It was November. The Wednesday before Thanksgiving and the rain had been battering the countryside for over a day. Daylight savings’ melatonin influx had us all drowsy and calm. Natural inebriation. We’d just gotten home from college. Christina’s comment wedged its way between the predisposed, almost needlessly fixt plans to meet up at Duke’s where everyone in our graduating class would congregate around the holidays, the suggestion stirring our purple, dreamy consciousness like Eleanor Vance’s elusive cup of stars - “let’s get lost in Black Forest”.
I didn’t know if the catalyst was a testing of our limitations of fear or the catharsis of its familiarity surrounded by friends - a comfort hike under the black gloaming to the Bell Graveyard. The only place we’d ever known to be haunted, just a few miles from our front doors. Two opposing yet paradoxically identical notions. We’d known it well, and yet, there was a sense of intrinsic danger tied to being in such close proximity to the many wolf pits which pock the landscape like subterranean goosebumps, the watchful eyes of predators, and the dreadful mystery that is Mrs. Lansky.
The decision was last second. As all our friends scattered to small factions and huddled under their car rooves to escape the downpour, uttering goodbyes and pulling away from Katie’s house, we hugged ourselves into our winter coats, hoods and Timberlands, kicked our way through the blackened tangle, balancing ourselves on the slippery mud, headed down the trail to see the dead as a trio - me, Christina and KJ.
Their was something ominous, final, about seeing their brake lights melting under the persistent streams of icy fog across West Street. “The wolves might be about”, said Christina. “No. The rain clears scent molecules from the air and makes it hard…impossible… for them to smell prey”, replied KJ, trying to keep his rifle sling from spilling off of his shoulder. The diminutive screeching of owls emanated from all around us, and it made me wonder what might be lurking on the ground. “Then why bring a gun?”. “You never know. Mother Nature’s a mad scientist”. “I recognize that line. What’s it from?”. “I don’t remember”. “‘Weird Science…’’. “No, not that. Something else”, said Christina in a muted voice.
“You okay, Chris?”, I asked. “Yeah”, she said quietly with a wan smile. As we rounded the bend the trail widened and the gnarled, leafless claws reached skyward from the mud, spilling rivulets of rainfall over the desolate forest floor, were visible for half a mile in every direction . Despite it being a pitch black night thick with dripping vines and thorny bushes, the ghostly grey of the fog inked the shapes from amorphous to absolute, the water sparkling across the forest like a million little spinning stars.
“I’m feeling such strange pleasure right now”, said Christina. “Yeah. It feels like home. It feels welcoming”. “We should enjoy it, just this way we are now. In two years we’ll all have graduated and have responsibilities”. “Yeah, it’s like our second - to - last hurrah of childhood. We’re right on the dividing line”. “Yeah, I needed this. I’ve got this perpetual anxiety running through me, knowing it’s coming, that my youth is gonna be nostalgic pretty soon”. “Eff that, though. I’m not gonna stop living just because I’m out of college”. “I’m never having kids, I’m gonna do nothing but travel, go to work and revel in my hobbies”, said Chris. “So you’re moving to Colorado, then?”, I asked earnestly.
Christina had been my best friend since 8th grade, and knowing she was moving across the country gave me terrible, mournful depression. “I don’t know yet, but I’m definitely getting out of here”. Jeff coached football for Ohio State so he already had a foot and a half out the door. It would only be me remaining, and I’d inevitably get sewn into our community’s implacable quilt, turning out just like my parents, gaining their accents and falling into the same boring, sedentary lifestyle of all the overweight, lifeless dead around me.
Our boots sopped and splashed along, branches chittering as we pushed through with our gloves, snapping and tossing them, the frost of our breaths linking us to some cosmic chain of satisfying sameness. At times fog seemed to swirl around us centrifugally one at a time, like something otherworldly was inspecting us with inquisitive preciseness. “It likes you”, said KJ to Christina, laughing assuredly. For some strange reason it seemed to be all over her. “I don’t know if I like this”, she replied with a disposition of unease. “It’s alright, Chris. It’s just fog”. “No, NO! WHY is it floating around me???!!!!”. Then it dissipated, sighs were heard, exhalations escaped, and thoughts brewed.
