Uncollected Blood (5 page)

Paul was irritated, how had the night gone so wrong, he was going to get a nice bit of sleep before his early morning hike and he could only top that by seeing Melinda again, now he wished he’d settled for the Z’s.

“You think I’m crazy,” she said.

What could he say?
He chose silence, which is never the right thing to say to a woman.

“It creeps me out what I believe.” She continued in his silence, “I’d love to be like the rest of you, never knowing the better. But I can’t. I cannot let them go on to the next life in confusion, lost, angry, scared. I learned how to speak to them.” Paul took the couch this time. Almost as a challenge,
come sit beside me, I’ll get what I want out of this night if you’re going to act nuts. Then I’ll have to move out and change my phone number,
he thought
. Right?
He turned to his friendly shadow, which had returned sitting, waiting.  Must’ve been the angle he was at before that had made it look as if it were gone.

“She wants to cry,” Melinda said. “The old me wants to cry.”

“Are you okay?” He knew that was opening a can of worms. “You said someone you knew died recently…” Still playing the caring, sensitive guy,
give it up
! No matter how pristine and elegant a beauty she may be, Paul was not willing to deal with crazy, yet against his better judgment, he continued to play that role.

“Robert was the guy I wanted to marry,” she said. Her shoulders drooped and she collapsed into the recliner. “I know that must be awkward for you. But you’ll know what I mean when you meet that person. It sounds stupid to say soul mate, and that’s not what he was, he was just the kind of guy I wanted around me. I’d do anything to have him back.”

“You said it is a soul’s last night on Earth, is there any way to, I don’t know, reach him, say goodbye?”

“I don’t want to say goodbye.” Melinda’s face jerked away, she faced the wall like a pouting child.

Paul looked at the clock, dreading the moment it struck midnight.
Would she burst into tears and make him drive her home? Would she keep him up the rest of the night telling him about how her dead dream guy used to make her waffles and cupcakes?
It was 11:51 p.m.

Outside it sounded as if the wind was howling, but Melinda told Paul otherwise.

“You hear them, they all want in. None of them want to leave.” There was the rattling of doors and glass, from the wind, Paul suspected,
just the wind
.  The howling increased. Even the room seemed to swell,
or was it just Paul’s head that began to throb in pain?

The walls vibrated, the rattling of picture frames and plates and glasses in the cabinets filled the apartment.

“Don’t go with them.” Paul heard Melinda say, but he knew it wasn’t directed at him. Her eyes looked beyond him. He turned to see if someone else was there, only the shadow of the vacuum, still waiting.

The racket began to affect Paul’s heart rate. It sped up with his breathing. He fought to release his voice and finally gasped.

“What’s going on?”

“I’m sorry,” she said still looking through him. He twisted around and saw the shadow on the wall stand up. The shadow stepped forward out of the light and Paul could not see it any longer.  His heart pounded, he twisted back to Melinda.

“You are wearing his jacket,” she said. “You can’t blame me for wanting this, blame me because I knew how to do it. But realize how happy you are going to make me.” This time she was speaking to Paul. Their eyes connected fiercely.

“When we met you said you weren’t afraid of death. Do you remember our conversation that night?” Paul didn’t verbatim, but it certainly sounded like something he would say when he was drunk, but he knew in that moment it was not something he really believed.

“What are you doing?” He asked the right question.

“I’m swapping you out.” She bit her lips back into her mouth and cried. She whimpered something about how she thought it would be so much easier. “It’s what I want.”

Was Paul paralyzed?
His heart still pounded, his head was ready to burst, but his body could not move. He couldn’t even look back into the bedroom. Behind him he knew the shadow had joined them. The shadow loomed over him and suddenly it felt like a weight pressed against his shoulders. He hadn’t realized he had dropped to his knees until his view of Melinda changed and he was staring up at her.

She began to move her lips, but the sounds coming out were caused from the smacking of her lips, not words at first, but soon a low hum formed and from it a tone, a primal tone, held sharp like the wailing of a teapot.

At last the force of the shadow was no longer on his shoulders and he felt himself start to float back up to his feet.

“No!” Paul screamed as he saw the top of his own head now beneath him. Soon he had risen to the ceiling and beneath him Melinda had not raised her view, she was concentrating on his body. The sounds she made reverberated around him, they sounded different, felt different. Like air rushing all around him he felt himself pulled away from his body.

Melinda sighed; exhausted she fell back onto the couch. Her chest rose and fell deeply. She could barely keep her eyes open. They shut tight, and the only sound above her own breath and heartbeat was a ticking clock she’d never noticed before.  Before she could open her eyes, she felt Paul’s palm against her cheek. His warm hand cupped her cheek and his eyes greeted hers as she found the strength to open them again.

“You.” She smiled.

“Cutting it pretty close,” he said. “It’s two minutes to midnight.”

Melinda found the source of the ticking and watched as it ticked nearer to twelve o’clock.

“Had to.”

