by JL Bryan
“I'm really sorry. It sounds like locking up all the others may have cleared the way for the horseman,” I said. “The horseman had never come near your house or done anything so destructive before, so we had no idea—”
“Is it ever going to be safe for us to go back?” Amber asked.
“We have a plan,” I said. “We think we've identified the Hessian horseman; the way he died fits with an historical person named Josef Bracke. We stopped by where he's believed to be buried, which is just outside the graveyard walls in a ghost town called New Ebenezer. It was on the way here from Savannah. We collected earth from his burial site. Our plan is to set ghost traps around your farm and bait them with candles, the horseman's grave earth, and a couple of old silver coins that might attract him, either as a mercenary or as a thief. If we can lure him into a trap, we'll seal him inside and remove him from your property.”
“And what if you can't?” Amber asked.
“Then we'll develop another plan of attack,” I said. “And we'll keep at it until the horseman is gone.” This last was delivered with more certainty than I really had. It was entirely possible we'd fail and the farm would end up as yet another abandoned, deserted property overrun with restless spirits. There seems to be at least one in every town. In many small towns, the ghosts are the only residents left, drifting among crumbling porches, sagging roofs, and empty roads.
Still, I wanted to inspire a little hope. If it turned out to be false hope, we could deal with that later.
The four family members looked up at me, all of them a little pale and desperate, shivering like animals who'd just managed to find shelter from a cold rainstorm. Maya stared at me mutely. Even Castor was looking up from his video game, and I had a sense he'd been listening more closely than he'd let on.
I felt the weight of my responsibility toward them—and more than a little guilt for mistakenly thinking we'd settled things for them, and attempting to enjoy a night off to myself.
I couldn't help thinking of my own family. At fifteen, I hadn't had the knowledge or skills to protect my parents from the vicious ghost of Anton Clay. Now that the horseman had shown off his well-hidden psychokinetic abilities, I knew I had to stop him.
It's my calling to stand at the border between life and death, sometimes helping the better spirits cross over, but more often trying to stop the evil ones from coming back. This family needed protection of a kind few people could offer. Even if they left the land, the ghost would remain to menace others, to claim more victims.
I thought of the violent crimes over the past couple of centuries on that stretch of road, and the various members of Jeremy's family accused and sometimes convicted of senselessly murdering travelers. I wondered whether the horseman had killed some or all of those travelers himself, on the road near the Neville farm, and Jeremy's ancestors had been blamed for them. From the cases I'd read about, Jeremy's ancestors usually pled not guilty, though that wasn't exactly clear evidence of anything.
Maybe the men of Jeremy's family weren't actually murderous at all, but haunted by a curse. The horseman Josef Bracke, having been killed by Hiram Neville, could have stayed close to the Neville farm over the generations, occasionally murdering people on the road, as he had in life. The descendants of his enemy Hiram were accused of these crimes and punished. The horseman was carrying out a centuries-old vendetta.
And over the years, Hiram and those who'd been wrongly accused had remained in and around the cemetery, perhaps waiting for justice, perhaps doing what they could to keep the dead Hessian horseman away from their living descendants.
On the other hand, I couldn't count on the dead Neville men as allies, either. They'd strongly indicated that they didn't consider Jeremy and his wife and children to be their family members at all.
“We should get going,” I said. “Hopefully we can catch the ghost while he's still active tonight.”
“He's angry,” Maya said, speaking for the first time since we'd arrived. “The man on the horse. He's angry at somebody.”
“Do you happen to know who he's angry at?” I asked.
Maya shook her head. “Can you make him go away?”
“We're going to try,” I told her. “I promise.”
The family didn't look as though they had much faith in us as they watched us leave the motel room. I couldn't say I blamed them.
Stacey and I were subdued under the weight of the task ahead and the family depending on us to get it right.
“This farm sounds like an adventure,” Michael said. He seemed in better spirits than us as he walked to his truck. I waited for him to back out so I didn't have to wriggle in between his truck and my van again.
