Fallen Stones (33 page)

Jason left that image drift from his mind as the tractor pulled alongside the copse of tall grass and weeds where he had discovered the burial sites of the two young boys while visiting the property the previous Saturday. He positioned the tractor so the cart was directly in front of the thicket and the tractor itself was blocking any view of the area from the house. He was quite certain none of the workers could see him from any of the windows due to the position of the barn and the spa buildings, but he wanted to be sure if anyone decided to walk out to speak to him he could have his activities hidden from their approach. He had instructed them to call him on his cell if they needed to speak to him, but in his experience most people often tended do whatever they wanted, no matter what instructions they might have been given.

With great trepidation, Jason stepped from the tractor onto the grass then up over the tall grass and into the family graveyard.

 

Chapter 20

 

As Jason's feet touch ground on the burial site, he felt a strange sensation, the likes of which he hadn't experienced the first time he entered the same area on the previous Saturday. Although his experience that day wasn't quite clear in his memory, Jason recalled how it had been surreal and possibly disturbing for him. A similar feeling was now overtaking him.  Yet it was different, unlike anything he had ever encountered before. His entire body felt as if it were straining to move against some sort of current or force, which seemed to turn the very air around him into a gelatinous substance.

Jason forced his head to look downward, not wanting to trip and fall during what had suddenly become a painstakingly slow progression, fearing that doing so might cause him to hover helplessly in the liquid atmosphere not being able to regain his footing. As he looked down, he saw the remains of the dead fawn, now all but completely gone, save for the blanched bones and a few random tufts of hair. He was uncertain why everything around him seemed so strange and surreal, but the rational part of his mind chalked it up to a combination of discomfort at the ghoulish task awaiting him and perhaps an active imagination, which he realized was apparently working overtime.

He was certain if he could just keep moving forward for another moment or so, everything would be fine, the strange almost hypnotic spell would pass and he would return to normal. However, for the moment, he was certain something was definitely wrong. Then, as if to accentuate that very fact, the temperature on the bright sunny morning seemed to have dropped over thirty degrees and the light faded all around him to a dull gray, sending icy chills throughout his body. He noticed a foul stench; deep, woodsy and feral, like that of a wild animal. There was also another underlying smell, perhaps that of decomposition. He felt as if this were not simply the result of the rotting carcass of the fawn, but was something else, something much worse; something coming up from deep within the very soil of this strange place. The feeling caused him to sense a terror deep down in the pit of his stomach.

Then as he had hoped, after a few seconds and a few more challenging steps forward, he was able to once again move normally as the light returned and the temperature rose around him to where it should have been on such a lovely spring morning. Likewise, the rancid stench had disappeared almost completely.

Jason was suddenly reminded of an experience from his childhood. He had always been terrified of funeral parlors and the idea of dead bodies being laid out for display inside. One day, one of his friends whose uncle was a mortician called Jason and asked him to meet him at his uncle's funeral home, the plan being they would meet there then head to a local park to hang out. Jason was about nine or ten years old at the time.

He recalled standing at the front door of the funeral home with his hand on the door, frightened beyond reason and unable to pull it open. It was as if some genetic primitive survival mechanism built into his brain would not permit him to pull the handle. After a few tense moments, when he finally gathered the courage to pull and the large wooden and leaded glass door slowly opened a few inches, his senses were accosted with the overpowering smell of funeral flowers.

One would normally think such an aroma might be pleasant and calming, but not for young Jason Wright. The odor, which was actually a combination of many different types of flowers that had spent the day filling the funeral home with their various blended scents, seemed to Jason to be a vile and revolting stench, which when he opened the door hit him like a baseball bat to the face. This repulsive stink caused his young stomach to turn over with revulsion. Instead of the aroma of pleasing flowers, Jason's senses had been bombarded with the smells of rotting, decaying vegetation. His mind was filled with the image of an unrecognizable pile of putrid sludge, infested with worms and other crawling insects. To Jason, the rotting mass was representative of the same type of decomposition that would eventually overtake the current resident of the funeral parlor once he or she was put deep into the ground.

At first the young boy felt as if he might pass out from the offensive wall of reek, then he thought he might vomit. Instead, he stood staring into the darkness of the interior of the funeral parlor while the invisible barrier of fumes surrounded his face and blocked his entry, terrifying him to the very core of his young soul.  

Jason had been certain if he tried to pass through that transparent wall of noxious vapors, the air might have felt thick and perhaps liquidy or gelatinous. Young Jason knew if he tried to enter the funeral parlor, the festering floral putrefaction would surround him like an invisible nest of living, deadly vines as it suffocating tendrils wrapped tightly about him in a final grip of death.

He imagined long, thin, serpentine fingers of unseen stench, crawling up into his nostrils, their slimy essence stealing slowly into his skull and penetrating his brain, while still other crept downward into his throat, eventually cutting off his air supply before slithering further down into his stomach, where they would begin to devour him from the inside out.

Overcome with terror, the young boy immediately turned and fled from the horrifying house of the dead, forgetting completely about his friend and not even caring if he ever saw him or the dreaded funeral parlor again. He recalled how when he had been running madly from the building he could have sworn he heard a voice inside his head calling him to come back and face his fate. But he refused to even turn around as he fled in terror.

Jason suddenly found himself alert and surprised that he had not run from this latest strange sensation but had somehow been able to rise to the challenge and make it past the strange barrier, that is to say, if there actually had been such an obstruction. Now safely on the other side, he was unsure of what, if anything he had just encountered.

