Where The Apple Tree Dies Part 4
By: P.G. Barnett
Tags: Short Story, Fiction Series, Fiction, Later Henry, Short Fiction

My name is Henry James, and I’m a writer for Dark Sides of the Truth magazine.

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

It was less of a challenge finding Eunice Richardson’s home in the quickly fading dusk than we first thought. Maybe it had something to do with all the police cars parked in front of her house. We found a parking spot on the opposite side of the street and hurried to the side of the house where we’d seen an opened gate.

Briefly, we stood watching the blur of motion of the police on the bottom tier of the back yard. Eunice stood on the flagstone patio just outside the back door, her hands moving from the sides of her legs to cover her mouth and then back to her legs in nervous agitation.

“Eunice, what’s going on?”

“Oh, thank goodness you two are here.”

The elderly woman pointed to where the dead apple tree had once stood. Police were digging into the ground, their noses and mouths covered with bandanas. The scent of Eunice’s rosebushes, although sweet, now seemed to mingle with another smell, a foul stench of something rotten, the smell of sewage roasted by days of brutal sunshine.

“Hey, Charlie!”

One of the men standing near the other band of police officers turned toward us, then lifted his hand to acknowledge us. We watched him take the stairs of each tier. As he neared us, he smiled and extended his hand.

“Hey, Henry. It’s about time you showed up. So, where’s Sunny?”

“Two weeks of fun and sun with the family in the Bahamas. This is Sally Peters. She’s running with me for a bit.”

After shaking hands, Charlie stepped back and gestured toward the corner of the bottom tier.

“I don’t know what it is with you folks at Dark Sides, but it seems weird stuff like this follows you around. Ms. Eunice, it was good of you to call us. We’re widening the hole until we know just how big that slab of concrete is, then we’re probably going to break through it and see what’s underneath. It may end up being nothing, but you were right. The stench is pretty bad.”

“Mind if we take a look?”

“Henry, I think it’s best for you three to stay here.”

“Is the ME here?”

“This ain’t my first rodeo James. Ruth Hayden’s down there waiting for me to give the word to bust through. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

Charlie gave us all a curt nod then wheeled around then started back down the stairs toward the bottom tier.

“Where are your grandchildren, Eunice?”

“In the house.”

“I’m surprised they aren’t out here checking out all the excitement.”

“They’re terrified, Mr. James. We’ve been experiencing these strange incidents for months and now this. It’s one thing to think you’ve purchased a haunted house. It’s quite another to possibly discover the reason why it’s haunted.”

We heard a sharp crack, the sound of metal striking the unyielding surface of cured concrete, and then another and then one more. As the sound of the concrete finally giving way reached us, the horrid stench of sewage and rot reached us. Instinctively we covered our noses with our hands. A pair of police officers removed their bandanas, stepped away from the hole, bent at the waist, and began to vomit.

As bad as that was, we all saw it. We all stopped and craned our necks, following a whispy green wraith that slithered out of the hole in the ground. At first, it took on almost human form. Then it expanded into a lime-green tuft of cloud and then back to human form.

It rose up and hovered for the longest time and then began to compress in upon itself, growing smaller until it devolved into nothing but a blazing green dot in the night sky.

And then it blinked out of sight.

Along with the sudden disappearance of the mist, the horrid smell lessened, incrementally vanishing in the gentle evening breeze, quickly replaced by the familiar, sweet bouquet of roses relieving our tortured senses.

Minutes later, the entire group of police, along with the ME and Charlie Alvarez, packed up shop and started up the tiers. Behind Charlie and Ruth Hayden, the ME, two of the officers clutched opposite ends of a body bag.

“Hey Ruth, care to make a statement?”

“Not really, Henry, but I know you’ll keep pestering me until I do. It’s a skeleton, and from the looks of the deterioration of the clothing, it’s been here at least twenty or thirty years.”

“Male or female?”

“Hell, James. I’m good, but I’m not that good. I need to get it on the table before I can be certain.”

“Come on, doc, give me your best guess.”

“This better be off the record Henry.”

“Cross my heart. Hope to die.”

Ruth Hayden snorted and said, “Cross your heart, hope to lie, you mean. Okay, if I were to guess, I’d say it was a woman. There. Happy?”

“Ecstatic.”

We watched them file through the opened gate and followed Eunice as she slowly closed and locked it. As we turned to walk back to the patio and the back door of the house, only one of us saw her. Beyond the reach of the porch light, the apparition of a woman, every inch of skin not covered by a sundress smeared with filth, hovered above the ground.

“Oh, damn.”

“What Henry.”

“There she is.”

“There who is Mr. James?”

“Your ghost Ms. Richardson. Ah damn, her hands look, they look like raw hamburger meat, bloody as hell. Peters?”

“Yeah?”

“Go down to that hole and bring me a couple of pieces of that busted concrete.”

“What are you going to do Henry, throw them at her?”

“Just go get the damn concrete.”

Eunice Richardson and I stood in silence, waiting for Sally to return. Our latest arrival to the party continued to stare at us, a curious expression on her smudged face, her eyes darting between us and the motion of Sally as she returned with two chunks of concrete in her hands.

“Okay, James, now what?”

“Step over in the light and let me look at them.”

“Henry, you can’t tell me you’ve never seen concrete before.”

“Turn them over.”

“What?”

“Turn the pieces over. I want to see something.”

When Sally turned over the pieces of concrete, all three of us saw them. Rust-colored stains, deep grooves which had been scraped into the underside of the concrete slab.

“She was alive, Sally. She died trying to dig her way out of a cement coffin with her bare hands, with what was left of her bare hands after hours, maybe days of clawing at that cement.”

“The bloody handprints on the window sill?”

“Yes, Eunice. It was her.”

“Oh, dear Lord.”

“Now what, Henry?”

“Okay, remember I see spooks?”

“Yeah.”

“Now comes the fun part. I get to talk to them.”

Read On — Where The Apple Tree Dies Part 5

Let’s s keep in touch: P.G. & Sharon Barnett (paul@pgbarnett.com)

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