Smoke Stack

by Andrew Gruse

  Maybe it wasn’t related. The school fire was an accident, and Derek ran away.

  They walked in silence, the rain steadily fell, and the wind blew again through the treetops. Signs and posts along the path identified different trees, animals, and birds found in forests, the significance of trees in fighting global warming, what other organisms and species depended on trees for survival, and other facts about the environment Zack and Jules trekked through.

  It was, after all, used as a teaching tool. Well done, in Zack’s mind.

  They passed a sign saying this was the end of the property line and said, do not go any further. That’s when Julie finally spoke.

  “Something tells me you are not going to obey that sign,” she said. Water dripped off the bill of her hood, and beads of water rested on her face.

  “We should have been here before the rain,” Zack said. “Any tracks have been destroyed.”

  “This would be a good area for kids for necking or smoking dope,” Julie said.

  “Necking? Do kids still do that?” Zack smiled, and Julie elbowed him.

  Seventy feet in front of them, a thick metal gate blocked the road. A large red and white sign on the gate said, Keep Out! Additional no trespassing and warning signs hung on the gate, which stood eight feet tall and anchored on hinges attached to a thick metal beam and the other side locked with a large lock attached through solid inch-thick steel clasps.

  They reached the gate, and Zack examined it. “They don’t want anyone to get through this, do they?”

  “We should go back. I don’t like the looks of this,” Julie forewarned with a tug on his arm.

  “Come on,” he said. “We didn’t come this far just to turn around.”

  “No, Zack, I don’t like this.”

  Zack looked at her and sighed. “Ok, I’ll go in by myself. You want me to walk you back to the car?”

  “Come with me,” she said. “Don’t go in there. I have a bad feeling.”

  “Nonsense,” Zack said with a smile. “Babe, I’ll be fine. Nothing is going to happen. I just want to look around a little bit. Head back to the car. It’s a fast five-minute walk. I’ll go in, look around for fifteen minutes, then come back, so if I don’t see you in thirty-five minutes, call ghost hunters and come find me.”

  “Don’t joke around like that, Zack!”

  He leaned forward and kissed her. “Trust me, honey, I’ll be fine. Synchronize the time now,” he said, and they looked at their watches. “Thirty-five, forty minutes tops, I’ll be back at the car.”

  She tilted her head, and her eyes narrowed. “Thirty-five forty? Thirty-five minutes and then I’m calling Orb.”

  Zack smiled, they kissed, and rain splashed their faces before she turned and briskly walked back to their car. He turned to the gate. Over the top was the only way around. The fence stood eight-foot high topped in barbed wire, and he wasn’t dealing with that.

  He climbed the gate, the metal slats acted as a ladder, and quickly he was on the other side. “The forbidden forest of Clyde,” he said to himself. “Let’s see what your secrets are.”

  The road, two paths separated by ankle-deep grass the exact width apart as the wheels on a truck, wasn’t what he wanted to see. If Derek hiked through here to run away, Zack knew he wouldn’t have stayed on the path. It was too in the open. No place to hide. Zack looked for smaller trails off the track. And fifty feet down the road, there was one headed east-southeast before the thick underbrush hid the path. Zack followed it.

  Carefully he stepped in the muddy, narrow path. Probably made by deer, raccoons, and other mammals in the forest. The rain fell onto the thin, immature canopy above, and what didn’t fall through collected, grew and fell in more significant drops. Distant rumbles of thunder warned of worse to come.

  Zack looked at his watch and around the forest. Trees skied into the air, all seeking to fight for as much sunlight as possible. Below, saplings grew straight and tall, also hoping to reach the life source it needed. Some grasses, plants, and underbrush lined the path, but mostly it was thin due to the thick canopy of the summer.

  Zack stepped forward, twigs snapped under his feet, a wind gust whistled through the trees, creaks of deadwood echoed throughout the forest as the wind moved branches against one another. Though it was somewhat eerie, to Zack, it was typical old-growth forest.

  The path turned south. Zack realized he was deep into it. No longer could he see the dirt road. He stepped forward and to his left less than twenty feet off the path was a shallow mound. Ominous.

