The woman in white still wailed against the wind and the trees.
* * * * *
Chapter 10 - Revenge at the Throat...
Lady Dubois seeped from the mask like smoke. The white wisps of her dress cascaded onto the floor before funneling upwards in a strange, reversed cyclone of a blur. The smoky column twirled rapidly as the wooden mask exhaled the last vapors of that cruel soul trapped in its carving. Shaped coalesced in the smoke, and the face that materialized mirrored those features cut into the sourgum.
Panic and fury pulsed through whatever ghost organ replaced the living heart. She twisted her forearms and wondered for a second night at what doom befell her to change her into white shade. Instinctively, she reached for that mask that grinned upon her. Yet her hands could not grasp such wood, and her fingers repelled from the carving regardless how hard she pushed.
Lady Dubois wailed, and the scream rippled the walls.
A dog barked at her. Lady Dubois twirled. Her fury magnified. For another night, she did not stand in the lawn of her family’s manse. Her surroundings were alien. Strange lights pulsed throughout the room. Weird boxes fluttered pictures of unknown people and places across their glass surfaces. She shot to a window to look upon snow-covered elms that were nothing like the swamp sourgums with which she was familiar. Some further sorcery trapped her and denied her the heaven she felt certain she deserved. Some servant’s witchcraft anguished her spirit after such a servant must have poisoned her body. She should have stoned and lynched them all. She had allowed the devil’s magic beneath the roof, and those powers had destroyed her body and caged her soul.
A child cried out, and spinning back towards the room’s center, Lady Dubois saw a boy gape at her as another jumped out of bed. She recognized in an instant the meaning of those children’s dark skin. They were the children of those who locked her into the mask. They were the children whose dark arts trapped her soul to linger. The color of their skin was enough to convince Lady Dubois that those boys were the descendents of that foul family who had long ago brought the dark magic into her home.
A golden dog snarled and took empty bites at her heels. Lady Dubois laughed.
She focused her rage at the smaller of the boys who quivered in bed. With another loud wail, she threw her smoke upon the child. She hardened her fingers with ill intent and choked the child’s throat, her hands relishing the grip found on that young boy’s skin after the mask refused to give her any grasp.
She squeezed and squeezed with all the power her wisps were capable of summoning.
She grinned as the boy’s eyes widened. She smiled to hear the boy’s breathing stagger. She had found a purchase upon the boy’s throat, and he would pay for the suffering his kind had placed upon her.
She would teach them all a lesson. She vowed to haunt them forever so that they tasted the justice their black magic deserved.
Lady Dubois’s face twisted as it never had before, and her features matched the wicked curves carved into that sourgum mask nailed upon the wall.
* * * * *
Chapter 11 - The Arrival of the Wolf...
Carol slammed her fists against the bedroom door as she listened to the screams and barks from the other side.
What had she brought into her home?
She had wanted to chase away a boy’s spirit. Instead, what furious form of ghost had she introduced into her halls to threaten her children?
“Trevor! Trent!” She pounded against the door. “Open the door!”
Thuds came from the door’s other side. Carol pulled at the chilly doorknob, but the barrier refused to budge, as if a cold vacuum beyond door refused to give an inch.
“Hurry!” Trevor yelled over the commotion. “She’s choking Trent!”
James pushed Carol away from the door and concentrated his force against the wood. His onslaught weakened the hinges. He felt the give and delivered savage kicks at the hinges instead of the bolt.
The hope of defeating the door increased Carol’s panic. “Hurry, James!”
“Trent’s turning blue! Mom! Dad!”
The hinges snapped, but the door caught awkwardly in the frame and remained closed.
“No!” Carol pounded as James again threw himself at the door. “No!”
Carol felt another force add to their efforts at the moment of their despair. A blue glow seeped from the hallway and floated through the narrow space between the wedged door and the frame. Carol recognized the blue mist as a new strength pulled at the door from the other side, and it spurred a new rush of strength through her.
“It’s the boy! The boy’s helping us with the door!”
A release of air hissed and the vacuum released that held the door closed. Carol and James did not pause to stare at the freckled face beneath the coonskin cap that glowed at them in the doorway as they rushed into the room. Nor did Buck feel any offense that the parents did not immediately thank his efforts.
“Let my boy go!”
