by J L Bryan
“Are you getting a little jealous?” I asked. “He's just a client.”
“A client who looks at you like a bowl of grits he'd like to butter.”
“You are jealous! Or else you're hungry for Waffle House.”
“A little of both,” he said.
“Too bad they don't serve fish sticks.”
“Keep yourself safe,” Michael said, reaching for me.
Then a bright light nearly blinded us. The horn of Michael's truck blew. Inside the cab, Melissa flicked the headlights off and on. He scowled at her.
“Merry Christmas,” I said.
Then I hurried inside, because I was freezing out there.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Upstairs, I made a final check of the gear. The family was playing together as a band, Ryan with his guitar trying to lead a rendition of “Deck the Halls” and then John Lennon's “Happy Christmas.” The guitar part and his vocals were fine.
The rest of the band was a bit less developed. Polly followed along with a keyboard on her lap, staring intently, as if determined to get every note right. Penny half-concentrated on her guitar while jumping around on the furniture and putting on a rock star performance. Ronan banged a couple of drums with no real regard for rhythm or what anyone else might be playing.
Ryan tried to offer me a tambourine, but I turned it down quickly. I'm not the musical type, or the having-any-hobby type, really—my life has been pretty narrowly devoted to hunting for supernatural monsters. Even if playing music was my hobby, I doubted I could hang around and listen to Penny and Ronan compete to see who could be loudest.
Soon as I could, I hurried down to the museum, where I welcomed the silence, at least at first. The only sounds were my footsteps, my breaths, and the small clicks of buttons as I moved among the cameras and microphones, making sure they were all charged up and recording.
The cold of the first floor grew biting, as if more cold were leaking up from the caves below.
When I returned to the second floor, the office was a bit warmer, but still not as pleasant as the third floor. The apartment must have had its own insulation and climate control. Of course, it also had a fire crackling in the fireplace, which wasn't an option on the first or second floors.
Even if I'd had the option, I wouldn't have built a fire here. The time when roaring flames in a fireplace had seemed cheery was a long-distant childhood memory.
Time went by; on the cameras upstairs, I saw the kids go to bed. Ryan read his son a story from a picture book, something about dragons eating tacos, then turned out the boy's light.
I try not to spy on my clients in these circumstances, truly. But there was nothing happening on the monitors showing me the museum.
Ryan sat alone with his guitar, not playing it anymore—maybe he was staying quiet so his kids would sleep. He sort of fingered it instead, like he was just practicing.
This went on for a couple of minutes, touching chords and moving his lips soundlessly. Then he gradually slowed and stopped. He gazed quietly at the dying fire. I wondered if he was thinking about his past, his near-brush with success and dreams coming true and such. He'd given up his chance at what he wanted in order to stick around and help take care of the unplanned twins.
I tried once again to imagine myself in an alternate life, one where I was married with kids, one where I'd gone some normal direction instead of straight into the world of the dead and the damned. It was hard to picture myself changing diapers and fingerpainting, or singing little songs and reading Dr. Seuss books like my mother had done with me—
I cut off those thoughts, feeling my eyes sting. Stupid. I wasn't the family type. I wasn't nearly sane or stable enough for any of that. And my work was abnormally dangerous. I wouldn't want to try to run out of a haunted basement full of hostile entities while pregnant.
I set the little silver bird box on the desk in front of me and pushed the tiny moon-button on the side.
The lid opened and the black bird trilled, twisting its head and flapping its wings as it hopped inside its moonstone nest. Then it lay down and the lid closed, leaving me in silence again.
It was really hard to believe that something so beautiful and rare could really be mine. It seemed like something only extravagant royal types would have. Michael had probably put a lot of time into restoring it for me. It made my heart ache, both the beauty of the gift and the effort it represented.
Why did I have to push him away? He genuinely cared about me, and I felt warm and safe with him, and sometimes even happy.
He'd pushed me away, too, I reminded myself.
Probably a wise move on his part, really. Someday he'd meet a normal woman with normal maternal instincts and a desire for a normal life.
Which was probably what Ryan needed, too, now that I thought about it.
I sighed and tried to focus on work instead of my feelings. As ever, as always.
Taking my eyes off Ryan, I decided to do some basic internet research to kill the time. I didn't expect much; previous attempts had yielded some tourism-focused sites, only one of which mentioned the oddities museum at all. The museum's own website was fairly basic and clunky.
I had even less hope for finding out specific details related to the history of the museum or Uncle Leydan, but I did get a hit for “Snake Man of Foxboro.” One hit, and surprisingly it wasn't the museum's own site, which didn't mention the Snake Man at all.
Instead, it was a site called “Conspiracies of the Unknown!” With exclamation point included. I'd run across the site before and did not consider its data reliable, not even remotely. I had little enough to go on, though, and I was a bit curious, so I clicked anyway.
A flashing red headline read “Tales of Tennessee Terror!” Below links for “The Mournful Mountaineer” and “The Lost Bride of the Smokies,” I saw it: “The Stalking Snake Man.”
I clicked.
Man or Myth?
According to locals, a creature dwells in the mountains, caves, and forests around Foxboro, Tennessee—or once did.
