The Color of Fear

by Billy Phillips

  “I owe you,” Caitlin said.

  “Don’t we know it.” Natalie held up her camera. “Here’s your first photo op. Standing at the grave of Lewis Carroll.”

  Caitlin shook her head and scowled.

  Click.

  “Isn’t Jack supposed to be here?” Natalie asked.

  He certainly was. Caitlin checked the time again on her phone, and as if on cue, it rang. Slick from the rain, it slipped out of her hand. It dropped right in front of the headstone! Right on top of Dodgson’s grave.

  “Whoops. Sorry, Charles,” Caitlin said as she kneeled to pick it up.

  As her hand reached for the phone, the grass shifted.

  That’s weird.

  Then it rolled like a wave. Instinct always seeks the logical, and Caitlin’s first thought was that a sinkhole must be forming from the pounding rain.

  A second wave rumbled the ground. Caitlin willed herself to believe it would be the last one, the same way she always willed herself to wake up from the throes of a nightmare when it was about to overwhelm her.

  Not this time.

  A small mound of grass thumped, as if being punched up from beneath the surface.

  An earthquake then? Unlikely.

  The rest of the cemetery grounds had remained motionless.

  Natalie took cover behind the wide trunk of the pine tree next to the grave. She crouched down, out of sight, camera poised. She was ready to photograph whatever happened next.

  Caitlin’s mind floundered for a rational explanation.

  Rain must’ve flooded the grave.

  Mud beneath the ground is being pushed to the surface.

  How absurd to even think for a moment that a body might be clamoring to get out.

  Caitlin again reached for her phone.

  A pile of soil suddenly spit up like a geyser.

  A shimmer of ice-blue light spiked through Charles Dodgson’s grave.

  Then a white, bony hand broke through.

  Caitlin’s terrified scream rang out into the night.

  The pale, cold hand seized her wrist.

  Caitlin’s body iced over with spindly needles. Her eyes grew wider than two full moons. She jerked her hand wildly and screamed again. “Let go of me!”

  Powered by adrenaline, Caitlin yanked herself free. In the moment that followed, there was an uncanny quiet.

  A voice broke the silence.

  “Caitlin, are you there?”

  Jack!

  His voice was coming from her phone. Hearing it stopped Caitlin from losing it, momentarily.

  A second pale, dead hand rose from the dirt. Two arms groped upward toward the sky, emerging from beneath the glowing muck and soil. Long, slender limbs, with scars and stitches cut into the forearms, began pulling at the ground—clawing, raking away globs of mud. Both palms then pressed against the soil for leverage.

  Caitlin went numb. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was climbing out of his grave. This might actually be more terrifying than dancing in front of people!

  Natalie stood behind the tree trunk, her camera flashing away.

  A jagged arc of lightning cut through black clouds. The corpse’s spindly fingers dug deep into the dirt, working to extract their body from the bowels of the earth. Natalie’s camera flashed bright. Through the sharp camera light and cold, blue glow seeping from the grave, Caitlin observed something that struck her as even more bizarre.

  The fingernails on those rotting hands were elegant and manicured and actually quite pretty.

  Huh?

  These were not the hands of a dead man who’d been buried for nearly two hundred years.

  They were the attractive hands of a girl!

  And she was now climbing out of the grave!

  In the charming and historic town of Guildford, on the night of October 31st, the evening of Halloween, a dead girl was apparently climbing out of a man’s grave in the old Mount Cemetery. She finally uprooted herself completely from the dirt, leaving a large gaping hole in the ground.

  From behind the pine tree, Natalie snapped away.

  “Caitlin! Are you there?” Jack was still on the phone, calling to her from a mound of mud. Unfortunately, a certain obstacle separated Caitlin from her phone.

  A beautiful dead girl who now seemed very much alive.

  Caitlin let go of the breath she didn’t realize she’d been holding. Blood found its way back into her knuckles. Her tensed shoulders slackened.

  It finally dawned on her, though she had already intuited what was going on in the back of her mind the whole time.