James hurled himself into the column of smoke from which a pair of arms grasped his son’s throat, nearly lifting Trent off of his bed. James tumbled through the white wisps as if he had passed through water. Still, the effort succeeded in loosening the grip long enough for Trevor and Carol to pull Trent away from the ghostly woman’s grasp.
Trent gasped for breath as Carol dragged him into the hallway. A necklace of blue bruises circled his throat, and strange, tiny crystals of ice layered those splotches that marked the wailing ghost’s claw-like grip.
Her prey wrenched from her vengeance, the white ghost threw back her head and screamed with an anger that shattered the glass screens of monitors and televisions. She stood her ground, hovering, while her features regrouped and considered the numbers opposing her. She cackled wicked laughter that shook the walls before throwing herself, with a countenance filled with hatred, one again towards Trent, who coughed and wheezed as he drew new breath into his lungs.
A sudden, thunderous roar overwhelmed the white woman’s wailing and rattled the windows. Buck’s blue illumination expanded, and the growl that followed the blue spirit’s roar buckled the knees of all who heard it. A second before, Buck’s freckled face was that of a young boy who remained comforted by coonskin caps and enthralled by pulsing, electronic lights. But as the smoking figure of the white woman charged at Trent, Buck’s form shifted into a fierce aspect. His teeth changed into rows of fangs. Muscles swelled and his limbs lengthened. Thick, wild fur covered his body. Fingers transformed to claws. His eyes narrowed into slits. Buck morphed into a wolf of a monster, and before the woman in white could again fall upon Trent, his bellowing howl stopped her in her tracks.
Buck pounced upon her and threw furious attacks upon the glaring, white ghost. Yet Buck failed to deliver a lethal strike; for before his tooth or claw could dig into his adversary, the woman’s shape receded into mist and enveloped Buck. Smoke surrounded Buck’s glowing, blue shape, and the wolfish ghost flayed at the vapor. The combat settled into a stalemate, but it purchased Trent with ample time with which to catch his breath before withdrawing with his family from that chaotic room.
They retreated through the house and jumped into their SUV. Carol now felt thankful for the blue, shimmering ghost boy who came to their aide, and she wished she would have had the wisdom to earlier realize how the boy, be he a spirit or an orphan, had only wanted a family with which to share his home.
* * * * *
Chapter 12 - None Left Behind...
“We have to go back for Buck.”
Trent made the demand the next morning during a pancake breakfast at the chain restaurant next to their prior night’s hotel. The bruises around his neck had turned dark. James prayed that he would not be thrown in jail for the suspicious marks. He doubted the court system would believe his claims a ghost was the guilty party.
Carol shook her head at Trent. “We’re going to stay at the hotel. The two of you can play video games while your father and I figure out our next step.”
>
Trevor gripped the syrup bottle until the sticky sap overran onto his hand. “We just need to get rid of the mask.”
Trent nodded vigorously. “And we have to make sure that Buck is alright. Did you see what he turned into to fight that woman? He did that for us. We can’t leave him alone again. Not after we’ve brought that awful woman into his house.”
“I can’t let you boys back into that house,” Carol responded.
“They can go back with me,” James rebutted. “Trent’s right. We can’t leave that boy, ghost or no, after what he did for us. I wouldn’t be able to tell if he’s hurt, if ghosts can even get hurt. But I think Trent can. We need to stand alongside that boy we left alone in our home.”
Carol felt tears on her cheek. “I feel awful.”
Trent slid closer to his mother in the restaurant booth and hugged her. “You didn’t know what the mask was going to bring.”
Carol sighed. “I’m sorry I didn’t invite that boy into our family, that I tried chasing him away. I didn’t want to believe a boy could be left so behind.”
James winked at his wife. “We’re going to make sure that doesn’t happen again.”
Trent jumped out of the booth and ran out the restaurant door to their waiting vehicle. James didn’t wait for the ticket and threw fifty dollars on the table. In less than half an hour, they returned to the country home from which they had fled, prepared and determined to stand with the boy they came to regard as family. A wailing ghost would not be such a terrifying wraith now that they had battled her a first time. Nor would the glowing, blue boy any longer feel alone.
* * * * *
Chapter 13 - A Special Way of Seeing Things...
