03 – Not So Dangerous Anymore

“Bachelor’s Grove Cemetery is the most haunted graveyard in the world?” Erika read off her phone. “I find that hard to believe.”

“Why not?” Daniel asked, sitting alongside Erika in the back seat of Rick’s new van. “It’s a creepy old graveyard.”

“It isn’t that old,” Erika corrected, reading from the article. “The first burial was apparently in 1844, not even two hundred years ago. Pick a random graveyard in Europe and I bet they’re older than this place.”

Leslie, up in the front passenger seat, turned slightly. “Ah, my inexperienced hunters. Age?” He scoffed. “Older places have been picked clean by generations of exorcists, hunters, and other people like us. The Eclipse and similar organizations help too, I presume.”

Erika supposed that made sense, but it was a hesitant supposition. “You’re saying I should be more worried about some modern high-rise apartment building than an ancient Dracula castle?”

“To an extent,” Leslie said with a chuckle, facing forward once again.

Erika hummed, frowning at her phone once more. “Woman in white, moving tombstones, a disappearing or shrinking farmhouse? Mob ties, satanic rituals, blue floating lights over the pond? Phantom vehicles along the road, extreme cold spots capable of freezing water even on a hot summer day, a two-headed ghost? This thing is supposedly haunted by everything it’s possible to be haunted with.”

“Most of those are totally fake,” Rick called from the driver seat, flicking his eyes to the mirror before focusing on the road. “Like the lights? That’s probably just ignitions from off-gassing corpses in the pond, thrown in by Al Capone. Little bubbles of methane that rise to the surface.”

“What causes the ignition?” Daniel asked. “Like, surely there are no open flames or anything just sitting on the pond.”

“Oh, ghosts, I guess,” Rick said with a casual shrug.

Erika rolled her eyes, feeling… relaxed. Despite the morbid nature of today’s job, it had nothing to do with The Mummy or The Fixer, so she was content. And it let her see Rick and Leslie in their element.

Sometimes, she found it difficult to tell when they were going on about conspiracy theories or something real, especially because she wasn’t sure there was a distinction between the two in their minds.

“The woman in white is real,” Leslie affirmed in a serious tone. “Saw her myself. Dark hair, pale skin, wedding dress with blood all down her front. Women in white tend to target lone men, so I hightailed it out of there.”

“And you never went back with help?”

“It is an old, defunct graveyard. The latest interment was nearly forty years ago. Not exactly a priority, and women in white tend to be… violent.”

Erika frowned around at the occupants of the van. “If these ghosts target men, why am I the only woman here?”

Daniel jolted like he only just noticed, and Leslie turned in his seat, looking around like he expected to find someone other than Erika.

“Anna is spending some time with her mother while babysitting our newest oddity, and Sofia has something going on with her day job today.”

“Yeah, but we weren’t under a time-crunch.” Erika slipped her phone into her pocket as the van pulled into a parking lot near a lonesome, overgrown path. “Could have put it off for a day,” she said as she squeezed between the new van’s extra row of seats to reach the racks. Most of the ghost hunting gear was old stuff, recovered from the crash, but Erika fiddled with some new device with two little movable wing things dotted with LED lights.

“Right,” Leslie said. “The plan for today is investigation, locating, containment, exorcism, prioritized in that order. Never be alone while we search. There may be more than just the woman in white—in fact, given our group, the Madonna may not make an appearance at all.”

Despite being open to the public, and right on the edge of a fairly major highway, Erika felt an ominous air as she stepped out of the vehicle. A thick forest lined both sides of the road, dense enough to obscure everything beyond ten feet. Two tall cellphone towers flanked the entrance to the path, itself blocked off by a chain and a dangling sign reading, Closed.

“They just mean closed to vehicles,” Rick explained, catching her staring as he donned a pack filled with gear—salt, mostly—with his shipping tube hanging off the side. “Paranormal activity is part of the draw here, so nobody will give us much grief if we walk in with gear.”

“Shouldn’t we have come at night? No people, more ghosts.”

Leslie scoffed, shaking his head. “This place is crawling with cops at night.”

“Every night?”

“Pretty much. More in October, but they’ve got a whole thing about keeping people out of this place at night. Perfectly open to the public during the day, however.”

