Halloween Ghost Story Contest -- 2014
Adult Winners

First Place

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Our first place Adult category winner was written by Grey Harlowe of Salem, Oregon.

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The Inheritor

by
Grey Harlowe

When Lucas MacAlastor finished his chores late in the afternoon on that chilly October day, he didn’t expect to look up to the front gate and see visitors.  He hadn’t seen a soul or even a vehicle for several weeks and didn’t expect to for several more.  Not with everything that had gone on that fall.

The man and the woman looked ordinary enough, if by ordinary one meant relatively clean, and dressed unremarkably in jeans and sweatshirts.  The man was brunette with a slightly scruffy beard, and the woman sported wavy strawberry blonde hair that gleamed in the last of the day’s sunlight.  He wasn’t sure if he should approach them or not.  They seemed healthy, but you couldn’t always tell from a distance.  He had never had great skill at identifying danger.  

At least they weren’t military, police, or wearing hazmat suits.  That had been his biggest fear since he’d been left alone on the farm—a confrontation with authorities.  He was never great at confrontation either.

Slowly, because the woman was smiling, he walked to the gate, an old and rusted metal one with a large, bolted padlock, and sized them up.  They were in their mid-twenties, only a couple of years older than Lucas himself.

“Hello,” he said.

When the first media reports had begun to circulate in August, they had said only one thing: no one knew what it was.  A virus, definitely, something affecting the respiratory system, but not the diseases anyone had feared—SARS, MERS, Ebola, enterovirus, another influenza pandemic.  This far more sinister and deadly.  It wasn’t uncommon for a person to wake up with a fever at ten a.m. and be dead by midnight.  It spread quickly enough no moniker had been attached to it before much of mainstream media went dark.  Around his hometown of Hewton, Washington, where Lucas had just relocated after college, most people had simply referred to it as “the fever,” or “that thing that’s killing everyone.”

Hewton was a smallish town, with a population of ten thousand tops, so when the first cases of Mystery Virus emerged at its community medical center, Lucas’ parents insisted he flee with them to his grandparents’ farm outside the city.  They all knew this wouldn’t necessarily save them, but staying in the city seemed equivalent to certain death.  Besides, Barb MacAlastor had said grimly, there was no point in anyone tending the family bookstore since no one would be out shopping for magazines when most were too petrified to leave their homes.

The family’s decision to leave became a moot point twelve hours after they made it.  Barbara MacAlastor fell ill the morning of September 3rd, and her husband, Alvin, in the early hours of September 4th.  They were declared dead between three and five p.m. on September 5th, by a crew of intensive care doctors so exhausted with tending to their onslaught of patients that Lucas had been unable to avoid comparing them to zombies.  

He had been forced to bury them in the backyard because the local mortuary had shut down, along with most other businesses in the area.  The process had been traumatic to say the least.  To make matters worse, there were rumors in town that the government would be stepping in soon, putting the entire country under martial law.

He felt unsafe trying to go to his grandparents’.  In caring for his parents, he had been exposed to...whatever it was.  Their self-sustaining farm felt like a in the storm, but they were in their sixties, and surely more vulnerable to the virus than he.  Although he still had no symptoms five full days after the onset of his mother’s fever, Lucas told his grandmother over the phone that he didn’t think he should come out there and risk their lives to protect his own.

“Come anyway,” she had said.

In the end, it was not the fever that did them in, but other, all too common ailments.  Immediately after Lucas arrived, his grandparents, Roana and Joseph, began showing him how to keep their farm operational.  Normally, Roana explained, the eight hands they employed as well as part time family helpers, would be handling the bulk of the labor, but most had taken off because of the virus.  So Lucas had learned as much as he could about keeping their solar panels and the farm’s well operational, how their home was heated by a wood stove at night, and the basics of caring for livestock.  Luckily, they were past the harvest season, so he would not have to deal with the work of picking and shipping his grandparents’ trademark apples.

He was starting to feel he might get the hang of rudimentary farmwork until they found his grandfather on the back porch at dawn, not breathing.  The doctor who ventured out later (much later) that evening said it had probably been a heart attack.  He also brought more bad news from town—the hospital, submerged by a deluge of the Mystery Virus, was closing its doors.  Anyone in need of medical care would have to drive to the next largest city, and risk coming in contact with sick people there.

