Shallow Graves (The Haunted Book 1) Read online

  Halfway through the article, it fell from his fingers and fluttered to the floor.

  Robert had been wrong; things could get more fucked up.

  “See?” Shelly said, but she seemed a mile away. “I told you it will mess with your fuckin’ noggin. But you need to get over that shit, Robert. We have work to do here.”

  Robert stared at the pages that were now spread across the floor by his feet.

  How is it possible? How is any of this possible?

  His eyes settled on the photograph embedded halfway down the page. One that, while she was much younger in the image, was undoubtedly of Ruth Harlop; he recognized her from the photo above the mantle, and the woman that he had spent weeks bathing and cleaning up after. The Ruth Harlop whose head he had bashed in…but in the article, it stated that she had died when she had slipped on the steps out front.

  He tried again to swallow, but still couldn’t.

  Patricia Harlop was also mentioned…about how she “fell.” About how the patriarch, James Harlop, had been devastated by their loss. About how the accident had affected him so. About how losing Ruth and Patricia was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.

  Dead. Ruth Harlop was dead. Ruth was already dead…

  He closed his eyes tightly, then shook his head.

  “It’s not possible,” he said quietly.

  “Fucking right it is. And the sooner you accept it, the sooner we can send these asshole ghosts back to where they belong.”

  Robert childishly covered his ears, unwilling to hear any more.

  Wake up. Wake up. Wake up!

  But when he opened his eyes, everything in the room was exactly the same…except now Cal had stood and was staring at him.

  “Robert.” The words were muffled, and he pulled his hands away from his ears. “There’s more, Robert.”

  “How? How the fuck can there be more, Cal?”

  Anger crept into his voice, and he stood.

  “Tell me how?”

  Cal took a small step backward. He looked scared, but Shelly wasn’t intimidated. She reached into her bag and showed him another article. This one was dated June 12, 1943, about a month after the first. It was from the same paper, and again it was about the Harlop Estate. Robert started to read, but Shelly pulled it out of his hands before he could get past the first sentence.

  Clearly, the woman was as impatient as she was crass.

  “Fucked up thing is, you know James Harlop? All devastated and shit from the”—she made dramatic air quotes—“‘accidental’ death of his wife and daughter? Yeah, well, turned out he was raping his fucking niece…a girl by the name of Jacky Sommers?”

  Robert’s world suddenly started to spin and he fell to the ground.

  Maggots. He tasted maggots in his mouth. He felt their plump, wriggling bodies spreading a sticky substance on his tongue as they squirmed about.

  “Shit!” he heard Cal shout. But Shelly kept on speaking despite his collapse.

  “One day, Jacky lost it and stabbed him in the neck. But James was a mean motherfucker, and he strangled the life out of her even as he bled out. Fucking psycho. Apparently he was also keeping the little girl—Patty—in the basement before shoving her off the roof. Jacky tried to free her from the basement. Didn’t go over too well, I guess. And Ruth? Wasn’t no fall that killed her, but the fucking fireplace poker…”

  Robert felt Cal’s hands behind him, trying to help his jelly-like body back to his feet.

  “Help me get him to the couch.”

  Robert’s vision blurred as Shelly moved toward him.

  “Fucked up family, these Harlops. Wife dead from a fireplace poker in the head, daughter accidentally falls off the roof, husband gets stabbed in the neck and chokes the shit out of his niece. Well, Robert Watts, you sure as fuck picked a great place to inherit, didn’t you?”

  Chapter 31

  They were outside, staring at the hole that Cal had shoveled. The sheet that Robert had used to cover Ruth’s corpse was still intact, but it was muddy and soft. They stared at it for a moment, Robert’s eyes glued to the spots that not only looked dirty, but bloody as well.

  “Before we do this,” Shelly said, “you have to be fucking ready for whatever we find in there. Whether you want to believe it or not, the fact is that Ruth Harlop died more than fifty years ago. Whatever you did, or whatever you think you did, you didn’t kill Ruth.”

