The Haunting of Romney Wood, Part Four

* * *

“Mabel Elliot took her own life a week after she provided the location of Walter Rupert III’s grave.  Rupert had gone missing nearly 50 years before Elliot was born, and forensics indicated that the grave had not been disturbed.

“The nurse found her in her cell at the Red Creek Run Asylum around 3am.  She’d chewed out her own wrists, but was still alive when they found her.  DOA by the time she got to the hospital.

“Her connection with the Romney Wood Witch is now the domain of legend. The latest victim, some would say.  Others would say that she must have found the grave and, in her madness, buried the discovery in the tale of the Witch.

“Let’s boil the Witch’s tale down. In 1976, an old house is discovered with evidence of decades of murders.  That’s the only factual point in the timeline.  We don’t even know her name.”

“Amanda Atherton?” Lon said, looking up from the viewscreen of his camera.  “Right?’

Laurie shrugged, “Now, Amanda also has a story. Something a bit more tangible. Amanda Atherton vanished into these woods in 1933.  We last see Amanda in New York, the sole heir of the Atherton fortune. But then comes the stock market crash, and Atherton is destitute overnight.  She loses her mind and, for a time, lives on the streets.  Then she returns to her roots – the ghost town of Black Hill, about a mile from here – and she lives out her days in these woods as a crazed hermit.

“Is she the Witch?  No.  The bodies found in the house go back to well before Amanda was born. Though she was here for several murders. How could she live in the ruins of Black Hill and not see anything?”

Lon grinned, and fed the next question, “The old woman was Atherton, though, right?”

Laurie looked seriously into the camera.  “Amanda would have been in her late 50’s when Shelby Marks first saw her in 1963. The question is: Did Amanda Atherton simply become the Witch? Did she take over the role from someone – or something – else?”

Walt smiled, shaking his head.

“And, if so, where was she when the authorities searched this area in 1976?”

“Okay, we’re good.” Walt said.  Laurie exhaled and scratched her nose gratefully, Lon flipped shut the camera and looked up through the trees.

“What’s the first stop?” Lon asked.

“Train tracks.”  Walt hefted his bag onto his back and started marching through the underbrush, “Where she waited for her train snacks.”

“Train snacks!” Laurie sang, mugging for Lon who blew her a kiss.

The tracks cut through the forest, clinging to the mountain, and now seemed like an old, slow-healing scar.  A few brave trees had taken root in the gravel and shoved their way through the ties, and a small mudslide had obscured the tracks just beyond what remained of the old Black Hill station.  The station was a roofless, crumbling hut, the interior half-filled with decades of dirt and leaves.  There was nothing modern about it… It felt more like a Roman ruin.  Odd remains with no hint of life, no relics left inside. Beside the station stood what was once a signal mast.  It was now just a metal post with several dead vines crawling up the sides.  Beside that post stood the old woman Shelby Marks saw.

Walt told Laurie to stand in the same spot, and Lon got in position.  Then Walt stepped out of shot and leaned against a tree.

“Shelby Marks.” Laurie breathed, “The only man to see the Romney Wood Witch.”  She looked at Walt, “God, can I just say Romney Witch?”

“No.”

She rolled her eyes, did the take again, and continued, “For 13 years, Shelby Marks dropped a gift bag on this spot for what he believed to be just an old woman, squatting in the ruins of Black Hill. In all those years, no one else would lay eyes on her.  The conductor and brakemen claim that they never saw an old woman, and joked that Shelby was losing his mind.  But, when the sheriff came to investigate the house, they found evidence of life.  The bottles of Coke that Shelby included in his gift bags decorated trees around the property.  Someone had stood here and received those gifts.”

Laurie clasped her hands in font of her, then stared grimly down the tracks for a long, silent moment. “Did the Romney Wood Witch stand in this spot, watching each day for Shelby Marks? And her Coke fix?”

Laurie and Lon burst out laughing and Walt covered his eyes.

“Shit,” Laurie said, “Sorry.”

“I don’t buy the Marks story,” Lon said, “A brakeman just jumps off the caboose of a moving train, runs up into the woods, has an adventure, and then makes it back to the train just in the nick of time, bad adventure movie style?”

“It’s the story,” Walt replied.

“Normal people would just go, hmmm, and then tell the cops when they got off work.”

Walt shrugged.  “We’re in the woods looking for a magical killer witch, Lon.  What do you want?”

“I think we should keep all the Coke jokes.” Laurie said.

Walt pointed at her and mouthed the word, ‘No,’ then he walked over and stood next to her.  “Right here.” He said, “Like this.”  He picked up a stick from beside the tracks and leaned on it, turning to watch an imaginary train trundle slowly up the hill towards the tunnel. “Like clockwork.”

“She could have heard the train coming, of course, and come out just so Marks saw her.” Laurie said.

“Why just Shelby Marks, then?” Walt asked, “And not everyone on the train?  What’s she care?”

Lon shrugged, “Why not?”

“Are we done?”

Walt nodded. “We’ll cut the Coke joke. I’d like to do a different take, but I think that can wait.”  He looked up at the sky, “We have about three hours till dark.  Let’s find Black Hill and camp there.”

