Scared and confused, Addie leaned against his bed.
He joined her, facing the door. Wondering how long it would hold, how long it would stop their father from killing them.
“Are we safe?” Addie asked, reaching out to clutch his hand.
A free shadow slipped into his room through his windowsill, circled his room twice, as if making a mental list of everything he owned, then ducked low under the desk and out through the crack beneath the door.
“Ethan, are we safe?”
He swallowed, afraid to tell her he’d made a big mistake coming upstairs. His first thought had been to run to his safe place, the place where Barry had told him over and over that he and his family wouldn’t be hurt. His bedroom. But none of that mattered now. Barry had lied. His family wasn’t safe. And Ethan’s bedroom was no more than a trap—a dead end.
The shadow people had acted as if they owned the house and resented Ethan’s family living there. So, now Ethan knew they wanted it for themselves. And they were willing to kill every member of the Yates family to take it.
Ethan couldn’t admit that to Addie. But anything else would be a total lie. And she would know it, would sense that he was lying to her, and she would panic. She would cry. And their father would hear her crying and he would come. He would break through the door, knock over the child’s desk and he would raise his bloody knife and…
“We need to stay here until help comes,” Ethan said.
He reached into the pocket where he stuffed his father’s cell phone.
At that moment, he heard slow and steady footfalls ascending the wooden staircase.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m calling 911,” Ethan said. “They’ll send help. That’s what they do.”
“Good,” Addie said, comforted. She knew about 911.
Ethan’s throat went dry. He couldn’t swallow. His hand began to shake.
A hand rattled the doorknob.
“Call them!” Addie whispered. “Why are you waiting?”
No matter how hard he stared at the phone display, the words stayed the same: ENTER PASSCODE
A fist slammed against the door, shaking it on its hinges.
Startled by the booming sound, Ethan almost dropped the phone.
“It’s locked!” he whispered. “It’s locked—and I don’t know his code!”
TWENTY-SEVEN
“How did Caleb kill them?” Dean asked. “By spiking the Kool-Aid?”
“Indirectly,” Bonnie said. “By his actions. The choices he made put them all in danger. From growing and selling drugs. To criminal carelessness. Technically, the explosion killed them.”
“Explosion?” Sam asked incredulously.
Dean had a similar reaction. An explosion would not have been high on his list of expected endings for a late Sixties commune or cult.
“That’s where the carelessness comes in,” Bonnie said. “When it happened, I was shocked, naturally, and for a long time after that I was simply… numb. Deep down, I was in denial, hoping that Barry had escaped the cult before the accident, even if he had to leave without saying goodbye. But he…”
Her voice faltered, and she fell silent for a few moments before regaining her composure. She reached under the counter for a bottle of spring water.
“We didn’t have to wait long for the official police report,” she said. “I watched the news and read the newspaper account. According to the police, the explosion was caused by unstable dynamite. For some reason, Caleb stored it close to where they conducted their midnight communal gatherings. Unlike the religious meetings, where attendance changed and overlapped, depending on which spiritual leader in the group spoke, everyone had to attend the communal gatherings. Caleb and the council discussed commune affairs, business issues, the harvest, rules changes. They also welcomed new Free Folk members during these meetings. Attendance was mandatory. Several times when Barry and I hung out late, he would have to leave to attend one of these meetings. Called it his midnight curfew and rolled his eyes.”
“Why midnight?” Sam wondered.
“Caleb believed midnight was a magical moment in each day, a ‘bridge between the past and the possible.’ He considered it a mystical gateway. Barry never explicitly told me this, but after Caleb started having visions, I believe he made the council and, eventually, all the Free Folk take his psychedelic concoctions at these meetings. Another rule he enforced. He wanted them to see what he saw. Barry didn’t want me to know he’d been forced to use the drugs to stay in the commune. But I think that’s when his mood began to sour.”
She took another sip of water. “RFK’s assassination may have pushed Caleb over the edge. The midnight meetings became almost a nightly occurrence. Caleb told the group they would ascend to a new world order, free of the sins of the past, but ascension was only possible during an altered state of consciousness and all the Free Folk must see and believe what he saw to ascend. But no two people hallucinate the same. That clearly frustrated him. In the end, none of it mattered,” she said. “I made Barry promise me he would get out of there. But he wanted to convince some of the others his age, mostly the runaways, to leave with him. He thought their best chance to escape would come after one of the meetings. They would have at least a twenty-four-hour head start before the Free Folk realized they had gone. Even so, some were afraid to leave. Barry either waited too long or recruited the wrong person, who betrayed him. And they ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time on July twentieth.”
“Why were they storing dynamite?” Dean asked.
“Before they turned to the drug trade,” Bonnie said, “they expanded their planting area by cutting down trees and blowing up stumps. According to Barry, the Free Folk took advice from Old Man Warhurst, who owned a nearby farm. He sold them dynamite from his own stock. Probably turned a bit of a profit at their expense.”
“Wait a minute,” Sam said. “Warhurst? Martin Warhurst Sr.?”
“Martin, yes,” Bonnie said. “But we all called him Old Man Warhurst. Crusty old bastard.”
