Devil's Creek

by Todd Keisling

  Jack nodded, smiling. “Thank you, Dr. Booth.”

  “Oh, please.” Booth waved away Jack’s words with a smile. “No one’s called me that since my Sue Bennett days. Please, just call me Tyler.”

  “Okay,” Jack said, “Tyler it is.”

  He ran his fingers across the cover of the notebook, tracing the contours of its coarse texture while he sought the right words, the right place to begin. There was no rhyme or reason to the notebook’s contents. Its pages were filled with various memoranda, some written in a scrawl so quick and narrow their words were difficult to decipher. From those passages, he gleaned his grandmother had developed her own form of shorthand, filling some pages with abbreviated words in patterns that looked like code. If he’d found the notebook in a kitchen cupboard, he would’ve mistaken them for recipes of a sort.

  Complementing her passages were articles from local newspapers, Op-Ed columns about the dark side of religious freedom, assorted update pieces about the status of the minors the media dubbed the “Stauford Six,” the formal inquiries from state officials about the goings-on at the church, and more recently, articles revisiting the horrid event five years gone, ten years gone, and even one about the twentieth anniversary. The final article in the book ended with a note in his grandmother’s script, four words scrawled in red pencil: “No mention of temple.”

  From there, Jack lost the narrative his grandmother was trying to convey, the articles set aside in favor of her odd shorthand, esoteric symbols, possible meanings, and something involving the cycles of the moon. Affixed to one of the pages was an old Polaroid of a dimly lit carving in stone. The carving depicted more symbols, much like the ones etched into her tombstone, but with one difference: a semi-circular design with a smaller circle in its center. Looking at it made his head hurt, and from the shadows of his mind crept a whispered phrase in a voice that was not his own. Old lies above, new love below.

  Together, her notes and collected articles served not as a sort of dark scrapbook compiled for the sake of nostalgia, but as a record of what happened, a bible of instruction for…what, exactly? A ceremony of some kind? Cycles of the moon? The spirit of religion dwelled in the pages of this notebook, more than he ever expected his grandmother to behold after all that happened at their church. She’d sworn off all manner of faith after the incident, a fact which the many townsfolk of Stauford refused to let her forget. How many times had they ventured down to the IGA for their weekly grocery trip and felt the hateful stares burning into their backs? Or what about all the times someone spat at her feet and called her a godless witch?

  Too many, Jack thought. He opened the notebook and flipped through its pages, searching for the place to begin. My work isn’t done yet, Jackie.

  This wasn’t like the Imogene Tremly he remembered. This wasn’t a bible. No, it was more like a grimoire.

  “Jack?”

  Tyler Booth stared at him with a twitching smile betraying the concern he tried to hide.

  “Sorry,” Jack said. “I was a million miles away for a minute there.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Tyler said. “Perhaps I should tell you how I knew your grandma?”

  Jack nodded. He sipped his weak coffee and listened. The old professor folded his arms across his chest and looked off into the distance, thinking.

  “Your grandma paid me a visit when I was still teaching. This was…1996, I believe. Near the end of the fall semester. Sue Bennett College was on its last legs then. Financial trouble. They lost their accreditation a year later and that was that.” Tyler shrugged. “Anyway, she’d sat in on one of my lectures and approached me afterward while I was packing up my notes. She said, ‘Are you the man who digs up old things?’”

  Jack smiled. “Yeah, that was Mamaw Genie, all right.”

  “It’s not every day a lady with an eyepatch pays me a visit, you know. We talked for a few minutes before she got down to business. She wasn’t one to mince words, your grandma.”

  “No, she really wasn’t. Why was she there to see you?”

  “She wanted to hire me. She’d read an essay I’d written on the discovery of strange Adena ceremony sites in the southeastern region, and said she knew of one I hadn’t mentioned.”

  “Calvary Hill?”

  Tyler nodded. “Yes, sir. Calvary Hill, off Devil’s Creek Road. I suppose you’re…well, I guess you’d rather not think about that.”

