Peripheral

A Ghost Story

Hikers. They visited Advanced Eye Care in all seasons having been poked or slapped in the eyes by branches, or perhaps having had forest debris swept under their eyelids on the pine-scented breeze. Some arrived puffed and red with pollen allergies, and once an unfortunate nature enthusiast had been horrified to find a hitchhiking tick on his sclera.

It was all part of the daily experience in the small mountain town where the untamed outdoors attracted hikers from the novice to the experienced, and none were exempt from unforeseen incidents. Dr. Anderson was happy he didn’t have to set broken bones or stitch gashes like his neighbor in the little medical plaza. He sat before the computer in his office, looking over the day’s schedule. Snow flurried past his window in the morning dark. It was early enough that he felt he had time for the cup of tea by his elbow before the first patient arrived.

“Doc, we tacked an emergency visit on before the day gets going. She’s seeing a new floater, right eye. She was hiking yesterday and thought she saw a flash in that eye, but none now. Just the floater. I dilated her eye and took retinal images. She’s in Exam One.”

Anderson sighed and swung his chair in a slow circle until he faced the tech in his doorway. “Who is it? Did she just walk in? We haven’t even opened yet.” He glanced at the clock and then, longingly, at his steaming teacup.

“It’s Kathryn Holmes. Had her annual exam in July. No previous floaters. She says it’s small and stays in her peripheral vision, but it’s annoying.” The tech hesitated, biting her lip. “She’s trying to be chill about it, but I think it’s really worrying her. She was sitting in her car in the lot when I got here.”

“Hmm.” The doctor pulled up the Holmes record and scanned her history. “Well, let me take a look at the images and I’ll be right with her.”

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The previous day had begun for Kathryn at the Trail Head Diner, her brother John’s round spectacles winking at her over the big breakfast spread across the rustic pine table. It was a grey and chilly morning, a brisk breeze twisting the cloud cover into elflocks, but Kathryn wore a grin that would have been at home on any canary-eating feline. She was going to explore a new trail, a two-hour drive from her usual hiking territory, in a wild preserve of vague historical significance. She opened her trail map between the plates and coffee cups, pointing to a roughly circular area with no marks inside it.

“Look, the Willow Circle Trail will be in here. The state only opened it to the public last week. There was a village there once, back in the 1800s. I couldn’t find much information about it.” She ducked her head at this. John was the research professional, not her. “But the trail makes a loop around where it stood. The village is gone now. There was some kind of terrible sickness, and the buildings were all burned.”

John set down his fork. “Jeez. I thought you were nuts for wanting to drive all that way to muck around in the cold and wet. The weather report calls for snow in the next few days, you know. Now I’m worried you’ll pick up some deadly parasite.”

He was only half joking. Kathryn would be happy to slither through forbidden muddy caves on her belly or to pry open the doors of abandoned vermin-infested shacks. Since they’d been children, his sister had lived at the mercy of her insatiable curiosity. Nosy, John thought, and devoid of any protective sense of caution.

Kathryn laughed and bit into a crisp strip of bacon. “I don’t think that’s a problem these days, Johnny. And I don’t mind snow. I’ll be back home and cozy long before dark.”

John nodded, knowing anything rational he said would go in one of his sister’s ears and out the other. For the next thirty minutes, he listened to Kathryn gabble about the ease of the hike (the loop was only a jot over five miles), and the pristine remoteness of the site.

“I’ll be one of the first to hike it. I bet I won’t see another soul out there.”

Note – Anderson, O.D.: Patient Kathryn Holmes reports new floater in peripheral vision, right eye. Imaging shows no tears or detachments. During exam, patient glanced repeatedly to her right and seemed agitated. Floater was not visible to me upon examination. Both eyes appear healthy. Advised patient to return if floater worsens or if flashes are seen.

The drive to Willow Circle took Kathryn deep into the forested ridges, bumping along a narrow dirt road without a single house along it for miles. She had begun to think she’d made a wrong turn somewhere when, out of the empty wilderness, a stone church appeared. She pulled into its diminutive gravel lot and stepped from her car, staring at the dour trees drawn close about the building, its steeple pointing into the snow-laden clouds like a wrathful judge. As lonely and sudden as it was, the church was on her map. To the left of the lot, she could see the freshly erected signpost that marked the start of the Willow Circle Trail.

