Dead Echo

By C.G. Banks

Patsy Standish is a woman on the edge. The only survivor of a horrible accident, she buys a new house to try to heal. But she's picked the wrong place. Ghostly children in the attic, strange forms along the trails. An entire neighborhood succumbing to an evil past. And somewhere between this world and the next, she and a host of others will slowly be drawn to an unthinkable conclusion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.G. Banks
• Release date: Sep 22, 2014
• ISBN: 9781310432439

C.G. Banks

C. G. Banks is the pseudonym of some other guy. These are the kind of stories I like. Hope you like em too. Thanks.

Book preview

Prologue

The girl had been kicking from the trunk for a good while and only in the last few minutes had she appeared to run out of steam. Joe Carter and his boy, Billy, were passing around a bottle and laughing. They thought the retarded girl kicking around back there was funny. She’d been walking along the road about an hour ago, right before dark, and she’d been nothing to get into the trunk. She didn’t have a lot in the brains department but those titties deserved a second look. Up close.

Carter slowed the car, looking for the turn off. It was hard enough to see in the daylight, by night it was like a needle in a haystack. There it is, Billy said pointing. Carter slowed down the Buick Roadmaster and slowly turned left off onto the gravel. As he checked the rear view mirror he was glad theirs was the only car on the highway.

Branches scraped and clawed along the side of the car and there were potholes big enough to get lost in but that wasn’t going to stop them. Carter already had a spike in his pants a cat couldn’t scratch. Wind on back behind the lake, Billy said as if Carter didn’t already know. They looked at each other and grinned.

After another couple of minutes they got to a break in the foliage where the road widened out and Carter steered left again. The highway now might as well have been in another universe. He stopped the car and pulled the keys free of the ignition. Everything around them went quiet as the grave.

Billy looked at him, his eyes shining like little diamonds. Carter could tell he was really pumped up. He opened the car door and got out, fixing his pants so he could walk straight. They met at the trunk.

Looked at each other for a moment until Carter opened it up. There she was, wide-eyed, shrunk down like she was trying to hide in the otherwise empty space. The two men smiled again. Billy leaned down and started pulling her out.

She yelled a little bit but didn’t seem to make much sense. Carter had seen her around town a couple of times, figured her brains weren’t much more than oatmeal anyway. She looked scared but what the hell did she know?

Get her over toward the lake, he said and left Billy to get it done. He skirted the side of the car and made his way to the lake. The moon was out like a small sun, casting shadows that writhed and stretched along the ground. He heard Billy cuss once and then the slamming of the trunk lid. He lit a cigarette. Turned back to watch Billy come on.

He had the girl pushed out in front of him and she was bent over, shuffling. Every once in a while she took her eyes from the ground and looked about as if trying to decide which direction to run. Billy had torn her shirt and one breast was visible in the moonlight, milky white like cream. He smiled, grabbed at the front of his pants.

Over here by this tree, he called to Billy. It was a big oak that had rotted through the middle and cracked on one side. Most of it lay on the ground but there was one jagged slice left pointing up like a fang with a hole of darkness around the base. It drew his attention for a moment until Billy shoved the girl to her knees in front of him. She didn’t look up this time.

All right, Billy said, almost panting. All right. He brought his feral eyes to Carter’s.

Bend her over that tree and hold her arms, Carter said. He pointed, spit out the cigarette butt, and started undoing his belt buckle.

Oh yeah, Billy said, dragging the girl over to the broken tree. He draped her across it like a wet blanket and she didn’t move. All she did was make a small mewling noise like a cat trapped in a bag.

Carter walked over and slapped her on the ass. Shut her up good and quick. Then he grabbed hold of her pants on either side of her hips and wrenched them down to the ground, panties and all. He stepped back. Two moons out tonight, hey Billy? he said and they had another good laugh. The goon moved around the tree, grabbed both of the girl’s arms. She made another small sound but it didn’t amount to much. Carter dropped his pants. Moved up behind her and spit in his hand.

Didn’t notice the tendrils of mist seeping out of the broken hole in the ground underneath the fang.

In fact, he didn’t notice anything but the jiggling white ass he was starting to work over. He went at it like a hound to the trail for a couple of minutes, only slowing down when he began to get light-headed. He leaned into her and straightened up. Looked into Billy leering face. The sonofabitch’s tongue was practically hanging out of his mouth. He pulled out. Billy’s eyes got wider. You done? he asked.

Naw, Carter said. Spin ‘er over. I wanta look at ‘er.

