by Greg Herren
Teresa knelt down beside me and took my hand in both of hers. “Don’t get upset or freak out, okay? Just stay calm, will you promise me that?” When I nodded, she went on. “Okay, I’ll tell you what happened.” She looked at Carson, who nodded, and she turned back to me. “You just went down. I mean, Rachel and I were behind you, but you just collapsed and fell.” She shuddered as she remembered. “It was freaky, your phone and your water went flying. And you were lying there, moaning and crying, and you kept saying—” She took a deep breath. “Over and over, you kept saying can’t be dead, can’t be dead, can’t be dead.”
Can’t be dead, can’t be dead.
I shook my head, biting my lip. “What does that mean?” I could hear hysteria in my voice, and I closed my eyes again, taking some deep breaths.
I’m losing my mind, isn’t that what it means?
“The worst part was you screamed right before you opened your eyes.” Rachel’s voice was shaking. “Oh my God, it was the most awful thing I’ve ever heard in my life.” Her eyes were full of tears, and she covered her face with her hands. “It was so loud…”
Teresa forced out a cold laugh. “Yeah, it echoed all through the forest, and you scared off all the birds. They really took off, got the hell out of Dodge.” She looked up and around. “It was really bloodcurdling,” she went on in a soft voice. “I’ve never heard anything like that—and I hope I never do again, no offense.”
Logan put an arm around her shoulders and squeezed, and she put her head down on his shoulder. “Do you remember anything at all that happened while you were passed out?” he asked gently.
I took a deep breath. “No. I don’t remember anything. But I remember”—I paused—“I felt like I was underwater, you know how you can go to the bottom of a pool and open your eyes and you can see the sun shining on the surface? It was—it was like that. And I had to get to the surface. And when I did, I woke up.” I shook my head. “I don’t know how else to explain it to you guys.”
“Something happened before you passed out, didn’t it?” Teresa said, peering down at my face. “Something’s been going on with you ever since we left the lodge this morning. Come on, Scotty, you have to tell us. We can’t help you if we don’t know what’s going on with you, and we want to help you.” When I didn’t answer, she turned to the others. “I saw his face before he went out. His eyes were glassy. He was looking at me, but through me, like I wasn’t there.” She shuddered. “I kept saying his name, and nothing—no reaction, no nothing. You saw it, didn’t you, Logan?”
Logan nodded.
“Scotty, what’s the last thing you remember before you passed out?” Rachel asked softly. “Dude, it was like you were in a trance.”
“I don’t…” I looked at each of their faces. “I don’t know how to explain it to you guys without sounding completely insane.”
“Scotty, you’re not crazy.” Carson whispered. “We were all there in the cemetery last night, okay? And you dreamed about coming into the woods last night, remember? You heard a voice calling Bertie—and we all heard it just now, before you passed out.”
“You…you heard it, too?” I stared at him, completely shocked. He nodded, and as I looked at each one of them in turn, they all nodded, too.
“It was…awful.” Rachel shuddered. “It was just like you described it this morning. Hollow and sad and mournful. It didn’t really scare me—it just made me feel, I don’t know, really sad. Like you said you felt in the cemetery last night.”
“There’s something going on,” Carson went on. “I don’t know what it is, but it’s something paranormal.” He didn’t seem triumphant or smug to be proven right. “But now we’ve all experienced it in some way. And right after the voice, that was when you passed out. The voice was the last of it, though.” He rubbed his head. “When you got down to the clearing, I could see you from where I was, on the side of the cabin here.” He gestured to the ruins. “You froze. Completely froze, like the girls said. Your eyes were all glassy, and they were talking to you, but you weren’t there.” He licked his lips. “And then you seemed to come out of it, and you walked over to where Logan was, next to the well…and then we heard the voice and you went out.”
“Do you remember anything at all?” Teresa whispered.
