by Reyna Favis
Cam nodded to Zackie as she pushed past him and into the cabin. He then took in Lucas’ presence with one raised eyebrow. “You people took your time getting here.”
Lucas’ voice was muffled as he stuck his head in the trunk and grabbed the bags. “This is a long, long way from Jersey. I’m not really sure I ought to be here.” I mentally added ‘while Hannah is alive’ to his statement. Taking my bag from Lucas, I shuffled doggedly behind the two men as they entered the cabin. My eyes were gritty, my brain was buzzing and I was more than ready for some quality sleep as I crossed the threshold.
Zackie lay near a pot belly stove planted near the back center of the old cabin. She looked at home and it was obvious that she was reclaiming her accustomed place. The interior walls of the cabin were horizontal stripes of alternating of light and dark as some ancient white material intercalated between the rude logs to plug the cracks and insulate the interior from drafts. Nearly hidden in the shadows of the back corner were stairs to a loft and two people holding bed sheets, poised to climb the stairs. They stood so perfectly still that at first I could not be sure they were animate. The young man and woman were tall and lanky and looked to be fraternal twins. Their skin was a white so pale that light appeared to reflect from their faces as they emerged from the shadows. This paleness was offset by rich, ebony hair that fell to their shoulders in soft waves. They might have been attractive had it not been for the shock of their ice blue eyes. Cold and inhuman, I found myself avoiding their thousand mile stare.
“Zackie,” the man nodded, simultaneously acknowledging her and paying respect. His body leaned ever so slightly away from the dog. The woman peeked at Zackie from behind the man and also gave a small nod. Her eyes were large and wary and she held tightly to the man’s hand. For her part, Zackie yawned cavernously at them, displaying a set of razor sharp teeth and her enormously long canines. Taking a quick step away to gain some distance from Zackie, the two next turned their attention my way, regarding me with open suspicion.
The woman cleared her throat and stepped forward. “My goodness, where are my manners?” The words were soft and had the gentle twang of Appalachia, but they were spoken by reflex and lacked true warmth. She took Bodean’s set of sheets and together with her own folded bedding, she set them down on a scrubbed, unfinished table next to the pot belly stove. “My name is Parmelia Sinclair and this here is my cousin Bodean Sinclair.” Bodean extended his hand to me and before I could respond, the dead hand shot forward and grabbed it.
Bodean’s eyes went wide and impossibly, he turned a whiter shade of pale, yanking his hand back as if the contact burned. “Whoa, girl! That ain’t right!” Parmelia ducked back behind Bodean and watched me with frightened eyes.
Lucas looked back and forth between the cousins and me, trying to make sense of what just happened. “What’s wrong?”
I took a step back to reduce whatever threat I might represent and improvised. “Um, I guess I have a strong grip for a girl?” Cam was smirking and Zackie showed a toothy grin. Neither was going to be any help to defuse this situation, so I decided a distraction might be the best way forward. “Pleased to meet you both. I’m Fia Saunders and this is my friend, Lucas Tremaine.” As I hoped, their attention was immediately taken by the presence of a celebrity.
“Mr. Tremaine, it is a true pleasure to meet you. We are huge fans of your show.” Parmelia gushed as she stepped in front of Bodean, who massaged his hand and shot me small looks of shock and dismay, but mainly turned his attention to Lucas.
“Please call me Lucas.” Turning on the charm, he shook both their hands and this simple act seemed to put them more at ease. “I want to thank you both for inviting us down here. I’m really looking forward to investigating the anomaly you witnessed. Can you tell us anything about what you experienced?”
Bodean and Parmelia shuffled their feet, glancing at Cam and me without quite meeting our eyes. They exchanged a look and Bodean cleared his throat. “Well, you see, the main problem is that we don’t really understand what it is we’re dealing with.”
Parmelia interrupted and her hands shook as she tried to hide them behind her back. “We got too much on our plate right now.” She tucked her hands under her arms to hold them still and began to gently rock her upper body. “We think y’all might be better suited to deal with this thing.”
