Dark Vengeance Read online

  Laura had miscarried twins before her husband, Doug, moved her out into rural Tennessee from New York City. Once here, what she called her student sixth sense helped her make contact with the trapped spirits of two girls murdered at Galaxy Farm. They became the daughters she never had.

  When an evil entity possessed her husband, he killed and skinned neighbor Vern Pugh in their barn. He almost did the same to her. The sheriff arrived just in time. But, strengthened by his supernatural possession, Doug overpowered the sheriff and shot him with his own gun. Luckily for Laura, Sarah, the spirit of the twin girls’ mother, manifested and ran Doug through with a fireplace poker. Laura and Theresa kept this full story to themselves and gave the police a more conventional, believable version.

  A few months later, before the summer’s start, Laura had freed the two girls to join their mother in the afterlife. They were released through the cleansing fire at Galaxy Farm and the offering of Sarah’s silver locket. That rang Laura’s emotional bill up to losing two sets of daughters, a husband and her home. If Theresa didn’t think that deserved a little leeway on burning a sandwich, then the little redhead had a serious problem of her own.

  Somehow, the apartment’s small space felt intimidating. For the first time ever, a living space would be hers alone. She’d gone from high school at home, to college with a dorm roommate, to married with Doug. In almost thirty years, this was the first time she would live alone, be a household’s only presence.

  In a box somewhere in her bedroom, a clock sounded a muffled chime and seemed to amplify the silence everywhere else.

  The task of unloading the boxes was suddenly insurmountable. The lethargy that had plagued her all summer crept through her like spreading kudzu. She collapsed into a chair. When she sighed it was as if life itself escaped into the air. Teacher in-service was tomorrow. Even the idea of selecting what to wear in the morning, normally a fun, creative process, felt like a burdensome chore.

  She just needed one of those elusive good night’s sleep. Then tomorrow she’d be back at school. Getting back to work would put all these bad experiences behind her and get her back on top of the world. Last year, bombarded by the bizarre and adrift in the adjustment from New York City to a small town, school had been her refuge. Among the children in her class, her true self, following her lifelong calling, had flourished and swept away the anxiety that the rest of life delivered. This year would be no different.

  All she had to do was get to tomorrow.

  Chapter Four

  The next morning, as soon as Laura set foot in the hallways of Moultrie Elementary again, she was home. This first August day, it was teachers only, in to get organized and deliver lesson plans to Principal Kenneth Wheedle. Laura passed several teachers in the halls on her trips back and forth for supplies and books. She could not catch their eyes. They seemed to hug the far wall, as if avoiding some communicable disease Laura carried. She hadn’t been popular last year. She was told it took years to shed the title of “outsider” in the small town. But it had always been a pleasant indifference or a feigned, superficial Southern graciousness. Nothing like this.

  As she stood burdened with an armload of books just outside her classroom, one smiling face flagged her down. The smile came from the last person she’d expect. Patrice Winegard, Moultrie Elementary’s sixth grade fixture, positively beamed beneath a thick coat of Tammy Faye-like makeup. No teacher last year had taken as much passive-aggressive pleasure at despising Laura, doubling down her hatred when test results and parental approval testified to Laura’s teaching gifts.

  “Back for another year of fun?” Patrice said. Her Old South drawl was thick as congealed bacon grease and about as appetizing. Laura knew the bitch saved it for only the most disingenuous of occasions.

  “Been planning lessons all summer,” Laura said.

  “Well, good for you,” Patrice said. Her smile went from friendly to foxlike. “Practice makes perfect.”

  Patrice strutted away. A sinking feeling overwhelmed Laura. Only the impending delivery of bad news could make Patrice that happy. Laura entered her room and dropped the textbooks on her desk. She closed her eyes and tried to retrieve last year’s good feelings working in this room had provided, something to wash away the lingering taste of Patrice.

  “Laura?”