“I waited all night.”

“I’ve waited seven months.” She countered. The walls were still shaking around them. Paul’s head twisted around looking through the wall, knowing who was outside trying to get in, so many souls unwilling to leave. It was Melinda’s magic that had brought them to this place.

“It’s almost over. A few more seconds.”

Outside a bell chimed and the last tick that mattered went off. Melinda sat up and Paul’s lips kissed hers. 
Finally
, she thought.

“Merry Christmas, Melinda,” he said.

“Merry Christmas, Robert.”

THE END.

Game trails run all through these woods. It is something you have to be careful when trekking back to camp late at night. You might think you are on a path, but deer don’t think like we do. They have their own reasoning for going the way that they do in the woods.

You see deer are very much aware that they still have predators, but perhaps technology and convenience has made it easy for mankind to forget his.

Spend a night out in the woods, look at how dark it is ten feet from the fire. Pitch black. Anything could be out there waiting. Oh it would be disconcerting if you could see what hid in the shadows, or maybe it would be a relief. But man’s enemy is not a bear or a boar.

It is a hunter with patience and poise.

It wasn’t all that long ago that my friend moved out into the mountains. He had found a cabin real cheap that he intended to fix up. He took a small camper up there and would park it on weekends and work all day long before spending the night enjoying the stars and a campfire, much like we are tonight.  He would work himself until his arms couldn’t swing the hammer anymore, or his old knees felt as bad as his lower back. Then he would plop down and have a cold adult beverage until he was good and warm and ready to pass out.

He did this every weekend, obsessed with creating the perfect cabin to retire to within the next year or two. He would come back each weekend and share pictures of sunsets and sunrises and the improvements he had made.

At work we joked about how he was going to become a bearded hermit who spooked hikers by day, and his snoring would drive away all the wildlife in the area. He wasn’t too far from the Appalachian Trail, but he said there was no trail connecting his cabin to it, nor to the creek that ran just below him. But it was all part of his plan once fall came around and all the leaves were off the trees, much like they are right now.

Fall came and true to his word my friend was deep in the woods cutting paths. He returned one week with pictures of the scenic spot he had uncovered.

“It’s on my property,” he told me. “Realtor never had a picture of it, would’ve made the cabin worth double what they asked for.”

He was so excited. “Funny thing is, I can see the remnants of a trail. Like the original owners had one and never kept it up.”

I warned him about it being a game trail, but he was certain.

“It leads straight down from the cabin. When you look back up the hill you can see it clear as day. As the trees on the edge of the path were much older than the saplings which had sprung up.”

A week or two later he was obsessed with plant life and had bored me to tears listing all the trees he’d identified in his woods, but the note of interest was that the saplings he’d cut up on the trail were not native to that part of Virginia. He even found a tag on one of the trees from a nursery.

“The trees were planted. They’d actually covered up the trail. Makes no sense.”

The property had been fenced all around afterwards. There was no gate leading down to the creek until my friend had fashioned himself one. He had assumed it was because the previous owner had dogs, as they had also left behind a couple of pens and igloos.

“Why have a place in the mountains, with a scenic few at a creek and fence it off?”

I told my friend I had no idea, maybe it was just a hermit who wanted to be away from town and didn’t want to bother with the upkeep of the trail.

“No, they had a family.” He told me, “They move a few years ago and let it fall apart a little, but they didn’t move far, just closer into town, big lot, no trees at all. Plenty of mowing and upkeep.”

I agreed it was odd because that’s what you do in polite conversation, but I doubted my friend’s concerns. He seemed obsessed with how he had managed to find the cabin at such a cheap price now.

The next time I saw him he was a different man. He looked old enough to be retired. His body moved like a limp sail on a boat and his eyes seemed deeper set, like his eyelids had fallen back behind his face, unable to be closed ever again.

I only believe his story because he had never given me any reason to doubt him. What he thinks happened may not have happened, but I believe he believes it happened.

Now, like any other weekend he left straight from work, driving three and half hours into the mountains, just south of Lexington. He arrived at dark and unloaded tools and supplies as he always did. By this time he had renovated the cabin so that it had working plumbing and a wood stove. But the weather on this particular weekend was going against the preconceptions for December temperatures, as the low was only expected for be fifty degrees overnight. So he had every intention of getting one more night out by the campfire.

Moments later, he sat by a hot fire, drinking a cold beverage. The moon was particularly bright, but not full. Through the leafless trees he could see just about every constellation. It wasn’t a sight he hadn’t seen before, but that night he said it felt different.

Like the universe was wide-awake gazing back at him.

The sensation spooked him. He’d never believed in ghosts or the supernatural, not since he was little. But he didn’t feel alone that night. Every time he brought his eyes down to the pitch-black woods surrounding him, his heart raced a little. The hairs on his neck stood up and his eyes played tricks on him.

There was something in the woods standing at the start of the trail to creek. He knew it was there. He said he couldn’t really believe his eyes, but he could feel it like its breath had traveled the 100 feet to his campfire.