  Robert swallowed hard and nodded. He hadn’t yet come to grips with everything, but he had somehow consciously evoked cognitive dissidence, separating the rational part of his brain with a thin veneer. It was the only thing he could do to ensure that he stayed sane. He just hoped that it was enough.

  But he couldn’t be sure.

  “Well? Should I?” Cal asked, wiping his filthy hands on the thighs of his track pants.

  “Do it,” Shelly and Robert answered in unison.

  Cal grimaced, and grasped the corner of the sheet. With a quick yank, he threw it back.

  All three of them experienced a sharp intake of breath.

  Bones.

  The sheet was filled with bones.

  Robert’s eyes scanned the bones, which were gray and weathered. When he saw the skull, he stared in disbelief.

  There was a hole in the side of the skull roughly the size of the fireplace poker, with a multitude of cracks spreading nearly over the entire surface.

  No one said anything for at least a minute.

  It was Shelly who eventually broke the silence.

  “Told you, you didn’t kill anyone. It was that psycho James Harlop. Now let’s go back inside and figure what the fuck to do next.”

  When she turned to leave, Robert reached out and grabbed her arm. Shelly didn’t pull away, but lowered her eyes to his fingers.

  “Sorry,” he grumbled as he let go of her.

  “What?” Her voice wasn’t as icy as her look.

  “What do you mean, figure out what we do now? Why the hell would we stay here? This place…this place is…” But he couldn’t think of any words to describe what the place was, let alone how he felt about it.

  Shelly rolled her eyes and turned to Cal, who had since pulled himself out of the shallow grave.

  “You really didn’t tell him anything, did you?”

  Robert’s heart skipped a beat.

  “What? What didn’t you tell me?”

  When Shelly turned back to Robert, her gaze had softened.

  “You can’t just leave…I mean, you can leave, but the Harlop family isn’t going to let you go, Robert. Not now, anyway, not since you became part of their story.”

  Robert visibly recoiled.

  “Part of their story? What in God’s name are you talking about?”

  He glanced over at Cal, but his friend averted his gaze.

  Shelly sighed.

  “You want to tell him, or should I?”

  Cal shrugged, and this time Shelly grabbed his arm.

  “Let’s go inside…there is a lot that you need to know.”

  ***

  Robert stared up at the strange woman with the blonde hair with weary eyes.

  “So, somehow they latched on to me…because I’m, what, their nephew or something?”

  Shelly shrugged.

  “Could be—I mean, if that’s what the letter said, and what Ruth said, then maybe. Could have been a ploy, though. Not sure.”

  “But why me?”

  Shelly had insisted on having a beer before she fleshed things out for Robert, but he had declined. He was still nursing a hangover from last night, and he wanted to make sure he understood everything that was said to him. But now, as he watched her red lips close on the neck of the bottle and she took a sip, he suddenly wished that he hadn’t abstained.

  “Not really sure. Based on my research, it seems that those that have just recently experienced a loss, a death of a loved one, are more sensitive to noticing them, or being noticed by them. Kinda like the living and the dead overlap just a litt
le bit. Most people don’t notice, or shrug these things off as coincidences, déjà vu and the like. But some—for whatever reason—some people like you pay attention. And they often join in their world, their narrative. As I told you before, these fucking spirits usually underwent something terrible before they died, and aren’t ready to pass. The shallow graves thing doesn’t help either, although no one is really sure why. These trapped spirits need someone to fill in the blanks, the holes in their stories.”

  Robert gulped.

  “And this is where I come in?”

  Shelly nodded almost solemnly.

  “Yeah. That’s where you come in. You’re the lucky author of their final chapter, Robert, whether you want to be or not.”

  There was no humor in her voice when she said this, and they locked eyes for a moment. Although Robert still wasn’t completely sold on all of this, the idea of spirits in this world, of ghosts that couldn’t pass over, it was a far better explanation than he had been able to come up with on his own. Explanations that required massive hallucinations, digging up old graves, pretending that Ruth was still alive…

  Shelly was right; he had to accept the facts whether he liked where they took his mind or not.