  Caitlin was the victim of a Halloween prank brilliantly orchestrated by Jack. He probably had majorly buff rugby legend Barton Sullivan dig that massively deep hole.

  Ha, ha, ha.

  The dead girl pulled her long, slender legs up from the ground and dusted off the dirt. Caitlin noticed that her blonde hair, though, stretched back into the grave. As the girl pulled it up, it kept on coming. And coming. And coming. Caitlin stared at the full length of her exquisite, long, braided locks. They seemed to flow on forever into the depth of the grave. Her hair wasn’t decayed like the rest of her body. It was silky and golden. Shimmering. A tumble of hair that Caitlin would die for—no pun intended.

  “Excellent zombie makeup and costume,” said Caitlin with a hint of nervousness in her voice. “So, where’s Jack?”

  The long-legged, long-haired zombie girl turned slowly. She made eye contact with Caitlin.

  “Kudos,” Caitlin continued. “A brilliantly executed prank. Scared me half to death.”

  The girl didn’t respond. She simply stared back with cold eyes.

  What’s her problem?

  Then the girl reached out her right hand. Caitlin flinched. The zombie gripped the collar of Caitlin’s raincoat with her bony fingers.

  “Hey!”

  She effortlessly lifted Caitlin straight into the air. A good four feet off the earth.

  Oh my God!

  Faster than lightning, she yanked Caitlin toward her so they stood face to face. Except, of course, Caitlin was hanging by her collar.

  Her veins pulsed with blood.

  The dead girl’s strength was inhuman!

  The more Caitlin struggled, the harder it became to breathe. Finally, Caitlin let her body go limp. She dangled there by the scruff, her collar gripped tightly in the strong grip of the female ghoul.

  The dead girl then uttered four words. Four words that Caitlin never expected to come out of a zombie’s mouth.

  “I need your help.”

  Caitlin swayed in the night air as the dead girl’s cold, damp breath hit her in the face like a winter wind. Unlike warm human breath, which produced a white cloud when exhaled into cold air, no steam rose from this girl’s mouth.

  And her breath … there was no odor to it. It was cold and scentless like ice. That fact unnerved Caitlin to the bone—as if she wasn’t already scared to death.

  Natalie, unfazed, stayed hidden behind the tree, clicking her camera. The dead girl did not seem to notice the flashes. Caitlin tried to signal her sister to stop before this creature caught sight of her.

  The dead girl’s gaze was unwavering.

  The corners of Caitlin’s mouth began to tremble. “What do you want?”

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  Caitlin struggled frantically.

  “But I’m not here to eat,” the dead one said. “Not if you can help me.”

  Caitlin calmed down slightly. The dead girl was forthright and spoke with a British accent.

  “I could help you a lot better if you’d kindly put me down,” Caitlin said.

  The ghoul lowered Caitlin gently to the ground. Caitlin lunged for her cell.

  She pressed the phone to her ear. “Jack?”

  Silence.

  Caitlin hit the Call Back button, but before it could connect, and before Caitlin could even see it coming, the dead girl’s lightning-quick finger tapped the End Call button.

  “No calls,”
said the zombie. “I came here to find someone.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone named Caitlin Rose Fletcher.”

  Caitlin’s heart stopped cold.

  “Hey, that’s you!” Natalie shouted from behind the tree trunk.

  Way to go, Natalie.

  Caitlin’s mouth fell open, partly because a real-live dead person was looking for her and partly because her kid sister had just thrown her under the bus!

  Natalie snapped pic after pic as the dead girl’s eyes scanned Caitlin from head to toe.

  Caitlin dried off her phone and stuck it in her jacket.

  She turned to the ghoul. “How do you know my name? And why are you looking for me?”

  “I need you to slide down into that hole.” The zombie pointed to her own long rope of hair, which still stretched down into the depths of the gleaming grave.

  Natalie broke out in laughter. “Hey, zombie chick, my sister would rather face an army of walking dead than plunge herself into that glowing pit!”

  “Zombie Chick’s” head swiveled, zeroing in on Natalie. Anger flared from her pretty, dead eyes. Natalie cowered behind the pine.