The henchman did as he was told. The girl mewled again and turned her face away. Carter moved in for the second show. But on his third stoke, the girl twisted violently, pulling one of her arms free, and with lightning precision lashed out and dragged her fingernails into a deep runnel along Carter’s face. He immediately pulled out and went to his knees on the ground, holding his face. Goddammit! I told you to hold her! he shouted at Billy, fumbling around on the other side of the downed tree. The girl flipped over backward to the other side of the tree and Billy began grappling with her. Carter, blood streaming down his face, made his move around the side to let her have it.

In the confusion of trying to control the girl, Billy had no time to watch Carter coming around. He punched out a couple of quick, hard rights and the girl quit fighting so much. And when he looked up he saw Carter. And pissed his pants.

The man was standing no more than ten feet away, seemingly frozen in place. The misty tendrils from the broken tree had thickened and grown during the struggle. Now they looped out from the hole and had somehow attached themselves to the older man. But not to just anywhere. The grey, almost-tentacles had reached over to Carter’s face, where the blood was flowing, and incredibly seemed to be digging inside. Carter grimaced and the skin of his face pulsed and stretched like something was entering him. He made a gagging sound and his tongue popped out. And then, equally insane, his head began to dissolve. Like acid had been injected inside it. Carter fell to his knees, clutching at his throat. His face was running like hot tallow dripping off his skull. His hair slid off the back of his head.

Billy started screaming. Backing up toward the lake. Not taking the time to look behind him. The girl was forgotten.

He tripped over a stump or some such thing and went down hard on his ass. From around the corner of the downed tree he could see steam rising up and an awful acrid stench burned his nostrils. It was also right then his hands touched water. Amid the horrible gurgling sound from the other side of the tree, Billy wrenched his head around.

The lake had come alive. There were what appeared to be floating heads dotting its surface and the water had pushed itself into thick fingers that had reached him while he wasn’t looking. And he couldn’t pull his hands free. It was like they were stuck in glue but infinitely worse. Glue that burned. He turned his face toward the sky and started screaming. Was immediately jerked backward as the water pooled over his body, moving over him like oil. And then he began to be dragged toward the lake, his shoes dragging ruts in the dirt. In another few seconds he was gone completely and once again the lake was confined to the bank. The floating heads dipped below the water line and the surface became glassy, still.

The abandoned Roadmaster was found several days later, but as to the three people who’d wandered into the trap of Leszno’s Acres, not a scrap of evidence was ever found.

Chapter 1: History

From the air, the area known colloquially as Leszno’s Acres appeared as a rough rectangle, its southern extremity pulled down slightly to follow the contour of Mill’s Stream. Highway 27, Old Perkins Way, bisected what had originally been almost a thousand acres of hardwood and swamp in its isolation, though everything on the east side of the highway had been sold in the late 1940s and for the most part remained untouched. This stasis, however, was slowly changing as the influence of Macon’s Bluff, a city of almost 45,000 souls ten miles to the south, pushed outward. Already land on the west of 27, almost three hundred and fifty acres cut from the original one thousand, was being scraped clean to accommodate a hundred and fifty unit housing development due to open in the spring of 2014.

Back on the eastern side of the highway, Leszno’s Acres tracked north to a long defunct spur of the Illinois Central Railway. During the dawn of rail travel it had served the growing cities of Blackburn and Angle Sides for most of a generation, but a mysterious outbreak of smallpox in the early 1900s had decimated Blackburn and business between the two quickly perished. The line limped along for another decade but eventually failed due to incompetent managers and the onset of trucking.

Gulliver’s Creek dipped away from the wide, muddy Turnley River near the dilapidated bridge the Illinois Central had left in the earth and ran a zig-zag southwest, transecting all that remained of the Acres to its farthest western boundary, the state line. Here Neadles County and Pharsee Parish met in a delineated stalemate south and north, facing each other across a vast tract of pine forest, owned for the past hundred and thirty-three years by the PetaCollins Paper Mill, only recently declared insolvent. Gulliver’s Creek joined Asdlundt Lake at the far southern extreme, yawning an oval five acres back into the forest. The company had stocked the pond years back for employee picnics and other such forgotten get-togethers but a spate of unusually wet seasons had spilled the lake over its bank, stranding and killing most of the fish in spread out oxygen-starved shallow pockets and creating a vast bog that mudded and made untenable most of the southwest corner of Leszno’s Acres.

