Four Corners Dark: Horror Stories (7 page)

She had experienced countless distractions in other places and they all repeated in the same way. The images and sounds varied and they appeared to be of different times. Sometimes they were adults, sometimes children or even animals. Occasionally, she thought they could sense her, but generally they wouldn’t look at her or acknowledge her presence. She watched the cycles for hours, mesmerized.

Over time she learned not to stare at corners and hear whispers. At least she couldn’t let anyone know she did. By the age of thirteen, she confessed to the doctors that she had lied about the visions, and made up the stories to get attention. Her mother was elated by the change; her father seemed strangely saddened. Either way, the meds and doctor visits decreased dramatically and Brenda moved on pretending to lead a normal life.

She closed the book and studied an unfinished painting standing on an easel. It needed more work but she would get back to it later. She had been commissioned to paint an historic lighthouse and still needed to have her neighbor Steven compare the photographs of the building to her painting. The painting only needed to capture what everyone else saw.

CHAPTER TWELVE

J
oseph walked along the empty road finding the time had grown later than he’d realized. He quickened his pace while walking in the near dark. A branch snapped behind him, he stopped and stood very still, barely breathing. He continued walking and heard another snapping sound, the noise came from the woods. Joseph started to run.

He cut through the woods and moved swiftly down an overgrown path. Murmurs and knocks came from within the trees. He stopped and put a small bag of stones on a string around his neck, charms that would help protect him. He heard a crash in front of him, then behind him, and two more to his sides. He was trapped and boxed in by toppled trees. He snapped the string holding the bag and arranged the stones in a circle. Reaching into his pocket, he found a vial of dried herbs and the stub of a candle. He lit the candle and placed it on the ground, poured herbs between the rocks, then sat and waited.

Joseph knew if he stayed still within the stones he would be safe. He jumped to his feet when a burning tree fell in front of the circle but didn’t leave the safety of the stones. The bark surrounding the burning tree cracked and inside something began scratching. The trunk of the tree broke open and a burning figure emerged. Joseph closed his eyes and did not look at the creature crawling towards him. He smelled burning flesh and knew it was near. The creature’s face, just beyond the stone circle, oozed liquid from black eye holes. Joseph curled up on the ground, prepared to spend the night within the safety of the stones.

South of town, Ima sat on the steps of her apartment, smoked a cigarette, and stared at a half filled parking lot. She couldn’t stop thinking about the way she felt up at the James lodge, panic and suffocation, as if the place would choke the life out of her. As a child, Ima spent much of her time playing in the woods. She was at home there. Why was it so different at the Lodge? The comfort she felt in nature was replaced by something festering unseen below the surface. Like most people in the area, she lived in South Ridge. With two hundred years of bad happenings, people gave Silverton a wide berth after dark.

Ima had been orphaned at a young age. Her father had been a full blood Cherokee and her mother a farm-girl from Minnesota, but she lost any connection with her father’s heritage when her maternal grandmother became her guardian. Her birth name of Imala was shortened to Ima, and she was taught to hide part of who she was. Taught to focus on the modern world. She worked the night shift at the Sheriff’s office and saw her share of domestic abuse, drunk driving and robberies. Some modern world.

At the lodge, Terry sat in a leather chair as Abby gathered up the empty cake plates and walked them into the kitchen. She came back into the room and sat on the couch with a pillow across her lap.

“Joseph had a lot to say tonight,” Abby said. “You should open your mind to the possibilities of what Joseph is trying to tell us.”

“I believe he means well,” Terry said. “But I think we need to keep what he says in context. The man has lived in isolation for a long time which has sent his imagination spiraling out of control. Mix that with area legend and you get some pretty wild stuff.”

“What about the intruder and the cave?” Abby said.

“Joseph mentioned there were other places like that cave in this house,” he answered. “I think we have someone who is either a prankster or didn’t realize the place was occupied. We need to locate any passages into this place and secure them, and when we do, these strange occurrences will end.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
he morning sun shone through great room windows. Terry was up early and began a detailed search of the house starting with the great room. He examined the walls and mirrors tapping on them for any evidence of a passageway. He came upon an ornate mirror resting on the hallway floor. He ran his fingers over the elaborate scroll work on the frame and found a piece that moved. With a twist the mirror unlatched and swung open. Terry grabbed his flashlight then entered a doorway behind it.

He walked down into a cavern and found another water channel and a wooden canoe propped against the wall. Launching the canoe, he drifted towards an opening in the rock wall, slipped into a tunnel and floated deeper under the lodge. As the water in the channel began to churn and move faster, the paddle was wrenched from his hands and lost in the waters behind him. Rudderless, the canoe was battered against rough stone walls.

The boat slowed and drifted into another cavern, mist moved across the water, chilling him as it passed. On a muddy beach were large crows cawing, the sound deafening within the confines of the cave. He covered his ears as the birds launched themselves into the air, their feathers hung in mottled strands and bones protruded as they flapped skeletal wings.

The current pulled him into another tunnel where he saw the gray figure of a man, shoulder deep in water, hands turned towards the ceiling. The bow of the canoe passed through the man and Terry experienced the man’s death by hanging. His head pounded with pain and then he vomited and fell back on the floor of the canoe. Passing through the creature took only a moment but Terry relived hours of torture. He was exhausted and shaking as the canoe drifted further.