He turned slowly and he looked behind him. It honestly felt to Jason as if he really had passed through some type of invisible barrier in which the air was thick and impossibly semi-solid and almost pliable. Now safely on the opposite side of the strange passage, Jason began to wonder if he would ever be able to return through it with the tombstones or if he might never again be able to penetrate the blockade. Suppose he had passed into some sort of alternative dimension? Suppose he was no longer in his own world?

He had a momentary attack of anxiety, imagining himself trapped behind the barrier like an animal in a cage unable to get back to his world. And if he were trapped, would he ever be found? He wondered what someone on the opposite side of the transparent wall would see, if anything. Might they see him trapped on the other side or would they see nothing? He could see the tractor and trailer right where he had left them. He began to be overcome by panic. He questioned if he might spend the rest of his life, or perhaps eternity, in some strange alternate dimension where he would be able to look though the invisible wall and see his family living their lives on the other side but they would never be able to see or hear him.

He couldn't wait any longer. He had to find out immediately. Jason reached his hand in the direction of the place where he believed the obstruction had been, expecting his fingers to sink deep into what he suddenly thought of as the gelat-mosphere and feel the icy cold encompass his hand. However, he was pleasantly surprised to find nothing. Whatever that previous sensation had been, real or imagined, it was now completely gone.

Jason shook his head as if trying to clear away the residual cobwebs of some strange disorienting dream. He felt as if he had just had a bizarre hallucination, one so detailed, so authentic it seemed to be completely real. But he knew such things could never actually occur. It was obviously some sort of strange spell or perhaps a type of seizure. He would have to be careful and watch for any other signs of such peculiar activity, as it might mean the onset of a serious medical condition.

He walked cautiously forward and after finding what he was looking for, knelt to examine the two small gravestones once again. As he had seen five days earlier, the first stone read "Matthew James Livingston, June 12, 1916 - December 19, 1922". And the second inscription said Charles Edward Livingston July 2, 1918 - December 19 1922". Then he reread the identical cryptic addendum carved into each small stone, "Taken From Us Too Soon, By The Hand Of Evil."

"Boy one and boy two," Jason spoke aloud. Then he said, "I suppose if you had lived, you two would have been great uncles to my wife, Stephanie. I wonder why it was you both died so young and on the same day; and also what this strange inscription might mean."   

He looked about and found a few other gravestones, six of them. They were so thin, old and worn that none of the inscriptions could even be read. It seemed to Jason, that perhaps several hundred years had pass since the time the last person was buried in the plot, and the time almost a hundred years earlier when the two boys had been laid to rest in the graveyard. He realized it was more than likely the occupants of the other graves were not even related to Stephanie's family but were put here by previous owners of the land.

As he recalled from his conversation with the lawyer on the previous Saturday, the Livingstons had purchased the farm from someone else and were likely the first of her relatives to own the property. Whatever the case, the inhabitants were unidentifiable.

"Well. I suppose no harm, no foul." Jason said, "If I can't tell who these stones belong to then I suppose they don't belong to anyone." Then he thought of the old adage about the tree falling in the forest with no one there to hear it and thought "If a body is buried in the field and no one knows it is buried there, is it really there?" Then after a moment's hesitation he said, "Nope. Not as far as I am concerned it isn't."

He bent down and picked up one of the unreadable headstone finding it to not be as heavy as he might have expected and easily carried it over to the tractor, placing it gently down on the tarp he had laid across the bed of the truck. Each time he passed by the grassy edge of the cemetery, he expected to encounter the strange barrier, but for whatever reason, it never returned. In several trips, Jason had picked up the remaining illegible stones as well as the Livingston boys' markers, and placed them in the trailer. Once he was confident all of the stones had been removed, he looked around him and discovered something he had not seen earlier.

The remnants of what appeared to be a low stone wall surrounded the gravesite. After a closer examination, he decided it was hardly a wall in any normal sense of the word, although at one time it might have been. It was actually just a rectangular border of a few carefully placed stones, now spaced far apart, which he assumed were put there at the time of the boys' burial to separate the site from the rest of the area near the edge of the forest. Obviously, during the past several centuries, most of the stones had somehow disappeared, leaving only a few remaining, enough to indicate the former presence of the wall. Perhaps the wall's original purpose was to protect the site from disturbance of any future farming which might take place or perhaps it might have simply been a makeshift way for some grieving relatives to mark the location of their family plot. Regardless of the reason for the wall's existence, Jason decided it would be best to remove these stones as well. He had no desire for the area to even slightly resemble its original purpose.

Then he had a strange thought. Why had the two boys been the only members of the Livingston family to be buried in the cemetery alongside the graves of strangers? Where were their parents laid to rest? Shouldn't they also have been buried here in the family graveyard? It all seemed so very strange to Jason. Then with a pain in the pit of his stomach, Jason realized he was going to have to look around the rest of the property to make sure this was the only burial site present. The thought of a second or even third site was something he didn't want to consider.

After placing the last of the stones in the back of the trailer, and covering them with the tarpaulin to shield them from the potentially curious eyes of the security system installers, Jason decided he would drive along the back perimeter of the property to see if he could both find a suitable place to breakup and discard the headstones. He also needed to see if he could locate any other burial plots; he hoped against hope that he would find no more. He climbed into the seat of the tractor and looked across the expanse of the field preparing to head off to the left. Then he would eventually make a complete circle of the property and finally returned to this point of origin. With any luck, by that time he would have successfully disposed of the tombstones in a safe and unidentifiable location.

He drove slowly along the periphery of the field looking over toward the woods, which surrounded the property on his right. After a few hundred feet, he stopped the tractor seeing something in the distance he hoped he was only imagining. "What the hell is HE doing here?" Jason said angrily to himself.