Chapter Four: Things Better Left Buried
The Curse of the Lumberjacks
They say the woods remember. I'd heard that a thousand times, the old-timers at Carter's General warning us kids in their gravel voices, eyes on the pine-dark horizon. Never thought so. Anyway, not until that August. Not till we found the logging camp. Not until I had touched the ax.
That summer, the town council decided to hack back the tangled border of forest, make room for a park, something for the tourists. They hired my dad, some other locals. I went along for pocket money, maybe to look cool for Danielle, who lived up the street. Danielle and her brother Casey were there, sweating in their shirts, waving away clouds of mosquitoes as thick as smoke.
The first thing Casey saw was a rotted timber half swallowed by roots, old nails and broken tools poking out like fossil bones. The grown-ups grinned and called it history and slapped each other on the back, but I sensed something else. The air was wrong. Thick. Stale. Silent, as if the trees were holding their breath.
Curiosity gnawed at me when the others left. I snuck back with Danielle and Casey in tow. The sun was low and made long, knifelike shadows. Then I saw the ax, lying half-buried in an old stump, its handle mottled with rot, its blade red with rust. But it shone in the failing light, and I found that I wanted it, that I needed it. I touched it, my skin tingling, the wood warm and wet, almost throbbing. Danielle grabbed my wrist. "Don't," she whispered, but it was too late. I gripped the handle with my fingers.
Nothing was there. Not initially. Then a chill crawled down my spine, cold as grave dirt. The woods whispered and hissed in a language older than English, secrets in every sound. That night I dreamed the camp was alive again, fires burning, men shouting, the air thick with sap and sweat. And there was the lumberjack: huge, red plaid shirt, swinging the ax over and over, his face contorted with rage. Blood splattered the snow. The victims’ faces were blurs but their screams seared into me.
I woke up gasping, my heart pounding. My hands were sore, red marks around the fingers as if I'd been working all night. Mom looked at the bruises at breakfast, “You working out?” I shrugged it off. Just a dream, I said to myself. But the visions were becoming worse. I saw him every time I closed my eyes, wild beard, crazy eyes, swinging the ax at men begging for mercy. Sometimes a small white woman was crouched in front of a cabin, mouth frozen in a scream.
And then I heard things. Voices in the dusky wood. Footsteps behind me, always out of reach. I wanted to sleep but the ax beneath my bed kept whispering my name.
I didn't tell anybody. Not even Danielle. But I snapped at my folks, shoved Casey playing basketball, almost clocked Danielle when she startled me. The anger was alien, thick, old. Every night, I’d walk around my room with the ax in my hand, beating with my heart.
One night I lost track of time. In the yard I stood, ax in hand, facing the moon. Danielle's voice cut through the fog. Thin. Desperate. Next thing I knew, I was inside, sheets muddied, ax blade slick with something dark. I cleaned it up but the smell was still there. Wrong. Earthy. Metallic.
The next morning the town was full of it. Someone found a raccoon, chopped to bits on the edge of the woods. Mom told the cops it was a stray dog or a coyote, but I looked at the blood on my sneakers and knew better.
I tried to get away from the ax. Tossed it into the creek. By sundown it was under my bed, wood dry and warm. Stuck it in the stump, eh? Found it on my pillow the next morning. The ax was after me. I had to have it. And I was running out of battles.
Danielle caught up with me after school. She'd been dreaming, too. The sobs of a woman, a burning cabin, the voice of the lumberjack, howling through the trees. “He was wronged,” she said, her eyes wide with fear. They blamed him but it wasn't him. He wants to punish himself.
That nite the truth unraveled in my dreams. The other loggers had set up the logger. His strength, Jealous of his land. They killed his wife, and then charged him. He got his revenge one by one until they caught him and hanged him. His spirit was chained to the ax, waiting for a man to complete his bloody work.
I woke up in the woods, my skin freezing with the dew, and my fist clutched an ax. Danielle stood in front of me, hands outstretched, tears streaming down her face. Don’t,” she begged. “You’re not him.”
And for a moment I saw her as the lumberjack must have seen her. A shadow, a menace. I wanted to swing. I closed my eyes, pushed the rage away, and let the ax drop.
The curse was broken like thunder. The woods sighed into birdsong. Rot and rust, the ax lay at my foot.
