Thank heavens, or I might be overcome by everyone’s life traumas just going to the grocery store or the doctor’s office. Not every object or antique resonates either, which is a mercy. The relatively few items that do more than make up for the large number that don’t.
“The land goes back that way,” Teag said, pointing. Not far behind the foundation, trees had encroached on whatever lawn the mansion might once have had. It looked like much of the rest of the land was forest. Whatever else we found; at least there would be shade.
Theodora Wellright was long dead, but the land that had been her home buzzed and chirped with life. Squirrels chattered in the trees overhead. If it weren’t for the mosquitoes, I would have enjoyed the walk. They reminded me that there could be something else lurking in these woods that also fed on blood. I shivered, despite how hard I was sweating.
“Things have grown up so much, it’s hard to see anything,” I muttered, staggering as my boot caught on a tangle of vines. Wild rose bushes snagged my jeans and scratched my hands.
“Look for periwinkle,” Teag said, scanning the ground. “It was a popular plant in old cemeteries. It grows well where the ground has been disturbed.”
I tried to imagine what the land might have looked like two hundred years ago. Many of the trees around us were far too young to have been here back then. Big old trees cast more shade, meaning the ground would have been clear of all the weeds and brambles that held us back.
“Looks like there might be an old well over that way,” I said, spotting a mound of stones that looked like they had once been stacked in a square. We walked over, but what remained of the well had been capped long ago with a rusty metal plate that didn’t look like anyone had bothered it.
I closed my eyes, trying to remember what I had seen through Theodora’s eyes the first time I touched her ivory disk. My fingers brushed the disk in my pocket, and I knew we were in the right place. Then I spotted the clue I was looking for: eight trees all nearly the same height planted in a neat semicircle.
“I’m certain this is the area I saw in the vision,” I said. “I remember those trees. Theodora was attacked near here.” Did she die here? I wondered. I folded the disk into my fist, hoping for a hint, but Theodora was silent.
“Head that way,” I said pointing. As we walked toward the trees, I saw a depression that might once have been a wagon road. I was sure that if there had been a cemetery on the Wellright land, we were heading right for it.
“The development deal takes the back third of the old property,” Teag said, stepping carefully around downed branches. “You can see where they stopped digging.”
Sure enough, large construction equipment sat idled along a raw tear in the ground. A hastily built barricade of orange plastic netting cordoned off the area where the unmarked graves were found. We kept well away from that section, as we were hoping to avoid guards although no one appeared to be on duty at the moment.
Teag and I tramped back and forth beneath the half-circle of old trees. “There’s periwinkle everywhere, but no markers,” he said, kicking at the dirt.
“I don’t even see broken headstones.”
“During epidemics, they often buried people in mass graves,” Teag said somberly. “The survivors often had more urgent things to do than make tombstones.”
Bad enough if Theodora died of Yellow Fever, I thought. But the vision suggested a worse fate. Why was she running for her life out here, so far from the manor house? And what was behind her diary entries about fangs and sharp teeth? My fear that Theodora’s killer was a vampire rather than a virus grew stronger, and I was impatient for Sorren to return.
“There’s a lot I want to ask Sorren,” I said. “I wish he’d get back.”
“No luck with email?”
I shook my head. “I’ve left a voice mail and sent an email, but he hasn’t responded. So we’ll have to muddle on by ourselves.”
While we had been exploring, the sun had gotten lower on the horizon, and shadows were lengthening. “We’d better get back,” I said, eyeing the forest that had been sun-dappled and alive with nature when we left the plantation ruins.
“It’s gotten cooler,” Teag said, glancing around us. “And the birds aren’t singing.”
We both knew what that meant. Spirits were beginning to stir. We were far off the main road, and close to recently disturbed graves. It was definitely time to go home.
The trip had already gotten us what we wanted. I had validated the vision I’d gotten from Theodora’s disk, and we had a good guess as to where the epidemic victims had been buried. Plus, we now knew the lay of the land around the old mansion, and that might be valuable. We had nothing to gain by sticking around.
