Eve Morton

Happy Spirit Season!

I’ll be at the Homer Watson Gallery today giving readings for the start of my spooky season markets–and since Homer Watson is a famous spiritualist (at least in Canada), I wanted to share one of my historical ghost stories.

Please note: this story deals directly with suicide. Nothing on the page, but the entire premise–about spirits at a crossroad–is related to people who have passed on via suicide, and how the church handles (or doesn’t handle) their spirits in the afterlife.

This story was written as a prompt for a friend who wanted something “Ambrose Bierce-y” to read. Bierce is one of America’s most heavily anthologized authors, an early supernatural writer, and his stories influenced the later works of HP Lovecraft. My friend said I delivered with my request–and so did the horror publication Scare Street. They accepted this story for one of their many anthologies, and it was so nice to give this story a second life via them. Now, hopefully, there is a third life this Spirit Season.

Enjoy!

***

Crossroads

By Eve Morton

Father Brown awoke to the sound of terrible scraping. The church was drafty. Surely, the strained shrieks were nothing more than the wind against the brick church. 

Yet, as he awoke, he grew certain that the deathly scraping was something unearthly, something that required more attention than a prayer in the dead of night. 

Father Brown rose and dressed hastily. The sound of scraping had continued, along with the sickening thud of something heavy. 

Footsteps? Thunder? Perhaps. 

The wind was still strong, and the trees were still lashing the windows, but Father Brown could feel something else deep inside—a presence. He’d only felt something like this once before, on the eve of Easter inside the rectory, and then, he’d hidden away in his room and prayed until he had fallen asleep. 

As he glimpsed out the window with his oil lamp, he saw a shadow on the horizon. Where the main road crossed with the dirt road to St. Paul’s Church, a man stood hunched over. He seemed to sway with the wind, a stick of a willow tree or something else in his hands, which he plunged deep into the dirt. 

“He is digging,” Father Brown said aloud. His voice echoed off his sparse room. He donned a jacket over his clothing and set out for the crossroads. 

The man was still digging when he arrived. His silhouette was clearer, no more than a youth of eighteen, someone who should have been drafted into the army, surely. As Father Brown approached, he noticed the man’s loping gait and the slight tremor in how he held the shovel, beyond what would have been simple fatigue from the digging in the middle of the night. Perhaps he was a cripple, stricken with palsy. 

Or, perhaps, he was just a drunk one.

“Evening,” Father Brown said. The wind cut through and shrieked at the moment he spoke. He cleared his throat, pulled his coat around him tighter, and spoke again. “What are you doing, young man?”

The youth jumped. He had not noticed Father Brown approaching, and he almost raised the shovel in his hand to strike a blow. 

Father Brown stepped back, his shoes becoming caked in the mud that had formed from the boy’s shoveling efforts. 

“What are you doing, young man?” Father Brown repeated. “There is no need for violence. This is St. Paul Church’s property. However, I, the father of this parish, would like to know what it is you seek.”

“I’m sorry, Father,” the boy said. He truly was a boy. Father Brown could hear it in his soft voice, hardly broken by the chains of puberty. “I don’t mean you or anyone else any harm.”

“I find it hard to be convinced of this fact. It is the middle of the night, and you bear your shovel like a weapon. Please, tell me. What is it you seek?”

The boy leaned against the shovel, both hands over it like a thinking post, as his face became ashen with sadness. “I… my uncle, you see, he is here.”

“Buried here? Or over there?” Father Brown gestured over his shoulder to the cemetery gates on the other side of the church, directly opposite his personal study and bedroom. “That is where our congregation meets their end on the other side. Even if you were in search of your uncle’s grave, you should not be digging it up. You should show respect to the dead.” 

Father Brown’s voice boomed, each syllable causing his cadence to rise and fall as if he was at the pulpit. 

The horror of the boy’s words—digging up his uncle!—struck fear into him in a way no specter or vision of the afterlife ever could. This boy was a grave robber, a ghoul, nothing but the deepest darkest sinner he’d ever faced.

