by Joe Sharp
It was all very … cultured.
Crystal couldn't take her eyes off of the table. Ash coated the grating, falling through the holes and onto the concrete floor. The ash was gray with bits of white …
“It is time, child.”
She jumped at the sound of Eunice’s voice echoing off of the stone walls. It was the peal of the cathedral bell announcing her funeral.
They really expected her to do this, to place Beau in the ash on that filthy grate and watch him rolled into the furnace like Sunday’s roast.
He deserved more. He may just be a child and only recently alive, but he deserved more.
This is your destiny.
Crystal sat on the edge of the grated table, and with Beau snug in her arms, she laid down. She rolled onto her side, holding him gently off of the hard surface. His baby fingers grabbed at her blouse buttons and she began to whisper a song in his ear, a song from a memory, from long before she was alive.
She pulled her legs in as the Paladin tucked her long skirt in around her. They eased the table slowly back into the furnace as Eunice and the others stood and watched solemnly, wordlessly. They did not deny her destiny.
Crystal finally understood, No one would ever remember what she had done here, because it had all been done before, many times before.
No matter. Her phone had rung and she had picked it up.
The door creaked shut and sealed the two of them off from the world. She listened to the quiet and to the cooing of her child, and she was right where she was supposed to be. She didn’t mind the cold and dark.
It would be bright soon enough.
Jessilyn, October 9th
Its initials were JPL, but the Jackson Public Library was not exactly the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The musty smell of dusty old books, the antiseptic glow of fluorescents and the stillness of an ancient tomb all made Jess yearn for the warm bosom of WiFi Joe’s Java Hut. WiFi and caffeine was how research was done, everybody knew that. All the quiet made her suspect that they were up to no good.
But while JPL may have been in the stone ages, it was the Library of Congress compared to Willow Tree. At the Rusty Gate, like dark and light, the eras collided.
The cable got the History Channel, but not HBO. There was WiFi in the rooms, but the phones only connected to the front desk and room service, not the outside world. The staff hid their computers behind their desks, and the cleaning crew hoovered up at night while wearing their bonnets and long puffy skirts. Credit cards worked as easily as money, and the Wells Fargo armored car was not pulled by a team of horses.
A person could get jet lagged just walking through the lobby.
Then, there was Eunice.
Eunice Pembry wants to rule the world!
Jess thought that would be a great headline for her blog, which was looking less and less like a ghost story and more like Night of the Living Dead. But, she had too many hints and not enough real clues.
Where was Superman when you needed him? Or Aquaman … she’d take Aquaman, because right now, Jess was drowning in questions.
They had watched Josiah Pembry for over an hour, until neither of them could stomach another spoon full of fudge ripple. He waited on customers and turned the fudge and wiped down the counters and did all the other things an ice cream shop owner would do.
But, he had the exact same mole over his left eyebrow as the man in the old photograph. Jess couldn’t let that go. A strong family resemblance was one thing, identical twins one-hundred and fifty years apart was another. Jess had no idea how to broach a subject like that.
“Excuse me, sir, but could you tell me … are you a zombie or a vampire?”
Yeah, right. Her journalistic integrity was going to take a spanking on this one. Even Jameson wouldn’t print this, and he printed everything! She needed a comrade, and the only other person she knew, who knew what she knew, was Patrick, and he was …
Patrick was worthless! He just sat there with a big dumb grin on his face, basking in Jess’ astonishment. He loved looking at the puzzle, but not solving the puzzle. He preferred to believe in the magic.
It was a good thing he was so pretty.
The book slammed down on the table in front of her like Thor’s hammer. Dust clouds billowed up and drifted over the other books and newspapers … and into Jess’ nose and eyes. As she sneezed into the crook of one elbow, her other hand shot out to cover her open cup of espresso. When the dust settled, she waved away the moldy odor and glared up at the librarian.
“Nice presentation!” she grumped sarcastically.
“Thanks,” chirped Maddie, ignoring the tone. “I went to college.”
According to Maddie Kemp, her first job was cataloging scrolls at the Library of Alexandria. She had apparently brought some of that Egyptian dust back with her to the Jackson Public Library.
Her hair was spun of the finest white silk, and she was as thin as a number two pencil. She had placed every book on every shelf, and could point to one without a moments hesitation, if she did say so herself.
But, when Jess had asked her about Willow Tree, her mouth dropped a little.
“Why you wanna know about that place?” she pried.
“Um … I heard they’ve got this great festival,” fibbed Jess. “Thought I’d check it out.”
Maddie glared suspiciously over the top of her yellow tiger-striped reading glasses. “You don’t strike me as the festival type.”
Jess tried not to look like a cat munching on canary feathers. “I like historical stuff.”
“Really?” Maddie drew down on her. “Okay … who was John Hunt Morgan?”
Jess munched on that for a second. “Wasn’t he in Watchmen?”
The librarian dropped her mouth again. “You know this is a library, right? There’s a Redbox down the street in case you’re lost.”
Jess threw up her hands. “Okay … maybe I didn’t come for the festival.”
She bit her tongue as she considered how much to tell this woman. Then, she stuck her toe in the water.