I thought about the idea again and again, beginning to visualize stepping out of the forest to the edge of a cliff on Ganymede, overlooking Jupiter, joined by a female warrior with an extra bow and arrows with iridescent tips, ready to venture out into the night on our black mares and snuff out a pandemic of red - eyed werewolves killing off civilization. Some sort of conquest. A life of pertinence and meaning. I wanted to escape so badly. A girl can dream. And then a sound distracted me back into the wakeful dark, and the deeper we trekked…
Christina was splashing along whipping a pliable stick through the air over and over she’d picked up back a ways. The woods smelled like fresh earth and the petrichor decomposition of the last summer’s lifeblood. The water would drip into my mouth occasionally, and it tasted so damn clear and fresh. I began to stick my tongue out and catch droplets, and I couldn’t stop smiling. If anything would keep me around, it would be nights like this in our tucker away timber, away from everyone.
The leaves were slippery and the mud was almost frosted over. Old Man Winter and Persephone were having a blowing contest, the warm and the cold commingling and fortifying the entire forest with chilly condensation. Winter’s prevailing. My favorite time of year. The taste of mom’s pumpkin pie still lingered on my tongue, and I kept running it along my teeth, still picking out the left over crumbs. A warmth coiled itself tight in the center of my body, beneath my solar plexus and outwardly distributed itself evenly to the tips of my limbs.
Branches were snapping far away, halting us now and again, the obscure comment “did you hear that?” materializing from an anonymous voice deftly embedded into my mind so much so that the difference between falsetto and baritone inside this patchwork might be singularly defined as either all or one of us. The stops started to form a beating heart, but the deeper we cut through, I felt a camaraderie indelible of only this moment on this day in this place at this time. But also an abandonment as we traveled further and further away from the last dwindling illumination of a neighborhood kitchen window lit by the bouncing light of a candle, into the breath of the night.
“Hey guys, in all seriousness, how many times have either of you been to Bell?”. “You know, I’m not sure I ever had the courage to actually go all the way”. “I did, once or twice with my dad, but it wasn’t much of a graveyard. Only a few big stones”. Nobody spoke after that for a while. KJ’s father passed when he was ten. Anytime “dad” escaped his lips there was this unspoken immediacy to mourn quietly and not talk unless someone could break loose the moment’s levy with the flood of a joke. None came. Only the ghostly howling of the wind against our numbing ears. But the branches were crunching nearby, one after another, and I felt we shared a mutually electric anxiousness.
However there was a moment, a flawless break in the sound of our footing, the night birds cackling, and the snapping apparition where the question just ejected from my lips before I could reach fast enough to retract. “What’s this story of The Crying Baby?”. “How could you not know this?”, asked Jeff, brows furrowed with a queer grin. “The Cherub, Lexi”. “I don’t often walk among predators to graveyards in the rain at eleven o’ clock at night. Sorry”. “You remember. Come on”. “I think maybe I’ve pushed it out of my mind. Besides, I just want to hear the story, really. Jeff? I like the way you tell it. Enhances the mood”
A few breaths and a few breaks through binding gnarl later, the honey deepness of KJ’s voice soothed us into a bedtime story’s gentle lull - “the last house in the neighborhood is thirty - some years younger than all of its neighbors”. “Okay…,”. “You know the entire town was built in supplication with the steel boom in the ’30s. The last house - the one with the yard we walked through to get to the trail…”. “Is different. I can tell”, mumbled Christina.
“Right. The siding is new. The driveway gravel. The pool. The wall out front…”. The branches crunched again, only this time it didn’t sound like a footstep, but a violent thud, like something had literally fallen out of space and crashed into a tree, projecting its echo across the canopy’s encumbrance end to end in all directions. Something scurried across the trail a little ways up, but it only looked like a small animal.
“Anyway….”. “Wait, are we just going to ignore that s - sound?”. “Probably mud or a heavy branch fallen under the weight of the wind and rain. Just listen for a moment…”. He was right. Static silence and drip drops. Stinging rain pelting with sidewinding, watery bullets against our padded wool fabric coats and hoods. But no footsteps. An owl hooted somewhere ahead of us. We all fell seamlessly back in tandem with the gloom of the moment, and KJ continued, slinging his rifle off of one shoulder and up around the other.
Christina didn’t say it, but she looked bothered. She was visibly translucent. Her skin was porcelain white and the stick in her hand was now dangling, as if the part of her brain which controlled kinesics had been shutting down in slow increments, energy wrung from her center like a wet rag by the melancholic, darkly depressing surroundings. Something penetrated her thoughts, something bothersome, but she wasn’t speaking. Just KJ. My skin bubbled and I felt an unsolicited, stinging chill in my blood, perhaps in anticipation of the story. “Maybe he shouldn’t tell the story”, said Christina. We ignored hastily.