“Are you not fearful for your own soul, my lad?” Father Brown asked, some of his theatrical cadence descending into the personal. “Are you not fearful of the task you take on? Digging up a grave! And in the wrong spot. Who are you? Have we met before?”

The youth had been staring at his hands and the overturned earth for the majority of the priest’s speech. Now, he met his gaze, his blue eyes suddenly bright orbs in the darkened night. 

Father Brown stepped back. A demon? He wondered, yet he felt the gaze as he would an angel, bright and feverish with hope. 

The boy began to cry, wetness like the fresh spattering rain staining his cheeks. “I saw my uncle here, Father, forgive me, three weeks ago. My sister goes to your church. I came to visit her. I attended the afternoon service. You surely do not remember me, but maybe you remember Rebeccah. She was large with child.”

Father Brown had several women as part of his congregation who were large with child, but there was no need to hunt through those names in his mind. He knew Rebeccah Northrop. He knew of the entire Northrop family and the tragedy after tragedy that had befallen each member. 

If Father Brown had any notion to believe in curses, the Northrop family would be the basis of such belief. Rebeccah’s father had died in the Boar War from a gangrenous wound he should have survived. He’d left a wife with five children, one with a crippled leg, to raise and no money to do it on. Her brother, Peter, this child’s uncle surely, had moved to their small New England village to help. That winter, three of the children had died of rheumatic fever. 

During the worst of the illnesses, the mother had found out she was with child once again, her husband’s last brood. But the boy had been born still, a stone in the hand of the midwife. The mother had gone mad with grief and ended her life in the local sanitarium. Then, the uncle had lost his own life, stricken by heartbreak and madness at the terrible hand his family had been given.

“Your uncle was Peter; am I correct?”

“Yes,” he said and nodded. “I am also Peter. Named after him. I saw him a few days ago. Right here.” The youth tapped his shovel into the muddy dirt. “I saw him here, and he was lost.”

Father Brown could not help but feel a chill, even as his words came out with a cool precision. “Son, there is no such thing as specters and spirits.”

“Then, what was Mary visited by? Then, what was Job stricken with? I must believe in what I see with my eyes and touch with my hands during the day. There must be more to the physical world. There must—”

“Yes, dear Peter. There is more than what we see. There simply must be, or I shall be a fool spending my life as I am.” Father Brown took in a deep breath, feeling far too vulnerable—and too cold, much too cold as if this boy was dead in front of him—at that moment. “But we must face the living. We must go on with our daily waking worlds. The dead have been buried. Your uncle included, and—”

“That is the thing,” Peter interrupted. His hand was shaking, but Father Brown noted it was not with palsy but fear. “I know my uncle is dead and buried, so why did I see him here? It must be because his death is not truly his death. I am missing a piece.”

“What sort of piece could there be?” Father Brown asked. He thought of the cursed family and wanted to truly be there for the boy. “So much tragedy can happen, and it can feel as if the Lord is testing us, like Job indeed. We must let it go and endure those trials. You have done all you can for your uncle. You have—”

“He died in an unsanctioned way,” Peter cut him off yet again. His young face became older at that moment, his lips hard and firm. “We covered it up, Rebeccah and I. He wanted to die, not being able to face the terrible consequences of his own life, his own struggle. That baby…”

“Your mother’s child, your lost sibling. It is sad—”

“The child was his too.”

Father Brown gasped. This was not the first accusation of evil within a family that he had witnessed, and he’d read many tales within the Bible of men and women within the same bloodline lying together. But those were stories, necessary parables for something greater at their core. Seeing the consequence in the flesh maddened him on the youth’s behalf. 

“He killed himself,” Peter confessed. “He died at his own hand. And we could not bear the shame of that. So, we covered it up. We shouldn’t have because he does not deserve those lies. He made our mother crazy and then took her only solace. He is the sinner, not us. And now he has come back to prove it. He will not rest.”

“What do you mean he has come back?”

