Moore Hollow

By JD Byrne

Ben Potter’s life is a shambles. As a journalist he’s hit rock bottom, writing dreck about monsters and ghouls to make ends meet after a big story blew up in his face. As a son he’s a disappointment, unwilling to follow his father, grandfather, and great grandfather into the family business. As a father, he’s mostly just not there.

Now a new assignment could change all that. All he has to do is go from London to the hills of West Virginia to investigate the strangest of stories his great grandfather told. Did a sleazy politician really raise the dead to try and win an election? And if he did, what happened to the zombies? Could they still exist? Ben needs to find out, to solve the mystery and find a way to get his life back on track.

But finding the answer only presents Ben with a whole new batch of problems. Does he use what he learns to put his life back on track? Or will he be compelled to do the right thing, even if it leaves his life a mess?

The hardest part of a mystery is deciding what to do once you’ve solved it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: JD Byrne
• Release date: Oct 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781540185983

JD Byrne

JD Byrne was born and raised around Charleston, West Virginia, before spending seven years in Morgantown getting degrees in history and law from West Virginia University. He's practiced law for nearly 20 years, writing briefs where he has to stick to real facts and real law. In his fiction, he gets to make up the facts, take or leave the law, and let his imagination run wild. He lives outside Charleston with his wife and the two cutest Chihuahuas the world has ever seen.

Book preview

Chapter 1

Ben’s hands gripped the steering wheel just a bit tighter as the little Lotus Elan crested the hill and, for just a moment, became airborne. With all four wheels back on the ground, he double-clutched a downshift, dabbed the brake to settle the small car’s front end, then turned hard into the next corner. It was a sweeping right-hander around an old oak tree, plunging him into shade for a moment before exploding back into bright sunlight. Once the apex was clipped, he punched the accelerator and wound the tiny four-cylinder engine until it screamed. It was a crisp autumn day in the English countryside, the breeze whipping around Ben’s head and shoulders. A chill shot through him now and then, but the unexpected sunlight kept him warm.

Ben smiled broadly and upshifted before the next kink in the road. This made all the effort worth it. First he had to take the Underground across London to the old barn where the Lotus was stored. It huddled undercover more days than not, but this wasn’t one of them. Next he had to track down Bayless to let him in. Then he had to clear away the dust of too many days gone by and find petrol. But after that, finally, there was only joy.

No one would ever mistake the low-slung green roadster for fast. Even the eye-catching yellow stripe down the middle of the bonnet and boot couldn’t make it look any faster. But it was quick and nimble on the road, like a gazelle bounding across the savannah. Colin Chapman had been onto something way back then when he emphasized light weight. No wonder Granddad was such a fan.

The only connection between Ben and the real world, the one where there were things more important than a perfectly carved corner, was his phone. It sat on the passenger seat beside him. He knew he couldn’t turn it off, not in this day and age, but he could at least ignore it. It had already rung a few times, jingling the generic tinkle of someone he could afford to blow off. There were more of those these days. Bill collectors, solicitors, and other unsavory types had all tried to track him down. He would have to deal with them at some point in the future, but not now.

Up ahead the road curved gracefully around a hedge, behind which lurked a tight left-hand hairpin. If he didn’t know the road well, Ben would have had to be more cautious. As it was, he knew he had just enough room after the gentle curve to brake so he could whip through the corner itself. He jumped on the brakes hard enough to slow the car dramatically but not so hard as to lock up.

Kids today will never know the joy of threshold braking, he thought.

He ran the gearbox down two gears, let the back end drift ever so gently around the corner, then clicked into second gear and pushed the gas once again.

He found the joy in his life here. The car was the one thing Ben had left that was truly his. He had no home, only a too-small flat that, nonetheless, he could barely afford. There was no doubt in his mind that his landlord would kick him out in a heartbeat anyway. It was a small comfort that, if it came to that, he could stuff all his meaningful possessions in a backpack. It was less of a comfort to think of Abby and all the parts of her life he was missing as she grew up.

His career was in even worse shape. In truth, he had no career anymore, just fond memories of one. Never trust a source, a veteran reporter had told him years ago. Remember Ronald bloody Reagan? ‘Trust but verify?’ he had asked. That’s shit. Old fuck had it backward. It’s verify, then trust, and only as much as you have to in order to get the story.

Now Ben knew that was easier said than done. Shortly after that bit of drunken advice, as Ben began to prove his worth as a journalist, he was scrupulous about sources. He didn’t just get verification, he got double verification if it was possible. But in the modern world of digital media and twenty-four-hour news cycles, sometimes there wasn’t time for that kind of diligence. If you take an extra day to nail down the details, someone else comes along and scoops the story. Even worse, somebody scoops some other story, altogether more sensational than yours, relegating you to the back pages.

