by J L Bryan
“What exactly am I walking into here?” I asked.
“A bookcase,” he said, then he rolled one of them aside, revealing a narrow passageway beyond, with stairs winding down and out of sight.
“That...is not the kind of answer I expected.” I watched bulbs flicker to life inside the hidden stairwell, concealed between the walls of the apartment.
“He had a flair for showmanship, I guess. Even in his private life. Walk carefully, it's a little steep.”
It was barely wide enough for a human, flanked by exposed studs and wiring on either side.
“Did you ever experience anything strange in here?” I asked.
“To be honest, yeah. Nothing as clear as the reptile guy, but sometimes I feel like...there's something in here with me.” He shivered as he reached the second floor, where he stepped into an alcove and slid open a pair of narrow double doors.
We emerged into a cluttered office, with shelves and bookcases crammed full of odds and ends, including some actual books.
I turned back and saw that we'd stepped out through a tall old cupboard in the office. The cupboard had split into two to grant us access from the hidden staircase. Each half of the cupboard was fronted with a glass door, behind which sat shelves of small objects: animals skulls, a few stone arrowheads and spear points, a greenish curved tool that might have been a copper sickle a few thousand years earlier, a bone knife with a deer-antler hilt.
“So this was my Uncle Leydan's office, obviously. I guess he liked being able to move between work and home without anybody seeing him.”
“Are there any more hidden passageways I should know about?” I asked.
“Why? Do ghosts like those?” He flashed a smile, and I had to avert my eyes, worried I might look at him too long. And possibly drool a little.
“They do, actually. Doorways, stairways, trap doors, even corridors—ghosts are caught, you know, between worlds. Failure to fully transition can make them obsess with areas of transition. Add in the fact that hidden passageways like this tend to be dark and lesser-used...and of course they have that intent of being secretive built right into them, which can help attract ghosts who wish to avoid the living.”
“You talk about ghosts like you see them every day.” He slid the two halves of the cupboard closed, leaving no sign that one could exit the room through it.
“I see them at night, mostly,” I said. I tried to take in the riotous room as methodically as I could. Papers were heaped on the desk, which looked like an antique. The drawer pulls on the front looked like a woodcut of a horned man's face. You opened the drawers by reaching your fingers into their open mouths. Each face was slightly different, no two horns or shallow blank eyes just alike, indicating it had been hand-carved.
The wall behind the desk was crammed full of photographs and advertising posters. The oldest, most faded poster, accented with a cluster of black and white pictures, advertised ENCHANTED CAVERNS! AMAZING CAVING! FUN FOR YOUR FAMILY! EVEN WOMEN LIKE THEM!
“Even women, huh?” I asked, nodding at the poster.
“I know. It's amazing how women can enjoy natural wonders, too. Like other, non-women people.”
“Are the caves really that amazing?”
“Are you asking for a tour?”
“Only if they're relevant to the case.”
“The caves were the original tourist attraction here,” Ryan said. “Someone decided they were interesting enough to put up some billboards and a ticket booth. Then a display of odd things found in the cave. Native American pottery, tools, things like that. Old animal bones. Basically just a few sheds outside the mouth of the cave, trying to draw in tourists taking the highway to the Great Smokey Mountains. That was how my great-uncle found it. And he bought it.”
He pointed to a picture on the wall, showing a young man in a fedora and suit shaking hands with a bearded older man wearing bib overalls and a tie. Behind them stood a slightly tilted wooden shed with a hand-painted TICKETS sign. Another sign hung above a wide entrance into the mountainside: WELCOME TO ENCHANTED CAVERNS!
“I wonder why he did that,” I said.
Ryan shrugged. “He was some kind of traveling salesman before that, I think. And he was in the war.”
“Which one?”
