Ancient Guardian Of The Sacred Blood

Turkey ridge is nestled on a long hill running through the midst of an eight mile wide bay known as The Great Labyrinth Swamp. There is a good reason why this swampy bay was referred to as a labyrinth. For some strange fact of being virtually all direction finders seem to cease in their function, many often giving opposite indications. Even the best of talented interlopers, from coon hunters and deer stalkers to surveyors, often wind up going around in circles all day and night, exiting in places far distant from indications given by their inner sense of direction; yet simultaneously eerily cheerful that they had managed to make it out back onto the hard surfaced road at long last.

These woods were known by past generations to hold many unsettling secrets. Fearsome spirits were said to lurk about who bore an ardent hatred for trespassers, and new residents when they possessed no blood connection with the land, the local people, or the areas rich history. There were many recent examples of situations where confused people stumbling through the bush, had dreadfully run afoul.

During the Civil War the place was said to have been a battle ground soaked in blood, although nothing could ever be discovered inside the record to substantiate the local account recalled from a tradition of oral history. So goes the tale, the US Federal Government’s blue coated army was passing through, originating from the Cape Fear River. The local plantations had scout accomplices who patrolled with the Federal Troops up and down the river, many acting as double agent informers to the locals. Intrepid runners carried news back to the plantations that enemy forces were on their way from the beach, since the mighty invincible fortress, Fisher, had recently fallen.

In response to this long dreaded news, the locals cleared out all of their golden chains, watches, rings, their steel hardware, dried meat, dried fruit, rice stores, black eyed peas, grits, butter beans, guns, ammunition, and other valuables; then stashed them in cache’ areas constructed in anticipation of a future need, deep down inside The Great Labyrinth. For personal protection while their arms were in concealed storage, many persons crafted extremely powerful homemade cross bows and arrows from river cane growing throughout the general area. Wild hemlock or infused tobacco provided the juice or the nicotine, that became the deadly arrow poison, as did manure when nothing better could be scrounged while living on the run.

Live stock was carried deep down into the swamp and temporarily corralled when possible, or simply allowed to free range when corralling wasn’t possible. The intended victims of this total warfare policy resided inside the many hollowed out trunks of great cypress trees until this huge army of horrendous ravishing fiends had finally passed them by.

So the story goes, local bands ambushed an encroaching Federal patrol with these bamboo cross bows and poisoned arrows. Once every member of the patrol had taken an arrow, the concealed ambuscade attacked with side knives, hatchets, and iron spiked oak branches, until the few remaining survivors had been slaughtered. Any weapon or tool on the individual person of this patrol was seized up, to include a light portable six pound howitzer. These weapons and this howitzer were promptly set up at another point of ambush for use on these invading foreign troops as they passed through.

At night areas back toward the Cape Fear, where the enemy encampments stood, were located, and swinging or dropping poisoned spiked logs were put in between these encampments and the nearest creek observed to have been utilized for bathing or cooking; in anticipation of scoring a catch when awakening troops meandered down to dip water for the morning breakfast.

According to the local regal down through the decades following, all enemy troops were eventually eliminated with this highly effective guerrilla technique from plantation farms and cabins on Turkey Ridge. While no record of the time honored account could ever be located, during the 1970’s a small gathering of kids watched in awe as two six pound howitzers were pulled from a local slough by outsiders working for the State Museum in Raleigh. Obviously these guns had been located by farm owners before hand.

In the minds of these kids, and many adults, this witnessed discovery verified the old tales from inhabitants, of past glory and valor. For sure they all really were sons and daughters of the undefeated, many laughed later on. To this day unexplained events in the lives of people from outside the area who dare to venture in despite being thoroughly warned, are said to be the actions of spirits originating with these past violent citizen bands who once hid out deep down in the Labyrinth.