  The voice pulled her out of her reverie. She turned to see Principal Wheedle in the doorway. He was in his midfifties and sported a well-trimmed silver beard and broad wire-rimmed glasses. It was the first time Laura had ever seen him without a sport jacket on.

  “Mr. Wheedle! Good to see you.” And she wasn’t pleased just because he wasn’t one of the teachers. From her first day, she’d had an excellent professional relationship with the principal.

  “This year you need to start calling me Ken,” he said. “Everything going okay so far?”

  “Absolutely,” she lied.

  “I’m afraid I’m going to toss a bit of a wrench into it.”

  Laura sat down behind her desk to better weather the storm.

  “I’m going to have to move you out of third grade,” he said. “It has nothing to do with your performance.”

  Laura just stared in shock. Patrice had already known. She must have.

  “Britney Rutledge, the granddaughter of one of the school board members, graduated with a teaching degree in May and I have orders to make room for her.”

  Laura sagged in her chair.

  “Now I know what you’re thinking,” he continued. “Small-town politics. And you’re right. But you aren’t fired. You signed a contract. I just have to reassign you…to remedial reading this year.”

  Laura’s hopes had buoyed at the phrase “you aren’t fired”, but the lift didn’t last through the rest of his sentence. The remedial reading teacher took on the lowest performers, usually with undiagnosed learning disabilities. The teacher met with them individually or in small groups for forty-five minutes a day. She’d experienced the haphazard execution of the program last year. For a whole host of reasons, kids didn’t attend every session and frequently missed their few scheduled days. Last year all the sessions were limited to the mornings.

  “Don’t get me wrong, Mr. Wheedle,” she said. “I more than understand your position. And teaching anything is better than being fired. But remedial reading isn’t a full-time job.”

  “You’re right there. We are really only budgeted for a half day. So the rest of the time I have you on homeschool monitoring.”

  Laura felt like screaming. Shaw County had piloted homeschool monitoring last year. The monitors dropped in on homeschooled students from kindergarten through fourth grade before they had to take Tennessee’s standardized tests. The monitor checked on their progress and reviewed a set of prepackaged classes on state-mandated material. The prospect was as far from teaching in her own classroom as she could get without bagging it altogether and selling nails at Randolph’s Hardware.

  “Mr. Wheedle…”

  “Look, I know you aren’t happy with this turn of events. I was lucky to get you this. If you hadn’t minored in reading, the Board was ready to buy you out of your contract.”

  “They climbed out on a pretty small limb to cover someone’s granddaughter.”

  Mr. Wheedle looked out the classroom window. “It’s not just that. This town is insular. The events around Galaxy Farm matter to people. Sheriff Mears died that night and he commanded a lot of respect in a town used to corrupt, do-nothing sheriffs. On top of that, the grapevine is full of stories about ghosts and such out there. Now I don’t take any of it seriously, but some people do. And those people are worried about who teaches their children.”

  Laura’s attitude snapped from depressed to furious. This unappreciative little burg had no idea what hell she had gone through in the days leading up to that night. And the sanitized story she and Theresa had fed everyone had completely ignored the two’s personal heroism and the mistakes Sheriff Mears made that led to his death. For these small-minded pe
ople to think she wasn’t worthy of teaching their children…

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Wheedle,” she said. “I can see that you stuck your neck out here for me. I’ll take this new position, run with it and prove to everyone you were right to keep me.”

  A relieved smile crossed his face.

  “I just knew that’s how you’d take this,” he said. “Like a professional teacher. Elvira’s granddaughter will be in at ten this morning, so let’s save you the uncomfortable moment and get your stuff out of here and into the remedial reading room.”

  “Sorry to shake things up,” Laura said. “Thanks for believing in me.”

  “It’s more self-serving than that,” he said. “I’m hoping to have you around long enough you can take my job when I retire. Now, that will shake things up!”

  Chapter Five

  The prep day officially went on until four o’clock. But by two, Laura was done. Not just done with setting up the remedial reading room, which took no time at all given the small space, but done for the day with Moultrie Elementary.

