Chapter 6: Blessed are the Bold

CHAPTER 6

Blessed are the Bold

“The name means Hill of the Ghouls. Isn’t that messed up?”

The black van clunked on through the fading light of day. It was All Hallow’s Eve and rather than get drunk and steal candy from children like their peers, Jon and friends were bundled away in warm winter gear and passing around a bottle of scotch Kathy had stolen from her parents’ liquor stock.

“How much longer, you reckon?” Louis asked.

“Soon. Maybe twenty more minutes,” Michael answered from the driver’s seat.

“You actually been there?”

“Uh . . . ”

“That’s what I done figured.”

“Hey, I got a road atlas.” He hefted up a massive spiral notebook filled with the finest AAA maps. “It’s current. Came out last year. I know where I’m going.”

Michael lapsed back into discussing the fanciful and grotesque history of Goodleburg Cemetery, their ultimate destination. Jon only tuned in with half an ear, since he knew the first thing Michael said was untrue. The place was named after one of the families who had settled the area and donated the land for the religious to plant their carcasses. Their name might actually translate to “Hill of the Ghouls”, but that wasn’t the intent of those who Christianized the place Goodleburg.

Michael went on about ghosts, fatal car accidents, suspicious deaths, satanic cults, desecrated graves, and mutilated children. All of these apparently were connected to the graveyard. Each account had been published in various ghost hunting guides available in local bookstores.

“You really believe all that?” Louis asked.

“I look at it this way. A few things you might be able to write off as coincidence, bad luck, or someone making up a tale. But there are just so many stories collected in this one place that you have to pay attention. I mean, it seems like something’s going on.”

Jon kept his mouth shut. His recent brush with the bizarre had tossed all his old objections out the window. But—he couldn’t help yanking out that but—one of the reasons there were so many stories was that it was one of the first areas inhabited by colonists. The cemetery had some of the oldest graves in New York State. Thus it had more time to collect weird stories than in other places.

As for the larger number of car fatalities, the roads were barely one step above dirt paths. Add the icy winter weather and a Depression-Era alcoholism rate and you have a perfect recipe for large helpings of road pizza.

Jon moved to the back of the van and sat down next to Kathy. She had been keeping her distance on the trip.

“So, how is it my fault your parents abandoned you?” he began.

“Those damn pictures you showed them. It’s all my mom could talk about for days. They called up everyone they could about it, all over the world, and no one knew anything. Dad said it was probably a hoax, but when my mother gets on a new idea . . . Where did you get them anyway?”

“It’s not important.”

“Well, she got some anonymous package in the mail with a broken bowl and a letter in Latin.”

“Latin?”

“Weird, huh? That got them all excited and she got my dad to make a few phone calls down to some colleagues at the state university in Mexico City. Three days later, they had permits to do an excavation at an old site and they ran off.”

“That was fast, wasn’t it?”

“Yeah. That process is supposed to take months and the financing even longer. I guess some strings were pulled or whatever. My dad has a lot of connections down there.”

“So they just left you alone? “

“They gave me money for food and other stuff. It’s not the first time they’ve done this. ‘You have to make work your greatest joy in life,’ my father always says, ‘otherwise you’re just wasting time.’ And they do.”

“Sorry if it was my fault.”

She touched his hand lightly. “That’s okay. I’ll be home alone a lot.”

He stiffened up, in both senses. Damn it, why did his hormones have to constantly run wild? The invitation was open, right there for him to grab. Again he had an idea in his head of the movie-star hot woman he really wanted, and Kathy just didn’t fit the bill. He’d heard plenty of his mother’s feminist minions whining about men thinking with their cocks. He decided to take the opposite route for once and show them all. He pulled back. Kathy withdrew her hand and stared at the floor, saying nothing, cheeks a little red.

Michael’s voice filled the interior. More ghost sightings. More creepy happenings. On and on and on. It seemed like he’d memorized the book. Louis turned to Jon.

“Is he fulla bullshit or what?”

“Sort of.”

“No, I’m not,” Michael protested.

“I’ve looked into it.”

“‘Course you did,” Louis sneered. “You’re a big nerd. Always lookin’ shit up.”

“And the only real thing corroborating these stories outside of the spook books,” Jon said, ignoring Louis’s barbs, “is that abortion doctor in the 1940s. Pregnant women would slip into town at night for the operation and he would bury the unborn remains in the graveyard. It was hinted that he paid off the local cops, because he was only stopped when the FBI stepped in.”

“Shows what you know,” Michael yelled, gleeful. “They don’t have any cops. Place’s too small for a department. It’s patrolled by the county.”