Teag and I headed back at a brisk pace. The land around the semi-circle of trees had been relatively open and still lit with the fading sun. Under the trees, it was much darker. Shadows seemed to close around us, and the temperature seemed much cooler than normal for a South Carolina summer night.
“Did you see that?” I pointed to where the gray shape of a woman in a long, old-fashioned dress slipped behind some trees and disappeared. I thought it might have been Theodora, and then I realized that the profile was wrong. Another ghostly outline caught my eye to the left, and I thought I saw something stir off to the right as well.
“I’ve seen enough to know that we’ve got company,” Teag replied, breaking into a jog. I tried to keep up, but the tangle of bushes, vines, and fallen branches made it difficult to move very fast without falling.
“They’re not trying to stop us,” I said, hoping the spirits didn’t suddenly change their mind.
“It’s almost like they’re leading us back.”
The sun was low in the sky, setting the horizon afire in an orange glow. Overhead, the bright blue sky was rapidly darkening to indigo. I fished my phone out of my pocket and turned on the light. Teag did the same, and together we cast a jerky beam over the uneven landscape, hoping we remembered the path back to the mansion. Once again, I closed my hand over Theodora’s disk and concentrated. A sense of certainty filled me.
“Veer right,” I called to Teag. “We’re on the right path.”
I had a sudden vision of Theodora standing in front of me, looking in terror at something over my shoulder. She screamed wordlessly and turned to run, hiking her long skirts and stumbling across the bumpy ground. Am I seeing a different view of the night Theodora lost her life, I wondered, or is this a fresh vision, a warning for here and now?
Behind me, I heard a rush of air and a hiss. Ghostly hands grabbed for me, unable to clutch my clothing, but capable of sinking through flesh and bone, momentarily robbing me of breath. I cried out as the strike made me stagger, and I nearly lost my footing.
“Cassidy!” Teag had been a few steps ahead of me. He turned, looking past me with an expression of horror.
I knew whatever struck me was going to try again. I held tightly to my phone with my left hand, and with my right I pulled the bag of salt out of the pocket of my hoodie and let the contents fly as my arm made a wide arc, spraying the crystals as far as I could.
The hiss was louder this time, and angry. Whatever it was, I bet it didn’t like the salt, but I couldn’t pull that trick again. The salt might make a barrier between me and my pursuer, but I hadn’t cast a full circle, and I couldn’t stay here all night. And the salt wasn’t going to do anything for Teag.
The hiss came again, moving now, circling around to the side. I scrambled to my feet, clasping my agate necklace in my right hand and shining the phone light with my left, where the wooden amulet dangled from its cord.
Cautiously, I backed toward Teag, keeping my light shining in the direction where I had last heard the creature hiss. I listened for footsteps, crackling twigs, anything that would reassure me that our pursuer was something normal and physical. I wanted to convince myself that I’d let my imagination get the best of me and that we had spooked a coyote or a fox from cover, maybe a frightened possum. H
ell, I would have gladly faced down a rabid raccoon rather than what I feared we were up against.
Teag and I could handle the raccoon. At worst, we’d end up with rabies shots. There’s no vaccine against vampires.
Teag and I were back to back, slowly moving in the direction of the plantation. I could glimpse a band of twilight at the edge of the forest. If we could get out into the open, we might make it to the car. Who was I kidding? We’d never outrun him.
The hiss came from the shadows, closer now. Teag had grabbed a fallen branch and broken it to make a staff. Against a mortal enemy, with his martial arts training, it would have been a formidable weapon. But what was sizing us up from the shadows wasn’t mortal.
The hiss became a roar, and I felt a rush of icy air as something barreled toward us at full speed. I shone my light straight at the noise, and for an instant I glimpsed the translucent figure of a man, his face twisted with rage, long eye teeth leaving no doubt as to what he was.
