The sounds of early morning surrounded them as Terry and his team got ready to set out.
The access road had been half hidden by a fall of limbs and leaves, but it was camouflage. His contact had told him to put the covering back when they were done and so before rolling down the rough dirt road, he and Wayne had put it all back the way they found it. The trees were close to the van, and Terry rolled the window to pull his mirror in before asking Scully to do the same. She had taken the front seat, Wayne sitting in the back with the gear, and he was currently trying to keep it all from sliding around in the back of the bumpy van.
Terry watched as the trees pressed in around them, making his drive feel claustrophobic.
This was all starting to feel very Blaire Witch the longer he drove, and he was hoping for different results.
Of course, the whole thing felt a little bit like an urban legend the more you looked into Jeremiah. After the mines had been reopened, people started going missing. Only a few at first, the owner of the hardware store, a cab driver taking someone home, a waitress at the local dinner, the principle of the local highschool, and the second deputy for the local sheriff. No one really looked into it, people left Jeremiah for better prospects, and the town had a history of people just picking up roots.
Then, one day, the whole town just disappeared.
It started out as absenteeism from those who didn’t work in town. A nurse who worked at the hospital in Cashmere never showed up for her shift. Several students who attended the Clarkesville Technical College missed a few days of school. A teacher from Clayton Elementary with a perfect attendance record not calling in a sub for the day. When people called the truant individuals and received no answer, they called the police in Jeremiah. When emergency services never responded, they called their local law enforcement for help.
When the state police went in to see what had happened, the entire population of Jeremiah was nowhere to be found. They found no evidence of foul play, not a single thing out of place at all aside from a few disrupted rooms, and the homes had things set out for the following day. Clothes were laid out, lunches packed, important things set aside so they could be easily picked up the next morning. It seemed like everyone had gone to bed with the intention of waking up the next day and then suddenly disappeared in the night.
It was a mystery that no one had ever found an answer to, and it led to interested people coming to Jeremiah to this day. The town remained abandoned, and anyone who lived there never stayed for long. They either moved after reporting strange occurrences or they simply disappeared. The city of Cashmere had talked about tearing the town down, but the city had been declared a historic site after the mines collapse. They couldn’t just get rid of it, so they had blocked the only road to it in an attempt to keep people out.
An attempt that had little results.
When Terry was a kid, lots of people had gone there, and most came back unscathed.
Dust puffed up as Terry put on the brakes, the road coming to an end.
“Let’s get moving,” Terry said, taking the window covers out of the back as he reached for his bag, “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover before noon.”
“You know what direction we’re heading in, right?” Scully asked, climbing out as she followed Terry to the back of the van. Wayne looked a little ruffled as he opened the double doors, and he grumbled about potholes as he handed Scully her bag. They had packed everything they would need the night before, and Terry hoped it would make them look like hikers if any cops found them out in the woods.
“My source said to walk West and if we come to the road we’ve gone too far.”
“And how far from here is it?” Wayne asked, closing up the van as he shouldered his pack.
“About two miles.”
Scully coughed, smoke curling from her nose as she hacked, “Two miles? Last time we just walked right in. You couldn’t have gotten us closer, Terry?”
Terry tested the straps to make sure they would be comfortable, the gear inside jostling around, “That's the closest we could safely get. We don’t want to be caught so we’re coming in on the far side near the school and walking in. Come on guys, we gotta get moving.”
The three moved into the woods, the compass on his watch taking them due west. The Georgia hills were dressed in color, her golds and ambers on display as the trio tromped over crispy leaves. The bird song was muted, most of them already heading for warmer climates as winter threatened to come rolling in with every crisp morning that dawned. It would not be outside the realm of possibility to wake up to snow on the ground before Halloween, Terry had certainly seen it before. He hoped to be somewhere warm before then, sitting on a beach as he sipped something tasty and laughed at the locals who would be bundled up for the winter weather.
He was sweating under his flannel as the sun grew higher and higher, and Terry thought longingly about the tanktop that was in the front pocket of the bag he carried.
This was a lot more work than it had been the first time, but Terry believed it would all be worth it when they came into the town without incident.
The six teens that had started the lock down had a much easier time getting in. The road was blocked by a barricade and a sign telling people not to enter, but they had just stepped over and gone into the town unhampered. Terry had watched the TikTok she had made a few times, saving it to his phone before it had been taken down by the platform. Heather Johns had then shot eight videos in all, each more troubling than the last. She and Sara Winters and Margo Chule had yet to be found, though Dennis Smith, Francis Johns, and Clive Green had been identified.