  “Back off,” Caitlin said. “That’s my kid sister.”

  The zombie girl’s expression softened.

  Natalie fearlessly emerged from behind the safety of the tree.

  “That grave doesn’t even belong to you!” she shouted.

  In her stylish yellow boots, Natalie stomped over the muddy mound and right up to the zombie. “You’re not Charles … Lewis … Carroll … Dodgson … or whatever his name is. So what are you doing messing with his grave?”

  Caitlin’s kid sister was half the size of the zombie, but that didn’t stop her from getting up in her face.

  “Where I come from,” Natalie continued, “we call that invasion of privacy. And trespassing.”

  Natalie had finally moved close enough for Caitlin to yank her out of reach of the zombie.

  “Charles has been resting in peace for more than a century,” the dead girl said. “I’m borrowing his grave as a sort of off-ramp.”

  “Off-ramp?” Caitlin exclaimed. “Off-ramp from what?”

  “The wormholes.”

  Caitlin’s brow scrunched. “Excuse me?”

  Natalie’s eyes flickered like fireflies in the dark. “Wormholes are shortcuts,” she said to her sister. “They bridge distant regions of the universe by traversing the space-time continuum.”

  Sometimes Girl Wonder does come in handy.

  The long-haired dead girl smiled and explained, “Certain graves in your world are the gateways into the wormholes. They connect distant dimensions and faraway worlds.”

  “Which graves are you talking about? Caitlin asked.

  Long-haired dead girl smiled. “The ones belonging to the storytellers.”

  Caitlin glanced over at the plaque posted at the foot of the grave. A gleam lit her eye.

  “You mean like Lewis Carroll?”

  “I do. And JM Barrie. And Hans Christian Andersen. And the Brothers Grimm. Do you understand?”

  She did. Caitlin saw it clear in her mind’s eye. And it made her skin tingle from awe. The graves of all the great story-tellers were not just ordinary graves. They were portals into the mythic kingdoms and wondrous worlds found in the beloved fairy tales of childhood.

  Natalie obviously got it as well. Her eyes had opened like a book. “We’re totally going, sibling.”

  “There’s no freaking wa—”

  Caitlin’s phone buzzed.

  Jack!

  Caitlin desperately wanted to tell him that the sightings were positively real.

  She lifted her finger to accept the call when a movement she saw out the corner of her eye made her pause. She pivoted. Her heart stopped.

  Natalie was sliding down the zombie’s luminous locks. She was headed straight into the wet, muddy pit of the grave.

  “Natalie! Don’t!”

  Caitlin dove across the mud-drenched ground to grab her sister’s hand. But she only managed to break Natalie’s grip on the zombie’s hair. Caitlin watched, horrified, as Natalie fell into the glowing tomb. She vanished quickly, leaving only a fading scream behind her.

  “Yippeeeeee!”

  The zombie fixed her dead, enchanting pupils on Caitlin and sighed.

  “You have a choice: slide down my hair or fall into the hole like the little one just did. Which will it be?”

  Another crack of lightning split the sky. Caitlin felt her chest vibrate as thunder shook the humid air. A split second of silence, then—pow! Bucketfuls of rain poured from the dark sky.

  “Hurry,” warned the zombie, “before the rain pushes the dirt back into the passage and the poor kid is stuck there for good!”

  Caitlin bit off a sliver of thumbnail.

  “What’s actually down there?” she asked.

  Long-haired registered a coy smile, which only amplified Caitlin’s anguish.

  There’s no choice here. None. My sister is somewhere down that hole.

  That’s all that mattered at that moment.

  Caitlin set her tablet against the tree trunk next to the grave. She slid her mobile into her front right pocket.

  Then she scrunched up her face and climbed onto the zombie’s shimmering strands of hair. She slowly lowered herself into the grave, fully expecting to wake up from the bizarre dream at any moment.

  The passageway smelled like a wet dog. She clung to that rope of hair for dear life, her fingers gripping it till her knuckles gleamed white.

  Am I really sliding into a grave on a cable of golden, braided hair?