“The last house belonged to a guy named Lansky. Roger, I think, but I can’t be sure. Worked down the mill, and you know how word can spread in a small town, much less a factory? Anyway, he’s hearing from people, you know those types of antiquated boors always drunk, working, watching football or fighting, that some of the guys had seen his wife with a man at gas stations or stores. Usually a guy would jab another if unceremonious rumors were about, but this was about Lansky’s wife, something to be taken seriously and without levity. She was cheating with some guy from Greenville, I think. He knew about it for over a year, and I guess she was getting brazen with it. Leaving panties lying around, etcetera…”.
“I feel nauseous, I think”, said a withering Christina. “Just give us the word and we’ll go back”. “No, we need to do this, I think…I feel….I don’t know….”. “Is it the story? Is that what’s freaking you out?”. She didn’t say anything. We slogged along through our crimson voyage into the black and tangled trees, and just as my eyes were adjusting to the darkness, I felt something slippery below my feet. Like some pulsating organism. I illuminated the ground with my flashlight and found hundreds, thousands, even, of worms, coiling, stretching and slithering through the mud. I almost screamed. The ground had come alive.
Christina’s head was hanging, and she was more shuffling than walking. The worms looked bizarre, however. I recognized them. Nematodes. The worms which burrow most deeply into the earth, sometimes several miles. The rain was so heavy and the vibration so strong it had flooded and forced creatures 2 miles into the ground to ascend. They were everywhere. The forest floor looked like a disease, yet the rain and the geography, the thought of being in this deserted, sopping dead place gave me the same feeling I had being cradled as a baby.
“I can see where this is headed”, I remarked. But I had no idea. I’m thinking he put a bullet in the guy’s head, but no. “Nobody knows exactly what this Lansky guy was into for him to do something so messed up. Yeah, the rumors told of infidelity, and they were true, but you couldn’t imagine…”. “How do we know this is true?”, asked a visibly forlorn Christina. “Only through word of every single person I’ve ever known. Especially the older guys who’d go hunting with me and my dad. Yeah…no, this isn’t made up. I’ve seen them talk about it, and when they do, the stoicism of their expressions, the kink in their armor of masculine bravado, was always unnerving”.
“Anyway, he waits for the babysitter to show up one night when he’s supposed to be working. She does, and the wife is picked up by the guy from Greenville, who was a doctor, and whom claimed she was going to leave her husband for. Lansky then comes home. Babysitter lets him in, thinking he left his work boots at home. He hits her over the head with an empty whiskey bottle, knocks her out, and then goes to the baby’s room. Doesn’t even think about it. Just douses his own newborn son with lantern oil and tosses in a match”.
“Jesus….”. “Babysitter never wakes up. Entire house burns down and kills them both - the baby screaming snd burning, and the babysitter dies of unconscious smoke inhalation. He’s arrested. Gets two life sentences. The wife moves away. They buried the urns of both the babysitter and the baby at Bell Cemetery, its eponymous name of which came from the last of the fifteen year old babysitter, Angelique Bell. They find the mother of Baby Andrew there a week later drunk out of her mind. Saying she keeps hearing the baby crying, all the way from Thornburg. Five hour walk”.
Lansky always said “I didn’t mean to kill Angelique”, even weeping over her death in court. Apologizing to the family. To this day, still doing so publicly. However if asked questions regarding his own little baby boy, his face would straighten, his expression turns vacant, and with expressionless eyes, he says what he’s always said - ‘I have nothing to say about that’. And of course, what followed? Ghost stories”. I notice Christina doubled over with her hands firm in her back, squinting her eyes shut in the dim of the moonlight.
“She goes missing another five times and she’s always found at the same place. Anyway, she eventually went missing completely. I remember as a kid, maybe you guys do too, that they had the ‘Missing’ posters everywhere with her face transposed on them in black and white. The mother went missing here apparently, and they say the baby can be heard crying for her from the graveyard. She was always following the sound. It drilled into her like some macabre ritual”. “Wait… she’s still here????”. “Hiding in one of the little caves, yeah. Lots of eyewitness reports….”
“This officially isn’t fun anymore”, I remarked hesitantly. Eyewitness reports. Holy shit. “Even if it’s a little anticlimactic”. Then KJ finished. “No. The rest of the story is that she killed herself and the family kept it secret. And now she possesses people - the bodies of people - and compels them to hike to the graveyard to be with her baby….so, basically, we had the idea to do this…. we’re doing it…which means she’s got ahold of one or maybe all of us”. KJ paused with a pensive expression, and then giggled. “Jesus…you freaked me out there you SOB”. “No, but it’s true. That’s the myth. Maybe she’s out here. Or maybe she’s you…or you”, he chided, pointing at Christina.