  Ruth Harlop was dead, had been for more than fifty years. The newspaper article and the websites that he had made Shelly show him on her phone proved as much. And short of an elderly woman posing as Ruth and inviting her into this home, drugging him, and convincing him to swing at a skeleton in the bed with some light show projection, then Ruth was haunting the Harlop Estate.

  And that said nothing of Patricia or Jacky.

  Just the thought of what he had done with Jacky, the woman who had been repeatedly raped by James Harlop, made him itch all over.

  “Can they…hurt me?” he asked after a pause. His mind turned to Amy, who was still sleeping in the other room. She too had seemed exhausted, drained by her interactions with Ruth, maybe, or by the house itself. “Us? Can they hurt us?”

  Shelly and Robert exchanged a look.

  “What?”

  It didn’t take long after meeting someone to experience the gamut of their facial expressions, especially in the emotionally heighten situation that the trio now found themselves in. But for the first time since meeting her, a look crossed over Shelly’s face that Robert hadn’t seen before.

  Shelly was trying hard not to show it, but she was scared.

  She took a sip of her beer, then quickly followed that up with another, as if the first had been insufficient to soothe her nerves.

  “Worse.”

  “Worse? How can it be worse?”

  “The living can’t be immersed in the dead for too long, Robert. I’ve heard stories…stories about what happens to these people.”

  She paused and again exchanged a look with Cal.

  Robert held his hands out.

  “And? And what happens? Fuck, I’m on board, alright? And I have a right to know. I have to know.”

  Shelley seemed torn, and for a brief moment, Robert thought that she was going to shut him out. But then she opened her mouth to speak.

  “You ever heard of ‘Quiditty’?”

  Robert racked his brain. The word seemed familiar, something he had heard, maybe, back in a philosophy class, but couldn’t recall the details.

  “Well, some people call it Quiditty, so I guess it’s as good a name as any. Basically, it’s the thing that makes us us, that gives a quality to everything. An essence of sorts. Does that make sense?”

  “Like a soul?”

  Shelly grimaced.

  “I hate that word, but yeah, kind of. Anyways, this quiditty is what would make you different from a clone of you, you know?”

  Robert nodded.

  “Have you ever stared into someone’s eyes and not seen anything? Like nothing at all?”

  Robert’s first thoughts were of the dark black eyes that seemed too large for Patricia’s face, but before he could answer, Cal chimed in.

  “I have,” he offered, and both Shelly and Robert turned to look at him, surprised. He had been uncharacteristically quiet ever since Shelly had arrived, but now, it appeared, he was compelled to speak. Cal cleared his throat and continued.

  “I was a young boy and I watched one of my friends die. It was an accident, a freak train accident, but as I held him and waited for the ambulance that took too long to come, I saw something leave his face moments before he died. His eyes, they just went…empty. He was still breathing—he kept breathing for a good minute or so—but he wasn’t there. He was gone.”

  Shelly nodded, her lips pressed together tightly.

  “His quiddity left him.”

  Cal closed his eyes, and Robert saw him shudder. Shelly gave him a moment before continuing.

  “But here’s the thing; what’s most important is where, exactly, your quiddity goes when you die.”

  “Heaven?” Robert offered. He felt like a child in the classroom just throwing out answers to questions he had never heard before in order to gain the teacher’s favor.

  Shelly clucked her tongue.

  “Oh, fuck, I hate that word even more. All these fucking religions hijacked that word, you know? Even the idea…shit, all of religion’s ideas are just recycled from other parts of the human psyche. No, Robert,” she said, a hint of patronization on her tongue, “it’s not like heaven. There are no fluffy clouds, no bearded Santa Claus reaching out to touch fingers. This is different. This place, it’s made up of your quiditty and everyone else’s when they pass. People call it different things, even, blegh, sometimes Heaven. The best name I’ve heard is the Marrow. It’s a simple formula, really: when you die, your quiddity leaves to exist in the Marrow, to become part of the fabric.”