Danielle walked me home and the lumberjack’s anger thawed in the morning light. We never mentioned it again. But sometimes, on the edge of the trees I still see his shadow. Waiting. Watching. The woods remember. Some things are better left in the ground.
Chapter 4: Better Left in the Ground
The Thing That Waits
When I was ten my parents sent me to stay with Grandma out in the sticks for the summer. They packed my suitcase with shorts, socks and a Game Boy. I did not want to go. Her house was old, old like forgotten tombstones are old, and the woods were close, close enough that the trees seemed to lean against the fence and sigh. At night the wind would whisper things. Things I nearly understood but didn't.
I missed my friends, I missed my room, I missed the busy, happy noise of home. Silence filled every room like some other piece of furniture. The creaks and groans of the house sounded like somebody walking around, looking for company.
On the third day Grandma handed me a broom and said “Go sweep the backyard. It would do you good to get a little air. Her voice was soft but her eyes said, Don't argue. And I did. I poked at some fallen branches and dandelions and found myself behind the old shed looking at a dog house half sunk into the earth. It was leaning, twisted and dejected, as if it was trying to crawl away from something. The paint had become corpse gray. The roof was sagging. I couldn't read the nameplate. It was too rusty.
But there was something about it that appealed to me. Maybe it was the way the grass grew wild and high around it, the way the ground was spongy—soft as a bruise—under my sneakers. I told myself I’d make it nice for grandma. She hadn’t owned a dog since before I was born, but perhaps it would make her smile.
Scraped moss, hammered roof, cleaned inside. I spent the day. I found a toy that had been chewed up, a bone that broke when I touched it, and some straw that was moldy. When I finished it almost looked inviting, if you squinted and ignored the dark stains on the wood.
That night I was awakened by barking—deep and lonesome and bouncing across the yard. I put my face to the window – and saw a wanderer. Sniffing around the dog house. A lean mutt with a torn ear. It circled and crawled in and curled itself up. In the morning there were no tracks in the dew, no fur, nothing but a single muddy paw print on the threshold. The yard was empty.
Didn't think much of it, not until the next nite when a different dog showed up—a black lab with eyes clouded by time. Same old story. Vanished by dawn. Just the faintest echo of barking and a chill that refused to leave my skin.
I tried to tell Grandma but she just gave me a tired smile. “You are imaginative,” she said. “This house is full of old tales.
Then the stories began to hunt me down. On the seventh night I woke up and saw blue-lit shapes drifting through the yard. Dogs. Dozens of them. Their eyes glowed like hot coals, and their bodies shimmered, half here, half not. They prowled the fence line, but never put a ghostly paw in the middle, where the dog house sat like a rotten tooth
One, a huge beast missing half its jaw, turned, and looked at me. A warning. Cold as the grave: stay away.
But curiosity is a fire that cannot be quenched. The neighbor's cat vanished the next day after the dog house was looked into. I waited for dark that night, flashlight in hand, heart pounding, and slipped outside.
The yard was different. Shadows grew deeper, the air thicker. I huddled by the dog house, shivering as a cold draught oozed from its mouth. I put my hand in and touched something slick. I pulled back, my fingers tingling, as a low growl rolled out of the darkness.
And then they were there, ghost dogs, all around me, hackles raised, eyes with fear and fury in them. They didn’t bark. Just watched, bodies shaking as if fighting the urge to run.
Something moved in the doghouse. Sounds like silk tearing. A shape, as black as nite, uncoiled. Teeth flashed, eyes like coals, a body of shadow and hunger. The air froze. The world was as big as my breath.
One of the ghost dogs, a female with kind eyes, nudged me. Her muzzle slid through my hand, cold as ice. I heard a voice in my head say,
Run.
I knew without being told twice. I sprang up, pumping my legs, the thing pounding behind me, claws digging into the earth. Ghost dogs swarmed between us, howling, a wall of blue flame and memories.
I slammed inside, heart pounding, tears burning. Grandma found me shaking, but I couldn’t tell her what I had seen. 'Some things are supposed to be forgotten out there,' she whispered, holding me tight.
By the next morning the dog house was upside down. The grass around it was burned and where the entrance had been there was only a deep, empty hole.
I never saw the ghost dogs anymore. But sometimes on a clear note I hear barking that is not quite warning, not quite mourning. When summer was over, I left Grandma’s house, but I still dream of bright eyes and the thing that waits under the ground, hungry for anything foolish enough to look for it.
