttering. With trembling hands I pushed at the old double doors and lurched outside onto the weathered steps. Down them I went to a bench in the courtyard, where I sat down heavily, shaking with fear.
It took me awhile to regain anything like composure. The ladies swooped down from the building and fretted around me. Perfume lady went back inside and returned with a cup of cold water. I gulped it down, still mouthing apologies and assuring them all I was okay. Somehow I convinced them, and with three worried (or watchful?) backward glances they all went back inside. A couple of months ago this would have been the time to drag a pack of smokes from my pocket and light up. But that was a thing of the past, as was so much of what I was and who I had been prior to The Event. I wondered there as I had many times if my life was ever going to get back to how it had been, or for that matter if I really wanted it to.
The Event loomed so large in my mind. I heard again the words of my friend Stan, about how damage to the heart changes someone. I could not accept what I had just seen. I had to believe there was something broken in me that was creating these monstrous images from thin air. Throughout my Cardiac Exile I had always been determined to heal, to mend, to improve. Was this not a chance given to me to rewrite many pages in life? But it was a hard time, and a fearful time. All of it. And until now I felt it was the leg
acy of my own death that caused the hallucinations in the wood. Did this image make it real, or was this still my mind – my soul – somehow wrecked by The Event?
I slowed my breathing, forcing myself to relax. My hands stopped their shaking, and I felt myself ease back down from the edge of panic and terror. Down on the ground here and there I saw cigarette butts littering the ground. I had smoked for thirty years, and the taste and aroma of tobacco had been such a part of my world that I had not even noticed it before. But now that it was gone there were times when the unmasked taste of my mouth or the human scent of my own breathing were just disgusting to me. I had to find a way to move on from all of this.
I got up slowly and started for home. I was unwrapping a stick of gum as I rounded the corner and saw the old cornerstone of the courthouse. The date 1883 winked in my eye. I walked maybe three more steps then stopped and turned back to the cornerstone frowning, knowing my eye had caught something else. I walked to the cornerstone and knelt down, running my fingers over the words and letters, and there to the left of the formal inscription was etched a symbol, that if I had seen it before I had dismissed as Masonic in origin. But there was a chill down by back now as I recognized the three fingered hand, and recalled where I had seen it before. I stared at it a few more minutes, running my fingers along it. I gave myself a bit of a headrest when I quickly rose and started walking home.
Once there I fired up my BMW, and made my way back down to Tyler Street. I looked up and down the street, eyeing carefully all the old buildings lined up in a tight row. I parked near the old white opera house which had been empty as long as I’d lived here. People told me it had been a JC Penny’s for years, and it was only on the scroll work at the top of the building that one saw the words Opera House with the date 1891. I searched the three exposed walls of the exterior before finding the cornerstone, and there was yet another symbol, this one a fish. I searched down the block for any building that might have a revealed cornerstone. The next building that had a stone had a bird with a long beak, the next a crescent moon. All of them were replicas of what I had seen on the accursed spinning granite slab.
My mind reeled at this new information, and I was unsure of what I should do next. I knew already the ladies at the historical society would be no help so instead I drove to the library, thinking perhaps there was some explanation I could find in their small collection. I parked the car and walked around the building to the entrance and froze before I got to the door and turned around. There was a dedication stone here, too. This one had yet another symbol from the rock.
But this was no old building. The date on it was 1997.
Quickly I jumped back in my car and drove to the new city administration building, just months ago constructed and with a lot of controversy far east of downtown. My motor idled in the parking lot as I jumped out and looked for a cornerstone. It took a while but in time I found it, and there was etched the names of the mayor and council who dedicated the building, this year’s date, and to my growing horror a carved spiral, bisected by a vertical line.
I don’t really remember driving home. My car idled in front of my garage and I sat behind the wheel staring ahead at nothing. Ever since the event, I had these recurring pains in my chest. The doctors assured me it was not my heart, and I was told this was how my body was manifesting stress. Now sitting there I felt my right hand massaging my sternum in little spirals. Slowly, degree by degree my courage returned to me.
I had seen something in the wood. I had known it was there in some black reptilian place in my mind ever since that spring day in the courthouse parking lot. There were bad things there, evil things. I ran my mind over that morning. Cutting my way into the wood. Finding the grotto and the spinning stone. Standing in the water spinning the stone with one hand, snapping pictures…
Pictures.
I had never looked at the pictures.
I killed the engine and got out of the car. I walked to my backdoor and opened it, and just as I went inside I saw a police cruiser slowly drive past, Chief Hardwick behind the wheel, watching me go inside. Did he watch me? I thought so. Did he?
I closed all the curtains tightly. Then opened the door to the basement where on the steps I had tossed the backpack. I rummaged the pockets and found the camera. It was crusted with dried mud. I pried open the memory card compartment and pulled the card from the slot. I dropped the camera and went upstairs. I had made one of the upstairs bedrooms my office, and I sat down at my computer and slipped the SD card into the slot. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Then opened them and started scrolling through the photos, one by one.