“Try to take care of yourselves here as best you can,” was his only advice.  “You are safer here than in Hewton.”

His grandmother had died October 1st, from what Lucas thought, but wasn’t quite sure, was a stroke.  She had started to weaken during the morning milking, her speech had become slurred, her vision hazy.  She had let Lucas help her up the stairs and tuck her into her bed under a layer of quilts.

“Don’t worry, my boy,” Roana said in a faint rasp.  “You’ve done well this last month.  You’ll be fine on your own ‘till this all blows over.”

And when will that be?  he wanted to ask.

“Besides, you may have a little extra help here and there, keeping the bad luck away,” she said, in a firmer voice.  “Or at least, the bad people.”

Lucas looked desperately into one of the corners.  He could remember a vague conversation or two about this over the years.  It always make him uneasy.

“This place,” his grandmother told him, “it separates the wheat from the chaff.  Rewards the hard working man, not the grifter.  But take care, Lu—”  

Those were her last words before she died.

“I’m Sarah,” said the woman with the strawberry blonde hair.  “This is Eli.  Our car died a few miles South of here and we’re looking for help.  Maybe a place to crash.”

“Your car?” Lucas asked, surprised and now very suspicious.  Last he’d heard from town, the gas stations were closing along with everything else.

“Yeah,” Eli took over.  “I think it’s the alternator or something.  You don’t know how to fix cars do you?”

“Sorry,” said Lucas.  “I’m having enough trouble trying to keep my grandparent’s farm running.  They passed away a few weeks back, along with my folks, so it’s been hard.”

“Well, maybe we can help you out,” said Sarah, a bit too eagerly.  “I mean, if you let us stay here with you until we can get another car.”  Then, “I’m sorry about your family.  Mine had it, too, down in Oregon.”

“Are they alright?”

“My mom is.  But my dad didn’t make it, and neither did my little brother.”  At this last part, she seemed to tear up a bit, but Lucas felt the story a tad rehearsed to be genuine.

“That your way of trying to find out if we’re sick?” said Eli.  “’Cause I’m pretty sure we’d know by now if we were.”

“Right.”  said Lucas.  He considered a moment before asking,

“What kind of work could you do to help out around here?”

“I can sew,” Sarah volunteered.  “I think my cooking skills are passable.  Eli paints houses for a living, so if you have anything that needs new--”

“We really just need a place to crash,” Eli interrupted.  “Probably for tonight.”

“Okay,” Lucas agreed at last, digging a heavy key out of his pocket and undoing the gate’s padlock.  It had been a while since he had spoken to anyone else.  Aside from the half-wild barn cats there had been no one at MacAlastor Farm for company of any sort.  And he couldn’t lie:  if the couple’s song and dance involved using Sarah’s charm to seal their deals, it worked.

Since it was getting dark, Lucas decided to save any speeches he might have to make about farmwork until the morning and brought the couple into the house.  They set their back packs by the front door.  They must have kept in reasonable contact with civilization, Lucas thought, as the packs were practically new.  Maybe their story wasn’t complete b.s.

Sarah asked immediately about a shower, and Lucas pointed up the stairs.

“First door on the left.  But keep it short, I really try to conserve power at night.  In fact,” he looked back at Eli,  “I think you can help me light the oil lamps.”

While Sarah was in the bathroom, Eli and Lucas went about the tedious business of lighting the five oil lamps his grandmother had brought out after it had looked like civilization was truly ending.  After their deaths, Lucas had used no power that wasn’t solar or generated by his own efforts.

As they placed the lamps strategically to give the front room enough light, Lucas noticed Eli checking out the family photos.

“Any of these you?” he asked, pointing to a set on an end table that included his grandmother hugging a young boy.

“Uh, no,” said Lucas.  “My parents didn’t let me come out here too often after I got to high school.  Before this fall, I really hadn’t been out here since I was a kid.  And my grandparents rarely left here to see us--”

“Is this really your farm?” said Eli abruptly.  Lucas was taken aback, not just because of how hard he had worked to keep things going all alone, but because what the man was actually asking was, Is there anyone else here who could get in my way?

“It really is my farm.”  He used his grandmother’s firm voice.

“Hey, guys.”  Sarah was on the stairs behind them, her hair much more red now that it was wet.  “Are we going to try eat anytime soon?”