His family remained in their SUV as James searched his home’s halls. He saw no suspicious vapor mists, nor did he hear any wail or growl. He entered his sons’ room as confidently as he could muster, and the mask’s wicked grin did not bite his fingers as his hands took it from the wall.
With Hunter at their ankles, Trent and Trevor ran throughout the halls calling their ghost friend. Trevor held his cell phone in front of him and Trent opened his portable gaming device, the brothers watching for any blinking light that might indicate Buck’s presence.
But after searching through the home all morning, neither found any indication that Buck still lingered in their rooms.
Trent and Trevor guided their father through the backyard woods to the frozen pond they knew a handful of lifetimes past had stolen the breath of the living boy who became their ghostly brother. James sobbed, and he did not think it wrong that his boys should see him do so.
James set the wooden mask on the pond’s frozen edge and doused it with lighter fluid. He cautioned his boys to step back, and with a flick of a burning match lit the mask aflame. The mask’s crimson lacquer had been thickly applied, or perhaps a raging woman’s wraith struggled against the combustion, for the flames did not immediately bite. The winter’s cold breeze eventually fanned the fire, and the wood wilted to ash. Trent and Trevor shoveled the remaining soot and funneled it into an empty, plastic soda bottle. They twisted the lid shut after filling the remaining space with rocks before sinking the bottle into a hole Trent and Trevor bashed through the ice. The brothers hoped that silt would eventually cover the bottle and bury whatever ghost might still hover about the mask’s ash.
“Do you think the awful woman will come back?” Trent asked his father as they returned through the woods.
James paused. “I doubt it. I watched the face on the mask melt away in the fire, and I think the lady disappeared along with it.”
Yet Trevor sighed. “I’m going to miss our friend. And Trent’s going to miss having someone he can beat at hockey.”
James set a hand on his boys’ shoulders. “Don’t forget that he probably had family too. He’s probably found them. Maybe he’s realized he can move on after helping you two.”
“I hope he doesn’t think we ran out on him that last time,” Trent added.
In his heart, James felt his answer to be honest. “I don’t think he will. Being a ghost probably gives him a way of seeing things. I bet he sees the two of you returning home, and I would think that would make him very happy.”
“I sure hope we see him again,” Trevor spoke.
Trent giggled. “How about that? We actually want to see more ghosts.”
Carol helped her returned men warm with steaming mugs of hot chocolate. She asked no questions regarding the mask’s disposal. Jame’s expression seemed assurance enough that her boys would once more sleep safely.
The brothers did not see any indication of their ghost friend for the year’s remainder. But a new winter followed, whose chill air chased Trent and Trevor inside, where they occupied more time in video and board games instead of the woods. Trent badly missed his ghost friend, for that younger brother could not convince himself that he had not disappointed his spirit friend when he had fled from that battle with the raging wraith.
But then one night, Hunter rolled onto his back and his tongue drooled onto the carpet. The dog smiled as if invisible fingers scratched his belly. The brothers ran to their televisions and powered up their gaming console. Trent held his breath as he navigated the game’s opening menus, and Trevor’s fingers shook when he placed their best controller onto the carpet.
They simultaneously laughed and cried when they watched the controller wiggle as the skaters clumsily moved across the ice.
“You’re just as awful as ever!” Trent beamed. “But we’re never going to leave you again! No matter if you ever learn how to beat me at my favorite game!”
* * * * *
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About the Writer
Brian S. Wheeler calls Hillsboro, Illinois home, a town of roughly 6,000 in the middle of the flatland. He grew up in Carlyle, Illinois, a community less than an hour away from Hillsboro, where he spent a good amount of his childhood playing wiffle ball and tinkering on his computer. The rural Midwest inspires much of Brian's work, and he hopes any connections readers might make between his fiction and the places and people he has had the pleasure to know are positive.
Brian earned a degree in English from Eastern Illinois University in Charleston, Illinois. He has taught high school English and courses in composition and creative writing. Imagination has been one of Brian's steadfast companions since childhood, and he dreams of creating worlds filled with inspiration and characters touched by magic.
When not writing, Brian does his best to keep organized, to get a little exercise, or to try to train good German Shepherd dogs. He remains an avid reader. More information regarding Brian S. Wheeler, his novels, and his short stories can be found by visiting his website at www.flatlandfiction.com.
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