Peter stood a long time, hands on his shovel, and gazed into the dirt. A twig snapped in the distance, seemingly impossible given the mud and wet air all around the two of them, yet both men heard it. Their gazes followed the sound. 

On the main dirt road, a man’s shadow was present. He walked back and forth, a terribly maddening pacing ritual, before he simply disappeared into the ether. 

Father Brown met Peter’s blue eyes. He pleaded with the man without words. 

“I refuse,” Father Brown said, turning away. “That was not real.”

“Yet you saw it. I saw it. That is my uncle, trapped between worlds. I heard a legend long ago that all suicides remain at crossroads. They cannot go to heaven. They cannot go to hell. Something draws them here.” Peter began to dig again. “If I find whatever has brought him here, I can then place his spirit underground again where he will stay. I can bury what I have lost.”

“No,” Father Brown proclaimed in fear, trembling from the night’s events. He did not want to believe anything that had occurred, yet his shivers told him that even if his mind refused to label it in language, it had happened. He shuddered beyond the cold as if an invisible hand of the otherworld was reaching for him from that pitiable hole. “No, my dear child. I will not allow you to dig here.”

“You cannot do anything.” Peter continued to toss dirt over his shoulder. 

The hole was deep, up to his knees. Water from the rain and spring runoff cascaded into the hole, covering his shoes and surely setting the boy up for a fever. Perhaps he didn’t care. Yes, Father Brown could clearly see now that this boy didn’t care about a thing. His blue eyes had become affixed, almost possessed, with his mission of finding his uncle at the crossroads and putting his spirit back to rest. 

“What are you hoping to find in the dirt?” Father Brown asked. “He was not buried here.”

“But I see him here. There must be something.”

“No,” Father Brown said once again. “You are a simple boy, and this is far beyond your capabilities. I forbid it. You must leave now, or I will call the authorities.”

The youth continued to dig. Even as Father Brown repeated the threat—arrest, imprisonment, insults at his mental ability—Peter continued on his mission. Father Brown understood the boy was motivated by a higher calling, as he’d once been. 

So, Father Brown evoked the only thing he could. “Peter, this will damn you. This act is barbaric and against the Lord. I will not stand for it. I will not allow you to dig at the crossroads because it will put your soul in mortal jeopardy.”

“It already is, Father. You don’t understand that. I’m already damned.”

“I do understand. I have ministered to your family. And if you continue on in this way, you will only pass the curse on to the next generation. Your sister’s child, Rebeccah’s brood. Surely, you do not want that child to meet the same fate as your lost sibling? Do not damn someone already so innocent.”

Peter halted. His shovel was in the dirt, but his face was now crestfallen. Father Brown knew that he had struck a note. He had saved the boy. He extended his hand for him to take, to help lift him out of the hole, which he grasped with a chill. 

Under the oil lamp, Peter was filthy and covered in mud. The only thing clean on him were his blue eyes. Peter opened his mouth to say something, but every time, he seemed to fold in on himself and not utter a word.

“It is all right,” Father Brown said. “You have done your very best. Go home now. Stay warm. I will see you and Rebeccah on Sunday.”

Peter nodded. He regarded the shovel as if it was a foreign object and then handed it to the priest. His actions and facial expressions said, I won’t need this any longer, but no words came from his mouth. He slumped up the main road, past where his uncle’s specter had emerged, and then kept going. 

Father Brown waited at the crossroads until the youth disappeared into the night. Then, he waited for another five minutes to be sure that the ghost did not return as well. When the night seemed empty of spirits and hauntings, he returned to his room, washed as much of the mud and dirt from himself, and then lay under the covers. 

The terrible feeling persisted until the morning, and he knew he could no longer fool himself that it was the chill. 

***

Father Brown did not see Peter or Rebeccah on Sunday. He’d prepared a sermon on the nature of the afterlife and the sins men have inherited from their fathers, but the homily fell flat on his tongue. Those he needed to administer to the most were not present. What was the point? Though he went through his sermon and the congregation was respectful and kind, he could tell they were not listening. They did not need to hear about breaking family curses and respecting the dead, God-fearing as they were already. 