And there it was. With boundaries thus defined, the encompassed seven hundred acres were nothing to shock the imagination (as it would in the future) or cause sustained pause. Any magazine on farm and woodland would have contained its various elements, the cleared areas for grazing, the wooded for shade and protection, the ponds and creeks supplying water and irrigation. But it was what had happened there over time that made all the difference, the creation of the thing that refused to lie quiet beneath the earth.

*

One should remember history is not the sole provenance of man. It lays a gossamer tissue of experience upon the land and bides in seeming disinterest. And because land and time are not human constructs, they are not subject to our whims and petty laws. Therefore patterns can be very subtle, if recognizable at all, and ripple through the ages like a goosefleshed skin across the land. So it had been for the swath of land known currently as Leszno’s Acres. So it has been for every other spot on, above, or under the earth for time out of mind. But the land, like us, its human counterpart, slowly acquires personality and quirks, intent, and finally will. Like the delineations of old scars on a fisherman’s hands or the thin burst veins in an alcoholic’s nose point to deeper, more savage, truths, so too does land acquire a history, a personality of its own. So call it Leszno’s Acres now, but before it had known other more malicious titles: the Hill of Blood, the Flame Trap, Carter’s Demise, Malice Stop and on and on.

The land becomes a magnet for what it has known, and like a child at Christmas, it learns, it eventually burns, to acquire its wishes. No matter how banal, how bizarre, how perverse.

It becomes both Lure and Lair.

Such was Leszno’s Acres.

*

If one had the inclination to lie flat a transparency across a map of the area and mark with a red X all locations where animals and/or humans had happened upon misfortune of one sort or another, the area would appear to bleed. There were, of course, the natural deaths: wild horses trapped in unexpected brush fires, deer broken legged in deadfalls, wooly pigs snorting out their pitiful rage as muckpits dragged them to their depths. And then, the metaphysical ones: Indian tribes slowly, surely losing ground to defeat at the hands of the Wasicun, ritually disfiguring themselves amid other fruitless tortures in the vain attempt to placate and tame their stern and deadly gods. Or finally, and perhaps the most stigmatizing, the purely mysterious: hunting parties gone missing, sometimes single men, but other times complete organized parties. Leaving nothing to herald their passing except short passages in newspapers of the time, scattered bones in gullies and creek beds. And always thereafter, the forgetfulness as people, the living, got on with their lives. Leaving the dead to whatever spaces they would inhabit.

And so time went until, eventually, with European settlements and all the accoutrements of modern living creeping down from the northeast corner of the continent and up from the south, the area, which would one day become Leszno’s Acres, claimed the rather blasé nom de plume of haunted. The term was implied in newspaper accounts on the occasion something strange happened within its boundaries; it was proclaimed in bold type in the popular serials of the day, huckstered by ‘professional’ clairvoyants and their specious castes; it was warned by parents to their children to by all means steer clear of the area whenever possible, and if not able to avoid it, then to arm themselves with accomplices, and never, never after dark.

But the plague of misfortune continued.

*

In 1848, three boys excavating along the backbone of a gradual rise near Grimball Rock Quarry, just on the verge of the present southeastern border, were smothered to death when the roof of their primitive tunnel let go. When discovered two days later (they had, of course, not mentioned to their parents their whereabouts nor their endeavors), a pair of hands and a pair of boots stuck out amid the rubble of the entrance. One going in, the other out, like adjacent currents in a vast ocean, two short lives caught in the process of entering and leaving.

Then fourteen years later, 1862, a minister’s daughter suddenly missing from her bed, found miles away and days later, close within the dim rectangle, tied with rusty wire to a willow tree, her poor young body nude and ravaged from time, the wire, and depravity. For the crime a drifter took the fall, some toothless vagrant tossed out of his own home years before in the deathgrip of alcoholism, blasted out of his mind and completely clueless when the vigilantes rousted him from sleep near Gulliver’s Creek. To be hung by the neck from a nearby oak, vehemently proclaiming his innocence until his ability to continue was…shall we say, choked off.

The area drew victims like a spider web draws flies.

*

The new century offered little respite. On January 1, 1901, a dog-handler in search of his prize Catahoola bitch broke through a magnolia copse and into the light of what was known for the next thirty years as the Hill of Blood. After retching up his breakfast and arming himself with a stout red oak branch, he managed to stumble to the summit of the small rise.

Around him, scattered in haphazard piles and even a few to their own spaces, lay the remains of what was eventually identified as thirty-seven bodies. Men, women, and children. Four were identified; two, a forty year old farmer and his nine year old son, having disappeared in a fishing boat four years earlier on the other side of the state, and the other two, unrelated fieldworkers, one white, one black, both middle aged, identified by their families, owing to the fact they appeared only to have died very recently.

