The Haunting of Rachel Harroway- Book 1

by J. S. Donovan

  “Keep the coroner busy,” Rachel ordered.

  “How long will it take you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Peak opened his mouth to speak but then thought better of it. He walked up to the coroner.

  Rachel waited till the men were talking in hall before she slid off her glove and put the palm of her hand on the girl’s forehead. Her skin was cold and smooth. Taking a deep breath, Rachel cleared her mind and thoughts. After a few seconds of silent foolishness, she wondered if the Reality really worked. Then, she was gone.

  Rachel could feel Maxine, understand her thoughts, see what she saw, taste what she ate but had no control. She was a watcher. A visitor in the girl’s final moments of life.

  School was out and the rest of the students were headed out the front doors, chatting up a storm. Maxine walked alone. Annabelle was going home with Duncan, and Timothy was avoiding her since their first date last week. I must’ve said something wrong, she thought as she walked down the road.

  Highlands had been her home since she was six, and it seemed like every day she found another trail or path that led to some hidden spot, i.e. a massive, mossy rock structure or a small creek with tadpoles and minnows. As much as the biology intrigued her, Maxine’s mind found its way to the upcoming SAT and ACT. Throughout her last years of high school, standardized testing had sapped away much of her life. She would’ve rather spent that time enjoying the sights and activities of her youth, but her parents forbade it. They saved up for her to go to med school, and they were going to make her do it. Maxine kicked a stone, wondering what she really wanted to do with her life.

  She wandered up the road, avoiding an oncoming car, and hiked through the woods. It was the quickest route to Satulah Road, where her home was. The chilly breeze and rattling leaves gave her chills. The news report about those girls’ bones turned the scenic shortcut into an ominous deathtrap. She shook her head. Mom’s right. I need to stop watching scary movies. The straggly game trail ended at the proper street. She noticed an old car parked off to the side of the road. The radio was on, reporting the news of the girls’ bones, but there was no one inside.

  Weird. Maxine jogged past the vehicle and farther up the winding road. Her home wasn’t far. Perhaps a quarter mile. She heard pattering behind her. She twisted back, but a sharp pinch in her neck caused her to stagger. In her peripherals, she noticed a gloved hand and a needle. Heart racing, she pushed herself away from the stranger but then found her arms and legs failing. The world spun and the ground shook. Within seconds, Maxine Gunther was unconscious.

  She jutted up from the inside of the trunk, knocking the cracked door open with the top of her head. Stars blanketed the sky. Sounds of nature could be heard in the dark canopy behind. Where am I? She rubbed her scalp. First she felt confusion, but fear followed.

  “Hello? Anybody out there?”

  The wind replied with a soft whisper.

  Maxine hugged her chest and waited for her eyes to adjust before climbing out of the trunk. Her bear feet hit the dirt. Where are my shoes? She twisted back to the trunk and saw the flashlight tucked in the back. She picked it up and blasted the light up to her face, blinding her temporarily. She bounced the beam of light through the trees. A carving caught her eye. Carefully, she approached, making sure not to trip on any rocks.

  The tree’s truck before her split like a two-headed snake. On the right stem was a soft, ball-size area where the bark had been smashed. The light picked up the engraving. Maxine read it aloud.

  “Run.”

  Behind her, leaves crunched. She twisted back and cast the light on the burlap sack held snugly around a man’s head. Maxine screamed. She ran without a second thought. The woods around her blurred as she jumped hurdles over felled trees and brushed past a thorn bush. Adrenaline kept her from feeling the pain. She didn’t think anything but what the tree said: run. And she did. How long or where she couldn’t say, but in the distance, she spotted an old building with a peaked tower, almost like a church but without a cross. Slipping between two trees, she headed for the building when the man with the rope appeared on her left, forcing her to change her direction away from the church.

  “Someone! Help!” She screamed as she ran.

  A root caught her ankle. She fell to a knee and let out another scream, but it was snuffed out by the noose that fell around her neck. She got yanked back by the rope, being dragged across the dirt on her back. Her hands desperately grabbed at ferns and underbrush, uprooting them.

