Migrators

by Ike Hamill

  Bob complied. They rolled up to the house slow and dark. The inside of the house was black and the front door was open, inviting them into the darkness of the hallway. The storm door hung to the side from one hinge. Bob slowed to a stop.

  “I’m thinking that maybe they wanted my family here. I just don’t know why,” Alan said. “I’m going to check out the house.”

  “Is that wise?” Bob asked.

  “Probably not,” Alan said.

  He slipped through the car door and walked across the road. His foot throbbed, but the pain was manageable. Alan climbed the hill and heard Bob kill the engine and get out of the SUV behind him. Alan stepped through the door and let his eyes adjust to the interior of the house. The floor was wet and littered with leaves and sticks. The filing cabinet they’d used to wedge the door shut was cast to the side. The door to the den was closed. Alan walked up the stairs. He paused halfway up. Divided squares of moonlight came through the window over the stairs and lit up the steps ahead of Alan. He heard that same low murmur from somewhere on the second floor. Alan turned. Bob had come through the door and was crouched. He had a stick in his hand. Bob was looking up the stairs.

  “Did you hear that?” Alan asked.

  Bob nodded.

  Alan continued climbing. The carpet squished under his feet. Alan knelt and felt the runner—it was wet. When he got to the top, he saw that door to the master bedroom was open. Alan continued on. Bob caught up as Alan walked through the door. They both looked up at the ceiling as the murmuring began again.

  Alan led the way to the dark closet. The hatch to the attic was open. A little moonlight filtered through the opening. Alan sat down and pulled himself through to the landing of the stairs. His hands hit a patch of dampness on the closet floor. The murmuring upstairs stopped. Alan took care not to bump his toe when pulling his foot through the hatch. He pushed up on narrow walls to stand. Wind blew down in his face as he climbed. Behind him, Bob grunted as he pulled himself through.

  Alan touched a stair in front of him as he climbed. It felt damp. When he reached the top step, Alan’s breath caught in his chest. Below the open window, the old rocking chair sat. He had broken the chair into small pieces before throwing it out to the lawn below. He had taken those pieces out to the back field—the old fire pit—and burned them until the chair was nothing more than ashes.

  He took a step forward. A cloud passed in front of the moon and the shadows shifted on the floor. When he blinked, the chair wasn’t there—the vision had been a trick of the light.

  Alan jumped and grunted when Bob put a hand on his shoulder.

  “Something left a trail,” Bob said. He was pointing to the floor.

  Alan saw what his friend meant—the wet trail came from the stairs and went over to the window where he’d seen the phantom rocker. The wood planks were damp.

  “Hand me that pry bar,” Alan said.

  Bob reached and handed the long bar to Alan, who walked it over to the window. With both hands, he drove the narrow end of the pry bar between the floorboards. They creaked in protest as he levered a board until the nails popped out. Bob got his fingers under the board and pulled. When they had the first board up, they moved on to the next. The insulation beneath the floor had settled, leaving several inches of airspace between the floorboards and the loose tufts of insulation. In the dim light, the insulation looked like dirty cotton. There was something else beneath the floor.

  “What is it?” Bob asked.

  “I don’t know,” Alan said. He closed the attic window and dusted off his hands on his borrowed pants. “But I think those things wanted it.”

  Alan and Bob pulled up several more boards and crouched on either side of the hole they’d made in the floor. Between two joists, a container several feet long sat atop the compressed insulation. Bob reached out his hand and touched the white surface.

  “It’s wet,” Bob said.

  Alan reached out and touched the thing. It was rectangular and several inches deep. The corners were rounded and the white surface was shiny in the moonlight, and not just because of the dampness. It was a shiny white enamel or ceramic.

  “Help me lift it,” Alan said.

  Bob nodded and slipped his hands under it. On his side of the hole, Alan did the same. They balanced the object as they pulled it from the hole. They sidestepped past the stack of floorboards and set it down in the middle of the attic.

  “Hinges,” Bob said.