And the other thirty-three? A mystery, thirty-three dead ends. For those not too far gone in decomposition, photos went out in the paper, black and white grainy shots to be sure, but photos nonetheless. The others were buried at parish expense, immediately, some said to make the nightmare end. That grisly circus of lost bodies.

And of the photographed few?

Not one word, not one single inquiry from the entire limit of the newspaper’s influence. Some fearful townsfolk hinted the dead were the derelicts of Heaven, others the rejects of Hell.

And there it stayed.

*

On May 22, 1929, according to the microfiche remnants from the old Angler’s Gazette, a man named Antonio Grasse, a recent Italian immigrant, was found dead in the woods near Asdlundt Lake. His fishing pole was found nearby, owing to the interest by the gazette, but not to the follow up stories that would continue by print and mouth for the next quarter century. The gazette laid it out in simple terms, bereft of histrionics. Grasse had spoke of fishing one afternoon, obviously had held true to his word, and even though the area in which he’d been found was far from the typical haunt of such types (angler’s are known for their quirks), no eyebrow was lifted to this irregularity. Initially. The odd thing, and here the paper only suggested, was how he was found: hooked by the pantsleg to the third strand of barbwire in the PetaCollins fence line, head down, his face resting in six inches of foul lake-runoff from the previous summer’s flood. Not a mark on his body, not even cuts from the barbwire, and yet his lungs full of the swampy water. Drowned somehow, hanging upside down from a barbwire fence. A damn sight strange indeed, but that’s where the Angler’s Gazette left it.

By the time of the first sighting the periodical had gone the way of the dinosaurs. And that was in 1939, April, just short of a decade later, when two teenagers, a boy and a girl, hysterically reported being dogged in the woods by a ragged stranger. More attention was paid on the fact that these two were together in the woods at all, but there was an interesting little side note in the story of a rare, old fishing lure found embedded in the boy’s torn shirt. And for some that brought back the memory of Grasse.

Over the course of the next fifteen years his ghost was spotted numerous times near the area, shadowing hunters and fisherman, occasionally getting close enough to become an actual menace according to those few who claimed these encounters. And then, very slowly, as the area became more notorious, the apparition slipped from the public conscience completely, or as completely as ghosts ever do.

*

The 1940s passed with little more of substance to add to the public record. People, however, continued to talk. Hunting dogs, it was said, had difficulty following trails within Leszno’s Acres, and even if not, game taken was often deformed and distasteful. Camps would burn, lightning strikes from clear skies. Compasses would point errant directions. And then, the only real significant episode of the decade, the dead cows.

*

The owner of PetaCollins Paper Mill during that period had been a certain Thomas Clark, a sixty year old philanthropist from Chicago and supposed distant relative of H.G. Wells, the writer. Or at least that’s what he told everyone. Known for his mysterious whims (orchids from South America for two years, ancient Irish metallurgy for five more, numerous endeavors and interests in between) he happened upon the idea of raising Hereford cattle on the huge tract of land the paper mill had owned for years.

Once inflamed with an enterprising scheme, Clark was relentless. Within four months he owned 30-head of the finest producers he could nail down. By the end of the year he’d added 50 more. Some of the older-growth tracts were cleared for grazing, other areas sectioned off by barbwire with transition gates and a gang of wranglers to handle every day operations. And consequently a lively, lucrative operation for the first year or so.

Until the cows began straying into Leszno’s Acres.

Seven times in the course of three months they were found in the boggy southern extremity, having broken down the same stretch of fence every time. But when they were discovered, none save the few on the PetaCollins side of the fence were still alive. All of the others (eight the first time, to a record of fifteen on the fifth) were stone dead. Some found hunched on the ground as if at rest, the others upright. All dead and as desiccated as Egyptian mummies. According to one clandestine report, a wrangler had taken his Bowie knife and cut into one them. In the absence of blood or resistance he’d removed a square of flesh from the animal almost nine inches thick and as dry and brittle as a sponge left all day in the sun. The vet couldn’t explain it, nor could any of the local cattle wizards, and with the persistence of the cattle to return to the same deadly place, Mr. Clark soon found new interests and sold off what remained of his herd. That was in September of 1948.

Nothing else of significance is known to have happened in the short span of decade left.