Sam turned to Dean. “Dynamite exploded during a thunderstorm on the afternoon before the blackouts.”
“Right,” Dean said, recalling the article. “Long before midnight. A dead end.”
“Maybe not,” Sam said. “That explosion occurred on the Warhurst farm.”
“Okay, good to know,” Dean said, guessing it was no more than a coincidence. Not many farms in the immediate area. And regular suburban homeowners wouldn’t be stocking dynamite.
“So, get this,” Sam said. “Martin Warhurst Jr. inherited that farm when his father died forty years ago but never worked the farm. He left everything as it was when his father died.”
“You’re suggesting—”
“The dynamite that exploded during the thunderstorm could be part of the same batch that killed the Free Folk.”
“So, maybe there is a connection,” Dean said, frowning, “but damned if I can figure it out.”
“It’s a puzzle piece,” Sam said. “Not sure how it fits yet, but…” He turned to Bonnie. “You were saying—about why they needed the dynamite…”
“Once they started selling drugs, I guess they no longer needed dynamite. But it was unstable, and blew up during one of the midnight meetings.”
“You believe someone betrayed Barry?” Sam asked.
“They found Barry’s body and a few others in the detention chambers. Maybe they were caught trying to escape or somebody told one of the leaders what they were planning, and Caleb decided they needed to be realigned for ‘their own good.’ Because it was always for their own good. But some of them must have escaped before the explosion. I only wish Barry had been one of those who got away…”
“What makes you think some escaped?” Dean asked.
“The police only found twenty-three bodies,” she said. “Barry never had an exact count, but there should have been close to twice as many. It’s possible Barry inflated the size of the group to make me bel
ieve he was safe, less exposed to Caleb and the council…”
“It’s been a long time, and I’m sorry for your loss,” Sam said, “but why do you believe the shadow person who came here was Barry?”
“Because of those back-to-back Bs,” she said. “And because he told me to remember. Back then, I couldn’t tell my parents about Barry. They never would have approved of him. I worried daily my mother would have the police grab him and send him back to the foster family he fled in Kalamazoo and I would never see him again. But when I was home alone, and thinking about him, I started doodling the Bs. I showed that to Barry. He laughed, but then he carved it into a tree and a picnic bench and other places. He would take me around town and show me the Bs, acting surprised, as if he hadn’t carved them himself. Nobody knew we were an item—not my family or the Free Folk—but we were together everywhere, like those back-to-back Bs. Our little secret. Because, if Caleb found out about us, he would have pressured Barry to have me join the Free Folk.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “After Barry died, I grieved, crying at the oddest times. My parents asked me about it, and I told them I had met some of the Fields kids and thought about how horrible it was they’d died that way. That was the closest I came to the truth. Maybe deep down, I knew it wouldn’t last with Barry, but I never imagined how it would end. And yet, now, after all these years, he’s really come back to me…”
“You’re a librarian,” Sam said. “If this shadow person cares about you, why would he burn your books?”
“You’re right,” she said. “I was scared at first. Book burning is kind of a librarian’s go-to nightmare fuel, but I believe the fire was another message. I know what’s been happening in town, the craziness. Barry knows too. And I think he wants them stopped, that he wants to help us stop them. He made me watch him burn his… host, to expel himself from the body.”
“He could have left the body on his own,” Dean said. “I’ve seen it.”
“But this way, he revealed something that hurts them or forces them out. Fire.”
“Thank Barry for the tip,” Dean said, “but torching the possessed townspeople of Moyer is not gonna be Plan A, B or C. We need something else.”
“The Free Folk died communally and violently,” Sam said. “Based upon the time of the explosion, they were all drugged, experiencing an altered state of consciousness.”
“And instead of straight-up ghosts,” Dean speculated, “they became shadow people, all linked to this town and that one event.”
“Who knows? Maybe the communal altered state of consciousness somehow linked them at that shared moment of death, creating a metaphysical loophole,” Sam said. “It would explain the sheer number of shadow people in town. And definitely rules out an alien invasion.”
“You seriously considered aliens?” Bonnie asked.
“Anything’s possible,” Dean said, tilting the flat of his hand back and forth.
“What if the midnight blackouts are some sort of paranormal echo of that explosion and the moment they all died?” Sam said.
“But why now?” Bonnie asked. “After all this time?”
“Albert Kernodle first noticed the shadow people before the first midnight blackout,” Sam said. “Something ‘awakened’ them.”
“Of course,” Dean said. “The explosion – caused by Old Man Warhurst’s dynamite.”
“You’re right,” Bonnie said. “People assumed it was a transformer explosion during the storm. Nobody was hurt. I’d forgotten about it already.”
“Bonnie, do you remember where the commune house was?” Sam asked.
“Was?” she said. “It’s still there.”
“But the explosion—?”
“Only the outdoor communal area was destroyed, along with the closest detention rooms,” she said. “Next to the storage shed where Caleb stored the dynamite. The house and the planting fields survived intact.”
“That property is ground zero,” Dean said.