Soon we were driving again through dark pine barrens, past overgrown remnants of houses and fallen fence posts, toward the farm and the host of unhappy souls waiting there.
Chapter Seventeen
The farm had a charged feeling that was palpable as soon as we turned off the paved road and began meandering past the pumpkin patches and the gardens. A strong gust of wind moved some of the decorative scarecrows, which were cutesy by day but a little ominous by night, reminding me of the restless dead who inhabited the farm.
I thought of ancient idols, statues built to be inhabited by the spirits of strange pagan gods who fed on blood sacrifices. Amber had told me that she'd often felt watched while she was out in the gardens in the evening, and she would look up to see one of the scarecrows, having momentarily mistaken it for a shadowy person staring at her from a distance. I wondered if the ghosts sometimes stirred the scarecrows or looked out somehow through their cloth-patch eyes.
These thoughts made me shiver, and I tried to push them away.
We checked the stables first. The horses seemed jittery but unharmed, so we doubled back to the house.
We parked in the gravel driveway at the main house, and Michael pulled in close beside us again. Jeremy's old Corolla sat on the other side of our van, waiting in the driveway like a faithful old pet abandoned in the family's hurry to leave.
I sat for a moment, taking in what I saw in the van's headlights. The house was completely dark, without a single external or internal light shining. An orange mash of broken pumpkin was scattered over the porch. The front windows, downstairs and upstairs, were all cracked, some of them smashed out entirely, with only a few jagged pieces of glass clinging to the window frame.
“Well, they wanted a haunted farm, didn't they?” Stacey said.
“Yeah, very funny,” I replied.
“Just trying to lighten the mood. Which, to me, is a little heavy and thick right now. Do you feel that? It's like something's waiting for us in there.” She nodded at the house.
We stuffed our backpacks with thermal goggles and extra tactical flashlights, plus a few floodlights with batteries. The horseman might still be in the house, lying in wait to attack, if we were lucky. If we were unlucky, he'd already gone for the night.
“Should we grab a trap?” Stacey asked.
“First we'll have to figure out where to set it up. Let's see where the horseman's been active tonight.” We had only two stampers, the heavy devices that could slam the traps shut either by remote control or automatically, whenever a ghost was detected inside the trap. We had to pick the two most likely locations to trap him.
I pocketed a Ziploc baggie of earth that we had collected from the area where Josef Bracke had been buried. Sometimes the dirt from a spirit's grave can ward it off. I wasn't holding my breath for this to help very much, though, since we couldn't be sure exactly where he'd been buried, just a general area of unmarked wartime graves outside the old cemetery wall in New Ebenezer. It was better than nothing. Or maybe it wasn't.
We advanced toward the front porch, Michael just behind us. The porch stairs showed signs of damage, the wooden steps cracked and splintered in an alternating pattern, as if the horse had been so heavy that its hooves had bashed and broken the wood.
We made our way up carefully. The floodligh
ts we'd set up lay shattered on the higher steps and on the porch. Stacey found the motion detector and other sensors off to one side, as if they'd been kicked away.
The front door had been vertically ruptured, broken in half. The doorknob and deadbolt remained locked, holding a splintered fragment of the door in place.
I nudged open the half of the door that was still attached to the hinges. My flashlight revealed the wreckage of the foyer beyond. Chairs and lamps were overturned, pictures were shattered on the floor.
The light switch did not respond when I jiggled it up and down. It was like walking into a house after some natural disaster had knocked everything off-kilter, like an earthquake or a flood. I'd never experienced the Neville house when it was truly silent and empty like this—even a house where everyone is asleep still feels alive, with whispers of small movements behind the walls and doors. Now it felt abandoned and cold, just the way the ghosts of Hiram and his heirs seemed to prefer it.
“I'm reading a degree or two colder than outside,” Stacey said, circling the room. Michael stayed close to me. I could feel his warmth.
