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Chapter One
1972
The photograph showed a procession of ghostly orbs floating through an eerily lit room toward the camera.
One explanation for the glowing spheres is that dust particles, stirred by my presence, had reflected the bright flash from the camera, causing an optical illusion. Roger and I didn’t accept that cop-out any more than we believed a few scraps of aluminum foil weather balloon could account for the plethora of witnesses to the UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. As far as we were concerned, this was going into our newspaper, The Astral Beat, as a ghostly manifestation.
I had taken the mysterious photographs with my 35mm camera in the pitch-dark basement of an old, abandoned church. In the summer of 1972, a few days after graduating from high school, I entered the church through a side door, stepped over rat droppings and busted pews bearing rusted screws, and crept down the dank concrete steps.
Extinguishing my hand-held light, I aimed at nothing and clicked the shutter a few times, each flash illuminating a desolate array of dusty angular junk for a lingering microsecond. After developing the film, we were amazed to see spectral orbs of light floating in the church basement.
Roger and I were enthusiastic fans of anything involving unexplained mysteries. This was before the actual television shows, Unexplained Mysteries, Ghost Hunters, or In Search Of. There were plenty of books and magazines on the subject, but reading other people’s accounts of strange phenomena was not enough for us. We wanted to be a part of it.
We proclaimed ourselves investigators of the paranormal. Our friends Anne and Nancy proclaimed us goofballs who embellished the truth to legitimize our games and to convince local businesses to buy ads in our otherwise amateur rag, the aforementioned Astral Beat.
Roger was a natural born PR man. Almost seven feet tall and still in shape from playing high school basketball, he could be imposing, but most of the time he was friendly and articulate. To tone down his intimidating stature, Roger’s girlfriend Anne, an aspiring hairstylist of the emerging scissor-cut school, feathered his thick brown curls to contour naturally around his head, a popular coiffure among rock musicians that year. He usually wore an open white buckskin vest, with western tassels, over various band logo T-shirts.
Roger had recently sold a full-page ad to Rock City Records & Tapes because the store manager, Meg Longino, was into New Age.
“You know about that Wicca commune in Roanoke?” Roger asked her. “How the local churches are harassing them for supposedly practicing witchcraft?”
“Yeah, man,” said Meg, chin raised, eyes obscured by the ruby glint in her rectangular granny glasses. “I read something about that in the paper. The Wicca folk should have freedom of religion like anyone else! They observe the seasons, man. The cycles of the harvest.”
“And,” added Roger, “They have herbs and roots that heal sickness and bring visions. The big drug companies don’t like that because they don’t want anybody to learn about natural healing. My friend Whit is writing a story on it.”
“Fight the power,” agreed Meg Longino quietly. “Yeah, I’ll buy an ad.”
My attempt to look hip was nowhere near as seamless as Roger’s was. My hair always looked like it needed a trim because I only went to the barbershop when pressed by my parents, and then refused to go again for two or three months. This resulted in choppy, ragged bangs and fuzz on the back of my neck. Still wearing slacks and shirts my mother bought me at the department store where she worked, I left my shirttail out and drew on my sneakers with colored ink markers to show the world that I eschewed convention.
At least one psychiatrist has labeled my lifelong thirst for a genuine supernatural experience obsessive. This obsession, or as I prefer to call it, field of study, would eventually carry me across the ocean and, some would say, propel me into insanity. Others say I was insane from the get-go. Looking back, I always did have a secret morbid side, even as a child.
Roger said he believed in the paranormal as much as I did, but he always told me, “Whit, I know we are convinced, but we have to construe it for our readers.”
We had developed a system of presenting supernatural phenomena that we called the “three-point construct.” There always had to be at least three points. The ghostly orbs floating in the church basement is a perfect example. We looked up the history of the church to see if there was any dirt.
According to the archives at the public library, the abandoned Gothic structure had once been Grace Lutheran Church until the Lutherans built a bigger, more modern facility, and sold the old church to the city. Some people wanted to tear it down and build a parking garage for City Hall. Others voted to preserve the church as a historical landmark due to its 19th Century Gothic architecture, with the high pointed steeple, stone archways, stained glass windows, and bell tower. The Town Council formed a committee to avoid doing anything for a while. That was two years ago.