“Vietnam?” Ryan rubbed his forehead. “Nah, Korea. Had to be. He was eighty-eight when he died. Anyway, once he bought this place, it was his life's work. Exploring the caves and the mountains, always looking for museum exhibits. Weird skulls, artifacts, things like that. I remember coming here once as a kid. I thought it was amazing. My mom thought it was horrible. She told my dad we couldn't come back here again after that trip.”
“What did she find so horrible?”
“Let's head in and I'll show you.” He opened the door out of the office.
“I can't wait to see it,” I said, feeling like I could have waited another day or two. Or a week, maybe.
I followed him into a dusty, shadowy hallway beyond.
Chapter Twelve
“There used to be several people working here, believe it or not,” Ryan said, leading me past a series of dusty offices cluttered with yellowed paper and old furniture and crates. “I remember that from when I visited as a kid in the nineties. Somebody working the gift ship, the snack bar, the ticket window, a couple of tour guides. It was kind of a must-visit spot for tourists in the old days. It's hard to believe now. This is the workshop.”
We reached a large room full of cobwebs. A couple of long workbenches lined the walls. One was thick with dust, but another looked recently used, the dust wiped away, the tools shined up.
A life-sized mechanical bear in a jester hat sat in the middle of the room. Its fur was moth-eaten. Half its face was gone, revealing an unsettling metal and rubber skull underneath, and an unblinking glass eye. Its belly had been opened up to show rusty gears inside.
“My uncle would prepare his exhibits up here. Artifacts and bones had to be cleaned, you know, and other random junk repaired. And when they were ready...” Ryan stood among several ropes attached to the floor and reached for a crank attached to an overhead pulley system. “Uh, the surprise effect works better if you're standing over here.”
I stepped closer to him, and the floor wobbled under my feet.
“Hold my hand,” he said.
I raised my eyebrows.
“Just for a second. That first drop isn't always smooth.”
“This is getting to be less and less of a surprise as we go,” I said.
“Yeah, maybe it'll still be a little dramatic.” He took my hand, and I felt the strength in his grip, the calluses on his palm and his fingertips.
With his other hand, he turned the crank.
The floor dropped away beneath us, and I swayed, grabbing him desperately for balance.
The large square of falling floor jerked to stop after a couple of feet, then began to descend more slowly, swaying and creaking on the ropes at its corners.
“I doubt this is legal under OSHA or whatever,” Ryan said. “But anyway, this is how he moved exhibits between the workshop and the actual museum.”
We descended through the first-floor ceiling, the pulleys above squeaking and rattling as they lowered us to a stop in the lobby at the front and center of the museum. Doorways and wide corridors branched off around us. The two heavy doors where I'd originally knocked stood at the front of the room, sealed tight.
“Where would you like to go first?” he asked. “Settlers' Row? The Hall of Monsters? The Medical Maladies Exhibit? The Tomb of History?”
“Wherever you've encountered problems,” I said. “You said you had unsettling experiences down here, right?”
“I've been fixing up Settler's Row most recently.”
“Sounds like a good place to start. The other exhibits actually sound kind of awful.”
“Oh, they are,” he said. “I'm sorry about that. I wish it was a museum of happy paintings of frolicking puppies, believe me. I hope you don't think I
'm, like, personally creepy or into this stuff. I mean, I liked it when I was ten, but...” He looked suddenly embarrassed.
“It's fine. You inherited it. Any idea why your great-uncle left it to you instead of somebody like your dad?”
“My mom. He was her uncle. But she hated this place, remember? And she thought he was mentally ill for creating it, much less putting it out in public for everyone to see. It embarrassed the family, apparently. She said the town ought to close it down. She couldn't believe all these mansion-dwellers with their expensive estates tolerated it all these years. The museum was here first, though, or at least the tourist-cave version was.”
“Are the caves still open?” I asked.
“Nothing is open now,” he said. “Not for months. But yeah, the cave exhibit is still part of this place. It's at the end of the Tomb of History.” He pointed to what looked like a heavy crypt door, propped open with a big stone skull, which led to the historical exhibit beyond.
“We can hold off on it,” I said quickly.