What was left of them at least.
It had started on the last week of September, about three weeks ago, and Terry had planned their route very carefully by the landmarks in the videos.
In the first video, the teens had laughingly jumped the barricade at seven thirty pm as they proceeded into the outskirts of Jeremiah. They had been passing around a flask as Heather explained that some kids at school had told them the place was a cool spot to hang out. They had never been, despite having lived in the area for years, and most of the kids in the area had never heard of Jeremiah. It was an urban legend that none of them really believed in, just a spooky story for sleepovers and summer camp fire pits. She explained that they meant to head to the mines and see if they could see anything weird and then her ten minutes had been up and she told everyone to catch them on part two.
Part two had the kids stumbling through the abandoned streets of Jeremiah. They had passed the post office, a shadowy feed store, and stopped for a few minutes to lounge at an abandoned ice cream parlor. People had pointed out that if you looked behind them as they sat, you could see a shadowy figure lurking, and people had been divided on its authenticity. It was hard to see, but it got easier in the third video.
The third video was a selfie at the ice cream parlor with all six of them leaned in as something light played over it. They were all clustered around an odd looking ice cream character out front, but the weird concrete ice cream man wasn’t what people had been talking about. The shadowy person was practically looking over their shoulders from the back of the picture, and that was what had sparked a lot of the controversy.
“Not seeing any foot traffic out here,” Wayne said, his hiking foots crunching along through the leaves, “looks like maybe their patrols haven't gone quite this far.”
Wayne was an avid hiker and he knew what to look for when it came to tracking things. That was part of the reason Terry had brought him, but the other was that he didn’t flake when the shit hit the fan. Wayne had been with him for a while, acting as his cameraman, and Wayne was always steady no matter what was going on around him. The problem with Heather’s video was that it had been shot in the shaky cam of a teenager's cell phone.
When Terry got proof, he knew it would be rock solid if Wayne was behind the camera.
“Let’s hope so,” Terry said, “It’ll make it easier if they’re too spooked to leave their check point.”
The fourth video had been about thirty minutes later and Heather had clearly been reading the comments on video two and three. Most people believed she was trying to set up some kind of Found Footage, Paranormal activity thing and they had begun to speculate on it with rather unforgiving comments. Heather told them how she didn’t know what that thing had been in the last video, but that she was a little freaked out by it too. Her brother, Frank, had told her not to think about it, and that it was probably just a shadow, as they came up to the Fill N Go. This had been the reason Terry had wanted to set up camp there, hoping that following the kids might bring them some results.
The fifth video showed the opening to the mines and as the deep pit had yawned at them, the kids had yelled into it, making echos. Some of the echos came back strange, sounding high pitched or distorted, but the kids kept right on yelling drunkenly into the abyss. Some of the boys had started talking about going in, the lights on their phones winking on, but when the beams fell across the smiling face of something waiting just inside the tunnel, Heather screamed and turned away from it. It was quick, less than three seconds on the recording, but it definitely fit the description he’d been given by a few of the old miners.
The kids had run then, the video catching a few of them as their liquid screams cut the night, but their fates were unknown then.
“I can see buildings,” Scully said and Terry realized she was right. They had come to a small hill and below they got their first look at Jeremiah in two decades. It was a squat, ugly sore in the sea of green, and Terry didn’t like the look of it even by day.
“Let’s go,” he said, “looks like we still have about forty minutes to go.”
As they headed in, Terry felt his steps getting heavier. He had been excited by the prospect of the scoop, but now that he was within sight of Jeremiah, it was like being transported back in time. It had been early afternoon when the three of them had walked in last time, less geared but more enthusiastic, and Terry had felt just as nervous then. The school had agreed to give him a section in the paper for paranormal events, and Terry had been curious about Jeremiah since he was young. He had been a few times, but he had always lost his nerve when he got to the barrier.
He had always felt like that barrier was there to keep him in just as much as it was there to keep whatever lived in there inside
“At this rate, we’ll be there before noon.”
That was good.
Terry wanted to be set up before dark.
