The Watchtower

The cabin stood, tall and crooked, like a spike in the throat of a kudzu monster. The local kids called it “The Watchtower” but Laurel wouldn’t regard it as such. There weren’t even windows on the top floor. Laurel’s family, the Matneys, owned over 400 acres spanning the northern peak of Mulberry Mountain down the eastern side to the foothills. 

Much of the land was used to farm spruce trees, but kudzu ran wild over the northeastern corner of the territory. It was there that two rivers crossed like the markings of a treasure map. No treasure existed there, only a log building built too high to logically withstand its own weight and too close to the crosswaters not to succumb to erosion in one direction or the other. 

Still, there it stood, at least a century and a half old as far as anyone knew. It was tradition in the Matney family to treat it like a clubhouse and over the years it had many reinforcements added. That corner of the mountain remained open to the public for hiking, but it was mostly frequented by juveniles looking for a secluded spot to toke. No one ever messed with the clubhouse, though. There was no easy way to get to it from the access side. No bridge to cross the rivers.

The clubhouse was a sanctuary for each new generation of Matney. A place where children could make-believe and teens could keep secrets. But the area did not exist without its share of dangers and folklore. The Matneys were very strict about two things: Never enter the crosswaters and never go out to the clubhouse at night without the light of the moon.

This year Laurel finally had enough friends to throw a Halloween party and call it that. She had all week to plan and prep for the party on Friday. Since Laurel spent all of Monday and Tuesday finishing a Physics project, it wasn’t until Wednesday that she made it out to work on the clubhouse.

Upon entering, Laurel stiffened. The interior of the cabin was a fright of spiderwebs, bugs and dead leaves. Laurel hadn’t been out there since the night before the school year started. She now had two afternoons to get everything cleaned and set up, then maybe an hour to lay out refreshments on Friday. Laurel took a deep breath, sighed and plopped her paint bucket down along with the rest of her supplies. She set her phone and speaker down on a windowsill, hit play on her downloaded Halloween playlist and got right to knocking webs off the ceiling and sweeping up debris. 

When Laurel had finished with the lower floor, and a few clumsy dance moves with the broom, she hit the staircase and climbed to the top floor, dragging cleaning materials and an LED lantern up with her. Even in the low afternoon light the room was a box of shadow. Laurel frowned at the smell, hung the lantern up on the wall and quickly tidied up the bit of mess she could see. A soft mass rolled under her foot and she lept back, horrified by the tiny crunch it made. Laurel swallowed her grimace and brushed a dead mouse into the trash bag.

The boards creaked dauntingly as Laurel stomped downstairs in a rush to retrieve her paint. She almost thought she’d fallen through the boards as she missed the last step and plummeted, crashing the side of her arm into the floor. 

“Fff-HUCK!” she blurted and sucked through her teeth. Laurel could tell her shoulder had been subluxated. It didn’t help that “Monster Mash” was taunting her melodically. She winced and held her shoulder as she willed it back with an inaudible “Pop.” Laurel had a condition that affected the stability of her joints and dealt with this injury all too frequently. She lumbered across the room and fumbled with the zipper on her backpack, then wrestled her shirt off and laid some athletic tape to brace her shoulder.

Laurel already felt exhausted, but she was not about to let the setup for her first real party look lazy. She spent a few minutes cross-legged on the floor, staring at the ceiling, then towed herself up, grabbed the paint supplies and headed back up the stairs. When she got to the top, she realized she’d forgotten to bring a ladder. 

Laurel huffed. She was now one-armed and at least a foot too short to adequately paint the upper tier of the wall. She was starting to doubt the necessity of a paint-job, but Sylva was already working on shadow puppets and Laurel had promised her a red backdrop in a creepy room. Laurel decided she would skip painting the entire upper room and just do one wall. She still needed a step, though, and there was no way she'd manage to drag the rocking chair up the stairs with one arm. 

The only usable object in the room was an old wood stove attached to the corner. It’d be a stretch, but this room was small enough that she could probably reach most of the wall from there. She could get the far corner from the ground if she jumped, she thought. 

Laurel set her paint bucket up on the stove and perched tediously beside it, lifting herself up slowly. She wobbled slightly and braced herself against the stove wall. Using her good arm, she started painting in the corner. She stood up on her tip-toes and cautiously angled her body to get as far out as she could. With her chest firmly locked to the wall, she reached out a little bit further and prepared to use momentum to swing herself upright and descend the stove. 

She wasn’t sure how it happened, but Laurel felt her legs fly out from under her and sharply rolled her back into the floor. She gasped, ears ringing, and darted her eyes around. The room was suddenly alight with the orange glow of the newly setting sun. She tilted her head up and stared in disbelief at the stove-shaped hole that’d been punched clean through the cabin walls.