  Rachel Harroway had seen all she needed from the vision. She needed to get out, feeling her own heart racing on par with Maxine’s. The pain around her neck and lack of air was so palpable that she couldn’t think straight.

  Maxine clawed at her neck to tear off the rope. The hemp only broke her nails. Why is this happening? she thought as the wood darkened around her. I never did anything wrong…

  Rachel tried to break the connection but as the girl’s will faded, so did her own. The forest darkened, and the Roper dragged them, stealing their breath with every inch he walked.

  Maxine’s face lost its blood. Her arms became weaker and her legs kicked slower and slower.

  Rachel focused on her world. Her reality. The coroner's office. The cadaver. She need to run to that place, but her consciousness was in a different body. As Maxine’s life faded, so did Rachel’s, and her imagination was failing her.

  Gasping, Rachel jolted up from the floor, grabbing her neck and taking in every sweet breath of that mortuary’s sterile air. Detective Peak and the coroner loomed over her with worried faces. Wiping a tear from her eye, Rachel extended a hand to Peak. He took it and helped her rise.

  “What happened?” Rachel asked breathlessly, using the desk as her support.

  “You collapsed,” Peak said.

  “That’s to put it mildly,” the coroner said. “You were thrashing about on the floor, clawing at your own neck. I called the ambulance.”

  “I must just be tired. I--we--should be going.” She gave Peak a look.

  “Yeah,” he replied slowly and helped her into the hallway.

  “You shouldn’t be moving,” the coroner exclaimed. “You have a serious medical abnormality.”

  That’s putting it lightly, Rachel thought as the door closed on the coroner. “Why are you looking at me like that?”

  Peak took his eyes off her since for the first time she woke up. He kept his mouth shut.

  “I said it was risky, but I’m fine.” That was a huge lie. Rachel still felt as though she was being strangled and was seconds away from certain death. “When I was in there, I saw something. A lead.”

  7

  Cross

  Rachel trembled as she sipped her hot black tea. Seeing the dead constantly numbed her to gore and decay, she’d realized, but to experience their death as if it were her own… That was a different matter entirely.

  The dark woods. The tight coil of the rope. Her raging heart. These were Maxine’s memories, but they seemed more real to Rachel than some of her own. And now that the vision had concluded, Rachel felt an emptiness inside, like she had lost something but couldn’t remember what. The Roper, with his burlap sack mask, watched her with his abyss-like eyes from the cafe’s sidewalk window. A dog-walking pedestrian passed in front of the Roper, causing him to vanish. Is the Roper an Orphan? Rachel wondered, unaware that she was rubbing her neck. She shook the thought, remembering the psychology class she’d taken in college an eon ago. Her conflict wasn’t with the spirits of the afterlife, but one of mental trauma.

  Pulling out her smartphone, Rachel researched the web for articles about near-death experiences, coping mechanisms, and PTSD. Granted, it was a self-diagnosis, but the idea of anything around her neck, whether a rope, hand, or something else, made her skin crawl. Her Internet browsing led to her an article about veterans returning from Iraq, Desert Storm, Vietnam, and a number of other American wars. It wasn’t about visions. It was about fear. Rachel’s olive green eyes
danced across the screen as she scrolled.

  “Every day, every hour, I never knew when death would come,” a nameless veteran wrote. “After months of living like I would die, I lost my ability to fear. Death wasn’t something far away that would take me when I grew old. It walked beside me, day in and day out. And I welcomed it.”

  Rachel put the jittery tea cup aside.

  “When I returned home, I realized that fear wasn’t the only thing I’d lost. There was a numbness to all aspects of my life. From love to hate, none of it mattered. I kept a loaded .45 on my kitchen table and contemplated using it as I read the morning paper or ate my cereal. Though my body left the battle, my mind did not.”

  The article continued, promoting a camp that taught veterans how to fear again, thus being able to feel other emotions as well. Numbing oneself to one aspect of life numbs all aspects, the author wrote. Rachel cast down her eyes and closed the tab, feeling ashamed to compare herself to those who had been in a foxhole. Maybe her comparison was well-founded, but at the end of the day, she hadn’t the slightest clue on how her battle--if one could call it that--stacked up against the true horrors of war. The Gift had been active in her for years, but it felt like decades.

