Chapter 7 – The Shrieking Child

The nightmare I’d had edged its way back into my thoughts; the sound in my dream resembled the description James had given when he’d told us about what he’d heard in his house, and what Robert had said that he’d heard before he died. Current events were tied to whatever happened one-hundred years before, and I needed to figure out why. I pulled into the parking lot of Tiffany’s apartment building just as my phone lit up. I picked it up to open my instant messages.

AmyF1620: hey dan

DanielFrame1134: Hey

AmyF1620: have u talked 2 james or tiffany

DanielFrame1134: Nope. Just pulled up in front of Tiffany’s apartment.

AmyM1620: u gonna b thr a min

DanielFrame1134: I was planning to be, yeah.

AmyM1620: me n will on r way to james’

DanielFrame1134: You want to check it out without him there? Probably a good idea. I’ll meet you there.

AmyM1620: c u thr

“Buy some more vowels, Ames,” I said to my phone before locking it, setting it down in the cup holder. I pulled out of the parking lot, turning right, but then I decided to take the long way that led around Penny Ann Mountain to clear my head before I saw my friends. I had been driving for a few minutes when I saw there was a roadblock up ahead, and traffic was backed up by about ten cars. Maybe there had been a rock slide, or it was a police barricade to bust people doing early Halloween drinking and driving.

I turned down the volume on my radio, rolled the window down a little way, and lit a cigarette, blowing smoke out as traffic inched along. After about a minute, a few ambulances sped by me on the shoulder of the road, and I remembered the ambulance that had flown past the library. So maybe not just a rock slide. Traffic inched forward slowly, and as I got closer I could see what happened.

There were a couple of cars smashed up together, and there was a truck wrapped around a pole at the bottom of the dirt-road entrance to the old quarry, up on Penny Ann. The quarry was a place where teenagers and people my age would go to party and skinny dip. They tempted fate, never knowing if Penny Ann would appear, but it was considered the only fun thing to do in Blackwoods Bend.

The owner of the truck was sitting by the side of the road, trembling in fear. The police had draped him with a blanket, and were questioning him as he blew into a breathalyzer. As I got closer I rolled my window down further to see if I could hear what they were saying. What can I say? Sometimes I’m nosy. This time I wish I hadn’t been.

The man’s hands shook as he ran them over his face. “I heard singing, so I went to see where it was coming from. Shouldn’t have been any kids out here! Shouldn’t have been…There was a little girl on the rocks in the middle of the q-quarry! I tried to get her to turn around and come to me. She stopped singin’, then turned around…She screamed this horrible sound! Came at me, and I r-ran away. I got in my truck and—Oh, God. I’m so sorry!”

I hit the gas as I got passed the blockage, blood was on the ground everywhere, and I thought that I might have seen a blood-soaked, canvas shoe underneath one of the smashed up vehicles. I threw out my cigarette then rolled my window up quickly. That’d teach me to go the long way around. If only it had taught me to keep my nose where it belonged.

+

The wind was picking up as I stepped out of my car at James’ house. The door was unlocked, so I let myself in. I walked into the kitchen to be greeted with four blank stares. For a moment I began to panic, thinking that some new horrendous thing had happened to my friends. I debated for a moment turning tail, and running out of the house screaming. I took a deep breath, finally Amy cut her eyes away from me. “Why are you guys looking at me like that?” I asked, running my words together a little. “Why’s James here? I thought—”

“Why didn’t you tell us that you were researching the history of the forest? Tiffany told us that you’ve been investigating the disappearances and the weird shit. We wanna help figure this out,” Will said. This wasn’t the intervention that I’d feared, though they were still cornering me.

“I’m sorry, y’all,” I said, scratching the back of my head. “I just didn’t want to upset you with more talk about monsters and ghosts, and whatever else. I’ll tell you everything I know.” For the next few hours, after I divulged all the information I had found at the library, we exchanged theories and possibilities.

James had a strange look on his face, and he leaned his elbows on the table. “Robby told me something right before he left for the camping trip on Penny Ann. I passed it off as his spooky, conspiracy shit, but…maybe?” Suddenly James jumped up from his seat, his eyes wide, clapping his hands together, he ran into his bedroom only to return a few seconds later with a newspaper clipping that was tattered and yellowed. He silently read through the article quickly, then handed me the clipping. “Read this. Think about it. What do you do when you want to keep someone out? Besides guards, or consequences for trespassin’? You put up a door or a gate. Right?”

I furrowed my brow, reading through the text quickly eager to see what he could be talking about. Out of all of the articles I’d found, this one hadn’t been one of them. This hadn’t been on the record in the archives. Then my eyes moved over what James must have been talking about. Returnal Cemetery was the cemetery that sat on the edge of Blackwoods Forest. It’s the closest landmark in Blackwoods Bend to the forest itself, and that’s the place that Harson chose to add his monumental forest to his family.