Other occurrences of the bizarre suggest that occultist forces of possession inside the general area might be hard at work, conjuring up armies of spirit citizen bands to terrorize all alien out-landers. So the account runs, a criminal family consisting of an old widow woman named, Mapia Lytle, and her seven sons from Harlan County, Kentucky, built a cabin on Turkey Ridge on squatted land back around 1910. She is referred to by long time inhabitants as Ma Pia. She and her sons lived on stolen livestock, wood, and from raiding local estates. Because of their frequent theft, the surrounding farmers declared war on her seven sons, with the cabin being a setting of intermittent gun battles. The cabin door and the front walls were virtually pock marked with bullet holes, even as the long abandoned cabin sat empty into the 1980’s.

The old hag was warned by an unknown message bearer to exit the area, but she ardently refused, openly declaring with laughter that she would remain in place there, and “anybody who didn’t like it could be damned.” One day she went missing, remaining so for a month. A freshly plowed field was seen to have an area of disturbed dirt near to the side adjacent to the tall oak woods, although no tracks could be found. One of her sons had the notion to dig in this disturbed ground. After going down three feet, his shovel struck a head of dirt soaked, jet black hair with a hollow thud. Her dirt filled, cupped hands, seemed to have been virtually clawing at the earth in a vain attempt at escaping the grave, only to have fallen after being overwhelmed by the situation.

Her seven sons vowed revenge on the farmers who they were certain had committed this awful crime, attacking a number of local farm homes, with the inhabitants thankfully anticipating their approach. Resulting from their inability to avenge the death of their wicked mother, the brothers eventually turned on one another, with more than half winding up in the graveyard themselves, and the others languishing away in prison doing hard time. Within five years all but one had wasted away on the chain gang, and the single remaining brother was transported into an out-of-state insane asylum, where he resided for nearly fifty years.

Though the true culprit of the old hag’s murder was never apprehended, to this day local accounts claim an eerie shadowy figure moved through the woods and field without making tracks or sound, entering the cabin through a raised window, and seizing the widow with a handkerchief covering her mouth. Somehow it seems, the woman was moved through the cabin and out the door, while the home was inhabited by her seven violent sons, yet none heard a single sound. Were they too intoxicated, so goes the local sneer? No one really knows the answer to this serious question.

A lone coon hunter who was outside on that night, eventually claimed that he witnessed the event first hand. While the assailant appeared as a transparent shadow, his features resembled accounts recalled of old man, Jarlaith Johnson, foremost leader of a murderous swamp band who was said to have annihilated seven Federal Patrols to the last man down in the Labyrinth. He was described as being particularly wicked in his designs, since he burned at the stake and crucified any survivors he discovered after the fact. When he did take prisoners, he was even said to have cooked some, then forced others to consume the roasted flesh, as he made degrading sport of them before finally dispatching these wretched souls from their unfathomable misery.

In another account from an earlier time, an out lander couple was being investigated in lieu of reports claiming murder of their own children. Investigators at the scene of the crime discovered the charred bones in an ash heap by the wood stand across from the pond behind the cabin, of an infant and two older children. There were scratch marks on these bones, suggesting that the flesh had been carved away with a blade of some sort.

After putting the couple under intensive interrogation, the grossly impoverished woman finally broke down in heaving tears, as did the man; declaring that it was like an immensely powerful force had entered into their bodies, compelling them to roast their own children alive, then consume the cooked flesh completely. They described being approached by a transparent shadow figure, having clearly defined features. Her description of this figure was virtually identical to that given by the coon hunter later on, who witnessed the hag from Harlan County, Kentucky, being murdered. Locals have declared ever since that in both instances it was the ghost of Jarlaith Johnson, continuing on in his war to purge the sacred homeland from alien domination.

There were a number of land tracts deep down in the Labyrinth, where massive live oaks, some seven feet in diameter, are said had once served as hanging trees. One oak in particular stands today behind a boy scout cabin some two hundred yards down from the antiquated Horse Pen Baptist Church. On the inside of this sacred building the candle lamps still hang. Underneath this tree are said to lie the skeletons of more than a hundred men and women, hanged from the Revolutionary Era, down through the Civil War, and on down into the 1960s.

These bones are either those of crusading out-landers who insulted the established hierarchy, or those who were warned to exit the area, yet held these kind admonitions into flagrant disregard. The few eyewitnesses to these tragedies always described bands of compelling mysterious, shadow-like figures bearing clearly defined features, with tied victims dealing out vigilante justice at ropes end. These features often so described resembled descriptions of individual swamp band members headed by none other than Jarlaith Johnson. In virtually every instance, no suspects to these crimes were ever located, since no evidence existed whatsoever, though many potential targets were investigated.