*

The 1950s and 60s also passed without obvious acts of malice, as if the land itself knew the modern world was closing in and its powers were not enough to keep it safe. Yet. Still, it took what it could for whatever purpose it conceived. March, 1953, a vagrant’s body was found along a stretch of what would eventually become Highway 27, Old Perkins Way. He’d been trampled to death, apparently, by horses, crushed into a bloody pulp of gravel, blood, and bones. October of the same year, Halloween night, a group of three boys living within walking distance of the old Illinois Central line did not return home. To this day they are still delinquent. And then nothing till June of 1965 when a farm truck was found planted into the side of a gigantic live oak near the newly-paved Highway 27, the four passengers in its bed tossed into oblivion, the driver impaled through the throat by a branch, his passenger, the only survivor, broken-backed and babbling incessantly about things in the road. Of course the newspapers reported it as a drunken accident (there was no doubt as to the number and contents of the wild scattering of cans) but some of the oldsters took a moment to pause and thumb their lip, recalling this or that story from years before, bringing a shiver along their spines until they turned the page and got on with lighter reading.

And it remained quite a task to keep livestock and other animals in the vicinity of the Boundary. A vague sense of unease accompanied any discussion of its worth and future, and it sat unclaimed, a prisoner to the federal government, so to speak, until a Polish extract, Karol Leszno, bought the whole plot from a room in the Angle Sides Manor, two days after arriving from the airport in New York. Sight-unseen. He was sixty-four years old.

The date was May 17, 1975.

Chapter 2: Leszno’s Acres

Karol Leszno, commonly known forever after in his new country as ‘Carl’, carried his last name due to a sheer act of circumstance. He’d hailed from a declining nobility in Poland, having entrenched itself somewhat securely in cattle and dairy products, in the rail town of Leszno, Poland. A farsighted ancestor had deposited huge sums in various Swiss accounts through a French agent for various favors and information after World War I, and during the scourge of the Holocaust, Leszno, at the age of 33, saw more human grotesquerie than he could stomach. His belligerence toward the Nazi regime targeted him a political subversive during the summer of 1942, and he was captured (taken really from his country estate as he sipped tea early one morning), imprisoned, boarded on a train like cattle, and shipped off to Buchenwald. Luckily, since he was not a Jew and had transcontinental influence, he was allowed ‘escape’ from the camp, but not until three months had passed. And it was these months that shaped him forever after. The images of death and defilement he’d lived with never retreated far into from his mind. Later he’d say that ‘evil that vicious had a way of seeping in whether you wanted it to or not,’ in his strange, pregnant accent. People would look at him and he’d stand there shaking his head, his eyes like steel, icy rods glowing through you, telling you, he knew, he knew goddammit. Some said that was part of what made him a good businessman: he had the carriage of a soul who’d seen into the pit of Hell and walked away. What could harm him after that?

He’d handled financial transactions from a safehouse in the Netherlands by the time 1944 rolled around. He lost an uncle, two children, and a sister to the crematoriums but managed to buy asylum for his wife and small daughter. During their escape to Hungary, Ellsie, his wife had died and left him alone with the three-year-old girl. They made a steamer on the Danube as far as Csepel Island, just south of Budapest. From there they took a train southwest to Siofok, situated on the shore of the inland sea of Lake Balaton and made their residence in a grimy dockside hotel, inundated with the reek of spotted foga from dusk till dawn, until better quarters could be secured. By that time the war was nearly at its end, and though conditions were not good for most, money always has a way of lessening a burden. He bought the land of a blasted abbey on the verge of the Bakony range and used the surroundings to cultivate grapes for wine. An extensive crypt below the abbey was converted into a cellar and they lived, both Karol and his daughter Meeta, in solitary, uneventful quiet. Nobody but hired hands was known to frequent the place, and most of these for only short stretches of time. This went on until early 1975, when the place was put up for sale, and the Leszno’s abruptly left for the United States.

Arriving in New York, in anonymity, they’d hopped a train south, with no apparent destination in mind, at least as far as the remaining relatives they possessed knew. They deboarded, only briefly in Atlanta, to get their bearings and procure the proper real estate literature, and ended up at the Angle Sides Manor two days afterward. The sale was made concrete around a small wooden table with no drawers and a deep gouge straight through the middle. The now young woman, Meeta, watched her father sign the document the great, bearded stranger had brought with him, the room a swirling mass of cigar smoke and low, grumbling voices. And when the bearded man finally left, closing his presentation and disappearing down the ghostly corridor, her father had turned to her and, hands on hips said, in Polish, Meeta, it’s done.

