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

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

We waited a subjectively long time crouched behind our two cars and whispered Prodigy up to present events.  Then Prodigy’s car died.  We stopped caring about the shooter because of our outrage.  We thought it was the ghosts killing the engine, frying the celluloid like in War of the Worlds.  I used to watch too many movies.   No it turned out that the old Thunderbird had caught a couple bullets to the engine um hoses or whatever (I’m not a mechanic) and was leaking fluids all over the ground.  Makes sense now, guy was shooting at the lights.

Together about all we came up with was to back track up the road without any light, slowly feeling our way around in the dark till we could get back on the main gravel road and out of ghostville.  That was fun… guns and ghosts and add some pitch darkness and your ready to have a mental breakdown.  We managed, we almost ran into the barbed wire fence on the way out.  The moon came out, Luna was being kind to us I guess.  Things were going well and then we realized Loudon was gone.  Well not gone precisely but way off to the side and heading away from us like he owned the place.  We didn’t want to start calling after him for fear of giving away our position.  So what choice did we have to follow?

Took us over a mile to catch up to him and then he wouldn’t stop.  He was being compelled by the Sheriff and he plunged into the Babyshead Mine.  We went after him, ready to use force when some other ghost, the town would be my guess now, pushed Prodigy.  Prodigy and Loudon started fighting like they were going to kill each other with their bare hands.  Prodigy took him to the ground where he was strongest but Loudon was a lean and slippery son of a bitch.  This turned into a dog-pile just inside the first bend of the mine as we tried to wrestle them off each other, our flashlights left streaking light across the passage and our struggling shadows dancing on the wall.

Someone kicked one of our lights off to the side as tempers cooled and as a result we found a shallow grave of a girl.  Alma Kruckenberg would be our guess, we hadn’t seen her buried in the graveyard and when they lynched her they must have dumped her in here.  She was all bones and dried beetles and a straggle of black hair.  But she wasn’t a priority right now.  If we got out of the mine without getting pushed down a shaft by her ghost we could always come back during the light of day and give her a proper burial.  Didn’t that help put ghosts at rest?

As we worked our way back out of the Babyshead mine we noticed some shuffling and falling dirt from the top lip of the cave.  It seems that our human sniper was staging an ambush.   He had taken up a position alongside the baby head shaped rock above the mine, the same stone that gave it its creepy-ass name.

With very little coordination above the gentlest whisper we came up with our first tactic and executed it.  First time the Horsemen were officially on the clock.  We approached the mouth of the cave and began talking loudly, trying to sound confident and perhaps intimidating.  I tried to sound like the deeper baritone of my father.  We took off from the lip at a sprint, leaving only Nergal behind.  At the same time we chucked our flashlights out into the darkness in opposite directions as far as we could.  Donnie started shooting blinding and we dove for cover around the larger rocks and shooting back.  We were very lucky that no one got shot, especially Creepy.

Creepy in his act of stealthy stealthy creepitude that is his namesake hung back and then climbed silently up around the cave mouth.  How he did it without rustling the gravel and rocks around the sides of the hill were beyond me.  He dived on the man and struggled for control of the weapon.  Donnie broke away but kept his gun, swiveling it around at us as we closed in to help our friend.

The rifle shot was deafening, and I frozen in stark terror that one of my friends had a hole in them.  But the only one who was bleeding was Donnie.  I recovered my flashlight, no gun after all, and trained it onto his dirty white wife-beater.  Prodigy had clipped him with the shotgun, carefully aimed to avoid Nergal (still way too risky for my liking, then again Prodigy was always kinda overconfident.

But Nergal had already delivered the coup de grace when he saw there was no other choice.  Stabbed him in the liver with his knife.  Donnie got to rant with manic intensity about his calling being to protect the town and keep people from snooping around.  The guy was clearly haunted, nightmares calling him back here again and again.  He was the Sheriff’s blood after all, blood calls to blood no matter how cold it gets.

We tried to save him but he kept trying to bash us with a rock or kick at us when we tried to apply pressure to the wound.  He didn’t make it and maybe that was the peace we could give him.  Really fucked up that our first hunt we killed a mostly innocent-ish man.  That is why I don’t count it as our first hunt, that was SpearFinger… maybe the run in with Ghosts at my dad’s mansion in the Black Hills haunted by James Magnus but only me, John, and two of my college friends (Kaity and Louis Bennett) were there.  And mostly we just escaped that one.

We talked about it; this whole business would be too hard to explain.  We dragged him into the mine and dropped him into a shaft.  Can’t say I was proud of this.  We also collected up Alma’s remains in one of our spring jackets.  The mine entrance collapsed with some help, that fucking babyhead boulder just needed five people pushing on it at once.

A little ways back on the road we found Donnie’s shitty red truck.  Couple more guns, id, etc.  You could see that he had spent a lot of time camped out near Krem, keeping people out or keeping the dead from escaping.  Ironically we were sort of working for the Sheriff just like Donnie, trying to right things a little.  For Donnie something must have gotten lost in ghostly translation, we were intruders threatening to build the town back up to its former glory.  Helping the Sheriff with Alma, the reverend, and with himself was something we decided to do after reading his journal and talking it over as our nerves began to settle.

No more manifestations out this far, maybe too far from Krem proper.  We decided to go right back through.  As Hell’s Bells began tolling and the reddish light of dawn could be imaged on the horizon we arrived back at Krem to try to something.  We buried Alma near the other Kruckenberg plot in the graveyard.  No time for six foot deep but there were tools in the back of Donnie’s rusted out truck.  We said all the prayers and verses we could remember and blessed her with the bible and the finger bone.  I thought I felt something maybe.  Jittery and exhausted mostly.

Finally a glimmer of inspiration.  Part of this so called curse could have been caused by unfinished business (like the live-action Casper movie).  When Reverend Janssen was buried outside of hallowed ground it could have caused him to come back, or for the curse of the town to fester.  Same with the other option, Alma being lynched as a witch or demon and being buried in the mine that no longer produced coal.  So we also blessed and did our best to sanctify the grave of Reverend Heio Janssen.  We also went back and set the Sheriff’s 5-shot on the Kruckenberg family plot stone.

As we drove away in our stolen truck the sun rose and in the rear-view I could see the outline of the Sheriff vanishing into thin air next to the gun and headstone.  Without magic you never really know if you succeed and sometimes magic doesn’t give you the answers you seek either.  We left there feeling somehow successful even know we didn’t know if we got rid of a single ghost, just killed a man and buried him in a mineshaft.  It felt right somehow, not what happened to Donnie, what we did to try to break the curse.

We ditched the truck in the lake and snuck back into the trailer, crawled into the sleeping bags in the living room in time for the grandparents to get up and start making coffee.  The boys split and I took a shower, checked my bandages.  I still don’t know if my grandparents noticed anything suspicious about my birthday that year.

The following day was logistics, I took my car and snuck over to the clinic in Beulah.  On the way I called my mom and told her I had been bitten by a mouse at the house and was stopping in to get checked out just in case.  That made a pretty good cover and explained paperwork.  John had appeared at the lake over night but that was his way.  The boys car pooled their remaining car to town and spent the better part of the day getting their cars back…”

I finish my drink, and look at everyone as if I had been in a daze, gauging responses.