  Exiting the restroom, Jenson Peak rejoined Rachel at the cafe table, wiping his wet hands on his dark jeans. He sat facing the doorway as most cops do and sipped the black coffee that had arrived when he was indisposed. Peak’s onyx eyes were far more intense than usual and his gaunt cheeks gave him a skeletal visage.

  “I would’ve preferred a bar,” he said bluntly, looking around the brightly decorated mom and pop cafe. The waitress bussing a nearby table heard the comment and frowned.

  “I needed a place to sober up.” Rachel turned her eyes up from her teacup. Dead Dakota Mulberry watched her from the other end of the room and, unlike the Roper, didn’t vanish when a pedestrian walked before her. After a second’s hesitation, Rachel completed her thought. “A bar might be too tempting.”

  “Tell me about this church you saw,” Peak got down to business.

  Rachel felt her pulse quicken as she remembered running from the Roper somewhere out in the dark woods. The late-night wind pushed against her. Thorns raking across her soft skin. “I only caught a glimpse of the building,” she said, suppressing the memory. “The cross had been knocked off of its point. The windows were fogged and broken. It was too dark to tell, but there may have been scorch marks on the wall. It seemed like the Roper didn’t want Maxine to go there. He steered me…her away from the building.”

  “An isolated building in the backwoods would make a perfect hub for someone like the Roper,” Peak said. “There’s also the possibility that building could be nothing more than a random ruin. My last theory is that your vision is not true.”

  “I was thrashing around on the coroner's floor because I wanted him to think I’m an epileptic, crazy person.” Rachel said sarcastically.

  Detective Peak shrugged. “Maybe you are. How would I know?”

  Rachel deadpanned. “I would think that my results would’ve been proof enough.” She braced herself for another one of Detective Peak’s rants.

  “You’re right,” Peak admitted. “There is something about you, Rachel Harroway, that is out of the ordinary. But seeing and feeling someone die as if you were them is beyond all reason and logic. The Orphans might be explained through some genetic abnormality that allows you to see a tear in the fabric of time. This Reality as you call—nothing explains that. Either way, natural selection will decide if your trait is something beneficial to mankind that our species will develop it in the coming millennia, or a horrid mistake that evolution will correct.”

  “Horrid mistake, huh? You’re a real charmer, Detective.”

  “It’s not personal. I’m only trying to understand.”

  “You still don’t believe in the afterlife?”

  Peak glared at her with his dark eyes. “An abnormality like yours must have a scientific origin, but with mankind’s current advancements, we cannot hope grasp it.”

  “I agree to disagree. If you saw the things I saw, you’d very much believe the afterlife’s real.” Rachel said and sipped her tea that had cooled during the conversation.

  “Perhaps,” Peak replied.

  Seeing that it was nearly noon, Rachel left a few dollars on the table top and said, “Let’s go find that church, unless you believe that’s a colossal waste of time.”

  Detective Peak rose from his seat. “I could be wrong.”

  Back at the police station, they inquired of Lieutenant McConnell in his office: a small room with a number of plaques on the wall and photos of his son through his middle school and high school years, wearing soccer uniforms in them all. Sleep deprivation had left circles under the lieutenant's droopy eyes.

  “A church, you say?” McConnell asked.

  “Yes, or any abandoned facility in the surrounding woods,” Rachel replied, standing before his mahogany desk. “Judging by the vehicle’s path and the footage that we’ve acquired, though limited as it may be, it led Peak and I to believe that the Roper had taken Maxine Gunther’s body from that location and dropped it off at the library.” It was a lie, hopefully a believable one.

  McConnell grinned, lighting up his tired face. “There’s a lot of surrounding woods. You’ll need to be more specific.”

  Arms crossed, Peak spoke up. “It’s probably near the Satulah Mountain area, but we can’t be certain. Harroway and I are wondering if you knew of any such place since you are a Highland lifer.”