They were on site a day later, a sixty-four year old man and his thirty-four-year-old, unmarried daughter. But it was a new day in a new land and no one knew them well enough to hold any opinion. They were simply a family, a monied-family it was whispered, from Europe, and a person’s business was his and his alone. He immediately hired a crew, had a travel-trailer delivered early one morning, and set out with purpose. Meeta remained the enigma, no classic beauty, but compelling nonetheless in her mysteriousness. She was never seen in town, never far from her father’s shoulder. There was seldom a day when some gigantic piece of machinery didn’t arrive to scalp or push the land into different places. The building of the house became a sort of sideline to the rest of the action taking hold of the place. And it wasn’t long after the endless stretch of barbwire went up along the side of Highway 27 that people began to slow down when passing its length, glancing off to the left or right and wondering just what kind of crazy hell was going on over there? By the New Year, the house was completed and the cattle ranch not far behind. All those hundreds of acres had been put to task and were responding magnificently. Vast cleared areas offered ample space for grazing, and the glades covered well over half of the entire property. The land movers had eaten three great ponds into strategic locations and now awaited the next acquisition. Within the following four months, 350 head of Hereford cattle (ironically enough) were bought by his hand. No one remembered (or at least made it known to anyone it would have made sense to tell) about the incident years earlier. It wouldn’t have mattered if anyone had. This was a new day, in a new land.

Problems began to occur within the first eight months. Dead animals lying about, having been found under no apparent duress or trauma. In the fields, in the barns. Vets were summoned, tests run, to no avail. No hoof-and-mouth disease, no anthrax. And still the deaths continued. Sometimes it was up to ten a week. And then there started a different angle, cows found floating dead in the ponds, some lying flat on their backs on the shallow banks, some only surfacing days later from the ponds when their bloated, gas-filled bodies rose to the surface. The land began to reek of death. Carl, not known to frequent town often even early on, retreated entirely to the compound he’d built. Groceries and supplies were ordered by phone and delivered by truck, unloaded without a word according to the men who undertook the rides out to the farm. The grass began to grow wild and unkempt along the stretch of barbwire. The hired hands drifted off to other endeavors.

Except one.

His name was Eduardo Mendez and he was from a small, destitute village near Matamorus, Mexico. Originally he’d been hired as a carpenter’s apprentice but upon completion of the house, and having proven his work ethic, the Old Man kept him on as a cattle hand. The travel trailer was removed to a corner of the compound as the cattle increased, and up until the spate of mysterious deaths, many of the hands elected to stay there. Eduardo had been one of the first. He was tall, just over six-feet, and bore his muscle within wide, swarthy bands of glistening skin. He had flowing black hair and the tongue of a priest. Early on the other men developed a dislike for the Mexican because of his grace with the lady. Because there was not a day went by that Meeta didn’t bring a fresh pot of lemonade out to whichever outfit Eduardo happened to be in the interest of. And then the deaths started. There were attempts to write off all as natural occurrences, until the vets were brought aboard and continued to meet the wall. Carl became increasingly withdrawn, complaining incessantly of some debilitating pain in his legs, one that he refused to see a doctor for and which continued to plague him until his death. More and more Meeta was seen in the company of the hired men, with her eye obviously fixed upon Eduardo. But during those days her demeanor never changed, her distant aloofness remained a constant. However, word did begin to filter around the camp. The cattle continued to die, the revenue to dwindle, and the Old Man was seen less and less, and even then usually in pillowed chairs, his legs set out before him on ottomans. Then came the carcasses in the lake, which led to more odd whispering, and with the new unease of superstition the exodus began. First, one or two of the hands over the course of a week, then a steady, rising stream until Eduardo stood alone. At his little corner of the lot. With the Old Man now confined to the porch, rumored to be dying of some consumptive illness.

And then he was dead for good.

The coroner came and went as did the undertaker and his macabre entourage and Meeta was alone, captive to a haunted place. Eduardo remained. Within three weeks he was a fixture in the main house. All correspondence and transactions with the cattle ranch on 27 and the outside world abruptly ceased. Effectively they split from the world until almost ten months later, when a public school bus driver reported repeatedly seeing two small children riding horses on the now defunct cattle ranch during school hours. A truant officer was briefed on the driver’s information and took his state vehicle out to investigate several days later. He didn’t get far. At the turn-in to the drive he found an old cattle gate hanging lopsided from a broken hinge. Grass had grown up through the ruts work trucks had left in the hardpan years back, and after the state employee pushed the gate back far enough to get the car through, he continued along the drive to the main house.

