The Dead-End Road Read online

  The Dead-End Road

  An ancient evil awaits...

  A paranormal thriller

  M. R. Vilano

  The Seven Talismans - Book One

  Copyright © 2019 M.R. Vilano

  All rights reserved.

  This book is dedicated

  with love and appreciation

  to my wife Nikki, my family,

  and to all of the wonderful people

  who patiently listened

  to my endless ideas.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is entirely coincidental.

  CHAPTER 1: THE DEAD-END ROAD

  The dirt bike whizzed around the turn leaning into it, and accelerated down into the valley, weaving back and forth through the curves in the old road. “Slow down, Marc!” Brian yelled as he held on to the cargo bars with a white-knuckled grip, but Marc laughed and sped around the turns despite Brian’s pleading. Finally, Marc slowed down but cranked on the throttle now and then, jolting Brian in the rear seat, and he could hear Brian’s muffled cursing in his ear over the sound of the engine.

  The motorbike was a Suzuki DR650S dual sport that Marc bought to celebrate retiring from the military. At 38 years old, Marcus Ryan was in his prime, and it seemed strange to say he was retired. Marc had tried to get his friend Brian to take a ride on the bike once before, but Brian was afraid – and with good reason. Marc knew Brian would never ride with him again, so he had to have some fun while he could.

  Heading west out of Mount Pleasant, it was a beautiful autumn evening, with at least another hour until dusk. The colorful canopy above them was in a full display of red, orange, and yellow hues, with leaves beginning to fall. It was unusually warm for the third week of October, and it looked like it would be an Indian summer this year. Marc pulled the bike over to the side of the road and cut the engine.

  “Does any of this look familiar?” Marc said as he pulled up his helmet without taking it completely off, revealing his three-day beard. His piercing grey eyes and strong jawline were stark

  and handsome.

  “I think so; I think we’re pretty close. Take the next left about a mile ahead, and then the entrance to the graveyard should be on the right-hand side after that, but we still have a few miles to go.” Brian said as he adjusted his feet on the foot pegs. His legs were too short to sit comfortably on the back of the bike.

  “Roger that.”

  Marc kick-started the bike and sped back onto the road, attempting to follow the vague directions. Marc was able to find his way, with or without a map, to just about anywhere. His many years of experience in the military had placed him in situations much more complicated than this.

  They made their way down through the hollow, and the air suddenly became much colder. The trees closed in overhead and seemed to create a tunnel. At last, they turned left onto Deep Run Road and crossed a small bridge as the road started to ascend in the direction, they thought they needed to go.

  Brian McMillan was Marc’s childhood friend and just a few years younger. Brian’s good nature and easy-going personality were complemented by his short and portly stature. A natural comedian. Both had many adventures together in their youth and were always getting into trouble, often trying to create their own excitement in a small town that seemed so dull. Today was no different. Brian was a member of a local paranormal society called Para-Tech Research, and he had convinced Marc to accompany them on a ghost hunt on Halloween night by citing Marc’s skills as a detective, which would come in very handy. Besides, Brian wanted to help Marc readjust to normal life after returning home from the Middle East.

  The evening before, the friends enjoyed retelling scary stories that their parents had told them when they were young. Marc’s father was an excellent orator, and even though he told the same tale repeatedly, they never grew tired of it. His father set forth to tell with great detail “The Green Hairy Hand” every year, and each time it always resulted in one of the listeners becoming “the victim,” being grabbed from behind by what was described as the detached rotting claw of a corpse, and they would scream

  with terror.

  Outgrowing that story, they needed something better, something real, something that would scare them to death. Whatever they decided, it had to be extraordinary, so they talked about folklore from the area, tales that they had heard growing up, such as the Mothman Prophecies, the haunted Moundsville Penitentiary, and Old Lady Laughton’s place. Brian said that you could hear her cries from the road below the house, and occasionally, you could see a light glowing in one of the upper windows. He said that there was no power in the house, so it had to be a candle that lit the upstairs rooms, which was impossible because the house had been abandoned for decades. There was also the murder in Egypt Valley, and even an account of an old crazy hermit that lived in the woods and chased people with an ax, and a nearby haunted graveyard with a marker known as

  “The Chair.”

  Marc convinced Brian not to go to the Penitentiary or Egypt Valley because both places were too far away, and he didn’t care to visit the old ax-wielding hermit, just in case he was real. Getting chased by a madman with an ax wasn’t creepy, it was just stupid. The haunted graveyard seemed to be the obvious choice since it supposedly wasn’t that far away. Somehow the thought of spending Halloween night in a cemetery was just scary enough to fill their desire for excitement. They just needed to find it.

  The Chair was a grave marker that was rumored to have a curse attached to it, like many similar legends from around the country. The Chair was made to look like it was crafted with wooden logs, and it had granite leaves growing up from its stony base. It had a cloth tapestry draped over the back, and a scroll on the seat carved with an insidious inscription, all in bass relief. This inscription was reported to be a strange poem, although Marc didn’t recall what it said. The legend they heard stated that anyone who sat on it would have something terrible happen to them – to include death – by provoking the evil that lay dormant within it. “Seven years, seven months, and seven days,” was the time it was alleged that this would happen. Marc didn’t believe the story at all and needed to see the grave for himself to determine if it was even real. Brian insisted that it was.