We scanned the obituaries for people who died before the city bought the church. A man named Crebnor Miles had died from tuberculosis on August 3, 1912 at the age of forty. The wife, son, and daughter that survived him held a memorial service at Grace Lutheran Church, where they were members.
We looked up the church in an old book about our small town, called A History of Hansburg, Virginia.
“This is perfect!” said Roger in a loud whisper. “Look.”
Back in 1910, the book said, a fire destroyed several buildings and apartments in the downtown area. The Lutheran church didn’t burn, so it provided temporary shelter to all the people who lost their homes to the fire. Neighbors donated clothing, blankets, pillows, and food. The assemblage soon discovered that one man among them had tuberculosis. Fearing that his wife and children might also be infected, they quarantined the whole family in the basement of the church. Could that man have been Crebnor Miles?
We had our three-point construct. If anyone questioned the connection between Crebnor Miles and the Lutheran church, we had (1) the obituary, officially documenting his memorial service at said place of worship. If anyone doubted that people had ever been (2) quarantined in the church basement, we had a record of that. While there was no record that Crebnor Miles had been among that group, or for that matter, that anyone actually died in the church basement, I had (3) a photograph of disembodied spirits floating in that very place!
“I have a good feeling about this one,” I said. “I think there’s something to it!”
“Oh, me too,” Roger agreed. “Me, too. What we need is a quote. We need to visit Old Baxter.”
Old Baxter lived across town at the end of a dirt road. His mobile home, ensconced under a shady chestnut tree amid briars, vines, wildflowers, and mushrooms, was actually a 1946 Airfloat travel trailer, made of aluminum and magnesium from refurbished World War II airplane parts.
The trailer looked like a space-age moon rover, something out of Buck Rogers. Looking back, I would call it retro, with the clean stylish lines of a solid-state art deco radio. A horizontal red stripe ran along the side, under the windows and across the door. I almost expected to see tailfins. The forward curve on the front end of the trailer held a convex observation window, flanked by two convex vent panels, textured with silvery ridges.
The first time we visited Baxter, to arrange a liquor transaction, he confided that sometimes, late at night, he saw the ghosts of an ill-fated flight crew that still refused to abandon their station. That disclosure had given us material for Issue # 1 of our tabloid.
Baxter usually needed a couple of dollars for some tonic.
“I mix it with sassafras root for my arthritis,” he explained.
We gave Baxter enough money to get two bottles of whiskey, one for him and one for us. It was a good way to score alcohol until we were old enough to buy it ourselves.
“You boys can wait in the backyard,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”
Behind the camper trailer, in a patch of dirt by the chestnut tree, we sat in decorative but corroded wrought iron chairs that must have looked good twenty years ago at some sidewalk café. Roger rested his arms on a round, glass-topped table, rolling a joint. Insects buzzed in the honeysuckle-scented sunshine beyond our shaded nook. By the time Baxter returned from the liquor store, the buzzing had clicked into a symphony synchronized with the sparkling molecules around us.
Leaving his bottle inside the trailer, Baxter emerged from the back door with a coffee cup full of whiskey. He handed our bottle to Roger, who opened it, took a sip, and handed it to me.
“What you boys want to know?” he asked.
“Do you remember something about people being put in the basement of the Lutheran Church after the big fire?”
“Oh, I know what you’re talking about,” said Baxter in a vague tone. “I was just a little feller, but I’ll never forget it.”
“In 1912?” I said.
“That’s right,” said Baxter. “I’ll never forget my daddy tellin’ me about it. ‘Course I was only, uh, not born yet, but yeah. Human beings herded into a cold stone basement like cattle. A terrible chapter in the history of Hansburg . . .”
Chapter Two
1982
Glenda Wells tried to tell herself there was no reason to be afraid, alone in the semi-darkened room, a wood-paneled writer’s study filled with mementos of the man’s life and work. A collection of puzzle boxes from all over the world, books, journals, a small model of Stonehenge, the requisite human skull, paintings and prints (mostly surrealism and pop art), and on the writer’s desk, an IBM Selectric typewriter with a blue-grey matte finish.