All of it was real. All of it. The images revealed my journey down into the grotto. There were pictures of the water, the rocks. The spinning stone. Behind this the mound loomed large and in shadow. Each of the etchings was there. Eleven symbols, some exactly as I had just seen them on the buildings. The last picture was in to the water at my feet. My legs spread in the water. The flinty tools visible on the pebbles. The cutting tools. I remember putting one in my jacket pocket. Was it still there? I had dumped the torn clothes in my garage, still in the bag from the hospital. I leaned back and stared at the screen. I squeezed my eyes shut and opened them again, letting them drift over the image.
There. Right there at the edge of the water, near the top of the frame. Was that a reflection in the water? I had not seen that when I first looked at the photo. My chair creaked as I leaned closer to the screen. Yes, right there. A head with long hair. Shoulders. Arms. I squinted, peering closer now, closer. I heard a car roll by outside. A dog barked. Wait… no, I’m wrong. I see someone, some reflection in the water, but it is not on the water. It is a reflection on the screen.
Something behind me in the room.
Again the chair creaked under my shifting weight as I slowly rotated the swivel chair. I sucked in a deep breath and turned.
She stood in the doorway to my office. She stared at me, with eyes filled with terror and sorrow. Her teeth did not touch behind her black lips, but her jaw raised and lowered, up and down, like a fish left out of water. She wore a red pinafore that was stained with mud and blood, and torn. Her hair hung down her back and over her slender shoulders. Her feet were bare and muddy.
“Betsy,” I croaked, and she started towards me, slow and deliberate across the floor. She reached out her slender arms, placing her hands on my shoulders, and leaned into me. Her face drew closer to mine. I held her gaze. I could not look away. Closer her head came to until her slender nose touched mine, and slowly she pressed her gaping black lips to my mouth. I felt the icy wetness of her mouth, the soft lips and the hard teeth like icicles. A scream was bubbling up inside of me, but before it could escape she heaved her little body, and exhaled a blast of rank, putrid air deep in my lungs. I leaned far back in the chair, silently gagging on the rotting smell that soaked into every part of me. And in a raw moment, in that same split second within a split second’s time when I knew death, the memories of that hideous night that were repressed deep within came flooding back to me.
The woods was dark when I returned to consciousness, and there was a light misty rain. I was lying on my side, my clothes beaded with moisture, and I shivered in the cold. My legs thrashed as I tried to get a purchase on the ground and rise, and I heard beside me in the darkness a whispered “Shhh.” She sat close by me cross legged on the ground. There was a faint gold gleam flickering through the trees and I could make out her face, and the intense eyes staring at me. She looked so very real, and I reach my hand out to her and touched the bare flesh on her side. Her skin was so cold, and wet with the rain, and yet there were no goose bumps, and the exposed nipples on the early buds of her breasts were soft and not pebbled with the cold. Droplets of water dotted her hair like upon a glistening spider web. “Make no noise,” she whispered, “they are here.”
I heard it then. The drumming sounds and the droning of voices through the brush towards the grotto. Shadows from the firelight flickered
and danced through the trees. I heard screams, wailing, and violent laughter. I slid down on my belly and crawled forward through the brush. I had to go about twelve feet before I could see anything, and Betsy kept appearing beside me, her head darting from the frenzied noise ahead of me and my own face, her eyes wide. Finally, after what seemed like an hour of stealthy crawling, I pressed myself flat against the ground and parted just a little of the thick bush in front of me.
I was back behind and to the left of the huge mound. In front of me the grotto was lit with kerosene torches. People, some of whom I knew, all of whom I’d seen, thrashed naked and wild to the insane beating of drums. They thrashed into each other in their wild ecstasy, the men leaping and howling, the women thrashing and convulsing as they were mounted from behind and pumped by the raging men. Here was a woman I knew from the bank writhing and bouncing up and down on a man who coached little league. He had her flabby hips gripped in his hands and pumped her up and down on him furiously. Bodies whirled and twisted in the sickly yellow light, and fell voices echoed through the woods.
I peered through the savage group down into the water of the grotto. There on either side of the stone stood Jake and Betty Mather. Each wore nothing but ragged flapping capes and that looked to be made of human skin. They roared a chant into the night, spinning the stone in front of them with demoniacal fury. Beside them I saw Hardwick, his hands raised to the sky, clutching in both hands chips of stone from the pool.
And then the drumming stopped. The cultists – for what else could they be – stopped their hellish orgy, and heaving and panting crowded down the blocks of stone into the pool. The stone was spinning, slower now, slower, and as it was no longer a blur I could see the skinny arms and legs tied to its surface. Each of those who pressed into the water reached down and came up with a stone knife clutched in their hand, and just as the spinning of the stone came to a halt, with a savage scream they descended on the helpless offering, flaying the skin and slicing at it madly. And then when it was done, when the blood from dozens of raw ragged wounds poured over the stone it started spinning again, and all those assembled were baptized in the flying blood. And still the stone was spinning, spinning, spinning…