Before I could even scream, the ghost attacked, slamming into me with enough force to nearly take me off my feet, and going through my body like a frozen knife. I dropped my phone and fell to my knees. My right hand broke my fall, and as I felt the ghost circle again, I thrust my left hand out, holding the wooden amulet in the palm of my outstretched fist.
The icy blast washed over me again and then recoiled as it brushed my fist. An awful, ear-splitting keen filled the darkness. A vision sprang from the wooden amulet, obliterating everything around me.
I saw the same figure whose ghost had been chasing us, but now he was solid, and if not exactly mortal, then at least corporeal. His dark hair was shoulder-length, tangled from the wind. The clothing he wore was stained and torn, but from the loose shirt and knee-length breeches, I guessed it to be early seventeen hundreds. A large iron key hung on a chain around his neck.
“Leave this alone,” the man snarled. “It’s none of your concern.”
“You stole the Key, and used it to cast a plague curse.” I knew that voice with its hint of a Dutch accent, even though I couldn’t see the speaker. Sorren had faced this enemy, and the memory of that encounter sprang from the amulet in my fist. “That makes it my concern.”
A woman joined the man from the darkness of the forest. Both she and the man had dark skin turned corpse ashen, with long black hair braided in the fashion on the sugar islands of the Caribbean.
“Plague makes for good feeding,” the woman vampire said with a leer. Her voice was languid with a deep drawl, thick as chilled blood. “They’re going to die anyhow. Where’s the harm in feeding from them? Puts them out of their misery.”
“You brought a plague down on a city full of people,” Sorren snapped. “That ends now.”
“You can try,” the man replied, standing in a confident slouch that suggested he felt no fear.
Everything in the visions seemed to happen at once. I glimpsed Sorren moving toward the stranger in a blur of motion, and his enemy meeting the attack with the same speed. Another voice I did not recognize, a different woman’s voice that also had an Islands’ lilt started chanting.
A streak of white fire like lightning crackled through the air, striking the stranger in the chest on the key itself. The dark-haired vampire screamed and began to jerk and buck as if struck by seizure, his skin charring and peeling back to reveal bone.
Sorren barreled into to the woman, hitting with enough force to take her off her feet though she struggled and fought his grip. She was shrieking curses in a language I did not understand, clawing at Sorren with immortal strength, but unable to break his hold. Sorren held the woman’s arms pinned and pivoted to face another person, one I still could not see clearly.
“Now!” Sorren ordered through gritted teeth as if it took all his strength to hold the screaming woman. I saw another figure, a large woman dressed in white, chanting in the same heavy islands drawl. A man wearing a priest’s shirt ran into my view. A glowing blade glinted in his hand, and I saw the blade sink deep into the female vampire’s chest, between the ribs and into the heart.
One last piercing scream of pain and fury filled the night, and the vision ended.
“Come on!” Teag’s voice brought me back to the present. I was trembling all over, and I thought I was going to be sick. Teag jerked me to my feet. I grabbed my phone from where it had fallen as he dragged me with him. We staggered and ran toward where the mansion used to be.
“That thing—” I started, barely able to talk.
“Whatever you did, you got rid of it,” he replied, his breath ragged as he pulled me along with him.
“It’s not gone,” I said, not sure how I knew that to be true, but certain nonetheless. “It’ll be back.”
I dared to glance behind us. Dozens of ghostly figures glowed dimly in the darkness. Theodora Wellright was one of them, but there were many more. Men and women, children, and old people. These were likely the victims of the vampires I’d seen Sorren destroy. They had formed a line behind us, a bulwark in case the vampire’s spirit came back, doing their best to buy us the time that had run out for them. We ran.
We almost slammed into the car in the darkness. Teag and I threw ourselves into the car, and he roared away, sending up a spray of dirt and gravel behind us. My heart was thudding so hard I thought I might pass out, and Teag looked just as shaky. Neither of us spoke, and I saw that Teag’s hands trembled on the steering wheel.