Rick scratched at the scruff on his chin with a thoughtful look. “I always thought twenty-four-seven patrols was a bit odd for a defunct cemetery. Bet that’s The Eclipse’s doing.”

“So they definitely know about this place,” Erika said, stepping over the chain across the path. “And haven’t taken care of it themselves,” she added with a frown.

“You heard The Adjustment,” Daniel said, hopping the chain behind her. “Ghosts are menial tasks that they all see as below them.”

“Doubt they care if a few humans go missing,” Rick added from the front of the group. “As long as the public at large remains calm and ignorant, a few aspiring truth-seekers are acceptable casualties. Just the opposite, in fact: I bet they prefer truth-seekers disappear.”

“I wonder how The Puppet would run things if they managed to oust The Eclipse…”

“Not going to happen,” Leslie said, waving around dowsing rods as they advanced up the overgrown path. “They’ve got no support, no real numbers. The Eclipse sits atop not just their own supernatural force, but an entire infrastructure that they command.”

Rick nodded along. “Even if it did happen, I doubt it would be good for us. Well, maybe not us, us, since we’ve got some comradery with them, but regular people? I get the impression that The Puppet wouldn’t care to set up cops around a place like this. They’d just let anyone wander in and get merc’d by the ghosts.”

“It does make you wonder just how much The Eclipse is doing behind the scenes,” Leslie continued, nodding as well as he shuffled behind Rick.

The dirt path narrowed, shrinking to a thin line with weeds and winter-withered grass sprouting up on either side. Erika’s eyebrows popped up as she spotted a tombstone covered in moss, with grass and plants reaching high enough around it to hide it from a casual glance. She hadn’t even realized they entered the graveyard proper, figuring it was still ahead. A chain link fence in the distance did nothing to hold back the overgrowth of the forest, with trees leaning over its top and shrubberies spreading outward from its base, all looking dead and drained.

“Doesn’t this place have a caretaker?” Erika muttered. The only funeral she had ever attended, that of her grandmother, took place in a fairly well-kept graveyard, with mowed grass and regularly-spaced spots dotted with assorted tombstones, different yet somehow orderly.

As she looked around now, knowing what to look for, she spotted graves scattered everywhere, marked by haphazard tombstones to the point where she couldn’t believe that half the corpses didn’t intersect with one another. Some graves had crumbled and broken, others were coated in plants, some flatter ones were only obvious because of the small gap in tall grass that their presence caused.

Everywhere she looked, something felt off, like she had entered some bizarro world where humans and their general obsession with order and patterns hadn’t ever visited. Even the path twisted and wound its way forward, rather than taking a straight, direct path through the cemetery devoid of people.

Despite the unease, Erika didn’t feel too worried. She had broken out of a whole hell dimension with nothing but a baseball bat and a small fracture in reality. Escaping the clutches of ghosts couldn’t be harder than that.

The EMF reader in her pocket buzzed and beeped. Though not at a high level, it still brought the whole group to a pause. Rick, Leslie, and Daniel all pulled out various tools to start the hunt. Erika stopped at a nearby headstone, split with a heavy crack straight down its center. The elements wore down the epitaph to the point where Erika could only pick out two words, but the name remained visible. Peach Berkly. Died in 1849. She reached down to clear away a layer of dirt hiding the birth year, only to pause and pull her hand back.

The last time she carelessly touched random things around ghosts, she ended up spewing ectoplasm all over the place.

“Anyone have anti-ghost gloves?” Erika called out.

Rick snapped his head over, first alarmed, then confused. “Did you find something?”

“No, I just don’t want what happened at the bar to happen here.”

“What happened at what bar?” Daniel set a radio down on a gravestone, resulting in a burst of static, but no other noise. He quickly rummaged through his pack to find some other equipment to wave around, leaning against the stone in the process.

Erika watched with a mildly amused smile. “Keep touching random things and maybe you’ll find out.”

After shooting Erika a strange look, Daniel tapped a tuning fork against the grave. The tines vibrated, humming, only to abruptly stop. His eyebrows popped up as he tried one more time, this time getting a longer, more natural hum. Flicking through a notebook from his pack, he paused on one page. “There might be an… um… Residual Haunting here.”