What the hell, if I can’t trust them who can I trust? I took a deep breath. “It’s like I was there, but I wasn’t. I know that doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t make sense to me. One minute I was walking down the path”—I looked over at the path—“and the next thing I knew, I was still there, but I wasn’t there, everything was different. The well, for one thing, it wasn’t broken down the way it is now, it looked like a well, you know, with a round brick base and the little roof and the crossbeam with the rope, and the cabin…” I explained, slowly and carefully, everything I’d seen.
But something told me not to tell them the young man looked like Marc, so I didn’t. Or that I’d dreamed it all before. That was too much.
When I finished, I shrugged. “So, what do you think? Am I going crazy?”
“No, you’re not going crazy,” Carson said quickly before anyone else could respond. “I think…we encountered something like this on the show.”
“Here we go,” Rachel muttered, rolling her eyes.
“Just because you don’t believe doesn’t mean it’s not possible or true,” Carson retorted angrily. “So you’d rather just believe Scotty’s going crazy and have him locked up in the nuthouse? And how do you explain the voice on the recording? The voice we just heard? Can you explain that?” He folded his arms and actually started tapping his foot. “I’m waiting.”
“I didn’t say Scotty’s going crazy, asshole,” Rachel snapped. “But there are other possibilities besides the supernatural, you know.”
“Nobody’s locking Scotty away in a nuthouse,” Teresa snapped. “Just let him finish, Rachel, before we decide what to do, okay?” Rachel made a face but nodded. “Go on.”
“As I was saying”—Carson glared at his sister for a moment—“one of the houses we investigated on the show this past summer was in Northern California, and before this particular family moved into it, no one had the slightest idea that the house was haunted. But their teenaged daughter—within a week of moving into the house, she started acting really strangely. Walking in her sleep, talking in her sleep to the point where her family could actually have conversations with her that she wouldn’t remember when she woke, and they swore the person they were talking to wasn’t their daughter.”
“Was she possessed?” Teresa managed to keep her voice neutral, but disbelief was clearly written all over her face.
“In a way, but not the way you think—not like The Exorcist, you know, a demon or the devil or whatever it was.” Carson replied with a scowl, totally serious. “There was a restless spirit trapped in the house—she died in the house when she was the same age as the family’s daughter, Ruth. Well, she was murdered in the house when she was the same age.” He pushed his glasses up. “Look, I don’t pretend like I know everything—no one does. All we can do is theorize based on the evidence”—Rachel snorted at this, but didn’t say anything—“that we do have, but the general consensus among parapsychologists is that ghosts are simply souls that can’t move on because, I don’t know, they have unfinished business? This girl in the California house, she was raped and murdered by a previous owner, and she eventually led them to where her body had been buried on the property. Once she’d been buried properly, the hauntings stopped.”
“You’re right, you didn’t explain that well,” Logan said with a shake of his head. “So, basically you’re saying this ghost in California was haunting that house because she hadn’t had a proper burial? What about countries where burial customs are different? Wouldn’t all those souls be trapped, if they needed to be buried?” When we all stared at him, he shrugged. “I took a Comparative Religion class last year. It was interesting.”
“I said I don’t know all the answers
—no one does.” Carson glared at Logan. “But there’s also a theory that the afterlife—what happens to the soul after we die—is directly tied to what we believe in while we are alive.” He shrugged. “Maybe what we experience after we die is completely based on what we believe, who knows? When you’re a spirit—”
“So what you’re saying is Albert has some unfinished business here?” Tell them about the young man you saw. I leaned back against the tree. “And for some reason, he’s using me to finish it? I don’t see how that explains what just happened here. And he is buried—we all saw his grave.”
Carson flushed. “Ruth—the girl in California—the same thing that’s happening to you also happened to her. She was getting flashes of memory from the murdered girl, seeing the house the way it had been when the dead girl had lived there, that sort of thing. And when it would happen, her eyes would go glassy, and she wouldn’t hear people talking to her. Sometimes she’d go into a dead faint when it was over, just like you did.” He turned and looked at the ruined cabin. “My guess is that this place is important somehow to Albert, and he was trying to show you something. Are you sure you told us everything you saw?”
