by Gene Baker
Copyright © 2017 by Gene Baker
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
“Angel of Midnight” and “Lost in Shadows” by T.J. Baker Copyright © 2017 by T.J. Baker. Used with permission. All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-9987732-5-4
Cover art by Katie McLeod
Edited by Emily Regan
First Edition
Author’s Note
Some parts of this book are written in the language of the place and time (1952-1954 East Texas), and they use terminology that some present-day persons might find offensive. There are also vivid descriptions of horrible acts of violence. The author would like to make readers aware of that, and apologize in advance to anyone who is disturbed by such terms and descriptions.
Angel of Midnight
Shrouded by loneliness
alone in the dark . . .
an Angel of Midnight
opened my heart.
To a world of wonders
that outshone the stars . . .
her words kind and tender
reached through my scars.
Her love always flowing
like warm winter wine . . .
I crave for her touch
I ache for that time.
When we’re together
I’m free and alive . . .
my mind bursting with dreams
my soul again thrives.
Believing our lives
are fragile reflections . . .
of moments in time
and heart soul connections.
Knowing true value
of those memories made . . .
living out loud
unshackled, unafraid.
She entered my walls
through clutter and dust . . .
with a soft place to fall
and someone to trust.
I hold my treasure
with every sweet breath . . .
and will ‘til the day
of my own mortal death.
T. J. Baker
1
March 17, 2014
Harley Baldwin stood as best she could in the low and narrow entrance to the attic. At one end was a window, opaque with age and weather, with enough room this side of it to stand up more comfortably. At the other were the hidden stairs she had ascended to get here. The air was thick with the pungent smell of resin that had oozed from hundred-year-old pine boards. Since the death of Harley’s father three years prior, her mother, Nikki, had made a pretty good living for herself and her daughter by restoring old houses like this one. 12-year-old Harley always found the attic or basement first. That, she had come to know, was where the real story of a house and its inhabitants dwelled.
Surprisingly spare, just a few boxes and other dust and cobweb covered items were pushed to the sides. This left a fairly wide walkway from one end to the other. It had apparently not seen any change in a very long time. As she approached the window, Harley found a jumbled pile of old clothes and blankets that looked as if they had formed a makeshift bed. Next to this were three stacks of books, some puzzles, and a tray with a plate and other eating utensils. A long coil of heavy rope was looped over a nearby rafter. This attic space was different, however. Its story was well-known and had the dubious distinction of being included in the brief pamphlet the state had provided to them:
The Hale House, Silver Thorn, Texas
This two story Victorian style mansion was built in 1900 by a lumber baron named Gerald Andrew Hale. The senior Hale died in 1919, a victim of the first influenza pandemic that also took the life of his wife, Faye, and his youngest child, Marie. The home and business were taken over by the son, Edgel Eugene Hale.
On the evening of June 27, 1954, Edgel’s 15-year-old son, Edwin Andrew Hale, escaped from his attic prison and killed his father and the butler, Robert Hutchins. He spared his younger sister, Penelope, and she was found holding his body after Edwin succumbed to a gunshot wound inflicted on him during the attack. Apparently the focus of horrific abuse by the alcoholic Edgel Hale, the young boy had been driven insane and left his confinements to mete out his revenge.
The home lay abandoned for quite a few years until it and the surrounding property were purchased by a European investment consortium. Recently, the Hale House was deeded back to the state of Texas with the understanding that it would be restored and utilized as a tourism attraction to help alleviate the chronic underemployment of this area of East Texas.
Harley reached out and gently touched the EAH carved into the rafter beside her. Instantly, she was filled with a terribly painful sadness. Edwin had been only a few years older than she when he died. In the fading illumination from her flashlight, she noticed something else scrawled below the first set of letters. A small heart with a plus sign in it and the initials MVA appeared before the flashlight batteries completely died. Now, alone in the half-light of the setting sun filtered through cracks in the window, she let her eyes adjust to the gloom. During this time, Harley thought first about why the fresh batteries had been drained. She had experienced a ghost in only one of the houses her mother had worked on. However, with this place’s history, she wasn’t surprised that it would be haunted as well. She wondered how the spirits of this house would manifest themselves after acquiring the necessary energy from the electrical device she had placed on the floor beside her. Who would it be? Edwin would be the most likely candidate since she was in his dungeon. Or, maybe it would be the mysterious MVA that he had carved his declaration of love for.
All of a sudden, a floorboard creaked loudly and snapped up to her left. As Harley let the burst of fight-or-flight leave her body, she slowly crawled towards the location of the sounds. She had apparently overshot the raised planks because it was her knee that painfully encountered them. The flashlight flickered back to life and shone through the dust filled air and into the opening.
