Long black coffin, p.23
Long Black Coffin, page 23
The girl’s name is Stephani Cotton. She is one of the missing.
She had gotten sick in her belly at her friend’s house and is now going home. It’s only a few houses away, what harm can there be in that? She was certain of it until the headlights found her and held her fast like a bug on flypaper. Now she’s caught and it can only end one way.
The passenger side door opens.
A voice says, “Get in.”
I know the voice because I’ve heard it before: it’s Bridey’s. There is nothing unpleasant or horror movie guttural about it; it’s simply the voice of a young woman, even and crystal-clear…yet, there’s something ominous about it, something just beneath it opening like a grave.
Stephani shakes her head with one last shred of willpower. “No.”
I want to scream, I want to intervene, but I have nothing to do it with. No voice. No body. I’m just a drifting, all-seeing mind that has broken its moorings. The idle of The Coffin increases. It’s a threatening, frightening sound.
“Get in the car. Now. We need to take a ride.”
Stephani does as she is told, stumbling towards the open door, her brain probably filled with cautionary tales about accepting rides from strangers. Then the door slams shut. I hear her scream. But it’s lost in the growl of The Coffin’s engine as it disappears into the night, destination unknown and, maybe, unknowable.
That was the first of them and I had no doubt then—nor do I now—that I had just witnessed the abduction of a schoolgirl named Stephani Cotton whose dark ride would end up in a coal bin where she would be shackled to the wall as something nameless squeezed the life and sanity out of her drop by drop.
The second dream was not about any missing child, it was about a woman. A woman I did not know but soon came to realize was a younger version of the wizened hag from my other dream, the woman who wore the drab brown dress and was whipping Bridey. It was her. I knew it was her. Except she was much younger and the stamp of iniquity and intolerance hadn’t yet been engraved into her face.
She is in the woods.
I watch her running amongst the trees, placing her hands against the mossy green trunks that are huge and seem to reach up into the sky where their high branches interlock into a canopy through which only single spoking rays of misty sunlight seem to penetrate. There are shadows everywhere, dark pockets of them like oozing black crude, some that seem to move, pulling themselves into oblong faces that yawn open as if they will speak.
The woman seems to know the forest well.
She climbs huge jagged deadfalls and slips easily between leaning trunks. She hops across a creek using half-submerged rocks, easing her way through thorny dark thickets and ducking under hanging creepers and is never once tripped by the black roots that erupt from the ground like coiling snakes. Unlike in my earlier dream, she isn’t dressed in any shapeless puritanical sack of a dress, but in a clean white linen blouse and a red skirt which is the exact shade of blood. Something about its red vibrancy catches my attention—it’s so bright, so scarlet amongst the heavy growths and clustered greenery. The color of pagan sacrifice.
Even in her youth, she is not an attractive woman. Her body is lean and strong, but breastless, her face plain and homely and unremarkable.
She is barefoot.
I remember being struck by that. Who would run around in a place like that barefoot with rotting logs and fallen trees, pickers and thorns and sharp stones everywhere? She does, though. I never see her once stop and nurse an injured toe. She is light and fleet-footed, like some forest nymph from a fairy tale. She seems almost to float through the trees. After a time, she stops at the edge of a pool whose waters are stagnant and dark as tar. She stares down at her reflection and I hear her voice speaking. What it says is crazy, but then so is she.
Staring at her reflection, she drops the petals of wildflowers onto the surface of that oily water, watching them drift about. “He is forever beyond and behind me,” she says in the voice of a child even though I know she is probably in her twenties. “I must not look at him. I must see his reflection and not the veil of his face. I must never look upon it.”
Those are her words.
After a time, she comes to what looks like a tunnel cut through the congested woods that thicken around her like weeds. The tunnel is made of brambles and it leads through clotted verdure and amongst blasted trunks and the twisted, gnarled boles of trees that have fallen over into one another in a mazelike profusion.
On her hands and knees, she crawls through the brambles and comes out the other side into a green glade of ferns and creepers and bright wildflowers. It should be a pretty place, but it isn’t. The air is misty and suffocating, the shadows thick and undulant. The trees and brush pressing in are claustrophobic, the standing pools of water miasmic and steaming. The glade is surrounded by a perfect circle of tall oaks that are arranged, it seems, almost like the Neolithic standing stones of England and Ireland. They are tall and straight, weirdly megalithic and symbolic. In the center of them there is a low grassy mound.
The woman climbs the mound and starts doing something that scares me even in the dream. She raises her hands over her head and it is almost like the trees pull in closer and closer, as if they are leaning in to hear what she has to say. And what she says is this:
“I want to bleed. I want to bleed on the earth and in it. Let it surround me and suckle me, bring me forth swollen from its womb.”
That’s what her words are, part of which I’d heard Bridey say on the video and Stella say as I watched her through the window. I recognized—or maybe felt—some power to those words. Not like they are a witch spell so much, but like the way she says them, the rhythms and intonations she uses, the way she fits them together and where she says them combine, brew up into something bigger, something rising and malevolent.