Looking back on it now, Ben realized he had gotten extremely lucky with the footballer. Some young up-and-comer headed for Manchester United and the Scottish national side had torn a swath through the clubhouses of several smaller clubs. Brilliant on the pitch, a complete disaster off of it. The drunken assaults and sexual harassment were bad enough, making for garish headlines, but the hush money paid to the victims by his agent was what really made the story sizzle. As it happened, one of the victims decided, after pocketing a smaller-than-promised payoff, that she would not keep quiet. It also happened that she was the daughter of a friend of a friend of a nephew of another friend of Ben’s. She came with built-in credibility, and Ben was able to run with the story almost immediately. It made a huge splash and raised his profile to the point where newspapers, websites, and even television outlets were banging down his door.

Late at night in his cramped flat, Ben often brooded about whether what came next just happened or was some kind of setup, revenge for the footballer in some fashion. He wasn’t prone to conspiracy theories, but they’re easier to buy into when you’re the one at the center of the storm. Another rising star, this time a young Member of Parliament, was allegedly living well off of kickbacks from local contractors to whom he funneled government business. As with the footballer, the story came to Ben on a silver platter. The catch was that he didn’t know any of the players personally. He should have sat on it for a few days. Should have poked around, asked some questions. He didn’t. Still high from breaking his last big story, he rushed forward, looking for another fix.

This high lasted about a week. In that time the MP managed to fire back, not from a more friendly press haven, but from court. Ben knew from talking with colleagues that in the States, politicians had almost no chance of winning a libel case against a reporter. The pol would have to prove actual malice, which they almost never could. Ben had no malice toward the guy—he didn’t even know who he was before he wrote the story. He never invested in the story enough emotionally to hate him. But the Queen’s Bench isn’t in the United States, and the laws in Britain favor plaintiffs, not reporters, in libel cases.

To its credit, Ben’s paper went to the wall for him in court. It hired a flock of high-priced barristers to defend him, but they had little to work with. Ben’s source recanted and claimed the quotes attributed to him in the story were false. Without any other evidence to back up the story, Ben looked precisely like the kind of muckraker the libel laws were designed to handle. The verdict was swift and harsh. Ben’s savings, which weren’t much but had been growing, were wiped out. His reputation fared little better. He went from being the top name on anybody’s list of investigative journalists in Britain to the guy everyone said they had never heard of before.

It took a little longer, but the verdict destroyed his little family too. He realized now that it had been coming for some time, but the strain of his career free fall opened up the fissures between him and Tara so wide that they couldn’t be bridged. It didn’t make their separation any easier, but at least he understood it now and had convinced himself they never really had a future. They certainly didn’t now. They only had Abby in common. Thankfully, she was young enough that she couldn’t really understand any of what had happened around her anyway.

In the few years since the libel case, work had been sporadic and hard to come by. Every now and then, he could put his skills to work as a copy editor, but it was nothing he could actually put his own name on. He tried playing at being a private investigator for a while, figuring he could at least keep his surveillance skills sharp. That work had been even more soul crushing than he could have imagined, nothing but an endless succession of cheating spouses and lovers playing the same roles over and over again with few interesting variations.

Thank goodness for the loony rags. They kept him from being evicted. There were few scruples in the cheap newspapers that traded in wild sensation, certainly none that would make for a raised eyebrow at a disgraced investigative reporter. A cut below even the famous London tabloids, the loony rags ignored real human affairs completely and instead reported on the latest sightings of UFOs, Spring-heeled Jack, and the ever-popular Nessie. Many of them only published online now, which made Ben wonder how any of them made money. In print they were fit for a dog to piss on at least. Thankfully, the checks didn’t bounce. They would pay Ben to go out and talk to deranged old ladies and rum-soaked country squires who were just certain that last night they saw a flying saucer piloted by the second coming of Christ himself. Or possibly Elvis. In England’s green and pleasant land, indeed.

He still had the car, although, if he was honest, even it wasn’t his. Not in spirit, anyway. Granddad left it to him when died back during the Thatcher years. In a cruel twist, he had bought it just days before the work accident that crippled him. He only ever drove it once or twice. Regardless, Granddad loved the Lotus. It was the embodiment of everything he dreamt of: a clever piece of engineering that made great use of what it lacked, which was weight. The Elan stood out in the 1960s when it was made for its lightness and stood out even more so now. To Ben, even a modern small car felt like a bloated Range Rover compared to the Lotus.

None of that mattered to him when he was a teenager, of course, and was first drawn to it. It was a sports car with two seats and a top that went away. It was the epitome of cool, the kind of car James Bond would drive if he were poor. Ben was certain that girls would love it as much as he did. He wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t quite right about that, either. They loved the car, but they didn’t love him.

In later years, Granddad schooled him on the Elan’s finer points. By the time he died, it was just about all he had left to his name, aside from the shell of a company with the family name on the door. He gave the car to Ben. His father got the company. It had worked out for the best that way.