“Camp in the ghost town?” Laurie asked.

“Scared?” Lon teased, slapping her bottom.

Walt hiked up the hill into the trees and Laurie reluctantly set after him, Lon sliding up to her ear and whispering, “I also think we should split up as soon as the opportunity presents itself and each individually investigate a mysterious sound.”

“And read from the weird flesh-bound book that we find in the old church?”

“Oh, definitely.”  Lon spread his arms out and shouted, “Klaatu barada nikto!”

Black Hill was a tiny grid.  Two north-south avenues and two east-west.  The roads had been dirt or gravel, and were now just overgrown flats surrounded by foundations and piles of rubble. A handful of buildings still stood – the church, now without spire and roof, and the town hall, though subsidence had turned the west half to rubble.  On the hill, just visible, was the Atherton house, overlooking the entire town.  It still stood, with ominously staring windows, the forest moving in around it.

“Is that the Witch house?” Lon asked, pointing up towards the Atherton house with his chin.

“Nope,” Walt said.  “Her place is a little further up.” He pointed off to the east. “That’s the Atherton place.  We’ll be checking it out.”

“Oh, good.” Laurie mumbled.

Just outside of the grid stood the oilworks, long ago capped and now marked by a jumble of timbers, each well looking more like a stack of rotting wood at a sawmill.  A narrower gauge train had once made the run up the hill to the derricks, the tracks still visible and, at the end just beyond the derricks, twisted upward as if in a parody of a Sherman necktie.

The first thing that all three took in was the lack of vandalism.  There was no graffiti, no trash.  No signs of campers..

“A bit weird,” Lon said, not needing to explain himself.  “Hunters and kids must come through here all the time, yeah?”

Laurie waggled her eyebrows, “None who survived…”

“Come on, Laurie. It’s all a story.  Nobody has come through here in 30 years? I don’t think so. With a ghost story, especially, this place should be overrun with local kids fucking around.”

Walt shrugged and threw down his pack in a bare patch of grass, ringed by the natural-stone foundation of a building.  “Let’s camp here.”

“Thank god,” Lon threw down his pack, and Laurie slid her smaller pack off her shoulder.

“We’ve got another couple hours.  Let’s get some shots of Black Hill, and the Atherton house.”

Lon was already filming and moving, weaving through the ruins of the tiny town.  It wasn’t much more than just a wide space, but the church and town hall provided a great urban decay feel.  Lon framed a few shots of the Atherton house between those two buildings, then followed Walt and Laurie up to the old manor.

At the house, Laurie stepped onto the creaking porch and peered through the doorway.  The front door was missing, and the inside looked like it had been stripped.

“Well,” she said, “signs of life at last. Looks like someone took everything of value.”

“Copper!” Lon barked from the front of the house, where he was setting up the camera on a portable tripod, “And the woodwork, probably.”

Laurie turned and moved down onto the steps.  She brushed her hair back and watched for Lon’s silent count.

“George Cecil Atherton.  Overseer of Black Hill. A man driven by greed and lust…” Laurie stopped, cocked her head, and then said, “You hear that?”

* * *

The Witch started.  She gasped and threw the forest-words away from her.  She screamed through the rooms of her tiny house, her howl echoing against the mildewed walls.

A name she hadn’t heard in over 130 years tore through her mind.  The name of the man who killed her.  The first to rape her, throw her down on the ground and invite the menfolk of the town to continue his punishment, and then he knelt beside her, smiled at the blood pouring from between her thighs, gently wove her hair around his fingers and, slowly, began to pull her head up and then down again on a stone.  He picked up speed, grinning, drooling, and finally she blacked out.  He slapped her awake and, anger boiling behind his pale grey eyes, he leaned in and whispered, “Now you die whore.”

Her curse.  She whispered back her curse.  Just so he could hear.  And he did, twisting his ear to her lips, then he grinned and caved in the back of her skull.

How dare they.

She moved through the trees, a wind rustling along the edges of the town, up to that vile house.  She had begged Amanda to burn it.  Destroy the Atherton house.  But the poor, troubled woman couldn’t bring herself to do it.  The Witch had come to believe that the house was a spirit, just like her.  It was Atherton.  It would live on in decaying pain until she was set free.

She rushed down towards the three strangers, and they turned and stared.  She hesitated, but no eyes fixed on her.  They were staring at the wind.  The girl, a soft brunette, edged closer to the tall one with the camera.  The third one, short and dark and severe, was different.  He stood apart.  He looked angrily around the forest, snarled at the house as a plank fell  from the roof and his two companions screamed, then turned and looked down the road towards town, at the Witch.  His eyes narrowed, and the Witch blinked.  She cocked her head, she tried to make words come.  He just shook his head, slowly, from side to side.  Then he barked an order, and the man with the camera turned it towards her.

She screamed…and, then, she was back in her house.  Sitting as if she had never moved.  And she realized why the sheriff had failed so many years ago to free her.  The cameras had chased her away.  The radios and all those things they carried with them had made her invisible.

And the man out there knew it.