“Thank you, Edwin, or whoever is with me here, for that.” The girl whispered. She peered gingerly into the narrow space hoping that a rat or some other nasty creature would not jump out at her. Once she had given anything alive the time to make itself known, she picked up the light and used it to flip the old piece of wood out of the way.
Harley had seen cigar boxes and Big Chief writing tablets from the 1950s on display in the library of an old school her mother had worked on. Written on the faded red cover of this pad, next to “Property of”, “The Journal of Edwin Hale” was scribed in smudged black ink.
Harley had learned in her young life how to play the clown for her mother. She would do this to change Nikki Baldwin’s sad aura of dark blue to one of opalescent white. After the death of her father and grandparents in an accident caused by a drunk driver, her mother had gone into a deep depression. Since she had become much better at reading her mother’s moods, she became Nikki’s unpaid counselor outside of a doctor’s office.
The girl was delighted when her mom shared in the excitement of discovery, and this hidden treasure in the attic was just what Nikki needed. It temporarily distracted her from the almost overwhelming task of restoring the aged mansion. Harley could barely contain herself as her mother lifted th
e fragile items from their dark, over half century old tomb.
“This could be the centerpiece of a display I’m planning in the front hall,” Nikki said to her daughter, who was impatiently waiting next to her. “The hot and dry conditions up here have made it pretty brittle. It could all fall apart if we aren’t careful. There is a guy I know in Dallas who could preserve it for us if we can get it to him without damaging it too much.” Seeing the look of disappointment on Harley’s face, she smiled and said, “But until he gets to use his talents on it, I think I’ll let you take care of it.”
Later that night, while sitting on her cot in what was once Edwin Hale’s bedroom; Harley listened to the hissing of the gas lantern. It was in a desperate battle against the crushing gloom and, for now, it was winning. Her mother hadn’t inventoried the room’s contents yet, so it was with no small amount of reluctance that she agreed to let her daughter to spend the night here. The electricity wouldn’t be turned on until all the wiring in the house had been checked. Even so, the room was cool and dry enough to afford some measure of comfortable rest.
When she tried to carefully lift the cover of Edwin’s journal, it started to come apart, so she didn’t explore it any further. Instead, she opened the much more resilient Hav-A-Tampa cigar box. There, she found what one should expect of things a teenage boy would place in his private cache of memories: small round stones, probably polished by a stream; the requisite pocket knife with one long and one short blade; a can opener; and a nail file. A flint arrowhead with a broken tip lay next to some animal’s discarded canine tooth. The real jewel in all of this was the carefully folded family portrait. Most telling was the trimmed out section of the photo. Only what appears to be the tips of a man’s hand could be seen on the little blonde girl’s left shoulder. Referring back to the brief on the Hale House, Harley surmised that it was Edgel Hale that had been cut out and discarded. A tall, strikingly beautiful woman of maybe 30 plus years stood next to the cut out section. She was an older version of the little girl, but did not have the same carefree smile. The eyes told it all, and what they spoke of was a hidden sadness. The smile was obviously forced.
“Hello, Edwin Hale!” Harley said to the slim boy with short, curly, brown hair. “It is a pleasure to meet you.”
A warm wind blew through the open window and slightly lifted the cover and top few pages of the diary. As she deeply inhaled the musty odor of aged, unbleached paper, Harley physically felt the energy in the room change. That was how Gaielos announced his presence in this world after leaving his. She knew quite a bit about the featureless, human-shaped shadow that appeared before her. He was a being of great spiritual power. That physical contact between a human and a Shadow was impossible because the mortal would be incinerated by the dark energy. He, and others like him, had been around for at least as long as human beings, because their likenesses were scrawled in charcoal on the walls of Cro-Magnon caves.
Most importantly. however, Gaielos only appeared as a preamble to the “oh shit!” moments of her life. Such as just before her father and grandparents were killed in a car wreck.
“Hello again, Harley. It has been a while,” he spoke into her mind.
“Not long enough!” Harley growled spitefully. “Who’s going to die now?”
With no response imminently apparent, the girl turned her attention back to the Big Chief writing tablet. She didn’t notice anything different—at first. But when she saw that many of the cracks and wrinkles on the cover were fading, she nearly jumped out of her skin.
“What the—?!” she shouted, but no one was there to answer her question. Gaielos was gone.
2
April 14, 1952
My name is Edwin Andrew Hale. I turned 13 years old today. This is my first writing in this journal. Father says that diaries are for girls and sissies. Mother does not think so. This will be our secret. I may not be able to write every day. Father is named Edgel Eugene Hale. Mother is Anezka Hale but father calls her Annie. My sister is Penelope Bertha Hale. Penny is a year and a half younger than me. We live near the town of Silver Thorn. It is in east Texas. Father owns a lot of land with trees on it and runs the sawmill. They also make other things like turpentine. Mother is from a country called Czechoslovakia. She has to help me spell it.