“Touché.”

They hit the border limits for South Wales, a hamlet clustered in the poverty ridden towns south of Buffalo. It was an unincorporated township, hanging onto the ass end of the larger Wales. South Wales had been grandfathered in to modern New York because it originated from a time before local governments bothered to write stuff down. Pioneers went out, chopped down some trees, slapped up a mill near a creek and, voila, a new pocket of civilization blossomed.

The only thing in the colonial records about the place was its physical location. Rumors suggested that the place had been the scene of at least one unrecorded massacre. The area had originally been conquered by one of the Iroquois tribes and was then taken over by the unfriendly emissaries of the Holland Land Company. Later on, the company was ousted by English land grabbers.

It took them roughly five minutes to drive through the entire hamlet and another ten to locate the graveyard. Jon imagined it would be an image from an old horror flick. Iron railings surrounding the perimeter and a perpetually squeaking gate. Maybe a deranged groundskeeper with a lantern and rusty shovel prowled about the grounds. The ancient stones of the dead listing this way and that, and moss growing over everything. It was nothing like that. There was no gate or barrier, just some slate steps leading up to a raised area covered in graves that stretched out over an acre and a half.

They pulled their gear from the van and Michael led the way, waving about a flickering flashlight. It was a cold and biting night with a hint of icy rain on the wind. Typical late autumn in New York. The graves were old, low, and faded. Most were so weather beaten that their epitaphs had nearly eroded away. Many had been knocked over and broken in several pieces. Anarchy signs and swastikas were liberally spray painted about. A few beer cans and plastic six-pack rings spouted up here and there. Several graves looked like they’d been dug up as well, or at least recently disturbed in some way.

Suddenly Michael began running back towards the van.

“Where the hell you goin’?” Louis yelled after him.

“Forgot to lock the van door.”

“Gawd damnit.” Louis kicked a chunk of rock that used to be part of someone’s headstone. A dearly beloved sister. “I ain’t never gonna get used to this cold. That wind zips up and cuts you right to the bone.”

The ones born in the area almost instinctively pulled their jackets tighter and stomped their feet to generate warmth. Louis looked at them as if they were crazy, then joined in after a minute.

“Where’d he get that van anyhow?” Louis asked.

“He said his uncle let him borrow it.”

“Didn’t know he had an uncle,” Louis mused.

Neither did Jon. He’d known his friend since the fourth grade and the only uncle ever mentioned was one who burned up in a house fire in the early 1970s. Assuming the man hadn’t come back from the dead and bought a van, Michael was lying. Maybe he stole it?

The little light of their driver’s flashlight stopped, then became bigger as he returned. “All right,” Michael said. “Let’s get going. It’s over this way, I think.”

“You been here before?” Jon asked.

“Ah, no.”

“Then how do you know where we’re going?”

“Uh, well, I read about it, okay. It’s the only mausoleum here.”

“Where did you read about that? I didn’t see anything on it.”

“Guess you didn’t read those books as thoroughly as you thought.”

It took them a few more minutes of stumbling around to find the entrance. The door was obscured by a semi-circle of trees. It was a rectangular building with a locked gate in front of stone stairs that echoed down into the dead earth. The name above the entrance was nearly gone. Jon rubbed his hands across it and could barely make out the surname “Goodleburg”, the family who had donated the land. An old lock had been smashed off long ago and replaced by a modern one wrapped around a thick chain. Louis jerked it.

“We ain’t gettin’ in there.”

“Sure we are.” Michael pronounced and fished out some lock picks. “My brother showed me how to do this. Only thing he ever showed me.” He pushed forward and set to work on the lock.

“I don’t like it,” Kathy said. “We’re literally walking on someone’s grave here.”

“Ah, it’s not like we’re going to dig them up or anything,” Jon chided.

“Besides,” Michael triumphed, holding up the jangling lock, “we’re in.”

Total darkness dwelled below. The kind that only the bowels of the earth can produce. Four flashlights illuminated the room, but still could not drive it away. Musty smells, rotting leaves, dust, dirt, maybe some old rat feces. A wide room opened up from the stairs. Three stone caskets sat in the middle. The walls were lined with plaques where lesser members of the family had been interred. Michael was beside himself.

“Nice. Very nice.”

“Creepy as hell. Perfect for Halloween. You can almost feel the weirdness.”

And Jon could. Little by little, as he walked across the granite floor, the feeling crept up on him. The dread. The clench in his bowels. Just like in his basement. He stopped. What did it mean? Did it mean anything? Perhaps his mind was just playing tricks on him.

