Scary Creek

by Thomas Cater

  “SCARY CREEK”

  “Where the blood of human sacrifice has sanctified the earth, screaming things abound.”

  By

  Thomas Cater

  “There are ghosts in the jungle about the waters of the Tonie Sap,” the village people murmured; “Ghosts of kings and queens and elephants, back there where the tigers howl and the gibbons swing from bough to bough, where trees grow from the roofs of ruined buildings that were once larger than mountains.”

  This book may not be reprinted without the written consent of the author.

  Thomas Cater, 16 Bette Lane, Hurricane, WV, 25526.

  Copyright 2002

  Chapter One

  There was a time in my life when the mere mention of the word supernatural would have provoked nothing but resentment and derisive laughter from me, but now I am not so sure. I have spent too many days and nights in this house on Scary Creek to say I know anything for certain. I am not a student of the occult, not in the traditional sense. I have not spent my life on a university campus surrounded by ancient manuscripts and pieces of tattered papyri in search of the unknowable. My knowledge of the transcendent comes from the simple fact that as a photojournalist and a contributor to magazines and wire services, I travel. I have lived in countries that leave indelible marks upon one’s soul and subject one’s mind to subtle influences. Humble circumstances nevertheless conditions that have predisposed my mind and heart to intimations from the other side.

  I am a photojournalist only by coincidence. A few noteworthy credits secured my professional fate years ago. I am by nature a repository of unassailable dreams, the most passionate of which include following in the footsteps of Marco Polo from Venice to China, sailing a canvas boat from Newfoundland in the legendary wake of Saint Brendan the Irish monk, rediscovering America and circumnavigating Australia in an ultra-lite. I have spent years preparing psychologically to follow Sinbad the Arab sailor’s perilous voyage from Oman to China. Even now I long to raft the lengths of the Yangtze, Amazon and Nile rivers.

  There has always been fertile soil in my mind for the cultivation of even the most forbidden and sinister dreams. I felt those dreams take root when I witnessed Abidji tribesman along Africa’s Ivory Coast commit acts of self-mutilation prescribed by the spirits that possessed them. I felt those feelings quicken in India when I witnessed worshipers of Kali -- Siva’s black and shining treacherous queen -- mutilated their bodies for her pleasure. I have also observed those mesmerizing powers in rare Chinese photos of men suffering the excruciating ‘death of a thousand cuts’. I have always felt compelled to seek out and rediscover the sacred ancient places where the blood of human sacrifice has sanctified the earth.

  A rash of careless injuries precipitated my return to Washington from Southeast Asia. I fractured my kneecap and broke several fingers while exploring ruins in the ancient city of Angkor Thom, Cambodia. Wearing the same sweaty boots and socks for days on end also damaged my feet. I became indifferent to my personal health and safety, and I needed time to re-evaluate my state of mind and my dreams. I was experiencing frequent trepidation about life; mine in particular. The thought of dying on foreign soil and falling under the jurisdiction of alien deities, whose rituals and ceremonies I am only remotely familiar, inspired too many anxious moments and interfered with the performance of my obligations. It was not a significant consideration when viewed from ten thousand miles, but quite different when the icons glared down on me from every jungle ledge and temple.

  *

  “There are ghosts in the jungle about the waters of the Tonie Sap,” the village people murmured, “ghosts of kings and queens and elephants, back there where the tigers howl and the gibbons swing from bough to bough, where trees grow from ruined buildings that were once larger than mountains.”

  *

  While recuperating in DC, I spent a year compiling a book of ‘death camp’ photos. It was a bizarre concatenation of pictures juxtaposing fields of mangled bodies with religious bas-reliefs, statues and ancient temple ruins. Death and divinity sprawled in grand repose on every page. It was a stretch from my early endeavors at Wheels a truckers’ magazine, or my efforts to promote a small publication glamorizing the trials, tribulations and indiscretions of young female federal employees.