“Have you ever heard of the Paranormal Investigator?”
“Is that one of those websites devoted to,” waving her hands in the air, “the strange and unusual?”
“So, you’ve heard of it?”
Maddie shook her head and sighed. “And here I thought you had a brain.”
“Hey,” argued Jess, her back up a little, “you’ve got to admit, Willow Tree is strange and unusual.”
The librarian folded her arms in front of her. “So, you think you’ve got that nut cracked, eh? Well, let’s see what you can do with this.”
Then, she went to get the book.
It was an old spiral-bound scrapbook that looked like it hadn’t seen sunlight since Jimmy Carter was president. The spine was cracked and the edges worn. The bits of paper that spilled out from between the pages were yellowed and crinkled with age. Jess wondered why it wasn’t in a museum somewhere in a glass case behind a velvet rope. Maybe it, too, came from the Library of Alexandria.
“What am I looking at?” she asked the old woman.
Maddie ran her hands over the front of the book, leaving a trail of dusty fingerprints. There was a tenderness there that got Jess’ attention. Perhaps this was a family album of some sort, but was it her family? And, why was she showing it to Jess?
“I had a bit of an obsession, you might say, about Willow Tree,” she said wistfully. “It was 1975 and Gerald Ford was president in what many felt was a gross miscarriage of justice, but I digress. I had just finished my graduate degree, so I was young and stupid. I moved here from Louisville and I decided I needed to soak up some local color.”
“Let me guess,” Jess piped up. “You went to the Willow Tree Festival.”
“Seemed harmless enough. I had studied the Civil War in college, so I figured I could fit in with the natives. It didn’t take long to see that Willow Tree had little to do with the Civil War.”
“How so?”
&nb
sp; Maddie took the seat opposite Jess and leaned in. “Did you ever notice those colors?”
Jess had to think for a minute. “Wait … you mean the outfits? The greens and browns -”
“And blues,” added Maddie.
“Yeah … even the guys in uniform had color coordinated pants. What’s that about?”
“Well, they didn’t just run out of material, I can tell you that. I figured it was like a code, you know, like a way to keep them separated.”
“You mean like some kind of caste system?”
“Sort of, but I could never figure out what made them different. Anyway, that was just the first time I went.”
“You went back?” Jess couldn’t keep the disbelief from her voice.
“It was years later,” explained Maddie. “One of the middle schools in Jackson county did a unit on the Civil War. They had reenactors come out and all the kids did an essay on some character from that period. The library got involved and we ended up taking a group of them over to the festival for the day.”
She looked down at the book between them. “I hadn’t yet started to question, you see.”
“What was different this time?” asked Jess.
“Nothing,” she answered, the dark memory crowding its way back in. “It was the same. It was exactly the same. It was like I had stepped into a time machine and gone back to that first visit. It was … creepy.”
“What do you mean it was the same? What was?”
“Everything. The people, the outfits, the colors, the town. I mean, this was ten or eleven years later, but it could have been the next day. I can still remember the chill it sent up my spine.”
Maddie shivered and hugged herself.
“I’ve got some coffee on, you wants some, hon?” she asked Jess as she moved from the table.
“Yeah, that’d be nice,” said Jess.
When Maddie turned the corner into her office, Jess let her gaze drop to the book on the table. She leaned in close and blew air across the book’s cover. Dust rolled up into a gray cloud that drifted ominously out into the stacks. She brushed a hand over the surface of the relic as gently as an archaeologist, revealing a yellowed label that simply read “Willow Tree”.
Jess slid the book closer and slowly opened the cover. She listened to the spine creak at the intrusion and wondered when the book had last been opened. The inside page was blank, save for a scrawl in the upper right hand corner.
Madeleine Kemp 1989
Jess flipped through it carefully, not really focusing on any one page. The bulk of the pages seemed to be filled with reproductions of old newspaper copy from long ago. There seemed to be a chronology to the album, so she decided to start at the beginning. The first page held a newspaper clipping from the Jackson County Register. The date was June 6th, 1863, and the accompanying photograph felt like icy fingers around her heart.
“Here you go, dear,” said Maddie, stepping up beside Jess with a Styrofoam cup of hot coffee. “Sorry I didn’t have any extra mugs. I made coffee this morning, so it might -”
Maddie looked down at the book opened to first page and she stopped talking about coffee. Jess laid her finger lightly on the copy of the newspaper article and looked up at Maddie.
“What is this?” she asked suspiciously.
Maddie sat down in her chair across from Jess and put the cups on the table carefully. Then, she met Jess’ stare with one of her own.
“I think you know what that is.”
Jess scanned the date of the newspaper again, hoping she had misread it. She checked the caption beneath the photograph.
Mr. and Mrs. Josiah Pembry.
“Is this some kind of joke? Is this one of those fake newspapers you get at a carnival?” She pointed to the image of Josiah Pembry and his wife. “I met this man yesterday! And I met this woman three days ago!”
“And this photograph was taken 150 years ago,” stated Maddie evenly.
Jess fell back into her chair. “How can those things both be true?”
“You figure that out, you let me know.”
“But, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this?”
“What do you usually do with a story?” asked Maddie.
