Another Danny touch.
“Nice to have on hand if the power ever goes out,” she thought to herself.
Yawning, she finally dragged herself upstairs to her spacious bedroom and pulled back the covers. A fire would be nice, she thought, making her way over to the massive stone hearth, already stacked high with tender and firewood.
She found a box of long-stemmed matches next to the hearth and lit up. Within seconds, the fireplace was filled with warm, yellow flames crackling and licking around the thick oak logs.
Satisfied, she went over to the big bed and crawled under the covers. The soft, steady beat of the rain on the sloping, slate roof was mesmerizing. Within seconds she was sound asleep.
Sometime later she awoke with a start.
It was freezing!
She peeked out from under the pile of quilts and saw that the fire had gone down. She tried warming up by snuggling deeper beneath the covers, but that was no good.
She finally got up, slipped into her flannel robe and slippers and trotted over to the hearth. She reached down and picked out a couple of logs, which she carefully placed on the pair of antique brass andirons.
Rather than go back to bed, she went over to the small leather loveseat next to the fireplace and sat down. She had only wanted to close her eyes for a moment while the fire blazed up, but the relaxing sound of rain and the crackling warmth of the fire had her soon drifting off.
Suddenly her eyes flew open. Had she remembered to lock the doors downstairs? An abrupt terror gripped her.
Then she remembered where she was and relaxed, almost feeling foolish. She was in the mountains now. Atlanta was another world away. Up here, people never locked their doors.
Or did they?
Her attention was drawn to the sliding glass doors. She rose slowly, glided over and looked out into the night.
It was still raining, and she could see flashes of lighting in the distance. A darkness like none she had ever seen lay heavy over the lake, swathing the surrounding woods like a black funeral shroud. No stars twinkled in the pitched gloom. No fireflies twinkled in the night. She might as well have been gazing through a portal into another dimension.
She tried to imagine what it would look like tomorrow when the rain was gone and the sun was shining warm and bright on the water.
Just as she was about to turn away and go back to bed, she became aware of a soft, clanging noise. She listened, drawn to the sound, a strange clinking rattle coming from somewhere far out across the lake. Gradually, the sound grew louder. It was more like a low, muffled hum, really, almost like the hollow, ghostly gong of a buoy far out at sea.
If she didn't know any better, Laura could have sworn it was a church bell clanging away. How often had she heard the tolling of church bells back at St. Patrick's in Atlanta?
But this was not Atlanta. This was Bear Gap Lake, the middle of nowhere.
To her knowledge, there weren't any churches or church bells within miles of the place.
⸙
INTRIGUED, LAURA SLID back the glass doors and stepped out onto the rain-splashed deck. Except for the patter of rain and rush of wind, she was greeted by a deep wall of silence. For a moment she thought the unearthly sound had gone away, and she found herself wondering if she had not imagined the whole thing.
A split-second later, she was rocked by another explosive, vibrating clang that washed over her in waves.
The mysterious clamor lasted for only a few moments more, then gradually faded. More confused than frightened, Laura found herself staring off into the darkness, half expecting to be swept up again any second by the undulating, bone-jarring clatter.
But it was gone, whatever the strange noise was that had swept in off the black lake.
With the echo of the tolling sound still ringing in her ears, she glanced to her right and spotted a faint yellow light flickering in the woods near the shoreline. Curious, she twisted her head forward for a better look. From that angle, she could see that the odd glimmer was coming from a patch of dark trees near a bend in the lake.
At first Laura assumed it was nothing more than the glow of a campfire. But who could possibly be crazy enough to camp out in this raging storm? She considered the possibility that one of the cabins along the shoreline was occupied, contrary to Danny’s telling her they were empty this time of year. “You’ll be all alone up there,” he had said, “just you and the bears and five-thousand acres of pristine wilderness.”
When Laura looked again, the light was gone.
Like the weird clanging of bells, it had simply vanished, swallowed up by the darkness.
It all seemed so strange—first the eerie bells, then the phantom light in the woods.
“Mom, what are you doing out there?”
Startled, Laura whirled around and saw Bit standing in the doorway, her pajama top drawn tight around her throat. She hurried back inside and slid the door shut behind her.
“I’ve been looking all over for you,” Bit said.
“I’m sorry, sweetheart, I just stepped outside onto the deck.”
“What for?”
Laura slipped off her wet slippers and placed them near the hearth to dry. “Well, if you must know, I thought I saw a light out there in the woods.”
“What kind of light?”
“It was just probably coming from somebody's house.”
Bit's eyes widened. “But Uncle Danny said there was nobody up here for miles and miles.”
"I know, I know,” Laura replied, backing up to the fire for warmth. “I thought maybe one of the cabins was occupied.”
A blinding burst of lightning slashed across the sky, followed by a thunderous boom that shook the house and rattled the windows.
Bit cried out, darted across the room to her mom.
Laura pulled her daughter close against her. "It's only the storm, sweetheart."
"Do you think our lights will go out?” Bit asked anxiously.
“Let’s not even think such a thing,” Laura countered. She took her daughter's hand. “Come on, let’s get to bed. It’s way past your bedtime anyway, young lady.”
