The Groundskeeper: Fen Dead Ch#11

For my Paid Subscribers

As I’m writing the middle of the story, I need to ramp up the tension and uncertainty, while keeping the cozy feel you all expect from this series. It’s a tightrope to walk! Hopefully I’m managing.

Mock Orange for Recollection

The next morning, armed with her new knowledge and an umbrella because the sky was slowly leaking rain in a thick drizzle that threatened to ripen into full rain, Chloe walked across to the library door. She was prepared to spend the day curled up in an armchair with her books, after her morning classes with Trunk. Today was the day she’d finally hear the rest of the ghost river story. She’d thought that the other day, too, and somehow it hadn’t happened then but now, now was the best kind of day to be indoors with a roof over her head and some comfortably distant spooky stories that had no bearing on the puzzle she’d been given to solve.

Chloe decided, as she unlocked the door and let herself into the house, that she really wanted a cozy day with no worries. She wasn’t going to get one, she knew, but it would be nice. The house welcomed her with its familiar quiet steadiness, the kind of place that had seen centuries of worries and still stood patient and warm.

The library was warm and dry, with a freshly laid fire cracking in the fireplace. Chloe stowed her umbrella, put her mug on her desk along with her bag, then wandered over to the fire. The warmth was welcome. She was avoiding her duties, namely checking emails and cracking the books to study. She gave herself a minute to stare at the little flickering flames, instead, trying not to think about much of anything at all. The fire popped softly, releasing the clean, resinous scent of seasoned wood. For a brief moment the library felt like a sanctuary, safe from silent ghosts and theatrical murders and everything else pressing at the edges of her mind.

That was a failure. The moment you try not to think about something, it’s all you can think about. Memories of the fen kept rising anyway, the glistening sundew, the dogbane pods trembling in the breeze, the unnerving stillness of the ghost standing in the mud. The conversation with Eloise the night before, and the quiet drive home with a visibly fatter Padraig who’d murmured something about a carb coma before slumping into his seatbelt and starting to snore... that had given Chloe time to think. She’d gotten into her apartment late, had a cup of chamomile tea, and eventually had fallen asleep.

She took a deep breath, smelling the wood smoke and fruit, and... Something caught her attention. Chloe turned around. Della was just putting a tray on the table. The scent of warm oatmeal and fresh berries drifted up, a small, deliberate kindness that never failed to make Chloe feel looked after in a way she hadn’t realized she needed.

“Good morning,” Chloe greeted her.

Della dipped a little curtsey in acknowledgement, then lifted her little silver-bound notepad. Chloe walked towards her and accepted the note Della handed her. The skeleton housekeeper must have written it before she brought breakfast into the library.

Cooking lesson today, come to the kitchen at eleven. Chloe read aloud, then looked up smiling.

“Yes, ma’am!”

Della’s small curtsey carried quiet approval. Chloe had come to treasure these tiny rituals, the skeleton’s elegant way of saying she was doing well. Della nodded, and then smoothly left the room. Chloe lifted the cover from the plate and discovered a steaming bowl of oatmeal. Smaller containers held cream, brown sugar, nuts, and berries. Tea, of course, and a perfect little egg in its own fancy cup for the protein. Breakfast finished, Chloe went to wash her hands and returned to find the tray gone and the table ready for her research.

Chloe looked at the time, decided that she had enough to make a start before she needed to report to Trunk for the next installment in his story of the ghost river, and opened the book recommended on spirit movement - or lack thereof - after death to the third chapter.

Her alarm chimed as she was finishing it. Chloe closed the book with reluctant care, the pages whispering like dry leaves. She was beginning to understand why Trunk loved these old volumes so much; they held memories the land itself had forgotten.

Chloe left the book on the table, a bookmark tucked between the pages she had been working on, and headed downstairs.

“Good morning!” Trunk greeted her as she stepped into his domain. “I remembered something to tell you!”

“Good morning to you too,” Chloe crossed the room towards the comfy couch. “What is it?”

“They did a dye test!” Trunk sounded so excited, but the words made no sense at all to Chloe.Trunk’s excitement was palpable, his mossy brows lifted in anticipation. The big troll rarely got this animated unless something genuinely fascinated him.

“What?” She scrunched up her face. “Testing how to die?”

He chuckled. “No, no, dye as in color. They injected dye into the ghost river and tracked it. That’s how they know where it goes.”

