by JL Bryan
“So, that whole burial ground thing, I see major redness, flag-wise,” Stacey said. “Am I right?”
“Potentially.” I approached a glass display case full of pottery shards. Alongside these were an obsidian knife and a stone ax head. Another shelf held decorative items—a sheet of copper not much larger than a sheet of notebook paper. An owl was etched into it with outstretched wings like the effigy outside. There was a small circle of silver etched with what could have been a beaver or badger. At the bottom of the case, a handful of quartzite stones taken from the effigy on the hill were arranged in the shape of a tiny owl, imitating the shape of the real one.
“Little is known about the mysterious builders of Stony Owl,” Stacey read from the display, in a sort of over-the-top lecturing tone, like she'd always been the world's greatest expert on this particular site. “They were believed to be hunter-gatherers of the Woodland Period between 1000 BC and 1000 AD. Grave items indicate ancient continental trade networks—silver from the Great Lakes area, shells from the Gulf Coast, obsidian from the Yellowstone region.”
I looked at the old pictures of the excavation, dated 1896. The archaeologist, an old white man with a straw hat and a lengthy beard, knelt in front of a trench dug into the stony owl. He held a handful of decorative beads in one hand.
In his other hand, held up like a gruesome trophy, was a human skull.
“Yikes.” I shivered. “I hope they put that back where they found it.”
“Looks like they kept some of it.” Stacey pointed to the beads in the display. They were carved from yellowed bone and decayed bits of wood. “That could stir up the ghosts, right?”
“Maybe. Though with artifacts this old, most of the entities associated with them should have moved on long ago. I would hope so. Thousand-year-old entities are rare, but they're always unnerving. And dangerous. They've long since lost touch with their brief existence as a living thing.” I shook my head. “Anyway, let's not jump to conclusions. This isn't even the area where she heard footsteps.”
Further exploration of the museum turned up no skeletal remains from the dig, fortunately.
There was an area devoted to the camp's founder, a tall, broad-shouldered, stern-looking preacher by the name of Roger Carmody; his plump wife Laurie Ann stood beside him, smiling wide as if to make up for his solemn expression. They wore uniforms and wide-brimmed campaign hats like park rangers or state troopers. So did all the young campers. “Discipline, industry, and loyalty are the building blocks of character,” said one of several quotes pasted around Carmody's oversized black and white picture, in which he addressed precise rows of uniformed boys and girls.
We left a lone night vision camera watching the museum. Allison hadn't reported trouble there, but a room full of excavated grave goods was worth keeping an eye on.
In the office, we pointed our cameras and microphones toward the windows, which we left open. If anything walked by in the night, hopefully we'd catch evidence of it.
“Well, that just leaves the attic.” Stacey was leaning against Allison's desk, looking up at the somewhat saggy ceiling. “She didn't mention what was up there, did she?”
“She did not. Other than footsteps and strange sounds.” I couldn't help feeling apprehensive. The set-up had taken awhile, and it was completely dark outside. Very little silvery moonlight fell through the clouds to illuminate the night. I could barely make out the edges of the thick porch post outside the window.
We had to poke around for a minute to even find the attic stairs. They were at the back of a narrow closet with a mop bucket and broom, hidden behind a dusty louvered door that emitted a scratchy rasp as I opened it.
The only illumination over the stairs was a bare bulb on a string; we added our flashlights to that. The stairs felt like a rickety afterthought, wooden slats with no risers between them, just gaps looking into musty darkness.
The second floor had a definite forgotten-attic feel, ceiling low and slanted, bare rafters close enough to touch. Most of the space was cluttered with memories of summers past—broken oars, baseball bats, a broken heap of an old tent shoved into one corner. One box overflowed with grimy old trophies from long-forgotten events.
“Now that is... really unusual.” I pointed with my flashlight, but Stacey was already looking.
A structure resembling one of the camper cabins outside had been built here in the attic, taking up the back quarter of the space. It had a door with a keyhole lock, and even had small windows looking out onto the attic. Nearby, iron pots and a kettle hung by the fireplace.
“For when you want to camp out, but not really, I guess,” Stacey said
“Kind of eccentric.”
Unlike the downstairs, the upstairs had only a few small windows; it would be dim even in daytime.
We moved aside a lumpy, hand-carved wooden wagon, a couple of deflated balls, and some assorted toy soldiers and rag dolls, making room for camera tripods and recorders. While Stacey set up those, I poked around some more.
The floorboards creaked heavily as I approached the odd indoor cabin in the corner. The whole structure gave me an uneasy feeling.
I turned the knob. The door opened reluctantly, as if it had been stuck shut for many years.
Inside was an old bedroom, an austere, spartan space, the bed barely a double. Two small, plain wardrobes occupied the corners. A desk faced the room's single small window. There was a small, dark bathroom in the corner, the door ajar.
The little attic cabin had been claimed for storage over the years, crates and boxes shoved in haphazardly, piled up on the floor and almost burying the furniture. Everything smelled profoundly musty.
“I think I found the old headmaster's quarters,” I told Stacey. “Or whatever you call the head of a camp. Warden?”
“Director. Warden is for prisons.”