  Marc suggested that they should start looking for it now so that they would be able to find it easily on Halloween night. They wanted to be sure to get there before midnight. Neither of them remembered where they first heard about the grave marker, but Brian had friends that visited it when they were in High School. Somehow Brian remembered that the Chair was located at a historical graveyard called Scotch Ridge Cemetery. This cemetery dates back to the eighteenth century, and people were buried there that had lived during the Revolutionary War.

  After traveling a few more miles on the motorbike, Marc followed Deep Run looking for a sign for the graveyard and slowed down as a few roads were just ahead. Marc pointed to one that was unmarked and gloomy, and he could see Brian nodding in his side mirror. “Hold on,” Marc yelled as he prepared to go up the

  steep hill.

  At first, they made their way up the bumpy road quickly, the bike throwing up a rooster-tail of gravel and mud behind them, but the farther they went, the more difficult and overgrown it became. Marc ducked to avoid being hit in the face by branches, and some of them hit Brian unexpectedly, slapping his helmet as he held his head down. There were brambles on the right-hand side, and a sheer drop-off to the left, with a muddy stream at the bottom. The crag was blocked with a crooked line of barbed-wire fencing, which was probably used to mark the boundary of some
one’s property - someone they hoped not to run into.

  After they had gone about a quarter of a mile, the road suddenly became a dead-end, and only a footpath lay ahead. The road and path seemed too overgrown for Marc to get through with Brian on the back, and he stopped the bike, so that they could talk. Brian tapped Marc on the shoulder and pointed to a clearing up on the hill to the right. They decided to investigate the field since it seemed the only likely place for a church and the graveyard. Everywhere else they looked was densely wooded. Marc hit the motor kill switch, and they dismounted.

  “Let’s check out that field up there,” Marc said as he hung his helmet on the bike. Brian nodded and bent down to pull up

  his socks.

  There was no clear path to the field, and the two said little as they began trudging their way up the steep embankment to the meadow by crawling through blackberry bushes and under the low-hanging branches of trees that seemed to be trying to grab at their clothes. They couldn’t help but eat a few of the ripe blackberries as they pushed ahead, and finally they squeezed through into a clearing which opened into the field they had observed from the trail below. They were soaked with sweat from the climb. Marc’s athletic conditioning made easy work of it, and only the briars slowed him down. Brian was panting and attempting to catch his breath. Marc smiled and slapped him on the shoulder.

  “You need to hit the gym bro,” Marc chuckled.

  Marc looked to his left and saw the foundation of an old building while Brian was still picking plant seeds off his shirt. “The church?” The bricks of the chimney rose above the brambles and low trees as if peering at them to see who disturbed its rest. Decayed mortar filled the cracks and was eroded in places, making it look like the crooked structure was about to topple at any moment – but defiantly remained erect.

  “Is that the church building over there?” Marc pointed.

  “It looks more like an old house to me. Do you think we’re in the right place?” Brian wondered.

  The two walked around the bushes to the old building. In front where a driveway should have been, was the rusted carcass of an old car from the 1950s that seemed to be sinking in invisible quicksand. The elements had worn the vehicle so badly that Marc couldn’t tell what make or model it was. It was apparent that no one had been there for a very long time. The small country house was clearly not a church, and there was no graveyard to be seen.

  As it grew darker, the field that seemed so nice at first now felt strangely different – somehow the atmosphere around them felt eerie as if they shouldn’t be there. It was incredibly quiet. After Marc took note of his surroundings, he saw that the sun was sinking quickly behind the hill.

  One of the paths from the dead-end road led up to the old house winding through the woods, so it made their descent much more convenient. “I really didn’t want to crawl head-first back through the thorns,” Brian said, scratching himself incessantly. “Is there something crawling on me? We’ve got to check ourselves for ticks when we get home.”

  Brian continued fidgeting uncomfortably.

  “Just some briars,” Marc said as he brushed them off his back. “Let’s go down the other trail and see if the church is

  over there.”

  After they reached the forked path, the other branch wound deeper into the woods; woods so thick they couldn’t see farther because it was becoming very dark. After they walked for about a hundred yards, a looming multi-story brick structure appeared above them; the steeple and broken cross were visible through the trees. This is where the road originally ended.

  “Woah,” Brian paused. “This is it.”

  “Yeah, it definitely looks like we found it. Let’s see if the graveyard is on the other side.”

  The two walked along the foundation towards the far side of the building. “Stop.” Marc quickly spotted a deep pit hidden by the brush and held Brian back just in time to keep him from

  falling in.

  Brian gasped, “Oh man, thanks, I almost fell in there.” Marc’s keen observation saved Brian from breaking a leg, or worse.

  “What is it?” Marc puzzled.