After the service, Father Brown shook hands, spoke to people about their small issues, and shared some food with others, and his faith was restored in little gestures. 

Once he retired to his room, however, the noises returned. A subtle scraping of metal against rock, the sound of earth over his shoulder, a digging chorus of more than just Peter, but a line of gravediggers at their post, as if unearthing the entire Northrop line. 

Father Brown had been hearing the noises since that night with Peter. And he’d been ignoring them, calling them bad dreams and lingering guilt at his harsh treatment of the youth. But until this Sunday, these spectral noises had only ever visited him at night.

Now, it was daylight, and he heard the ghost. He’d once been surrounded by the power of his congregation, the living souls of those he could save, and yet he heard the distinct sounds of a man who had not been buried in the proper place, a man who had lain with the wrong woman, and a man who had continued to curse his own brood when he should have been protecting them.

“Peter Shunn,” Father Brown whispered inside his bedroom. “I see you and hear you. What do you want?”

There was no answer. Only more noises of scraping, of pacing against soft earth. Father Brown left his room and walked across the stone floors until he was on the other side, at one of the windows facing the cemetery. The grave markers were a hodgepodge of design and prominence. Some of the wealthier families had large stones, while others opted to be modest in death though they could afford angels and carvings like the biggest pieces. 

Father Brown gathered the birth and death records he kept on the shelf in this room. He located Peter Shunn in his roster,; his death listed as a heart attack at age fifty-five, and struck it out. He didn’t add anything in, but he’d hoped that correcting the register would make the sounds disappear. 

I am telling the truth now, his actions spoke. Please leave us alone.

The sounds continued. He sighed and returned to the window. A man was there—spectral, not literal—and he paced the gravestones. He wore a gray outfit, the working-class gear of those who owned a shop but still did all their own repairs, and it was barely visible in the gray mist. He hunched over some of the stones, touching them like they were a child. 

His child. 

Father Brown found the listing for the stillborn baby. He had no name, but there was a gender listed. Baby Boy Northrop. He was buried in the cemetery right next to his father, who was not listed on the birth certificate but would join him months later. 

Father Brown left the registry books on the desk in the room. He gathered a thick coat as he stepped outside. The shovel that the younger Peter had left behind leaned against the back door of the church. He took it now, merely to use it as a walking stick. Or as a weapon, in case these ghosts were violent like the demons in the Bible.

He walked through the gate of the cemetery, his heart hammering. I have been here any number of times, administering a number of different but no less sacred rites. Yet now I am afraid. “God help us all,” he said as his shoes became caked in mud. 

The specter turned. The face of the elder Peter was evident, even through the mist and distance. He locked eyes with the priest, his face caught in a rictus grin, and then disappeared. He did not run or hide; he was simply gone. 

Father Brown regarded the earth where the specter had stood. Footprints, deep into the earth, were present in front of the flat stone where his child was buried. He’d been buried next to the stillborn and next to his mother and father after that. A nice little family plot, usually bought all at once when the head of the household passed, so the family could be together in death. 

Father Brown stood there for some time, considering his options. His soul, the soul of Peter, and the likelihood of eternal damnation. Then, with another prayer for forgiveness on his lips, he began to dig. 

***

Hours later, as the sun set on the New England horizon, Father Brown walked to Rebeccah’s house and knocked three times. A woman he did not recognize came to the door, her hair gray at the temples and her dress simple yet professional. 

“Yes, Father?” she asked, but before either one could say anything, a scream came from inside the house. The woman blinked, though she did not falter. “Rebeccah is having her baby tonight.”

“Oh.”

“Yes. It is not the best time to come and bless, but I assure you we may need you in the morning.”