Arm in arm, they pattered back to Bit’s room. As she was tucking her daughter back into bed, Laura asked, "By the way, what on earth were you doing up this time of night?"
Bit looked up at her. "I thought I heard something."
Laura stopped. "Oh? Like what?"
"I don't know. Like bells."
Laura's froze. "Bells?"
Bit nodded. "Kind of like church bells." She yawned. "I must have been dreaming," she concluded, rolling over and closing her eyes.
Laura continued to stare at her daughter long after she had drifted off to sleep.
Church bells?
So she had not been dreaming. Bit had heard them, too.
A shiver swept over Laura.
It wasn’t that she was afraid of church bells.
It just seemed odd.
What were church bells doing way up here on the mountain?
Before going back to her own bed, Laura went around the house from room to room to make sure all the doors were locked.
⸙
DOWN ON THE RAIN-SWEPT beach, a solitary shadow crept through the grainy darkness.
It moved slowly along the water's edge, a blurry smudge that stirred unnaturally against the howling storm. Behind it, clearly visible in the intermittent streaks of lightning, bare footprints trailed along in the wet sand.
When it reached the narrow strip of beach in front of the unlit house, the shadow hesitated, as if searching.
An ominous tolling, low and hollow, rose from the black depths of the lake, reverberating across the angry waters.
As thunder clashed and bold streaks of yellow lighting scratched the swollen, dripping sky, the shadow turned away from the beach and started toward the big house beyond the rocks.
Chapter Nine
BIT AWOKE TO THE sound of laughter.
She sat up, rubbed her eyes and looked
around the strange room. She wasn’t in her own bed. Where was she?
She suddenly remembered.
Uncle Danny’s lake house.
A brilliant burst of lightning lit up the room. Long shadows leapt across the walls, skittered and slithered along the floor like horribly deformed centipedes. Another jagged bolt ejected more horrendous shadows, creating the impression that an army of bizarre, long-necked creatures with dark, flapping tentacles had somehow invaded her room.
Bit yelped in terror, flopped back on the bed with her teddy bear and yanked the covers over her head.
The laughter again…
Outside in the rain…
Outside in the darkness…
The cold, clawing darkness.
Snickering, giggling, child-like voices floating like harpies on the night wind.
Bit dared peek her head outside the covers, glanced warily toward the sliding glass doors.
What would kids be doing outside on a night like this, she wondered.
More laughter…
Louder this time…
Bit sought to bury her fears by cramming the pillow over her head. But it didn't work. The eerie, childish laughter continued, a vaulting crescendo of faint chuckles that lifted up from the stormy beach and penetrated the walls of her room.
She swallowed hard, finally forcing herself to push back the covers and sit up. Snatching Teddy, she padded softly across the cold floor over to the doors and peered out into the night. Except for the rain pounding against the glass and her own hollow breathing, the only sounds she heard were low booms of thunder and the sporadic hiss of lightning.
Screwing up every ounce of courage in her body, she forced herself to continue looking, searching for the source of the strange laughter beyond the glass doors.
She saw nothing but inky-black darkness.
Another pop of lightning jittered across the sky, obliterating shadows and illuminating a wide swath of the beach.
Just then the moon popped out from behind a thick cloud, and Bit thought she saw something—two figures, two boys, standing down next to the water. They stood perfectly still at the edge of the beach, ramrod-straight, like molten statues rooted in the muddy sand.
As she watched, Bit noticed the figures had a wavering, translucent quality that shimmered in the pale moonlight.
Incredibly, it seemed that the glow of the moon passed directly through their bodies!
Most frightful of all was the uncanny way they seemed to be looking at her--straight up from the beach with the saddest, palest faces she had ever seen.
Bit gasped, shrinking back from the door and clasping Teddy tightly to her chest. Fingers of ice clawed the back of her neck, tip-toed down her spine. She retreated a few more steps and stopped, more puzzled now than frightened.
What would a couple of boys be doing down on the beach this time of night?
She figured that, whoever they were, they must be staying at the cabin where Mom had seen the lights earlier. That had to be the answer.
Bit realized she was only a little girl, but she was old enough and smart enough to know that behind every mystery there usually was a practical explanation.
Boys didn't just appear out of nowhere!
She suddenly felt silly—embarrassed, in fact, by the throat-choking fear that had seized her when she first heard the laughter, then looked down and saw the pair of boys. Squeezing Teddy harder, she stepped closer to the door and looked out again.
The boys were gone.
Chapter Ten
LAURA RECLINED ON THE deck in an Adirondack-style lounge chair, sipping hot chocolate topped with marshmallows and watching the early morning sunlight cast golden patterns on the emerald-green waters below.
It still seemed like a fantasy being here, surrounded by so much lush beauty and limitless, uninterrupted grandeur. It was the silence that impressed her most. Except for the birds and the lapping waves down on the beach, nothing stirred to shatter her reverie. Yet, here she was, just a gal from the city, hunkered down on the deck of a gorgeous mountain house, fingers coiled around a hot cup of chocolate and gazing down on one of the world's most beautiful green lakes.
