Page 30 of The Haunting of Paynes Hollow

Twenty-Four

I go back inside to put in my contacts first. I’m no longer taking any chances that what I see is the result of poor eyesight. Then we walk to stand on the lakefront, and all I want to do is drag Ben away from the water. I can’t look at the lights. I can barely force myself to glance at them.

“Weird,” he says as he snaps pictures. “When you mentioned it, I pictured lots of lights. Maybe reflections? But there’s only a few. You thought it was something bioluminescent?”

I force myself to nod as my brain screams to get him away from the water.

“Could be,” he continues. “But I’ve lived near the lake my whole life, and I’ve never seen this. It’s like there’s something under the surface.”

Before I know it, he’s walking into the surf.

I lunge. “No!”

He glances back.

“Please,” I say. “Don’t go in. Not at night.”

“Not…?”

“Maybe I am losing it. I think I am. Just please, please, please stay out of the water. Out of the water and out of the woods. At least at night.”

He tilts his head, and I see myself in his eyes and shrink.

“I’m not making sense,” I mumble. “I know that.”

“Just tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I—I don’t even know. Just … my grandfather always said to stay out of the woods and the lake at night. So did my parents.”

“Stay out of the lake and the woods at night,” he says slowly. “That’s what they told you?”

I flail my arms. “It’s basic safety. I know that. I’m freaked out over being back here and my aunt going missing, and I’m seeing things and overreacting.”

“I won’t go in the water,” he says. “But whatever we heard seemed to come from the forest.”

I swallow. “So we need to go in there.”

“We’ll get Josie’s big flashlight. And your aunt’s gun. If there’s any chance—”

His head jerks up. He stares at something down the beach.

“Sam?” he says. “What am I seeing?”

I squint in the overcast night. Then I suck in a breath. There’s a shape on the beach. A heap that looks like a human form. As if someone washed up on the sand.

I take off at a run, even as Ben yells behind me. His fingers graze my side, but I’m already out of reach. With every step, any doubt that the heap is a human form evaporates. A bare arm extends upward toward the water. A leg is askew, twisted as if broken.

And then there is a noise. The rasp of breath, and the fluttering of that extended hand.

It is a person, and they are alive.

It must be Gail. She’s alive. Badly injured. There’s blood and twisted limbs and obvious pain in that labored breathing, but she is—

I’m close enough to see the leg now. A muscular leg covered in dark hair. Then the head, with equally dark hair and tanned skin.

I’m seeing a man.

I stop short. Ben knocks into me, and then, before I know it, I’m behind him.

“Fuck,” he says. “It’s the guy. The cyclist. The camper.”

He fumbles to pull out his phone.

“I’m calling for help!” he shouts to the man. “Just hang tight. I’m—”

Ben stops short and sucks in breath. Then he backpedals, his arms out to keep me back.

Something moves up ahead, right on the edge of the forest. I can’t see what it is. Just a huge dark shape against the trees. Then there’s a clomp-clomp, the sort of noise that you wouldn’t expect to recognize, but you do. The sound of a horse’s front hooves lifting and lowering in impatience.

I tear my gaze away and look down at the sand. Hoofprints. All around the dying man are hoofprints.

Ben stands frozen. He still has his phone in hand, and I pry it from his fingers. Then I turn on the flashlight. It illuminates the figure at the edge of the forest.

The horse. The rider. The rider’s severed head, outthrust in his hand, turned toward the lake.

“What the hell?” Ben’s voice comes high, words nearly unintelligible. “What the hell is that?”

“The horseman,” I say, and my voice is horribly calm. “The headless horseman.”

The rider’s arm moves, turning the head our way. I grab Ben and yank him back, seized by the impulse to get him behind me. But the head only looks our way for a moment, and then the arm moves, and it is gazing out at the lake.

“I’m dreaming,” Ben says. “You thought you were, but it’s me. Right? It’s me. Right?”

Something moves to our right, and we both jump. It’s a light under the water, another behind it. Then the light goes out and something dark begins to rise from the lake.

The figure of a man. A tall man. Nearly naked, his remaining clothing in tatters, his flesh gray and rotted. Ben gets in front of me, arms out again, backing us up. The figure doesn’t look our way. Doesn’t seem to notice us. It’s advancing on something else, and too late, I realize its goal.

The injured man.

I try to lunge forward, but Ben keeps inching us backward. I want to dart around him, to run to the man before it’s too late, but a primitive corner of my brain overrules the impulse. It whispers not to get between the tiger and its prey. Just run. Give thanks that we aren’t its target and run.

I still hesitate. I can’t help it. If there’s any way I could stop that creature from getting to the camper …

Except it’s not just that one creature. There’s another behind it, bobbing along and then dragging itself out on a body with one missing leg and the other nearly bone.

Two other shadowy shapes emerge behind them, and even then I’m trying to figure out a way to save the camper.

But the one in front, the tall male figure, charges and falls on the camper, head dropping and ripping into flesh.

