Random Reverie

They didn’t believe me. They never believed me. Not my parents, not my shrink, no one. Not then, not ever. But they will. Someone will. They have to.

Let me start at the beginning.

My family moved from New York City, a city full of possibility and actual things to do, down to an old cotton plantation in some rich, old town in Georgia. Why? Because my shrink told my parents I would do well with a change of scenery. I’d seen things — disturbing and frightening things like mangled, bloody bodies with arms ripped off, guts torn out and strewn about the place, eyeballs not in their sockets… I’d see these things walking around the city streets like normal people, or sitting on a bench in Central Park, or hanging from a fire escape. It all started once I hit puberty. It was as if when my body started changing, something in my mind snapped and I could see things I wasn’t able to before. I don’t know why, but I’ve learned not to question the weird things that happen to your body when your hormones start getting all out of whack. The first time I saw one of these…things I was so scared. I panicked. I screamed, my voice breaking and sounding like a mockery of the pain and horror I felt, as if I was just in one of those horror parodies and someone needed a good laugh. As soon as I told my parents what was happening, they sent me to get checked out because, of course, I just had to be losing my mind; there had to be something wrong with me. But there isn’t. It’s all real.

I was told that what I was seeing was simply a manifestation of the “sudden influx of testosterone” that’s flooding my system. That my mind was playing tricks on me because it didn’t know what to do with the extra hormones. I told the doctor that he was wrong, that this sort of thing couldn’t be cause simply by an influx of hormones — it just couldn’t. It didn’t seem normal; it didn’t seem right. I kept telling my parents, the doctors, the psychiatrists, and every other specialist I was sent to that I was fine, that what I was seeing wasn’t just in my head, that it was real. They never listened; they never believed me. “Ghosts aren’t real,” they would tell me, so therefore something just had to be wrong. But no matter what drug they doped me up with or what weird psycho-whatever therapy they tried on me (I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been hypnotized, scrutinized, poked, prodded and pricked), nothing worked. So we moved to get away from it all. Because running from a problem is, of course, always the best thing to do.

On our first day there, one of the maids, a stocky black woman with her braided hair wrapped up in a colorful scarf and a thick sort of Creole accent, told my mom she was glad someone was living here now and the children around the house would be happier.

“What do you mean?” Mom asked her, totally confused. “We only have one child and we’re not close enough to town for any of them to come play up here.”

Lula Mae smiled back at her. “Dere are children ‘ere, on de property,” she said softly, pausing momentarily. “Dey stay out by de woods. You don’t see dem much about de ‘ouse because deys ‘fraid of it.”

 That was it. She shrugged as if there was no better reason and went about her work. She wouldn’t say anything more, no matter how many times my mom asked her to. She said it was something too horrible and she didn’t want to bother Mom with it.

“You get settled first,” she told Mom. “No good scaring you off already. Your boy will do very well ‘ere. It good for him.”

I overheard my mom talking to Dad about it and decided to ask around. I found the caretaker for the whole place, this older black guy with just wisps of grey fuzz for hair named Benjamin, rocking in a chair on the porch of one of the cottages reading the paper. He told me the maid was probably talking about the stories from the plantation’s original owners. The story goes: When the plantation was first built in the 1850s, over 150 years ago, many people died. Some were from an outbreak of typhoid fever in the 1860s, most were not. 

“The owner was a cruel man,” Benjamin told me, his forehead creasing as he scowled. “He was a sadistic sort of man who would not only beat his slaves—both adults and children—within an inch of their lives for not working well enough. He would make a show out of punishing disobedience. He would rape whichever slave woman he felt like, and if she got pregnant, he would kill the baby.” He shook his head, closing his eyes as if remembering some nightmare he had many times before. “Every house has a history. There are hundreds of graves on this land. You probably walked across several just to find me.” 

Of course I didn’t believe him. I don’t think he believed the stories, either. 

And then the “visions” started happening again. Not like before, though, so I didn’t think of it then. But looking back now, the people I would see—the children, the men, the women—would all have something different about them. And I don’t mean just looks-wise, even though their clothing was a little dated; I mean, they felt different. The felt sad; angry; depressed. I just figured they were normal people having normally horrible lives. And then I saw the boy.

It was a chilly Fall morning in mid-November. We’d been having strangely warm weather for this time of year, according to the locals, with temps still in the 70s. We had just moved to this ancient plantation about a month ago, so it was all strangely warm to us. The night before there was a rainstorm, and in the morning I’d woken up to a thick fog that masked everything within a five-foot view and sucked all the warmth out of your bones. I probably shouldn’t have gone wandering, since I knew nothing about the area and couldn’t see any of it anyway, but I did. I’m a teenager; I don’t always think that far ahead.