Kathryn shrugged into her light daypack and slipped like a ghost into the dun and dark watercolor forest. The trail was rain-soft underfoot, pebbled with miniscule, glittering bits of crumbled schist. The trees swayed in the cold breeze, their deep groans and creaks marked rune-like on a blank, grey slate of silence. No birds fluttered or called. Kathryn’s breath and the occasional underfoot crunch and scuffle were the only other sounds. Like stepping into an unfinished story, one that’s just waiting for the next character, she thought. Waiting for me.

Swaddled in this chilly enchantment, she walked with no sense of the time that had elapsed since leaving the church’s parking area, nor of the distance she’d covered. Her mind empty of all but the soporific presence of the forest, she stumbled to a bewildered halt at the abrupt, open sweep of a cemetery. Her sensation of floating shattered. She stared at this outpost of the dead replete with stone monuments and an iron fence that had collapsed into the grass. Kathryn stepped toward the opening where a wide gate might once have hung. In the tangled weeds stood two plinths that might once have elevated statuary. Indeed, she saw the weather-bitten curve of an angel’s wing leaning against one stone base, draped in a velvet stole of moss. She stooped to stroke it.

“’Scuse me, ma’am? If you come to find someone, I maybe can help you.”

Kathryn stood as though the angel’s wing had been electrified and looked around wildly for the source of the voice. A man in a furry flap hat and plaid wool coat stepped from behind a brawny gravestone and raised a hand in greeting.

“Didn’t mean to scare you, there,” he said, scratching at his white-whiskered jaws. “I come by ever so often to check on the stones. Kids, you know, come out here and get up to no good sometimes. I know just about ever grave here, if you’re looking for someone.”

“Oh … no. Thank you. I’m just hiking the trail today. I didn’t know this place was out here. It’s not on my map.

The man gave a great snort and turned his head to spit phlegm. “Wouldn’t be on no map, I don’t guess. This here cemetery’s where all the ones died of the sickness were buried. You know about the sickness took the town way back?”

Kathryn squashed her rising repulsion. The man had a strange way of turning his shoulder to her, looking at her from the corner of one bird-bright eye. Still, if he knew something of the history of Willow Circle, she could gather the information to impress John at their next breakfast.

“What was the sickness? I read that they burned the village.”

“Guess folk’ll do just about anything to be rid of a bad thing. The ones that could packed up their belongings in wagons and set the torches to the houses and barns. Whether they got free of it, I can’t tell you.”

Kathryn felt a chill that had nothing to do with the wintry air. “But what was the sickness?”

“Spirits,” the old man barked. “Dead things come creeping, driving folks crazy. Wouldn’t leave ‘em be, until they killed theirselves and sometimes each other. My grandpap told me they come outta the old cemetery, the original one, out on the perif-ry. See, this here cemetery is on the inside of the town - protected, like. The old one is snugged right up against the woods. Some mighty strange things in these woods even today.”

The two gazed at each other for a long minute. Kathryn waited for the old man to laugh at his spook story, but he only watched her with his fierce eye. The other, she realized, was blind and milky as an opal.

“Well, that’s quite a story,” she said at last. “Um, I’d better get back on the trail. I want to get on the road before the snow comes.”

“You going to the cemetery on the perif-ry?”

Kathryn shrugged. “I guess I’ll look at it when I come to it.” Her feet were already backing her past the crumbled angel and onto the trail.

“I wouldn’t, I was you. Nothing in there worth lookin’ at anyway. Seen one boneyard, seen ‘em all.” He gave a sharp caw of rusty laughter, but his eyes – his eye – held no mirth.

Kathryn nodded and had turned back to the trail when a thought occurred to her. She swiveled on her heel. “How much further -”

The old man was gone, and only the silence filled the place he’d occupied.

Note – Anderson, O.D.: Patient Kathryn Holmes returned within two weeks of initial emergency visit regarding floater, right eye. She sees only one but reports that it has grown larger and has taken on a strange shape. No flashes. Patient states it remains in her peripheral vision and is constant. Dilation and imaging show no tears or detachments. I am unable to find anything upon examination. Patient appears distressed and is somewhat incoherent. I referred her to East Mountain Neurology, to be seen tomorrow a.m.

