Macie said, “I think I recognize her, but I couldn’t say from where. Have we met before?”
I put the car in park and got out to introduce them. “Carrie Jo! Thank you for coming! This is Macie, the girl I was telling you about. And I guess you know this is Wayland Manor. First built in 1845.”
Carrie Jo responded, “Sierra, are you kidding? It was built way before the 1840s. This place has seen fire more than once. There’s been a lot of houses on this property. There’s no telling what it is you’re up against. Hello, Macie. It’s so nice to meet you.” Macie extended her hand to Carrie Jo and seemed genuinely happy to meet her. “Let’s go inside. And remember, the less I know, the better. I’d rather dream walk without knowing anything at all. So, mum’s the word.” Carrie Jo hugged me and held my hand a moment as she stood surveying the façade of the old house. “Wow, Ashland would like this place.”
“You know, you two should join us some time. We’d love to have you,” I confessed honestly.
“Dream walk? What is that?” Macie was marching up the steps. She paused outside the door and waited for me to unlock it.
Carrie Jo said, “It’s a kind of trance that dream catchers use. I can do it awake or asleep. Today, I’m going to stay awake and walk the property. I do know about Jai and the thing known as the emoi.”
“Where did you get that name from?” Macie glanced at me suspiciously.
“From a dream,” Carrie Jo answered in a whisper. Her voice had taken on a dreamy sound. “It’s very telling, isn’t it? In Asian cultures, an emoi is something extremely evil. Westerners would call it a demonic presence, but I don’t think that’s exactly what’s going on here. I don’t think this is a demonic presence, per se, but it very much wants to become one. It aspires to be that because it wants to change. I think that’s the end game.”
We walked inside the house and locked the door behind us. Carrie Jo was silent and wasted no time going up the stairs. Macie looked at me, and I shook my head. “I didn’t tell her anything,” I mouthed silently. No, I hadn’t told Carrie Jo about the closet. She went straight to it and opened the door.
“This is where I’ll start my walk. This is a portal. Am I going alone, or is someone walking with me?” Carrie Jo watched us both. I didn’t want to leave Macie alone in the house, and I knew that my disappearing in front of her would freak her out. At the same time, I very much wanted to experience the otherworld with Carrie Jo.
“I’m not sure what that means,” Macie said fearfully.
“It’s okay, you guys. I do this all the time. Stay here. I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’m going in, and I want you to close the door behind me. Okay? Go back downstairs and watch the camera. I’m never sure where I am going to come out. So, if you could watch me, that would be great. Like I said, close the door. It will be a kind of signal to the other side that they can’t come through while I’m gone. And that they can’t close the door on me either.”
“Wait! How dangerous is this?” Macie said desperately. “I don’t like this, Sierra.”
Without another word, Carrie Jo stepped into the closet. And right before our eyes, she disappeared.
“Crap! Close the door, Macie! We’ve got to get to the monitors,” I said as I hurried down the stairs.
“I don’t think we have many cameras left. We took most everything with us last night, except for the cameras on the closet and in the kitchen,” she warned me as she ran behind me. She couldn’t help but look back. I knew this would freak her out, but I hadn’t expected that Carrie Jo would just jump in like that without talking to us about it first.
But there was electricity in the air. You could almost taste it. I could, anyway. Yes, there was a lot of power here right now. The place had come alive. Carrie Jo commanded such power. Did she even know how powerful she was?
Shoot. This was no way to run a paranormal investigation. Macie was asking me a thousand questions, and I had no answers for most of them. In the end, all I could do was ask her to be patient. That’s all either of us could do.
Be patient.
And wait.
Chapter Seventeen—Carrie Jo
“Yay! She’s finally here! The birthday girl. There is my Carrie Jo.” A woman who looked remarkably like my mother—but not quite—raced toward me with a big smile on her face. She wore a neat, flared skirt, a fitted blouse and a snug belt, all in white polka-dot fabric.