In our own day those who spoke with these lost souls walking the hard surfaced road, discovered that more than a few often had unsettling stories of strange occurrences experienced as they stumbled around in the great labyrinth backwoods. In the gloom of midnight, as the wind stirred the branches of the dense bushes and trees looming all around, many claimed their names were sharply whispered by numerous voices originating seemingly from somewhere inside the dense thickets. Then the phrase “get out!,” was heard to virtually ride upon the wind at twelfth striking. An entire barrage of words originating from a multiplicity of directions, spoken by what sounded to be a dozen voices, soon chimed loudly upon the blustery night wind.

“This is our land, get out! We don’t want you here, out lander. Our traditions are eternal. Get out! Get Out! You are not welcome here. You entered in uninvited. Get out, or burn for eternity inside the furnace of hell, out lander! We know we are right, as were our fore fathers. Leave us be! Get out! You sons of hell may rule the nation today, but one day soon our children shall rise to stake their final indisputable claim. When they finally seize control, a blood purge shall usher you into infinity, and our sacred land shall then stand proudly, forever free!”

All interviewed claimed that an inexplicable fear suddenly gripped their entire bodies, unlike any feeling ever before experienced. Their breathing raced, as their hearts hammered the insides of their breasts. Their blind stumbling transformed into a quickening disheveled pace. A number fell into unseen holes, thankfully only chest deep, as they raced madly from crunching footsteps looming in the unseen rear distance. Upon racing into a natural tangle of cat claw briers and huge two inch bamboo thorns on vines an inch in diameter, the piercing laugh of ghastly voices in a collective multiplicity filled the air.

A chronic threatening, almost nauseating feeling loomed in the air about, so these lost victims reported, until the crack of dawn. With the break of a new sun above the treetops, the gloom of terror gradually lifted, although a sensation of unseen eyes watching amid the tangle, persisted. When these poor souls finally stumbled out of the dense vegetation onto a hard surfaced road, all they were seen to do was shake their heads as they gasped for breath, saying as they panted;

“Thank God in heaven I am finally out. I’ll never go back inside that horrible place. No person could ever pay me enough money to go back in. We’ve heard stories of the Jersey Devil, the Grass Man, and even the Moth Man and the Lizard Man, but nothing anywhere has anything on this,” they would all say as they spoke to concerned passers by, who paused to inquire if these obviously disturbed people needed a ride, or anything else.

One of these staggering individuals lost in the bush was picked up by none other than a heritage resident from the nearby Dundarrach community named Dooley White. Dooley was a brown haired, short stocky, yet muscular man. He was a logger and tobacco farmer by trade. He had no personal qualm with out-landers in general; although he silently hated their often rude, haughty mannerisms, bearing suggestions of being on some type of crusade against every long cherished area tradition.

Because of aliens from the outside constantly complaining to state authorities, already the old time Tobacco Festival Parade had been canceled, as had the selling of multicolored chicks, ducklings, and rabbits at Easter time. The old style turkey shoot, with a live tom turkey behind a log had also now been forbidden by area authorities, although it still often carried on clandestinely.

This realization was excluding the ridiculous new building and State inspection codes, rendering an individual's use of his own property for his personal financial benefit, as being obsolete. The timeless farm tradition of running its own general store had now vanished totally, simply because of imposed codes designed to the sole benefit of tax extortionists so idealized by these crusading big city foreigners. Considering these whining out-landers as a whole among their own kind, Dooley concluded every one of them he had personally spoken with as being virtual disciples of some mysterious dogmatic collectivist doctrinaire, imposed right before the very eyes of every inhabitant who bore a constitutional inheritance and a bloodline dating back to the colonial era on the land.