Bodean put a comforting arm around her. “We tried--” he began, but an infinitesimal shake of the head from Cam stopped him from elaborating. Lucas did not need to hear the particulars of what we do. Bodean closed his eyes briefly and exhaled through his nose before he began again. “We heard about it from thru-hikers on the A.T. who came to rent goats from us.”
I was swaying on my feet with fatigue and my monkey brain took control. “This might be a stupid question and totally off topic, but why do Appalachian Trail hikers need goats?”
Parmelia shrugged and blushed. “They’re pack goats. They can carry up to fifty pounds, so if you want some relief from carrying your pack…” She scrupulously avoided my eyes as she spoke and my tired mind latched on to the fact that there was some weirdness regarding the goats.
I probably should have let it go, but apparently I get a little obsessive when I’m exhausted. “So, how does this work with the goats?” I looked directly at Bodean and extended the dead hand as if I were gesturing. He followed its every move as if it were a venomous snake. “What are you not telling us about the goats?”
Bodean cleared his throat again. “Well, our goats are pretty good about carrying stuff for us and we thought we could make some extra money if we could rent them out to hikers. By the time the hikers get here, they’re hitting the highest mountains on the Trail. It seemed like a good business opportunity….” His voice trailed off and he shrugged.
I took a step forward. “And?”
Parmelia looked up and flapped her hands nervously at me. “And we charge thirty dollars a day for each goat, all right?” I raised my eyebrows and encouraged her to tell us the part she was holding back. Her voice rose shrilly as she continued. “And then we charge them for the rescue.”
Lucas frowned. “Why would they need rescue?”
Bodean took up the explanation at this point. “Look, we didn’t know when we started, okay? Our goats worked fine for us and we didn’t know that they need to adopt you into their herd before they’ll cooperate right.” He pulled uneasily at the neckline of his t-shirt and shifted his weight. “When we found out that the hikers would get stranded out there with a bunch of stubborn goats, we thought we’d send them out with a GPS and tell them it was so we could find them to pick up the goats when they left the Trail. When they call us to say that the goats refuse to move and they are stuck, we get their location and then offer to get them mobile again for an additional fee.”
Parmelia sighed and looked down. “We thought it was a smart business plan, since we made a whole lot more off the rescue than the rental.”
I looked at Cam and silently shook my head in disbelief. The little voice chimed in to say ‘And that’s who you’re dealing with, folks.’ Lucas had his hand over his mouth as if he were thinking, but the slight movement in his shoulders revealed that he found this all very amusing. Under other circumstance, I would have thought this was funny too, but I was starting to have some serious trust issues with Parmelia and Bodean. If we were going to have to rely on them to deal with our Entity and their Anomaly, this whole collaboration might be a bad, dangerous idea.
Cam rubbed his face tiredly with his hands and then looked up, gritting his teeth slightly. “If I may bring us back to the original topic of this Anomaly, what exactly did you learn from the thru-hikers?”
Parmelia wrapped her arms around her middle, her body hunching slightly like her stomach hurt. Her voice was low as she answered. “There’s this old farmhouse not too far off-Trail and pretty close to us. Some people bought it recently and converted it into an inn for hikers to get a break from sleeping on the Trail.” She ran a hand thr
ough her thick mane to force it from her eyes and went back to hunching. “The hikers were there the night the innkeepers’ little girl got hurt.”
Bodean nodded and took up the tale. “The little girl is three and can’t really say what happened to her, but her parents said she was having bad dreams since the day they moved into that place. She’d come to their bedroom at night, crying and wanting to crawl into bed with them. She’d never been that way before and they just chucked it up to being in a strange place and that she’d get used to things eventually.”
Parmelia crooked her mouth and her eyes drifted to the side. “Well, instead of the little girl getting better about things, things started getting worse for her parents. To save money, they were doing all the renovation work themselves. But during the renovations, tools would disappear, they’d hear sounds coming from empty parts of the house and see something dark moving out of the corner of their eyes.”