I immediately felt saddened because I knew she could not be my mother. My mother was dead and gone. She’d died rescuing my son. I missed her every day, along with my brother and so many others.
The fake Deidre Jardine wore clothing from the 1950s. Obviously, whoever was trying to convince me that this was my mother hadn’t quite gotten the dates right. And then I noticed to my own amusement that her clothes changed a little.
Dressed now for the 1960s, then the ’70s, the pattern of her clothing remained the same, white with red cherries. Yes, this was somewhat comfortable. How did this thing know how to world-build? This entity knew what I was comfortable with.
Oh, this was no trifling ghost. But I didn’t think it was a demon. I looked down at my own hands. How strange! They were youthful, chubby. This had never happened to me on a dream walk. I’d never been a young me before. I had experienced things firsthand, like a murder, a physical attack, a horrible death. But I’d never been myself.
Yes, this was supposed to be me. Down to the freckle on my thumb, which had faded as I’d gotten older. As a child, I had been very self-conscious about my freckles, especially that one. I sometimes wore Band-Aids over that freckle just so people wouldn’t say anything or notice anything different about me. Seems silly now.
My hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail. I touched it briefly. It was long, like it had been when I was a child, just the way my mother liked me to wear it. I touched the bow in my hair and guessed by the color of my dress that the bow was also pink. But my mother had never dressed me this well. I’d never been this fussed over. We had been poor, far too poor for dresses with matching bows and patent leather shoes. I didn’t like shoes much at all when I was a kid.
And we lived in trailer parks, run-down apartments and the like. We’d never lived in a place like Wayland Manor. Never in a thousand years.
“Look, everyone! My Carrie Jo is here. Time for cake and ice cream!” the Deidre-thing said in a very definite and over-articulated Southern accent. Oh, her teeth. Deidre’s teeth were horrible and yellow. Someone was trying too hard to be normal, and it didn’t know how to be normal.
“I don’t want cake and ice cream,” I said defiantly, but no one was listening to me.
There was plenty of bright beautiful sunshine, and I could see that I wasn’t the only child here. This was indeed a birthday party, although I could recall no birthday party memories from my actual childhood.
I didn’t feel sadness—I didn’t feel anything except that this was all wrong. My mother and I made peace a long time ago. In fact, before she died, we had restored our relationship and become best friends. I missed her, but there had been those years when she was a little mad.
Judging by the Deidre-thing’s appearance, I would say that whoever was trying to imitate her knew of her but didn’t really know her. This entity could only summon up the details that I remembered. Like my mother’s crooked lipstick. Like her overly plucked eyebrows. Like her thin body. She was far too thin from all that fasting and praying back in the day. Things I loved and hated about her. It was so sad that she was being used like this, to inflict pain on me again.
Momma, I know this isn’t you. It’s okay, Momma. I love you…
It growled at me as it slung cake on chipped white china. Now, here I was in this weird situation, at a birthday party that never happened. I wasn’t in the past, not my past, for sure. There were children everywhere also dressed for a formal party, from many different time periods. The only other adult besides the Deidre-thing was a man. He was a real person, not an illusion.
&nbs
p; Hey, I know you see me. Help me!
The stranger paused his raking but only for a second. He did not want to be bothered with me and all these rowdy children. He wore a newsboy hat, worn blue jeans and a blue shirt. There was nothing boyish about the man, the Caretaker, that’s what he was. I heard that clearly, but from where I wasn’t sure.
Muncie? Are you here with me?
Muncie was my ancestor, a reliable spirit guide who often helped me out of some bad situations. He’d been my lifelong friend. There was no sign of him, other than that feeling of peace that often accompanied him. But for sure it had been him who had told me the man’s name.
“Hey, Caretaker. My name is Carrie Jo.”
The older gentleman with the rake paused his work. He seemed neither amused or afraid. He just watched, watched the party that never happened.
Suddenly, my mother twisted my arm. “It’s your turn! Take the cake!” It was a painful twist—one I had not expected. In my youth, my mother had been a lot of things, but she’d never been physically abusive. Emotionally, verbally, yes. Physically, never.