  Shelly paused to take a drink.

  “But, you know people…they fuck everything up. This simple formula? Die and bye-bye? Well, you can add some fucking numbers and letters in there—Greek shit, shit not even an accountant like yourself could understand—when things aren’t wrapped up with a nice bow here on Earth. And when these people aren’t buried deep enough, sometimes their quiddity struggles to make the journey. It’s worse with assholes and psychopaths like your pal James Harlop. I don’t like religious words, but some of them just fit. For people like James, the Marrow is sheer and utter Hell. And they will do anything to stay here, even if it means they are destined to be trapped between two worlds.”

  There was a far off gaze in the woman’s eyes when she spoke about James, a clear indication that this wasn’t her first interaction with someone like him. Somewhere in her past, probably long ago, Shelly had been scarred.

  To avoid things becoming even more uncomfortable, Robert spoke up.

  “And no one’s ever been and come back?”

  “From where?”

  “The Marrow.”

  Shelly shook her head.

  “No…some people claim to have seen it, to have come close to visiting but returned while on high doses of DMT or ayahuasca…they describe it as a frothing sea of some sort, but I have my doubts. Like I said, no one ever comes back. It just doesn’t work that way.”

  She let this hang in the air for a moment, letting her words sink in for maximum impact.

  “Let me ask you something, Robert. Did you notice anything with the lights? Anything weird when you first saw any of the Harlop family members?”

  Robert racked his brain. The lights had been flickering on and off since they’d arrived, but he had just chalked this up to shoddy knob and tube electrical work combined with the raging storms. He had never thought that the two could be related.

  Shelly nodded, even though he hadn’t said anything.

  “Read about that, too. Sometimes when the quiddity appears, the lights flicker in and out, like they are traveling along the power lines or something. Like the Marrow is somehow connected to the power. There are some theories about this, but…” She let her sentence trail off and shrugged, suggesting that she didn’t think any of them he
ld much credence.

  It was too much information for Robert to process all at once, especially given his headache.

  “Alright, I don’t know how much to believe of this, and it’s all very interesting, but what in God’s name does it have to do with me?”

  “As I said, no one has ever come back from the Marrow, as far as I can tell based on my research. Even if you accept that some people near death or by using psychedelics you can see it, they are always brought back from the brink. Besides, that’s just looking at it. Becoming part of the Marrow, on the other hand…no one has ever come back from that.”

  “Yeah, okay. But so what? What does it have to do with the Harlop family? What does it have to do with me?”

  “The Harlop family is trapped here; they can’t make it to the Marrow. They’ll eventually go, I guess, but now that you have become part of their narrative, you’re going to go with them.”

  A silence fell over all three of them.

  The scotch glass slipped from Cal’s fingers and smashed to the floor. Robert jumped, tweaking his back in the process.

  “Cal!” Sherry shouted. “Keep it the fuck together!”

  The man didn’t look up, his flaccid expression leaving no question that he was still thinking about staring into his friend’s eyes as he died.

  How long have I known Cal? Fifteen years? Sixteen? And all this time, he never once told me about his friend…

  The Marrow, the frothing sea, spirits, narratives…it was so much to take in, all at once, that Robert had no choice but to just let it flow. He resigned himself to analyzing the details later, to go over his own personal criteria of evidence to either dismiss or validate the claims.

  But he didn’t have time for that now.

  “Well, I don’t know about you guys, but the only Marrow I care about is in my osso bucco. Not interested in tagging along with a rapist murderer and his fucked-up family,” he said, trying to lighten the heavy mood.

  A smile crossed Shelly’s pretty face, partly because of Robert’s joke and partly because she knew what was coming next.

  “So now…how the fuck do we get rid of them?”