We wanted answers, I thought. And we got them. The epidemic that killed thousands of people was caused by a vampire with a cursed object. They fed on the dying. Theodora was right. There were vampires. And they killed her.
Urban Explorer
I heard the bell jingle on the door to the shop, and the exchange of voices told me someone had come in as Maggie’s customer went out. Their voices didn’t quite carry to the back room.
I was just getting up to go to the front when Maggie stuck her head around the corner. “Cassidy—there’s a gentleman here who wants to speak with you.”
I followed her out to find a tall, handsome man casually glancing at our display cases. Being five foot nine, I tend to notice height. He was in his late twenties or early thirties with chestnut hair and brown eyes, and he looked more like he was dressed for hiking than for window-shopping on King Street. I got the feeling that being in the shop made him nervous.
“Can I help you?” I asked, trying to place him and deciding I had never seen him before.
“You’re Cassidy Kincaide?” When I nodded, he looked relieved. “I really need to talk with you.” He glanced around, but Maggie had busied herself with something in a cabinet near the back of the store. “I’m Ryan Alexander. You might know me as Nikon Ninja—and I really need your help.”
Teag overheard the conversation and came up to the front. It only took him a few moments to confirm that Ryan Alexander was indeed Teag’s urban explorer friend. Things were still quiet in the store, so Teag and I ushered Ryan to the break room table in the back and gave him a glass of sweet tea.
“I’m sorry to show up without calling first,” Ryan said. “But I wondered whether you were able to learn anything about that ivory disk I mailed to you.”
“I’ve found out a few things,” I said cautiously. “Why the urgency?”
Ryan was silent for a moment as if debating what to say. “Teag’s probably told you that I’m an urban explorer in my spare time. I’ve got a group that’s been exploring in a lot of Southern cities—old ruins, abandoned manufacturing plants, forgotten infrastructure like storm drains and old railway tunnels, that sort of thing.”
“He mentioned it,” I replied, still trying to figure why Ryan seemed so nervous.
“We’ve seen some odd things poking around in the dark, but we leave the ghost hunting to other folks,” Ryan continued. “We actually cooperate with several of the area ghost hunting groups—we scout the location, and they come back with their woo-woo finders.”
Sounded to me like Ryan was a skeptic. Which made his conne
ction to the ivory disk all the more curious. “But ever since we started exploring the old Wellright plantation, there have been too many unexplained things happening,” he continued. “I’ve never been completely sold on the idea of ghosts. But I may have to change my mind.”
“Why’s that?”
Ryan tugged at the collar of his shirt. “Because in the three times my group has gone exploring around the plantation, we’ve had sightings of a woman’s ghost each time—and enough of us have seen her to make it hard to write off as imagination.”
“I’m an antique shop owner,” I answered. “Why tell me?”
Ryan gave me a no-bullshit look. “I’ve heard things about you. Folks say you have a talent for handling haunted objects. Before the Wellright incidents, I wouldn’t have put much stock in such things. Now, I’m not so sure.”
“I’m not sure I can speak to the rumors you’ve heard,” I replied carefully. “But I’m curious about what you’ve seen.”
Ryan took a deep breath and let it out. “You need to understand how unusual this whole thing is. We have logged hundreds of hours in dark, abandoned places and never saw anything that made us think we’d seen a ghost. Sure, your mind plays tricks on you for a moment when you’re in a strange place, but the odd noises or the weird shadows have always turned out to be rats or raccoons or a water leak—something very natural and normal.”
He paused, and I waited for him to go on. “We wanted to explore the old Wellright place because we knew developers were going to cut into it and we’d lose the chance forever. The first time, we went in daylight, and we found the foundation of the original mansion. One of my group had turned up a description of the house from the Archive, and so we knew that there should be cellars and tunnels running beneath the mansion. We went looking for them.”
“Weren’t you afraid that anything down there might have collapsed by now?” Teag asked.
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