He held no hatred in his heart for any of them, personally, but when these people infiltrated the public school system, preaching their infectious doctrine to the local children, he felt the hair upon his own body stand up in a heating tinge of anger. The contaminating lies being evangelized by these disciples of the damned were far too numerous for him to ever list, yet to summarize; the children of Turkey Ridge and the county at large, were being indoctrinated to accept the claim that by embracing their own degeneration economically, socially, the family structure at large, and even genealogically, hence the same degeneration noted by history as destroying every great empire of the past; that they were somehow headed toward a new plateau of advancement from every angle of ideological consideration.

He agreed with other locals when they asked the obvious question as to specifically who was sending these abiding abominable missionaries out to proselytize their insidious creed of the spiritually condemned, other than the devil himself? Where is the human face on this demon puppet master concealed in the proverbial bushes, all of them continued to inquire? Surely a mighty enemy must lurk somewhere within their own congregation, they all had recently commenced to conclude aloud. Could it be the Russians plotting to dominate, an economic caliphate seeking to enslave them in a calculated future era, the banking dynasties, or who? Answers to these questions proposed by the areas heritage inhabitants were as varied as were their endless questions.

In the past, the popularly elected government, laboring in tandem to the benefit of banks and corporations, had openly allowed foreigners to enter onto the heritage soil for the purpose of aiding the collective effort to conquer its liberated constitutional inhabitants, who had famously declared themselves to stand strong as their own freeborn nation. Problem was, a nation of independent individual citizens who ascended the ladder of prosperity into a level of wealth on par with that of aristocracy, and were actually running this nation of perpetual constitutional liberty; simply could not stand side by side with a nation where its citizens were enslaved to a central bank and the corporations that had grown up around it. Consequently warfare of one nation seeking to totally destroy the other, was inevitable. Resolute efforts of out lander invaders seeking to dismantle the ever persistent culture of the Labyrinth and areas nationwide in likeness, were sadly unremitting.

Truth is that the Labyrinth and other areas throughout the nation like it, continued to persist in their heritage convictions in spite of these continuing callous attacks, largely because of what was deemed by locals as being a spiritual army conducting battle. Every small town had a heritage of paramilitary security giving resistance to invasions from without. Most of these paramilitary efforts had been astonishingly successful, even in the face of the entire regional area at large enduring conquest and military occupation, in fairly recent times it must be said.

Dooley eased along a narrow paved roadway in a reworked 1969 full sized Ford F150 pickup truck. He kept the truck because of the ease and low cost in making repairs. Vehicles later than 1988 had been intentionally designed to frustrate their owners from maintaining them at home, compelling them into the shops of corporate owned dealerships, who now proceeded to extort every ounce of revenue possible from what amounted to being virtually enslaved consumers.

Ahead ambling aimlessly in the middle of road, he spied the staggering figure of a rather tall middle aged man, who he could tell from the manner in which he walked and carried himself in general, as being an out-lander. The man hung his head in the palms of his hands as he shuffled down the road, seeming as if he were about to weep. His tattered dirty and disheveled clothing revealed that possibly something very unfortunate had occurred. Dooley slowed the old truck down to an eventual pause beside the lumbering man, rolling down his window as he did.

“Hey fellow, you in need of a ride, or anything?,” he spoke to him through the downed window. The man picked his gnarled distressed face up from inside his hands.

“Don’t mind if I do,” he seemed to say as he walked around the hood of the truck. Dooley barely understood him as he spoke with what appeared to be some type of faint, yet still distinct, Swedish accent, at the same time he was opening the door of the old Ford. The stranger articulated a few more words, but Dooley failed to comprehend specifically what the man had said, since he only understood fragments of his bizarre, nearly incomprehensible accent. The man seemed to huff through the door as he sat up firmly in the leather bound seat, then slammed the heavy door.

“What happened to you, there friend?,” Dooley inquired with his usual smile.

The man took a deep breath, then proceeded on with his conversation.

“I was surveying out the swamp, “ he gradually seemed to be relaying back to Dooley.

“Oh, so you’re a surveyor?,” Dooley asked to confirm the words he thought that he heard the man say.

“Yeah, hired by the Doogan Clan to survey out their land tract down here in the swamp,” the man intimated.

“I know them,” Dooley responded with confident affirmation. “I’ll bet it was old man, Gerard Talla Doogan , himself who hired you on, was it not?”