“What’s the matter with you,” Louis laughed at him. “You ‘bout shit your britches.”

“It’s just dank down here.”

Michael and Louis laughed harder. It meant being cast down to a lower spot on the totem pole. However, he’d been insulted enough by his parents to know how to handle it. First point, don’t show any reaction. Second, hit back.

“Almost as dank as your mom’s vagina.”

The laughter turned. Even Kathy, who normally shunned the boys verbal roughhousing, joined in. Her eyes shined brightly at Jon, but that look went as quick as it came. They reached the far end of the tomb and laid out their sleeping bags. Little votive candles, dozens of them, swiped from Louis’s survivalist uncle, were laid out over the floor and lit with a barbeque lighter. Their low flickering added to the mausoleum’s sinister aura.

Jon suppressed the panic as best he could, but by God, that feeling would not evaporate. Doritos and Mountain Dew and little disks of sugar and chocolate called Fudge Rounds, were passed about. The game was unpacked.

Jon placed the image of Crixen Runeburner in its appropriate place, his stats laid out on loose leaf, and picked up the cards. He had honed his skills at the game down to an instinctual rhythm. He could almost anticipate each of the Game Master’s actions and block with a corresponding throw and chant. It was a pattern, a mental dance, where the world described became a vivid gossamer waking dream.

Once the atmosphere tape was droning on a portable tape player, the game began. Jon, Louis, and Kathy dove into their characters, becoming Crixen Runeburner, Big Jim Umbrage, and Black Leaf. The scenario was spun out before them. To the east of the New Lands, where they had been adventuring for some time, on a ramshackle road in a derelict country, the heroes found a toothless beggar, dressed in black rags and waving a sack of coins at a crossroads.

“Steal,” yelled Louis.

“Deflect,” countered Kathy.

“Ask,” demanded Jon.

Between bursts of bloody phlegm, the ancient beggar described a world of green and plenty that no longer existed. Because the world was so easy, a man, this man, pushed things too far. He poked into the membrane of the forbidden and released the beast. His fat, sheltered life, which he oh-so smugly thought inviolate, was cast to arcane winds. A ravaging beast, which sucked the land’s life, was nearby in a dilapidated cemetery. The old man was too weak to travel.

“Go,” they recited together and threw their cards.

When the heroes looked back, the beggar had melted into the earth. Iron railings, rusted and twisted from time’s decay, surrounded the graveyard. A perpetually squeaking fence greeted them with ear piercing shrieks. The old tombs were crumbling and decayed, becoming little more than havens for giant spiders and other violent aberrations of nature.

“Kill.”

“Kill.”

“Kill,” was repeated over and over.

Finally the erstwhile heroes found the grand tomb, whose bronze doors they hammered open. The three mighty heroes descended into an octagonal room. Shimmering before them was a lady silhouetted in white, cold as the winter’s morn. Her black eyes absorbed them. Her idol was placed on the board.

“Attack,” roared Louis.

“Repelled,” replied the Game Master.

“Dispel,” spoke Kathy.

“Absorbed,” replied the Game Master.

Crixen Runeburner racked his brains. Which wizard trick would destroy the evil? Every attack was harmlessly passing through the enemy and she did not retaliate. Was this not the beast they sought? No? No!

“Speak,” yelled Jon. “Speak with dead.”

The card was thrown.

A flare. A flush. An explosion of cold.

The woman was there. An exact duplicate of the miniature, only seven feet tall and screaming. The party jumped back. How could they not? Kathy rolled over some candles and accidently set her jacket on fire. Louis smacked his head clean into a stone wall. A small trail of blood followed him down to the floor.

Her outline was pure platinum white, yet nothing filled in the borders of its form. Her black orbs grew into terrifying dimensions. They tore into Jon’s soul, claiming portions of it for her own. An insect pinned to a card, he sprawled on the floor, limbs jerking about in rhythmic terror. An invisible foot crushed the air from his lungs.

And her shriek! Like razor blades across chalkboards. It cut deep. Into the soul. Into the psyche. Into the ear drums. Blood drops circled around the basin of his ear.

She ran forward on thin air. The tassels of her intangible shawl draped over him. Like a naked shower in the North Pole, the heat ran out of him. Then she was gone, up and out of the tomb. Jon sat up. After she passed, the cold air warmed ever so slightly. He rushed over to Kathy and helped her get the coat off, throwing the thing away to smolder in a corner.

“Come on,” Kathy yelled and dragged Jon towards the tomb entrance.