“Is everything all right? I know—”

The midwife gathered his hands with hers. She smiled warmly, so much like the smiles he gave newlyweds and those who brought their babies into St. Paul’s for the baptismal waters. She was like him; he saw that so clearly at that moment. She dealt with life and death at the beginning, while he seemed to be playing eternal catch-up at the end. “Things are going as they should go,” the midwife said as she let his hands go. “Do not worry about her.”

“I’m here for Peter,” Father Brown said, remembering his mission with stark clarity. 

Though he’d dressed again and done his best to wash the dirt off of his face before making the house call, he could see that his nails were ringed with half-moons of dirt. He had not been eating and was thinner in his vestments. He did not look well, not even for the midwife’s typical standards.

“Is everything all right?” the midwife asked cautiously. “Peter has been a big help to his sister thus far, though I’m sure some of the older children could take his place.”

“I’d like that. I need to speak with him. It is a private matter.”

The midwife nodded. She did not invite him inside—not as another scream erupted through the small house—but she bid him wait on the doorstep as she fetched Peter. 

He came out moments later, his dark hair askew and dark rings under his eyes. He regarded the priest with a polite smile reserved for guests, though it quickly fell away as memories of their last meeting clouded his blue eyes. “What would you like, Father Brown?”

The midwife closed the door, leaving Peter on the porch. He had grown stronger from her presence, and the boy now crossed his arms over his chest and repeated his question. 

“I’m afraid I am here to ask for your forgiveness on the matter of your uncle,” Father Brown began. “I believe that you were right. He has been haunting the rectory ever since you left.”

Peter stood up straighter. “He has? You have seen him?”

Father Brown nodded and rehashed many of the details that had kept him up at night. The scraping, the terrible howls, and his uncle’s forlorn pacing. “I’m afraid that you were right. Suicides haunt the crossroads, and the church is at a crossroads. This means that there is only one way to rid your uncle’s spirit. We must move him from consecrated ground back to the hole you were digging for him. I am… very sorry it is coming to this. I am also very sorry to your family.”

Peter held up his hands, silencing the priest. Then, he grew ashamed, having spoken so out of turn. “I am sorry myself. I should have sought council first. I should have—”

“Hold the apologies. We will need them for God after we get through tonight.” Father Brown drew a deep breath. He plunged his hands into his pockets, only to realize that some of the dirt and silt that he thought he’d rid himself of by changing was now back. He took out a small stone, only to find that it was a finger bone. He held it between the two of them, Peter’s gaze affixed there.

“May God forgive us,” Peter said.

Father Brown nodded. He could not have said it better himself. 

***

They left the house of birth and walked into the night towards the house of death. Once his home, St. Paul’s Church had begun to feel unreal as Father Brown dug up the corpse of Peter Northrop and brought it inside piece by piece. 

The man’s clothing hung off of him in tatters, having been disintegrated by the worms and other bugs after being in the ground for the past year and a half. His skin had mummified in some parts but decayed away to the bone in others. It was a horrible sight truly, one that Father Brown knew he would not rid from himself for years and years if his soul ever recovered. 

The groundskeeper had filled in the hole by the crossroads the morning after Father Brown had discovered it. No grass grew on the patch, and Father Brown knew that no grass ever would grow there again. It was a worthy sacrifice as long as it meant that they could rid the rectory and the roads of this spirit.

“I need you to dig again,” Father Brown said. “My back aches after retrieving your uncle.”

Peter nodded and went to work right away. He grasped the shovel as if it was an extension of his own arm. He dug without relenting, without stopping for a break, and without his leg smarting in pain. Meanwhile, Father Brown transferred the body piece by piece from the rectory hallway to the darkened night. Each time he lay down a new part, Peter regarded it with muted horror. He nodded sometimes as if saying hello to his uncle, while other times, he turned away as if he could hide from what they were doing. 

Or what his uncle has done, Father Brown reminded himself. They were not the bad men, the true sinners in this equation. They were doing the Lord’s work, rather dirty work, but they would be setting the scales of justice right again. 