This room, and the rest of the house, had been the private property of writer Olsen Archer for over twenty years, and tomorrow it would be open to the public, but in tonight’s dusk, the house floated in limbo between those worlds. Glenda Wells was not supposed to be there but she was technically not breaking any law. She had a key, after all. She was the real estate agent who arranged for the sale of the house from paranormal investigator Olsen Archer to the Hampton Literary Society.
Still wearing the smartly tailored blue business skirt and jacket, plastic nametag identifying her as Vice President of Virginia Coast Realty, Glenda strode purposefully across the carpet in her high-heels. The room was silent except for the zzt-zzt of her nylon hose chirping between her ample thighs. With dissatisfaction, she noticed there were still some last-minute jobs that needed completion before the opening day ceremony in the morning.
A couple of framed pictures, which should have been hanging at eye level, leaned against the wall on the floor behind the desk. Plastic electrical outlet covers also lay on the floor in front of each outlet. She briefly considered hanging the pictures herself, and screwing the outlet covers to the walls, to save time in the morning. Then she noticed muddy footprints near the bathroom door. She had mixed feelings: Anger that the work crew had tracked mud on the floor, and fear that someone else might still be in the house. Now she wanted to get in and out as fast as possible.
The desk bearing Olsen Archer’s typewriter sat in the far left corner of the room, with just enough space between the wall and desk for an office-style chair to roll in and out. From this spot, one could survey the entire room and greet visitors. Glenda Wells pulled the rolling chair out from behind the desk so she could get a better view of the small, wooden panel in the wall, just above the baseboard and framed by more baseboard. An access panel for plumbing.
First, she pushed gently on the panel. How to open it? She pulled on the frame itself, top, sides, and bottom, thinking it might swing out like a door. Or maybe the whole thing would pop loose. It didn’t. Placing all ten fingertips firmly on the wooden panel, she tried to slide it up, down, left . . . it slid left! The panel seemed to be on a track behind the wall. Glenda slid it almost all the way open, leaving an inch of board visible so she could pull it closed again. The compartment behind the panel appeared empty except for a couple of pipes that led to a sink in the next room.
She reached in, fearful of spiders and nails, and felt around timidly, kneeling with one knee on the floor, hoping not to get a run in her hose. The tight blue business jacket stretched at the buttons, showing diamond shaped patches of white shirt.
Her fingers found an envelope taped to the inner wall and peeled it loose. Losing her balance, she plopped abruptly into a sitting position on the floor. She blew strands of hair off her perspiring face with an upward puff and leaned forward to close the panel.
Like electricity, terror bristled through Glenda Wells from head to toe.
A man’s face, deformed and inhuman, gazed up at her. Even more ghastly than the deformity was the silent shriek of unspeakable outrage, filling Glenda with both revulsion and self-reproach, as though she were the intruder.
Her mind reeled, processing disbelief into fear and panic.
Standing bolt upright, she staggered backwards, broke one of her high heels and sprained her ankle. She fell hard onto the rolling chair, which tipped over, spilling her onto the floor, white shirttail flapping, buttons torn from blue fabric. She crawled on the carpet toward the door, gasping for breath, losing both shoes and scraping her knees, ruining her hosiery.
Standing up at the door, Glenda Wells took a deep breath and screamed loud and shrill as she ran into the street. A car screeched to a halt to avoid hitting her. When the driver and passenger got out of the car to ask what was wrong, Glenda collapsed in the glare of the headlights and sobbed until the tears washed her blue eye shadow down her cheeks and into her mouth. Someone called the police, who arrived quickly along with an ambulance.
The next day, when the Literary Society opened Olsen Archer’s house to the public, near the sparkling Chesapeake Bay in Hampton, Virginia, Glenda Wells missed the ceremony. She was in the hospital, heavily medicated.
Roger and I were there. We did not see what frightened Glenda Wells that night, but we did see her wallow in panic and flee in terror, because we were hiding in the shadows. When she screamed, I nearly pissed on myself because, despite what people might think, we had nothing to do with the horrible face she saw.
But we got what we came for. In her panic, Glenda Wells had dropped the envelope she found taped inside the wall. Roger snagged it.
Chapter Three
1980s
“You should stop blaming your parents for your quarrel with reality,” said Dr. Carnes, casually.
He leaned back nimbly in his chair, hands behind his head, framed diplomas on the wall behind him. For a second I thought he was going to prop his feet up on the desk in front of him. My psychiatrist looked to be around thirty, not much older than me.