  When he saw the seam that ran around the edge of the box, Alan had a flash of recognition. The thing was the same size and shape as a fancy guitar case—the kind of hard case a seasoned road musician would use because of its durability. This wasn’t black plastic though. This was white and felt like it was made of the same material as an old sink or a toilet.

  Alan moved to the side opposite the hinges and found the latch. It was a simple mechanism with no lock. He flipped it up.

  “Maybe we shouldn’t,” Bob said.

  “Why?”

  Bob shrugged.

  Alan frowned and pushed open the lid. It tilted up silently and revealed an interior of plush purple velvet. The material looked almost black in the dim light. Bob moved around the side and gasped when he saw the inside of the box. Alan didn’t make a sound. He felt a cold spike in the center of his chest.

  Laid out inside the box—not in anatomically correct positions, the box wasn’t long enough for that—were human bones. The skull had been snapped into several fragments. The pieces were grouped near one end of the box with a collection of loose teeth. Most of the bones looked intact, with the exception of the skull, collarbone, and pelvis. Alan closed the lid.

  “Who do you think it is?” Bob asked. “And why is it up here?”

  “I think it’s the woman from the stairs,” Alan said. He rubbed the center of his chest, trying to warm up the cold spot there before it spread. “I’m guessing though. Help me carry it.”

  They angled the box down the stairs and had to maneuver it carefully to fit through the small door at the bottom. Alan walked backwards down the main stairs and out through the front door. For its size, the box was heavy.

  “Where are we going with this?” Bob asked.

  “To your car,” Alan said.

  Alan walked down the hill and then pulled to the side so Bob could open the back hatch to his SUV. The light in the back came on and Alan slid his end onto the upholstered interior. Alan ran up the hill and closed the front door of the house. When he returned to the SUV, Bob was still at the back, tracing his fingers over the surface of the porcelain box.

  Bob knelt and scratched at the ground at the side of the road. He came back up with a handful of mud. He slapped it down on the lid of the box.

  “What are you doing?” Alan asked.

  “There’s something here,” Bob said. He wiped the mud over the surface and it settled into tiny scratches on the lid. As he wiped away the excess mud, he revealed engraved letters.

  Bob read aloud the writing on the top of the box.

  “Sophia Helen Prescott, 1933-1963. In aeternum.”

  Alan reached forward and took the remaining mud. He spread it across the rest of the cover, looking for more words. He didn’t find any.

  “I thought Sophia Helen died when she was a baby. Must be a different one,” Bob said.

  “It’s the exact same name, and the years are right for Buster’s sister. I think the old guy lied to us,” Alan said.

  “But why? And why was she in your attic?”

  “I bet Paul put here there. The Colonel bought the house from Paul in either ’63 or ’64, I don’t remember which.”

  “What are we going to do with her?”

  Alan leaned against the back of the vehicle and thought. He ran his finger along the side of the box, feeling the seam. With the latch secured, the box was tight. He could barely catch the edge with his thumbnail.

  “Buster said those things exist to decompose spirits,” Alan said. “If she’s the woman w
ho has been hanging out on my stairs, then I’d say that those migrators aren’t doing their job.”

  “Maybe they can’t get inside this box,” Bob said.

  “I wonder if I can kill two birds with one stone. What if I give these bones to the migrators and get rid of them and the ghost at the same time?”

  “I thought you didn’t believe in that stuff?” Bob asked.

  “So I won’t be disappointed if it doesn’t work,” Alan said. “Want to go on a hike?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Ceremony

  BOB WAS IN THE lead. He was reaching back and holding the box at waist-level. Alan brought up the rear. They marched through the woods.

  “What makes you think they’ll be at the pond again?” Bob asked over his shoulder.

  “It’s as good a place as any,” Alan said. “It’s on the way between the lake and river, and we’ve seen them there before. I say we just give these bones a Viking funeral in the pond and then see what happens.”