  The perfect size and depth if a person covered him/herself in leaves to survive cold nights. He stepped closer with each step carefully placed. He reached the mound of leaves and brush.

  Not natural. Zack squatted and looked closer. It was thick. Hesitantly, he reached down and pulled a handful of branches and twigs off the top of it. He heard a snap and a whoosh!

  Zack looked to the side, and a sapling whipped at him. He dove and rolled to miss it but heard a crack above him. A dead branch eight inches in diameter and over ten feet long fell from a tree.

  Zack dove the other direction, the branch crashed into the ground. Brush and twigs flew into the air as Zack rolled to a stop. The mound was obliterated, and Zack saw it was nothing to his relief.

  From his knees, he looked in all directions but heard only silence outside the whistling wind and the raindrops. No Blue Jays or Crows called to warn of intruders. No squirrels alarmed by his presence. No chipmunks screamed, and no woodpeckers protested.

  Zack rose to his feet and moved down the path further, oblivious to the time restraint he agreed upon. The trail smoothed out and covered in leaves. Zack stepped forward, and suddenly his foot fell, the path disappeared. It was too fast; he couldn’t stop the fall.

  He hit the ground hard. Zack heard himself expel an “Ugh” and laid for a moment, the air expelled from his lungs. Zack rolled over and saw the culprit: a two-foot trench in the path covered in leaves and light twigs. His left knee ached, nearly hyper-extended.

  He held his knee as the pain subsided, but the sound he heard next alarmed him.

  A slow, steady creak. Branches snapped and ripped off other trees. The noise intensified.

  Zack saw it to his right and leaped forward. He scrambled as fast as he could. The dead tree slammed into the ground and exploded bark and rotten branches in every direction. A branch broke over Zack’s back and knocked him to the ground.

  Just as suddenly, it was quiet again. The rain fell harder, and Zack felt his backside get wet. He moved, realized the branch was stuck in his raincoat, tried to roll over to free himself, and knew the tree part stuck in his back.

  Twenty-four minutes passed. Zack got to his knees and grunted to stand. The branch fell off. He looked at the destruction around him. Time to go back. He walked along the dead tree to the base. One quick look told him what he feared: Ghosts chopping down trees. Interesting. This place is booby-trapped. Why?

  CHAPTER 20

  Zack carefully stepped his way off the narrow animal path, reached the road, and hustled back towards the gate. He climbed over the gate, despite his throbbing knee, jumped off and hit the ground. The knee buckled. He hit the ground but struggled to his feet.

  I have to hide this pain. Jules will freak.

  He returned to a near jog, a limp obvious until he saw Julie by his car with Sheriff Orbison beside her. Deputy Sam was gone. Upon seeing Zack, they’re tension eased. That, too, was obvious from Zack’s distant view. Zack slowed to a walk and did everything he could to hide his limp. He knew he couldn’t hide the ripped coat and how soaked he was now, but one battle at a time.

  Zack walked past the pond and the small prairie and the fallen stack to the rear of the parking lot where they stood. The rain lessened to a nuisance, and the skies lightened though still gray.

  Zack stopped in front of them and took off his hood. “Hey Orb,” he said. Zack looked at Jules. “I must be late, huh?”

  “Stack, you
were told not to enter those woods, weren’t you?”

  Julie’s mouth dropped open. She saw something on Zack’s face, and he knew it.

  “Yeah, I’d really like to hear the story of the haunted forest.”

  “You’re bleeding. What happened? What did you do in there?” Julie stepped forward. “Oh, my God! Your coat is ripped. OH MY GOD!”

  “I tripped and fell over a log,” Zack said.

  “ZACK, THERE’S A TREE STICKING OUT OF YOUR SHOULDER!”

  * * * *

  The tree was a small branch, an inch diameter, but it was stuck in his back by his shoulder blade. Blood covered his back, but Zack didn’t feel the pain. Not until the doctor at the clinic dug it out and cleaned the wound and stitched it. It made him remember the times Stefani stitched him specifically to cause him pain. This doctor was no less merciless.

  He was bandaged and sent on his way. Orb waited outside.

  “Gonna live?”

  “Not planning on dying anytime soon,” Zack said.

  “Better heed my warnings then, Stack.”

