by J. Z. Foster
The trees seemed to hold hollow faces full of pain—each seemed a cover for the wicked to hide inside. Richard took a deep breath and considered whether talking would help him to remain calm.
“There’s so many stories about the woods at night and the strange things that live in them.” He was wrong, the talking wasn’t helping, but he kept on anyway. “Everything’s twisted here, demonic. Evil has corrupted everything.”
Or is that just my imagination?
“I can’t see anything.” Beth said and sprung a small keychain light from her pocket and used it to light their way. “We have to be careful, Ted could see the light.”
“Let’s just...” Richard looked across the dead trees and foliage. “Let’s just get behind a tree somewhere. Can you give me enough light to read?”
They could hear the sounds of the night responding to their intrusion: bugs and birds chirped and screeched. A crow flew overhead and landed in a tree near them. It gave a haunting squawk and watched them closely with its orange-ringed eyes.
Richard shuddered in fear of the crow. But in truth, he was sure that if a squirrel was to drop from a tree next to him, he could just as easily lose the strength in his knees. He was scared of everything, scared even to meet Beth that morning. He had thought that she might not take him seriously, that maybe he wouldn’t be interesting enough. He had a whole routine in mind that all went down the drain the second that knife came to life.
He was trying not to think of that now though; those were all years in the past for all he was concerned. He knew now he had to focus, but the fear kept coming back. Thoughts of Ted and his gun plagued his mind. Strangely, though, he found focus through Beth’s hand. He knew that if he had been alone, he’d certainly be dead by now. He’d never been particularly religious before, but he reached up to the crucifix and prayed to whoever might be listening.
He felt Beth tug his hand. “How did you know this would work?” She held up the hand wrapped in the necklace.
“I didn’t.”
“You just thought it might work and took a shot? That was brilliant, Richard. Good instincts.” She rested her other hand on his shoulder. “Thank you.”
He felt warmth fill his cheeks and only smiled in reply.
“What makes it warm?”
“It’s never been that way before.” He shook his head. “But it’s working.”
“I know what happened, Richard. I know you begged us to go. I can’t explain it; I knew it was happening but I didn’t care. I didn’t care about anything. Not until you touched me—then I got it all. But something else came over me when you let go of me the second time. Something else clawed its way inside of me.”
Richard only listened and trembled. He remembered that look in her eye when she twirled his cap in the rain.
“What was it?” she whispered, her eyes soft and unsure.
A demon.
He refused to say it out loud. He only shook his head, feigning ignorance. How or why it was here, he had no idea. Beth gave a shallow nod and looked as if there was something else she wanted to say.
“None of this is your fault, Beth. There’s something at work here. It got into your mind.” He held a breath to say more, but couldn’t, and he hoped she wouldn’t ask him again. Instead, he turned away and started to go through his satchel with his free hand. He pulled his tome out and opened it, doing his best to shield it from the pattering rain.
“Do you need the light?” She leaned over his shoulder and looked down.
He nodded as his thoughts refocused. He parted the leather covers and ran his finger down a page. A single drip of water splashed against it, despite the cover of a tree. He sighed and stretched out farther, pulling his streaked jacket across it and continued. It did well enough to cover the book.
The crow squawked again, not wanting to be forgotten. It jumped and fluttered its wings before landing on another branch not far away. Its orange-ringed eyes turned to them again, watching them closely.
“Shoo! Go away!” Beth reached down for a stone to hurl at the crow. The stone bounced not far from the creature. It blinked and twisted its neck, completely unbothered.
There was a scream somewhere far off. Or was it a roar? Richard couldn’t tell. He only took in a deep breath of the cool night and hoped whatever it was doing, it was doing it somewhere else.
“It’s Ted. Just try and go fast,” Beth said, dashing his hopes. She turned the light back to the pages.
Richard leafed through, but found it difficult with just his one hand. “Here. Possession.”
The crow squawked, drawing an angry look from Beth, who didn’t bother with another rock. “The stupid crow is going to give us away.” It hissed at her before its head twisted away to find something else of interest.
Ignoring it all, Richard tapped a neatly inked paragraph. “The ghost is anchored to the house, I think. If we get it out of Ted, I think it’ll be forced back into the house. We can chant and force it out, but we’d have to hold Ted down before it starts and I’d need my candles. We could try and drive it out if we knew its name, but we don’t…” He sighed in desperation. “The only other option is to find her body and where she drowned, it might even be a bathtub for all we know. I just... I don’t think we can do it, Beth. I think we have to leave him.”
Beth turned her gaze in the direction of the house and bit her lip. “What would happen to him if we left him? If we got help and came back?”
He might kill himself.
Richard knew that much. Being possessed wasn’t the same as wearing a coat or pulling on a shirt. There was a relationship there, between the possessed and possessor. “A symphony of insanity,” one passage had called it. He had read the sections on it, never thinking that they could be true and one day useful. It was a strain, though, to have something else in your head, and ghosts and spirits were not such easy things to understand. They were the restless dead. Perhaps without even knowing it they could drive their hosts insane or suicidal. More than a few testimonies had come to that end: suicide. But not all.