  Alan’s legs ached as they shuffled through the woods. He had been pointing his left foot upwards as they walked in an effort to keep the pressure off his toe, but his muscles cramped and then gave in. Now with each step, he felt the grind of his bone against the shoe. The feeling sent a weird itch up his spine. It was somewhere between excruciating pain and a weird tickle that he prayed would stop. Still, he walked. He tried to focus on his breathing, which whistled in through his mouth.

  Bob stopped and Alan ran into the back of the box.

  “What?” Alan asked.

  “Lights,” Bob said.

  Alan moved to the side so he could see past Bob. In the distance, uphill from their position, he saw firelight. Alan lowered his end of the box to the ground. Bob felt the movement and did the same. The two stared through the woods. The firelight was coming from inside the cabin at the top of the hill.

  “What the hell is that?” Bob whispered.

  “I’m going to check it out,” Alan said. “If something happens to me, run and get the real police. Get a state trooper if you can.”

  Bob nodded.

  Alan circled to the west of the cabin so he wouldn’t be approaching in the light coming through the window of the cabin. He paused every few paces to listen. When he looked back, Bob had moved behind a tree. Alan stepped as lightly as he could and pressed his back to the side of the log cabin. He made his way to the corner and peered around. Next, he slid along the north wall until he reached the window.

  Someone inside the cabin walked in front of the window and Alan pulled back.

  Barely audible above the cracking and popping of the fire, he heard a low conversation. He couldn’t make out any of the words.

  Alan held his breath as he moved his head around the corner to see inside.

  The light in the room was coming from a fire, burning in a stone-lined circle. Pillars of brick around the fire held up the chimney that carried away the smoke. On the other side of the fire, Alan saw two small figures holding hands. They weren’t the source of the conversation. The voices were coming from somewhere towards the front of the cabin.

  Alan blinked at the figures through the fire. There was something unusual about the one on the right. The flames died down and Alan got a better look—one of the figures was a little girl, but the other wasn’t a person at all. It was a scarecrow, dressed in jeans and a jacket and a red baseball cap. The girl wore similar clothes—jeans and a jacket over her shirt. She was holding the scarecrow’s straw hand.

  Alan ducked back as another person passed in front of the window. He heard the man’s voice.

  “Just start,” the man said. “They’ll be here.”

  “I won’t make it another year,” a second voice said. “If we don’t get it right this time, then I’m finished.”

  “It will work,” the first man said. “It takes more coaxing with a dummy, but it will work. We got new blood and the brood has done more tonight than they have in…”

  Alan couldn’t hear the rest. The man moved away from the window and the volume of the conversation dropped.

  As Alan looked off into the woods and struggled to hear the words being spoken, he realized that he knew the scarecrow. Rather, he realized that he knew the clothes the scarecrow was dressed in—they belonged to his son. Over the course of a couple weeks, Joe had lost all of those articles of clothes at school. Alan had chalked it up to carelessness.

  He chanced another glance through the window and confirmed his other suspicion. He recognized that girl—it was Pauline McDougall, née Pauline Prescott.

  She said she wanted to marry him, Alan thought. No, she said she had to marry him.

  Alan ducked under the edge of the window and moved towards the front of the building. He glanced back towards Bob’s position. The man remained hidden.

  At the front corner of the cabin, Alan crouched down before looking around the edge. There was nobody on the front porch of the place. Alan slid around the corner and looked up through the window there. Pauline was swinging her arm, dragging the stuffed arm of the scarecrow back and forth near the edge of the fire. The two men he’d heard talking were positioned across the fire from the girl. They conferred over a book that one of the men held.

  In the flickering light, Alan saw that the corner of the dirt floor of the cabin had been dug up. A metal box sat near the fresh hole.

  “I’ll start the process, but if they don’t come soon, I don’t know what I’ll do,” the man holding the book said.

  “Don’t worry,” the other man said. Alan finally recognized the second man by his uniform. It was the game warden—Rick Prescott.

  Rick began to read from the book, mumbling the words to himself.