  “It’s okay,” Jack said. “I’ve come to terms with it.”

  Tyler eyed him carefully, the twitch in his lip more prominent now. Jack suspected if Tyler knew anything of his artwork, then the professor would know Jack was lying to him. Anyone who knew Jack’s past could see his pain on the canvas.

  “Yes,” Tyler said, and cleared his throat. “As I was saying, Calvary Hill wasn’t a part of my article, because I’d never heard of it. I mean, I’d heard of what happened at the church back in the 80s, but I don’t think anyone in the anthropological community ever considered the hill to be a Native American tumulus.”

  “So, she hired you to…what, exactly? Go explore Calvary Hill?”

  Tyler nodded. “Mostly correct. She asked me to go down there and find something for her.” He lifted his coffee mug and saucer. The porcelain rattled together as his hands shook. “And I did. I went down there once. I won’t go down there again.”

  “I’m not asking—”

  The old professor raised his hand. “I know, son. I just…well, a man my age has to put his foot down, make his boundaries known. Twenty years ago, I wasn’t so keen to say no. If I’d known then what I know now, you and me wouldn’t be sittin’ here having this conversation.”

  “Fair enough,” Jack said. He sighed. “Will you at least tell me what you found down there?”

  Dr. Booth rose from the table, opened a cabinet over the stove, and plucked a bottle of dark rum from the shelf. He poured a good amount into the mug.

  “Care for some liquid bravery?”

  The offer was tempting, but Jack remembered the previous evening and thought better of it. He smiled and shook his head. Tyler shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

  When he was seated, the old professor sipped his spiked coffee and smacked his lips. “That’ll do.” He waited a few seconds, collecting himself. “I’ve never been much of a religious man. Not really. At least, I wasn’t until I went where your grandma paid me to go. Even then, I’m still not sure of a higher power. Not in the sense my mama and papa believed. What I do believe is there are things in this world we aren’t meant to understand.”

  Jack nodded. “But what about the sticker on your van? That seems to be rather…focused, in a religious sort of way, don’t you think?”

  “That?” Tyler chuckled, but there was no humor in his voice. “It’s another totem, son. I’m sure you’ve noticed they’re all over my house. You saw the ones in my front yard.”

  “I’m not sure I follow.”

  “After what happened at Devil’s Creek, I’ve tried to surround myself with protective energy. Positive reinforcement. Something to keep…” The old professor scratched the white stubble on his chin, searching for the right words. “…something to keep the wolf from the door.”

  Jack pushed his coffee aside and leaned forward. He stared hard into the old man’s eyes.

  “Please tell me what happened to you. Why did my grandmother pay you to go there?”

  Dr. Tyler Booth lifted his mug and drained its contents in three loud gulps. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and met Jack’s stare. There was a cold intensity in his eyes, the thousand-yard gaze of a man who’d seen something he wasn’t meant to see.

  “Have it your way, Mr. Tremly. Here’s what I can tell you…”

  4

  “I left here early one Saturday morning in mid-October. The college was in the practice of instituting a ‘fall break’ after midterms, and to be honest, I’d been looking forward to it as much as my students. Drafting exams and grading essays is about as exciting as it so
unds. Truth is, I’d been looking forward to checking out the place your grandmother told me about for weeks. I just didn’t have an opportunity to get away until that weekend…”

  Dr. Tyler M. Booth closed the door to his white 1990 sedan and slung the strap of his backpack over his shoulder. He looked up at the sky, noting the late morning sun overhead. Sweat dotted his forehead, and an uncomfortable dampness seeped into his armpits.

  He’d forgotten what it meant to dress appropriately for such adventures. Although he’d overseen an excavation two years earlier, Tyler had not been on a proper expedition since the 70s, when he’d done graduate work excavating several burial sites on the islands off the coast of the Carolinas. That was back before popular films made archaeology sexy and intriguing to the general public, when telling someone “I’m an anthropology major” resulted in a quick change of subject. These days, everyone wanted to go into anthropology and its understudies because of Indiana Jones and some video game about raiding tombs.