“That it was,” the man confirmed, “a forward speaking, cantankerous individual, I might add. Strangely enough, at the same time, he appeared to have a vein of warmth in his personality.”

“He is not a bad person, only greedy as all hell, but he’ll hoodoo ya just as surely as fermenting raw sewage flows down hill,” informed Dooley with a curt smile.

The man abruptly snapped his head around to gaze toward him, with a contorted confused face, then rather briskly turned back around.

“Do tell me what happened, fellow,” asked Dooley to break the ice.

“I carried the yellow plastic box with my tripod and laser equipment. The plat map was in my hand, showing me the property lines and where I needed to seek out the concretes. These property lines were long, real damn long. When I shot may laser beam out, somehow the reading didn’t register inside the computer in a way matching the directions on the plat. I couldn’t figure it all out, myself. I checked my GPS and it only rolled, without giving me any indications. I always carry my compos as a backup for support, should everything else fail. The compos needle only spun around in an eerie inexplicable continuum. I stumbled around for a while in what felt like circles, somehow thinking I knew where I had been, and where I was going to by heart. Boy was I in for a surprise,” the man gasped.

“I almost know you had an accomplice,” spoke Dooley. “What happened to him?”

“Haven’t a clue. We both were turned around, ass backwards, I guess.”

“You know they found a fresh body of a young man way up near Bryant’s Mill Pond early today. How old was your assistant?,” asked Dooley.

“No more than 23.”

“The one they found early this morning must be your man, I fear.”

The man suddenly assumed a disturbed composure, yet said not a single word.

“Its all crazy to me,” he swallowed hard and continued speaking, “ I stumbled around in the land tract there, and somebody was following me,” the man continued on in a voice that seemed to be fraught with hesitation, almost trembling as he spoke . “I never could see them, but I could clearly hear their footsteps crunching around in there. When these people in the bush spoke, their voices seemed to ride on the very wind itself. I simply don’t know what to make of it all, to tell the truth about it. The honest feeling I had all night long was that my experience was paranormal, if you will. I know people don’t believe in that sort of thing this day and time,” he spoke as he turned to gaze with unsettling hard eyes upon me.. Hearing that about the boy just tears me apart, though.

The man hung his head, shaking it from side to side.

“You are not the first to have these types of experiences,” Dooley informed the man. “The more outsiders venture into the bay here, the more frequent these types of tales become. The general story around here goes that Captain Jarlaith Johnson is still guarding his plantation estate. He was leader of a small citizen militia, who was never defeated in battle, and was said to have wiped seven platoons of pig blue invaders from the face of this earth. His enduring warning was for those who didn’t have a heritage connection to the land, to exit out, and quickly.”

The mans face suddenly flushed as it firmed.

“Well I don’t believe such poppycock nonsense, myself. How do you explain the Chevy van that was aflame last week over on Race Tract Road, deep down on paper company land? This van had also been hacked up with an ax. Ghosts have never been known to carry axes around with them. What about all of these bootleggers and dope growers that have been apprehended here inside of the past six months alone? These are the only spirits to be found down in this swamp!,” the man sneered as he eased firmly back into the seat., heaving as he did so.

“I am only telling you what people are saying, fellow,” Dooley intimated with an air of seriousness in his voice. He could not comprehend the reason this man’s voice suddenly transformed into one wrought with anger.

“I don’t give a rat’s ass what you have been told, or about the ridiculous foolishness these locals are claiming!,” the man suddenly fired, “ Somebody around here is behind all of this terrible behavior, and you locals are covering for them.”

The man suddenly leaned over toward Dooley, almost in a threatening manner.

“That’s what I think about all of this, personally. I’ll tell you what else to go with it, too. These guilty culprits will be found out, and they will suffer for it. You are talking life without parole, and maybe even death here.”

Dooley chuckled to himself as he motored along, never making a reply. These out-landers were slowly beginning to appear as one in the same, he thought to himself in silence. He was open minded about them right at first, though. He had witnessed these same stupid reactions before. This occasion was all only a tiresome repetition to him.

