by Aiden James
With his towel wrapped around his waist, he unlocked the door and stepped out into the hall. The air even colder, he could see his breath. He turned off the bathroom light behind him and hurried to his bedroom. Just as he prepared to enter his room, a man walked out of the guestroom where Auntie Ruth stayed.
He froze, afraid to take a breath. The man turned to face him, and Tyler relaxed, sighing in relief.
“Dad, you just scared the holy hell out of me!”
Tyler smiled, sheepish, but then a queer feeling washed over him. Yes, the man looked just like David, but somewhat different. And it wasn’t just the tan fedora he wore on his head, or the man’s old fashioned clothes. The fact his hair and beard were a shade darker than his dad’s should’ve tipped him that it wasn’t really him standing there. But it was more the way the man regarded him; wearing a contemptuous grin to go along with four long reddened scars just below the right side of his jaw. The scars pulsed unnatural, perhaps in tune with the creepy man’s heart.
As if amused by Tyler’s horrified expression, the man leaned toward him and said, “Boo!” That’s all it took for him to hurry back inside his bedroom. He listened in terror as footsteps creaked outside his door, until they suddenly stopped. As he had done when faced with Allie Mae’s vengeful ghost, he grabbed the baseball bat above his bed that bore the signatures of his favorite Colorado Rockies players. Summoning his courage, he pulled open his door with the bat wielded as a weapon. But the man had left. When he peered down the hall, he was just in time to see the figure disappear from the landing on its way downstairs.
His protective instincts kicked in. Clad only in his bath towel still wrapped around his waist, and with the bat held ready at his shoulder, he raced after the man that looked so much like his dad. No sign of the figure by the time he reached the stairs, and when he arrived on the main floor the specter wasn’t visible either. Peering into the living room, his family seemed at ease, so he knew the man hadn’t arrived there yet. Tyler backtracked, moving through the dining room and into the kitchen. Still no sign of the phantom man.
“Son, you’ll catch your death of cold dressed like that!” scolded Miriam, who stepped into the kitchen to grab the pot of tea steaming on the stove. “What did you forget?” She looked amused.
“Uh…I’m looking for my brush,” he replied, lowering the bat to his side.
David walked in just as he spoke, and eyed him in much the same manner as Miriam.
“So you need a bat to help you do that?” asked David, teasing him again.
“Uh…I...I um…I um found this in the dining room just now. I guess Chris or somebody left it in there for some reason,” he lied, realizing how silly he looked and how inconvenient it would be to try and explain what happened with only a towel protecting his privates from his parents’ gaze. He backed into the dining room, hoping for a head-start upstairs before anyone else wandered into the kitchen. “I’ll go back to my room and check again.”
He was gone before David and Miriam could respond.
“You do that, sport!” David called after him. “Remember we’ve still got some more showers to take care of, Ty, so don’t mess around in the bathroom!”
By the time he reached the second floor landing, the coldness had already receded—just like a few days earlier when the other shit went down in the guestroom. Nonetheless he closed his bedroom door while he got dressed. When he emerged again, the hallway’s temperature had warmed up considerably.
Once he arrived downstairs he took another quick tour of the main floor, just to be sure the apparition was gone. He then returned to the living room, where for the next hour he immersed himself in his music and games, secluded from all else by his new surround-sound headset. While his mom and dad made final preparations for their short trip to Janice’s place, he noticed the photo album that his dad brought back with him from Chattanooga in October, given to him by Auntie Ruth at that time. It sat near the edge of the coffee table closest to him.
Something to idly flip through while listening to the latest Cold Play CD, he recalled how the leather-bound album contained some really old pictures from Tennessee that his dad had shown him in early November. One picture was of an older man wearing a fedora similar to the one he saw the phantom upstairs wear.
