About a hundred yards past our property line in the back yard, there was a narrow line of trees that divided our housing addition from a small strip mall. Lucky’s Pub was located at the far end of the building and it made the perfect hang out for someone like me, who liked to get a little toasted every now and then and was a stickler for following the rules of the road by not driving while intoxicated.
As I took this walk, I had taken so many times before, I had almost forgotten what had brought me outside in the first place. That is until my new friend Jeffery appeared, walking right beside me.
“Hello, Adrian,” the ghost boy said. I noticed that the slight glow was surrounding him once again. “Are you ready to see the world the way it truly exists?”
“What does that mean?” I asked. I was growing annoyed with all of the cryptic insinuations.
“I will show you once we are on the other side of those trees.”
As we neared the trees the ground began to slope downward toward a small creek. I asked the boy a question that I had been thinking about all through dinner. “Tell me something there, Jeffery, why are you appearing to me in this ghostly image and using the phone to talk to me in secret? If you and your gang of creepy friends are residing in my body, why not speak to me from within?”
“That is a good question,” the boy said, jumping the creek as if his feet would get wet if he walked through the water. “We are actually clustered in a part of your brain and we feel mental communication, although possible, would be a little too much strain on your sanity. If you start hearing voices in your head you may think you’re going mad.”
“Oh, yeah, we wouldn’t want that to happen,” I mumbled sarcastically.
Jeffery stopped and turned to look me in the eyes. “I know things seem strange right now, but we need you to be as stable as possible, for the things you will see tonight will push your sanity to the limit. I only hope you can handle it.”
I nodded at him, silently hoping the same thing.
We came out of the trees and up into the parking lot of the strip mall. Jeffery came to a halt and I stood beside him, wondering what our next step was.
“Look around you, Adrian.”
I did as the boy said, and although I didn’t notice anything at first, I soon began to see a familiar glow surrounding some of the people that were walking up and down the sidewalk. Not only that, I noticed many of them showed signs of their deaths. A noose around a neck. A needle in an arm. Those who showed no signs I could only assume died of natural causes.
“You see them, don’t you?” Jeffery asked.
“Ghosts,” I said with a trembling breath. They were everywhere, walking amongst the living as if they were merely going about their day-to-day business.
I suddenly noticed that my heart was beating fast and I was sure that explosion was imminent.
“Try not to be scared, Adrian,” the boy said. “These ghosts will not hurt you, some of them can be very helpful.”
Jeffery began to walk across the parking lot, and after a few seconds, I convinced my legs to follow him.
“Why are they here?” I asked once I had caught up with him. “Shouldn’t they be in the land of the dead like the ones on the train?”
“Ghosts stay in the living realm for various reasons. Some have unfinished business to attend to, some have trouble moving on to the next step and leaving their earthly lives behind, some just prefer to stay here. Haunting the living is one of the most entertaining pastimes you could ever experience.”
“Is this your power?”
“Yes, and when I was living, it was a gift I was terrified of, but I soon learned that no harm would come to me at the hands of these people and while I was together with the other eight ghosts, I found that it was a power I could share with only them.”
“What about these evil spirits that you mentioned before?”
“The evil ones can and will harm you if they get the chance. Luckily, they are easily distinguished from the ghosts you see before you now. Their auras are black and corrupt.”
“Kind of like a politician’s soul?” I joked. I got the impression Jeffery didn’t care for the comment. “So, where are we going now?”
“Our next destination is a cemetery that lies about a mile west of here. Do you know it?”
I thought about a few of the funerals I had attended for some friends who had been lost in the train accident. “Yeah, I’m familiar.”
As we made our way to the main road, I noticed a woman walking slowly through the parking lot toward us. Her clothes reflected a long-gone age, when the females wore bodices and carried frilly umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun. When we drew close enough to see the woman’s face, I was surprised at the sunken features that graced it, as if the years of decay that must have destroyed her earthly body by now had somehow translated to her face. The glow that surrounded her was slightly faded and I could see parts of her skull through her thin, transparent skin.