The stove was gone, presumably fed to the rivers. Laurel was stunned but she didn’t feel like she’d been any more hurt and tried to make sense of how a shrimpy seventeen year-old could have pushed a cast-iron stove through layers of wooden panels and solid tree logs. 

Laurel was ready to scream. How was she going to justify a group of teenagers cutting loose in a tower with a massive hole overhanging a 20 foot drop to a swirling rivery death? Not to mention the floor and walls were now a splattered mess of red paint. As Laurel picked herself up, she realized she was a splattered mess, too, and the space where she’d landed was looking like a body outline found at a crime scene. If her parents found out about all this, they’d probably have the party moved into the house where they'd insist on their, assuredly ghostly, presence. A teenage nightmare.

With the afternoon fading into night, Laurel took some branches from the forest and lined them up in front of the hole. The makeshift railing would have to do for now. After hiking the brief trail back to her house, she snuck in around the side and headed straight for the bathroom. Laurel crammed her painted clothes into the trash can under the sink to deal with later. She scrubbed the paint off her arms into the sink, then drew a bath and texted Sylva and Morgan about the disaster.

On Thursday, Laurel’s best friends showed up at her front door hidden behind armfuls of last minute Halloween paraphernalia. With their help, the next few hours went by smoothly. Morgan strung up pumpkin shaped battery lights and zombie-hand wall sconces while Sylva dragged chairs from the patio to the cabin and organized them around the downstairs table. Laurel pumped balloons and staked various monster gnomes and solar lights along parts of the trail. When Sylva saw the paint job on the upper floor, she insisted on setting up her shadow play and laying out candles and incense skulls. More lights were strung up, and a special ring of lights was wrapped around the edges of the hole with multiple “DANGER” signs.

When everything was done, there were plastic spiders everywhere and cotton webs draping every corner and edge inside the cabin. A skeleton dangled around the bookshelf, and another one sat up by a window on a rocking chair, wearing a bonnet. Eight pumpkins were organized neatly in a circle around a pile of games and two candelabras. There were so many light sources, the ladies could hardly tell that it was already dusk. 

Roger half tripped on his blindingly shimmery tail as he stepped through the doorway on Friday. Laurel flattered him and hugged Sylva and Morgan before she failed at smuggling them all past her eager-to-pamper mother. Once Laurel got all her friends gathered in the bathroom, she shoved her face paints over and plugged the hot irons in. Morgan set out a few too many packs of metallic eyeshadow and Sylva managed to squeeze in some zombie makeup and prosthetics.

Roger lined chrome swirls and spots onto Morgan’s face while she browsed her palettes. Laurel sponged bright red body paint all over her own neck, face and arms and Sylva got busy mixing the perfect gray to match her costume. After they finished applying base layers and pretty details, they took turns laying silicone scars and painting fake blood onto each other. Laurel changed into a long, red dress and put on her antennae and gloves that’d been altered to look like claws. Sylva helped Morgan stuff long strips of bubble wrap into her tutu and pulled on her hammerhead hat. Each of them finished with fake fangs before heading outside to wait for the rest of their friends.  

“Dead sea creatures! Dope,” Mitch plopped a case of root beer on the driveway and smashed the gang of zombie fish together, trying to get his yellow-suited arms around all four of them at once. Ashe pulled at the tassels on the hem of her dress and leaned against them all as another car pulled up. Taylor hopped out and slammed the car door on their poncho, “You guys know you got a demon dog up here!?” 

“Tayyy, what’s up!” Mitch ran over and tried to wrestle Taylor’s “moth wing” from the clutches of their car. Taylor looked Mitch up and down and smirked, “The Mask, hell yeah.” Everyone headed down the trail to the clubhouse, then spent the next ten minutes “ooh”-ing and “aah”-ing over the setup. Mitch didn’t hesitate to stuff his green face with peanut butter cups while Taylor pulled airplane bottles out from the concealment of their fuzzy backpack. Everyone’s “cheers” were broken by a high-pitched holler and Ashe leaned back to see Tom through the window, his cape flapping toward the cabin.

The door opened just in time for Bat-Tom to leap inside at full-speed, nearly knocking a skeleton off the bookcase. “Yo…” Tom huffed, repositioning a plastic bone, “heard something big, then a–thought I was ‘bout to…spot a ‘squatch… stepped ‘round the tree and this groundhog shot out,” Tom arched back, checking the doorway, “Dude ran at me!” After everyone had a good laugh-and-greet, Laurel passed out the carving kits.

By the time the sun dropped behind the mountain, Roger had danced with almost everyone in the cabin. Ashe and Morgan were on their twelfth round of Blackjacks when Taylor shouted “It’s done!” They all made their way outside as Taylor lit the last tealight and took a step back. The front of the cabin was lit up by a mod podge of glowing orange designs. 