Tyler reached over and grabbed the album, and soon flipped the pages until he came to the photograph he sought. He might not have remembered it except for one major detail, since other than the same style of clothing, the image in the album and the apparition he saw earlier didn’t share much else in common. They definitely weren’t the same age, as the guy in the picture was in his sixties, and the man Tyler saw upstairs looked several years younger than his dad. But like the younger man, who must surely be a ghost of some sort, the older man in the photograph had four long scars on his neck, quite noticeable despite the faded condition of the black and white snapshot.
“Dad… do you remember showing us a picture here in your photo album, of this old man with four scratches on his face?” asked Tyler, removing his headset when his dad returned to the living room.
David’s arms were laden with a Pyrex dish filled with sweet potato casserole that Miriam prepared earlier.
“Yeah, I do.” He paused to look down at the photograph and appeared curious as to why Tyler seemed so interested in it. “That was your great-great grandfather, William Hobbs. Remember?”
Tyler nodded, thoughtful. Meanwhile, Ruth stepped out of the kitchen and into the living room, holding a cherry pie she baked yesterday. She apparently overheard the mention of her grandfather’s name; her dislike for the man evident in the deep scowl she wore. Tyler pointed to the picture again and Ruth told him quietly it wasn’t necessary for her to come any closer to it. She knew the image well enough.
“I think I saw him today,” Tyler announced, his voice betraying the struggle within; how he worried whether it would be worse to divulge what happened or keep silent and hope it had no significance. “But he looked a lot younger.”
“Where did you see him?” David asked, after his face fell.
“Upstairs,” said Tyler. “I saw him walk out of Auntie Ruth’s room and then I tried to keep up with him when he went downstairs. That’s what I was really looking for when you saw me in the kitchen.”
Though his dad went easy on him earlier, he worried what David’s reaction would be now.
“Oh, Lord, no!… No!” Ruth murmured. Her hands began to tremble while the color drained from her face.
“What is it, Auntie?”
She wouldn’t answer David. Instead, she nearly dropped the pie before she set it down upon the coffee table and hurried out of the living room. Miriam followed after her, while David looked for a place to set the casserole dish he carried. He called after his kids to hold off moving upstairs until he could join them.
When they reached the guestroom, Miriam had her arms around Ruth’s shoulders as she wept. Tyler noticed the bed cover had been pulled aside from her pillow, leaving it fully exposed. Something waited for Ruth under the pillow…an item she thought gone forever, lost in the myriad of nooks and crannies of her ancestral Chattanooga home.
She held it out to David, her upturned palm unsteady. A gemstone roughly the diameter of a quarter and a half inch thick, and the jewel she told the family about two days ago. The completion of a set of five gems intended to be the inheritance of the lone remaining Hobbs clan—the Colorado Hobbs family—that descended from the vile and wicked patriarch once known as Billy Ray Hobson. Tyler and everyone else now knew the specter he saw was indeed him, and the one who left the item under her pillow—his last surviving grandchild.
Tyler would eventually learn, after the ensuing ordeal ended, that she considered this particular stone as cursed. A defiled object left for her to find like the trinkets the old bastard would leave behind after he violated her as a young girl. The reason why she wept and could barely contain her sorrow and shame. She begged David to take the glistening ruby from her.
Watching his dad gently remove the non-faceted jewel from her palm and deposited it in his coat pocket, Tyler could tell he understood her pain. Such senseless suffering delivered by the man David called a ‘horribly wicked and twisted fuck’ back in November when he first shared the photo album with him.
David tried to speak, but nothing came out. He dropped to his knees and hugged his aunt tightly, with Miriam holding on with him. All three wept, while Tyler and his younger siblings helplessly looked on.
Chapter Fourteen
John Running Deer stood on his back porch, shielding his eyes from the bright afternoon sun. The air felt crisp and cool, but still warmer than it had been earlier in the day. A few clouds dotted the sky, and the forecast called for significant snow again by nightfall.