“EMF is slightly elevated but nothing special,” I added, after checking my Mel-Meter.
In the front parlor room, paperbacks and old album covers were heaped all over the floor. The big armchairs lay overturned.
Looking the other way, I saw that the dining room chairs had been toppled, the table was shoved out of place, and broken dishes and glassware lay strewn in front of the old china cabinet.
“Watch for glass,” I said. We took a quick look around the first floor. Everything was moved, fallen, or simply shoved aside.
“It's like some kind of tornado blasted through here,” Stacey said.
“This spirit is a real strongman,” Michael said.
“He's definitely got a temper.” I led the way back to the front stairs. Every few steps, a deep depression had been gouged into the front lip of a stair, roughly the size and shape of a horse's hoof. It echoed the damage to the porch steps outside, like some unbelievably heavy beast or monster had smashed its way upstairs. “I'm not looking forward to facing this guy.”
We started up toward the second floor. I had to give another broken-glass warning when I saw all the family pictures had been knocked off the wall and shattered. This is a common tactic of highly territorial ghosts. They don't like new people, living people, coming in and marking their territory. Family pictures are emotionally charged markers, the cheerful gang tags of the reasonably happy and domesticated.
The hardwood floor upstairs was dented heavily in a left-and-right alternating pattern, again like the prints of some impossibly heavy creature. Plaster was cracked along the walls.
We followed the deep hoof prints up the hall. They led directly into Corrine's room, where most of the furniture had been smashed or overturned, the windows shattered from the inside. A galaxy of glow-in-the-dark green stars and planets decorated her ceiling.
The hoof prints continued into Maya's room, the same room into which Mildred had crawled. The Mel-Meter ticked up as I entered the little girl's room, and the temperature sank. I could feel the coldness as the thermometer numbers dropped on the meter's display. I tried to imagine what it must have been like for the family as the entity had charged through the house just a few hours earlier, a huge shadowy thing that destroyed all it saw.
The deep hoofprints in the damaged floor led right to Maya's bed, or to the place where it had been. The bed now lay on its side against one wall, one bed post driven deep into the plaster there.
The prints crossed the floor where the bed had been and ended at another wall, into which a sizable hole had been bashed, like a small cave or an animal's burrow. Plaster dust and a trampled-to-shreds Winnie the Pooh poster lay on the carpet around the ragged hole. I could see an old wooden beam within it, crossed with a horizontal wooden timber like a hidden shelf. A heap of yellow paper lay amid broken slats of wood inside the hole.
“So where did he go?” Stacey asked. She blew a long piece of blond hair away from her eye. “Did he just ride away into the wall?”
I stepped closer and knelt in front of the hole, half-expecting something furry to leap out and bite me. The papers were old and fragile, and I had to carefully pick away broken splinters and chunks of wood to look at them. I had the impression the papers had been tucked inside some kind of old box, maybe a jewelry box, that had shattered around them, probably around the time the horseman had broken the wall open.
A chime sounded in the silent room, making me jump.
“Sorry, that was me.” Stacey drew her phone and looked at it, her face glowing eerie blue in the light of its screen. “Oh, it's a voicemail from Jacob. He finally calls me back, and of course I'm too far out in the sticks to get a signal...”
I ignored her as she stepped out into the hall. Picking the broken pieces of wood away from the fragile old paper was delicate work.
A necklace lay coiled in one corner of the shattered old jewelry box. I lifted it slowly in case it was broken, but it seemed intact. It was simple, a strand of red coral beads with a tiny silver clasp.
I pocketed the jewelry and continued quietly excavating the papers. Dried chunks of leather lay among them like puzzle pieces. It looked as though the pages had originally been bound together.
I lifted out one page after another, laying them in a row across the carpet. They were scrambled and out of order, some of them broken into fragments. The ink was faded, and the handwriting wasn't great, but at least they were in English.