He reported being fired upon halfway down its length, by a shooter he never saw. And yes, the car did have a crumpled left rear fender and no bullet holes, but the employee was very adamant in the defense of his story, to the extent that a sheriff was summoned to check it out. He, too, reported gunfire, but this time from behind the wheel of his cruiser, the butt-end of it planted in a run-off ditch, as he continued to take fire. When he was dramatically cut off in mid sentence, the Sheriff’s Department went into overdrive. Five units were dispatched to the farm, along with an ambulance and a fire truck. For the next six hours the latter two sat on the verge of the highway while an increasing number of law enforcement officers amassed at the scene in hopes of rescuing their downed peer. The raid was commenced an hour before sundown.

Two SWAT teams filtered off into the brush just at dusk, each with a military sniper. All members were equipped with night-vision goggles and Kevlar vests. One team came in from the southeast, the other from the northeast, both off the highway. No word had been received from the sheriff’s deputy for the better part of an hour and a half. HQ was situated just down the street at a utility companies’ parking lot. A professional hostage negotiator had been called in from New Orleans after the fact was clarified that at least one woman and several children were potentially involved. For the next five hours the area was as still and quiet as the eye of a hurricane, the only subdued buzz from radio traffic coordinating positions. At midnight the perimeter was tightened though no one could be seen moving within or around the house. The deputy had been found two hours earlier, dead in the driver’s seat, his brains blown out against the seat behind him. The car was later counted to have twelve bullet entry holes and most of these were from the driver’s side. Classic ambush. And then, at twelve-seventeen to be exact, years before the Waco fiasco, flames were reported in a downstairs window. Within minutes they had gained the outside wall on that side and were devouring the roof. The command to enter the dwelling was issued and SWAT teams fanned out from their nooks edging steadily closer, all weapons trained on the conflagration building before their eyes. The suicide mission was suddenly aborted when the front door burst open and what appeared to be a woman holding two bundles tore across the porch and into the small, manicured front yard. The woman was Meeta, the two bundles, children. Eduardo’s scorched bones were found the next morning as the arson team picked through the ruins of what had so shortly before been a beautiful home.

That was on December 14, 1976, just shy of a year and a half since Karol and his daughter had bought the place from their room at the Angle Sides Manor. And in that time they were still relative unknowns. Their reclusive ways had afforded the surrounding gossip mill with no real grist, but of course, that did little to stop its engine running; if anything, it only fueled ambition it would have had a hard time achieving on its own. Serious inspiration held sway of the airwaves in most of the parish by early the next morning. Everything at least third-person, but no one providing enlightenment, on the sickening number they’d allowed among their ranks for the last good while, right there in our midst, as even the Methodist minister’s wife was sworn to admit shortly thereafter, the phone lines popping with conversation. Now, even the typically mute mental pygmy voiced his mind on those foreigners with their goddamn Mexican bunch. How they’d always been a bomb waiting to go off. After all, the peculiar behavior between the father and daughter just went to show you. Why wasn’t that girl married? Yes, it just went to show you, they assured one another over cups of coffee, Foreigners could not be trusted. Meanwhile Meeta was interrogated, the children taken away as soon as her butt hit the cruiser’s seat, away from any sneaky photog just waiting to grab the next money-shot.

*

Among all the hearsay and innuendo that steadily made its rounds over the course of the next few weeks, predictably very little had anything to do with facts. Because there were few. One: Eduardo Mendez was dead, or at least someone of his general height and build (the fire had been started with a large amount of gasoline and had burned excessively hot). Two: Sheriff’s deputy Franklin Benoit had been killed by at least two if not three shots from a Winchester .30-.30. It was thought Mendez had owned such a gun after certain acquaintances were interviewed, but none was ever found in the burned-out wreckage of the house. Three: the children, one boy and one girl, were undocumented and obviously of South American descent, judging from the dialect of Spanish they spoke to one another. And four: though this was really more speculation than fact, that Meeta was mentally unbalanced. Of course, this conclusion was based solely on her behavior the night of the raid (she’d come close to scratching an officer’s eyes out when he reached for the children), and had absolutely no relation to any psychological examination of any kind. Tests were and would continue to be forthcoming but owing to the nature of the report, would never reach the eye of the Public. But this did little to stop tongues wagging. The fire was dowsed, the bodies (or what was left of them) buried, the children put under State protection, and Meeta relegated to the lost, dank rooms of a basement ward for psychotics in upstate New York. And with her departure so too went the remaining smoking tendrils of interest after the gluttony of the fat had been chewed from the story.

