Ashes to Ashes: Remembering Krem (Part 5/6)

Retold by LoreKeeper Casstiel of the Bridge of Souls on 27 December 2013

Regarding the events on 26 July 2008
Genius Territorialiss at the ghost town of Krem, North Dakota

“Seemed like a simple enough of a thing.  Surely you have thought about it while out driving at night.  If I break down here I will just head to that farm and someone will let me use the phone and call for help.  North Dakota is full of nice people and accommodating farmers.  The hardest step we took was to get out of the car after watching our first ghostly manifestations.

We did a countdown and then all lunged out of the car.  I refused to sweep my vision up the street where the sheriff had been and hoped the barbed wire fence to our right.  I remember if having four thick strands and could only be crawled over, not compressed by the cheap, thin, spread out shit.  I think at least one of us got caught on the wire because of trying to move quickly away from this haunted place.  After that bit of tom-foolery we wised up and didn’t tear across the field in a dead sprint but at more of a speed walk.  Things were still way too damn quiet around us and all squealing pigs near the farm, Jeez were they slaughtering them or what?

We got to within maybe 300 yards of the thick slabs of wood that made up the inner barnyard when the lights went out.  All that warm light from the farm faded like an afterimage on my retinas.  The squealing stopped too and then the flashlights flickered.  When our flashlights came back up we saw that the farm was nothing but abandoned buildings, much like those gray/black farmsteads you see falling down on the side of the road, full of rot and boards dry and white as bleached bones in the unforgiving sun.  This house looked black.

And then, popping up in our fucking faces was the spectral visage of the pig farmer… also the first time we got that fucking ghost “BOO!” power used on us.  I only saw him for a second but I saw the translucent rotund reflection of a man with empty eyes and a slack-jawed mouth in coveralls.  The noise that man made still chills me.  Worse yet, as I turned and ran away screaming with my future Cabalmates I could hear the hungry squeals of approaching pigs.  We all ran, we all screamed, no shame in it.

What there was shame in was that if we would have been a little smarter we would have seen how the town was herding us back to its territory.  Sure, new property and new ghost but this was the spirit of a place and all the horror that it had been a part of.  Also the pig farmer had a way with animals… from the howlers to the hunters.  We learned a lot in that single night.

As we sprinted and tripped our way back to the car with slashed tires we began to see a new dread horror.  Pairs of faintly glowing red eyes reflecting back the gloomy moonlight filtering down, dozens of them.

You see, in the last couple decades coyotes had been a growing menace in the northern plains.  Filling in the niche and picking up where the Rocky Mountain wolves left off they had become much more aggressive.  Even that year there were stories circulating about cattle mutilations and super packs forming and terrorizing cattle farmers.

I’m pretty sure coyotes aren’t supposed to have red eyes, these things were being pushed, most likely by the Pig Farmer.  That is my theory at least.  They might have just been rabid.  A dozen or more of the mangy scavengers surrounded us.  We tried to scare them off at first but they wouldn’t back down.  Then they began lunging in to the close sweeps of our flashlights and trying to take bites out of us.  I was terrified and now terrified of the subtle fear of catching rabies.  That is what they say isn’t it?  If any wild animal is acting overly aggressive and coming after people you need to be worried about rabies.  So with our tiny armament we began to shoot them, those of us without a fire arm kept trying to blind with our lights, make lots of noise and slash with pocket knives.  It was an impotent fight on both sides except for a few good shots.  In the end they did make us pay for it.  A few of us took nasty ragged bites.  I got the worst of it, they managed to trip me up and pounce on me, biting me across my legs in arms.  I was limping bad after that, and we had to bandage a few of the bites that wouldn’t stop bleeding right away.  I am pretty sure that is when my fear of being mauled to death by canids started.  We killed maybe two and the rest finally took off.

We got back to the car, climbed back into our zone of safety and got patched up.  Surprisingly Kairos finally got a signal on his cell phone.  This, I feel, reinforces the possibility that we were being jammed supernaturally.  Ghosts have displayed a prepotency to tamper or transmit with short wave radio communications.  If not from our occult reading, the Number Station Operators we ran into a year and a day ago attests to this capability.  Kairos called the one guy we knew who would not only find us but show up no matter what hour of the night ready to kick ass.  Before the call cut off Ethen managed to relay our general location and navigation to John (Prodigy).  John of course hopped into his Thunderbird and hit up his Grandparents the Talleys to get another Deer Rifle and a shot gun.  On future operations we usually leaned on our friend Cole Rohde for his dad’s home fucking armory with a few choice pieces.  Gods rest his mother Cindy, killed by the SpearFinger but I digress.

We waited and waited for John to find us and get us the fuck out of here.  Never mind we would all have to cram into the front or in the speaker-filled bucket seats.  While we waited we had our first huntersque planning session while Nergal kept close watch of the surrounding landscape.  We walked through all our speculations and contingency plans, talking about all this weird shit had a way of making me feel better and worse at the same time.  We turned on the car just to get some radio but creepy shit started coming through the static.  I think Loudon accidentally turned on his headlights for a second because before he killed them I could swear I saw young woman in white just out of the range of the highbeams.