  Her mobile rang.

  Jack!

  But she didn’t dare let go of that rope to retrieve her phone.

  “You have to keep moving!” said long-haired dead girl. “You can’t just hang there.”

  Inch by inch, Caitlin submerged herself into the hole, holding her breath for as long as she could, then sucking in what she believed every time might be her last gulp of oxygen. Mud pressed against her sopping wet body, and pasty, cold lumps of it clung to her arms.

  “Slide!” the zombie shouted from above. “We don’t want the walls to close around us!”

  No, we don’t!

  Caitlin inhaled. She closed her eyes. She unclenched her grip ever so slightly.

  She began her descent.

  The lower she dropped, the faster she fell. She was sinking and sliding along the twisting braids The silken tresses massaged her palms as braided folds slipped through her stiff-but-slightly-open fists.

  As she continued down the hair, the muscles in her body relaxed.

  She opened her eyes.

  The mud on the tunnel walls was now dry and hardened. And bathed in pale blue. Bright orange-and-pink streaks of light leaked through narrow cracks, and the faster Caitlin slid through the extraordinary passageway, the faster the streaks of light shimmered by, until she was sliding so fast they ran together into glowing, wide ribbons of color. Downward she whooshed, past lambent waves of light.

  She heard a distinct, though distant, meow echoing from high above her.

  That cat!

  The cry amplified, and a second later the blue British Shorthair whizzed by, heading downward.

  The tunnel, now awash in bright color, took a gentle curve, and Caitlin turned with it. The light shifted into swirling greens and twisting pinks.

  She finally landed with a thud.

  There was an uncanny silence.

  Caitlin took a couple of big breaths. She looked around. She was in an old barn. It appeared to be empty except for the cat, which had landed cleanly on all four paws.

  Before she could move, the cat bolted from the barn, leaving behind only the echo of a fading meow.

  Caitlin glanced around again. Then she surveyed the hole she had fallen through.

  Her hands turned clammy. She breathed in extra air to compensate for the lack of oxygen in her lungs. There was no escape, nowhere to run, nowhere to
hide. No way to get back up that portal. No Natalie.

  Caitlin forced herself to take stock of her surroundings. To settle down. The slatted, chipped walls showed more bare boards than paint, and the wood appeared to be rotting. Bales of hay were stacked to the ceiling, and piles of straw filled the corners. A pitchfork lay on the ground next to an overturned, rusty metal bucket. A faintly cheesy smell tickled her nose.

  There was something extra peculiar about this barn. Then Caitlin realized what it was: it was uncommonly small, as if it had been built for a child. Caitlin’s head almost bumped into the ceiling as she stood up.

  Where the heck was she? Where on earth was Natalie?

  Caitlin opened the barn door.

  Daylight!

  But it was a hazy, gray daylight.

  She checked her phone for the time: 1:37 p.m.

  Wow, well past noon! Definitely not my time zone.

  Before leaving the barn, Caitlin snuck a quick look at the four corners of the ceiling.

  One, two, three, four.

  Then Caitlin stooped and maneuvered through the pint-size doorway. She stepped outside—into extreme heat, and into what appeared to be a miniature, abandoned village. Most of the buildings were shorter than she was. A row of cozy, thatched-roofed cottages circled a child-size, covered well. Caitlin could tell there had once been bright colors here. But now the colors were muted.

  The windows on all the houses were broken. The walls seemed to sag against each other. Brown, patchy grass covered cracked, dry dirt, and the only green things she saw were weeds. Despite the intense heat, a murky sheet of fog hung between the sun and the clouds.

  Caitlin took a few tentative steps. Tall weeds tickled her knees. She glanced back a few times at the barn door. A tiny grasshopper hopped across her path. She let out a shriek.

  “What took you so long?” came a familiar voice.

  Caitlin glanced up fast.

  Her fists opened.

  Her jaw unclenched.

  For the first time in a long while, she was overjoyed to see her sister. The little twerp looked just fine. She was perched on top of a miniature brick schoolhouse, her camera swaying around her neck.