The cemetery on the periphery - the old one - wasn’t far from the end of the trail. A slender track, not quite overgrown but unwelcoming, meandered away from the trail into the moody woods. Kathryn pushed her way along it for half a mile, her parka clawed by blackberry brambles, her hat pulled from her head by a reaching hawthorn branch. Every growing thing that pressed close about her seemed to have thorns. The track was stony as a creek bed and gnarled with tree roots. When she emerged into the cemetery, it was as though the forest had spat her out with contempt. A place of shadows and smaller than the first cemetery, it was crowded with gravestones gnawed by the elements into blank, slope-shouldered submission.

Kathryn crept with cautious stealth among the stones, some toppled, others leaning. All of them contributed to a miasma of sullen hostility, bitter at the disturbance. A doorless mausoleum squatted toad-like at the back of the lot. On the periphery of the periphery, she thought with a hollow chuckle. The earth had sucked it down into the weeds a bit more each decade. Its roof sagged, broken open in spots and mended by chaotic vines and lichen. Kathryn walked to it and stooped to look inside.

It was bare and cold as a root cellar. Whoever had rested there was gone, coffin and all. Dim pencil beams of light fell through the splintered roof, digested before they reached the profound gloom of the floor. Kathryn hesitated, an unaccustomed warning zinging through her veins. The cemetery was dismal, but this ruined tomb radiated menace. She glanced at her wristwatch, at the pewter sky that had sunk into the trees and begun to release sparse snow flurries, and back into the mausoleum. An abandoned grave. Or, perhaps, one from which its tenant had been evicted. She stepped forward, into the dark.

The light that sifted from the broken roof contracted in the corner of her eye. A shape, tall enough to brush the ceiling and black as the abyss, interrupted the ghostly beams. It was the reverse of the flash she would later tell Dr. Anderson she had seen. Kathryn flung up her arm with a cry and stumbled back, tripping over the stone doorsill and sitting down hard on the frozen ground outside the mausoleum. There was no movement or sound from inside the building, yet something pivotal had happened. Kathryn felt it in the core of her being. Climbing to her feet, she stood gazing into the darkness for a moment, then turned and ran through the small cemetery, vaulting stones as she went.

Voice message, John Holmes: Hey, Kath. Just calling to see how your visit to the optometrist went. I’ve got meetings all morning, but I’ll call you again this afternoon. Try to get some rest.

Second voice message, John Holmes: Kath? Pick up. What did they say about your eye? I know you’re worried, but the eye doctor will know what to do. You kind of freaked me out with all that talk about being haunted. You weren’t serious, right? ……. Ok, call me, sis.

Third voice message, John Holmes: …….. Look, you’re scaring the shit out of me. I’m coming over this afternoon. Kath?

The thing was closer now, much closer than when Kathryn had seen Dr. Anderson. She hadn’t returned to the optometrist’s office, had not kept her appointment with the neurologist, not even as the dark image in the corner of her eye grew in size and detail. There was nothing the doctors could do for her, not yet. She could almost see its face now; it had traveled an appalling distance to show it to her. She was never free of its company, and now that it was so close, she could hear its awful voice. It whispered and whined and chortled, somewhere deep in her brain where a ghastly ear had opened that could hear only the thing.

It capered in her dreams, a grotesque hairy shadow. It made obscene gestures; slobbered its filthy exhortations across the vault of rest. It howled for blood. Sleep was a hell in which she could not even close her eyes to blot it from view. The slope of madness grew steeper each day she was infected with this horror, and she was afraid to see her brother. How could she exorcise the hateful thing? In a stroke of brilliance, she remembered the old man she’d met in the Willow Circle cemetery. The old man and his sightless, milky eye.

She stood staring into her bathroom mirror, her kit laid before her on a white towel along the vanity top. Dark circles ringed her eyes, purple pools of exhaustion. The thing was with her, cackling inside her head, striding ever closer on its spidery legs with its matted hair streaming around it in some blurring gale. It trudged toward her with gleeful determination, and now she could see the sharp points of its grin.

John would be here soon. The time for fretting was over; it was time to act. She picked up the silver cosmetic scissors and tested their wicked tip on the ball of her thumb. A garnet drop welled like dew; painless and sure was the nip of the scissors. She lifted them toward her eye, her hand steady.