I followed him through a square archway of heavy beams and rocks, modeled to look like the entrance to a mine. The room beyond was dark, its walls and floor rock.
Ryan clicked a button on the wall, and a light crackled to life. In front of us, a couple of mannequins knelt at a stream bed holding metal pans.
A scratchy recording began to play, hissing and crackling. “Foxboro was founded in the 1820s, during the Carolina Gold Rush, by settlers searching the local caves for wealth. No wealth was found, but the town remained as a trading post for fur trappers and other hardy mountaineers.”
“That's an actual record playing back there,” Ryan said, his tone a little awed. “My uncle's set-up is like nothing I've seen. It's rigged together from all these crazy parts, back behind the walls, lights and record players operated by switches. But that's where I started, you know. Sound is something I understand. I was in a band back in high school, and a while after, but with Paula and the twins, I couldn't tour or anything. Dropped that. The other guys went on for a while. Touring. They even got a big record deal, but it turned out to be more of a one-hit wonder kind of thing. You ever heard 'Karma's a Wrench?' That was the radio title, anyway.”
“Oh, yeah,” I said, vaguely recalling the ghosts of radio hits past. “When I was in college. They played it all the time for a while.”
“For a while, yeah. The guys had it big for a couple years. Big festivals around the world, but just for a while.”
“What was the band? Sorry, I'm not good with music.”
“Denial of Self.” He snorted and shook his head. “They never had a second hit, though. Everything falls apart. Still...I bet it was a great couple of years.” He stared at the mannequins, one older and bearded, the other younger, searching for gold they'd never find.
We continued on, around a bend and into an exhibit showing a female mannequin in a log cabin, working at a stove with crudely made pots and a matching kettle.
A small wood-plank table was overturned, and dishes and lumpy-shaped forks and spoons were scattered on the floor.
“Every time.” Ryan shook his head and cleaned up the mess. “The kids say it's not them. And I'm starting to believe it. So I've been in here, rebuilding all of this, and I'll hear things.”
“Like what?”
“Footsteps. Breathing, one time.” He knelt on the raised wooden floor of the cabin-interior exhibit. “I was rebuilding this whole floor—I know it looks like old wood, and it is, but it's not rotten old wood. I did go for authenticity.”
“Looks good,” I said.
“So I'm over here working,” he said, on his hands and knees, doing a convincing mime of hammering an imaginary nail. “And then I hear the footsteps. I look. Nothing. Call out my kids' names. Nothing. No more footsteps, so I'm back to work. Bang bang, hammer hammer.
“That's when I feel something on my neck, soft like a breath, but kind of ice cold. Now, it does get really cold at night, but...this felt wrong. So I turned...and there's nothing there, but the exhibit decides to turn on right then. Do you mind?” He nodded at the large button on the wall.
I pressed it.
The small wood-burning stove lit up, glowing fiery red from tinted bulbs inside. The red glow reflected off the female mannequin's face. Her face seemed alive, with shadows flickering across it, her eyes staring into the depth of the hellish red glare from her stove.
“Pioneer women helped carve our fine town from the wilderness,” said a woman's voice on a scratchy unseen record, “bringing the first signs of culture and civilization to the hamlet of rough trappers and hunters, transforming it into a modern city.”
“I'd say 'city' is a pretty strong word,” Ryan said. “But anyway...you can see how it makes you jump. The footsteps, the cold breath, then the mannequin coming to life for no reason.”
“I can. But the mannequin's pretty scary on her own, isn't it? I mean, she's sort of staring into the depths of the infernal abyss over there, whenever the oven light's on.”
“So you think I'm just making it up?”
“It's just procedure for me to consider all the options. Your mind can play tricks on you.”
“This place is pretty much designed to do that, too,” Ryan said.
We rounded another bend, looping back toward the central lobby of the museum. The final exhibit down this way sat in gloomy shadows, until I found the wall button and pressed it.