“Yeah, I don't know why I'd think of this spooky, cramped old place as a prison. How are we here?”
“All set, I think. I threw in a couple of motion detectors,” Stacey said.
“Good.” I looked over the array of gear and nodded, then started for the stairs. “Let's get out of the way and see what happens.”
We tiptoed downstairs and out the front door, then climbed into the back of the van. We'd use it as our nerve center, watching the array of little monitors and listening to the speakers. We were using fewer than half the available screens.
“I'm wiped out,” I said, sitting back to watch and listen. “I'm glad we only did one building tonight.”
“It's going to be hard to monitor so many sites spread out like that,” Stacey said.
“Good thing that's tomorrow night's problem.” I cracked open an absurdly tall can of something that claimed to be green tea under layers of added sugar and caffeine. I looked from the night vision view of the museum, to the cluttered attic, to the first-floor area around the office. “Seems like pretty decent coverage for a quick job.”
“Not that quick. It's almost eleven,” Stacey said.
“Really? Feels later.”
We fell quiet, watching and listening. The van sat in the desolate parking lot, the only vehicle there. I tried not to think about how isolated the campground was, or to imagine anyone emerging from the thick woods around us.
Something had inflicted the damage to the lodge and to Bobcat Cabin, after all; human or beast, alive or dead.
We kept the van's doors locked. I double-checked a couple of times to make sure.
Chapter Eight
Despite our surroundings, and the discomfort of my drop-down cot in the van, I dozed off at some point. So, it turned out, did Stacey.
While I realize that literally sleeping on the job might not sound super-professional on our part, it had been a five-hour drive involving hair-raising, adrenaline-extracting steep mountain roads overlooking steep mountain drops to steep mountain deaths. Then we'd spent hours with the client and setting up cameras and such.
The microphones in the office caught the night
sounds of the mountain forest through the open windows—fluttering wings of unseen birds and bats, frogs croaking from the lake and creeks. Scrabbling, scratching, screeching. A coyote howled. Owls did some weird cackling cries that sounded like a troop of monkeys threatening each other in the trees.
All of this became a constant background, calming in its way. Even in the uncomfortable van, it had been easy to grow accustomed to the night sounds and doze off.
I awoke to a sudden, sharp cry.
“What was that?” I asked. “Stacey, are you okay?”
In the gray glow of the monitor screens, Stacey was on her cot, solidly zonked out. I could wake her, but she wouldn't be able to tell me what I'd heard.
Something moved at the corner of my eye. A flicker on a monitor, but I wasn't sure which one.
I crept toward the monitors, looking intently from one to the other, listening carefully.
There.
Something moved in the monochrome image from a night vision camera up in the lodge's attic.
It was barely noticeable. The little hand-carved wagon, one of the toys we'd slid aside to clear our path, was nose first against a table leg. I'd glimpsed it shifting backward less than a centimeter, a movement so slight it could almost have been my imagination.
It wasn't, though. I grabbed Stacey's laptop and pulled up the recording of that camera's footage.
When I replayed the recent footage, it didn't take long to find what I was looking for.
The little toy wagon—it really was crude, handmade, a seemingly careless creation from a half-attempted craft activity in the distant past—wobbled forward on its uneven wheels as if pushed by an unseen hand. It moved through the legs of the thermal camera's tripod and back to where we'd originally found it, a distance of several inches.
It bumped into the table leg, then rocked back a little before stopping. That was the small movement I'd initially seen.
“Stacey!” I said, louder than before, while I played the footage in reverse.
“Huh?” Stacey looked toward me with sleepy eyes, her blond hair sticking up high on one side, staticky bedhead creating a punk look. “Whatsa?”
“Look at this.”
While she came over, rubbing her eyes, I noticed something else a minute earlier in the footage than the inexplicably moving wagon. A long-deflated red rubber ball shifted on the floor, as if someone had tried to roll it. It didn't go far, just twitched like a dying blobfish and fell still again.
“Whoa,” Stacey said, leaning forward and tuning in to the situation. “Some real psychokinetic activity in there.”
“Check the upstairs audio recording for spikes,” I said, continuing to work at the laptop.
“Got it.” Stacey grabbed a tablet.
“The EMF meter went wild for a minute there,” I told her as I checked through the data. “A temperature drop, like an entity came through. We should have caught something on thermal.”
Stacey made a slight mmph sound, like maybe she was listening, maybe not. “There was an audio spike,” she said, looking at the digital graph of soundwaves. “Let's have us a listen, shall we?”
She played the audio. As the vertical tracking line crossed the sharp peak, a high shriek filled the van. We jumped, even though we'd been expecting something. The audio returned to normal after that. We hadn't opened any upstairs windows, so the attic was fairly silent, aside from the occasional creaking of the lodge's old timbers or the occasional especially loud owl.
I looked at the live feed from the cameras upstairs. At the moment, nothing moved on the night vision camera. The thermal showed a leaky draft around the small window, but no particularly cold spots.
“Something passed through, anyway,” I said. “What did that sound like to you?”
“A scream, maybe?” Stacey played it again—it was high-pitched, abrupt, and brief. “It's only about a quarter-second long. Like something you might overhear from a passing car. Could be a scared scream or happy scream. Maybe even a really painful laugh.”