“Residual haunting?” Erika asked, cocking her head.

“Not surprising. Just ignore it,” Rick said before turning to Erika. “It means there is paranormal activity, but only remnants. The actual cause—the ghost—has moved on, either via exorcism, naturally, or it simply relocated. Usually, activity fades with time, but who knows how long that’ll take in a supernatural hotspot like this place.”

“Ah.”

Leslie gestured for everyone to group back up. “Let’s move deeper in. The woman in white who I saw wasn’t here in the entrance.”

Back on the path, the group advanced. The surrounding flora encroached further into the graveyard with every step. Despite the absence of snow, the weather stayed frigid, leaving plants withered and near death. The trees lacked leaves this time of year, making them look gnarled and decrepit, their branches clawing at the sky.

“Anyone hear that?” Daniel asked, his voice a soft whisper.

Everyone stopped. They didn’t speak, nobody turned and asked, ‘Hear what?’ They simply paused and listened.

Erika listened as well, even closing her eyes to focus more on her hearing. Some rustling of plants had been going on the whole time—the stringy grass blowing in occasional light breezes. She heard a light creaking of wood and branches knocking against one another, maybe an animal in the far, far distance, and a faint hum that might have been cars on the road beyond the thick forest. Nothing stuck out as alarming.

“I don’t—”

A faint thump-thump, thump-thump cut Erika off. It felt distant and quiet, yet unnatural enough that it stuck out.

“A horse?” Leslie asked, looking around.

“A heartbeat,” Rick corrected.

“I thought it was reeds knocking against a hollow log,” Daniel said.

“I can’t tell which direction it is coming from,” Erika added, turning her head after every thump. There were long pauses every so often, only for it to start up again a little louder than before. “It sounds like it is getting closer,” she said, tensing.

“A horse,” Leslie said, hand disappearing into the vest of his camo coat where he surely had a weapon.

“Or a heartbeat.”

Daniel turned around, narrowing his eyes as he scanned the graveyard. “I guess reeds wouldn’t get closer.”

“Rick,” Leslie said.

Rick swung his pack around, tugging on a small string. “On it. Everyone group up,” he ordered as he moved around the group. A stream of white salt poured out from a little plastic nozzle with a full half of it blowing away in the wind. The rest followed his path as he formed a full circle. Once he finished, he capped the nozzle and stepped inside the ring.

“Don’t step outside the circle,” Leslie ordered. “It doesn’t matter what you see or hear, stay inside.”

Erika’s fingers twitched, wanting to grab her baseball bat. She hadn’t brought one with her, both because she could retrieve one from her armory without much trouble and because she was actively trying to change her mindset toward finding solutions that didn’t involve breaking things. None of the past ghosts she had encountered required her bat, so that helped as well.

Still… she felt vulnerable.

“How does salt work against ghosts, anyway?” Erika tried asking as the thumping grew louder. “Like, does it work against all ghosts, or…?”

Without pausing his scanning of the area, Rick answered absently. “Anna thinks it is like salt on a slug. Dries out the ectoplasm.”

“Ghosts are slugs. Got it.”

“That’s not what I—”

The thumping changed, becoming less of a horse’s hooves clopping against the ground, less of a heartbeat pounding, and more of an animal hammering away at a drum set made up of only the bass drum. The repeated thumps merged together into one constant tone as it swept past the group. The ring of salt scattered, flung outward as if it had been poured atop a high-speed turntable. As the salt settled back down, the thumping grew faint once more, petering out until Erika couldn’t hear anything but the wind and rustling grass.

Letting the tension out of her shoulders, Erika stared down at their scattered circle of salt. “So… was that some residual haunting or what?”

“No…” Rick bent, pinching a bit of salt between his fingers. He lifted it up, letting it fall like some master chef. “But I don’t think it was attacking either. The salt didn’t carbonize.”

Erika’s heart skipped a beat. If blackened salt was a sign of a ghost attacking, hers and Daniel’s little vacation to the Cedar Lake farmhouse might have been more dangerous than she realized.

“It wasn’t the woman in white. Possibly a headless horseman?”

“This isn’t New England, Les.”

“Legends can travel, and that legend certainly has.”