With my flashlight, I searched among them, looking for the most legible portions. I read:
...cannot understand each other so well, but in place of words we have gestures, and laughter, and smiles, and touching. He heals and he hides, and if Father or the others knew where he hides in the forest, he would be dead. I bring what food I can. He is fond of peaches and salted meat...
...think of him always, and wish I had the courage to go with him. He is not safe here, yet daily and nightly risks his life to be near me, to wait, to again insist we should be together. He is stronger now, with a fine horse. He will not say how he purchased the horse nor the sparkling jewels he gives me, and I know it cannot be honest work, but what man is honest in times of war?
The truth is growing obvious. I cannot long hide it from Father, even less from Mother or my sisters. They will know. They must suspect. I fear the day when the truth must come forward, more than I fear illness or wild beasts, or death itself...
My heart was thundering. If this was what it looked like, it would completely change our case.
“It has to be her,” I muttered under my breath. I shuffled through the pages, one after the other, just looking for a name. His or hers. “Why else would Josef be interested in this?”
I finally found one of them: Joseph. The English version of Josef, naturally. The author of the pages had written how deeply she loved Joseph, how it pained her that her family would never approve. The Neville family had been Patriots and certainly wouldn't have wanted their daughter getting intimate with a Hessian soldier, even if he was a deserter. He would have been considered a foreign rough, a mercenary, and a dangerous killer.
“Come on, come on...” I whispered to myself.
Then I found it—a page where Mildred Neville had written her own name several times, in slightly different styles, as though trying to develop a trademark fancy signature for herself.
“Hey, Stacey,” I said. “What if...Mildred was secretly having an affair with the runaway soldier, the highwayman? And she was carrying his baby?” I turned to see Stacey's expression at this saucy, gossipy new possibility. I expected her to be somewhere between gobsmacked and jaw-dropped.
Stacey wasn't there at all. Neither was Michael.
I'd been alone in the room for—who knows? No more than a few minutes.
“Hey, guys? Way to leave me stranded in the middle of a violent ghost's path of destruction here.” I stepped out into the hall and s
wung my flashlight around, but I didn't see either of them, not even a glimmer of a flashlight from either of them. “Hello? Michael? Stacey? I'm not in the mood for a prank or anything. Not funny.”
I walked up the hallway, certain that they must have heard me by now. Something creaked ahead—maybe a footstep on a floorboard, maybe the house settling. I followed the sound to a closed door. Just a linen closet, or a small storage closet, if I remembered correctly. Of course, that's exactly the kind of small, dark place where the nasties like to hide, ready to leave you scratched and bitten with their invisible nails and teeth.
So I approached the door with caution.
I opened it with one hand and jabbed my light ahead with the other. Soft shapes and deep shadows lurked within, but these were flowery hand towels and folded quilts, nothing more.
“Stacey? Michael?” I called out again. No response from the dark house around me. “Stacey, if this is a joke, it's very unprofessional.”
I did a quick room to room search upstairs. They weren't anywhere, and I was breaking into a cold sweat. At this point, it had dragged on much too long to be a joke.
I couldn't imagine an entity capable of sneaking into the room and physically removing both Stacey and Michael in complete silence from just behind me. I'd been pretty focused on looking through the remnants of the old journal, and I do tend to wear blinders and just zoom all my attention onto one thing at a time, but it seemed pretty far-fetched that the horseman could have grabbed up two people without either of them making a sound.
It quickly became apparent that Stacey and Michael weren't going to come popping out from behind a door or a piece of furniture just to laugh at the look on my face.
It was possible we were dealing with a psychotropic ghost, one who could get into my head and make me believe I was alone when I wasn't, but I didn't think that was happening. There wasn't any other distortion or hallucination, no sense that the floor was sliding out from under me or bugs were crawling underneath my skin, no blood-red haze falling over the world while all the corners of the room melted like an Escher painting.