As if reading my mind, (come to think of it, he probably was) Jeffery answered my next question before it passed my lips. “The longer a ghost remains in the realm of the living, the weaker their image will get. It is the memories of the living, of those who loved us in life, that keep our spirits strong. As those people pass on or their memories fade, our spirits fade with them. Soon, that woman will fade into nothingness, unless she decides to move on to a different realm.”
“The realm of the dead?”
“Either the realm of the dead or one of the many others that await after life.”
“What do you mean? Are we talking about Heaven and Hell?”
“Perhaps. I know of other realms, such as that of The Nightmare Tree, an awful place I visited while alive, but I know not what is to be found within the others.”
We continued to walk down the main road with the number of ghosts that crossed our paths far outweighing the living.
“Cemeteries are extremely heavy with spiritual activity, and many of the older ones act as gateways into the other realms. There is one in particular in southern Indiana that is very powerful, in a town called Triloville, are you familiar with it?”
“I’ve heard of it, but I’ve never been there.”
“There have been quite a few strange occurrences in that town over the past seventy-five years or so. The cemetery affects the entire area. If worse comes to worse we may have to go there.”
Up to that point I was only partially listening to Jeffery, my attention still being held by the multitude of ghosts that were passing us, but the foreboding in his last sentence brought my attention fully back to the conversation.
“See, what does that mean? Why are you so damned cryptic all of the time? Why can’t you just come out and tell me what would happen if we went to that town?”
“Because there is much to learn, and you do not need to be burdened with that information unless it is absolutely necessary. For now, we just need to focus on the cemetery down the road.”
Both of us fell silent after that and it wasn’t long before we found ourselves standing at the entrance to the Woodbridge Cemetery. Only days before, I had read a news story in the paper about recent vandalism to some of the gravestones and the plans to add heavy wrought iron gates to the entrance. At this point there was nothing to bar our entry into the welcoming darkness beyond.
I stepped over the threshold and somehow felt an immediate drop in temperature. Trying hard to shake off the cold, I kept walking down the paved path. A gravestone near the entrance caught my eye and Jeffery must have noticed the recognition.
“What does it say?” he asked.
“Joseph Wincot,” I answered. “He was killed in the train crash. One of our porters.”
We walked on. The dead leaves crunching under my feet echoed in the empty air and as Jeffery and I drew closer to the headstones within the middle of the grounds, more ghostly figures came into view and an eerie mist seemed to seep out of the ground like steam from a hot soup.
“The mist, what is it?” I inquired.
“The cold you felt when you entered the cemetery is caused by the low temperatures of the ghosts, the mist is also caused by this and surrounds a spirit at all times. When such a high number of ghosts populate one area, the mist will be more visible.”
I watched with interest as the ghost of a young man crawled out of a freshly covered grave and ran to another ghost to ask what was happening to him.
“Is this mist something only I can see?”
“You and anyone else who has the gift of sight. Despite what society thinks of them, there are many people in this world who are able to see the dead. When I was alive, back in London, I was apprenticed with a ghost hunter for a while. He used this gift to make a small fortune ridding haunted houses of their ghosts. Now, society sees these people as con artists and charlatans.”
“Wait, you’ve been dead for over a hundred years, how would you know anything about our society?”
“I know everything that you know, Adrian, for I picked it directly from your brain.”
That little piece of information made me feel a bit uncomfortable.
As we started to near the center of the graveyard, I noticed that the number of ghosts were starting to thin considerably, which made the creepy mist thin out as well. Soon, Jeffery stopped near a large headstone and pointed to an enormous, ugly tree that was hanging over a big puddle of muddy rainwater.
I looked into the ghost boy’s face and saw his eyes widen with fear.
“Hide behind the headstone,” Jeffery said with urgency, “he’s coming.”
Jeffery and I quickly crouched down behind the grave marker and I asked; “Who? Who’s coming?”
He looked me in the eyes. “Samen!”
I then heard a strange bubbling sound coming from the old tree. “I’m not ready for this!”
“Of course not,” Jeffery shot back, “you are only here to observe. You must know what you’re up against. Peek over the top of the headstone, but try your best not to be seen.”