A pale light flared above, through a silver circular filter, doing a fair imitation of moonlight.
On the scratchy record, wolves howled.
A baby cried.
“In 1838, the discovery of gold in the Appalachians led to the removal of thousands of Cherokee Indians, in the event remembered as the Trail of Tears.”
In front of us, a couple of mannequins draped in blankets sat over the ashes of a burned-out fire. A woman held a plastic baby in her arms. The charred remnants of a wooden house stood behind them, recalling their lost home. Though the mannequins wore factory-standard blank looks as they stared into the ashes, their posture and circumstances made it easy to see their faces as shocked, their eyes blank after witnessing too much horror.
“Did you experience anything in this area?” I asked.
“No, though I guess it seems like it would be haunted, right? I spent half a day restoring this Trail of Tears exhibit and nothing unusual happened. I guess it's haunting enough on its own.”
I nodded. The pale fake moonbeam clicked off, leaving us in darkness.
Chapter Thirteen
“The next big thing I saw is over here,” Ryan said. “And I'm sorry in advance.”
“For what?”
“For taking you to the Medical Maladies room. But that's where it happened.”
“Yeah, that doesn't sound like fun times.”
“I'll keep it quick,” he said.
“Don't worry, I'm sure I've seen worse.”
“Like what?” He led me over to Medical Maladies entrance, which looked like the double doors to a hospital ward, propped wide open, a bloody handprint on one of them.
“Oh, old bodies hauled out from under houses...I'm guessing that handprint is supposed to be there, right?”
“Pure decoration.” He grinned, then his grin faded. “I assume. It's been here since we got here.” He cringed, then reached out to touch the bright red handprint.
“It's paint,” I said. “Dried blood wouldn't be that color anymore. More of a brown.”
“You're the expert.” He led the way into the Medical Maladies room, which continued the hospital motif with tile floors, white walls, and dim, flickering fluorescent lighting. Any dust or cobwebs had been cleaned up, and the glass display cases were crystal clear, so there was nothing to obscure my view of the ghostly implements inside.
“These are surgical tools from the 1800's,” he said, indicating some very crude-looking scalpels and saws. “I don't think the patients lived very often.”
I winced at the black and wh
ite pictures on the wall above the tools, showing war amputees. I turned away. I'd encountered the ghosts of badly mutilated Civil War soldiers before, haunting a hidden lab where they'd been subjected to inhuman medical experiments.
“What specifically did you see?” I asked, moving on quickly from the surgery area, past a birdlike medieval plague mask and images of rare diseases from around the world.
“I was in here, doing the clean-up and restoration—”
“Is this real?” I interrupted, pointing to a skeleton mounted on a stand behind glass. It was slightly shorter than me.
“I...don't know. I guess I assumed it wasn't.”
“Not a safe assumption. Lots of real bodies have been made into skeletons for study. And keeping an actual dead body hanging around in your home is a good way of asking to be haunted.”
“Even dead bodies for educational purposes?” he asked.
“It can't help the situation, anyway.” I moved on, looking at more surgical implements, more images of bizarre mutations on the wall, like a man with an extra eye looking out the back of his head, his hair pinned away from it. There was a picture of conjoined twins, an alleged human foot bone with six toes, and something that made me stop short. “That's not real. Right?”
The next display featured what looked like a baby, slightly curled toward fetal position, its tiny fists clenched and eyes closed.
Spines jutted out all over the baby's back, like porcupine quills. They might have been actual quills, removed from a porcupine and surgically attached to the baby.
“Porcupine baby? I doubt it,” Ryan said, but he didn't sound sure at all.
“Obviously the porcupine part isn't real, but...just tell me I'm not looking at a real dead baby here.” Feeling my stomach tense, in a pretty equal combination of fear and disgust, I took a step closer to the baby in the jar, looking more closely at its tiny feet and hands. If it was fake, it was a very thorough illusion.
I moved closer, with a sinking feeling in my gut.