He made noise as you should for most bears, but he thought it too small to be a bear. Still he banged on a pan and talked nonsense at it.

He knew it didn’t move. It had no reaction at all and because of that he was certain it was just his mind playing a trick on him.

He remembered yelling one final thing at it before dousing his campfire and going inside his cabin. He said, “Come on out, coward!”

The next day he woke up laughing at himself as he made coffee and breakfast. He figured it was a sign he was getting closer to needing to retire, just a senile old man. To further prove his point, the hook he used to close the screen door was unhooked and he must’ve tracked some mud in as he followed it all the way back to the cot he had set up next to the wood stove.

He swept it up before he noticed his boots were not muddy. Well he was determined not to believe in anything spooky happening so he chalked it up to the previous weekend and getting in late last night and not taking a notice at all.

He went about his day working on the cabin, adding a bookcase I believe. So he was indoors most the day, but by lunchtime he had to get out in what was for December, still exceptionally warm weather. He decided he’d investigate his visitor by taking the trail down to the creek.

There were no tracks to cause any alarm and by the time he reached the creek he felt like he had just been spooked the night before, nothing to worry about at all.

But he was wrong.

He told me he had never been more wrong in his life. And he knew he was wrong because nothing in his mind or body prepared him for what happened next. It had told him,
everything is okay. Everything is fine
.

That night he even stayed outside again, having a cold beverage or two and roasting hot dogs. Not a care in the world as he waxed nostalgic about his days before having such a fantastic getaway.

He went to bed around 10 o’clock or at least tried. It was a nightmare he couldn’t wake up from. Something was in the cabin with him. Something mocked him with echoes and stirrings. Every time my friend found the cause of a noise—a banging pipe, a fallen book, then a new sound would occur luring him elsewhere in the cabin until he was certain he had been running around in circles all night. He told me in confidence that he lost his wits that night. He had gone feverishly insane as every little sound bothered him. His heart shook in his ribcage like it wanted out and finally in a panic unlike anything he’d ever experience he got in his truck and drove the three and half hours back to his home. Leaving his wallet among other items he had intended to take home with him at the end of the weekend.

He didn’t tell me about this weekend right after it happened. It was a couple of weeks at least. We had kind of grown tired of seeing pictures of the cabin and hearing him talk so poetically about retirement that we didn’t even notice he’d stopped feeding us updates every Monday morning.

When he finally did tell me, he told me he had not been back to the cabin since. He told me he had tried to contact the previous owners and had finally decided to show up at their front door unannounced hoping not to sound so crazy.

“It makes sense, don’t it?” he asked me after every revelation. “Why else would they have abandoned such a great spot at that price?”

I wondered if my friend was having buyer’s remorse, but one thing my friend was, was good with money and I couldn’t imagine the cabin had brought him to ruin. But perhaps the amount of work he’d given himself now felt too daunting.

I reminded him that his realtor had to tell him if the cabin was haunted or a murder had happened there. But that’s not true in Virginia. You don’t have to say anything at all. Just remember that when you are getting ready to buy a house. You might just want to investigate it a little before you plop down a deposit, if you believe in that sort of thing.

My friend was a true believer now. I could tell there were events of that night that he did not share.

Still I wasn’t the only one who tried to talk some sense into him and keep him from scaring the family he’d bought the cabin from. But there was no stopping him and I was only surprised by the fact that he called me at home the night after he confronted the family on their doorstep.

“They called the cops,” he told me as he headed back to the cabin. “They didn’t tell me anything.” I could hear how upset he was and I told him he should just give the cabin another rest this weekend. But he was determined.

Now I know I couldn’t have stopped my friend. But guilt is a funny thing and if you don’t know that you’ll learn it at some point. I still wonder to this day if I had the words in me to tell my friend to take it easy, to go see a doctor, I would’ve. But I didn’t think I needed to at the time. I didn’t believe in ghosts and goblins and things.

I was wrong. When work didn’t hear from him for several days, they called the police and sure enough his body was found at his cabin. He’d had a heart attack and died.

I was wrought with guilt and so when we were asked by the police to come up and collect his things since he had no next of kin, I felt required to help out.

I was there three hours, boxing up his things when a pickup with a trailer arrived. A bunch of young Latinos jumped out of the truck followed by an older white man who introduced himself as Pastor Crosby or something. And I just figured he was from my friend’s church and was there to help as well until I noticed all the trees in the back of the trailer.

I asked him what all the trees were for and he pointed at the trail my friend had made down to the creek.

He told me, “You should never make a path for evil to find you. Trees have always confused dark forces. They toil in circles as they should, and they leave us alone until we are foolish enough to guide them back to us.”

I asked him what he meant, but he seemed irritated to be delayed so what he said was terse. “There is a hunter waiting for each of us. Our own personal predator, remember that. All it has to do is find you.”

It found my friend.

THE END.