  My coffee table documentary attracted the attention of one small publisher whose enthusiasm for my work outweighed monetary considerations. The advance was small but sales were encouraging and the book went into a second printing within the year. A major book publisher offered to buy reprint rights with a small advance and royalties that hinted at financial independence, and I jumped at the offer.

  Things were going well. I was working part time and earning a few dollars taking pictures for AP when I discovered a distant relative had also died and left a small trust and real estate in northwest Washington, D.C. My benefactor was a part of the family I knew very little about. Apparently, he was heirless and died a horrible death. The executor of the estate was somewhat reluctant to speak about it, but eventually confided to me that ‘cats’ had devoured him.

  A police investigation revealed that he had fallen on his basement steps and died of a stroke. He was a recluse and occupied the entire house with nearly a dozen cats. It was nearly a year before anyone realized he was missing. The cats turned the house inside out searching for food, consumed everything edible, including leather furniture, and eventually began to feed upon each other. A few neighbors noticed unpleasant odors, but no one complained. A tradesman sensed something peculiar about the disreputable condition of the porch and convinced authorities to investigate.

  Driven mad by hunger, the cats had torn every container to shreds in every cabinet and pantry in the house. Feline teeth and claws perforated cans, paper and plastic containers. Every room was filled knee deep with litter and ragged remnants, including gnawed and fragmented bones. Police suspected that some might have belonged to a man. No one could imagine how long the cats survived by breeding and devouring each other. Their source of water, authorities concurred, was a sump-pump that collected ground water seeping in through the basement walls. The horrific event posed an intriguing problem in thermodynamics.

  Trustees refurbished the townhouse into apartments and leased them to upwardly mobile professionals. Because of my work and travel in Asia, months occurred before I learned of my inheritance. Within twenty-four hours of receiving notice, however, I had moved my meager collection of art and artifacts into one of the vacant apartments.

  I spent a portion of the inheritance on a 10-year-old used recreation vehicle, a veritable land yacht. I thought of it as the kind of luxury vehicle Aristotle Onassis would have taken pride and pleasure in owning if he worked for a living. The RV purchase was atypical of my usually parsimonious nature, but the sudden acquisition of expendable wealth had overwhelmed me. It was my descent into indulgence, my stately pleasure dome, on wheels.

  The RV provided me with a new will and greater mobility. Tooling down the highway in $35,000 worth of second-hand decadence made me feel as if I were once again in control of my life, the master of my fate, the captain of the ship, or land yacht, and no longer subject to the whims of fortune, good or bad. I began to concede that one’s destiny did not necessarily depend on whether one adhered to the traditional codes of charitable messiahs, bloodthirsty Asian gods, thieving warlords, dictators, or diabolical truckers, only expendable wealth mattered.

  On occasions, I would reflect upon the cruel misfortune of my benefactor, Rufus C. Dangerfield, but realized there was not much I could do to express my gratitude. The few remaining bones were sufficient to identify him, but no one knew with any certainty what had actually happened. I was unable to fathom how a man living in the midst of a bustling metropolis like DC could fall
heir to such a horrifying fate.

  Returning from the fleshpots and killing fields of Asia, I, who had made every effort to seek out the darkest corners of the planet and understand there mysteries, discovered that under the most civilized conditions, a veil of psychic darkness existed that could not easily be penetrated. I tried to imagine what life was like for the cats: a safe haven had become their living hell. Stalked day and night, they waited for the weak to die, for brothers and sisters to tear them apart. Eventually, one lone cat would survive, but endless hunger and the ghosts of previously slaughtered cats would have driven it to madness. If ever a house was ripe for a haunting …

  They were not comforting thoughts. Whenever they occurred to me, I heedlessly opened a door or window to let in a breeze, or to release the spirit of an errant cat. It was rather intriguing to realize that starving cats may have devoured an esteemed relative.

