Nightmare (37 page)

It was a quiet night until about two.

Jordin and I had returned to the sniper's lookout at the top of
Devil's Den and were sitting inside the small natural rock alcove
where the sniper often appeared. Our equipment had functioned
flawlessly all night, but suddenly everything went dark. Every
camera, recorder, the thermal imager, even our flashlights. We
sat in the near pitch-black-the only light coming from the dim
haze of the moon behind a gray cloud-and said not a word,
knowing that something big had to be up.

"Look!" whispered Jordin.

I could barely see in the dark that she was pointing out over
the plain toward Little Round Top, and in the trees off to the
side of the large monument there, a series of tiny lights blinked.
They were scattershot within a specific twenty-foot area of the
woods, flickering to life like a group of fireflies, and then the
whole forest went dark again.

After only a second, a sound traversed the distance to reach
our ears. It was the sound of muffled musket fire, and its rhythm
matched perfectly the random lights we'd just seen blinking.

"Oh man!" I whispered, my heart speeding up. "I think it's
the regiment!"

"The what?"

"The phantom regiment. It's one of the most famous ghost
sightings in Gettysburg. It's a regiment of Civil War soldiers,
dressed in dirty period-perfect uniforms, marching in formation
through the fields. They disappear almost as soon as they're spotted. It's a residual apparition, but one of the most impressive,
because there are like a dozen of these soldiers and they're always seen marching together. I've heard a few stories that sometimes
they break formation and engage in a battle out on the fields,
but I never thought it was true!"

Jordin was grinning. I couldn't see it, but I could hear it. "And
what do you think now?"

'
"I-'

I stopped when we heard a loud clamor. Small bits of metal
brushing up against metal, and it was getting closer.

We stood and looked down into the valley below, certain the
sound was coming from there. How I wished our equipment's
batteries hadn't drained!

As we watched and listened, we never saw a thing, but we
heard plenty. The heavy, perfectly timed clomping of boots
marching in step. The clanging sound we'd heard earlier, which
we figured could be equipment dangling from soldiers' belts. We
even felt the stirring of a freezing-cold wind as the regiment-if
that's what it was-marched past us, right down the middle of
the valley below.

From the sounds of it, I had to guess that there were more
than a dozen of them. It sounded like an entire battalion was
parading right past us, and I could almost see them in my mind,
mud-stained uniforms, rifles set against their shoulders, grim
faces thinking of some battle to come. I smelled gunpowder wafting through the air.

There were never any voices, no orders called out into the
night by an unseen commander. They just marched.

The almost total darkness and the chill of the air made it
too dangerous for us to climb down the hill to chase after them,
but I was sorely tempted to try it anyway. Even though the night
kept us from seeing them, we slowly followed their approximate location as they moved, rounding the valley and following a trailwhich was now a paved road-off to our right.

As the sounds of the disturbance were fading from our ears,
I thought I caught a quick glimpse of the rear of the group, their
dark backpacks shifting back and forth as they trudged.

I could barely see the enormous whites of Jordin's eyes as
she turned slowly to face me, unblinking, but even in the dark
it was easy to guess the look of anticipation and excitement on
her face.

Our third and final night was spent out among the battlefields. I took Jordin to the little-known Triangular Field, which is
very active with paranormal activity but hard to find, because it's
rarely on any maps. We smelled rotting flesh there, and thought
we saw a campfire a few hundred yards away, but when we went
to investigate it, it'd vanished.

I'd decided by this point that it was true Jordin really was
a magnet for paranormal activity. There was no other explanation. I'd never seen so much activity on a single trip as I had this
week.

Around one a.m. we were wandering to the southwest of
the main battlefield, and we made our way to the famous Sachs
Bridge, a very historic and very haunted covered bridge that's
open to foot traffic only.

As we walked, Jordin spotted something and ran without
warning toward the small pond beneath the bridge.

"What?!" I shouted, running after her.

"I saw something! In the water!" she shouted back, not slowing down.

When she reached the pond, I was shocked to see her ditch
all of her equipment on the shore and dive straight in.

`Jordin!" I screamed.

I arrived at the edge of the pond and shined my flashlight
into its dark, murky waters. There was no sign of her.

A full minute went by without so much as a ripple in the
water, and then suddenly her head popped up out of the water
for a fraction of a second. Just long enough for her to take a
gasping breath and scream, "Help me!" Then she dunked back
down and vanished again. I couldn't reach her-she was at least
ten feet out beyond the edge of the water.

Knowing what I had to do, I quickly shed my electronic equipment, muttered something horrible under my breath aboutJor-
din's gene pool, and crossed myself. Then I dove.

The chilly waters of the pond were fierce and unwelcome,
but I pushed the sensations aside.

I found her quickly-the pond wasn't all that big-and yet she
was pulling away from me, deeper, like something was dragging
her. She stretched out her arms in my direction, but I couldn't
reach her. I kicked with all my might against the water, giving
chase as she slid away from me, and finally I got close enough
to grab her hand. I pulled toward the surface but found that she
was surprisingly heavy. I wondered if her leg had gotten caught
on a branch or something.

We'd drifted closer to the bridge while underwater, and when
we crawled out of the pond, we were at the mouth of the old
wooden landmark.

Sopping wet, Jordin got to her feet and turned back to the
edge of the pond, searching desperately for something I couldn't
see.

"If you jump back in there, I'm not helping you again!" I
warned her, furious.

"I'm not going back in!" she replied.

"What were you doing? And why would you dive in when
you're obviously such a terrible swimmer?"

"I'm a fantastic swimmer, Maia," she retorted angrily. "Something had a grip on my leg! It was pulling me under!"