  She’d felt like an outcast since she arrived last year, the outsider from New York with the stay-at-home, uppity novelist husband. Every day she had rationalized away the slights she’d perceived from the parents and teachers, attributing it to her paranoia and unwarranted insecurity. But she couldn’t hide behind that curtain anymore. The teachers wanted her gone. The parents who’d loved her last year were nowhere to be found. The fractious school board had finally found a common cause to unite behind: tossing Laura Locke out on her ass. Persona non grata. More like summa non grata. Last night she’d counted on today to vanquish her depression. Instead, it had fueled it.

  She sat alone in her idling car in the school parking lot. She couldn’t take another minute inside those claustrophobic block walls. She could face it all tomorrow, but the stares and whispers of the teachers were too much to handle now. But returning to a soulless apartment full of packing boxes was about as inviting as a week in Death Valley.

  Her first thought was to call Theresa to commiserate. Not likely. Laura had moved her stuff out while Theresa was at work yesterday, and hadn’t heard from her since. That bridge was burned to the abutments.

  She scrambled for somewhere she could call a temporary sanctuary. Only one place came to mind.

  She left the school. A few turns through town and she was on US 41 heading north. Her little Honda remembered the way and she practically drove on autopilot. Only when she reached the destination did she process where it was she was going.

  She jammed on the brakes as the car nosed under the big Galaxy Farm sign over the driveway. She hadn’t been here since the visit with the insurance adjuster the day after the main house fire, the day after she’d given up the companionship of the twin spirit girls, Constance and Elizabeth, so they could join their mother in the world beyond this one.

  The car crunched up the gravel driveway. To her left, just the foundation remained to mark the location of the once-grand house, standing like a cemetery wall for the structure entombed within. The insurance company had cleared the charred remains away. The fire had consumed all the reminders of the insanity that had gripped her husband, Doug, in his last week on Earth.

  She rolled past the barn, unscarred and still standing. A chill ran up her spine. The fire hadn’t spread that far but she wished it had. The list of bad memories from that place was way too long. A flayed human skin on the wall. Sheriff Mears shot dead. Her possessed husband prepping her to be stuffed and mounted. The spirit of the ghost girl’s mother, Sarah, impaling Doug. Laura gave the accelerator too big a tap and shot away from the barn.

  She rolled to a stop at the edge of the pond. She got out of the car and sat on the hood. The autumn sun warmed her face against a cool northeasterly breeze. A smattering of leaves tinkled down in the woods behind her. She hadn’t felt a cool breeze in months. The season was about to change.

  For three months after the deaths in the barn, she and the girls’ spirits shared Galaxy Farm. Games in the main house, night walks down here by the pond in the moonlight. Laura played the surrogate for their missing mother; the girls played the surrogates for Laura’s miscarried twins. Laura had never been so content, so complete. No decision had been harder than to pass the girls over to the other side and to the spirit of their waiting mother.

  She wondered what would have been so bad if she hadn’t made that decision. The girls’ spirits were happy; she was happy. Eventually, they would have all crossed over to the other side together. Their mother Sarah could have waited. What are a few decades when you have eternity?

  Maybe the girls could come back. A person’s spirit could remain on this side after death if it had unfinished business. Her experience proved that beyond a doubt. But Laura wasn’t sure about after the transition between worlds, whether it was permanent or temporary, with a spirit able to return to visit at will. How wonderful it would be to spend a brief, refreshing moment with them again.

  If they could pass from that world to hers, she would certainly try and open the door for them. She closed her eyes and cleared her mind, filled it with happy thoughts, memories of the times she’d spent with Constance and Elizabeth.

  “Constance? Elizabeth?” she said, like she was calling them inside for dinner across the open grass. “Girls, can you hear me?”

  She waited, concentrated to feel that familiar sensation, that static charge that sent the hairs on the back of her neck tingling and her heart racing with joy.

  Nothing.