  “No idea. Maybe an old basement or a crypt? I heard that sometimes churches bury important people in a crypt below the main floor. I didn’t bring my flashlight,” Brian said.

  “I have mine,” Marc reached into his cargo pocket and pulled out his tactical LED flashlight.

  Peering down into the hole, the pit was far deeper than they thought, going down nearly ten or twelve feet. Rubble and debris covered the bottom of the pit, and there was water dripping along the walls creating a seeping stain down the sides. A musty smell emanated from the hole. “Brian, this is really unsafe, you need to be more careful,” Marc pointed out. “You could have been hurt badly there.” Brian was awkwardly silent, knowing Marc

  was right.

  Marc stepped towards the church building to the right and shined his light up through one of the windows, and the two craned their necks to look inside. The building seemed very dangerous; some of the upper floors had caved in and the boards were hanging down into the center of the building. Marc could see up to the top floor attic through the hole in the center, all the way up to the bell tower. The stairs along the west wall were tilted inward as if anyone attempting to climb up would slide off into the hole in the floor, which looked like a six-foot gaping mouth. On the bottom floor, a few pieces of broken pews were still fastened to the auditorium floor. Most of the windows were boarded up, making the interior extremely dark and foreboding.

  “We should save investigating this church for when we come back with the team and our equipment,” Brian suggested, “The guys are going to be excited to hear about this location.”

  “Let’s check the perimeter for the graveyard. I wish I had worn some long pants, though. I thought we were going to a normal church and gravesite, not crawling through the weeds,” Marc said, rubbing his scratched-up legs as they walked around

  the building.

  They waded across a small walled courtyard, and an open arched doorway with no gate was before them. The arch that led into the graveyard had rusted wrought-iron nubs where the gate should have been. The cemetery had a four-foot outer wall surrounding it, and an eerie statue of a woman in the center, covered in vines. The important graves were above ground, with heavy stone slabs covering each sarcophagus. Families were grouped together with small walls around the tombs. There were other in-ground traditional gravestones beyond the wall poking up through the weeds.

  Brian peered through the doorway, “Amazingly spooky. It’s really overgrown too.” Brian waded through the brush and read some of the stone lids. “This one is dated 1786. I can hardly read anything except for the dates. Look around and see if you can find the Chair. It may be outside the wall,” Brian gazed farther out.

  Marc hopped the wall and wandered around in the dark, but even with his flashlight, it was just too thick to find it. Thinking that the Chair might be farther into the woods, he started walking deeper with bushes up to his elbows. Suddenly, Marc stumbled into a two-foot-high stone in the ground and almost tripped, and in front of him was a large earthen mound. “What in the world?” “Hey check this out,” he called.

  “What is it?” Brian wondered, slowly trailing behind, following Marc’s light.

  “I don’t know. It looks like a small hill or some sort of

  mound. I thought that stone there was a gravestone, but it’s not, it could be some type of marker.”

  “You mean like a burial mound marker?” Brian said.

  The six to eight-foot mound was covered with grass and looked more like it had once been a dump site rather than a burial mound, but the ring of stones signified it had been

  something important.

  “Could be,” Marc said as he grabbed a long stick to poke through the brush. “Yeah look, another stone, it’s a small ring of stones with the mound in the middle. But I can’t see, it’s getting too dark. We best head back down before we get los
t, trying to find our way out.”

  Just then a baying dog echoed in the distance, stopping the two men in their tracks. Knowingly they looked at one another and started heading back down the trail to where they parked the motorbike. The significance of finding this dead-end road was

  no accident.

  CHAPTER 2: UNDISCLOSED LOCATION

  Dr. Antoine Levine nervously adjusted his silk tie while he anxiously waited in the lobby to be summoned to meet his client. Simon Hughes was a collector of antiquities. Dr. Levine’s Brunello Cuccinelli suit hung loosely over his thin body, the shoulders giving him a squared mechanical appearance. What he lacked in physique, he more than made up for in intellect. Dr. Levine was a weaselly man, with small round glasses and high widow’s peaks cleft into his sandy-brown hair. His inquisitive blue eyes darted around the room to discern what he could about his benefactor. He had worked for Hughes before, although the two had never met, until now.

  In his last engagement, Dr. Levine was hired to track down some rare items that were stolen from Hughes. Antoine used his knowledge to pose as a legitimate buyer, manipulating the Dark Web to outmaneuver the thief by building trust and eventually sending a significant cash down payment. “Money always gets their attention.” After the meeting with the thief was arranged, Dr. Levine traveled to the meeting and brought his henchmen to recover the items, and the thief was, well, eliminated. The doctor smiled as he died. Outsmarting the thief gave him satisfaction.

  Like Antoine, Simon Hughes was also a very secretive man, and this current task must be extremely important to invite the doctor in person. Antoine suspected that Hughes worked for a much larger organization, a group of people with a long arm and deep pockets. Antoine’s greed and malice far surpassed any moral compass he may have once had. The task was undoubtedly highly unethical, as Antoine liked to think of it. Referring to his new job this way was how he managed to rationalize it, searing his conscience in the process.