Ben thought that Granddad would approve of what had become of him. Not so much for his life, but for how he lived it. Even when the rest of the world was ready to roll over Ben, ready to wipe his name off the roster of those who matter, he could find pleasure in something as simple as driving. Not driving to get somewhere, not driving for transportation, but driving as a kind of therapy. London was no place for a car like this, and even if it was, the Elan was not a commuter car. The convertible top leaked, for one thing. For another, it was slung so low to the ground that drivers of more modern saloons and SUVs often lost sight of him. And, finally, it was British, which meant that it worked when it pleased and was prone to fits of mechanical moodiness.

But today the Lotus had no complaints. Neither did Ben. He shuffled from gear to gear, from corner to corner, over the rolling hilltops and down into shallow valleys. The stupid grin on his face was genuine and not going away anytime soon.

His phone rang again on the seat beside him. It wasn’t the generic jingly tone this time, rather it was the first few chords of Marillion’s Grendel, an adolescent epic of such pomposity that it always left Ben feeling young and fearless. More critically, it meant someone important was calling, someone he wanted to talk to, maybe someone from one of the loony rags. Did they want him to go track down the elusive beast itself? It rang two or three times before falling silent.

Around a few more bends, Ben spied a derelict petrol station on the side of the road. No place to stop if you actually needed service, but a good place to pull over and check for a message. He checked the call log and saw that the last call had come from the London Journal of the Paranormal, a name that elevated the publication well above its station. He punched the number and called back without listening to the message.

Hello? a familiar woman’s voice answered on the other end.

It’s Ben Potter, Artith, he said, more chipper than he had any real right to be. How’s my favorite editor doing? It wasn’t a complete lie. Ben hated all editors equally, so whoever was about to pay him was, by default, his favorite. No point in explaining to Artith that it wasn’t much of a compliment.

Ben! she said with obviously forced warmth. You should answer your phone, naughty boy. You never know what you might have missed.

I was driving, Ben said.

Why should that stop you? she asked, completely sincere.

Driving the Lotus, Ben said. It’s a two-handed job.

Ah, she said, still clinging to that relic?

It’s a classic, Ben said, correcting her ignorant slight.

Classic, relic, whatever you want to call it, it hardly matters she said. You got my message then?

Not really, Ben said. Figured I’d just call you back. What’s up?

Picked something up over the weekend, something a bit unusual, she said, emphasizing the last word. There might be a story in it. One that’s particularly up your alley.

It’s not more fairies out on the moors, is it? he said, groaning slightly. There was nothing more depressing than fairy watchers who strike out when the press shows up.

No, no, of course not, Artith said. Haven’t I apologized for that? No, this is something bigger. Something in America.

That got his attention. America?

Thought that might pique your interest, she said playfully. Can I assume you are nowhere near my office?

Not in my classic, he said.

I figured as much, she said, then paused for a moment. Then why don’t you swing by tomorrow sometime, say, midmorning? Think you’ll have returned to civilization by then?

He chuckled. I can probably handle that. But before I get my hopes up, Artith, be straight with me. Is it really a big one?

She didn’t answer immediately. Could be. Probably depends on what you can do with it, though. Tomorrow, then?

Tomorrow, Ben said, and they exchanged good-byes.

Ben tossed the phone back in the seat beside him. The sun was setting over a nearby hill, casting the trees and fields in a deep maroon glow. He adjusted the rearview mirror and looked at himself. His hair, some of it prematurely gray, was mussed and the airflow had somehow made the wrinkles on his face more prominent. It wasn’t a pretty sight, but it didn’t matter. He was happy and he had a job in the offing. He twisted the key to bring the engine back to life and pulled back out onto the road, coaxing the tiniest squeal out of the Elan’s tires.

Chapter 2

The London Journal of the Paranormal has a long, if not particularly illustrious, history. It was born during the age when Spiritualism, a movement that arose in the United States before their Civil War, captured the British popular imagination. The story goes that the Journal was formed by a group that splintered off from the Ghost Club, an organization founded in 1862 that counted luminaries such as Charles Dickens and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle as members. Unfortunately for the Journal, it had no such illustrious names attached to it. For years, it was led by a failed magician named John Lloyd Calvert, who went by the stage name the Amazing Johnny. But Calvert was of limited means by that point, and if not for a wealthy benefactor that bankrolled the Journal well into the years after World War I, it would have disappeared in the Victorian era without anyone giving it much notice.

As it turned out, the Journal had the last laugh. Insulated from market forces, it remained just active enough to weather the end of the age of Spiritualism and stumble into the era of UFOs and conspiracy theories. A little more than five years ago, it went completely digital, giving up the printed volumes that once gave it some respectability. The Journal itself was gone in all but name only. Wearing its clothes was a website that was constantly updated with reports of the supernatural and unexplained from all over the world. Throw in the annual Best of issues for e-readers published at the end of the year and the Journal was on its firmest financial footing since the days of Churchill.

Unfortunately, one of the casualties of the Journal’s long battle with mediocrity had been its offices. It was first run out of the home of the Amazing Johnny, which was in a posh London residential neighborhood. He recognized that it was the wrong location for a publishing concern, particularly a struggling