These were the times Edwin Hale treasured most. He gathered them into the secret hiding place in his heart. Like his mother who would gather in her wash from a clothesline as she watched an approaching thunderstorm with dreadful anticipation. He smiled as his sister carefully held a tadpole cupped in a handful of creek water before laughing and dropping the baby frog back to its home.
“It tickled me!” she squealed. Penny, with her long blonde hair and sparkling blue eyes, loved being the center of attention. Edwin didn’t mind though. The star of the show had to be someone, and he was content to hide himself among his books. Eddie’s favorite stories were the ones contained in the voluminous tomes his mother had brought with her from her native Czechoslovakia. In particular were the stories of the legends and myths of the old country: witches, ogres, werewolves, and vampires were much more interesting and felt more real than how the movies portrayed them. He learned, for instance, that the Camphor tree he was sitting in was planted long ago to prevent witches from crossing the bridge it was located next to. Such supernatural creatures, according to the stories he read, could not cross running water. Their energy and life force would be drained away if they tried. Thus, bridges were guarded day and night by the trees that stood as sentinels.
The Hale house was located atop a low hill, surrounded like a castle moat by this spring-fed creek. An old stone and wood bridge provided the only access and egress. To give an even more medieval appearance to the home, a three story tall tower dominated the manor and surrounding area. It was where Edwin’s father and grandfather before him would survey their vast domain. The conical peak could be seen for miles around, and reinforced in the locals that it was the Hales who were in charge.
Down the road his wealthy father had paid the county to have paved, was a centuries old Catholic church that his mother attended. He could barely see the cross that topped its steeple over the trees. Edwin couldn’t see it from this vantage point but, there was an old sexton’s house that had lain unoccupied for several decades. It was reputed to be haunted by the sinful dead buried in the “Blue Light Cemetery” hidden in the woods behind it. People that the church regarded as not being capable of redemption were buried there. Mostly executed criminals such as murderers occupied the shallow holes, their graves only marked by a small pile of cement with a number scrawled in it while it was still wet. It had been the sexton’s side job to keep a log of the actual names of those otherwise to be forgotten persons.
As Edwin turned his attention back to translating the final passage to the story of the Blood Countess, Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed, Bobby drove up and stopped Father’s car at the end of the bridge. Robert “Bobby” Hutchins was the personal servant of Edgel Hale. Among his other duties was driving the Master’s children to school. He had been seriously wounded in the First World War as a young man and the shrapnel that remained in his brain, twisting his speech.
“Miz Pen ann Missa Ebbin, school!”
***
Harley was usually able to feel someone’s approach long before they ever got this close. That could only mean the person casting the shadow that suddenly appeared beside her was very adept at “flying under the radar.” This disturbed her greatly, especially after what she had experienced the day before and in her sleep that night. She had purposely come to stand at the roots of “Edwin’s Tree” and, sure enough, the aromatic smell and the sound of water flowing were as vivid as in her dream. Harley had wanted to be alone while standing between the tree and bridge. She wanted to watch the small fish swimming in “Penny’s Creek”. The gently running stream recharged her. It was better if the water were flowing over limestone instead of the iron ore rocks that predominated here in East Texas, bu
t she made the best of what she had available at the moment.
Harley half expected to see Edwin Hale standing there when she turned to look at the boy silhouetted by the evening sun. Clasping the crystal hanging from a silver chain around her neck, she could see why he was so stealthy: his aura was almost non-existent. A pale blue, ethereal fog that indicated he lived in a terrible sadness; the small scar on his right cheek glowed red and was edged in lavender. It was put there by someone he had loved and trusted. She didn’t need to have a doctorate in psychology to read the signs of parental abuse. He knew how to be invisible when necessary. The sight pulled at her heart so, as the boy opened his mouth to speak, Harley switched off her aura vision.
“You just moved into the Hale House, didn’t you?”
The question was barely a whisper. His hands were shaking, rattling the objects in an old shoebox he was carrying.
“You should sit down before you fall down,” Harley gruffly suggested and pointed to the wooden side of the bridge. The boy looked furtively towards the house on the hill.
“Um, okay.” And he sat on the decades-old, rough cut cypress timbers at a timid distance of more than a yard away. Harley chose to respect the visitor’s aloofness and set herself on the rail near to where she was standing.
“You’re the one who watched my mom and me from the end of the driveway when we came by last month, aren’t you?”
Blushing, the boy answered, “Yeah that was me.”
Harley felt the response to her question more than heard it. “It’s okay to speak a little louder.”
Without looking up from the box in his lap the lurker said, “My name is Cody Taylor. What’s yours?”