And there would be no more ghosts. Father Brown kept reminding him of that fact, over and over again, until the last piece of the body was brought out. He rested the skull, devoid of skin and possessing only a few wisps of hair, on top of the rest of the body. A beetle, black as the night, crawled out of the mouth and scampered away.

Both Father Brown and Peter shuddered. 

“Well,” Father said, “shall we lay him to rest?”

Now, it was Peter’s job to transfer the body, piece by piece, into the grave that he had dug. He worked slowly, carefully, but soon his hands became a blur of white bone and mud, desperate to get it all underground and behind them both. 

A driving wind shot up out of nowhere, and the clouds that had been hovering in the sky all day, turning the afternoon gray, now parted in the night sky and showered them with rain. The hole for the body was not as deep as six feet, only three or four at most. 

But as the rain came, the dirt around them became a mudslide. Peter slipped as he transferred the legs of the corpse, and the rest of his uncle’s body cascaded into the hole, along with Peter.

“Help!” he cried out, his voice half under the muddy water. He slipped onto the floor of the grave with his face next to his uncle’s skull, which had fallen in during the short mudslide. He screamed for help again. The bones crunched under his feet and added to the horror. Another beetle came out of the mouth of the skull and ran between Peter’s lips as he yelled for help again.

Peter shot up, spitting, spluttering. His fingers crawled and scraped against the mouth of the grave, pulling more and more dirt over himself as he tried to escape. “Help! Father, help!” 

Father Brown was silent as stone, watching it all in a lunatic’s trance. The wind and rain had frozen him and made his limbs stiff with fear. Peter reached out for him, desperate to grab onto life again. Father Brown wanted to grasp for him, longed to do so, but he held his position on the side. 

“Father!” Peter called out, his gasps becoming gurgles. “Please help me! He has me!”

“The Devil,” Father Brown said, whispering. He drew in a deep breath against the harsh wind and crossed himself awkwardly as if the action was foreign. 

He tried to get onto his knees, bracing himself against the pain that had never been there before in his joints, and offered a hand to Peter. He grabbed him. He slipped. The sequence was repeated threefold. It seemed they could not hold one another, their fingers transparent as ghosts.

“We have done the Devil’s work,” Father Brown said. He repeated the words like a chant. He could feel his own soul leaving his body, down into the hole with Peter and the boy’s eternal soul. 

Father Brown had been forsaken the moment he’d woken up and heard the terrible noise. The moment he’d let the Northrop family into his congregation. The moment he had become a priest. It had all led to this moment, this fearful ruin of a life ended in suicide and two lives, two souls who were desperate enough to end a family line of pain and hurt with the sacrifice of their own souls. 

“We are dying,” Father Brown said. He held onto Peter’s hand tighter and brought him out of the grave, though he knew Peter was damned along with him, had been damned the moment he was born a cripple, a Northrop. “We are dying, dear Peter. We are already dead.”

Peter let out a low, almost animal scream as he scrambled up the rest of the grave. He grasped onto Father Brown’s leg, tearing his pants as he finally emerged from the slippery mouth. Peter stood, gasping for air and spitting out dirt. The rest of the grave filled in suddenly, the rain and mud and wind completing the rest of their horrid task. 

Peter held onto Father Brown’s thin body in a tight embrace. He hugged him tight, tighter than the father had ever been held by family or friend alike. When he finally drew enough strength to hold the youth in return, he felt something slide into place. Not the soul that he lost—he was sure that his eternal life was now in the grave with Peter’s uncle and would remain there until the end of time—but something more primal and freeing. He and Peter had completed a deadly task together. The Devil’s task.

But they had done it in the right name.

“Thank you, dear Father,” Peter said as he ended the hug and grasped the priest’s hands in his own. “Thank you. You do not know what this has meant for me.”

“I do. I do,” Father Brown said. 

Over the youth’s shoulder, he spotted the place where the main road crested a hill, leaving the rest of it invisible from their position in front of St. Paul’s Church. A man was there, dressed like Peter’s uncle had been dressed in the grave. He paced from side to side, and then he walked down the road. 

Then, he was gone.

END