Their voices echoed strangely in the hall, as if a new room had opened up in it. Footfalls followed them out into the star bright night. The Cold Woman was in the center of the cemetery, dancing on the tip of a pointed gravestone. Kathy clutched Jon close, and he held her back with equal intensity.

“Ah seen some messed up stuff,” Louis’s voice drifted in from behind them. “Once saw a kid get a pencil shoved right into his eye, but this beats all.”

Her wails began again, dragging over them. The sounds had a tang, a flavor like old sins dredging up putrid blood. The world wavered. Shadows grew teeth. Monstrous feet shambled about them, unseen yet there. Hot breath with evil intent snorted, its origin a single microbe apart from the world. So close it could taste their flesh.

Louis broke. All that football practice aided him well in running from danger. Head still bloody, he dodged and weaved away from the unseen perils. His screams merged with the Cold Woman’s, then disappeared among the grave markers. Jon only wished he could follow, but he was rooted to the spot. He pulled Kathy’s head into his chest and held it. Eyes squeezed shut, tears dripped all over his shirt.

“It’s coming. It’s coming,” she cried.

He felt it too. Though the true nature of “it” was an unknown. Just a supreme sensation of impending evil, of a calamity yet to happen. A nuclear winter where Jon and Kathy were squashed bugs, trampled and forgotten.

All he could do was stare at the Cold Woman without blinking. The world became worse if he shut his eyes. That’s when things became real. All the evil in existence played out for him.

This site had always been a point of evil. Here, monsters were born and innocents died. It had always been so. They all danced through Jon’s mind. Weird, blood soaked rituals, enacted by tribes whose existence had long been wiped away by the sands of time, created totem beasts of ferocious power and bottomless appetites. Bad magic had created a leak, allowing things from beyond the universe to sneak in. Over the ages, hordes of demons manifested from this cemetery had caused untold misery throughout the world. Witch doctors, shamans, old world sorcerers, even a few New Age gurus had exploited the weakness here to ferment evil.

Reflections of the magician’s spirits increased, each presenting a foul offering to things beyond. While their garb changed significantly—feathered headdresses, shirts made of human skin, bloody lab coats—their intentions never did. Even a few kids, no older than ten, were part of the increasing horde. They ran about in knee pants, holding up a mason jar filled with something inky black and putrid.

Jon couldn’t stand anymore. For the worst was to come, he knew. A primeval warning, dredged up from a thousand fear-filled past lives, told him not to look. To hold on. To do whatever it took to keep those lids open. Terror lurked about, absolute alien malevolence, that meant to steal his soul, absorb his being, feast on his karmic effluence. Formless, caught on the eddies of time, inscribed in antediluvian rock, the evil was there. And it could not be bested.

The Cold Woman turned and ran at him, shrill and covered in all the pain of the world. He screamed, but no sound emitted. Knees buckled, the frigid earth received his body. Kathy stood still, her own high-pitched wailing lost in the Cold Woman’s cacophony. Her transparent face loomed over him, distorted in anger. The black eyes rolled about abnormally in her skull. Her shivering fingers reached for his throat.

Jon’s willpower abandoned him. An instinct to close his eyes, to not see his own death coming, took control and he squeezed them shut. All he remembered was a pale glow. Sickly yellow with black splotches, fading in and out like a dying sun. His heart was grabbed and squeezed. Life in all forms sucked away to feed this beast. Then—

It was gone.

Jon opened his eyes. There was nothing there. He was still cold, but the woman had disappeared, evaporated into the ether. Kathy was stark still, whimpering. He took her hand and led her quietly across the graveyard, towards the van. Submissively, she followed, face half-buried in her shirt.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“I . . . I don’t know.”

“What happened to that thing?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated. “My eyes were closed.”

“Yeah.”

“So what was that? What happened?”

“I don’t know any more than you do.”

“It looked just like that miniature.”

“I know. Let’s get a safe distance and—”

They had reached the stone steps near where the van was parked. Headlights flared up. Jon leapt down the stairs, leaving Kathy behind. For a moment, he thought someone had jacked the van, but it was still there. Its chrome reflected the moonlight. Twin brake lights trailed off down the road. Who the hell was that? Another goddamn mystery.

“Let’s just go,” Kathy whined.

He took two steps forward, realized his error, and ran back up.

“What?” Kathy whined.

“Michael’s got the fucking keys,” he yelled.

Their driver was still deep in the mausoleum, sitting among the empty soda bottles and sleeping bags. He was hunched over, rocking back and forth, game miniatures scattered about him.

“Yes, yes,” he said to the air. “I understand. I agree.”