  Zack nodded. “Fair enough. Now, how about you tell me about the legend of the haunted forest of Clyde.”

  Julie stood near Zack with her arms crossed. Her glare at Zack didn’t de-intensify. She reminded Zack four times that she told him not to go in there.

  “How about I buy you two a drink? Looks like you could use it,” Orb said.

  Julie drove and followed Orb’s vehicle to a bar and grill at the far west end of town. Only four cars sat in the parking lot, which Orb said was usual for a weeknight. One belonged to the owner, Orb said.

  The three walked across the gravel lot and into the bar through the side door inside a fenced-off patio area for the smokers. Orb pointed to a high top table near the bar enough to get a refill quickly but far enough away to be able to talk without fear of eavesdroppers.

  A large man behind the bar smiled at the sheriff. Julie sat beside Zack and looked at the man behind the bar as he filled three mugs with beer.

  “Tell me if I’m wrong, but there seems to be a resemblance, huh Orb?”

  Orb smiled. “There should be. That’s my dad. He and my mom run this, the diner and the motel. Been here most of their lives.” A waitress brought over the drinks, said hi to Orb, and disappeared. “Dad was in the Army. Put in his twenty years and had enough of the bullshit, as he called it. Mom grew up here and wanted a simpler life. They moved back, dad said no way was he going to farm, and they started this and the motel. A few years later, a nice couple who ran the diner wanted to retire and sold it to my folks. They’ve been here happily ever since.”

  Zack held up his drink with his un-sore left arm. “Well then, a toast to happily ever after,” Zack said. He stared into Jules’ eyes, winked, and drank from his mug.

  “Happily ever after,” Orb repeated and drank.

  “So, let’s hear about these ghosts.”

  Orb wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and let out a deep breath. “I moved back here about ten years ago. The job was open, I applied and got hired. A few months later, the sheriff retired, I was appointed acting sheriff and been that ever since.”

  Zack and Julie waited as Orb drank again and paused as if in thought. He looked over his shoulder and back to his guests. “Shortly after I became sheriff, a boy went missing. Twelve-year-old, nice kid. After about a week, a couple of teenagers hiking in the forest stumbled upon his body. The autopsy couldn’t tell us much, but we believe he was sexually assaulted. We had no leads, but we kept our eyes and ears open. A few months after that, a teenager went missing. Not long after, another one went missing. One disappeared from Hobby about the same time, then another went missing from down in Earlville about twenty miles south of here. People were in a panic.”

  “And?” Zack asked as Orb paused again.

  “All boys, all between the ages of 12 to 16, until a girl here in Clyde went missing. Two days later, she appeared, almost naked, scared, a little banged up. It looked like a sexual assault after the abduction, but somehow she escaped. Well, she couldn’t tell us much, but she came from the direction of the farmhouse behind those woods. I investigated, and circumstantially it looked to be the work of some drunken worthless waster of oxygen. Try as we did, we just couldn’t put enough of a case together to arrest him or pin him with the other abductions.”

  “The other bodies weren’t found?”

  “No. Anyway, the drunk seemed to fit the mold of a child molester, so we kept our eye on him. He inherited a huge profitable farm from his parents and may have had a chance to spend a few years working hard at it, then sell it and retire. Instead, he rented the land to neighboring farms to keep an income even though the rumor was there was a large pile of money from his parents left behind for him.”

  Orb drank again, finished his mug, and motioned to his dad, the bartender for a refill.

  “The ghost part?” Zack reminded him.

  “I’m getting to it.” The waitress arrived with a refill. “How about a couple plates of wings, Doll?” Orb said to the waitress. She smiled, said, coming right up and left. Orb looked back at Zack, and to Julie, whose disapproving look never left her face. “Oh, her name is Dolly. We call her Doll. Anyway, where was I?”

  “Rich drunken child molester,” Zack said.

  “Right. Well, again, the case wasn’t strong enough, but deep down, I knew it was him. I’d catch him hanging around the rear of the school at the end of the day, I suspected eyeing up another target. The townspeople cast him out of the town. Blackballed him. We arrested and tried him but got embarrassed in the trial. We had nothing. After the trial, he returned to drinking. I’d pull him over for drunk driving twice a week. I got to the point where I got tired of writing tickets. He was like Otis, the town drunk. A couple months later, during the summer, he allegedly tried to grab a female off the street, lure her into his truck or something. The next day I went to his place to ask him about it and found him dead. He took his shotgun, put both barrels in his mouth, and somehow pulled the trigger. The worst mess I’ve ever seen,” Orb said and drank his beer to wash away the thought.