“What are you doing?” Young me snatched away from the Deidre-thing, but it was difficult because she was much larger. Indeed, she’d grown right before my eyes. Six feet, seven feet. Or was I shrinking? The children stopped playing, laughing and running around me. They turned to watch us. They studied us. They waited to see what would happen, although they were certain I would die.
No. I’m not going to die!
The thought stirred me to action. “You are not my mother! I do not belong here! Where is Jai? She wants to leave. She told me she wants to leave. Don’t touch me again!”
The children around me began to whisper, and some of them cried. The tall woman that pretended to be my mother crossed her spindly arms and stared down at me. Her beautiful eyes were not there anymore. The imitation skin was beginning to wear thin.
Now I could see this thing for what it truly was. Evil. Hatred.
You don’t want to play? You don’t want to be one of us?
I closed my eyes and concentrated. I visualized myself as I truly was—a grown woman. I was no child wearing a bow in her hair. I was a mother in my own right. And a mother to be.
When I opened my eyes, I looked down at my hands and could see that I had taken on my true form. I was no longer sad, little Carrie Jo. And all the children were gone too. The thing that pretended to be my mother wore all black. It remained behind my mother’s face, but that’s all that was like her.
“I see you. I see who you really are. You don’t have the authority or the power to keep these children here. They don’t belong to you. You must let them go. They deserve to be at peace!”
The thing put its hand on its forehead. I wasn’t sure what it was going to do, but I didn’t expect it to remove my mother’s face.
It ripped it off and tossed it away, and it broke like a porcelain mask on the ground between us. As best as I could tell, we were outside in the yard in between Wayland Manor and the old crematorium.
Yes, I had done my research. I knew some of what had happened here. I knew that this was an unauthorized crematorium. Although no charges had ever been made against the Wayland family, Mr. Wayland had done terrible things. He’d never been charged with murdering a child, but he had stolen dead bodies.
Stolen them in the night. Burned them up. He believed it was to protect them, protect them from the evil of death. But this wasn’t Mr. Wayland.
This wasn’t him at all. Something was here. It had collected the sadness and the loss and the resentment and the hurt and all the things that had been left behind by the children. Wayland had needlessly treated them so cruelly that they had been disintegrated and forgotten with no headstone—with no remembrance whatsoever. They’d returned to dust, and no one could mourn for them.
Yes, the thing had come in to steal their sadness. Steal their souls.
“What are you? Give me Jai. I want Jai.”
And it collapsed in front of me like a folded piece of black paper. It folded away, and I heard the screams of dozens of children.
“Jai!” I shouted as black clouds rolled into my dreamscape. “Muncie, are you here? Help me find Jai!”
Caretaker!
“He’s not helping me! I can’t find him!”
I began to run, but the grounds were not familiar to me. This was not Seven Sisters, my home where I knew every corner, every room. Wayland Manor had a strange darkness to it.
That smell, that horrible smell. What is it?
I entered the room, and the ceiling was missing, caved in by storms or age. Who knew? It smelled like death. “Jai?” I could see the little girl. Was she dead? Oh, yes, she had to be. She was all broken, and the side of her face was bloody, but she appeared to be sleeping. Asleep on the slab.
And I saw the oven. It was roaring, the fire so hot it made me want to retch. “Jai! I’m here! I’m here to help you!” The folded shadowy figure stood in front of the oven, shoveling in more coal, but then it saw me. It screamed, and the shovel fell to the ground. Where was the Caretaker?
The children came into the building through the gaps in the decrepit walls. They stood and watched, then pointed at the fire.
We all burn here. All of us.
The thing that used to look like my mother lurched toward me. Still extraordinarily tall, it growled as the children cried. They hated the thing, they feared it, but they also served it.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see him. The Caretaker. I slid my arms under Jai’s lifeless body, but he made no move to assist me.
“Help me! Help me save the children. This isn’t right. What kind of caretaker are you? You let it hurt the children!”