The cemetery land sat on either side of the road leading into one side of the forest, and it was the last part of the road that had been paved. The laminated article I held in my hand was from 1895, and it reported that the black trunks of the chestnut trees had grown into part of the back of the graveyard, uprooting headstones from early settlers of the area, and there were tales that the bodies buried in the far back of the cemetery were carried up through the ground by the roots, then had to be reburied.

The article went on to tell how there had been strange writing found on the walls outside of the cemetery, but they weren’t legible enough to decipher, and mysteriously the name on the wrought iron lychgate had been changed from Eternal Cemetery to Returnal Cemetery. The inhabitants of the town were unnerved by the occurrences, and a few men had gone to check in the woods to see if there was any indication of drifters passing through, or any sign of vandals camping there.

It seemed highly unlikely that someone would replace such an expensive and heavy wrought-iron sign as a prank, but no one at that time wanted to believe that something supernatural might be happening. The men who set out in the search party for the vandals were never seen again. “This is the story of the first disappearances,” I said, my eyes wide. The article concluded with the information that the cemetery would be abandoned, and anyone venturing near would be arrested for their own safety. I finished reading, looking up at James, bewildered. “Where did you get this article?” I asked, maybe a little too forcefully.

“Robby brought it over here when he was telling me about some weird stuff he and his friends were looking into as a ‘school project’. He told me that he didn’t want to tell me everything, because he wanted to get more information on it. Said it was a tip from an anonymous source. He didn’t want it leaking, and other people finding out what they were doing. They wanted to do one of those ghost investigation things. I think he said he was thinking about writing a book about it, or making one of those movies—the found footage-type.” He scratched the back of his head looking confused. “I don’t know what else he found out, if anything.”

“Some Blair Witch shit. Seriously, it sounds like…Never mind.” Will shook his head, cracking open another beer.

“What, babe?” Amy prodded. “All the crazy things we’ve been talking about, I don’t think one more theory is gonna hurt.”

She took Will’s beer, much to his protest, taking a couple of big gulps from it. Will cut his eyes at her in mild irritation, walking over to the refrigerator to open it, drawing out another beer. “It sounds like a fuckin’ supernatural mob hit.” We all stared at him, completely perplexed as he chugged down half of the beer, then Amy urged him to elaborate with a wave of her hand. “Well, if it’s like the story says, and ol’ Harson wanted to keep whatever was goin’ on out in the forest a secret so badly that people just up and vanish when they get close…With all the weird shit goin’ on in this town, it makes sense.”

“So, what you’re sayin’ is that anyone who gets close to the truth is—for lack of a better word—assassinated?” Tiffany asked, and I saw Amy fidget in her seat. “If that is the case though…” Tiffany lowered her voice, looking around a little nervously. “Why would Keith have been killed?”

“Could he have found out about this on his own? Is it possible that Robert had talked to him about it?” I asked, to no one in particular. If it was true that knowing too much was what put the hit on all of us, I’d just cemented our fate with my big brain’s need to solve the mystery. “Did Rob and Keith talk often?”

“There’s no way. Why would he have lasted so long after Robert if he knew just as much?” Amy looked around at all of us wide-eyed, the shadows of horror creeping up in her eyes, threatening to take over. “There would have to be a reason right? He had to know less than we do, right?”

“I showed him the article,” James paled. “I showed it to him the night he died, before I left for the store. He laughed, and said I was startin’ to sound just as gullible as Robert. I didn‘t get it, when he said it…Robert must have told him something before he died.”

“What’s gonna happen to us then?” The fear had finally gotten its claws into Amy, and she went into near hysterics. “We’re all gonna die!”

Will reached his arm out, wrapping it around her shoulders. “Come on. Let’s go have a smoke and calm down, Ames,” he said as he led her out of the room to the sun-porch.

“One thing I do believe is that we’re all still alive because we haven’t been alone,” Tiffany said quietly.

She was wrong, though. I had been alone. I’d been alone when I’d stopped by my house, and then again when I’d fallen asleep in my car. Why hadn’t it come for me? “Well, I’m gonna need somebody to sit at the bathroom door while I get a shower, and I’m gonna need some serious sleep.”

“I got you. Tub’s been thoroughly bleached, but I still don’t wanna be the first person to shower in there…Anyway, we’ll figure this out. We’re smart people. Someone started all this. A person—just like us. There’s gotta be a way for one person to stop it, too,” James said, and for the first time in days I saw determination in his expression. Resolve. That was what we needed.

“You’re right. Who does this Harson bastard think he is, anyway?” Tiffany stood up to slam her palm against the table.

I was proud of my friends, and their faith in us strengthened mine. Maybe we would be able to survive this, then life could get back to normal. “Now, we just need to get Amy and Will on board, and figure out what we need to do—Wait!” I said as the plan occurred to me. I met Tiffany and James’ eyes, a grin growing on my face. “I know what we need to do.”

“What would that be?” Tiffany asked, raising an eyebrow.

“We’re going to have to retrace Harson’s steps,” I said, and James smirked slightly, though there was still sadness in his eyes. “That is how you find things that are lost.”