  She dug deeper, mined her subconscious for moments of true happiness. The time she bounced a ball with the girls in the nursery. The dream where the three of them played in the sun.

  Another happy memory surfaced, not of the girls, but of Doug.

  Laura’s eyes snapped open. It wasn’t a memory of the Doug he had become, but one of how he had been, the college senior with the world ahead of him and a heart full of love for his Laura. She remembered how he’d leave her notes everywhere: her purse, her coat pockets, somehow inside her locked car. He signed them with a little drawing of a shovel, an inside joke on the sound of Doug. They always made her smile.

  Laura leaned back against the windshield. He was a good man back then. They had gone astray in New York, but moving here was supposed to be their new beginning. If they had moved somewhere else, anywhere else…

  She sat up with a start and shook her head. Well, they hadn’t. So she’d never know, and playing a game of I Wonder If wasn’t going to do her any good. Neither was hanging around here waiting for ghosts to come a-haunting. Coming here was a stupid idea.

  She climbed back in the car, spun it around and headed back to her dreary apartment.

  Chapter Six

  The full moon glowed directly over the small clearing at the top of Pear Tree Hill. Lane. Miles from even the scattered lights of Moultrie, a million pinpoints of white in the black sky blazed undiluted by man’s imitation. It was well past midnight, but it was the position of the moon, not the sun, that set the time for the witches’ first great spell.

  Three women in red, hooded cloaks surrounded a black iron pan suspended from a tripod of matching iron rods. Beneath the pan, shards of oak, each at least a century old, blazed away. Orange flames licked the iron pan’s base. Inside, a thick, oily brown mixture maintained a slow simmer, each steam-filled bubble bursting through like gasses through hot magma.

  Three witches stood silent around the pan. Their long hoods kept their faces in shadow, red cowls facing the brew, as if each was focused on the rising bubbles, conjuring them individually from the pan’s bottom.

  The tallest of the three bent and pulled a white dove from a knapsack at her feet. The bird recoiled at the sight of the flames and struggled in the woman’s grip. She tucked the bird into the crook of her elbow and pulled a large gleaming butcher’s knife from beneath her cloak. The bird cooed. With one chop, she severed its head and the bird went still in her arms. The head hit the ground. Another witch
scooped it up and tossed it in the brew. A huge bubble burst and sucked down the head in the aftermath.

  The tall witch poured the dove’s blood upon her fingers and traced a scarlet line around the pan’s rim. The wet blood sizzled and dried a muddy brown.

  “Let this avian offering open the doorway for the spirit of the longarex to enter our world,” the tall witch said.

  The other two witches sprinkled collections of herbs into the steaming potion. The three pricked their thumbs and joined them together over the pan. They began to chant in an ancient tongue never heard before in Tennessee.

  “Cowawhaxie morti quito. Cowawhaxie morti quito.”

  The taller witch took a locket, the silver keepsake she’d stolen from Galaxy Farm, and hung it from the tripod’s apex. It dangled inches from the simmering contents. Wisps of steam swirled up and around the locket as it began a clockwise spin.

  The tall witch sprinkled into the mix dry, black hair cut from a man’s corpse.

  “Cowawhaxie morti quito. Avenging spirit of the great longarex, come!”

  The ground trembled beneath their feet. The simmering stew shifted to a violent boil. The pan bounced up and down. Escaping brew splattered into the fire and each drop popped into blue flame as it hit the blaze.

  The pan exploded. The force threw the witches to the ground. Their hoods blew back and revealed bone-white masks in the shape of skulls. Outsized skeletal smiles grinned beneath black sinus holes and red teardrops wept at the corners of their eyes.

  Over the fire, a pulsing ball of blue flames formed. It twisted and morphed until it had twin outstretched wings. With a flash of blinding light, it transformed into a great black vulture with a blood-red beak. It let loose a scream like a thousand tortured voices. With great flaps of its enormous wings, it ascended into the sky. For a moment it hovered, silhouetted against the moon, then flew off into the darkness.