“I’ve never had a story like this.”
“But, I thought you dealt with the strange and unusual.”
“No,” she said, crossing her arms and shaking her head defiantly. “What we do is debunk your favorite urban legends, only, at the end of the piece, we admit that maybe it could be true after all, and we leave everyone with a big question mark and a self-satisfied grin on their faces. It’s all a scam designed to sell ad space.”
“So, what would you do if one of those legends turned out to be true?”
“They’re never true.”
Maddie smiled at that. “First time for everything.”
She reached over and nudged the book a little closer to Jess, then sat back and waited.
“The question was, what would you do?”
Jess twisted the ring on her right thumb absently as she eyed the challenge to her profession. Could she really debunk a legend if it was true? Would she even want to? And, would it ever be believed?
Jess scooted back to the table and reached out to touch the scrapbook. She could feel Maddie warming her with her smile. She took a second to glare.
“Gloating is unbecoming a lady.”
“What lady?”
Jess tucked a thumb under the second page and turned it slowly, blotting out the photograph that was giving her the willies. Page two showed an entry from inside The Register, a photograph of a rundown farm house and some scrub acreage.
The caption read “Pembry Farm 1863”.
“That’s where Josiah took his blushing bride to begin their life together,” explained Maddie.
“Maybe it’s just my expectation, but even this looks a bit familiar.”
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.”
Jess flipped to the next page, and things got very familiar. The photograph showed Josiah Pembry decked out in his Prussian blue uniform, all buttons and epaulets shining and pressed. His hat was cocked slightly on his head, and his beard trimmed like it was Sunday morning. This was an army commissioned portrait of a new lieutenant, taken just weeks before he died on the battlefield, March of 1864.
It was the same portrait Jess had seen hanging in the alcove at the Rusty Gate.
This made Josiah Pembry seem much more dead, much more of a ghost than she had made him out to be. She was having a harder time fitting the man from the ice cream shop into this picture, even with the mole over his eyebrow.
This was stupid! What were they trying to prove? Josiah Pembry was dead …
Maddie turned the page.
… and Eunice, it seemed was missing.
There was a single column below the fold on November of ‘64.
“Eunice Louise Pembry, recently widowed of Lieutenant Josiah Pembry, Department of the Ohio, is missing from the Pembry home these last several weeks. Local authorities conducted a search of the Pembry farm, where upon food was found rotting and cold ashes in the wood stove. The livestock animals evidenced neglect, suffering from malnourishment. The farm is shackled by order of the sheriff. Anyone possessing knowledge of the whereabouts of Eunice Pembry need contact the Jackson county sheriff’s office immediately.
“So, Eunice, what … just walked off into the sunset? That doesn’t make sense.”
Maddie flipped to the next page of scraps, and this one was a hodge-podge of different clippings with no particular focus. The librarian helped her to zero in, pointing from one article to another.
“These are all from 1870,” she noted, as a pattern started to crystallize for Jess. “Burglaries of stores and homes. Clothing, food, blankets … all things a transient might take.”
“You’re thinking that Eunice came back?” asked Jess.
“If she did, then where had she been for five years?” asked Maddie. She had obviously played this p
uzzle a lot more than Jess.
“Was she seen?” asked Jess, her gears turning.
“No, just the things taken. The only clue was women’s clothing. At first, only women’s clothing.”
“At first?”
Maddie turned the pages.
“After a while a lot of other things started disappearing. Some of the clothing was men’s, and there were other things, too. Tools and … weapons. The locals knew that the group responsible was living somewhere in the thick woods on the Pembry property, but they could never find them. The thieves only took bits and pieces, making an all out search for them more trouble than it was worth. In the end, no one was really sure how much was taken, or how many of them there were.”
”I’ve got clippings off and on for about twenty years. By then, it had been almost thirty years since anyone had seen Eunice Pembry. She could have walked right down the main street of town and no one would have batted an eye.”
“Did she?” Jess asked, starting to ride the edge of her seat.
“No … but Cyrus Randell did.”
Jess cocked an eye at Maddie. “Who the hell is Cyrus Randell?”
Maddie flipped to the next page, with a picture of the broken-down Pembry farm. Standing in front was a man and his family, a wife, two young sons and a baby daughter.
“Cyrus Randell bought the Pembry farm from the county in the spring of 1890. By then, it was mostly an overgrown pile of shingles and wood siding. The elements hadn’t been kind, and much of the lumber had sprouted legs and walked off in the twenty-six years since Eunice herself had walked off. Cyrus got it for a song and started building his church.”
The word had almost slipped by, and then it stuck. “Wait … church? You mean he was …”
“Cyrus Randell was Reverend Randell. He started out as a Methodist minister in his younger days, but apparently the church didn’t see eye-to-eye with his ‘methods’. He was de-ordained, or de-frocked, or whatever it is you call it. So, he moved out here with his family and decided he didn’t need the backing of an actual church to do his preaching. He wasn’t too far off the bead, according to the stories. He didn’t mess with snakes or smack people on the forehead, but he wasn’t above speaking in tongues when the spirit moved him. Garnered himself a modest congregation in the roughly ten years he was here.”