My parents had gone back up North for a few days to oversee the packing and moving of the rest of our stuff and to do some shifting of finances or whatever. They figured I’m old enough to take care of myself now, plus the hired help that came with the house is around all the time, so everything should be fine. No “visions” or “hallucinations” (or whatever the shrink told me I was seeing before) had happened since we moved here, so it should have been—it would have been fine… Until I saw that boy.

I was sitting on the steps to the porch, playing on my phone. I didn’t want to be inside for some reason. It just didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel safe; it didn’t feel like home. It felt both too old and too new, and I didn’t belong in either time. Suddenly my head felt as foggy as it looked out the window, my chest felt too tight and I couldn’t breathe normally. I grabbed a light jacket and went outside, hoping the fresh air would help clear my head. I was out there for a few minutes, but I still couldn’t shake the static feeling that was making my hair stand on end. I tried distracting myself. I looked through some social apps on my phone, chuckling halfheartedly at the stupid pictures of nothing very important, played a couple inanely boring games… 

It got suddenly colder. The chill from the fog seemed to seep into my soul. I pulled my jacket tighter around me, hoping to ward some of the feeling off. A shiver ran down my spine. It was like I was being watched.

Out of the corner of my eye I noticed a little black boy standing just off the corner of the porch. Partially shrouded by the fog, he stared at me, and I stared back, trying to make out the details of his face. He looked muddied and poor. His clothes were old, tattered, and looked like they had never been washed; his shirt, which was covered in mud and some other darker, thicker substance, barely covered his chest, and his pants were nothing more than scraps that seemed to only cover his hips; his hair looked as if he had had his head shaved and was growing back in unruly, matted clumps… I stood up and moved a couple steps closer to see more. That’s when I noticed some of the more disturbing bits about him.

His face was bruised and bloody, lumps all over from what may have been multiple beatings and constant healing. Where one eye should have been was nothing but a hollowed out socket. His nose was unnaturally crooked. An arm hung crooked and useless at one side, fingers pointing out in all directions, cuts and more bruises discoloring his skin. I wanted to cry, to scream, to run, but I was too scared to remember how.

“Help me,” the boy said. Or did he? I don’t remember seeing his lips move, but I remember hearing him clearly. “Help me,” he said again, this time beckoning me with his good hand.

“H-help you? How do I help you?” I could feel my body and voice shaking. My fear sat in my stomach and my chest like lead, twisting my vocal cords like string in the wind. 

“Help me.”

“How?!” I would have yelled it if my voice worked right. Instead it broke like I was twelve again. “What happened to you?”

He beckoned to me again. “Follow.”

He didn’t wait to see if I actually followed him; he just turned and started walking toward the forest about thirty feet from the house. I did follow him—how could I not? He was hurt and needed help. Maybe there were others like him that needed help, too. I made sure I had my phone so I could call someone when we got to where he was leading me.

The boy stopped to look behind him, to make sure I was following. He waved at me again before walking into the woods. I walked after him. The fog seemed to thicken the further we went, as if I was in a bad horror movie. I lost sight of the boy a few times, but he would appear from behind a tree or I would catch him in the corner of my eye and follow again. We zigzagged our way through the trees and the brush for what felt like a mile. He seemed to just float over the ground, his footing sure and deliberate, as if he had been out here forever, while I was slipping in the leaves and mud and tripping over exposed roots. 

He stopped near the top of a dell and waited for me to catch up. He didn’t turn around when I reached him; he just stared into the small hollow. I looked down at him—he had to have been about a foot shorter than me—and for the first time I could see everything more clearly.

The darker spots on his clothing was blood—clotted, black and red. Through the scraps of shirt I could see where part of his ribcage had caved in, with one of the broken ribs poking out. This kid should not be alive, should not be walking, should not be breathing… But he wasn’t breathing. There was no rise and fall to his chest.

“Look,” he said, pointing down into the dell.

When I looked I saw more children, varying ages from infant to maybe ten, just like him: broken, battered, bloody and bruised. There had to be at least twenty of them, and each one looked at me, some with eyes and some with black holes where they should have eyes. Some of the children were horribly disfigured, permanent marks around their necks from the metal collars used to lead them around like dogs, scars that made their backs look like raised relief maps, rope burns around their ankles and wrists, open wounds, limbs and jaws missing, skulls caved in… All things that would never heal.

“Help us,” the ones who could talk said. “Help us, please.” Some of them started standing and walking over to me.

I ran.

I turned and ran back to the house, all my senses on overload. By the time I reached the porch again, my stomach caught up with my mind, with what I saw, and emptied itself into the rosebushes. I needed to find someone, tell them about what I saw. I ran into the house and found the caretaker in the kitchen, chatting with another black man in muddy overalls and a dirty flannel shirt. They both turned around as soon as I came through the door. Benjamin, probably noticing the state of panic I was is, put a hand up to interrupt the other man.