I pulled myself up to my knees and cautiously peered over the top of the stone. I could see the puddle of dark water bubbling and watched in horror as a large shape began to emerge from within.
He had to be over ten feet tall, and at the tip of his head I could see something rotted and green that coiled once on itself and then came to a point. It was only after I saw the rest of his head that I realized it was a stem. The back of his head was that of a dull, orange, pumpkin that gave way to a large, skeletal face. His long teeth met in a terrifying grin of death. He wore a heavy cloak and from each sleeve protruded hands that most resembled the curling vines and leaves that his pumpkin head would have been born from. From the midsection down, the cloak changed into a shadowy smoke that seemed to move of its own accord. I could see black hands flowing out from the darkness and grabbing the surrounding gravestones for support as angry eyes stared out of the cloud to take in the surrounding area. It was then that I realized one of these creatures was what held my son in the Taco Hut bathroom.
“The dark clouds that surround him house many of the evil spirits at his command.” Jeffery stated.
As I stared at the horrific being that was slowly moving across the graveyard, I could faintly pick up the sound of torturous moaning that I assumed came from the damned spirits around him. It was with dawning dread that I realized the sounds were coming from deep beneath the ground. As if the dead bodies which populated the cemetery were crying out in great discomfort at the very presence of the nightmarish creature.
Samen suddenly came to a stop and turned in our direction, his hollow eye sockets searching the grounds around us.
I ducked down behind the stone and looked at Jeffery. “Do you think he knows we’re here?”
The boy paused for a long moment, and then said; “He may have seen us, but strange things like this tend to happen when he’s around.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, but Jeffery didn’t need to answer. I could feel the ground beneath me rumbling and as I tried to back away from the headstone, I was thrown off my feet by an emerging coffin.
With a great splintering crack the lid of the casket was torn away and a tattered, skeletal dead body began to crawl out. The dead man was dressed in a three-piece suit that was as rotted and deteriorating as his flesh. What remained of his face was a mixture of loose muscle and decayed skin over a gaping skull. As he tried to reach me, his hands made clawing motions at the ground in an effort to pull himself further out of his hole, his jaw moved up and down as if trying to form words, but only a dusty, rasping sound came out.
I clumsily got to my feet and turned to run from the zombie, but was stopped in my tracks by the broad chest of another walking corpse. Suddenly, I was back on my butt and surrounded by four more wheezing, rattling dead bodies.
With a blinding move of its arm, the big one gripped my throat in his boney hand. His strength was uncanny. His decaying flesh was rough and cold against my skin. He swung me hard and I felt my feet leave the ground, just before I was slammed full force into a tall, monument headstone. The headstone moved with the weight of the impact, tilting backward slightly but remaining in the ground.
The pain in my back was searing, but soon forgotten when the arms of the other zombies began to cover me and hold me down against the grave marker.
The first zombie was now fully out of his grave and was limping toward me slowly, while his companions held me in place.
I struggled to try and get free and felt a wet sensation around my midsection. Looking to my right I saw that the one holding me from there must have died fairly recently. Her soggy, rotting arm was dripping down the front of my shirt.
The first corpse had now stopped directly in front of me and was looking into my eyes. Again, his jaw moved up and down, but again the same rasping, gurgling sound poured from his throat. Only an inch from my face, I could smell the ancient earth, and long decomposed innards on his breath.
From the corner of my eye I could see Jeffery watching the show unfold with a look of utter hopelessness.
“Do something!” I croaked.
“I can’t, our powers can only work through you.”
“Then use me, just hurry they’re crushing me.”
“You can’t control it yet, something could go wrong and you may be hurt.”
“I’m hurting now,” I groaned.
“Very well. Emma, we need you!”
The pain was immediate. A white-hot stream of fire blasted from my mouth and the zombie in front of me was engulfed in flames. He began to stumble away and an unholy scream poured from his throat. Suddenly, I could feel the blaze searing from my eyes and my vision was filled by a fuzzy, white blur. I could feel the grips of the other corpses loosen and more screams filled the air.
Then, once again, everything went black.
Find out what happens next in The 9 Ghosts of Samen's Bane, available now on Amazon in paperback and for the Kindle and Kindle app.