  Months after moving into the townhouse, I began to experience other unusual and inexplicable events. I learned that in the early 1900s the house belonged to a famous theosophist and personal acquaintance of Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Mary…something or other. Occult gatherings, table-rapping, levitating tambourines and ghostly images were the order of the day. Local historians advised me that many famous Washington personalities once gathered around a séance table in my dining room. Sometimes I am inclined to believe the trip wires are still in place waiting for someone to work them because, on several occasions, I have heard the strangest sounds.

  I was contending with the doubt and trepidation I had faced and photographed in Asia. It would have taken more than a glib-tongued evangelist or a movie on demon possession to convince me that life and death amounted to more than a series of random or arbitrary accidents. The afterlife, I concluded, was only a waking hallucination. After all, what function could a spirit world serve? It was a situation, so vague and temporal, as to offer only the slimmest of hope to those not prepared to shuffle off the mortal coil. It offered only dubious rewards to those who could not concede that man was just another elaborate hoax of nature destined to return to the dust from whence he came. Some egos were just too great to admit to such inevitable conclusions. I however had few misgivings about death. I knew with certainty it amounted to no more than the corruption of flesh, a condition we were all destined to endure. Then I met Elinore.

  I can hardly believe that what has happened has actually occurred. It was not long before events in my life began to take a curious turn. I lost my job with the news agency, book sales began to decline and investments I'd inherited in Appalachian oil and gas stocks bottomed out. I could not find the motivation to work no matter how hard I tried. I spent too much time lounging around my apartment listening to curious sounds that came from nowhere in particular, but everywhere in general. The sounds, not unlike voices, did not speak to me but spoke around me. For several months, I thought the voices were coming from neighboring houses or apartments, but my efforts to locate and understand them were fruitless.

  I started having equally strange and repetitive dreams involving old stone houses choked with vines dripping from three hundred year-old rotting trees. Tangled within the snaking arbors were tiny naked babies with orange eyes as bright as tracer bullets and silent sucking mouths that had forgotten how to scream.

  When I told Myra, the Polish poet and painter I married -- while riding the ripple of success -- about the dreams and the babies, she stopped caring whether I found another job, or even continued to look. An artist and an illustrator, she helped me scope out the book on death camps and killing fields and eventually moved into my house. You can imagine my shock when she loosed her grisly old tomcat in my home, an act she repeatedly denied.

  Not entirely overjoyed with sleeping and financial arrangements, she and the cat eventually retreated to the basement apartment. It wasn’t long before she began concocting excuses to avoid me. Every day she was meeting someone for lunch, visiting distant cousins, or spending the weekend with artsy friends. Since I did not aspire to paint or sculpt, I was not entitled to meet them. I knew she wasn’t cheating on me; she was married twice before and preferred etching and painting to sex. Both her previous husbands left her for less talented and less attractive women. I knew she was bored with my lack of appreciation for her genius and was waiting for the right moment to break free.

  It was not long before my suspicion proved true. She informed me by postcard that our marriage was over and we were through. ‘It is not possible for two artists to live together’, she said, even though she did not approve of my photographic art. She frequently declined my requests to photograph her in the nude, and her portraits were disdainful and proud.

  If she had not destroyed my spirit masks, including the nank-schou, an African We wisdom mask, rumored to be capable of provoking primitive ferocity in the gentlest human soul, we may have had a chance at reconciliation. When I discovered my collection trashed, I knew there was nothing she could say or do to make me forgive her. It was the final indignity in a history of indifference to my interests.

  Claiming a financial interest in the town house and book, Myra proceeded to sue. She did help with some book engraving and illuminating and created the artwork for each section, even contributing a few rhyming lines. However, the fact that I provided her with room and board seemed compensation enough at the time.

  I have it on good authority that she has moved out of the town house. I do not know to where, probably in with one of her artsy friends. Until the case comes to court, I still own the DC property, even though I haven’t been there in months; not since I became an occupant of the house on Scary Creek, which is where I met Elinore.