The Sixth video was mostly a lot of heavy breathing and Heather begging for help. She was hiding somewhere, a storage room or a closet, and the sound of something scuttling around outside her hiding place was very loud. She peeked out, covering her mouth as she tried to show the viewers what was chasing her. It looked like the same black shape that had been trailing them this whole time. It was moving on all fours, seeming to sniff the air as it hunted for her. It was pretty grainy, the quality hard to see because of all the shaking. It turned to look at her suddenly, and as she dipped below the edge of the door, the video ended.
The seventh was a shaky cam shot as the road slid up behind her. Heather was running flat out, the sound of her pursuer hot on her heels. She was crying and gasping, probably not even aware that she was taking video. The few stills Terry had isolated made him think she had been running past the same ice cream parlor they had stopped at for selfies. She wasn’t stopping now, though. She sounded ready to drop as she sprinted, and as the timer ran out, there was a single still image of the loping shadow creature coming after her.
When he’d shown it to them the night before, bringing Wayne and Scully up to speed, they had looked knowingly at each other. Terry had to admit that whatever the creature was, it looked very similar to whatever had come after them all those years ago. None of them had said it, but it was understood that if they went back, they would be facing something they had escaped once already.
“Just makes us that much more likely to escape it again,” Terry had said, his bravado not reflecting how he felt.
As they came into the city limits, Terry reflected on the eighth video as he swallowed his fear.
It was only a few seconds, but it was the mouth of the mine as Heather was dragged inside, kicking and screaming, by whatever had pursued her.
* * * * *
They came to the Fill N Go just as the big clock over city hall struck eleven.
The walk in had been far from eventful. The whole place had been quiet, deserted, and Terry was ready to duck behind anything at a moment's notice if they encountered police. He had expected to encounter something, but the lack of anything was a little unnerving. The whole town was deserted, nothing but trash to make any noise, and the overwhelming silence was a little unnerving.
Terry had expected to have to break into the old shop, but found the doors unlocked and the inside relatively clean.
“Lets get set up,” He said, putting his bag down as Scully set about putting together their base camp.
She worked on autopilot as she set up. The more things that came out of the bags, the more impressed Terry was with the pack job. With some help, Scully took over the front counter and soon had an impressive little command center. She had an array of small monitors, little more than tablets on small stands, and a laptop that looked powerful enough to control all of them.The case she sat down in front of them was the larger thing she’d packed, and as the laptop began to hum, she patted it affectionately.
“While I get set up, I want you guys to set these up.” she said, flicking her butt off into the empty store as she fished out another.
“What are they?” Terry asked, popping the latches so he could have a look inside.
Inside were six little bubble cams like the kind you’d expect to see in any retail store.
“There's only a few of them, so use them sparingly, but as long as you put them within the city limits, I can see all of them from here. They’ve got motion sensors on them as well, so they’ll zero in on them if they sense movement. I’ll stay here, you two go together so we don’t fall victim to typical horror movie shenanigans.”
“And if you get snatched while we’re gone?”
She tossed something at him and when Terry caught it, he saw one of those neat little ear pieces he always saw in movies.
“Just stay in communication so we can be sure that no one gets snatched.”
Terry snorted, sliding the earpiece into place, “I guess your gear was worth the rental fee. Come on, Wayne, we’ve got work to do.”
They left her setting up her network as they prepared to give it eyes.
“You think it’s really safe to be here?” Wayne asked, boosting Terry up so he could get one of the cameras on the lip of the Ice cream shop's awning.
“Not in the slightest,” Terry said, letting it go gingerly and breathing a sigh when it held, “but neither was that cornfield we were in last week either, the one with the sinkhole, or that weird school that people were hearing screams from at night.”
“Yeah, but that was different.” Wayne said, looking around like someone who expected to be caught at any minute, “The station knew what was going on and knew exactly where we were. I’m guessing management probably doesn’t know we’re out here, do they?”
Terry sucked his teeth as he pointed towards the chainlink fence that surrounded Gould Mining Company, “Let’s see if there's a way into there. I want to get a camera facing the mine entrance.”
The gate was padlocked, so the two circled around until they found a piece of fencing that had collapsed around the east side. The mine area was pretty big, and Terry had felt certain there would be some way inside other than the front gate. The fencing had been put up in the late sixties, and fifty plus years of wear and tear would have taken its toll somewhere. Scully checked in as Terry held the fence open for Wayne, and he answered back in the affirmative when she asked if they were okay.
“So that's a no then?” Wayne asked as they slunk around towards the front.
“Sharron knows we’re here, and if Sharron knows, the Boscow definitely knows we’re here. If we don’t check in on Monday, they’ll send someone out to investigate, I'm sure.”