  These days, most of his prospective students dropped the class after the first week when they learned how much research and study was involved. “This is a science,” he’d reminded his most recent class. “We’re studying native cultures with what little they’ve left behind. We’re not looting tombs and digging up buried treasure.”

  Except here he was, on his way to explore an uncharted burial mound and retrieve an artifact for a nice old lady who’d paid him a thousand dollars in advance for his trouble. The irony wasn’t lost on him, and he smiled as he stepped off the gravel road and found the old trail into the woods.

  A blanket of fallen foliage covered the path, painted orange and yellow and brown from the deciduous canopy overhead. Imogene gave him detailed instructions from memory, but he still had to stop several times to get his bearings due to the overgrowth. The babble of water from a nearby creek led him toward the footbridge. Once there, he stripped off his flannel shirt and tied it around his waist.

  Birds chattered at one another in the distance as he surveyed the path ahead. The fiery blanket of leaves spread out for as far as he could see, coating the forest floor with vibrant patchwork foliage. Something small—perhaps a chipmunk—skittered through the leaves on the other side of the creek. Overhead, two squirrels argued over a cache of walnuts in their nest. Gnats hummed in his ear.

  Tyler closed his eyes, listening to the language of nature, wondering what stories it might have to tell him. Something horrible happened here years ago, something senseless and terrifying, but he was more interested in the other untold secrets this area had to whisper in his ear. He’d done as much research as time allowed in the weeks leading up to this moment, poring over what articles he could find in the college’s limited library catalog, searching for any mention of a Cherokee or Adena burial mound in this part of the state. All searches yielded nothing. How had no one heard of this burial mound? Furthermore, how had a little old lady from Stauford known about this anthropological anomaly?

  These were the questions he hoped to answer today. Imogene Tremly wanted him to collect an artifact from the wreckage of her old church, but Tyler Booth hoped to unravel this local mystery which, to his knowledge, had not come up once in regional lore. That was his reward for this little trip—and the thousand bucks sitting in his bank account.

  He fished his canteen from his backpack, took a drink, and continued on his way.

  “When I was a kid, my daddy took me and my mama on a family vacation across the country. We stopped at all those funny roadside attractions. You know the ones I’m talking about? ‘Come See the Largest Paperclip in the World,’ things like that. Well, we stopped at one of these roadside places out west—New Mexico, I think, or maybe it was Arizona. The attraction was a literal ghost town—one of those single-street towns you see in all those Western movies with Clint Eastwood or John Wayne. This place—Dry Gulch or Gulch Junction or some sort of ‘gulchy’ town—had been abandoned for decades after a gang of raiders drove through and murdered the folks who lived there.

  “The tour guide was really big on playing up the ‘ghost’ angle of the place. You know what I mean. He’d say things like, ‘And sometimes we can still hear them screaming,’ and other such nonsense. He was trying to scare me, of course, me being a kid and all, except I don’t remember being scared. I felt sad. That old town sat dormant since the 1800s, its last living residents slaughtered in cold blood.

  “I mention all of this, Jack, because that’s what it was like when I walked through the old shantytown you used to call home. It was eerie, sure, but I also felt a profound sadness there. Those houses were still standing, no one bothered to tear ‘em down, and it was like walking through a graveyard. Every house was a grave marker. The names weren’t etched on their doors, but that didn’t matter. I knew what had happened—doesn’t everyone, even if they don’t want to talk about it?

  “But I’ll tell you one thing, son. One thing different about that shantytown I didn’t feel at the old ghost town out west.”

  “What’s that?” Jack asked.

  Dr. Booth wiped his lips and shook his head. “It felt haunted.”

  As Tyler wandered slowly between the two rows of shacks, he was struck with the nagging sensation of eyes upon him. The shacks themselves sat abandoned for thirteen years, but the knowledge did not set his mind at ease. He remembered the ghost town of his youth, the way the buildings sagged with age like rotten fruit, their windows and doorways slightly askew, the angles a few degrees wrong somehow, all staring at him, all watching—

  Stop it. There’s no one here but you, and you’re just scaring yourself.