Shawn had almost finished taking care of his business, and would soon seek to get inside the cabin rather than stick near to his own private igloo. Certainly, the temperature was mild enough for Shawn to spend the warmer daylight hours outside today. John had his granddaughters to thank for his prized husky’s newfound preference to be inside the cabin rather than out. He smiled while considering Hanna and Evelyn’s copious charms, and how easily they disrupted his routine and turned his watchdog into a demur pup. And they did so in just a few days’ time. He hated the idea of them going back to Knoxville and Johnson City tomorrow, after the Christmas holiday ended.
It made him ache even more for Susanne and the days when his granddaughters were still little girls. Only a short matter of time before they graduated from college and then moved on with their lives, their careers might take them even farther away from Gatlinburg, Tennessee. He’d already begun preparing himself for that likelihood, the very thing he coached them to aspire for since completing high school.
Shawn finished and wagged his tail as he prepared to meet John on the porch. But suddenly he stopped, looking out toward the densely wooded area just north of John’s cabin. His tail ceased to move and pointed downward, and he growled protectively with sharp canines bared at an unseen menace his master couldn’t detect.
But John did hear something. It sounded as if wooden chimes hung in the branches of the evergreen trees that stood like tall sentinels along the border of his property. The objects clanged softly against each other as a light breeze traveled through the woods. John stepped down the porch’s worn wooden stairs and moved out into the backyard, never removing his probing gaze from those evergreens, deftly avoiding slick patches where melted snow had turned the ground into a muddy mess. He removed the chain from Shawn’s neck, commanding him to stay next to his side. Cautious, John made his way to the area where the clatter emanated from.
The sound of wood on wood grew louder, and Shawn’s growls became more urgent, punctuated by agitated whines.
“Steady, boy,” John whispered, bending down to stroke his neck. “Stay with Daddy.”
John soon saw what made the noise. His initial reaction one of horror, he carefully examined the leg and rib bones of a dead wolf hung by strips of blood-streaked rawhide and sinew from a stout cedar tree’s longest branch. Beyond the tree lay a pristine forest that stretched for miles toward the deepest wilderness of the Smoky Mountains. Wolves were infrequent visitors to his property, naturally skittish in the presence of mankind.
“What in God’s name happened here?” he whispered, motioning for Shawn to wait while he took a moment to examine the immediate area around them.
The skinned and bloody hide of the animal also hung from the branch, swinging back and forth from a steady breeze. The wolf’s head lay positioned to where it’s frightened, glassy eyes looked out toward the cabin from the base of the cedar. The animal’s four severed paws arranged in a ring around its gaping jaw, the entrails and other organs were nowhere to be found.
John stepped over to the head, noticing trails of dark crimson covered recent snow that escaped the sun’s reach beneath a thick evergreen canopy. Along with the blood trail were moccasin impressions in the snow, along with what looked like an unusually large naked human footprint with odd toe marks. He followed the trail around the tree, until the footprints abruptly disappeared roughly thirty feet into the forest.
After standing motionless, listening to the wind as it moved through the dense woods around him, John returned to where Shawn waited for him near the cedar tree. He thought Shawn would venture closer to the remains out of normal canine curiosity, but the dog remained where he’d left him, glancing nervously toward the cabin.
“Everything will be okay, boy,” John told him, his tone soothing, knowing otherwise.
Gently stroking the husky’s neck, he surveyed the scene once more. It had been many years since he’d witnessed anything like this. The last time was when his grandfather, a great shaman who refused to add an English surname or nickname to his Cherokee name of ‘Tali Awohali Atloyasdi’ or ‘Two Eagles Cry’, took him as a young teenager to a hidden sacred burial area where Cherokee skeletons from long ago lay exposed in the open air on high wooden pallets. Animal bones hanging from thatched, wooden pole frames, along with weathered deerskin ornamental shields, accompanied some of these remains along with the weapons most favored by each honored warrior.
But those bones were ancient in comparison to what had been left here next to John’s property. His grandfather told him the sacred mountain grave site hadn’t been used since the mid-nineteenth century, carefully camouflaged from Andrew Jackson’s armies and others who hunted the Smoky Mountains looking for renegade Cherokees refusing the federal mandate to join their brethren heading westward on the Trail of Tears. To John’s knowledge, no one had since practiced the protecting or cursing of an area like this anymore.