Christina didn’t laugh. She asked if we could take a break. We agreed and she took a seat on a mossy, fallen tree. We asked if she was okay. She lit a cigarette. She didn’t smoke. Jeff looked worried. “You wanna go back, Chris?”. She said sullenly she was fine, that she didn’t want to ruin the night, and was just feeling a bit “funny”. We picked back up and the trail had begun to constrict again. The tangles of enormous thorn bushes auspicious, almost like an omen or warning sign, inflicting pain to keep us out. The trail vanished, then came the next marker - a sign, made of two wooden planks painted white nailed together in the shape of a cross.
But it didn’t say ‘Keep Out’ or ‘Beware Of Dog’. It read only two words - ‘POSITIVE THOUGHTS’. My stomach flipped. I’d never been this deep. We were 3.4 miles in. It was just about 11:20. “Hey, have you guys watched ‘The Haunting Of Hill House?” ,”I read the book”. “You need to watch the show”. “I don’t like TV”. “The book is better, but anyways, this thing reminds me of the woods around Hill House”. “Welcome Home, Eleanor”. “Lions”. Through faded visibility, came the creepy balustrade. Old world Victorian style painted white, wrapped in vines and smeared in muck, not nailed to or supported by anything. It just mysteriously existed like some marker to the gates of Purgatory.
This was the second indication we’d been on course, in close proximity. Crackle! Crackle! Snap! Crackle!!”. “Stop”, halted KJ. “Stay still. My blood pressure on the rise again, now it was followed by the absolute opposite of sensory deprivation. Everything was heightened. “This is too weird. It sounds like we’re being followed…”. The hackles on my neck raised again. By now Jeff’s rifle was in his hands. Though the canopy provided some shelter, it couldn’t hold off the immutable strength of this bizarre, never - ending rain. Carved into a tree were the words “LAUGHTER” and “YOUR LIFE IS WORTHY”.
Christina moved a little closer to KJ, looked back at me, and then ahead again, and I stopped. There was a worry in her eyes exposed only by the pale glint of watery moonlight seeping now and again through holes punched in the clouds. The woods’ color would pulse and variegate from golden pink to sightless black under the fast moving rain clouds. Then came thunder. Though huddled by impossibly tall firs, caves with icicle - shaped stalactites were around every sharp turn and roundabout bend. Much of the weeds had gone of the disease of blight, yet their toxic scent still curiously wandered around us in cyclonic spirals.
Each time we passed a cavern I could feel us each collectively speed up. The image of a crazy old woman prepared to strike with a sharp object scrawled impatiently across my mind’s eye and I could actually feel they were thinking the same thing. Especially Christina. By now she was a good ten yards ahead of the both of us. We asked her to slow down numerous times. “Tina, hold your effing horses!”. It was difficult to ascertain through the splashing puddles and heavy rain, but she muttered something that included the word hurry.
“I don’t see any danger. I really don’t”, KJ said stiffly gripping the stock and muzzle of his great grandpa’s Winchester. I couldn’t explain it at the time, but my next words to escape me were “do you guys think we’re really here?” Even more terrifying was the silence. The rain now hitting so hard the ground was vibrating, the trees were groaning like the hold of a pirate ship and swaying, and I began to feel extremely lethargic and dizzy. Almost as if I needed a pair of hands and arms to pull me further into the direction of our destination.
Christina shouted through the blur that we ought to go back. That she didn’t like “this feeling”. She said she wanted to cry. I told her it’s fine and that she’s just feeling down about Casey, her older sister recently diagnosed with Crohn’s Disease. She said it wasn’t that, but something else. She cried to me many times about Casey and her suffering, and the two years it took doctors examining her to come to a consensus. Unable to eat, always on the toilet, vomiting, losing control of her bowels, etc. Absolutely awful.
“Charles Dickens once said that you dream more in the few minutes between sleeping and waking than you do in perfect sleep and perfect unconsciousness for five days”. “So? What’s that supposed to mean?”. “Just saying, what if we’re dreaming right now???? Do either if you feel ridiculously tired?”. “A little irresolute”, murmured Christina as we continued clocking along, and after about three more minutes, the ground started to really rumble, like an earthquake. You could’ve heard it thrumming from fift miles away. Jeff’s assessment made sense. It was a mudslide. They occur here often, especially when it rains heavily.
This might have meant that our way back was blocked, or, even worse, that the ridge we had been crossing for the last quarter of a mile might do the same thing and pull us down to our wet, muddy graves. KJ thought that maybe we oughta get out of there and choose another night. Just go to Duke’s until it’s safe to come back. The rain was heavier than ever. The two fronts had created a smokey smog obscuring our vision and only making the situation all the more precarious being on a ridge and all. I leaned back against a tree and looked at Christina. I asked her how she was doing.
