Dark Water (Cooper M. Reid Book 1)

by Barry Napier

  As far as Cooper was concerned, the vision was proof that Pickman’s Caverns were behind this wooden blockade. He also felt that it meant that he was supposed to get inside.

  He gave the blockade a final look, taking his hands slowly away from it. He supposed he could come back with a crowbar and an axe and hope that might be enough to get through. Of course, if there was concrete reinforcement behind it, he was screwed. Again, it made him almost miss the conveniences of working for the government, even when working in the shadows.

  Frustrated, Cooper turned back towards the trail and headed for his car. He followed the trail back to the road, starting to knit together a plan that he thought might lead him back into the darkness for the first time in a year or so.

  19

  With more than four hours remaining before he was due to meet Mary Guthrie at her house, Cooper decided that it might be a good idea to stop by the campground’s visitor’s center. If he planned to revisit Pickman’s Trail with intentions of getting through the barricade, it would do him some good to know when the grounds had the least amount of security. He also wondered if they might have some more information on Douglass Pickman inside.

  He parked his car beside the only other car in the visitor center lot and stepped out. He stood in the parking lot and looked to the surrounding woodland. It was hard to believe that the beach was less than a half a mile to the east. The exterior décor of the visitor center was very beachy indeed; palm trees jutted from the small lawn and the parking lot was bordered with white sand and crushed seashells. But it was all overly staged and cheap-looking.

  He walked inside and saw a single man behind the counter, folding tee shirts with generic beach slogans on them: Salt Life, Salty Dog, Surrender Your Booty, and unfortunate slogans of that nature. He looked up when Cooper walked in and gave a hearty smile.

  “What can I do for you?” he asked.

  Cooper spotted the rack of brochures along the front of the counter and headed directly for them. “Nothing for now,” he answered. “Just doing some snooping about local attractions and history.”

  “Well, just let me know if you need anything.”

  “Sure.”

  He leafed through the pamphlets and brochures, passing recommendations for restaurants, family fun, and boat tours of the area. Every pamphlet looked exactly the same, promising fun and excitement. It wasn’t until he reached the bottom row that he found a brochure that mentioned Pickman’s Cavern. It gave the same information the historical marker had given, with a footnote stating that the caverns had been closed since 2008 and the site was considered to be dangerous and off limits to the public.

  Cooper slapped the brochure down on the counter. “What else do you have about this Pickman character?”

  “Douglass Pickman?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Not much. There are some really great stories about him that get passed around, but a lot of it is pretty grisly. We had parents complain from time to time about the tour guides telling the stories when children were around.”

  “Are they historically accurate or just made up to sell stuff?” Cooper asked.

  “As far as I know, every story we ever told about him was true.”

  “Any idea why they closed Pickman’s Caverns?”

  “It wasn’t safe,” the man said. “The further down you go into the caverns, it gets sort of treacherous. Even with the installed steps, it was pretty dangerous. A lot of people kept telling us that it was creepy down there, too. We thought about switching up the approach—maybe turning Pickman’s Trail into a ghost walk sort of thing—but decided against it.”

  “Do you know the history of Douglass Pickman?” Cooper asked.

  “Just the bare bones, really. You interested in it?”

  “Yeah,” Cooper said. “Just morbid curiosity.”

  “Well then, you want to talk to Jack Paulson. He used to do some of the tours through Pickman’s Caverns. He’s a local expert on just about anything you can think of. And he loves to talk about history.”

  “Does he work here?”

  “He does. In fact, he’s out back right now, fixing up one of our golf carts.”

  “You think he’d mind a visitor?” Cooper asked.

  “Jack? No way. He’ll talk your ear off if you let him.”

  “Thanks,” Cooper said, swiping up the brochure and walking out of the visitor’s center.

  He walked around the side of the building, on a sidewalk bordered with sand and seashells. Around the back, he saw a man bending over into the exposed battery compartment of a golf cart. He was humming to himself as he worked.

  “Excuse me.” Cooper said. “Are you Jack Paulson?”

  The man stood up, slightly startled. He saw Cooper and gave a weary smile.

  “You startled me,” he said, chuckling. He was an older gentleman, maybe sixty years old or so, and his chuckle sounded raspy and broken, but genuine.

  “Sorry,” Cooper said.

  “No worries. And yes, I’m Jack.”

  Cooper tried to say something else, but not words would come. He felt frozen for a moment as he realized that the man standing in front of him was the tour guide he had seen in his vision no more than half an hour ago.

  “You okay, son?” Jack asked. “You look like you just saw a ghost.”

  It was Cooper’s turn to laugh nervously.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I get that a lot.”

  ***

  After Cooper told Jack Paulson what he was interested in, Jack led him to a small picnic table that sat in the shade to the right of the visitor’s center. He took two Cokes out of a cooler that had been sitting in the back of the golf cart and handed one to Cooper. The two men sat at the picnic table, drinking their sodas in the shade, as Jack started to talk.