According to an October 1983 Foxboro Gazette article on local legends and ghost stories, the Snake Man was sometimes seen walking at night. He was taller than a normal man, and his skin was scaly and green.
“When they found Davey Bawden hacked up in the woods back in '68, out on the old Cherokee path, he was raving about the Snake Man,” said Ray Gramercy, owner of the Fox's Den Bait and Tackle and Sandwiches. “That's the only time I ever heard of the Snake Man really attacking somebody. Davey was dead by the time they got him to the hospital. They said it must have been a wild animal. A bear, maybe, or a puma, but it's been many a year since anybody's seen a puma in these parts. And getting attacked by one of these black bears is about as likely as getting ambushed by a squirrel.”
Another Foxboro resident, waitress Bridgette Simmons at the Town Square Diner, recalled seeing the Snake Man years ago.
“Oh, we used to go up to the old ruins as teenagers,” Simmons said. “This was the early nineteen-sixties, you know, so we weren't really getting into real trouble like them kids today. Maybe we snuck a little of Daddy's whiskey out there with us, but that was about it. And I didn't drink that much, didn't want to get in trouble with the boys. Anyway, I saw it watching us. I thought it was a crocodile or a giant snake at first, but then it stood up on its legs. We ran out of there quick, I'll tell you what!”
But where did the Snake Man come from? Nobody seems to know. Some say he ran away from the circus and took up residence in the old Curing Springs resort, a Roman-style bathhouse and hotel built on the natural warm mineral springs in the area. The luxury resort was built in the 1800s but abandoned by the year 1900.
“I suppose Curing Springs does look like a place where monsters might feel at home,” Gramercy said. “Tell you what, I wouldn't go up there by night. Daytime, neither.”
“What old ruins?” I asked the empty room around me.
The room didn't reply, so I asked the internet about Curin
g Springs resort instead.
Here, the results came mostly from the personal blogs and Instagrams of hiker types who'd stumbled across the ruins, and of urban-explorer types who'd deliberately sought them out.
“Creepy old temple in the mountains??” one hiker captioned her picture. “What is this??”
Her shock was understandable. She'd snapped pictures of overgrown steps and columns, supporting a mossy triangle pediment depicting fauns and nymphs. Or, as the baffled hiker wrote under a close-up: “Devils and witches?? Who built this place?? I'm staying away!!”
An urban-explorer guy had gone inside the dark, vine-hung opening where the doors had long since been removed or rotted off.
His pictures included antique furniture thick with mildew, a barroom with a small stage in one corner, and a marble pool full of dark water overgrown with slime. Graffiti was scattered all over the walls.
“How far away is that?” I was definitely missing Stacey now, and talking to myself to try and make up for it.
I checked online—the ruins didn't appear in any search of Google maps or any similar app, but I could plug in the GPS coordinates provided by the baffled hiker.
It was a five-mile drive around the mountain to the spa ruins, or at least to the closest spot to them on a modern paved road. They were much closer than that, less than two miles if you cut through the boulder-strewn woods. I could see the grainy satellite imagery of old, overgrown Roman-style buildings.
“Great,” I muttered, taking notes and saving a snapshot of what looked like the closest route through the woods. “No Christmas vacation is complete without a hike to some creepy old ruins.”
I'd be saving that hike for daylight hours, too, thanks.
I finished reading the online article:
But there's reason to believe the Snake Man may have died some years ago.
First, there have been no sightings of the man-creature in many years; only a few old-timers around town speak of him with any seriousness.
Second, a local museum of antiquities and oddities displays a scaly, cloth-wrapped claw that—according to proprietor “Dr. Weirdman” (aka Leydan Aberdeen)—is a hand of the Snake Man.
“A hiker brought it in,” Leydan told the newspaper. “Just a tourist, you know, someone passing through. Said the Snake Man's body was all chewed up by the animals. I went up there, but never found anything more than this hand.”
Dr. Weirdman declined to remove the hand from its case to let the local newspaper reporter inspect it, on the grounds that it was “very fragile” and might break into pieces.
Was the Snake Man real? The mystery remains....
A picture at the end of the website article showed the bandage-wrapped hand on display in the museum.
Over the hallway camera, I watched a glowing thermal version of Ryan walk into his bedroom and close the door. Soon I'd be the last one awake, staying up and keeping the night watch against ghosts and ghouls.
I looked back at the image of the hand in its display case. It had to be connected to the reptile creature that Ryan and his son had seen. But I felt no closer to solving the mystery of the reptile guy's origin, identity, or fate. It sounded like it could have been some guy with a terrible skin problem or other deformity, someone driven to the fringes of society.
It didn't take long before I was reading about ichthyosis, a rare genetic disorder that causes people to have scaly, snakelike skin, causing them to be shunned in many societies. In the worst cases, I was looking at real pictures of babies with faces very much like cobras, the eyes crusted over, the nose just a couple of visible nostrils, the mouth round and fixed open.
I began to feel sorry for the unknown Snake Man, if indeed he'd been driven out for looking strange, for an incurable disease that made him frightening to others. Perhaps he'd been part of a circus freak show, as the rumor said, but that could not have been a very happy life.
