Note: This was the first ‘episode’ where I shared my experiences: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/12jfpjb/the_town_that_time_forgot/
When you do the kind of work I do, you often find yourself being something of an outcast. I mean, sure, there’s the whole ‘necromancer’ vibe there… but there’s a good bit more to it than just that. It’s hard to put a finger on, but I suspect that my colleagues are watching me just as closely as they are the unexplained incidents we’re sent to investigate. Honestly, I can’t really blame them for that. There is a tendency for those who practice my particular ‘art’ to either go bat shit insane at some point… or to get flush with power and need ‘retired’. Nice way of saying buried six feet deep with their heart removed and burned. I don’t think they watch the vampires as closely, but I digress.
I don’t handle every case that pops across my desk. I mean, not any more. I’ve enough time with the division that I can generally pick and choose what I want to investigate, as long as I don’t cost the division too many resources. Monetary resources specifically. People are, for lack of a better word, replaceable. Take that to mean what you will.
Someone once asked me if there were any cases which scared me. I… I don’t know if it’s even possible for me to be scared of anything now. I mean I’ve literally stared a demon in the eyes, and told death to go bother someone else. I’m not brave, not by any stretch of the imagination. I’ve just seen worse. Don’t believe it? Well, let me tell you about a case I worked on a few years ago.
I was just wrapping up a report, when my phone rang. The phone was this old rotary dial type, the kind that went out of use in the 60’s, though I suspected this one even predated that. If that phone rang, then I was needed. It never rang. In fact, it couldn’t. The phone wasn’t hooked up to any line, and didn’t have any power. Yet every so often, maybe two or three times a year, it’d ring. I’d answer it, and be given directions to some place I was needed. Drop everything, grab my ritual tools, and head there. No questions asked.
That day was no different. I was directed to a small train station in Virginia, where I was informed that my ‘expertise’ was needed. Tickets would be waiting for me, and I was to leave in the next hour or so.
I don’t like flying. It’s not that I’m afraid of it or everything, but…let’s just say that every time I’ve flown, it’s been turbulence the whole way and something has always gone wrong. Probably the machinations of some spirit I’ve pissed off… or it could just be coincidence. I’m superstitious. Kinda goes with the territory there.
I don’t remember the flight, just my trying to sleep through out it, and a rather hard landing. On the ground, I was met by two other agents, and piled into a car. We drove out this long winding road, passing into the wilderness and mountains. We must have driven an hour before the car turned on this dirt road that was little better than a walking track through the woods. This dead ended at an old bridge that crossed a river which, I suspected given another good hard rain storm, it’d eat that old bridge and a large part of the bank with it.
The briefing was pretty simple. They always are. Two weeks earlier, a group of kids from Raleigh, had headed up into the mountains to do a ‘ghost hunt’ at this station. There was some local rumor about a murdered girl who haunted the station. All normal stuff, creepy building, some poor lost soul. Not what I’d be sent to deal with. I said as much, and was told that there was more to the story. Of the kids, two had gone missing outright. They hadn’t been found yet, and it wasn’t expected they would be. One had managed to ‘escape’, though she’d either gouged out her own eyes, or had them gouged out. She was also declared clinically insane, and had kept babbling on about some ‘ritual’ they had tried to talk to the girl.
Shit.
So that was the problem.
See, with necromancy, we will perform rituals in some cases to encourage (more like force) a spirit to come forward to speak to us. Those rituals aren’t exactly what you’d call ‘safe’. Make one simple mistake, fail to do one thing right… and the spirits can (and will) hurt you if given a chance. Ever play with a Ouija board? Maybe you’ve heard the stories about seeing or hearing things after doing that. Same premise really, though this is 100 times worse.
Naturally, the agents weren’t about to go with me. I mean, I could have demanded an escort, but honestly I didn’t need to worry about them causing more problems, or ending up possessed. Dealing with an angry spirit is one thing. Dealing with one that’s in the body of an agent armed with a pistol… it’s another.
That town was dead, much like the girl I was going to try to contact, if not contain. Like those two missing kids were. Broken windows on abandoned stores flickered in the dying light as the sun started to dip beneath the mountains that surrounded it. Small animals skittered at my footsteps, sometimes offering a hiss of displeasure, or a dark glare from their luminescent eyes before they moved out from my sight. The town had probably been one of those old mining towns at some point, but now it was just a skeleton, bared to the world and waiting for its own final burial.
At the station, I found the markings of a ritual, the melted candles, and a crudely painted mark of power in a circle. Everything looked right, at least at a first glance. There was even the remnants of a salt circle present, so it told me they’d tried to do it right. Fat load of good it’d done them. I don’t know what it is about people reading something on the internet, and deciding that it’s a good thing to try for themselves, but I digress. Just ramblings of an old necromancer those, take them as you will.
Over the next hour, I meticulously set about getting my ritual tools out. I made my circle of black sand, I lit my candles, I drew my own blood, and called upon my watcher spirit to protect me. I sat in the center of my circle and called out for the girl to come forward. She wasted no time in doing so, which made things easier. She may have been pretty at one time, though you can never tell with a spirit. The problem is, they can really look any way they want, if they’re powerful enough. She stood before me, rooted to the spot, a look of pain on her face, begging to know why I had called her there. Why couldn’t I just let her rest?