I frowned, not liking the sound of that. "Then what made
you dive in, in the first place?"

Jordin looked back at the water again, searching its calm,
smooth surface. "I saw a person!" she said. "Or maybe a body!
It was floating on the water."

"You almost drowned because you were looking for a body
you think you saw floating on the water?" I cried.

She spun and glared at me. "I don't think I saw it, I know I
saw it. It was there! I just wanted to touch it-"

"Why?!" I screamed. "Why are you willing to risk your life
for this?"

She looked at me with a mixture of hesitation, fear, and defiance. "I told you, my parents-"

"NO!! Don't give me that again!" I shouted. "There's more to
this, and you know it! For crying out loud, just tell me, Jordin!"

"You won't believe me!" she shouted back.

"If anyone in this world is prepared to believe you, it's me.
Did you ever think of that?"

"My family is cursed," she blurted out, tears spilling out of
her eyes.

I was sure I'd heard her wrong.

I turned her loose and took a step back as she took a long,
steadying breath.

"A few years ago, an uncle of mine told me that the women in
my family were cursed a long while back by some kind of Haitian
witch doctor. My great-great-grandparents lived there as missionaries, and my great-great-grandmother did something to offend
a local tribe. I don't know what. So a priest placed a curse on her,
that every female descendant she had would die either right after
she got married or after the birth of a child, so they would never
know the fulfillment of what it truly is to be a woman."

She'd gone off the deep end. If that was seriously what all
of this was about, then Jordin was certifiable. I couldn't help
feeling a hint of amusement that if the two of us were at a party,
suddenly I wouldn't be the one that everybody pointed at and
whispered about.

Jordin spotted my lopsided smile before I could conceal it.
"Go ahead and laugh. I didn't want to believe it at first, either.
But it's real!"

"Jordin," I said, trying to be rational without making her
sound as crazy as she obviously was, "I've never heard of a real case
where anybody has been cursed to die. There have been claims,
but proof has never-"

"I know it's true!" she replied, almost shouting now, and trembling with emotion. "After he told me, my uncle gave me a box
of old records. Newspaper clippings, handwritten love letters,
birth and death certificates. A complete record of every one of
my female ancestors going back to my great-great-grandmothermy mother, grandmother, and four other women in my family
between them. All of them died at unusually young ages, all within
a few years of getting married or giving birth. And all under very
odd circumstances."

Okay, I was a little intrigued now. "Odd, how?"

"Freak accidents, like the way my parents died."

Jordin's parents had been gruesomely killed by a runaway
train engine that jumped the tracks and slammed into the back
of their limousine.

"You know how my parents' deaths were all over the TV and
stuff?" she went on. "It was the same with the rest. Mostly newspaper articles. I saw them all. It was one horrific, outlandish
death after another. Being attacked by a wolf up north. A house
catching fire and burning down because a tiny meteor hit its
gas line. Getting washed into a sewer drain during a flood and
drowning in sewage."

I didn't want to hear any more. "Okay, I get it...."

"These deaths were real. They happened-you can look them
up at the library to confirm, and I have. Not one of them lived
past the age of twenty-seven, Maia. Not one."

I couldn't think of anything to say.

"You may think it's crazy, but I want to marry Derek and live
a long, happy life with him. I want to have children with him.
And I don't want any of the crazy things that have happened to
my family members to happen to me. Or to him because he's near
me. Or to any of our children!"

"Okay, okay," I said softly, resigning with my hands up. "I
understand. I get it. What I don't get is how your obsession with
ghosts is going to help you undo this supposed curse."

Jordin let out another long, heavy breath. "My uncle found
a diary that belonged to my grandmother. It was the reason he
came to me about all this in the first place. He said that in her
diary, my grandmother had written not long before her death
that she found a way to remove the curse. A Native American
shaman told her that a curse is like a physical, tangible mark on the soul. And the only way to remove it is to rip the curse from
the soul."

My ears were burning as I stared Jordin down. This story of
hers explained every bit of her motivations and behavior, but it
was preposterous.

"This is what you've been after all this time? You've been trying to find a way to physically touch your own soul? Jordin, it's
madness."

"I know," she moaned. "I just thought ... if I could catch an
apparition somehow... maybe I could use it. It's part of the spirit
world, where souls live, right?"

I shook my head in dismissal. "Ghosts are intangible, Jordin,
you can't use-"

I stopped talking as we heard heavy, clomping footsteps echoing off the wooden planks of Sachs Bridge.

A dark figure walked into view at the far end. It stood there as
we watched, blinking open a pair of glowing red eyes. It watched
us silently.

A searing pain struck my chest and I clutched it, sinking to
my knees.

"Maia!" Jordin shrieked, ignoring our intruder for the
moment. "What's wrong?"

"My ... heart. . ." I gasped, finding it hard to breathe the
suddenly freezing air and even harder to speak. I thought of the
Valium. "Pills ... in my bag..."

But Jordin couldn't understand my mumblings. "Hold on!
I'll call 9-1-1!" she cried, panicking at the sight of me pale and
weak and in pain.

I could see past her shoulder down the tunnel of the covered bridge, and what I saw made my heart beat even heavier. "Jordin!"
I hissed, raising a weakened arm to point behind her.

She turned and saw what I saw. The shadow figure was
moving.

It was striding or gliding-I couldn't tell which-in our direction, right down the center of the bridge. As it walked, it passed
into the ambient moonlight shining through the slats in the
bridge walls, and we both gasped as we caught glimpses of it in
the dim light. There, it was no longer a shadow person. It looked
like a Confederate soldier, its rifle raised and pointed at us, and
it had dark black circles around its eyes. Yet it wasn't fully solid;
we could partially see through it.