If you ever see an old doghouse, where the grass is wild and the air feels wrong, leave it alone. Some homes are for things that should never have a home in this world.
Chapter 4. Things Best Left Buried Screams in the Fridge
When you're really broke, the kind of broke that chews through your bones and sucks the color out of your dreams, you take what you can get. That was my gospel when I arrived in that battered single-wide on the edge of town, faded blue siding, insulation as thin as a thief’s alibi. My wallet was emptier than a preacher’s promise and my future looked about as bright as last week’s lotto ticket. But it was a roof. A clean slate, I told myself.
But no fridge. Not initially. Not until my neighbor Rick, the kind of guy who looks like he’s hiding a secret and a hangover always, showed up grinning at my door.
“I’ve got an extra fridge if you want it,” Rick said, rubbing the stubble on his chin. 'Found it down at the junkyard off of Route 19. Works well. needs a little elbow grease.
So I went with him, hauling that big white antique across his yard, its corners rounded, chrome handle heavy enough to weigh down a boat. Mildew and old pennies, but after two hours of bleach, baking soda and silent prayers, I decided it was clean enough for eggs and beer.
The first night nothing happened. I filled it with groceries, cracked open a cheap beer and snuggled under thin blankets with my girlfriend, Sam. We watched reruns of sitcoms until the TV went static and the world outside shrunk to the size of that drafty trailer.
But on the second night something went wrong.
It was a sound, far away, muffled - like a radio left on in a locked car. I turned over half asleep, thinking that was the compressor doing its thing. But Sam was wide awake, and her hand was clutching my arm.
‘Do you hear that?’ she whispered. Her voice was tight, thin.
We both heard it. A scream from the kitchen, a woman's scream, thin and desperate, as if it had to claw its way through layers of frost and metal. I thought for a second I was losing my mind but Sam's nails digging into my skin told me I wasn't alone.
We snuck into the kitchen. The fridge just sat there, humming like all the other appliances. But when I put my ear to the door, the scream came again—louder and then a scraping, frantic, like fingernails raking against plastic. My stomach churned with ice.
Sam stared at me, his face ghost pale. What the hell was that?
I had no reply. The next morning I tore the fridge apart, searching for wires, for a secret radio, for anything. But there was nothing there. Just a few faint, ragged scratches gouged into the plastic at the back. Human-sized, fingernail-shaped.
Then I started locking the bedroom door. Sam wanted to get rid of the fridge. I said no.
“It works great,” I repeated. “It’s just ancient. “Motors make odd noises.”
But the screams grew louder. Not every night but quite often. Sometimes a woman's voice, pleading, begging, then breaking into sobs. Sometimes just the animal scratching. When nite came I would stay out of the kitchen. I only opened up the fridge when I really needed to.
Then I swallowed my pride and asked Rick about it. His eyes flicked. He shrugged.
“I don’t know man. Got it from the junkyard. The place gives me the willies. Maybe it was someone who left it. I can take it back if you want.
Should have let him do it. God, I should’ve.
A few nights ago Sam and I got home late. The trailer was hot and sticky with summer heat. I grabbed some ice. I opened the fridge and the light sputtered on. For a split second I saw her curled on the bottom shelf, knees drawn up, hair matted, eyes wide in terror. Blood was pooling around her, soaking into the cracked white liner. She looked me in the eye and screamed. It was so primal, it shook my teeth. Time stopped.
I slammed the door, and staggered back. Sam rushed in but I couldn’t speak. I just shook a finger pointing.
Sleep was only a rumor after that. I saw her all around me. In the kitchen, in my peripheral vision, pressed to the glass of the freezer, mouth agape in a never-ending scream. The sounds haunted us in our dreams.
Sam left for work early the next morning. She was a thin-faced woman with blank eyes. “I’ve got to clear my head,” she said. “I’ll call you at noon.” She never did.
The hospital phoned at 12:00 p.m. Collision head on. Route 19. They did all they could.
She was gone by the time the ambulance got there.
I lost it that day. I grabbed a crowbar and went to work on the fridge, broke the door off, pulled the shelves out. But as I destroyed it I could still hear her screaming, still feel the cold breath on my face. I scrubbed my hands but the blood was still there and only I could see it.