Suddenly the emoi became something else, not a tall black shadow but a child, a black-eyed child with dull, lifeless brown hair. It spoke to me, but I did not understand its language.
It was the language of hate.
The language of evil.
Jai began to whimper and cry in my arms. I ran—it was all I could do. Run for all my might! The thing screamed in protest, but the Caretaker, the man with the rake, was there. His presence loomed larger than the emoi’s, and I had my chance. This was my chance to run.
And run I did.
Chapter Eighteen—Sierra
We saw nothing on the monitors, nothing to suggest that at any second we would hear the door bursting off its hinges. But Carrie Jo was back, and I ran as fast as I could up the steps. I saw the pregnant woman lying on the floor, her arms outstretched as if she carried something or someone, but there was nobody there.
I glanced inside the closet, but all was black except the dimness of the light that managed to filter into that strange space. Carrie Jo called it, and we’d all been dancing around it—that closet had been a portal. A bad space. A doorway for the darkness that infiltrated this once beautiful home.
“Carrie Jo? Are you okay? Speak to me!”
“I’m fine. Help me get up. Jai?” Suddenly, a pile of leaves circled up around our feet. Where had they come from? They rose higher and higher, the leaves making a tiny column before they settled down again.
Carrie Jo was near tears. “What he did here was wrong, Sierra. The children he burned, they want justice. They want to be remembered. He stole that from them. They were dead already, but he burned them. It’s so weird. It tried to look like Deidre, but it didn’t fool me.”
My friend was talking in circles, babbling. Something was wrong. “Please, Carrie Jo. Let’s get downstairs. I’ll get you some water and you can rest.”
Macie agreed, her eyes wide, and asked no questions as we led Carrie Jo away from the broken door. What in the world had happened? We got her settled in the foyer in one of the overstuffed chairs. Macie sat close to her, her concern obvious. “Is the baby okay? You took quite the fall out the door. Or were you pushed? Can you tell us what happened?”
“The baby is fine, and I wasn’t alone. Muncie was with me. And another man. He’s t
he caretaker here, I think. I didn’t get his name, but I get that’s what he does. I hope that makes sense.”
I tugged at my collapsing ponytail and slapped it up into a bun. “Do you mind if I record this, Carrie Jo? I promise I won’t give the homeowner your name. Scout’s honor.”
“Okay, if you think it will help.” The little machine clicked, and I set it on the end table beside me. CJ was pretty close, so it should pick her up easily. “There is a caretaker here. He is a good man, but he’s let some things in. He doesn’t know how to get rid of them.”
“The man you saw, was it Mr. Wayland? Were you able to tell?” Macie asked curiously.
“No, it wasn’t Mr. Wayland. He is long gone. Only the children are here, plus the Caretaker and the thing. It is not a demon. It’s something intelligent, but it’s more like a high-level PK manifestation. It is all the children, all the pain of being forgotten. I don’t know what happened here—unfortunately, we may never know—but something major did happen, and now they are trapped. They have no way out. Muncie kept telling me to call on the Caretaker, but he wasn’t responding to me. I could not break through, Sierra. I’m sorry.”
Macie said, “No, I’m the one who’s sorry. I can’t understand how you disappeared from the screen; we didn’t even see via the IR camera. And then you reappear only to break the door, and y’all are okay with it. What in the world is going on here? I thought we were here to collect evidence of the supernatural for the homeowner, not go into trances and such. No offense, but this is too deep for me. Way too deep.” Macie’s fear had turned into anger. I couldn’t blame her, not really. It’s the fear that was speaking at the moment.
There was no chance to put her fears to rest. A cacophony of voices filled the house. Not one or two but dozens. Some of them moaned in pain, and others whispered hurriedly, as if they were passing around some terrible secret. The furniture shook, the china in the cabinets clattered, and the chandelier in front of us began to sway.
The Wayland Manor Haunting (Gulf Coast Paranormal Season Two Series Book 1) Page 10