  “And proud of it, though the murders make me doubt the innocence of our humble town folk,” McConnell said honestly. “I do know of a few such places where local kids congregate to party. Mostly it’s a number of cabins built out in the woods near Highlands Falls and the like. I don’t know where you got the idea of churches, but I can send you the cabins’ coordinates.”

  “That will be much appreciated, Lieutenant,” Rachel said dutifully.

  At Rachel’s desk, they looked over the page of coordinates.

  “You’re positive it was a church you saw?” Peak asked, drumming a pen on the desk side.

  “Ninety percent, yes,” Rachel replied. “We should ask more locals. Principle Godfrey might know something. Students are always talking about new party spots.”

  Peak sighed. “Worth a shot.”

  The overweight Principle Godfrey had a wide smile on his round face. “I know the one.”

  Peak and Rachel exchanged looks.

  “It’s haunted.” Godfrey let the words linger as a storyteller would to a crowd of kids around a campfire. When Rachel thought about it, that’s probably where he heard about the church.

  “The First Revelation Church of Christ,” Godfrey continued, a glimmer in his eye. “It was home to one of the most extreme snake handling ministries in the Appalachia. One Sunday in the late ‘50s, Pastor Saul Burnsman dipped a hand into the bucket of snakes, as he did every week to prove his faith, and got chomped right on the wrist. In pain, he knocked over the rusty bucket, and poisonous snakes ran wild through the chapel. The people ran away, narrowly escaping with their lives. Forgotten by the congregation, Burnsman died a short time later. Some say he was testing his faith and he doubted for a split second. I say he was tempting the devil from the get go, and it finally caught up with him.”

  The principal leaned back, fingers drumming on his rotund belly. “They say that the ghost Burnsman walks between the pews, testing the faith of those who pass through the door by forcing their hand into a rusty bucket of snakes.”

  “We’re not here to listen to ghost stories, Mr. Godfrey,” Rachel said, thinking of the irony. “What is actually true about the chapel?”

  “Only the snake wrangling part,” Godfrey admitted with disappointment. “Once the police found out, they shut the place down. Can’t say when. Around the fifties and sixties, most likely.”

  “Do you know where to find the church?” Rachel asked.

  G
odfrey thought it over with his usually mindless expression on his face. “I can’t say I do. Is that where the Roper… you know?”

  “We don’t know yet,” Rachel answered, suspicious of Godfrey’s guess, but understanding that it was only logical for him to believe that to be the reason for their visit. “Are you sure you don’t know where to find it?”

  “I only know of the story. Sorry I can’t be of more help.”

  Rachel thanked him, and her and Peak set out. Back at the station evidence lockup, they sifted through old catalogued cases between 1951-1969, keeping an eye out for any snake handling violations. Most of the file boxes were dusty but well-maintained. After all, they were hardly ever used. Box after box, they sifted through files while sitting at a plastic table in the middle of the evidence lockup.

  “Found it,” Peak said and removed the file. “1951. First Baptist Church of Christ: snake handling violation.”

  He opened the thin folder, taking out a dusty photo of Pastor Saul Montgomery, a bookish-looking man with a creased forehead and intense eyebrows over an even more intense glare.

  “I can see why Godfrey called him Burnsman,” Rachel said. “It fits that hellfire and brimstone persona better than Montgomery.”

  “He got bitten one Sunday. A woman got the police and managed to save Montgomery from the Copperhead poison.” Peak summarized the file.

  “Let me guess: that’s what led to the church being closed?”

  “Yep,” Peak replied. “The place doesn’t have an address. All it says is a few miles outside Whiteside Cove Road.”

  “So much for using the GPS. You got good hiking shoes?”

  “Never leave home without them.”

  As Peak closed up the file and put it back into the old cardboard box, Rachel got an idea. “You think there’s a chance Fiedler didn’t destroy all his evidence from ‘77?”

  Peak shrugged.

  Rachel glanced over the various case boxes and dates. Rachel spotted a gap in between two cases from the seventies. She walked back a few paces, noticing something back there shoved against the wall.