If you come around here enough, then you’ve been to Valmar, Delaware and know what awaits you there.

But have you been over the bridge to South Jersey? I have. I spent most of my life there. Come on. Let me tell you a story about the Down Jersey Dread…

                                  

                                                        1992

          Jericho Road runs from Quinton toward the eastern approach into Bridgeton, with a speck of old Roadstown keeping the Holy Ghost between. She spans two counties in South Jersey, Salem and Cumberland. A quiet road, one of trees and fine sand, where spotted red deer dig up roots along her shoulders and the hills roll back into maddening antiquity. 

          Guess global warming is a thing after all, Marcia thought, sweating, not ready to pant just yet. Despite it being October, the Salem County air kept in the heat. She hoped on this, her first jog down Jericho, to see the brilliant blossoming of changing colors in the leaves. But all they had to show her were the many shades of green as if summer refused to die.

          Mosquitoes swarmed. She was unaccustomed to their affectations having moved to Jersey from up north. They offended her, forced her to spend more energy on swatting than enjoying the jog. 

          At some random intersection she paused to rest hands on knees. A water pack on her back felt heavy. Headband saturated. Marcia glanced around. A field full of upturned dirt and vultures to the right. Deep woods left and across the intersection. No road sign. 

          Hot damn this is the Sticks alright. She was one month into her stay here, at love with the countryside while hating the wariness of locals, the stores closing early. But nothing beat the view. Southern Jersey pine forests, its sandy grounds and aged maples stood thick and undaunted. Out here, peace reigned. No traffic or fighting, curse words or smog. 

          Back home she was but another link in the hustle and bustle chain of academics slogging across the city, teaching, smoking, drinking coffee and threatening students to turn in their work. Late night gossip at a restaurant with the gals. One night stands. 

          “Derrick, your mess set me free,” she said to the woods and the field before continuing the run. Derrick, the last fling in the city. Brilliant and built like a bull. Best affair ever. Until he moved in. Got into having his way while she slept. While her visiting sister slept. Her neighbor. The fights. Broken glass. Police reports.

          A year of litigation inspired a daring move to buy a house in the States. 

          Now, after settling in and meeting the locals, she roamed freely down Jericho, just her and Mother Nature. Word was up ahead would be a series of hills, a trailer park in the expansive, watery region known as Shepp’s Valley. No more men. Smoking abolished. Clean living.

          An old Ford pickup came up behind her, sputtering. Marcia heard it slow to a crawl and knew this beautiful affair with Nature was about to take a turn. She faked kneeling to tie a sneaker, sucking on the straw to take in water. Swat the bugs. 

          “Fancy seeing you here,” said the driver, a forlorn old man decaying under an oily John Deere ball cap. His compatriot in the passenger seat might have been twenty years younger, but equally as bedraggled.

          “Yeah,” she said trying to recall why their faces were sadly familiar. “Guys at the pork place, right?”

          “Niblock’s, yes ma’am. Thought you were just passing through. Live nearby, huh?”

          She hesitated. “Yes.”

          “Well I’m John Tucker. This is my lil’ cousin, Ed. We’re right over in Alloway. You know the place? Named after Allowas, he was an Indian around here back in the day.”

          “You don’t say.” She looked out to the road ahead.

          “Yeah. Say, we come around here a lot and know damn near everybody. How about you tell us where you live an’ if you ever need something fixed–”

          Marcia put up a hand. “I’m good, thanks.” Nerves powered muscles. She returned to jogging. She was certain the men said more words, mumbled some foul ones, but she moved on.

          The Ford drove on, revving the engine hard as it passed her.

          It took a hundred yards for her chest to unwind, to feel Nature flowing through her hair again. Vultures circled over the dense wood, waiting to catch a whiff of demise. She found their incessant glides on unseen thermals good company, not the dreadful omens many had placed on the aloof birds.