Chloe blinked. “It’s underground... how?”

Chloe leaned forward on the couch, curiosity cutting through the morning fog in her mind. The idea of tracing an invisible, ancient river felt like the kind of puzzle that could unlock everything else.

Trunk shrugged. “I dunno. It’s been forty, fifty years ago now?”

Chloe leaned back in the couch cushions and looked up at the old black beams of the house above them. “Well, I needed to go see my friend Mark at the library just to check in, this gives me an excuse.” She sat up straight. “What do you remember about the test?”

“Well, it’s still ongoing.” Trunk rubbed the back of his neck, bowing his head. “And there’s not going to be anything in newspapers about it.”

“Trunk, what are you not telling me?” Chloe asked, getting up and coming to where he was standing by the wall.

She searched his craggy face, the warm glint of quartz in his eyes. Trunk had become one of her most trusted teachers, but she was learning that even he held some stories close until the time was right. Even he didn’t get all the details right, as she’d learned from Eloise about the Great Black Swamp.

“Let me finish my story?” He looked down at her. “Then I’ll try to explain what I know and maybe you can’t use it.”

Chloe tried to parse this and shook her head, giving up. “I’m looking forward to the rest of your story.”

Chloe settled back into the couch with the throw across her lap, the familiar basement coolness settling around her like an old friend. Whatever Trunk was about to tell her, she had the distinct feeling it would change how she looked at the fen case.

She gave him an encouraging nod. “I’m ready when you are. Tell me the rest of the ghost river story.”

Trunk rumbled with quiet satisfaction and began, his voice filling the vaulted space like distant thunder rolling over ancient hills.

“The locals, they decided the bridge was haunted, but not one of them took that seriously. Spooky stories are for children.” Trunk’s deep voice carried the weight of someone who had lived long enough to watch those stories shift from entertainment to something far more serious.

Chloe nodded. Until she’d come to the cemetery and started to meet ghosts, she’d thought the same thing.

Trunk turned to the wall and tapped a yellowing newspaper clipping he’d put up there, then traced his finger along a thread to another. “The mist, no one connected to an apparition. Except me, and even that,” he shook his head, and bowed his shoulders inward, making himself a little smaller. “I did not see at once.” Trunk’s massive shoulders curved inward, making the big troll look smaller and older for a moment. Chloe felt a pang. She grieved when her friends carried guilt that didn’t belong to them.

“Why would you?” Choe hated seeing her friend sad. “Fog happens, and you were low, under a bridge, that’s where fog starts, right?”

“The differential between temperatures...” Trunk started, raising a finger, then he stopped himself from slipping into full lecture mode and smiled at her. “Yes, the mists on the marshy low area are normal. This was not normal, but I was perhaps too close to see just how thick it was.”

“You were in it.” Chloe could imagine the scene in her head. “Under the bridge?” She could picture it too easily: Trunk tucked beneath the concrete, surrounded by the normal evening damp and the low-hanging mists that always gathered in low places.

“Right where it started. Well, I thought it started there at the time.”

Chloe shook her head. “Don’t jump around in the timeline! It’s too confusing.”

He grinned. “I couldn’t see my hand in front of my face,” Trunk held up his hand only a foot or two away from his nose, and crossed his eyes.

Chloe laughed at his expression.

“It wasn’t until I heard the crunch and crash that I knew something bad happened.” He lost the silly smile. “Could smell the fire.”

Chloe got up and walked over to the big troll, who let her lean up against him. “It was a bad accident.” The memory still seemed to pain him. Chloe leaned closer, offering silent solidarity the way she would with any friend recounting an old wound.

“Wasn’t an accident.” The troll patted her shoulder very gently. “Happened again, a few weeks later. Thick mist, rose up in a hurry, flowed over the road, no drivers had a chance to slow down.” Trunk’s finger traced another yellowed clipping, the paper brittle under his mossy touch. The wall of stories felt heavier now, layered with real loss instead of distant history.

“What did you do?” Chloe asked, looking up at him. He was pointing at articles clipped, yellow, pinned almost on top of one another. He moved to a letter, written in rough blocky print.

“Asked for help. No one at Belleview then, no one within walking distance I could call on and talk to. Wrote two letters. One to my family and one to the Brotherhood, mailed them and waited. Three more crashes while I sat there wondering where the mist was coming from.”