“I’m not blaming my parents,” I said. “I’m just telling you what happened.”
“Well, go on, then. You say your mother gave you paregoric?”
I studied the pastel Aztec pattern in the arm of my comfortably stuffed armchair. Nice texture.
“You know what paregoric is, right?” I asked, still looking down.
“They stopped making paregoric in the late fifties,” Dr. Carnes answered correctly. “It was a medicine made from camphor and alcohol with a small amount of morphine. They gave it to children for cough medicine.”
“Very good,” I said, looking at him. “Well, my mother says that when I was a baby, she used to rub paregoric on my gums when I was teething.”
“Because it hurts when your teeth are coming in,” the shrink inserted.
“See? You should have become a peditrician,” I said sarcastically.
“Right now I feel like one,” he reposted. “Do go on.”
“Well,” I said. “I have this memory of lying in my crib in my bedroom, looking up at these cartoon pictures on my wall. Eight pictures – two on each wall, spaced evenly. They were Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. You know, Happy, Sleepy, Doc…”
“Yes, I’m familiar with the dwarves,” said the shrink, a bit impatiently, I thought. “But you were very young. You actually remember this?”
Ignoring his question, I continued, “So I’m lying there, and I look at the picture of Grumpy, and he seems to be scowling at me. It was scary. His eyebrows bristled and writhed and he blinked his eyes. Then I looked at Happy, and watched his grin spread and stretch, wider and crazier, until it curved up into his pink cheeks, and his red nose started to stretch and bend like one of those balloons they twist into animal shapes. His big eyes were crossed and his tongue stuck out! It scared me so much I looked away and closed my eyes.”
“Were you traumatized?” said the doctor, stifling a laugh.
“I think so, but I felt so good I didn’t care. I kept my eyes closed and laid my head sideways, with my ear pressed into the pillow. That’s when I heard those quiet, far-away noises I told you about before.”
“The miners?”
“I’m not saying they were miners, but that’s what it reminded me of. Muffled clanging, faint rumbling, almost like vibrations more than sound. Once in a while, I thought I heard a voice.”
“What did it say?”
“I don’t know. It was usually just deep, indistinct syllables.”
“But, Whit,” the shrink tilted his head skeptically. “You were too young to even know what paregoric was. How can you possibly remember that?”
“No, listen,” I said. “Years later, my mother found those pictures of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was cleaning out the attic. She said, ‘Do you remember these?’ and I said, ‘Yeah’ and then she told me how, when I was a baby, teething and crying, she rubbed paregoric on my gums. After that, she said, I stopped crying and just looked up at those pictures. She said I would get the most peculiar looks on my face until I fell asleep.”
“What about the miners?”
“I didn’t think of them as miners until I got older, but I heard the sounds, off and on, throughout my childhood. Months would go by when I didn’t hear anything. I would almost forget about it, but then for some reason, just playing around, I would press my ear against the walls, or my pillow, or the floor, and I could hear it. You know how, when you hold a seashell against their ear, and you supposedly hear the ocean roar?”
“But it’s not really the ocean,” said Carnes as if I needed reassuring.
“I thought maybe it was electricity in the wiring,” I continued. “You know, the wiring in the walls, humming. But sometimes it didn’t hum. It was a muffled thumping and clinking. I got scared once and told my dad. He said maybe I was hearing my own pulse in my ear, but that was not it. I did feel my pulse, but this was different. When I was in the fourth grade, the noise woke me up in the middle of the night. I saw a dark shape of somebody, hunched over in the hallway, just outside my bedroom door.”
“What did you do?”
“I closed my eyes and pretended to be asleep. Even when I felt something touch me, I never opened my eyes. Then I heard the metal grate rattle in the hallway.”
“Metal grate?”
“The house had an oil furnace in the basement. The heat came up through a metal grate in the hallway.”
“Maybe the furnace made noises in the middle of the night?”
“No, we actually didn’t use that furnace anymore. My parents had already replaced it, because I burned my hand on the grate.”
“Burned your hand?”
“Yeah. One winter when I was three years old, my mother was babysitting Nancy, who was about the same age. We were just playing around – I was chasing her down the hall – and I fell palm down on the hot grate.”