          Every now and then, a squirrel darted to and fro across Jericho. A plump brown rabbit glared into Marcia’s soul before fleeing for safety. Ferns sprouted up along the edge of the woods. She found herself looking more into the spaces between trees than on the road ahead.

          Then, as she fought over the first lengthy hill, Marcia saw it. The Ford. Parked on the shoulder in the sand, engine running, muffler fuming gray smoke. 

          Why are they– but instinct screamed the jog had ended. The only urge now was how to make a retreat. Turn and walk away, or run?

          An inviting breeze blew in from the east, filling her nostrils with a ripe joy.

          Honeysuckle? This strong so late in the year? She followed the air to her right, a split second forgetting the blockage ahead. In her vision, another option was laid bare.

          A path. For a second Marcia considered that at one time it may even had been a dirt road now long covered up by tall grasses and hearty vines. It seemed to go back a ways.

          A getaway. Maybe even a future secret walkabout spot for the future to avoid the creeps. She sent a salute to the unsuspecting Ford, and went off the beaten path.

          Now this she could get used to. The greens seemed to pop more from within the forest as honeysuckle became aromatherapy to her spirit. The path was rutted and rose up in the center, and she envisioned this had not been trafficked since the days of wagon wheels. 

          Marcia soon jogged beyond an abandoned house, a simple one-room home whose facade had bent to form that of a moaning ghost. She thought she saw what remained of a tractor swallowed up in sassafras branches. Tree stumps all around signified that, at one time, a small community had thrived back here in a glade of flowers and singing birds.

          Further through the treeline she could make out the glint of sunlight reflected on a body of water. 

          Then the bushes grew thicker, linear, and Marcia reasoned they were sprouting up along an old wall. That wall trailed off behind saplings and the remains of a thick wooden fence. All of this came up almost naturally.

          But the cemetery behind the wall caught her off guard.

          “How in the hell would somebody forget this?” Marcia stopped at the entrance, a puddle of brown water, striped frogs hopping out of it croaking mad. She looked back down the path. No Ford truck coming by and by now she was far removed from Jericho, enough to let curiosity sink in. “Place is massive.”

          Stepping over the puddle, she went inside. The breeze stopped, perhaps by the wall or the thickness of red maples and white oaks outside of it. Marcia glanced out and away. Another dilapidated house from the nineteenth century further down the way. Perhaps a barn. 

          Yet she estimated hundreds of grimy, weather worn headstones. The latest were the smaller block cut variety from the Second World War and on, with clean, visible names and dates closer to the front. The most recent death year: 1949.

          Farther back she found taller stones dedicated to those who passed in the end of the 1800s. A few had the shape of the Cross, one even came equipped with a small but noticeable weeping angel, half her head broken off. None of the graves had the characteristic wreath or flowers, save for the occasional patch of late blooming forsythia. Honeysuckle bushes had overtaken the land, absorbing many headstones. 

          Others were illegible. Faintly she could make out they hailed from the colonial era. This place was unattended. Unloved. 

          At the rear lay two faded stones so close they seemed as one. Marcia noticed the ground ahead of them lacked grass or flowers. Black soil, different from the beige sand that dominated much of South Jersey. It felt so out of place and time, the earth so hard. Squatting in front of the stones, she wiped away layers of earth from them, but could only make out three pieces of information.

          17-

          SISTERS

          FOUNDERS

          “So you two did all this, huh?”

          Marcia pondered for a minute why the honeysuckle scent came from the opposite direction, why it had no scent now. The forest darkened as the number of shafts of penetrating sunlight dwindled. She wandered, tracing a mass of vines with a finger, following them angle sideways to a great, broken tree near the center of this resting place for the forgotten.

         “No. This was, a building?” She wandered around it as much as she could. The vines had a grip over half the structure, and she guessed it might have been a gazebo. Marcia poked at it, tested vines for breaking points. Then, where planks of wood had fallen off, an opening beckoned.