“Hang on, Joe, this seems important.” He came over to me and put a hand on my shoulder. “What’s wrong, boy?”

“In…the forest,” I gasped, head still reeling, heart working overtime. “I saw…kids…in the forest. Horribly beat up kids.”

He looked at the other man and they exchanged nervous glances. He guided me over to the table. “I see. Tell me more.”

Joe grabbed me a cup of water and sat down at the table as well. I took a swig and started telling them about the boy and the woods and the kids… Everything. By the end, they both looked just as creeped out as I was.

Joe looked at his father. “Do you think it has anything to do with the stories?”

Benjamin leaned back in the chair. “It’s possible. I certainly wouldn’t doubt it in the slightest.”

“Well, what can we do?” I asked, downing the rest of my water.

Help us. 

I froze. Joe and Benjamin froze too. I guessed they heard it as well. I stood up and walked out of the kitchen, heading to the front door. The two men followed me. We stopped as soon as we reached the main hall. Standing by the door was the boy.

“Help us.” His voice was more solid than when I had heard it before.

“This the boy?” Joe asked. I nodded. We watched the boy turn and walk out the door. “Then let’s follow him.”

Benjamin clapped Joe on the shoulder. “You two go. I’m too old to go trekking through the woods. We don’t need another dead body to add to the pile.”

With that, Joe and I went after the boy. He led us back to the dell, but this time there were no other kids. The boy, again, pointed down into the hollow.

“Help us.”

I looked from the boy, to where he was pointing, and back to the boy. “How? How can we help you?”

The boy didn’t answer. He just kept pointing down into the hollow. I looked at Joe, silently pleading for help. Joe looked back.

“I have an idea.” He turned and headed back in the direction of the house, returning a few minutes later with a shovel. “Show me where to help.”

The boy disappeared, reappearing a few feet away. Joe went to where he stood and started digging. Several feet down he stopped and looked up at me, eyes wide. I made my way over and peered into the hole. There was a skull and some other bones, glaringly white against the dirt. I looked at the boy. He gave a faint smile that almost wasn’t there.

“Help us,” he said again, disappearing and reappearing a few feet away. Joe again started digging, more frantically, and again found some bones. This happened over and over until he had unearthed thirteen skeletons, all varying sizes and states of completion. Joe looked up at me once he finished the thirteenth one. 

“I thought you said there were about twenty kids here?” he asked, wiping his forehead with the back of his muddy hand.

“There were. I swear there were. This can’t be all of them.” I looked to the boy, who was standing by the last grave. “Where are the rest of them?”

“Follow.” He headed off again, in the direction of the house.

When we got there, the twenty or so children I had seen in the dell were surrounding the porch. I looked over at Joe, and judging by the surprised, sad look on his face, he could see them all, too.

“There are so many of them,” he said, his eyes scanning the line of mangled children. “Some of them are so young… And they’re all so badly beaten. These have got to be the slave children from the stories.”

“I guess they’re not just stories,” I replied.

“Nope, guess not.”

We reached the porch and found the boy standing in front of the door. He didn’t say anything to us; just walked through the unopened door. Joe and I followed. We watched him go to the back of the house, then down into the basement. Once we were down there, we found him standing in a corner under where the dining room would be.

“You want me to dig here?” Joe asked. “Through the concrete floor?”

The boy stared at him, expectantly silent.

“Okay.”

Joe had me locate a sledgehammer and began smashing the floor into bits and pieces. I moved the crushed concrete with the shovel so he had more room to move. Once he had broken enough of the floor, I gave him back the shovel so he could dig. Again, a few feet down, there were bones. The boy led us to more spots in the basement, and we broke through the floor and dug more holes and found more bones, sometimes multiple skeletons to a grave. 

When Joe finished digging up the last grave, he leaned on the shovel and whistled.

“So, I count ten more here,” he said, surveying the basement, now riddled with freshly dug ditches.

“Yup,” I said, taking a breath and letting it all sink in. “That gives us twenty-three kids in all.” I shook my head. “That’s unbelievable.”

Joe huffed a laugh. “Didn’t Pops tell you the history of this place? It’s not that unbelievable.”

The boy, who had been watching us work, stepped closer. He smiled for the first time that day.

“Help us,” he said, smiling a little. “Prove we existed. Tell our story.”

And then he disappeared.

Since then, I haven’t seen him, or any of the twenty-three other children Joe and I dug up that day. It’s been two years. I’ve done research on the house and the original owner. I have names for eleven of the twenty-three children. I’ve been in touch with people from the historical society, telling them my findings and getting the stories of the children out there for people to read. Who knows? Maybe this is what I’m meant to do.