“He could be okay if we got help and came back.” Richard’s words might have been true, but they may as well have been a lie. He certainly didn’t believe them.
Beth had clearly smelled his doubt. “I can’t. I really can’t. But you go, Richard. Go and get help. Leave me the book and the necklace, I’ll go and see what I can do for Ted.” Her eyes were honest. She really would face it by herself.
His mouth dropped; he hadn’t expected that. “What... what are you going to do?” He struggled to keep his voice from quivering. He wasn’t sure if it did or not.
“I’m going to find the body.” Her voice was still, resolute. “You said the house seems like an anchor. Does that mean the body is there?”
Richard lifted a shoulder and turned to read some more. “It might be. Maybe she always lived there and can’t stand the idea of leaving, or maybe she did leave once and that’s when she was killed. There’s really no way to tell.”
“Let me see the book.” Beth leaned in and looked over the pages. She traced over the passages that had been translated into English. “It says that she likely died unnaturally? Richard, do you think there might be something else in these woods?”
Richard felt the fear creep back in, and the hairs stood up on the back of his neck.
The knife, it pointed toward a witch, but they found a ghost.
“The knife. It told us where the witch was. That’s why we’re here. Not for a ghost.”
“We can’t just leave Ted, Richard.” She shook her head. “What would happen to him? Think, Richard, think. You’re a witch hunter. You’ve been right on everything so far. What can we do, how can we save him?” She squeezed his hand tighter.
A witch hunter. A game, yesterday.
“You’re right.” He straightened his back. He clenched his hand, hoping that this would somehow give him the courage he needed. “We’re going to go back in, get my candles, and find the source. And then w
e’re going to rip it out of Ted. After that, we’re getting the hell out of Dodge.”
Chapter 5
“Getting the hell out of Dodge?” The lawyer was clearly skeptical. “You really say that? Sounds like something you were practicing in the mirror again.”
“Dude. No, it just totally came to me.” Everything was starting to come back and Richard was feeling better. “Though I’m pretty sure I stuttered that last part. I was just trying to play the part, be confident for Beth, you know? She was knee-deep in all of this and holding it all together. I had to try and do the same.”
Minges grunted. “Why didn’t ya’ll just leave and let the chips fall where they may? You just told me you hardly knew what the hell was going on anyway.”
“Like I said, we didn’t know what could happen He could kill himself, or maybe anyone else that showed up would be just as controlled as Beth and Ted were. I just didn’t know what would happen. Besides, we needed to find the body of the ghost somewhere in that house, if that really was her anchor to the world. Imagine trying to find the body and use it for a ritual with police help.”
“Mmhmm. S’pose I can see how that line of insanity could pose a problem for ya’ll.” Minges laced his fingers together on the table. “So you can’t or won’t leave, and your phones are dead. Mighty convenient.”
“Convenient?” Richard spat back at him. “It’s the freaking opposite of convenient! I couldn’t call anyone, even my group back home! They might have been able to tell me something, give me some help.”
Minges flicked his tongue against his teeth and presented a sharp smile. “I’ll be needing the phone numbers of your cult buddies too.”
“I don’t have them right now. Who remembers phone numbers these days? They’re all programmed into my phone, and that got fried. I got them in my book somewhere, wherever that is. Everything is still blurry.” He rubbed his temple with his palms. “God, it’s so hard to remember what exactly happened.”
“Could be the drugs, or something wacky up in your dome.” Minges pointed a finger at his own balding head. “Memory can be funny like that, change things around with the right prompting. Get you thinking all kinds of things that didn’t actually happen.”
Richard squeezed his eyes shut. It was true, it was hard to remember anything, but talking made it all come back, like waking from a bad dream. “I know it’s hard to remember, but I know I didn’t kill Beth. That’s a lie. The witch…” Richard struggled to remember, but it came only in pieces. “He could do things.”
“Yeah, I got that part.” The lawyer said, donning his white hat once more. “All kinds of things, I’m sure. And that’s the story we’re going to go with, right?” His smile opened wide. “We’re going to say those voices were talking to you, made you do all that evil shit you did.”
Richard clenched his teeth hard enough that they might chip. “I didn’t do it! I didn’t do any of it! You have to believe me!”
“Well, son, we got a body. But let’s keep playing with the idea that it wasn’t really you.”
God, I wish it was Beth. I wish she was the hunter and I could just follow her. I wish she could be here right now. I wish she was alive and I was dead.
He squeezed his eyes tight, trying to stop the tears from coming. “Beth was so brave, so ready to just get into it all. She would have been a great reporter. She could have done some good work.”
“Sure.” Minges’s words were bland. “So ya’ll were walking up to that spooky old house that ya’ll shouldn’t have been at in the first place. What happened next?”
“We went in.” Richard said simply. “What else was there to do? We had to go in and find the anchor.”