I bit my lip. For some reason, I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t tell them the young man I saw looked like Marc. “I think so. I mean, I’m pretty sure. If I think of anything else I’ll tell you.” Why won’t you tell them about Marc? Don’t you think it’s important? Are you afraid if you tell him the guy you saw looked like Marc they’ll think it’s some gay fantasy of yours? They’ll laugh at you? They’re your friends, Scotty. Don’t be afraid of them.
But I didn’t say anything.
“We need to know who this cabin belonged to,” Carson went on. “Since it’s on the lodge property, I’m sure the Bartletts probably know something about it. Someone lived here—you can tell.” He swept his arm around. “Rosebushes, a well…yeah, someone lived here.” He beamed at them. “And I’d be willing to bet a million dollars someone lived here when Albert was alive.”
“I think we should talk to Aunt Arlene and Uncle Hank,” Rachel insisted. “If you’re wrong, and there’s something medical wrong with him—and before you bite my head off, brother dear, I’m not saying that a medical problem precludes paranormal activity, okay? But wouldn’t that be part of the process?” She smiled triumphantly at her brother, who was sputtering. “Just because I didn’t intern on the show doesn’t mean I don’t ever watch it, you know. And your Ruth—she had a complete medical exam, complete with a brain scan to make sure there wasn’t something physically wrong with her, didn’t she?”
“She has a point,” Teresa said. “We have to rule out medical causes.”
“And the voice could have been a collective hallucination,” Rachel continued. “We have to tell Aunt Arlene and Uncle Hank. If something’s really wrong with Scotty, and we didn’t tell them—I don’t want to be responsible for that. I mean, for all we know, he could have a brain tumor or something. We don’t know. We’re not doctors.” She flung a hand out. “And this is crazy. Carson, I’m sorry. I know you want to believe in the paranormal and all, but do you have any idea how crazy all of this sounds? Could you imagine the reaction we’d get from our parents if we tried to explain all of this to them? They’d have us all locked up in a psych ward.”
“Sorry, bro,” Logan playfully punched Carson in the arm. “But I gotta agree with Rache. We are so in over our heads here.”
“I don’t want anyone to say anything to my parents,” I said. They all looked at me. “I don’t. I think I’d know if I had a brain tumor or not, and a brain tumor didn’t make my back cold last night in the cemetery, and it wasn’t a brain tumor that made me walk out into the woods last night, and it wasn’t a brain tumor that made that flag wave in the cemetery, either.” I crossed my arms. “I don’t know how to explain it to you all to make you understand, but I think I’d know if I was losing my mind or if—if I was sick.” I shook my head. “None of this happened before yesterday. How could that be if I was sick? Or going crazy? Wouldn’t I have had symptoms before I got to North Hollow?”
“He has a point,” Teresa replied. “Seriously. Why don’t we do this?” She turned to Carson. “Let’s see what we can find out to maybe prove Carson’s right—or wrong, for that matter. It can’t hurt to do some research about Albert, the Tylers, and this cabin. And Rachel, if you want to you can do some research on brain diseases, see if any of this can be explained as symptoms of some kind of illness—and not just physical.” She looked at me and smiled sadly. “Sorry, Scotty, but we have to consider the other side of it, too. You may be having a breakdown. Maybe somehow you caused the voice we all heard—the voice your mother heard, too. And after a few days, if Carson can’t prove any of his theory, then we have to tell the adults. Are we all agreed?” The others nodded.
“It sounds fair.” Carson agreed.
“Don’t I have a say in any of this?” I asked. “I mean, come on, guys, you’re making decisions about me without any input from me? How is that fair?”
Teresa smiled at me, and patted my leg. “Sorry, Scotty, but we have to operate under the assumption that you’re not in your right mind, one way or another.” When no one said anything, she looked at her watch. “I say we get out of here. We’ve made some good progress.” She looked over at the ruined cabin. “And for the record, Carson—I do think you’re right. We just have to cover every base.”