“You laugh today, but I am telling you when the truth finds all of this monkey business around here out, any accomplices will go down right along with the guilty. Do you hear me when I speak?,” the man roared.

As the man roared, even Dooley was beginning to become somewhat perturbed. Here he was offering this distressed person a ride in his vehicle, and this yelling in company with this baseless accusation was all the thanks he received for doing it. He never gave response to the man’s question, but only continued driving down the road. He made a right hand turn, then eased down a hill on a similar narrow paved road. A green sign stood on a pole before this newly constructed neighborhood on the right hand side of the road, bearing the title of Happy Valley. As he eased on down the hill, to the right was a large pond with a tree swing beside it. Around the pond stood numerous outward spreading weeping willows, with statues of Athena and Apollo positioned tactfully in various shaded places.

“Where are you taking me?,” the man roared. “This isn’t where I asked to go!”

“You never told me where you wanted to go,” Dooley intimated. “Where do you want to go?”

“I told you that I want to be dropped off at Jabbo’s Cotton Gen out on highway 242,” the man fired with an inexplicable anger still lingering in his voice.

“We are headed there. See how everything works out. There’s no need to behave so disrespectfully. 242 is directly up ahead.”

As he motored along soon the newly constructed neighborhood transformed back into fields, with beautiful woods all around. In the center of one field stood a massive dilapidated two story house. As a high school student Dooley had once been inside this mansion ruin. Up the stairway on the porch was the foyer door. Directly above the entrance way hung the metal skeleton of a candle lamp. When one opened the doorway to the foyer, then entered inside, on either side were six different rooms. The two rooms near the wall had fireplaces.

Beside the foyer ran a staircase to the second floor. Here there was a hallway, with six rooms on either side. In the ceiling areas of each room, upper and lower, could be seen marking where huge chandeliers once hung. Dooley always imagined them to have been constructed of pure crystal and gold. All of the land around the mansion house was the landed estate, some 5000 acres of it.

When he neared the dilapidated mansion ruin, he slowly pulled off the road. As the two gazed upon the faded wooden structure standing so proudly in the slight distance, a bizarre ominous sensation settled in upon them, causing them both to visualize an invisible dark cloud of some sort.

“Well there it is,” he said to the man sitting inside the truck seat beside him.

“There is what? I don’t see anything but the ruin of an old house, myself,” the man growled.

“That’s the ruin of Captain Jarlaid Johnson’s old mansion. He was my fifth great grandfather. He once owned five thousand acres, and a hundred slaves.”

“Why should any person give a happy damn about this old stuff now? What good has it done you? I can’t see anything special when I look at you there,” the rude man angrily spouted.

“My family was wealthy back in those days. My mother’s people originated in Norway, settling in Normandy, France, after its conquest. They were only estate farmers, tradesmen, and businessmen back then. When William The Conqueror took over Great Britain, the Johnson clan came over with him. The status and wealth of the Saxons was confiscated, then given to incoming Norman settlers. Now my family had lavish land and rather vast real-estate holdings, being employed agents of his majesty himself. They held this title and position in merry England for some five hundred years, before emigrating to America as some of the Lord’s Proprietors, and employed as agents of the crown government here. This was how they received this five thousand acre land tract carved over time from a much larger original land holding. ”

“Well what happened to them? Couldn’t they manage all of that money right? Judging from the looks of you, I take it that they lost all of it,” the rude man continued to spout, directing what amounted to being outright insults toward Dooley. Dooley remained calm through all of it, without ever responding in anything resembling a likewise fashion.

“Yeah, they lost it, all of their wealth and status with the Civil War. After the Civil War it seems like they only had women for children, so the land married out from the family over the course of time. But that is alright, because the Fed never ventured into these parts and physically took anything away. My great grandfather saw to that. His ghost, and its ferocious swamp band is still at work guarding this land to a magnificent wonder, even as we speak.”

“I’m sick of hearing this kind of rubbish from you stupid locals,” the angry out lander suddenly huffed to Dooley’s astonishment. “ I declare, the farther south I travel, the damn dumber the people seem to get. Do you hear me? I’m sick of hearing all of this!”