I ran. Left the trailer, left everything. But sometimes I hear the hum of a fridge late at night and a woman’s scream in the wind. Perhaps memory. Or it’s something that won’t let go.
If ever you find yourself down on your luck and someone offers you a free fridge, take my advice and say no. Some things are better left in the grave. Some screams never go away.
CHAPTER 4.
It is best to leave certain things buried
The Eternal Detour
I have never been afraid of getting lost. Not that much. Freedom was the open road dashboard lights, an old Stones song on the radio, headlights slicing the midnight dark. Maybe that's what led me to the detour sign that nite. Grief gnawing at me after the funeral, I needed something that felt like movement. I told myself a backroad adventure wouldn't hurt.
So I got off the highway near midnight, following orange arrows into the black belly of nowhere. After the second curve my GPS died, a cold blue blink, gone. I didn't panic. The trees, thick and old, crowding in and smothering the signal, were what I blamed. For miles there was nothing but me and the car and the lights, the sad gleam of battered reflectors nailed to telephone poles.
The road turned winding and narrow, and the pines bowed over it as if they had secrets. Old Mill Road. The fish mailbox is rusty. Scarecrow face in dirt. Green sign battered. Fences broken on each side. I laughed the first time I came to the sign. The second time my smile faltered. I looked at the clock, twenty minutes wasted, and I was still where I started.
I slowed, peering into the dark for a turn I must have missed. The heater roared but each breath fogged the glass. I promised myself that I'd go back, take another route but the third time I passed the scarecrow, head cocked at a weird angle, straw spilling from a stitched-up mouth, a cold, wormy dread crept up my spine.
Colder, each time around. Static crackled over the radio, then it died. My phone, a black stone, is dead. Every time I went round the scarecrow seemed to watch me more closely, button eyes glittering, stitched grin wider.
By the fourth turn the road was wrong. Claustrophobic Trees crowded, branches scratching at the roof like fingernails. The old mailbox waited. Its mouth was that of a fish, open, its teeth jagged and chipped. I wouldn't look in there.
My memories faded. With one blink of the funeral, Aunt Claire's face, even my own name, all slipped away. I whitened my knuckles on the wheel. My mouth was bone dry, my heart pounded. It was impossible to turn back - the ditches on either side were brimming with dark stagnant water that reflected nothing but blackness.
The fifth time past the sign I realized I wasn't alone. Not any more. First, just a shape, a flash in the corner of the rearview. It must be some optical illusion I told myself, until the shadow moved.
A shock of pale skin, mossy hair, eyes like slick stones shining. I tried to speak, but my throat just closed. The figure smiled with thin, colorless lips.
“Your turn is missed,” it hissed.
I jerked the wheel, I needed to get off the road, but the road was just going on, endless turns through haunted trees. Something up ahead. Headlights flash on. A figure waves, then is gone. I slammed on the brakes. The figure in the mirror was closer, fogging the glass, eyes huge and bottomless.
It croaked, 'Let me out.' Or I will never let you go.”
Cold seeped into my bones. I tried to think where I was going, who I was, but it was only fog and fear. I mashed the pedal. Had to get out of the loop. But the road kept folding in on itself, swallowing itself, taking me past the same haunted landmarks.
The figure became more real each time -- flesh and bone and earth-matted hair, nails scraping the seat. Now the sour, wet smell of it filled the car, like something dug up from a forgotten grave. It talked of drivers who had been caught here before me, lost souls to this endless midnight.
“Turn here,” it hissed as I went past the gaping mailbox for the seventh time. My hands moved by themselves. The car swerved onto a lane that wasn't there before, trees parting just enough. The world became the arc of my headlights. The thing in the backseat leaned forward, its breath cold in my ear.
“You can’t go,” it whispered. 'Not until you bring someone else.
I slammed on the brakes, jumped out into the woods, branches clawing at my skin, breath tearing in and out. I tore through brambles, broke out on another road. The glow of a gas station, the blessed hum of traffic, in the distance.
I staggered into the station, wild-eyed and trembling. The attendant looked at me as if I were a ghost. And my car was never found.
Sometimes I still hear the radio static at night. I see the pale shape in my dreams, waiting just around the next bend, hungry for me. Or for you, perhaps.
So when you see that orange arrow in the dark promising a shortcut, don't take it. Some roads never let you go, until you leave a piece of yourself behind.