The camper only makes a gurgling sound, as if he’s barely conscious. Another of the drowned dead falls on him, biting and ripping, but the first knocks the second flying with a backhand, grabs the camper by the hair, and drags him toward the water.

Other dark shapes swarm, taking hold of the camper by whatever body part they can reach as they walk into the lake. And throughout it all, the horseman watches. The horse stands on the shore, the rider holding his head out to the lake.

“Sam?” Ben’s voice is ragged. He’s backed up until there’s only a sliver of space between us. He wants me to retreat—desperately wants me to retreat; I can see that in his wide eyes. But he won’t grab me or push me. Nor will he run past me to flee.

I need to get out of here—get both of us out of here. Before those things emerge from the water again. Before more appear. Before the horseman remembers us.

I take one slow backward step and then another. The figures in the water are nearly submerged. Another’s head rises above the surface. I don’t stay to get a better look. I turn and I run, and I get three strides before I realize Ben isn’t behind me.

I wheel to see him still back there, staring at the lake.

“Ben!” I shout.

He breaks from whatever holds him and sprints until he’s right behind me, his hands out as if to spur me on. I run as fast as I can, and he’s right there on my heels as I pass his tent and then scramble up the cottage steps.

“No!” he shouts, and I turn to see him gesturing at his truck.

He gets the passenger door open first, throwing it wide for me before opening the driver’s side. He’s inside in a blink, starting the truck, backing out, and then roaring down the drive. I sit there, numb and staring at the rutted road until I see the gates ahead.

Then I shout, “Wait! I can’t leave!”

He hits the brakes hard enough that I slam forward against my seat belt. I wait for him to shout at me to forget my damned inheritance. Nothing is worth staying after what we just witnessed. But he only puts the truck in park and leaves it idling there as he breathes.

“You should go,” I say softly.

“What happened back there?” he says. “What the fuck just happened, Sam?”

I don’t answer. We both know what we saw. The only question is how it was possible. What it could have been. And I don’t have answers for that.

“Sam?” he says. “You saw that, right? The horseman? Those—those things, coming out of the water. That camper. What they did to him.”

“Yes.”

He turns, vinyl seat squeaking under him. “That’s what you saw, isn’t it? Your aunt. The blurry photo. That’s what she looked like.”

“Yes.”

“And the horseman?”

I nod. “I saw him, too. The horse, and the rider holding his head in his hand. Like the legend. Except … drowned.”

“You saw it when you were young, too.”

I shake my head. “Back then, I’d only hear a horse. Everyone thought it was my imagination. Dad gave my grandfather shit for filling my head with those stories. Even I thought it wasn’t real. That I was amusing myself by making up stuff.”

“Amusing yourself…”

I tense and then wrap my arms around myself.

“What we just saw … Obviously that’s different.

Like I said, I never saw anything like that until last night.

It’s just … the way my grandfather told the stories, they weren’t scary.

Even the part about not going in the forest or the lake at night.

It wasn’t because I’d be hurt. It was just…

” I shrug. “I don’t know how to explain it. ”

“The horseman didn’t come after us,” Ben says. “You shone the light right on him. He just looked at us and then looked away. What about last night?”

“The same.”

He goes quiet, thinking. I should be doing the same. Working it through. But every time my thoughts slide in that direction, I shrink back.

Don’t think about it.

Don’t analyze it.

“Those things killed that camper,” I whisper. “Or the horseman did. The guy didn’t leave the property after all. He just moved to a different camping site. The horseman … The screams … The hoofprints…” I swallow. “We need to call Sheriff Smits.”

“Yeah.”

I relax, as if I’d half expected him to say no. Don’t call the sheriff. The cyclist is dead and gone into the lake. Pretend nothing happened. Because that’s better than explaining what we saw.

“What are we going to tell him?” I say.

“What we saw. The … things from the lake. Like your aunt in the photo. They dragged him in.”

“And the horseman?”

He goes quiet. “Did you get a photo?”

I shake my head. “So we don’t mention the horse. That’s my advice. We say we thought we saw a shape, maybe a horse, and the hoofprints might be there, but we don’t say … exactly what we saw. The drowned horse. The headless rider.”

“Yeah.”

I exhale, relieved.

“If we go too far, he’ll think we’re high on something,” Ben says. “Or he’ll think I’m high and snuck you some. I did stuff when I was a kid. Experimenting.” He pauses. “A bit of selling. That was years ago. I haven’t so much as smoked a joint in a decade, but that won’t matter.”

“He’ll say the horseman was a drug-induced hallucination.”

“Fuck, even with those things from the lake, he might say that.” Ben bangs back against the headrest and closes his eyes. “Zombies coming out of the lake.”

“The drowned dead. But we have the photo.”

He exhales a slow breath. “Calling in Smits is probably a bad idea, but I don’t know what else to do. A man is dead.”

“And if anyone comes looking for him, we don’t want to need to lie about him being here.”

“Yeah. Agreed.” He rubs the back of his neck. “I’m going to call Smits, but while we’re waiting, I need to ask you about something.”