  Alan thought about his years as a photographer. He thought about his career of entering towns and cities besieged by violence, and the variety of reactions people exhibited. When he’d traveled to Qalat, Afghanistan in 2004, he’d found people who understood the threats around them. They’d been living amidst violence—it was a part of their daily existence. When something started to go down, there was little screaming and only isolated panic. Mostly, people just tried to protect their family and their own lives.

  Kano, in northern Nigeria, was a different story in 2009. Alan visited just as various groups were rising to power and only beginning to bring their violence to the streets. The people were stunned. They were too shocked to act decisively, and too often paid a heavy price for not responding quickly to the approaching threats. Hell, a person from El Paso, Texas would know enough to get off the street if they heard gunfire when they were visiting Mexico. Put that gunfire back in Texas, and people would just stand there, looking around and maybe pulling out their phone to call the police.

  You can’t ignore a threat, no matter how far outside your realm of experience. That was the lesson that Alan had learned while traveling and photographing armed conflicts. The people who will do evil don’t care whether you understand or believe in them. They’ll hurt you or your family either way. You can run or fight, but you can’t ignore them.

  They’ve got Joe’s clothes, Alan thought. I don’t know what kind of weird shit they’re doing here, but they’re not going to involve Joe.

  Alan stood and stepped onto the porch.

  X • X • X • X • X

  Alan ducked in through the low door. He stepped over a line of white powder and circled the fire to where Pauline McDougall was holding the junior scarecrow’s hand. The girl didn’t move from her spot, but her eyes followed Alan. The men stood near the window. There was a woman there, too. Alan hadn’t seen her since she was sitting on the floor below the window opening. She looked tired. She was roughly Liz’s age and looked exhausted. A dirty white dress ended mid-calf and her bare legs and feet poked out from under it.

  Alan plucked the hat from the scarecrow and tucked it under his arm. He unzipped Joe’s jacket from the bare straw.

  “Let go,” he said to Pauline. He pulled the straw from her grip so he could pull
the scarecrow’s arm through the sleeve.

  “Ow!” Pauline said. She put her finger in her mouth.

  “We need those clothes,” Rick Prescott said. He didn’t take his eyes off of Alan as he set the book down on the floor.

  “Sorry,” Alan said. “They belong to my son and he needs them back.”

  “We’re not going to let you take them,” the other man said.

  “Listen, buddy, it’s not up to you,” Alan said. He lifted the scarecrow and unsnapped the pants. The men weren’t making any movement to stop him, so he kept working at undressing the figure. As he got the pants off the scarecrow, Alan saw the men exchange a glance. Rick moved towards the door and the other guy began to circle the fire. Alan didn’t have any intention of letting either get close enough for a scuffle. There were four windows and the door, and only two men. Alan dropped the scarecrow and picked up Joe’s old gym shoes.

  “Do you have anything else that belongs to my son?” Alan asked Pauline.

  The little girl looked up at Alan and nodded slowly. Alan had Joe’s clothes all bunched together and held them to his chest with one arm. He held the other hand out to Pauline. He looked up. Rick stood in the doorway. The other man was moving slowly but picking up speed to circle the fire. The men didn’t seem to know what to do with Alan.

  “Mommy?” Pauline asked.

  “Yes, honey,” the woman sitting on the floor under the window spoke. “Yes, they’re almost here.”

  The other guy—the one circling the fire—stopped when the woman spoke. He backed up towards the wall behind him.

  “Do you have anything else of Joe’s?” Alan repeated.

  Pauline turned to look up at Alan. Her eyes reflected the fire—they seemed to glow orange and red.

  “I’ll give it back when he’s my husband, you devil,” Pauline said.

  Alan took a small step backwards.

  How silly of me to think that I was demonstrating authority, he thought.

  “Whatever you have,” Alan said, “give it to me.”

  “You’re not my father,” the girl said. “They are.” She pointed towards Rick. He looked as confused as Alan felt. Rick looked around. He looked everywhere except at Pauline’s pointing finger.