If he was terrorizing Ronan, though, I couldn't afford to get too sentimental. I had to trap or remove the ghost somehow.
“Who are you, Snake Man?” I whispered.
The coldness and silence of the museum really sank in as the night wore on. I alternated between quiet observation and more internet searching, mostly fruitless. I couldn't find much that would shed light on my case.
Michael texted me a good-night message. I replied the same, repeating how much I loved the little bird box.
I made the bird sing again, in fact. It was so lifelike it was mesmerizing, somewhere in the overlap of cute and funny and uncanny.
Hours later, I saw movement on the third floor that made me sit up and watch closely.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I had a camera in Ronan's room, pointed at the wall where he'd most often seen the snake-ghost crawling or walking toward his bed. Nothing could approach the boy now without passing the camera.
However, there was nothing in the girls' room, only outside it.
The thermal camera in the hall caught a small, warm shape slipping out of that room now and tiptoeing away.
She passed out of sight, but crossed in front of a night vision camera on her way into the kitchen. She crossed back with a plastic cup in her hand, and I thought that would be the end of it, but she didn't go into her room.
Instead, she walked into the library.
I didn't have a camera in there, and I was worried she was heading for the hidden stairwell in the library...heading down to the museum.
If so, she would emerge in the main office, so I headed to the open doorway of my borrowed side office and listened.
Sure enough, about a minute later, I heard the glass-fronted cupboard rattle as it slid apart. It wasn't a loud sound, not something anyone would notice if the building hadn't been so dead quiet.
I started to step out and ask her what she was doing...then held back as I realized she was talking to someone.
“...I know...I will...” Polly said, in her usual shy whisper. Her voice was very distinct from her more outspoken twin's. “I don't know what you're so afraid of. She's not here to hurt you.” A long pause. “No, I don't think she's here to hurt me, either. Are you worried about me because you...of how you feel?” She giggled. “I don't know. I feel it for you, too, I think.”
This one-sided conversation wasn't particularly reassuring on any level. It was also probably the most I'd heard Polly talk since meeting her.
As she approached my office door, I decided to stretch out on my air mattress and close my eyes.
“She's sleeping,” Polly said, her voice louder, or at least less muffled as she looked at me through the doorway. “See?”
The air in my room went cold, all at once, like a freezing cloud had drifted in through the window. Or maybe through the wall.
I shivered, feeling unseen eyes watching me, as if someone stood over my mattress and stared at me. That's something I feel way, way too often in this line of work. The creepiness never really wears off, either.
My heart thumped, but I made myself lie still, feigning sleep, hoping the entity called Amil didn't see through my ruse. Because he sure seemed to be studying me very, very closely at the moment.
“Come on,” Polly whispered. “Amil.”
The sound of its name seemed to get the entity moving. The icy cold retreated, and the room gradually became...well, not warm, because it never had been, but it was less cold, anyway.
I listened to Polly walking away, whispering to her cold invisible dead boyfriend.
Then I stood up and followed them. I wasn't about to leave the girl alone with this spirit who was leading her out of her room in the middle of the night, but I did want to observe and learn all I could. I was ready to intervene if it threatened her at all.
They went downstairs, using the cobwebbed stairwell that came out by the gift shop.
I followed, keeping my distance, trying to keep my steps light and my breathing shallow. When I reached the first floor, I caught the door before it closed so I could watch them.
Out in the museum lobby, Polly was following her invisible friend, whispering too quietly for me to hear the words. She would pause for long moments, too, as if listening. They walked out of my range of sight.
I crept out of the stairwell, easing the door shut behind me so it wouldn't slam, then followed as distantly as I could, keeping to the shadows.
She paused in front of the Hall of Monsters and whispered something, gesturing inside.
Then she started walking again. I kept to the walls of the dark room, thankful for once that the windows in this building were mostly high and narrow. I drew as close as I dared, which wasn't all that close, but at least I could hear her again.
“I can't,” Polly whispered. “It's scary.”
They stopped in front of the crypt door to the Tomb of History. Cold seemed to radiate from it, the chilling effect of the caves below.
“I do,” she said. “I do care about you. But I think we can trust her.”
Then Polly took in a sharp breath, as if something had scared her. Or struck her.
I drew my flashlight.
“Don't say that!” she said. “Okay. I'll do it. If that's what you really want.”
Polly stepped in through the open tomb door and walked into the history exhibit, past shards of possibly real Cherokee pottery towards supposed relics of Carthage, Rome, and Egypt. And Atlantis, of course.
Beyond that lay the entrance to the caves.
I decided I wasn't going to let Polly get that far. It was a tangled maze down there, no one knew where the tunnels ended, and lights had only been installed in the main tourist areas.
If the ghost led Polly into the caves, she might never be seen again.
“Stop!” I shouted, running through the tomb door. “Polly! Stop right there.”
“Huh? Ellie?”
“Don't go into the caves.” I clicked on my light, but kept it dimmed and pointed at the floor so the sudden white glare didn't scald our eyeballs.
“I wasn't.”