Joy Anderson and the ghost of John

itsostylish(70)

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Scholar and Scribe

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556

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3 min

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Joy Anderson and the ghost of John

In the night, the claws of her dreams scratched her reality to threads. Fear plagued her brain. There was no escape, no respite. She would awake sweating while the remnants of dread dissipated slowly into mist.

Life had devolved into a shattered kaleidoscope existence.She was afraid to sleep.

Doctors tried medication. Therapist, meditation. Quacks, hypnosis. But there was no rest. The details of her dreams were nebulous, vague memories of a determined fight, but the emotion, the terror, clouded her days.

An existence of perpetual exhaustion that defied remedy.

She could hardly remember a time when her dreams had not haunted her.

She pondered her predicament often. Somehow she knew that the secret key to unlocking her sanity was in the color of her dreams, but she couldn’t remember the shapes or the hues.

On a gray day that held the merest hint of sunlight, she sat in her garden. She was tired, but the breeze was pleasant and the scent of nature, sweet. A songbird sang in the willow that dipped its tendrils into the garden pond. She felt drawn to the bird; she wanted to see its bright feathers and hear its shiny, melodious tune a little more closely. At the side of the pond, the water lapped gently, gliding over the white pebbles that marked the bank. Her eyes searched the tree, but the bird and his song were gone. She turned back to the pond. Without warning, images began to float in her mind. She felt the fine hairs on her arms stiffen.

The pond... on a gray, dark day…the pond. There had been a bird in the tree that day, too. She flew to find a shovel and a garden fork.

She just knew...

The work took most of the afternoon, but eventually her shovel hit something solid. The box was weathered but still in one piece; the key was tarnished but still in the lock.

She heaved the box out of the ground at the edge of the pond and collapsed with the trove on her knees while she caught her breath. Gently, she turned the key and lifted the lid.

a stack of faded photographs

A black man wearing a noose around his neck.

A group of people dancing around a fire, covered in white sheets with holes in them where the eyes should have cried.

The man was hanging from a gateway in the middle of a wooden fence.

But near the bottom of the pile, a clear, although yellowed, shot of the dancing men before they donned their hideous garb

And at the very bottom, a list of names:

Jimmy White

Sam Hallow

Derek Smith

John Anderson

Gary Chalk

Shaun Thomas

Baker George

She held the evidence in her hands. Baker George had simply vanished years before.The Ku Klux Klan in the area was suspected, but nobody could prove a thing.

She wondered who had taken the photos and buried the box.

That was a mystery. The perpetrators were long dead, but Baker—Baker—was finally free.

...and so was she.