This is where Kairos’s Catholic background came in handy.  That vault coffin looking thing sticking out of the ground near the church was a reliquary, when a church was christened and blessed its foundation or premises usually had a relic.  A relic was something associated with a saint, even if it was derived through transferring the holy energy via touch.  Sometimes these included a lock of hair or bit of bone.  There seemed like a strong possibility that Prodigy would take a long while to find us, maybe dawn, and the safety of the car was an illusion.  So we decided to try to find something useful to ward off evil from the Church.  It beat sitting in the car waiting for one to pop into the back seat like the girl from the Ring or something.

We proceeded as a group back down the road to the church.  When we went through the front door again I kept seeing the half imaged form of Father Janssen.  We managed to pry the reliquary open.  Turns out that when the town was cursed some of the congregation tried to dig up the reliquary and bail with all the holy stuff but must have taken off hastily before succeeding.  In the vault was a wrapped bit of lily white linen with a tiny brown finger bone.   In the half-collapsed lower level we helped each down and also found a German bible (which I keep to this day in the library), a part of a rosary.  These small trinkets combined with the Sheriff’s Bible with no cover made four potential holy items.  But how would we know if it would affect these apparitions?  I had read that sometimes it was the faith that powered these weapons rather than the items themselves.  I think part of me still felt like all this was our imaginations gone wild into a form of mass hysteria but I was slowly coming out of the fugue in realization that we were not messing around here.  I would have rather had a gun than a bible at that point, the coyote bites were real enough and hurt like a mother.”  Casstiel rolls down his left sleeve and shows a scar on the inside of his left forearm and then rolls up one leg of his jeans on the right ride to show a tight mesh of white scars along the right calf.  “See?”

“Kairos almost broke his neck when, while climbing back up the slick stone floor of the collapsed church the Reverend appeared.  He slowly became opaque a few feet from me and I was struck dumb with the sight of the ghost.  Tall a thin like Ichabod Crane he had this one polio-stricken arm (like the guys hand from Scary Movie 2, sorry I try to joke about stuff that scares me).  They didn’t have the cure back then you know?  His face was pulled into a tight rictus and he began shrieking what I could only parse as religious verse about fire and brimstone.  I felt a tingle on the book I held in my hands.  I couldn’t read German, what are you supposed to do with a blessed relic anyway?  Without thinking I fucking hit him with the book as hard as I could.  It flared up in a flash of phosphorous and the priest discorporated like a popped flaming balloon (creepy white eyes and all).”

That’s when I saw Loudon pointing that corroded 5-shot revolver at where the priest had been, and I felt cold seeing the Sheriff’s features overlain for the shortest flash over his own.  Maybe he drove the priest off with the help of the Sheriff.  I was starting to feel like we were fleshy play actors for these spooks.  He checked up the road and saw the sweep of headlights. Prodigy had come in record time.

We ran up to the car hollering in terror and relief, glancing behind us to see if we were being chased by ghosts.  We had nearly reached the Thunderbird when shit got deadly.  John was leaning on his open driver’s side door and making some arrogant remark about how awesome he was.  And man the guy definitely got props for this, I had never been so happy to see the gapped grin.  Just then came a sound of a bug zipping by, a bit of displaced air over the hood of the card.  Then the boom followed it, the sound of a rifle shot.  We were getting shot at!  All these ghosts around and it had been a man who slashed our tires, the same guy who was sniping at us now.  John ducked behind his engine block and started rooting around to get his trunk (where the guns were) open.  Luckily he was on the far side of the shots.  Sounded like he was far off whoever it was.  Loudon and Kairos made it to the car on the wrong side.  Loudon jumped over the trunk (closing it again) and Kairos ninja’d into back somehow without opening the door (jumped through the window like a Mexican jumping bean).  I and Nergal weren’t there yet and dove into the slight ditch on the far side of the street opposite the shots.

When I say slight I mean like the road maybe gave us about a foot of wiggle room.  We had to low crawl the rest of the way.  John was trying to get into the trunk without getting his head blown off and it wasn’t going well.  We should have cut the lights.  In retrospect we didn’t want to plunge ourselves into total darkness or resort to handheld flashlights which would be like putting giant bull’s eyes into our hands.  When we caught up to Donnie Kruckenberg all nice close and personal like we discovered that he hadn’t had any cool night vision goggles like Grampa Schwindt, he had simply been taking pot-shots at our flashlight beams we had been using all over the center of Krem.

My heart was thudding in my chest so hard it hurt; I was going to be suffering from adrenal fatigue after this.  Little did we at the time that I only had one kidney, and therefore one adrenal gland, I can’t help but remain calmer than others in any situation.  The gland was working fine by itself though.  It is nerve wracking trying to peek out into the darkness and not knowing whether or not you’re about to catch a 30 odd Six round to the eyeball.  I remember sweating and panting into the grass.

Prodigy did manage to get the deer rifle, even spotted a muzzle flash and through some back.  That allowed Nergal to throw down some suppressing fire.  I just held up my bible lamely to try to block the top of my head from rising above the ditch level.

The shooting stopped as soon as we started firing back.  Donnie hadn’t been counting on that.  Chances are he only took seven shots, the max you can get in one of those 30-30s he was using.  But it felt like a firefight.  Mage Armor would have been swell.