They came up on the entrance to the mine, that gaping maw into fractured earth, and Terry could almost hear Wayne roll his eyes as he hooked the camera to a nearby shed, “Sharron had a good head on her shoulders, but Boscow couldn’t find his morality with both hands. Sharron might make an anonymous call to the police and let them know we snuck in here, but Boscow wouldn’t be likely to call the cops unless they found our bodies with station ID’s on them.”
Terry saw something interesting just inside the door of the shed, and grinned at Wayne as he reached in and found a pair of bolt cutters that someone had stashed there god knew how long ago, “Then be sure you keep your ID at hand, buddy.”
Wayne didn’t think it was funny, but Terry wasn’t much in the mood to reassure him that no boogins were going to come get him.
He clearly liked not having to go through the back gate again, and as the new lock broke apart easily, the two headed back into the quiet town.
They put the other four cameras up at random, saving the last one for the Fill N Go. Scully was still there when they returned, and told them the signal from her little plugin was good. She claimed the uplink would be as good as fiberwire in here, but Terry was just happy to hear everything would work like it was supposed to. The camera images looked good, way better than the grainy CCTV footage Terry had expected, and he told Wayne to grab his camera so they could go shoot some footage.
“I thought that was what the camera’s were for?” Wayne said, pulling the bag out of his backpack as he checked the little handheld the station had provided him.
It was a far cry from the bulky shoulder set up they had barely escaped with last time.
“This is gorilla journalism, Wayne,” Terry said with a stage wink, “It can be a little rough, but a certain amount of showmanship is still expected.”
Scully waved at them as they left, the sun already beginning to work its way towards dusk as they went to get some shots.
Terry had Wayne shoot the outside of the Ice Cream parlor, paying special attention to the table where Heather and her friends had taken their selfie. Wayne was a pro and needed very little prompting as he worked, and that was good because Terry was more than a little distracted. He could feel an itch on the back of his neck as Wayne went about his work, but he couldn’t find any source for it, no matter how many times he checked. It didn’t get any better when they went to get more stock footage from the town, and when Wayne suggested they get back to the Fill N Go, Terry realized he was feeling it too.
“One more shot,” Terry said, the shadows beginning to grow long, “I want one more in front of the mine.”
“Do we have to?” Wayne asked, looking around nervously, “it’ll be dark soon and I don’t really want to be on the street when it gets dark.”
“Just a quick one,” Terry said, “I want to do my promo in front of the mine.”
Wayne looked like he wanted to argue but he nodded as the two headed back to the mine entrance, checking in with Scully as they did.
“Nothing to report yet.” she said, “I haven't seen anything but you two on the cameras all day.”
“Let’s hope that changes come nightfall.” Terry said, pushing the gate aside as the two came before the black hole again.
“Yeah, let's not.” Scully said, “As much as I could use that extra three grand, I’ll take my five and consider it money well made.”
Wayne got set up as Terry got into position, putting his back to the opening as Wayne got him into focus. He didn’t really want to put his back to the mine, but Terry wanted the shot of the dark hole to be perfect. With the mine as his backdrop, Terry would have a much easier time selling this to the station. It was the scene of that final Tiktok, the location the girl had unofficially disappeared into, and now Terry was here, on the scene, and ready to report.
It was well worth the spooky itch he could feel building on the back of his neck.
Like someone watching him intently.
“Ready?” he asked, and Wayne nodded as he counted him down.
“I’m Terry Flowers, standing in front of Jeremiahs Folly, the last known location of Heather Johns. Over twenty million people have seen her final video, and speculated on its authenticity, but the fact remains that she and her five friends are still missing after,”
He stuttered a little as something dropped in the mines behind him and it took everything Terry had not to bolt. It was just an old mine, it made noises, this was all normal. Terry kept repeating it like a mantra as he stood there and composed himself as Wayne counted down again.
“The fact remains that she and five of her friends are still missing after coming to Jeremiah. Three officials have also gone missing searching for them and it remains to be seen if any evidence can be found of their whereabouts.”
Wayne was shaking a little, clearly feeling the same pressure that Terry was, and when he told him to cut it, he couldn’t help but turn and look down into the mouth of the old mine.
Did he see something there?
Perhaps something smiling?
“Let's get back to Scully.” Terry said, trying to make it sound nonchalant, and failing.
Neither of them took their time as they made tracks for the Fill N Go.
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