“Anything on the thermal?”
“Playing it backwards at quarter speed.” Stacey watched her screen. I kept my eyes on the live monitors, but nothing else seemed to be happening.
After a minute, Stacey spoke up again, oddly quiet and serious: “Ellie?”
“What?”
She turned the screen toward me and played some of the thermal video.
For a period of several seconds, the thermal showed a cold blue mist filling the attic. It was like a burst of volcanic eruptions or geysers, only icy instead of hot.
The cold grew and grew, enveloping most of the room. Stacey paused the video.
“That's... kinda big, isn't it?” Stacey asked, her voice hushed.
“Yeah. That's really quite a presence.” I didn't know what else to say; I just stared.
We'd certainly detected cold spots before, but there was something different here. Usually they were concentrated in one place, sometimes taking on the rough shape of human beings, sometimes not.
I wasn't sure what to make of the cloud of cold that had passed through the room. It was huge, swelling to fill much of the attic before shrinking away and vanishing.
Stacey played it back more slowly. I shook my head.
“That's weird,” I said. An understatement.
“It's enormous. I hope we don't get on its bad side. Whichever side that may be.” She frowned at the shapeless presence.
As I watched the vast coldness flowing through the cluttered attic, it was like I could feel it right through the recorded video, the chill eating through my skin and down into my bones.
“What do you think it is?” Stacey whispered.
“I don't know,” I said. “It makes me think of vampire stories.”
“I thought they turned into bats.”
“Bats, wolves, mist. The really top-notch ones turn into all three.”
“So you think it's a vampire? Like from Sookie Stackhouse?”
“I doubt it. Myths and folklore tend to be rooted in truth, though.” I looked over at the live feed from the thermal video, but there was nothing happening in real time. The enormous cold presence had filled the attic and vanished in a matter of seconds, as though just passing through on its way from the afterworld, leaving us with lots of questions and no answers at all.
Chapter Nine
I remained wide awake for the rest of the night; having watched some giant presence pass through the lodge's upper floor, nudging objects, I was eager to see whether it came back or not.
After a few hours, I was even tempted to head in there with a voice recorder and ask a few questions, try to elicit a response from the entity, but I didn't want to rush into anything the first night. I forced myself to be patient and observe.
In the last darkness before sunrise, unexpected bright lights filled the front of the van. From where we sat in the back, looking at the monitors built in behind the driver and shotgun seats, we couldn't see the source of the light.
“Allison must be coming to check on us.” I looked at my phone to see if I'd missed a text or call from her, but I hadn't.
The lights held steady, like a police car studying a potential suspect. I clambered over to the driver's seat and looked out. I couldn't see much but the headlights.
Being in an annoyed, sleep-deprived kind of mood, I kicked open the driver door and hopped out. My hand lingered against the tactical flashlight holstered at my belt, which can make a handy weapon when needed.
“Can I help you?” I asked, stepping out of the beams so I could see better. It was a Jaguar sedan that looked out of place at the campground. Its low-slung chassis was thoroughly painted in mud. It was parked sloppily, across two spaces, but I guess there wasn't much demand for parking at the moment.
I approached the tinted window and knocked.
The glass rolled down. The guy behind it was in his forties, with a deep tan, close-cropped blond hair, and a toothy grin. I had the impression he was about to inv
ite me to watch a video about timeshare condos, which was similar to the impression I'd gotten from his picture on his wife's desk.
“Hey there.” He reached out a hand for me to shake. His grip was firm, and his eyes sparkled as he looked at me, as though he were laughing inwardly at some joke, possibly at my expense. “Josh Conner. Nice to meet you. I thought I'd swing by and try to understand what's happening up here.”
I introduced myself. “I'm sure your wife told you why we're here.”
“She did, yes. To be honest, I thought she was joking.” He killed his lights and engine and stepped out, towering over me, a few inches past six feet. He was a guy who kept in shape. He wore a faded linen shirt and designer jeans, and he flashed me a sale-closing smile, his teeth movie-star white. “Then last night she mentioned you were actually here.”
“We actually are, yes.” I introduced Stacey as she came around to join us.
“Do you do ghost tours?” he asked.
“I'm sorry?”
“She said you're paranormal investigators from Savannah. We went on a ghost tour there once. A haunted trolley ride at night. Well, a bus, but they call it a trolley. They told us about all the haunted places downtown.”
“Most of the places downtown are haunted or allegedly haunted,” I said. “But no, we are not on the tourism side of things.”
“We enjoyed it. Lovely city, very inspirational. Our Heritage Green development in Alpharetta was meant to look like a square lifted from Savannah. Those units sold fast. I can show you pictures.”
“Sounds nice,” I said, hoping he didn't mean right away, or maybe ever.
“Allison said you were planning to spend the night in the lodge,” he said. “What did you think?”
“Well, we actually—”
“I know it still needs work, but we're hoping to build on the history here. We want arcs of connection between today and yesterday, a tapestry of many traditions. The old days of the camp, its past eras, and of course the native people who lived here in ancient times. We want to honor the past while looking ahead to the future.”