“Ouch.”
“Yeah, I screamed like a banshee,” I said. “It burned a little tic-tac-toe pattern on the palm of my hand. See?”
Dr. Carnes leaned forward, squinting.
“I can barely see it,” he said. “Looks like a sideways H.”
“Yeah, it showed up better when I was younger. I was sorry to see it go. Used to show it off to my friends. I thought it looked cool.”
“So, your parents replaced the heater in the basement?”
“They installed a new space heater, right outside my room, recessed into a hall closet. They covered the metal grate with a rug and sealed it off from the basement with a sheet of plywood. Oh, and I think they gave me paregoric for the burn.”
“Did you use any other drugs when you were a kid?” asked Dr. Carnes.
“I had bad hay fever.”
“Allergic to pollen?” the shrink clarified unnecessarily.
“Yeah,” I said. “It made my eyes itch. I sneezed a lot. I had to take antihistamine for years. Sometimes the antihistamine allowed me to dream these amazing Technicolor dreams if I took it at night.”
“I’ve dreamed in color,” said the shrink. “Some people say we only dream in black and white, but I’ve dreamed in color.”
Whoop-de-doo, I thought.
“I think it’s a myth,” I said. “That people dream in black & white, I mean.”
“A myth that we do or don’t?” asked Carnes.
“You just said you’ve dreamed in color.”
“True, true,” he said. “Of course.”
“What about dogs?” I asked.
“I’ve dreamed . . . what? Dogs?”
“Dogs,” I said, making up some bullshit. “You know, that dogs can only see in black & white, but they dream in color.”
The shrink frowned and averted his eyes for a moment.
“Not my field,” he said. “Tell me about your allergies.”
“Sometimes,” I said, “When the pollen was extra bad, I had to stay indoors. While other guys were playing baseball, I was inside drawing pictures and writing stories. Our kitchen had a Formica countertop, 1950’s style, with squiggly designs in it, dark shades of green, red, and black. If I stared at those squiggles I saw faces and other things.”
“People do the same thing looking up at clouds,” said the doctor. “One time I saw a cloud shaped like…”
“I’ve seen shapes in clouds,” I interrupted. “Everybody has. But it’s more intimate when faces emerge from the Formica.”
“Is that why you are so interested in Richard Shaver’s art?” asked Dr. Carnes.
Very astute.
I should stray from this fascinating therapy session to provide some background on Richard Shaver.
Richard Sharpe Shaver was, by all accounts, a strange man. Primarily a science fiction writer, he also created some unusual art. He split rocks open and saw patterns in the grain, then used paint and ink to enhance the images so that other people could see them. He called these “rock books” and said that an ancient civilization had created them.
Shaver made his writing debut in a magazine called Amazing Stories. Created in 1926 by Hugo Gernsback, Amazing Stories is arguably the first science fiction magazine. In the 1940s, Richard Shaver sent a story to the magazine about a race of evil mutants, called Dero, who lived in underground caverns and sometimes captured humans to torture and eat. According to Shaver, aliens from another planet had abandoned these subterranean creatures on Earth, back in ancient times, and centuries of inbreeding underground had made them insane and sadistic. Shaver also claimed that the Dero were using some kind of energy beam to send disturbing voices into his own mind. He called this mental harassment “tamper.” The most remarkable thing about Shaver’s entire body of work was his claim, in all apparent seriousness, that it was all true!
It was never clear whether Ray Palmer, the magazine’s editor, believed that Shaver was serious, but Amazing Stories continued publishing Shaver stories because it increased their sales and thousands of letters poured in. Some of the letter writers claimed that they, too, heard strange voices in their heads. This annoyed the more serious science fictions fans, who looked upon the “Shaver Mystery” as a ridiculous hoax.
Years later, in an interview, Editor Ray Palmer admitted that Shaver, like me, had spent some time in a mental institution.
I’m tired of talking to Dr. Carnes.
Let’s move on, shall we?
Soon, I’ll explain why Roger and I broke into the study of writer Olsen Archer, and how we later flew to the island of Malta to investigate the freaky underground catacombs known as the Hypogeum.
First, some background. I arranged the following events into a “four seasons” motif, but you know how memories overlap and become tangled. These childhood tales are probably not in chronological order.
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