Richard slopped through the mud as they closed in on the house, and he wiped rain from his eyes. He wasn’t a hunter or tracker, but he could clearly see distinct boot prints in the mud that must have been Ted’s. A single trail made its way out onto the road and curved off onto the grass. Richard couldn’t tell where it went from there, but he hoped Ted was now deep in the woods and nowhere near the house. He ran a hand across the van as they passed it, wishing he could jump into it, search it top to bottom for a spare key, and drive away, but Beth’s hand still pulled him forward.
Swaying in the cold wind, the front door creaked open and closed, the flickering candlelight illuminating the house from within.
What if Ted is there, waiting for us?
Richard didn’t have long to dwell on the idea. Beth easily led him onto the creaky wooden stairs, and he was unwilling to refuse her. She reached for the worn door and pushed it the rest of the way open, and the quiet groan of the metal hinges welcomed them once more. Holding his breath, Richard crept inside, picked each candle from the floor, and blew them out.
He tilted his head and focused on the dark of the hallways and crevices of the gloomy house, praying that nothing was watching them. “Where should we go? The body could be anywhere.”
Beth shined her light across the floorboards and exposed their disturbance in the dust. “The basement, maybe. Where else would you put a body?”
Richard couldn’t argue with that logic. “Great. Well, how do we get into the basement?”
“Not through the living room.” She shined her light across the room and settled on the entrance to the kitchen. “Maybe here? That’s where the basement door was in my parent’s house—the kitchen.”
The tip of Richard’s nose itched. He rubbed it, but the feeling didn’t go away. More than an itch; he knew Beth was right. He felt drawn to it, as if hands pressed his shoulders forward. Was it instinct, or intuition, or something else?
A breeze passed through the house and whispered in the wind. The quiet sound crawled up Richard’s back and slithered onto his neck as if it had a thousand legs.
It was hard to see in the kitchen; guided only by Beth’s small light and the moonlight piercing the window. Richard grunted as he cracked his shin against a stool, which clattered against the floor a few feet away. He frowned, then gave a sheepish smile of apology to Beth.
They both stood still and waited to see if anything had heard them. “I think we’re okay,” Beth said.
A strange yellow and orange rot grew in the corners of the kitchen’s floor and climbed up the sides of the peeling wallpaper. A pile of dishes sat in the sink with a layer of gray dust that coated everything. A door in the rear of the kitchen was busted in and had collapsed to the ground some time ago. Dirt was everywhere, as if some animal had broken in and dragged the wild in with it. Richard took a deep breath and watched the door as they moved past it.
“Something broke in here,” he said as his focus stayed on the door, waiting for something to lurch in, though nothing did.
“I don’t think so—look at the dust. We’re the only ones leaving tracks.” Beth shined her light across the floor. “If something broke in, it was a long time ago.”
What could it mean?
He’d heard countless tales of other things beyond witches or ghosts that ran through the dark and preyed on men, any of which might have been able to break a door but not leave tracks. He would have laughed at the idea just yesterday, but now he didn’t know what to believe.
He shook the thoughts away and brought his attention back to the kitchen. The basement door was there, just as Beth had guessed. Beth tried the old, stiff door latch. “I can’t get it open. Can you try?”
Richard nodded and wiped his hand on his pants, more for fear of opening the door than anything else. Reluctantly, he grabbed onto the handle with one hand while he gripped Beth’s hand with the other. “I might have to put my shoulder into it.” She nodded for him to go ahead.
He pressed down on the latch as hard as he could and threw his shoulder into it. It popped open, and a shower of dead bugs and dust spilled down over them, causing the two to squeal and pull back.
After brushing off the filth, Richard turned to look down the stairs. He gave a stiff, unsure look to Beth as he took a step closer to the basement, bu
t all he could see were steps that descended into a black pit.
“Just... just give me a second.” With an uneasy hand, Richard fished a candle and lighter out of his bag. He had Beth hold the candle while he made several attempts to ignite it. Beth finally asked to try. She lit the candle after a few attempts.
“I’ll go first, Richard,” she whispered, even as she moved to get ahead of him.
“No, no, it’s okay. I’ll do it.” Richard didn’t even know he could say those words, let alone take the first step into the dark. He took several steps down before his mind caught up to the idea. Beth kept pace with him as they slowly descended. His candle’s flickering flame and Beth’s light pushed the darkness back and brought the ground into view.
So far, so good.
The last step creaked, and the dark took notice, seeming to shift and move farther away. “Did you see that?” Richard nearly shouted.
“Richard!” she hissed, and glanced to see if anything was approaching. “Stay quiet.”
He gulped and braved another step forward. “We’ll have to find her bones,” he whispered in an effort to distract himself and force another step forward.
The basement floor was packed dirt, and the walls were stone. Water trickled down the sides and into the dirt, creating slop. Large pieces of trash were stacked, one upon another, so rusted that it was impossible to distinguish what it might have once been. The mounds of decayed metal created a maze of rusting filth. The thick musky smell of the basement was hard to ignore, but it wasn’t just that.
Something is rotting here.
Richard held the candle high and saw the string of a hanging light. He reached and pulled it a few times, but it gave only a quieted click-click.
“No bulb,” he said between nervous laughter.
“We’re going to have a hard time finding anything down here,” Beth said.