Best of all, she was alone, just her daughter and herself, far removed from the crashing roar of the city. She closed her eyes, drinking in the sweet serenity of the high mountain vistas, the magnificent silence of the forest, the awesome stillness that wrapped around her like a perfectly-stitched Alpaca sweater. Down below, she could hear the gentle murmur of the waves licking against the golden shore.
She sighed.
They might as well have been on Mars.
The rain had gone, clearing way for a blazing blue sky and pleasant temperatures which guessed to be in the low fifties. As she sat gazing across the tranquil lake, with the dark range of hazy, pine-scented mountains rising high into the low-hanging clouds like grumpy old men, she couldn't help thinking about the strange light she had seen in the forest the previous night. Nor could she shake the eerie clang of the enigmatic bells that kept reverberating in her head. She continued to stare across the glittering waves, as if that was where she'd find the answers to her questions.
She wanted to stop thinking about it, just forget about creepy bells and lights and just enjoy herself. If she didn't get her mind off it soon, she'd ruin her vacation for sure.
But Bit had heard the same sounds.
Like church bells, she had said.
The thought occurred to Laura that the place was haunted.
These were the mountains, after all. Weird things happened in the mountains, right? Ghost lights and red-eyed wampus cats prowling the lonely hollows and ravines. Bigfoot. She'd heard all the old stories.
She recalled one old Indian legend about a race of gnome-like "Little People" who supposedly lived somewhere deep underground below the mountains. On dark, stormy nights, so it was said, these subterranean-dwelling dwarves came crawling out of their holes to snatch babies and drag them down to hell.
In an anthropology class in graduate school, she had done a paper on the folklore of the Southern Appalachians. She recalled that the original inhabitants of this region were Scotch-Irish immigrants who had brought over with them their legends, myths and superstitions from the Old Country. Isolated as they were in the lonely, high hills, far removed from the civilizing influence of the Eastern seaboard, it was only natural that succeeding generations of these hearty mountainfolk would keep alive many of those same old traditions, customs and beliefs, including tales of ghosts, goblins, witches and other nightmarish fiends
She also recalled reading that these mountains were old, far older than the Himalayas or the Rockies out west, going back many millions of years. They were here during the age of the dinosaurs, long before the coming of Europeans. Until they were conquered by encroaching white settlers, whole nations of Indians had inhabited these wild ridges, most of them living their lives according to the Old Ways. For countless thousands of years, the original people of these thick-mantled mountains had practiced quaint religions handed down from their own Dark Elders—strange and frightful religions now lost to time that curiously revered the dark entities of their ancestors.
Eventually, as the valleys and trackless forests were overrun by pale-faced outsiders, most of the old ways disappeared. Some lingered, gradually being absorbed by the newcomers, and in time, producing what was now considered one of the purest storehouses of folklore in America. Even today, as gated communities and golf courses transformed the land, the people of the mountains still clung as tenaciously to the old ways as did their ancestors and the Native Americans who preceded even them.
But Laura was an educated woman, not given to superstition. She didn't believe in ghosts or goblins or Little People who gobbled up children in the night. Deep down, she suspected many of the local legends and old tall tales so pervasive in the mountains of Southern Appalachia had as much to do with peddling corn-husk dolls, painted gourds and other trinkets to the tourists than anything else.<
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Laura marveled at the ring of low mountains undulating serenely across the horizon. Some ridges seemed to rise straight up, as if perched on the backs of the dark clumps of trees lining the opposite shore.
Glancing to her right, she noticed the tips of several stone chimneys poking above the trees. She assumed that the light she had seen last night had come from one of those cabins.
Most likely a security light.
In the cold light of day, everything looked a lot different. A reasonable person would naturally assume that some property owner had installed a timed security light or hired a caretaker to check up on the place.
That would at least explain the light in the forest.
There was no spectral visitor from beyond the grave, no spooks trolling the lake. The world was perfectly normal this fine, sun-splashed morning, and absolutely nothing this side of metropolitan Atlanta, Georgia, was going to ruin her day.
A shadow fell across her and Laura jumped. She looked up and saw Bit standing over her, still in her pajamas and holding Teddy.
“Morning, glory,” she said quickly. “You’re up early.”
Yawning, Bit said, “I couldn’t sleep.”
Laura turned around and sat on the edge of the lounge chair. “What was the matter, sweetheart? Did you have another bad dream?”
“Well, it wasn’t exactly a dream,” Bit said. She sat down next to her mom and played with the top of Teddy's head.
Laura saw her struggling for words. “Want to tell Mom all about it?”
Bit shrugged her shoulders. Laura saw the troubled look on her daughter's face, felt her confusion.
“I saw a couple of kids last night," Bit blurted. "Down on the beach.”
Laura felt a tingling in the back of her throat, like prickly little fingers digging around. “You must have been dreaming, sweetie," she said softly. "There aren’t any children around here for miles.”
Bit continued to fidget with Teddy. “But I saw them, Mom, honest. Two boys, a little older than me, maybe. They were down by the water. It was real creepy the way they just kept looking up at my window.”
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