  It was not a planned meeting. I had barricaded myself in the Washington apartment to avoid a subpoena when I spotted Myra, her attorney and a process server marching up the steps. I knew they had come to evict me, to take possession of my apartment and building, the furniture and my beloved RV, my only real joy in a world of transitory and fleeting pleasures. My only option was to run. If I could beat them to the garage, I knew I could be on the road in minutes. With a little luck, they might never catch me. She would, I surmised, eventually tire of the suit. In the meantime, I could survive on what I had concealed in a secret checking and savings account. If worse came to worst, I could always find a job writing for a small daily or weekly newspaper.

  I however underestimated Myra’s appetite for retribution, something I had done before. Her desire to control the known universe and everything in it was legend.

  I ran down the basement stairs and climbed into the RV. I heard her shout instructions to “lock the garage door!” I knew the order had caught the server off guard. At that point, I was no longer vulnerable to official intimidation, especially when it came to destroying my own property.

  I revved the RV’s engine up and blew the diesel horn … long and loud. I drove straight toward the door without a thought to what might have happened if the server had neglrcted my warning. Fortunately, it was Sunday, traffic was light and he was clever enough to know not to linger near a garage door when a disgruntled husband was protecting his most valued possession.

  He vacated the drive when he heard the engine start. Moments before the RV collided with the door; a loud and lengthy blast on the horn seemed to blow the door to smithereens. I can still see her red enraged face as the door shattered. She and her attorney were standing on the steps waving papers in their outstretched arms, as the RV bounced over the curb and down the street.

  Chapter Two

  I drove for hours before stopping at Harpers Ferry, West Virginia. Early the next day, I scavenged a ragged week-old newspaper from a coffee shop. An ad announced an estate auction in a town called Vandalia, Upshyre Country, located several hours southwest. The house, a Victorian mansion built by a coal and timber baron in the 1880s, looked as if it had possibilities. Surrounded by 26 acres, the house, land and contents were selling as a package per the previous owner’s wishes. There was something compell
ing about the house, though I cannot say what it was. The auction was closing that very day.

  The town was easy enough to find on the map, but making time and progress on the narrow winding roads proved another matter. I arrived several hours late and found the courthouse doors locked. I was under the mistaken impression that most state and county facilities remained open until 4 pm.

  There were numerous cars and pickup trucks lining the streets, but the sidewalks were nearly empty. The stores appeared to be open but in dire need of customers. Across the street from the courthouse and located within the block were empty restaurants and dusty storefronts, banks, a department store, drug stores, and a real estate office. A magistrate’s office and notary public shingles dangled from faded aluminum awnings.

  High school senior class and aging wedding photos were on display in a vacant storefront window. I suspected there were malls somewhere on the outskirts of town doing a thriving business, medical clinics, donut shops, burger joints and automotive stores scattered throughout, but from the steps of the courthouse, the streets were dead.

  A lone figure moved inside a realtor’s office. I had traveled too far to walk away from Vandalia without registering a word of complaint. I checked the name of the agency in the auction notice. They were the same. If it was an error, I felt entitled to an explanation, or at least ask a few questions if nothing else. The door was open and a bell announced my entry in a rattling noisome way. The office intimated there were profits in real estate to make, even in a county as remote as this one. Several desks seemed to be comfortably nestling in a blue shag carpet that emitted a pleasant fragrance. The newest and most impressive desk was adjacent to a frosted-glass room divider.

  A young man wearing camouflage fatigues and combat boots had risen at the sound of the bell and was weaving his way across the room. Midway he discovered some pleasure in my presence and smiled. I thought it had something to do with my thinning hair, which I neglected to brush. The wind had swept it over my ears to look like fender skirts. I was also wearing red suspenders over a tie-dyed purple tee shirt with a Grateful Dead logo, a gift from a woman trucker who aspired to be an exotic dancer. My hastily assembled fugitive attire was sadly uncoordinated. It had created a similar response in the Harper’s Ferry coffee shop.