Lucas started a fire in the large fireplace off the kitchen, and the three of them roasted a cauldron of green beans from his grandparents’ prodigious supply of both glass and aluminum canned foods.  He also offered them some dry, stale bread he’d made himself, some chewy strips of dried pork, and apple cider.  In truth, he could have managed a better dinner, but hadn’t liked Eli’s attitude.  Or the way Eli kept looking at Sarah, suggestively.

Finally, she asked, “You don’t have any alcohol around here, do you?  I haven’t had any in a month and I could use a drink.”

“I think there might be some in the cellar,” said Lucas, rising to get it.  

Finding a jug of spiced wine, some of the herbal powders his grandmother used for insomnia and the scant contents of an old first aid kit, he made his move.  Pouring the alcohol into two large mugs and serving it to his guests, he finished the evening slowly sipping apple cider until Eli started to complain about tiredness.  Lucas and Sarah put him on the first floor couch where he promptly fell unconscious.

“So, where am I sleeping?”  Sarah asked him, almost sweetly.

“You can have one of the rooms upstairs,” Lucas said calmly.  “Not the one I’m in.”

Though mildly put off, she allowed him to guide her up the stairs to what had been his grandparents’ room.  Lucas had been sleeping in the actual guest bedroom and didn’t plan to change just to accommodate Sarah, even if she was pretty.

She wobbled a little, going through the door, and Lucas had to hold her steady to get her to the bed, where he tucked her in under the quilts.

Perhaps sensing she’d been caught, she admitted at last, “We...didn’t exactly get here by car.  We haven’t had a car for I don’t know how long.  Eli wanted me to, um, distract you tonight while he searched the place for money or stuff we could sell.”

“Really,” Lucas said dryly.

“Yeah,” she said sheepishly.  “But don’t worry, I mean, he’s not dangerous or anything.”

“I’m not worried.  There was enough kava, valerian and Benadryl in that wine to knock him out until morning.  Don’t worry,” he said, to her reproachful glare, “there was a lot less of that stuff in your glass.”

“So you’re not...mad?”

“No.  And I’m not scared of either of you.  This farm, is, well, you might say, special.”

She stared at him fuzzily.  He realized she was succumbing to the herbs as well, and might not remember this upon waking.

“The Greeks called it a genius loci--kind of like the guardian spirit of a place.  My mother told me about it when I was younger.  How my great-grandparents ran into trouble during the Depression, and held a ceremony in the fields to ask it to come here.  Then they worked hard, and their farm prospered, and they survived.”

Sarah’s eyes had widened.  “You’re kidding, right?”

“Nope.  My mom told me that it’s very...effective at protecting the property.  That bad things happened to people who tried to hurt the family.  An insurance salesman who tried to cheat my grandparents in the ‘60s...some cousin who tried to run off with one of their trucks...and the occasional farm hand who didn’t want to work.  All met bad ends, apparently.”

Sarah swallowed.

“Don’t worry, I’m sure it won’t hurt you.  Like I won’t.  See you tomorrow.”

He closed the door on his way out, then listened for Eli’s snoring from the upstairs hallway before going to bed himself.  He really wasn’t afraid of them, although the tale he’d told to Sarah had been laying it on a bit thick.  While mostly true to his mother’s story, Barbara had never specified what ‘bad ends’ the interlopers had met, exactly, and whatever supernatural force lingered here, it didn’t seem to mean him any harm.

He awoke uncharacteristically late, just after 7:30, and while hurrying about to catch up with chores he was behind on, especially the cows, Lucas discovered Eli’s body behind the house.  He was sprawled next to a barrel of spilled apples, which he’d clearly been trying to steal, but Lucas could see no obvious signs of trauma or the infamous virus on him, and knew he hadn’t put anything in Eli’s wine that could have killed him.

He stayed there a long time after that, thinking.  Did the spirit of the farm act only out of protection, or did it want something from everyone there?  Had it taken his grandparents because they were simply too old to work its land anymore?  What would happen to him if he could not do the work, or, worse, wanted to leave entirely?

Eventually, he moved to pick up the apples and replace them in their barrel.  Suddenly, he stopped, remembering.

“Sarah?” he called out, allowing himself a moment of hope.  Maybe it had seen some potential for hard work in her, and she had been spared.  

“Sarah?” he said again.  

There was no answer except the cold October wind.