  Right away, Cooper could tell that the man in the visitor’s center hadn’t been exaggerating. Within two sentences, Jack had settled into story-teller mode. Cooper thought he might be the sort of man that, if he had grandchildren, would always find a kid on his lap, eager to hear a story.

  “So why are you so interested in Douglass Pickman?” Jack asked.

  Cooper felt an excuse that he had once used many times in his previous life coming to the tip of his tongue. He allowed it to escape and when he spoke it, he felt like someone had walked over his grave.

  “I’m writing a book,” he lied.

  Jack seemed impressed as he leaned forward and gave a huge smile. “Well in that case, I’m more than happy to help.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Do you, by chance, know how Kill Devil Hills got its name?” Jack asked.

  “No, I don’t,” Cooper said, although he had been struck by the morbid name on more than one occasion.

  “Well, while there’s no real concrete proof that I’m aware of, there are two stories. It doesn’t matter which you believe, though. They both equate to the same thing. One story claims that locals woke up one morning in the late 1700s and found hundreds of barrels of rum washed up on the shore. There was other debris with the barrels, indicating that the rum had survived a shipwreck. Once they tried the rum, locals were fond of its ability to get them drunk pretty fast and said that it was potent enough to kill the devil. Another story suggests that a pirate ship crashed somewhere very close to shore and the pirates that survived started brewing moonshine that also had the strength to kill the devil.

  “The reason that I tell you all of that is to get the pirate part of the story out of the way. I’m sure you’ve noticed that most businesses around here milk the pirate angle as much as they can. But it’s legitimate; around here—and along most of the coast and the sound, actually—the pirate culture really is a pretty strong part of our history. It’s one of the things we usually try to make visitors the campground aware of.”

  “Was Douglass Pickman somehow associated with these stories?” Cooper asked.

  “No, he came around a bit later. Some people claim that when Douglass Pickman was a boy, he s
ailed with Blackbeard. He was well known for trying to take over Blackbeard’s post and reputation several years or so after Blackbeard was killed.”

  “And you’re talking about the actual Blackbeard that everyone knows about?”

  “That’s the one. His real name was Edward Teach. He was killed in 1718 when the crew of a competing ship overpowered him after he had killed the captain.”

  Cooper found himself wishing that he was writing a book. History had always fascinated him and if everything that Jack Paulson was telling him was true, he had hit a gold mine of trivia. When he had gone rogue from the underbelly of the FBI—from a shadow organization that only a handful of people knew about—Cooper had carried a small recording device with him everywhere he went. He would have given anything in that moment to have it on him so he could record Jack’s story.

  “But really, Pickman wasn’t nearly as gruesome and deadly as Edward Teach,” Jack went on. “Many people think he wanted to be, but his story ends very differently that Teach or any other pirates of dubious reputations. That’s why no one has ever really heard of him.”

  “So how did he come to end up in Kill Devil Hills?”

  “Like any pirate did in those days…looking for goods to plunder, women to bed, and trouble to start. Pickman came to Kill Devil Hills in 1759. For the most part, the real threat of pirates was over by then. If you were going out to sea, there was some risk but it was pretty rare to see them coming ashore with any ill intent. When Pickman showed up, he had his ten year-old daughter with him. No one really knows anything about the mother. But if Pickman’s life was like that of any other pirate of that time, it can be assumed that the mother either died, was captured by some other crew, or just up and left her family. And if her husband chose to live his life as a pirate, who could blame her?”

  “So you mean to tell me that this so-called pirate was sailing the seas with a daughter in tow?”

  “That’s how the story goes. The real experts that document these kinds of things for historical records and whatnot have all but confirmed everything I’m telling you.”

  “That seems like a pretty harsh life for a child.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Jack said. “But if a man like Pickman that desired the pirate life also wanted to keep his child, that says something. Stand-up fathers were few and far between in Pickman’s circles.”

  “Oh, I’m sure.”

  “Anyway, Pickman came ashore with a crew of about eight other men. From what we know, they legally purchased some rum, some clothes, and other goods. Some people even claim that Pickman’s daughter played with some of the local kids along the beach while he did his business, but there’s no proof of this.

  “After their shopping, Pickman and his crew visited the bank—which back then was really more like the town treasury. What we know for certain is that Pickman did not enter the bank; he stood outside with another crew member as a look-out. The men that went inside started shooting. When all was said and done, eight people within the treasury were killed and Pickman’s crew left the building with around four thousand dollars…a nice sum in those days.”

  “I assume that during the escape, Pickman somehow ended up on these grounds and to the place that you guys have marked as Pickman’s Trail, right?” Cooper asked.

  “That’s right. But much of what happened was left off of our cute little historical plaque.”

  “Why’s that?” Cooper asked.

  “Because sometimes history is ugly. Sometimes we’d rather forget about things that the so-called innocent did and how it influenced history.”

  “What happened?”