His face suddenly firmed up into an anger induced sneer for no apparent reason.

“I’ll tell you what I’ll do right now. Wasn’t his master bedroom up stairs near the balcony, so that he could watch over his estate from the heights, like I have heard so many others of the time were around here?”

“Yes, I suppose,” replied Dooley.

The man glared at him through clenched teeth.

“I’ll tell you what I am going to do. I’m going to get out of this truck now, and walk right up to that house. I am going to walk right through that door. The master bedroom was the largest one on the second floor balcony, and it was only one of two up there with a fireplace, right?,” the man glared as he continued to clench his teeth.

“Yes, but-”

“I’m going to march right into that house,” the man rudely interrupted as he trembled with consuming rage.. “I’m going to stomp up that stairway hard enough so that the mud will fall off from my boots, then I am going to go right over into that room. Do you hear me?,” the man roared as he eased toward Dooley.

“But, you might not-”

“Then you know what I am going to do?,” the man roared through tightly clenched teeth again. “I’ll prove to you and everybody else around in these parts, that all of you are full of poppycock!”

“But, I woul-”

“I’ve got to go real bad. I mean, like I have to go real bad, right now. So what I am going to do is to take a massive dump right there in the middle of his bedroom,” the man declared as he chuckled in a series of wheezes and coughs. “Then I am going to piss right where his bed more than likely stood, which I presume would be near where the fireplace is. When nothing happens, then I am telling you and everybody else around here to shut up all of this nonsense about ghosts fighting wars, and killing people, and other such ridiculous cock and bull. Are you with me? Now you just watch me!”

Before a single word could be spoken, the man huffed out the door, slamming it with all of his might as he did so. All Dooley could do was watch with a mixture of swelling contempt, horror, and disgust as the man’s overweight body strode out upon the loose sand and scattered grass of the field. With a thick aura of crass arrogance he marched his worn mud caked knee high work boots directly up the stairway, then kicked the door of the once elegant mansion ruin open; glancing back out toward Dooley with a menacing smile upon his face, who casually remained inside the pickup truck paused out beside the road.

Dooley only calmly retrieved a chew of homemade plug tobacco, then placed it underneath his lower lip, as he eased backward into the leather bound seat of his Ford F150. He slowly chewed as he gazed outward across the field, toward the old home. Something had to be done about these types of people, he thought to himself in lingering silence. Of late, he was seeing far too many of them around. Maybe ten minutes passed, then a colossal crashing sound was heard on the inside of the structure, as a dust cloud suddenly surrounded the mansion ruin on the outside.

Quickly Dooley exits the door of his F150. He steps into the field, running toward the door of the mansion, yelling;

“Fellow, are you O.K.? I tried to tell you, but you wouldn’t let me do it. This structure looks to be stable even though its a ruin, yet the house isn’t in the best of shape, I have always feared. It has been used as a pack house for the past sixty years or more. I tried to tell you, but-!”

Dooley races up the brick steps toward the opened foyer door as he yells again, then pauses. On the lower floor in the foyer lies the bloodied, badly battered, crumpled body of this grossly overweight man, who appears to be unconscious. Above him is the massive hole torn through the upper floor, into which his blubbery form had consequently fallen. The man’s body appeared to be laying in a virtual puddle of feces and urine. Dooley races up, then seizes the downed man by the hair of his head with his left hand, while he slaps his face on both sides with his opened right hand. He casually leans over to spit beside the place where the man’s head lay.

“Hey fellow, you alright? Hey! If you can hear me, then wake up!”

A sudden gust of wind blew from the outside, causing the heavy wooden door to wag slightly as it loudly creaked. On the outside a dust devil spun around in a near taunting gesture at this particular inappropriate moment. From the freshly turned red clay soil a raven’s soft tail plumage suddenly arose from the plowed earth, then danced in midair, somehow making its way through the opened foyer door; continuing to jitterbug mysteriously in midair, until it finally fell directly beside the crumpled body of the man where he lay. All Dooley could do was to arise from his stoop o’er the man’s frozen blue face, and chew, while the sensation gradually consumed him that surely he had witnessed something far beyond any mortal explanation.