“If the shadow people have been dormant in Moyer all this time,” Sam said, nodding in agreement, “they must be tied to the house.”
Dean turned to Bonnie. “Have you seen the house since the craziness began?”
She shook her head emphatically. “I haven’t seen it in decades,” she said. “Once I got past my grief, I couldn’t bear the thought of seeing that house again. All these years, I’ve avoided walking or driving down that street.”
“I understand,” Sam said. “You wouldn’t want to relive those memories.”
“I have no memories of that house with Barry,” she said. “We avoided being seen anywhere near there. I visited the house once, after the explosion, to say my private goodbye. But even then, it was torture. Knowing he spent his final moments trapped in a hole underground—what amounted to a vertical coffin—before his life was snuffed out by Caleb’s paranoia and carelessness. So, I told myself, never again.”
“We’ll need some local perspective,” Sam said. “Do you remember the street address?”
Bonnie nodded. She scribbled an address on a sticky note and handed it to Sam.
“What do you have in mind?” Dean asked.
“Gruber,” Sam said, dialed his phone, and waited for an answer. “It’s Blair. Any better?” He listened for a moment, gave Dean a head shake. “We’re working on it. Have a lead, actually. Wondering what you can find out about the cult house in Moyer and the explosion that killed the Free Folk of the Fields on July twentieth, 1968… I understand. Any old-timers on the force? Okay, here’s the address…” Sam read the address from the sticky note. “Yes,” Sam said. “We believe it’s very important to ending this.”
“What did he say?” Dean asked after Sam disconnected.
“Before his time,” Sam said. “But he’ll make inquiries, check records, all that.”
“Regardless of what he finds out,” Dean said. “We don’t go in cold.”
“Agreed.”
“What are you planning?” Bonnie asked.
“Like I told Gruber,” Sam said. “We end this once and for all.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Senior Patrol Officer Tom Gruber stared at his computer screen. He ignored the waves of chaos that swept through the department with every new round of dispatch calls and focused on something that had happened in Moyer long before he’d been born.
Chief Hardigan must have thought his department had transformed into a bunch of Keystone Kops. He’d stormed into the station, glowering at anyone who dared offer a greeting or even glance his way. Slammed the door to his office to catch up on the endless reports and called them in one by one to grill them about everything they’d done, were currently doing and planned to do for the foreseeable future. Any whiff of a mistake or perceived incompetence and the walls shook with his enraged voice.
During the early stages of the chief’s epic blowup—or meltdown, depending on your perspective—Gruber had tried to explain how the number and severity of the calls had continued to escalate. But Hardigan couldn’t get over his embarrassment that the Bakersburg police force had come to Moyer to help get the chief’s town under control.
Forcing himself not to dwell on the chief’s fury, Gruber skimmed through the few short articles with sparse details about the Free Folk commune and the accidental explosion that wiped them out back in 1968. A mix of free-love types and societal drop-outs, teenaged runaways and some juvenile delinquents had been killed. All twenty-three bodies identified, next of kin notified. Cause of the accident identified as well: explosion of unstable dynamite the cult used periodically to clear tree stumps from their harvest area. One unusual detail mentioned that some of the recovered bodies had been in small underground chambers, which were described as meditation rooms. A crude form of an isolation tank or sensory deprivation chamber, Gruber supposed.
He leaned back in his chair and scratched his jaw.
Something about the articles, other than their brevity, troubled him. He couldn’t put his finger on it. They listed the facts, but ref
used to identify the victims until next of kin had been notified. That made sense. But something was off. He checked for follow-up articles about the mass death and, again, details were scarce. A brief piece about the remains shipped back to the victims’ relatives. And then the story dried up. No human-interest pieces about the victims. No details about the commune’s time or activity in Moyer. Then it occurred to him that what bothered him was that nothing seemed to have bothered the reporters who covered the story. Minimal details about the incident. No speculation or follow-up.
What disturbed him weren’t the details he read, but the details that had never been recorded for posterity. As if they wanted the incident forgotten as quickly as possible, he thought. But maybe that made sense. Back then Moyer thrived only with the influx of tourist dollars from Lake Delsea.
Last thing you’d want to do is poison the tourist well. Unless, of course, you’re Pangento, in which case you don’t really give a damn.
And yet…
Blair had mentioned talking to old-timers on the force, but most who were old enough to remember the Free Folk explosion had retired. Not quite true…
Gruber left his desk and walked toward the chief’s office. He raised his fist to knock on the door, but somebody yanked it open before his knuckles fell against the wood. He took a reflexive step back as a red-faced rookie emerged, excused himself and hurried away as if a grizzly had caught his scent.
“Was that blur Gurevich?” he asked Hardigan from the open doorway.
“One and the same,” Hardigan said. “Threatened him with crossing guard detail for the next twenty years.” The chief straightened the nameplate at the front of his desk. Gruber thought it had probably shimmied a little closer to the edge each time Hardigan pounded the desk with his fist.
“Chief…?” Gruber began hesitantly. No easy way to ask.
“What is it, Gruber?” Hardigan asked, irritated, then sighed. “For Christ’s sake, you look constipated. Speak up!”
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