I asked, because it didn’t take a nuclear physicist to notice her dreadfully pallid complexion and to see she clearly felt something that certainly wasn’t good. “You miser…”. She mumbled. I couldn’t compute what I was hearing. First she goes silent, then starts spouting nonsense. “Excuse me?”. “I said you’re a miser! Always have been!”. ‘A wha-“. “I’m not going to repeat it. She didn’t say anything, just stared into the distance catatonically. “Yeah, this was your idea and I get it now. Now can you stop????”.
The hairs bristled on the back of my neck and all over my body. That wasn’t her voice. Not at all. She sounded like an older woman. Her voice shrill and creaking, the tone of a door opening with rusted hinges. KJ cried out something indecipherable before slipping on the mud and falling to his back.. His gun went off, luckily during directly up into the sky. Christina was beginning to frighten me, but what caused me to scream to an interior meltdown was the sound of closely approaching boots, and the absence of any other physical presence.
And then it stopped. Jeff was pointing his rifle, swiveling in every direction. I grabbed ahold of Christina and held her quivering hand. And some way that the miniscule pitch black night had coalesced a bit brighter for a moment, and I noticed obviously Christina’s hands as she sat next me on a log, and they weren’t hers. They were long, bony, and frail. And she no longer had fake nails, but natural ones, etched in dirt. It must have been a figment of my imagination or trick of the light, because by the second take, she was fine.
“Guys, if we keep going then we might spend Thanksgiving in a cemetery. That was for certain a mudslide behind us”. “So we skitter down to the creek and go along the bank”. “It’s flooded. By now, it has to be”. “Tina, you okay?”. She was sitting there breathless, not exhaling, no frost floating from her mouth. It was as if she was dead. Her mouth hung opened, she was drooling, and her eyes kept rolling as if she was high. I suddenly was afraid of my best friend. Truly afraid.
Her skin was so pale it had begun to turn green and act as a sort of translucent glow stick. True light was escaping her pores like drifting molecules or the rising CO2 from a firepit. We told her it was time for us to go. Finally her jaw clamped lazily shut and her irises came back into focus. She asked a series of bizarre questions, some making absolutely no logical sense at all - “did I have sex?”. “Who were the Washingtonians?”. Then she started to shake. We pulled her along the way we came, but she kept resisting.
She had this incalculable strength neither of us had ever felt before, and we’ve talked about it so many times since. It felt as if two bodies were fighting us off instead of just one. She ripped herself away from our grasp and we followed her, all the way to the cemetery. And there they were - two spherical stones lying in the mud. Christina was never one to get dirty. If anything she was the most dainty person I’d ever known, but once we broke through the trees to the clearing of Bell Graveyard, she sat down in the mud with her legs wrapped around one of the stones, and then wept like an old woman.
Neither of us were sure whether to believe this very irrelevant act (I’d assume she’d at least want an audience), nor could we deny it. I assumed it had to do with her sister. She told us to go and leave her, but we refused. We sat next to her all night and eventually laid back, drifting deeper and deeper, until we fell asleep. I woke a few times and still heard her crying, but something imperceptible lulled me back to sleep. We all woke up covered in worms. We came across the mudslide on our way back as an obsequious Christina followed suit. Nothing was said.
We’d asked her about it ever since, and she kept repeating the same thing - “I felt like I was in mourning. I felt like someone close just died”. And exclamitorily, she’s said she’ll never go back into Black Forest again, not for any reason. “Not if you pay me a million dollars”. We asked if it was just because of the sadness. She says invariably, time and time again, “I dont know. All I do know is that I felt like I wanted to die. But not just in any way. I wanted to hang myself”. I’ve done all I can to repress the feeling of that night, but it still tickles me now and again as a reminder. A beckoning.
Sometimes it feels like a pair of eyes are watching me from two miles away, through the walls, bewitching me from the treeline with intrepid green eyes. I refuse to even drive near it anymore. Now when I look back on that night, I recall something I didn’t initially - from the moment the idea escaped Tina’s lips until we got back that morning, she’d never smiled. Not once. I don’t believe she ever wanted to go on that hike, but she was compelled by what we don’t understand that exists there.
I don’t dismiss myths anymore. If I learned anything from that experience, it would be to question everything. Christina had her first child last year, and as with every baby, she’s awakened by its crying in the middle of the night. Only very often, when this actually occurs, she runs to baby’s room, and finds her sound asleep. She lives in Colorado now.