Rick shrugged, dusted off his hands, and stood. “Either way, it wasn’t attacking, and it isn’t what we’re here for. Let’s move on.”

“Agreed.”

Erika and Daniel shared a shrug—neither feeling quite so confident. She might have been a little overconfident earlier. She still wasn’t afraid, but there was something intangible about a ghost that made it feel like it would be harder to disperse with a wave of her bat. Rick and Leslie didn’t appear concerned, so Erika cocked a grin that she didn’t quite feel, ribbed Daniel in the side, and followed after the more knowledgeable duo.

The tension in Erika’s shoulders hadn’t quite faded when she caught a glimmer of white in her peripheral vision.

A woman stood, framed in a cut-back portion of fence, with a pair of trees curled over the opening like curated hedges. Pale and adorned in a short, strapless white dress in a modern style, with stringy black hair dangling down to her waist, she looked remarkably like The Stalker. Blinking, shaking the resemblance from her mind, Erika stared again.

There was nothing but the opening.

“I think I saw her,” Erika said, pointing toward the fence.

“Where? When? Just now?” Leslie asked, positioning himself in front of her with his hand on his gun again.

“Just now,” Erika confirmed. “A woman in a white dress, black hair, just like you said. No blood down her front, I guess, but maybe she hasn’t murdered anyone recently?”

“Where did she go, back into the forest?”

“I guess so,” Erika said, looking around. Despite the forest encroaching upon the graveyard, there wasn’t anywhere nearby for a full-sized human to hide out of sight. “I blinked and she vanished.”

“Right,” Leslie said, advancing with his dowsing rods out. As he neared the fence, they swung of their own accord, forming an X right on the spot where Erika saw the woman. “There was something here,” he confirmed.

“That’s what I said.”

Leslie pushed aside part of the cut fence, widening the opening. “Stick close,” he said, ushering everyone through.

Rick took the lead this time, putting his tools away to hold fast to his cardboard tube. Daniel’s EMF reader maxed out right at the opening, then remained buzzing at a low level as he followed behind Rick. None of Erika’s gear seemed to react, but most ghosts seemed to trigger only a handful of all the equipment anyway. Leslie brought up the rear, eyes sharp and pistol out, aimed at the ground.

If the graveyard had been eerie, outside the fence was something else. Gone were the scattered tombstones, but in their place was nothing but trees, trees, and more trees. Twenty steps past the opening and Erika couldn’t even see the fence anymore. There was no path out here, just weeds, grass, and bushes that made it nearly impossible to move forward at any reasonable pace. Erika wished she had a machete in her storage, just so she could hack and slash her way through like some kind of ancient explorer traversing the Amazon jungle.

They’d doubled back twice already when Daniel’s EMF reader chirped, picking up the trail again. “That way,” he said, pointing to an even denser part of the forest.

Rick grumbled something under his breath, snatching the EMF.

As the EMF reader ticked to a higher rating, the air changed. Erika’s breath misted despite the afternoon warmth, and that graveyard smell—earth and decay—grew thick enough to taste. The trees thinned ahead, their trunks leaning away from something, like the immobile plants had been trying to get away for years.

The EMF reader hit a shrill, sustained note.

They emerged into a clearing barely larger than a bedroom, and all stopped and stared.

A crumbling tombstone, so battered by time and weather that any inscription had long ago faded away, stood atop a slight bump in the clearing. Behind it, a woman slumped against the granite, her posture limp and unnatural, as if she’d been tossed there from a short distance. Her skin wasn’t pale, but a sickly, mottled gray, stretched tight over protruding cheekbones. Blood, fresh and vivid in the muted light, splattered the front of an elegant, frilly dress.

The woman’s arms lay open at her sides, palms upturned and unresponsive.

Nobody moved.

“Is she…” Erika started forward, then stopped as a heavy hand gripped her shoulder.

“Didn’t expect to find her fully manifested in the middle of the day,” Leslie whispered, his breath clouding in the freezing air.

“Burning her bones might be harder with her watching,” Rick added, backing away as well. “We need a better plan.”

Leslie nodded, drawing Erika and Daniel back to the edge of the trees. “Back away slowly, carefully, and stick together.”