Chapter 4: It’s better underground
The curse of darkness in the Canyon
You don’t think it’ll be someone you recognize. That’s the one that still sticks like a thorn under the skin. A year gone by, boots wiped clean, body safe, but my mind still drags the desert dust into my dreams. I'm Mark, and I should have listened to the old Navajo man at the gas station, the one who squinted through cigarette smoke and told us not to go into the canyon after dark. It wasn't a warning. Not exactly. More like a truism.
There were six of us: me, my girlfriend Jamie, her little brother Tyler, and our friends Greg, Casey and Maria. It was to be four days in the slot canyons, no cell service, no city noise, just red rock, stars and secrets we'd tell under their cold, hard light.
The first nite the canyon yawned around us, the fire’s glow barely touching the darkness. The coyotes howled at the moon and Jamie made fun of Tyler for flinching at every twig that snapped. Greg, the clown of the group, told old ghost stories he half-remembered from Boy Scouts skinwalkers, witches in borrowed skin, things that could get under yours and wear your face. We all laughed, but it was a thin laughter, not enough to fill the hollow miles of the canyon.
The next morning, the weirdness began. Tracks in the sand, deep pressed. Wrong for a man, too heavy. Greg called it a joke. Maria’s eyes told him she didn’t believe him.
That afternoon the canyon walls drew closer, red rock bleeding into the blue sky. The air was bone dry, but as dusk approached a chill crept in. Casey fell behind, taking pictures, then hurried to catch up, her face pinched, looking back over her shoulder.
“You’re getting sick?” I asked.
She shrugged. ' Odd headache. I thought I heard someone say my name, but .. . probably nothing.
That night I woke up to the sound of someone rustling through food. I opened my tent. Greg sat by the fire, eating trail mix. He looked up, slack-jawed, eyes red with reflected flame.
“I couldn’t sleep,” he said. His voice was flat and wrong, his lips barely moving.
I told myself it was a trick of the lights. But Greg was not there in the morning. Pack. Boots. Everything. Nothing but a line of deep, ragged prints heading away from the camp.
We screamed his name until our throats were raw. Jamie wanted to hike for help but we were a day out from the trail head. We walked, heads down, hope thinning like the morning mist.
That was when Casey started acting strange. Have you seen Greg? “Are you sure which way is north?” she said, but it was Jamie’s voice, perfect and hollow. Maria said she'd seen Casey talking to herself behind a boulder. I asked Casey, and he just smiled. Too wide. Too empty.
The sun bled out, shadows lengthening and thinning between the stones. Voices calling. Jamie's. Tyler's. Mine. Calling in ways I never called, desperate and wrong. The canyon answered him back.
We were huddled close to the camp fire. Casey was rocking. Eyes glazed. Lips twitching. Then she looked at me, slowly grinning.
"You never told them about the pills, Mark," she said, syrup-thick. Or dreams.”
My blood curdled. I'd never told a soul. Not Jamie. Not anyone.
“She’s only playing with you,” Jamie whispered, but she was as white as milk.
Maria roused me before dawn. Her breath was ragged and hot in my ear. “Casey is dead. And I saw something. It was like Greg, but it wasn't Greg. Rock crawling. “I think it saw me.”
We packed in a flurry Tyler crying, Jamie trying to be strong. The air got colder as we climbed. The sky contracted into a gray slit. Shadows writhed, sometimes in the form of people, sometimes not. Sometimes it was familiar faces.
We came to the river, and I glanced back. He noticed Greg waving on the far bank. His smile. Too big, all teeth, no joy. Eyes. Pits. “Come back,” said me with my voice.
Tyler shouted. Maria ran. Jamie grabbed my hand and pulled me along. Too many footsteps behind, too fast. The canyon was narrow, the air heavy with the smell of dirt and decay.
We blinked and shivered ourselves out into the sun. Three down, bleeding. I spun around and for a second, Casey and Greg flickered in the shadows, their faces changing from friend to monster and back.
The rangers found us an hour later. Good for us. I can't tell them what happened. They would not believe it. Greg and Casey never showed. People still get lost in that canyon, and sometimes, they say, you hear familiar voices calling from the rocks.
If you ever find yourself somewhere too quiet, too old, listen to the stories. Observe your friends. And if you hear your own voice answering back, run. Not all shadows are owned. Not all faces are more than a mask for what lurks in the dark.