Knowing the message was intended for him greatly worried John. An even worse portent, in his mind, than the terrible visitations he’d endured for the past month. At least those had a predictable pattern and outcome, where at the end of the day he and his family remained safe from harm—at least so far.
“Grandpa? Are you okay?!”
Evelyn stood on the back porch, shielding her eyes as she looked in his direction. Luckily the wind had died down just before she called to him, and the ‘wooden’ noise of the wolf bones hitting each other was barely audible. His granddaughters thrown into a panic was the last thing he needed. Especially today, Christmas, where they’d already enjoyed a fabulous morning together, sharing more presents and merriment around a warm fire in the living room.
“I’m fine—just checking some deer tracks!” he called back to her. “I’ll be there in a minute!”
John urged Shawn to head back to the house. The dog glanced one last time at the woods before trotting up to the porch, seemingly happy as hell to get away from there. He looked back at John a couple of times, just to make sure he came too. But John lingered long enough to try and sense if anyone remained, hidden within the forest’s dense foliage. If someone was near, he couldn’t detect it. He stepped back onto his property, and as he moved toward the cabin he felt less anxious. His home that had seen the births and growth to womanhood of first his daughter and then his granddaughters would protect them all as it had for more than forty years.
“Are you sure it was deer tracks?” Evelyn asked as he stepped onto the porch.
He paused to look again toward the woods. Shawn had already snuck in, and Hanna met him in time to wipe his paws clean.
“Hanna said she heard some animal crying in pain early this morning, just before sunrise. But she didn’t see anything when she looked through the back door window…. Maybe she and I should take a look later.”
“That won’t be necessary,” John assured her, forcing a broad smile and praying she couldn’t see or sense the plummeting depth of his worry. “It’s just deer tracks. Maybe Hanna heard a screeching owl. They can sound pretty heartrending sometimes.”
The misdirection seemed to work. They shared a laugh at how Hanna often overreacted to so many things. John opened the back door, motioning for her to go inside bef
ore him. He followed her into the kitchen, where the scents of cinnamon and nutmeg embraced him. The afternoon promised to be as merry as the morning had been. As he closed the back door, he allowed himself one last glance toward the woods. Still no sign of anything, but another breeze moved through the trees, awakening once more the now eerie sound of bones tapping against each other. John shuddered and locked the door. Despite several more hours of daylight, he closed the curtain and set the dead bolt. He wasn’t taking any chances.
Chapter Fifteen
Just after eight o’clock Christmas evening, Vernon Mathis arrived at Langston Hall. The building looked cold and foreboding as he pointed his flashlight’s beam to either side of the cement steps and then through the glassed front door as he climbed up to the porch. All lights were off, both inside and outside the former dormitory, except for a slight glow emanating from the upper stairwell in the rear of the main floor. That would be consistent with the information he’d been given by Jerry Simmons, the security staff dispatcher who called him at home earlier tonight. John Campbell stated he turned on some internal lights last night around midnight, Christmas Eve, before he left. That really was all John had to say of importance in his hastily composed resignation letter, which he later delivered to Jerry’s desk at the University of Tennessee’s main administration office right before his shift started today, at 4 p.m.
Vernon wasn’t an unreasonable man, or so he told anyone interested in hearing his perspective on how he ran his crew. Most of the time, anyway. Only when a situation severely tested his patience—like tonight, after his entire staff bailed and left him to manage the security functions for both Langston Hall and the McClung Museum alone—would his squared jaw and sharp jowl lines reveal the grizzled retired police veteran that he was. Physically fit with defined, powerful muscles, Vernon wore his hair close-cropped in military fashion, which minimized the ever-increasing loss of his hairline. He liked the fact he looked intimidating, and it usually took a solitary stern look from him to coerce subservience in any of his direct reports. And when seriously pissed, again like right now, his deep blue eyes flashed as narrow slits two shades lighter, easily reinforcing the venomous power of his words.