  “As Pickman and his crew were escaping, a gunfight broke out in the streets. Three of Pickman’s crew were killed right there and then. The others, Pickman included, made it to the beach and headed for their ship. Pickman rounded up his daughter but before they made it to the ship, she was shot in the back. From everything I’ve heard and read on the subject, this sent Pickman into a rage. He took his daughter up in one arm fired into the crowd. He went into a blind rampage. He was shot anywhere between three and five times and did not fall. He managed to get away from the crowd, escaping to this area and, as you guessed, into the caverns on these grounds.”

  “Was he ever apprehended?”

  “No one knows for sure. But the thing that stands out about Pickman—the reason his legend didn’t just quietly die away like so many other no-name pirates, was because of the threats he screamed at the locals as he was trying to escape.”

  “What kind of threats?”

  “That even after he was dragged down to Hell, not even the Devil himself would stop him from killing every child in the town if his daughter died.”

  ***

  The Cokes were drained and the afternoon was cooling down. With the new information Jack Paulson had given him, Cooper could feel the night’s task already pulling at him. He felt that old itch of being on the cusp of something monumental, of something that would give him yet another unfiltered glance into the unexplained. The old Cooper would have been positively wired. But now, given the events of the past year of his life, it felt like a massive burden to carry.

  He’d seen more than enough during his time in the field to solidify his belief in the supernatural, but he was always surprised and excited when he came across something new and unexpected. Surely, the connections he had come across in the last thirty-six hours or so were leading him to just such an event. Burden or not, he had no choice. He could only keep searching.

  “You think you got enough for your book?” Jack asked him as they walked away from the picnic table and back towards Cooper’s car.

  “Oh yeah. More than enough. Thanks for your time.”

  “Of course.”

  Jack seemed to be thinking about something as they reached Cooper’s car. He was looking to the right, towards the road that led to the campgrounds and trails.

  “There’s one other thing you might want to know,” Jack said.

  “What’s that?”

  “As you know, the caverns were closed a few years back because the terrain further down was too treacherous. People were slipping even with the stairs. We got two broken arms and a dislocated hip out of a few tourists. It got pretty nasty. The ceilings were starting to crumble in a few places, too. So it was an obvious decision to close the place down.”

  “I sense a but coming on,” Cooper said.

  Jack nodded and said, “But…among myself and a few of the other tour guides, we were almost glad to see the caverns close. I know it sounds stupid, but there was something about that place that never seemed right. I won’t go so far as to say it was haunted or anything, but there was a feeling…I don’t know how to describe it.”

  “Was it just the guides that felt it?”

  “Oh hell no,” Jack said. “We had at least thirty or so tourists over a five year period to freak out when they were down there…and not just from pressure or claustrophobia. People were saying that they felt a tugging at their clothes and weird voices whispering in their ears. There was one lady that even said that she had clearly heard a man say ‘I’ll kill your children.’ Keep in mind that the guides never revealed that part of Pickman’s story to the groups we took down. No one really wants to hear that sort of stuff before you lead them down into a deep dark hole in the ground.”

  “Yeah, I guess not,” Cooper said.

  “You can decide whether or not to include that in your book. Just don’t use my name.”

  “As far as any further information,” Cooper said, “are there any maps of the caverns down there? Like any sort of actual schematics, layouts, anything like that?”

  “You mean like a map of the actual cavern system?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Not that I know of. And even if there were, I’d highly suggest you not go down there even if you could. It’s dangerous and, if I might be so honest, creepy as hell.”

  Cooper didn’t bother hiding the disappointment from his fac
e. “Well again, thanks for your help.”

  “No problem.”

  Cooper got into his car and pulled out of the visitor center parking lot. He looked back in his rearview and wasn’t surprised to see Jack Paulson standing in the same place. He stood motionless, watching Cooper’s car head back towards the beach as if he didn’t quite trust the man that was driving it.

  20

  With a few hours still remaining before nightfall, Cooper spent the rest of that afternoon in his motel room, browsing the internet for more information on Douglass Pickman. He didn’t find much and what he did find was just different variations of what Jack had told him. What Cooper found most interesting of all was that during Pickman’s escape into the caverns, the locals were thought to have blocked the cavern off. This was despite the fact that no one ever found Pickman or his daughter.

  Cooper assumed this meant that Pickman had either found some other way out of the caverns and made his escape, or he had died in there.

  When dusk fell, he took a quick shower and drove to Mary Guthrie’s house. He caught glimpses of the sun’s last glimmering rays on the ocean between the beach houses and motels that he passed on the way. Part of him wanted to slow down, maybe to park the car and sit on the beach to watch the day come to a close. Everything in the last two days had happened so fast, including his reunion and subsequent departure from Stephanie, that he thought it might do him some good to slow down.

  Yet, of the many things that had changed about him sense his disappearance a little over a year ago, there were a few things that had remained very much the same. Chief among them was his aversion to sentiment. He’d never been a very emotional person, so things like beautiful sunsets and lost loves didn’t usually stir much in him. That was one thing that his time away had apparently not changed about him.

  The sunset and deep inner thoughts of all that he had been through would have to come some other time. If he planned to live life in constant motion, moving from place to place to help people like the Blackstocks, he was sure he’d find plenty of time for reflection.