An old woman stood in the water with her hands reaching for the ceiling of the tunnel. Searing pain rocked him as he passed through the woman and experienced her death by drowning. White foam sprayed from his mouth and he began convulsing. In the tunnel ahead was a group of white specters, arms outstretched waiting to share their pain. Terry dumped the canoe and plunged into the water. He groped for a hand hold and found tree roots poking through the ceiling of the cave. He pulled himself onto the side of the channel and saw light streaming in above him. A vertical column rose out of the tunnel, he climbed the walls, hanging onto roots and jagged rocks and then emerged in the middle of a dense forest where it was neither night nor day.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“T
erry?” Abby called out.

She walked through the great room and into the hallway.

“Terry?” she called out again.

On the floor in the hallway were his tools and a pad of paper. She read the pad and found a list of furniture with check marks next to them. The mirror in the hallway was circled.

“Terry?”

She found the lever on the mirror and opened the door and was met with shadows and a damp smell.

“Terry,” Abby called out. The sound of her voice reverberated into the unseen space.

Abby turned and walked towards the front door of the lodge, stopped and grabbed the keys to the Cherokee. She sped towards Joseph’s cabin and turned at the stump in the road. Arriving at the cabin, she parked the truck, walked to the front porch and found Joseph’s door open.

“Joseph?” Abby called out.

“Abby, is that you?” Joseph answered. “Please come in.”

Abby walked in and found a tired looking Joseph sitting in a chair.

“Abby is something wrong?”

“Yes, I cannot find Terry.”

She drove Joseph back to the lodge and led him directly to the mirror door.

“I’ll get some flashlights,” she said.

“That will not be necessary,” Joseph said.

He pulled a small red candle from his bag and lit it.

“Please allow me a few moments alone,” he said.

Joseph walked into the dark opening and turned to face Abby.

“Please, close the door behind me and wait for my signal. If you hear anything else, do not open this door.” He turned and walked through the doorway.

When Joseph was a small boy he developed the ability to track, not physical phenomena like broken twigs or foot prints but psychic phenomena, the trails of the living and the dead. In the candlelight he saw the faint vapor trail Terry had left behind. The trail was jerky and erratic and looked like dust in sunlight. Over the years, Joseph had learned to recognize the patterns of people he knew, the patterns of the living were deliberate and geometric, while those of the dead were soft and flowing. He followed Terry’s trail until it flowed into the water.

“Terry?” Joseph called out.

Abby fidgeted in the hallway waiting for Joseph to return. Panic had begun to rise up in her when she heard a soft knock. She opened the mirror and Joseph emerged from the opening.

“He was here,” he said. “Can he swim?”

“What?” she said.

“Can Terry swim?” he repeated.

“Yes, but why? What happened? Abby’s voice grew high and panicked.

“We need to get to the woods.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

J
oseph led Abby to an outbuilding south of the lodge and swung open the doors. He pulled a tarp off a vehicle and threw it on the ground.

“Get in,” he said pointing at an Argo eight-wheel vehicle.

Joseph cranked the engine until it fired up then revved the motor and drove out of the building to the woods. There was little time left before dark and the trees seemed to close in behind them as they raced into the forest.

Abby turned to Joseph and asked, “Should I call the sheriff?”

“Wouldn’t do any good,” he answered. “I doubt they would come here anyway.”

The ATV tires clawed for traction on the rocky terrain when he slowed to navigate past a fallen tree. He knew the woods well enough having played there as a boy before the boundaries shifted. They reached a river crossing where the water rushed past rocks and roots jutted from the muddy river bank like tentacles.

“Hold on,” he said as he dipped the nose of the amphibious vehicle into the river.

With a jerk the current grabbed the ATV and Joseph was able to maneuver the vehicle across the river.

“Abby, remember when I told you about the place of danger, the place of change?” Joseph asked.

She nodded.

“This is that place,” Joseph said.

The trees cast shadows on the black earth of the forest floor and sounds were strangely muffled.

“Joseph, why is it so dangerous here?”

“In the early eighteen hundreds the town of Silverton became a hub for gold and silver mining. The town grew rapidly as did the greed for more land. The search for precious metals expanded and very quickly the townspeople demanded access to tribal lands which caused many border skirmishes. The leaders of Silverton struck a bargain with the tribal leaders, and agreed to rid them of a Raven Mocker that was terrorizing their people,” Joseph said.

“A Raven Mocker?” Abby asked.

“Yes, a creature that devours the hearts of the living and the souls of the dead, a witch that hunts on tribal lands. Upon learning of the tribe’s fears, the local townspeople agreed to intervene believing they would gain access to the tribe’s lands for simply dispelling a myth.”

Joseph conveyed the history to Abby. On June 7th, 1823, with the blessing of the tribe, a group of local men gathered up sacks of stones gathered from a sacred plot of tribal land. The men travelled by horseback deep into the mountains where the Raven Mocker was said to exist. After a half day’s ride they arrived at a ramshackle cabin, an old woman sat on the porch and stared silently at the men. One by one the men dismounted their horses and unstrapped bags of stones, the sky overhead darkened as rain clouds began to form.

“She is just an old woman,” Calvin Smith whispered to his partner Edmund.

The two men had been chosen to handle the mission. Calvin, Edmund and their men were popular in Silverton when unpopular things needed to happen.

“Who cares?” Edmund answered. “Her own kind wants her gone. It ain’t no business of ours what she is.”

With that said, Edmund gave the signal to start. The men, eleven in all, with sacks of stones at their feet, began throwing. The first nervous throws skipped off the rotted planks of the porch and one cracked through a dirty window. Calvin was the first to hit the women with a hard shot to the head, but she didn’t flinch. She stayed silent, eyes unblinking as the stones rained down on her. The skies opened up and a drenching rain poured down which caused the men to throw faster and harder. The woman remained still with her hands gripping the arms of a timber chair.