  “That still doesn’t get us to the haunted forest.”

  “Slow down, Stack,” Orb said with a wave of his hand. “I’m getting to it.” He drank again. “So during this whole time, the drunken slob was making threats and promises to destroy this town and get back at everyone responsible for ruining his reputation. Empty threats, you know how it is, Stack,” Orb said.

  Julie looked at Zack again and raised her eyebrows. Zack shrugged. I’ve yet to be threatened in an empty fashion. That would be a nice change of pace.

  “He left a note before he died that said his spirit would haunt his land after he died, and the forest and kill anyone who trespassed and it would forever be locked in his estate so the town would never get ahold of it. Thus, the legend of the haunted forest,” Orb finished.

  “Does the town want the land?” Julie asked.

  “It does now. It’s a lot of property,” Orb said. “The forested area is 600 acres alone. Beyond that is some prime farmland on both sides of the road. About 5000 total, I’d say,” Orb tilted his head. “Do the math. The land alone is worth a fortune and for a town like Clyde,” Orb trailed off.

  “What about the ghosts?” Zack circled back to the origin of the discussion.

  “Oh yeah,” Orb said the same time Dolly returned to the table with three small plates, a stack of napkins, and three bottles of hot sauce.

  “Wings will be here shortly, honey,” she said and disappeared again.

  “The ghosts,” Orb drank again. “Stack, you must have a one-track mind at times.”

  Julie smiled and nudged him. “He’s committed, Orb.”

  “So weird things started happening in the forest not long after his death. The high school kids used to sneak in there after hours to drink and smoke,” Orb lifted his hands in the air, “or whatever teenagers do nowadays that they don’t want us to see.”
r />   “Necking, maybe?” Zack smiled and winked at Julie, who elbowed him harder this time.

  “Necking?” Orb laughed. “To continue, cars had branches drop on them, trees fell over and crushed one car almost killing the couple inside who were more than necking, one teenager went in looking for those mushrooms kids eat to get high and somehow fell into an old well and died. No one lives at the farmhouse, and the estate wouldn’t sell, and no matter how hard we looked, we couldn’t see anyone on that property to pin any of these incidents on. The town believed in the haunted story, and the kids stopped going into that forest and instead shifted their things into the forest west of town where Weber organized the search.”

  Zack raised his hand. “Orb, how did Weber know Derek was missing?”

  Orb thought about it for a moment. “I don’t know. But word travels fast in this town. The grandmother hired you Sunday morning at the diner.” He shrugged. “People probably overheard and then it got to Weber. Everyone knows Weber and Derek were close.”

  Zack looked at Julie but said nothing.

  The wings arrived at the table. Deep-fried, steaming hot and drenched in a deep-orange sauce that smelled good but also burnt the hairs in Zack’s nose as the plate passed under his face.

  “You never said anything to Weber?”

  Orb shook his head. “Stack, I already told you. No.”

  “Yeah, I know,” Zack said. “But he organized a search party less than an hour after he got back into Clyde, which he claims is now on Sunday instead of Saturday that he told Jules and me.” Zack shook his head.

  Orb watched Zack and smiled. “Something tells me you aren’t buying it.”

  “Not what he’s selling.” Zack offered his hands in defeat. “But, hey, I’m not from around here.”

  Orb frowned, nodded, and stared at the wings. “You want to hear the rest of the story about the forest or not?”

  Julie nodded.

  “It was silent for a while until a couple years ago. A developer approached the estate, hoping to buy a parcel for a golf course. He went in to make some measurements and was found two days later stuck to a spruce tree. Looked like he fell, and a dead branch speared him. Another cop went in searching for clues and fell in a trench and broke his leg. No one has gone in since,” Orb said. “Ghosts? I don’t know.” He shrugged. “But in the absence of real evidence, it sure seems like ghosts to me.”