          Marcia ducked down and went inside, face contorting from the pungent odor of rotted wood. From the interior she could make out black char. A fire, or lightning, had done the place in some time back, she reckoned. But this was too closed in to be a gazebo. 

          “Too small to be a gravekeeper’s–” she paused. Aside from the blackened walls and bad smell, Marcia found nothing in here save a bell dangling from what remained of the crooked ceiling. She caught it under a faint sunbeam, shrouded in webbing.

           She would have ignored it, assuming it must have been to call together what passed for a town back in the day for meetings. But it was an odd, bulky monstrosity. For one, it appeared too big for this space. More fit for the steeple of a church than for this, well, she considered it a shed now. 

          Its dimensions were secondary to its design. Marcia picked up a piece of wood and used it to pull away webs. The bell was pitch black, the type of wrought iron common in the Revolutionary era. But the shape of it, bulbous, curled inward, like a–

          “Fetus?” She swallowed. It indeed bore too much of a resemblance to a fetal child, and where the umbilical cord would have connected babe to mother, an equally black chain attached it to the ceiling. It was an unpolished, jarring chime that gave her an unsettling sensation.

          Certain curiosity had been satisfied, she turned to leave. The floor snapped under her sneakers and Marcia went backward, hands up in the air. She fought for stability, arms waving, and she found it just as the plank in her hand tapped the damnable bell.

          It unleashed a baritone vibration, one that bothered her deeply. It didn’t sound right. That was that. Just enough of a sensory distortion to know it should never have been rung. Never have been made, though logic failed to answer why.

          Marcia pulled her foot up out of the hole, sighed seeing nothing bleeding, and moved to get out. It was then she felt. Feared. It was still too early in the day to be this dark.

          Back in the open graveyard, she felt as if the trees had closed up some proverbial shop without warning. No more sunlight dappling the honeysuckle or sinking into the depths of the Sisters’ feculent ground. 

          The forest seemed to close in. Worse, she heard an engine, tires splashing. The Ford had lost its patience.

          Marcia cursed under her breath and raced back into the empty shed. Her heart pounded. Face swam in perspiration as the bell kept up its dull moan. As soon as she went back in, she stopped dead, clutching her heart.

          On the once empty, dirty floor, a fresh figure lay bare. A person, formed from strips of vine and lashed together. In one of its arms, a rattle. 

          She backed up against the wall so hard more of the ceiling came down and the bell echoed its catastrophic bellow. Marcia held her mouth shut to stop a scream while she bolted out of the shed.

          Fear took hold. She raced out of the cemetery, seeing the cousins getting out of the Ford but not caring one bit. She would go right past them.

          “Say! You can’t just go running around wherever you want!” John scolded. “This here’s private property!”

          Marcia heard nothing worth responding to. She had to get out. The forest was too dark and events took place without context, happenings beyond reason. She forgot the puddle, racing through it, sliding, legs stretched out. Soaked. Slowed to a stop.

          Ed took her by the arms. “You okay? Gonna get yourself killed acting like that. John, look, she’s scared senseless!”

          “‘Cuz she can’t mind her damn business. The hell’s that moaning sound?”

          They were looking about as Ed helped Marcia to her feet. She pushed him away, staring at the blowing grasses under dark canopy. Grass parted as if people moved through them. But no one arrived. 

          No one adult. Moving towards the cousins. 

          “What in the f–!”

          Marcia found the power to swallow hard, scream, and bolt. Her eyes told her babes were coming out of the woods, children not old enough to walk by God’s good graces. She took off, screaming and running. Doing more of both as, behind her, the confusion of two men degraded into lost boys crying out in pain, begging for help until the woods fell silent again into a honeysuckle stupor.

          But Marcia ran. She ran all the way out of the wood, back up Jericho Road, as far away from the black bell as her sneakers could carry her, as old Jericho etched another dread into the fine cracks of its asphalt visage.