She had a point. She was going to make a good lawyer one day.
We walked back up the trail in silence. I looked back at the cabin, and felt –sorrow, sadness—and then it was gone in just a moment.
I knew I wasn’t losing my mind.
The cabin meant something.
“You know something,” I said slowly as we reached the fork in the path and started to walk away from the cabin, toward the lodge. “My mom thought someone was out calling their pet last night—we need to ask the Bartletts if anyone on the mountain has a pet named Bertie or something that sounds like that.”
Carson scowled.
“If we’re going to cover every base, we have to rule out that anyone was out calling, don’t we?” I scowled back at him. “And you know, we also have to consider the possibility that this whole thing is all a set up of some sort.” I shrugged. “I mean, someone could be playing an elaborate trick.” I crossed my arms. “I mean, maybe the Bartletts know about your dad’s show about the paranormal. Maybe they want to get their lodge on a national television show. It’s free publicity, isn’t it?”
“Excellent point, Scotty.” Teresa nodded. “People have done crazier things than this to get on television.”
“They don’t strike me as the type, but you’re absolutely right.” Carson was practically dancing in place. “We have to consider everything, and not until everything else is ruled out can we determine that whatever’s happening is supernatural in origin.”
“In that case, we also have to consider the possibility that Scotty’s involved,” Logan pointed out. He grinned at me sheepishly. “If we have to consider everything, we have to, sorry. I mean, I don’t think you’d do something like that, but we have to think about it.”
“Uh huh.” I nodded, my cheeks flaming. Some vacation—my friends are considering the options that I might be insane, or have a brain tumor, or am involved in some elaborate scam. Great.
No one said another word as we continued walking back through the woods to the lodge. It was getting hotter, and my hair was damp with sweat. Going down the path, too, had been a lot easier than hiking its steady upward slope. By the time we reached the tree line just outside the parking lot, we were all breathing a little harder and soaking with sweat. “Thank God,” Rachel breathed as we made it out of the woods. “I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to make it.” She emptied what was left in her water bottle into her mouth.
As we stood there, the back door to the kitchen opened and Annie Bartlett emerged, carrying a bag of trash out to the big Dumpster out by the shed.
“Annie!” Logan shouted and took off running.
Annie’s face lit up as she watched Logan run up to her, and I felt bad for her. She’s fallen for him already, I thought sadly.
“I know about the cabin but I don’t know anything about it,” she was saying as we walked up. “When Mom and Dad bought the place, the agent showed it to them, of course, but it’s in such bad shape, and there’s no sewer or power out there, and no road, so they decided to just leave it as it is and not bother with it. The well’s dried up, too.” She shrugged her small shoulders. “I know some kids like to go hang out there and drink, you know, because no one ever goes out there, but I never go out there.” She shuddered. “There’s something about that place I don’t like.”
I noticed that as she spoke Rachel got a smug look on her face and wondered what she was thinking.
“Who’d your parents buy the lodge from, Annie?” This was Teresa, and her voice was friendly.
“Why do you care?”
“Just curious.”
“The people who owned the place before we did retired—they were pretty old.” Annie made a face. “I think they moved to Florida, and Mom and Dad were tired of city life, so here we are.”
“There aren’t any stories about the place being haunted, are there?” This was from Carson.
My mind was already starting to wander. I was sweating, and I was thirsty. I moved away from the group and went into the lodge through the front door. The lodge wasn’t air-conditioned—there were window units in the rooms—and all the windows were open. I could see the lake sparkling in the sun at the end of the long sloping lawn. I walked over to the cooler, retrieved a Coke, and went out onto the porch that ran the length of the building on the lake side. I sat down in a wooden rocking chair and put my feet up on the unfinished railing.
Was I losing my mind? I had to consider the possibility, even if I didn’t believe it was possible nor did I like the very idea. Was I having a breakdown of sorts? I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket. I really missed Marc and wished he was here with me. Was this some kind of weird reaction to the pressures of coming out to everyone, and missing Marc?