“Who’s judging?” Ashe asked, rubbing her hands together. Laurel stepped up and crouched down in front of Ashe’s pumpkin at the far left, which had been finished so quickly the tealight was already burning out. Laurel crab walked along the row of pumpkins, leaning in toward each one and squinting her eyes to take in the finer details. Ashe’s cat eyes, Mitch’s puking pumpkin head, Morgan’s globe of stars, Tom’s bat signal—Laurel skipped over her owl—Roger’s alien, Sylva’s pac-labyrinth and, finally, Taylor’s fully outlined Death Star. “Clearly none of these are winners,” Laurel stood up, smiling with her claws on her hips. The group chattered while Mitch ran inside and grabbed a piece of candy, then set it next to the stem on top of Taylor’s superweapon. 

The group started to make their way upstairs and Sylva got the lights armed for her shadow play. The first act consisted of various monster silhouettes getting into petty fights and the second act introduced an alien spaceship. By the end, all the monsters had been abducted. After a bit of applause and banter over which creature was the mightiest, Laurel broke in: “Okay, okay. I have another story for you,” she removed her fangs and held a flashlight in her lap, shining the light into her red face. “The Legend of the Violet Mountain Lights,” Laurel paused as she caught sight of Mitch and everyone heard his trousers scrape against splinters in the dead silence. 

“Dude! What are you doing!?” Morgan grabbed for Mitch, who was on his stomach picking at the branches marking the danger zone.

“A meteoroid’s supposed to be passing in front of the moon, just trying to get a peek…”

“What? Are you for real?” Laurel’s Physics teacher hadn't mentioned anything about it in class yesterday. 

Taylor cut in, “Yeah, the A.P.’s thought it was headed further out but it interacted with some rocks this morning. We should be able to view it or at least see a shadow...”

Laurel felt a chill creep into her spine, “Okay, just let me finish my story first,” she flickered her flashlight. "It has long been told that if anyone should encounter a dark spirit on the mountain, they need only to retreat across a channel of flowing water..." As Laurel was narrating, the room seemed to grow darker and she couldn't help but notice that Taylor’s eyes were transfixed on the opening in the wall. 

"But where the rivers themselves cross, the churning waters stir the wells beyond the veil," Laurel’s voice got lower, "and when the air turns dark below a moonless night, the barrier between us and them dissolves."

The sloshing water below made Laurel tense, but she continued, “Campers from all over the mountain often report seeing violet orbs hovering near the crosswaters during a dark moon…” Laurel spied Morgan backing up against Roger and paused her story. “Don't worry, the moon isn't new, I measured it a few nights ago…”

Tom looked lost, locked onto the gaping hole as if it were a magnet and his iris's were screws. Laurel glanced at him briefly and got back into character, “On the occasion that one should find themselves out during an eclipse…” Ashe kept squinting toward the hole, which was now looking more like a chasm.

“They say when you hear the Powwow...” Laurel stopped. Everyone at once seemed to be unconsciously fixated on the hollow corner of the room. Before Laurel could address it, the music downstairs started skipping loudly.

“Service is so weird here,” Sylva whined as she snapped back. Laurel went up on her feet. “It shouldn..” Everyone froze in place trying to hear through the rapidly growing volume of the music.

“You think your dad…” Roger started, raising his voice. 

Laurel didn't even hear him, because the music had grown so loud it was as if it were blaring from the corner of the room. The songs shuffled briefly and stopped on a rhythm of banging drums. Morgan grabbed Sylva and Roger and dragged them up around her, causing Roger’s shoe to bang into Taylor’s knee. They stumbled up, their neck whipping back toward the hole.

“Has that bridge always been there!?” Taylor shouted, and their tone triggered Mitch to grab Ashe’s arm and back her into the far wall. Laurel moved to get a better look but dropped the flashlight and lost her step. She twisted her ankle and fell onto her hands, her heart pounding with the beat of the Powwow drums. Laurel stared incredulously out at the legion of violet lights bobbing along a bridge that appeared to be tethered to the cabin’s feet.

Tom screamed and the group fled, elbowing their way down the stairs like an army of ants trying to squeeze through a crack. The cabin door blasted open and Laurel’s friends scrambled out into the night. As they ran up the trail toward the refuge of the house, Laurel limped out. “Wait!” she wailed. Taylor doubled back to crutch Laurel, but froze at the bottom of the hill. Laurel’s face looked haunted as she stared into the sky. At the top of the hill, the rest of the group panted and turned, hoping to spot the stragglers hopping up behind them, but their gazes were torn upward, toward the colossal black mass crashing through the waxing moon.

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THE END

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This story was inspired by a selection of towns and oral traditions found in Southern Appalachia.

Written by Cari Rodriguez