Bodean nodded and stuck his hands in the pockets of his jeans. “To be fair, the house hadn’t been left derelict that long, so things weren’t in terrible shape. They got the kitchen done and a couple of rooms ready for hikers and then started taking in guests right away, figuring the rooms were still more civilized at less than half done than sleeping out in the open. They thought they could put up with the weird, minor nuisances in the house, but as soon as they started accepting guests, things began to escalate.”
Wringing her hands, Parmelia’s face pinched as she told the next part. “They started getting bookings pretty much right away and, like Bodean says, that’s when the trouble really started. As soon as the sun went down, something started stomping through the house, yelling, making pictures fly off the walls and throwing things. The little girl woke up screaming hysterically every night and a lot of the hikers left before the sun rose, deciding to trade a soft bed for the lesser comforts of the great outdoors. A man without a face began terrorizing the people in the house, slamming doors open in the dead of night, yanking people out of bed and throwing them to the floor. That’s what they think happened to the little girl. It broke her arm.”
Lucas’ eyes went wide and he grabbed a small pad and a pen from his pocket. “Really? A full-body apparition? That’s something… You’ve really got something there. The viewers are going to love this story.” He scribbled furiously to capture the conversation.
“What do you mean about his face? He had no head?” Cam frowned deeply and began to unconsciously rub his broken arm.
Shaking his head, Bodean made a circle around his own face. “He has a head, but where the face should be, it’s just a black hole. The thru-hikers are already trading stories about this on the Trail. They say that if you meet up with this spirit, you kind of start losing your own mind. Your thoughts get all jumbled and you get disoriented – and these are people who have a pretty good sense of direction.”
While everyone else focused on the ghost, I felt a surge of protectiveness for the little girl. That was me twenty years ago, I thought. “The family is still in the house?”
Parmelia shrugged her shoulders and shook her head with sigh. “They got nowhere else to go. They sunk all their money into that place.”
“So, you and Bodean went to the house after you heard the story from the thru-hikers?” Lucas poised his pen above the pad and waited for Parmelia to answer.
“Not exactly…” Parmelia once again wrapped her arms around her belly and began rocking.
“What do you mean ‘not exactly?’” Cam demanded. “It seems you had a clear duty here to help the family.”
Bodean’s eyes shifted as if he were looking for an escape route. He ultimately settled on staring at the ground. “We eventually got called into that mess because some folks around these parts still remember Lummie. Anything that goes bump in the night was her purview and I suppose, as her kin, we inherited that responsibility.” Bodean glanced at Parmelia, who nodded her head miserably in resignation that this was the way things were. Sighing, he continued. “After how Lummie was treated, we try to keep a low profile in the community. We don’t just go diving in anytime there’s a bump in the night. That’s not what our family does anymore.”
Zackie made a huffing sound, clearly unimpressed with what Bodean and Parmelia thought was their responsibility. The cousins winced at the rebuke. Cam narrowed his eyes at the pair. “So, that’s why you called us in? To deflect the responsibility from you two?”
Lucas stared back and forth between the cousins and Cam. Finally, he looked at me. “Who is Lummie?”
“I’ll tell you about her later,” I murmured, unwilling to let Parmelia and Bodean off the hook by changing the topic. Looking directly at the cousins, I jutted my chin towards Cam. “Answer him.”
Parmelia, her eyes downcast, whispered her response. “Yes… yes… that was the plan.”
I grabbed my bag, the sheets from the table and headed for the loft where I presumed I would find somewhere to sleep. “I’m going to bed. Tomorrow, we’re all going over to that house.” Pausing on the steps, I stared hard at Bodean and Parmelia. “All of us.”