Chapter 3: The Neighborhood

Three months after the debacle at Leszno’s Acres, the novelty of the catastrophe was sidelined by a child kidnapping in Bank’s Ridge, a little burg forty miles northeast. The child was an Honor student and daughter of a local district councilman, and by the time she was found a month later and twenty pounds lighter, the focus had shifted from the farm for good, or so people thought. The parish erected a new cattle gate to replace the old broken one in hopes of deterring late-night excursions by horny teenagers and the matter of succession was left to the courts. This was the Jimmy Carter years and with prices out of control and continuing to spiral out of sight no one was much interested in acquiring or developing over 700 acres of land largely in the middle of nowhere. The children were parceled out to foster families, Meeta Leszno wasted away in the bowels of the New York hospital, and the selectmen of the area agreed amongst themselves to let sleeping dogs lie. Or better still, die.

And die the Acres did for the next decade.

It lay unvisited but fecund; its vast pastures slowly reclaimed by wilderness. The burnt-out remnant of the farmhouse rotted slowly into the earth, leaving scarce reminder except for the odd shard of timber or crumbling foundation. The lakes spread in black washes of turbid water that carried a crown of scum on their surface. The cattle gate entrance was overrun by crabgrass and great banks of poison ivy. The barbwire rusted and dipped to the ground over vast areas, allowing whoever, or most likely whatever, to come and go as it wished. The towns and hamlets around its perimeter continued to limp along despite their sluggish economies, and it seemed at times that every ill will that washed across the land, either from a recent firing or simple bad luck, resonated simple and deadly from that dead, black plot of land which ran the gauntlet of Highway 27. Once again, inevitably, it resorted back to its former enigmatic self, a thing best talked about and scorned if the distance were great, but never on the nights, when alone, some soul would travel the length of barbwire fence lining Highway 27, and suddenly remember every word spoken about the place from their infancy; and, with the witching moon high over the land, have very little trouble believing every one.

And then, like a half-dead body left for a moment unattended on an examination table, it coughed once more to life. The date was October 29, 1988.

Meeta Leszno was found dead in her basement room. Strangled, apparently, from the proliferate bruises on her neck, the horror expressed on her face. The door to her room was locked as usual; there was no sign of a struggle. She was found at shift change and ultimately the security guard for the ward was implicated in the crime. However, he’d worked in the institution for going on fourteen years and his record had been exemplary. He swore he’d heard nothing and, indeed, no physical evidence ever did link him to the murder. The cameras marked him at his desk, accountable for every move, save when he left for his punctual attention to rounds. And these absences were nothing out of the ordinary, hardly providing enough time to systematically strangle a woman in her bed. But still he would have probably been convicted had the bruises on her neck matched his fingerprints. Because herein lie his salvation; they were not. In fact, they could be linked to no one on staff, both those working during the time of the murder and those who were not. Ultimately, the whole mess passed away; Meeta was cremated at state expense, the guard, still shrouded in the stink of mystery, was forced out and left the state entirely, thanking his lucky stars he was not to do the rest of his life behind bars. All was done, it seemed, everything could be put to rest, until a G1 clerk going through Meeta’s personal file rediscovered the land in Louisiana. The economic climate had changed dramatically during the Reagan years, and that much land, anywhere, was nothing to scoff at. Especially since the file specifically mentioned the fact of the two children. Gone these many years into the foster home circuit. So, in order to satisfy the law and put the whole matter to rest (it was still unclear as to just how the children were related to the diseased), the children had to be found and notified of their right of succession. The older of the two, the boy, looked, as far as the scant information from the files provided, to be nearing legal age. His last recorded entry indicated a Vermont residence, the girl’s somewhere in St. Louis.

Daniel Martin, the G1 clerk, made the appropriate calls, provided directives for the children to acquire their rightful property, or at least for an investigation to commence, and let the matter go. This caused further scrutiny of the land to which the fact that property taxes in the amount of several thousand dollars had yet to be paid since the incident with the Fire. Both families agree (in the interest of the children, they said) to sell off several tens of acres to satisfy the fees and penalties and provide a working budget for the children to receive. The rest would have to wait until both were of legal age and it could be determined just what their relationship had been to the deceased. The paper trail had long since gone cold and the lengthy gaps commanded unwelcome attention by public servants not known for their delicacy or diligence even on their best of days.

The children had come from Colombia,