Then, much as Stella had, she stands there a long time, her eyes rolling back white in her head. She turns around and around and around until she must fall right over with dizziness. But she doesn’t fall; she stops, still repeating those words. Then she begins moving in those same kind of concentric circles as Stella had, widening and widening, until she finally stops and returns to where she had originally been standing atop the grassy mound.
Then, grinning, she walks to each of the trees and wraps her arms around them individually, pressing her face into the moss of their bark. Like Stella—who I realized then had been doing some childlike imitation of this—she embraces a tree, returns to the top of the mound, proceeds to the next tree, returns and repeats the action until she has been with every one of those oaks. Then she stands atop the mound and spins around again, never left-to-right, but always right-to-left or “widdershins” as they used to call it.
“I will touch the darkness as the darkness touches me,” she says, her breathing very fast like she’s hyperventilating. “I will allow it inside me. I will accept its seed as my own.”
Then as I watch, the shadows swelling and black around her, she takes off her clothes and lies down upon the pinnacle of the mound in the luxuriant, lush grass which seems to swallow her in green, leafy depths. Those great pillar-like oaks leaning in, the wildflowers running with sweet pungent sap, the buzz of insects like a steady droning choir rising in volume, the secret thickets germinating and juicy with life and just as vibrantly green as Bridey’s pellucid emerald eyes, she spreads her legs, offering her moist, ripe sex to the thrumming, corporeal body of nature.
I see a shadow sweep up over the mound and creep over her. It is not the shadow thrown by a man exactly or even that of an animal, but something else, something exaggerated, grotesque, and shaggy. She shivers beneath it. It makes a snorting/grunting sound like a wild boar as it settles over her, burying her in its cool darkness. As it penetrates her, she begins to scream like her soul is emptying itself into the earth and seeping into it, being drained away by suckering mouths.
That was the final dream/vision/trip, whatever you want to call it. I knew without a doubt when I woke up that I had just witnessed the conception of Bridey. I had just seen her mother violated and impregnated by something, some obscene forest elemental which probably had no true name but was hinted at in the legends of fertility gods like Pan and Faunus. That was what I saw. Sometimes dreams are symbolic, they say, filled with the bizarre imagery of suppressed wants, needs, and fears…but as much as I looked at the second dream, I just couldn’t figure it in any way other than to think that it was literal. That, like the first one, I had seen something horrible that had actually happened.
If that was true, then there was something absolutely hideous in Bridey’s bloodline. Because if that woman was her mother…then just what in the fuck was her father?
49
I was out on the floor, lost in that weird dream fugue for hours. When I finally came out of it, I got out of there. I ran out of there. I didn’t even go upstairs to check on Stella. There was a black shadow descending on my life like it had descended on Bridey’s mother. I got home and took a shower to clear my head. If that was indeed Bridey’s mother in the dream/vision, then those woods had to be the Sagwa Woods. I didn’t know it to be a fact, but I felt it and I believed it with complete conviction. Something had happened in those woods and what was going on now was a direct result of that. But there was so much missing. I thought of Kurt’s letter and his mention of old man Borden, Skinny Borden, my boss. He’s the one who had those woods cut. And maybe he did that for a very good reason.
When I got dressed, I sat on my bed. It was getting to the point where I was feeling more helpless all the time. My pat little ghost story was becoming more complex and more convoluted. But something had to be done. I knew that. If not for the sake of myself and my friends, then for the kids that the Bridey entity would keep on snatching and murdering. This had to be stopped. Even if I had to sacrifice myself to do it.
I needed more background. And I knew where I had to go to get it: Skinny Borden. If anyone knew things, it would be him. I knew where he lived. Chances were, he’d put the cops on me when I showed up at his door, but it was a chance I was going to have to take.
But first, I was going to see Mrs. Canning, Stella’s next-door neighbor. I could clearly remember what she said to me that day: I know all the dirty secrets, what closets have skeletons, and where the bodies are buried. If anyone had a bird’s eye view of Lynntown and the dark, awful secrets in its past, it would be Mrs. Canning.
What I couldn’t stop thinking about was what had been in the coal bin. Had I really seen it? Were the bodies of the missing kids really in there or was that some image sent into my head? I just didn’t know, but I was sick about it. If they were down there, then the police had to be brought in even if that meant that Stella was blamed for it. Maybe Bridey had possessed her at the time, but the law wouldn’t care about that.
The question was: had I really seen them?
Before I did anything stupid, I had to know for sure.
As I was about to leave, Rachel came home from an early morning church breakfast. She put her sad eyes on me right away. She stood in my doorway, staring at me as she liked to do, the way you might stare at a puppy that has shit all over the carpet. I wondered how long it would have gone on for.
“What?” I finally said.
She blinked her eyes a couple times. “Johnny, are you in trouble?”
“No, I’m not in trouble.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
Oh, I was half-tempted to tell her, but the idea of the supernatural in all its forms was simply too much for her. I was afraid she’d have a nervous breakdown or fall into some mystical rapture. She was better off not knowing.