  Tyler wasn’t the only one to visit. There were signs of others. Graffiti, mostly, on sides of some of the shacks in faded neon pink paint. “Ricky + Julia 4-EVAR,” “SKYNYRD!,” and in one hilarious case, “Worship Stan!” On the other side of the hut were the leftover cans of spray paint, smudged with pink trails down their sides, the metal marred with spots of rust. A few feet down the path, Tyler spotted a cluster of crushed beer cans and what appeared to be a makeshift fire pit.

  He’d heard of kids driving out here to have parties. Part of him thought this was a shame, that society had slipped a few inches further down the slope into debauchery when even the dead couldn’t be honored. Another part of him, however, understood the appeal. The place was isolated, miles from anywhere, there were no neighbors to complain about the noise, and to get there, you had to hike over a mile into the woods. It was the perfect place to have a party.

  Or to start a cult.

  Tyler lingered near the edge of the empty village and looked back at the two rows of rundown shacks. People lived here, he thought. People actually lived here. They bathed in the creek. No running water. No electricity. They chose to live like this. He shook his head. The conviction it would take for someone to forego the amenities of modern life for the sake of their faith was something he admired and also something that terrified him.

  He tried to contemplate the sort of power a person would have to possess to influence and manipulate people. Such power was beyond him, but he admired it. Respected it. Feared it, and for good reason. Humanity had its limits for a reason. We were flawed creatures, truly unworthy of our own success. The power to convince people to give up their lives in servitude to a god they couldn’t see was the sort of power man wasn’t meant to have.

  Of course, to hear Imogene’s daughter speak of Jacob Masters, one might think he was the second coming of Christ. Tyler felt a pang of sadness in his heart, knowing a nice lady like Imogene Tremly had such an insane child, but that spike of emotional pain was short lived. A woman like Imogene wasn’t innocent. Wasn’t she just as complicit in what happened here? Hadn’t she helped build this half-assed Jonestown in the forest outside Stauford?

  Years later, as he recounted this story to Imogene’s grandson, he’d keep this detail to himself, but his gut instinct remained constant over the years: Imogene was partially to blame for what happened here. He felt tha
t in his bones.

  And later, after he went down in the depths of the barrow, he’d try to hold her accountable for what would eventually happen to him, but his heart would have other plans.

  “When I left the canopy of the forest and stepped into the clearing for the first time, I felt something I’d never felt before. There’s an energy to the place, like standing near a power station. A low-grade hum you can’t hear but feel in your fingers and toes, down to your bones. A slow vibration, almost hypnotic, buzzing through my head like a swarm of bees. Pulsing, breathing in rhythm, and it was whispering to me, Jack. I could hear a voice in the drone.”

  Jack watched the old man get up and make himself another drink. When Tyler sat back down, Jack asked, “What did the voice say?”

  The professor sipped from his mug—now more rum than coffee—and shook his head. “It didn’t say anything. At least, nothing I could understand. And maybe I misspoke before. It wasn’t just a voice, but voices. They were singing in chorus, and for a moment I thought I could make out what they were singing…”

  Tyler stood at the foot of the hill and cocked his head, listening. The voices were louder here, and they said something he understood, but what was it? Rejoice? He took another step up the overgrown path winding its way up the hill.

  The chirping birds ceased, and the insects weren’t singing anymore. There were only the voices, an absurd chorus filling his thoughts like church hymns.

  You’re letting yourself get scared by ghosts, he told himself. He continued along the path up the slope.

  Calvary Hill was surprisingly larger than he expected it to be, at least twice the size of a typical burial mound in width and height. When he looked up at the summit, he imagined what this place must’ve looked like when the church still stood. All around him were charred remnants of its presence, piece of rotted timbers and rusted hinges, fragments of scratched glass embedded in the earth, the half-buried steeple overtaken with weeds.