My watcher neared her, and she tried to shrink away from it, but rooted as she was, the best she could do is flinch. I began my questioning. Why had she hurt the kids, why was she haunting here, and most of all, why had she never moved on. I asked these questions multiple times, demanding her to answer me, but every time she feigned ignorance. She hadn’t done it, she didn’t know where she was, and just wanted to ‘go home’. I started to lose my patience with her, threatening to banish her to the void, from which no spirits can return, and she never wavered in her story. I even compelled her to tell me the truth, but her story didn’t change.
That was…disturbing.
I released the girl, telling her to leave this place. To go through to the other side, that her family was waiting and she would be free.
That’s where I made a mistake. I’d assumed that the girl was innocent, and while I was right in that assumption, I’d forgotten that something had attacked those kids, and driven one insane. If the girl wasn’t the spirit that did that… then something else had to be. Want to know how to royally piss off a controlling spirit? Remove the target of its desire. Guess what I did without thinking about it? Yeah…
I often attribute that mistake to fatigue, but it was just carelessness on my part. I’ll be honest about that, as it’s a mistake I have to live with.
Satisfied the girl had moved on, I decided that there was something else at play. Maybe drugs, or something less ‘paranormal’, and just more ‘normal’. I began to clear up my ritual, and that’s when the world went black for me. Not black in the sense the darkness jumped up to reach me. Black in the sense that I had gotten smacked in the head with a brick and knocked unconscious. The world was spinning when I came to, the moon high in the sky, and my ritual tools scattered across the old platform. My head was throbbing, and from the warm sticky substance on my face, I surmised I had been bleeding.
I slowly moved to lever myself up, casting my feelings around me, and found that I’d been knocked a good six feet from my circle, or at least what remained of it. My own candles had long since burned out, and though I could not see it, I could feel something predatory circling me. To say it was angry, was an understatement. This thing gave off a kind of anger that was strong enough to start fires with its heat. Figuratively and literally speaking. Every footstep left a burn mark on the wood of the platform. This spirit was waiting. It hadn’t wanted to kill me with that brick. Just get my attention. It had circled me, much like my watcher would when protecting me. The same watcher I had dismissed just before getting a brick upside the head.
I slowly stood, placing my hand on the wood of the station building for support and demanded my attacker show itself. This prompted a dark laugh, the spirit finding humor in that. I reached out with my senses again, and this time added some force behind my words, attempting to force the spirit to show itself. I got a bottle thrown at me for my troubles, and another dark laugh. Then, I felt pain in my face. I’d been struck… no… cut. Something had slashed out, tearing a gash in my cheek. New blood poured from the slash, and the pain invigorated me. This thing meant to take me to bits, but in doing that, it had made one serious mistake. Pain. Pain is something I can latch on, and use. Pain is a regular part of my rituals, and this thing had given me the ammunition I needed. If it knew what I was, it’d have bashed my head out with another brick, but no… it thought it was toying with me.
I demanded it show itself again, focusing on my pain, relishing it, harvesting it, and then casting it out.
I felt the spirit flinch at that. It staggered back, startled at the sensation. It hadn’t felt pain for a very long time, and now suddenly it did. It felt every bit of it, and that surprised it. In that moment, it stepped back into the circle. I was glad in that moment that I’d used black sand and not salt. Sand is heavier, and it doesn’t break the circle as easily. So much like a mouse trapped in a cage, it had walked right into the trap, and never realized it.
The spirit revealed itself then, taking the form of a man. He looked like any miner might, right down to the old overalls and headdlamp on his hat. He also looked quite insane. Though considering he’d just gone from the predator, to the prey, could you really blame him? He raged, he screamed, he cursed me, and he beat his fists against the invisible barrier. That’s the funny thing about protective circles. White keeps everything out. Black… lets things in, but doesn’t let them leave. My ‘friend’ found that out the hard way.
I let the spirit rage for a few more minutes, using that time to pick up a small stone from the ground and consider it. It wasn’t anything special, just a bit of the railroad’s ballast, but it’d serve my purposes. I turned and noticed the spirit was watching me. He’d calmed, and now seemed curious. Like so many of his kind, he tried to bargain. Don’t I want to know why he did it? Why he’d killed the girl so long ago, or maybe where he’d hidden the bodies of the two kids? Why he’d cut the girl’s eyes out?
I didn’t listen to a word of what he said. I simply pressed my thumb to my cheek, and then pressed that same thumb on the rock. Pouring into it my power, and creating a token. A token which I tossed into the circle, and watched as the spirit screamed. It was as though black flames leapt in that circle, licking at the spirit’s body, running up his legs and to his face. Flames that emanated from that stone. The spirit lengthened, it screamed in pain, maybe in fear, and tried to fight the draw. It was a fight the spirit couldn’t win. Eventually it was drawn down into that little stone, which in turn was picked up and thrown out onto the railroad track, joining millions, if not billions of stones just like it. The spirit had been sealed, and trapped, and would never walk the earth again.
My job was done. Thankfully, the agents were waiting for me, and though they gave me an odd glance, none asked why I was covered in my own blood. They knew better than to ask why. It took the better part of three weeks to recover from that interaction, well, three weeks for me. I’m told the investigation is still ongoing, though a couple months after my little ‘endeavor’, the other bodies were found. Local papers reported that they’d been struck by a train while enjoying some of whatever drug was in the papers as the “worst epidemic ever” for that week. The girl’s injuries and insanity being attributed to that too. It was as good a story as any. Wasn’t any truth to it, but it serves its purpose.
I would return to my little office, and patiently wait for my phone to ring once more. Such was my life, or what I called life. I still carry the marks from that day, though faded. They did teach me a rather valuable lesson though. Everyone makes mistakes. For me though, they’re more costly than anyone else.