“Please tell me what’s going on, Johnny.”
I brushed past her and went out onto the porch to have a cigarette. “I just need to be alone.”
“Oh, Johnny, tell me what’s wrong!” she said. “I know something’s wrong! Just tell me what it is! Please, tell me.”
There was no peace out on the back porch. She came right out there with me and hammered me with questions. I’m not sure what they were because I wasn’t listening. I was more interested in the figure watching me from the train yards. It was no longer satisfied to watch from the tracks in the distance. Now it was standing at the periphery of our back yard, staring through the bushes at me. I couldn’t see its face, not really. Every time I tried to, it seemed to reconfigure itself like moving fog. But I did see an eye looking out at me and not with casual interest, but with a mindless wrath.
“Johnny? Johnny, are you even listening to me?” Rachel said, exasperated as always.
“Can you see her?” I said.
“Who?”
“That woman standing on the other side of the fence watching us through the bushes. Can you see her?”
Rachel went down the steps. She looked where I pointed. “There’s nothing there, Johnny. There’s nothing at all. Oh, Johnny, oh God, you need to see someone, you need to talk to someone.”
“Exactly what I’m going to do,” I told her.
50
“So you want to know about the Borden family,” Mrs. Canning said as we sat in her living room, drinking coffee. She brought out blueberry muffins, too, but I still had no appetite. Not to be rude, I nibbled one and complimented her. But she could smell a bullshit artist a mile off and I could see that in the smile she gave me.
“The Bordens have a lineage around these parts that reaches back to the early 19th century. The story the old timers liked to tell was that they came from England with a small pot of money and built it into an empire. And they built that empire through shady business deals, extortion, political favors, and out-and-out robbery. They would have called themselves timber barons, but everyone else knew them for what they were: robber barons,” she told me. “The family landed in New England and once they clear-cut every forest out there they could get their dirty, greedy fingers on, they pushed west which brought them to Wisconsin which was wide open to profiteering weasels like them. They bought up land, usually in conjunction with railroads, and got their hands on miles upon miles of virgin timber. That’s all ancient history and I only know the basics of it.”
“What about Sagwa Woods,” I said. “Why didn’t they clear it?”
“Maybe that’s a question you should ask Skinny Borden.”
I told her that I was going to, but before I did, I wanted to know what she knew about it.
“Sagwa Woods.” She shook her head. “That’s a strange story.”
“I’d like to hear it.”
She set her coffee cup down. “Okay. Listen up then. If you were to go to any of the meetings of the local historical society, you might hear those old fools telling a story about an Ojibwa chief named Pennaquot whom the Bordens nickel-and-dimed out of his land. They’d tell you it led to a small-scale war between Borden Timber and the Ojibwas, how Borden’s hired killers rode into the Sagwas and gunned down twenty or thirty of Pennaquot’s people, this as a warning. That Pennaquot agreed in the end, though—through extreme coercion, mind you—to hand over his lands with the understanding that the Sagwas would never be cleared. They would stand as a monument to his slain people, a place long thought sacred and mystical by the tribe itself. That’s the story they’d tell you, but it would be strictly bullshit, son.”
She told me she had no doubt that there was plenty of gunplay back in those days and the local tribes were probably kicked off their lands or gunned down if they refused to move. She knew for a fact that there was a chief named Pennaquot and that the Bordens had robbed him blind and ordered the deaths of his people up in the Sagwas. That much was true. But there was no agreement to leave the Sagwas standing.
“Could you imagine such a thing at that time?” she said. “Indians were fourth-rate citizens. They held less stature than most people’s dogs. They were abused, mistreated, and robbed blind by whites. To think that one of them might demand a forest be left standing—and this to a family of ruthless timber barons—is ludicrous. History is a bit lacking when it comes to anything that would put our first families in a bad light, but be assured of one thing: the Bordens took that land from Pennaquot, slaughtered his people, and when he raised a fuss, he was shipped off to the reservation with the rest.”
“So why were the woods left standing?” I asked her.
“Because they were haunted.”
I just looked at her, wondering if she was messing with my head but I could see that she was dead serious. “Haunted?”
“Yes, but not in the conventional fashion. No sheeted ghosts were running about, but it was definitely haunted. Jinxed, at any rate. Time and again the Bordens tried to harvest those lands. Each time it met with disaster. There were accidents, deaths, one mishap after another. More than one case of lumbermen losing their minds and running off never to be seen again and several documented cases of them turning upon one another and going after each other with axes. It got hard to keep men at the lumber camps up there. The only saving grace for the Bordens was that for every man they lost or that ran off, ten immigrants were on hand to take his place. They came by the trainloads—Finns and Swedes, Irishmen and Germans and Welsh. There was no end to them.”
But it did end, she said.
It ended when a supply wagon went up to the largest of these camps and found it completely deserted. Over a hundred men were gone. Where they went or what took them was a mystery to this day.