“You couldn’t see the ghosts?” Chloe asked. She had wondered before if the troll had that special gift.

“Not sure there were ghosts.” She felt him shrug. “Shapes in the mist, at least that’s what the people wrote in the paper.” He pointed at a clipping that included an artist’s conception of a gaping maw in the white fog. “Thing is, pareidolia means folks see faces when they aren’t really there.”

“If not ghosts, then...?” Chloe straightened up and peered at the grainy black and white image. “That does look like a face, but it’s not a photo. So it made people think this is what someone saw, even when it’s not even close, couldn’t be.” Chloe studied the artist’s dramatic rendering. The gaping maw in the fog looked theatrical, almost comical in black and white, but she knew how fear could twist ordinary things into something monstrous.

“Right,” Trunk nodded, and tapped the next clipping. “The tabloids picked it up. The ghost hunters started showing up.” Trunk’s gravelly chuckle held little humor. “They always do. Humans love a scary story, especially if they can sell papers with it.”

“Oh, boy.” Chloe knew what Mr. Crour’s opinion of those types was. He’d been icily polite about it, where she was afraid she’d have been very sarcastic. “You should hear what Mark had to say about them.”

Trunk chuckled. “I may have to see if I can visit sometime, but you will have to translate. Unlike you, I cannot speak with the dead.”

Chloe noted that this didn’t answer her unspoken question about seeing ghosts.

Trunk went on. “The answer from my family was to suggest I contact the Brotherhood. The answer came about the same time I had a visitor.”

“Mr. Crour.” Chloe looked up from the wall in front of her, and saw Trunk smiling and nodding. The name landed with quiet weight in the basement. Chloe felt the pieces of the morning shift: the dye test, the mist, the anchored ghost in the fen. Everything seemed to be reaching backward and forward at once, connected by invisible threads she was only beginning to see.

“You remembered that he came here about that time.”

The basement’s cool air felt heavier now, as though the old stones themselves were leaning in to listen.

Chloe nodded. “And there was a terrible pile-up of cars in the fog.”

They had covered this early into her education about the history of Belleview and it’s caretakers, who had been mostly but not all from the Brotherhood. Speakers for the dead, and it turned out, to them as well.

“The mist had been spreading.” Trunk said, laying his mossy fingertip on a cluster of yarn knotted to a single line, then spreading out like the seedhead of a dandelion. he wall of clippings and yarn had never felt so alive or like such a warning.

“I did not see the pattern, but he did. The outbreaks were following the ghost river’s course, slowly, and they formed an arrow, if you looked at them from an unimaginable height...” He stretched out his hand to cover some of the threads, fingers pointing in all directions.

Chloe contemplated this, thinking about the rarity of airplanes during the time period he had lived through, when this was all happening. Satellites were unheard of. Now, she could pull up maps plotted from outer space at a whim to look at the relationships between the cemetery, the fen, and the ghost river. Chloe felt the hairs on her arms rise. The story was no longer comfortably distant. It was reaching forward through decades, brushing against the silent ghost in the fen and the desecrated grave in her own cemetery.

“Pointing directly at Belleview.” Trunk finished, bunching his fingertips together and tapping them on the last clipping in this yarn timeline. “And there below the cemetery the mist came that night, boiling up out of the low ground, where the marshes yet existed, where the farmers had drained fields to claim them back, leaving remnants.”

She could picture the drained fields, the stubborn pockets of marsh that refused to disappear completely. Places that remembered their old shape even after humans tried to force them into neat rows of corn and soybeans.

“This was a breach.” Chloe was trying to remember the whole lesson about the connection between rivers and the... “Wait. Padraig said something about running water keeping certain things from crossing it. And Eloise told me that a bog is still, unmoving, and preservative.”

Trunk had stopped talking and was looking down at her.

Chloe went on, her brain making some new connections from the past to the present and to her case, not just Trunk’s story. “But in this, something was traveling along the ghost river.”

The realization clicked into place with the same quiet satisfaction as finally spotting the pattern in a difficult patch of brush growing rank around gravestones. Not random. Not natural. Something deliberate moving beneath the surface.

“Yes,” Trunk confirmed. “I could not see them, but Mr. Crour could, and did.”

“Because he’s a psychopomp.” Chloe closed the loop. Chloe spoke the word with new respect. Mr. Cruor’s role had always felt abstract until moments like this, when the weight of standing between worlds became suddenly, viscerally real. “Which means it wasn’t elves.”