# # #
I woke up feeling tired, cranky and completely lacking in the patience necessary to infinitely blend the foundation colors to just the right hue. Putting on the fancy gloves after dressing, I headed downstairs intent on finding food and saw Cam sitting at the table near the pot belly stove. He was eating scrambled eggs and bacon with gusto and my stomach growled at the sight. His mouth full, he gestured towards the stove and handed me a plate from the table setting next to him. My stomach growled again loudly as I piled eggs and bacon on to the plate and then grabbed some buttered toast for good measure. Cam was filling a cup with coffee for me as I sat next to him. Nodding my thanks, I tucked in and fed the beast in my belly. When I finally looked up, Cam handed me a napkin and I absently wiped away the evidence of the meal. I could see Lucas outside through the open door as he paced and spoke on his phone. Must be Hannah, I thought. Zackie was lying comfortably near an empty bowl, her back to the pot belly stove. All accounted for except for Parmelia and Bodean.
I took a sip of coffee and then looked to Cam for answers. “Where are the wonder twins?”
“Tending to the goats. They left after they prepared the breakfast for us. They’ll be back.”
“They don’t live here?”
“No, this was Lummie’s house. The Sinclairs do the upkeep for the property, but no one in their family wants to live here. They find the history a bit off-putting. I think they rent the house out to summer tourists, mainly folks who like to day-hike, but don’t have the stamina for a real run at the A.T.”
I nodded and decided not to give into my feelings of irritation for the cousins. They did feed me, after all. Right now, it was far more important to be tactical than emotional. I fired off a question to better understand our current resources. “What are their abilities? I don’t want to walk blind into this situation with the Anomaly.”
“Bodean can bind spirits. They cannot disappear, move about, or influence anything in the environment when he binds them. Parmelia, well… her talent is a little harder to describe. I think the best I can do is say that she can sense the threat level of beings, both human and non-human.” Grinning, he added, “She’s terrified of you.”
I frowned and gave in to my irritation. “Me? What did I do? I haven’t done jack to them… yet.”
“Exactly. It’s the capability for violence that she hones in on. How much destruction a being may be capable of under a particular set of circumstances.” Cam sipped his coffee and winked at me, clearly trying to get my goat. “I think she pegged you just right.”
Rolling my eyes, I muttered, “Commencing eye roll sequence…”
Lucas walked into the room grinning. He looked significantly better after getting some more sleep. The dark circles under eyes had faded and he had regained some color in his cheeks. My eyes ate him up until I caught myself looking. Embarrassed, I coughed into my elbow and looked away.
; “I’m calling the fashion police.” Lucas picked up my normal hand and examined the glove. “Didn’t these go out of style in the eighties?”
I yanked my hand back, blushing furiously. Why was he always touching me? I immediately started grumbling to cover my reaction. “What are you? Some kind of backwoods fashionista?”
“He must know all about the glamorous fashion world and then some.” Parmelia stood at the door and examined Lucas appraisingly. Bodean stared at the gloves. Dressed in jeans and t-shirts, they smelled pleasantly of hay and unpleasantly of barnyard. Parmelia turned her attention to Lucas’ apparel. “You’re not wearing the great coat with all the silver buttons for the house visit?” She sounded vaguely disappointed at his lack of costume.
Lucas, still grinning, shrugged his shoulders. “We’re going for a different look this season.”
Cam took the opportunity to aim a friendly jab at Lucas. “I, for one, will miss the Goth look.” Picking up his coffee mug, he raised it in a toast. “The Goth is dead. Long live the Goth.” Lucas landed a light punch at Cam’s good arm, I suppose a guy’s way of appreciating another guy’s joke.
Cam’s good humor was getting on my nerves. I was concerned about having to deal with the Anomaly and definitely not in the mood for jocularity. We were still nursing broken bones and now we had to face another one of the dangerous dead. Damn right, I was nervous and irritable. I glanced pointedly at my watch. “We’re burning daylight. How far is this house anyway?”
Bodean and Parmelia provided directions and we decided that I would drive Lucas and Zackie, while Cam would hitch a ride with the cousins. Lucas called his film crew and told them where to meet us. During the short drive over, I filled Lucas in on what I knew about Lummie. He appeared to be intrigued by the idea of a sin-eater and took copious notes on the subject.