“Elves?” Trunk sounded confused and slightly alarmed, his voice rising.

“Padraig said the Unseelie can’t cross running water.” Chloe shrugged. “I’m not sure I believe in...”

Trunk laid a gentle hand over her mouth. Chloe could smell the moss. Trunk’s hand was warm and surprisingly gentle against her skin: moss and stone and centuries of careful watching. Chloe stayed still, letting him choose his next words.

“No, not elves.” He said. “There are those on the other side who would rejoin the living. And there are those among the living who attempt to raise the dead, or at least their spirits.”

Chloe was still processing his gentle correction. The words settled in the quiet like a dropped stone into still water. Chloe felt the ripple move through her, connecting the foolish party at the wall, the serious ritual in the fen, and whatever had happened here decades ago.

“When the mist dissipated, and the dead were banished to the far side of the river,” somehow Chloe knew he meant the liminal space the ghost river represented, not the actual physical other side, “Mr. Crour and I went looking for the source.”

Chloe leaned against Trunk’s solid side, the familiar stony coolness grounding her. The story wasn’t finished, but she could already feel its shape pressing against her current puzzle. There were two, maybe three rituals, two times, the same restless hunger to pull something back across the boundary.

“Was it the fen?” The question slipped out before she could stop it. Part of her already knew the answer, but hearing it confirmed felt like another tendril of the vine reaching higher.

Trunk shook his head. “No, but that would be interesting, would it not? We went further north than that. The Teays, the river that subsided into a ghost, drained north and west, as the glaciers receded. There are still flows, deep, slow, but they pass south, now. Towards the Ohio, unseen.” Trunk’s voice had that distant quality again, the one he used when speaking of things older than most living memory. Chloe could almost feel the weight of those ancient, redirected waters pressing beneath the present-day land.

“Along the ancient mountains.” Chloe remembered from school learning that the Appalachians were mere stubs of what they had been. Worn down like an old pencil eraser.

“Just so. The peoples who settled there brought old beliefs with them, from the lands across the sea.”

Chloe felt a tickle of something. The book she’d been reading before she’d come down to class had a connection, but it escaped her for the moment. Trunk continued on with his tale.

“We found what we were looking for closer to Columbus than Dayton.” Trunk lowered himself to sitting on the floor. Chloe moved back toward the couch, sitting on the ottoman to stay near him rather than nesting in the warm blankets. “This is before you were born, so you won’t know about it?” He looked at her and Chloe shrugged. She’d never heard anything about any of this before coming to Belleview. “There was a lot of what they call New Age going around about then. Anyway, these people, they decided they were druids. They thought they could tap into ley lines.”

Chloe blinked in surprise. “What now?”

Trunk chuckled. “Right, but what they got instead was a response from the other side. The veil is thin in places, as you’ve learned.”

Chloe knew Belleview was one of those places. The holler in Kentucky where she’d encountered a land spirit, ghosts, and a diabolical human presence was another.

“So they weren’t even trying to do it.”

“They were witless fools.” The anger in Trunk’s voice was quiet but deep, like stone grinding beneath the surface. It was rare enough to make Chloe sit up straighter, paying full attention. It was as close to angry as Chloe had ever heard Trunk get. “They called forth something they had no way to control or even understand.”

“What happened to them?” Chloe was wondering if there was a connection to her body in the fen, with the ghost tied to the deep currents there.

“You’d have to ask Mr. Crour.” Trunk replied simply. The simple statement carried layers. Chloe understood now why Trunk had been reluctant to finish this story. Some endings weren’t his to give. “I don’t know what he did. I just knew the mists stopped. The restless dead were at peace. And I came to live here.”

This felt almost anti-climactic to Chloe. She sat with the feeling for a moment, the way she might sit with a fresh planting that needed watering in to work out the voids in the soil. The story had ended neatly on the surface, but she could sense roots running deeper, forming connections with the puzzles she was attempting to piece together.

Trunk watched her quietly, his quartz eyes glinting with understanding. “Not every story gives you the full shape on the first telling,” he rumbled. “Some only show their pattern when other pieces fall into place.”

Chloe nodded slowly. The basement felt smaller now, the air thicker with possibility. She had come down here looking for answers about an old haunting. Instead, she was leaving with new questions about her own.