Chapterish
Haunted

I want to start with the one that made me start writing these down.

Last October I was walking the rail trail south of Kal Beach, later than I should have been. If you know the trail you know the stretch I mean, where the hill comes down close and the water sits maybe twenty feet below you, and there is nothing between you and the far shore but a lot of cold dark.

About halfway to Cosens Bay I saw a light on the water. Small and warm, like a lantern, maybe half a kilometre out. My first thought was a boat, some diehard out for fall fishing. But it sat too low. A boat light rides above the hull. This was right down on the surface, like the lake was holding a candle.

I stopped to look. The light stopped too.

I don't mean it drifted to a stop. I mean the moment my boots quit crunching, it quit moving, the way a person freezes when they realize they've been seen. We stayed like that for a while, me and the light. Then I took one step, testing, and it started moving again. Same direction as me. Same speed.

I'm not proud of what I did next, which was walk faster. The light kept pace all the way to the Cosens Bay gate, always exactly beside me, always just far enough out that I couldn't say what it was. At the gate the trail bends away from the water. I stood there a long minute. The light waited. Then it went out, not like a lamp switched off but like a candle at the end of the wick, a slow drowning of the flame.

An old timer at the Legion told me later there used to be men who rowed across from the Coldstream side to the packinghouses for work. Dark in the morning, dark coming home, a coal oil lantern in the bow. In November of 1913 one of them set out ahead of a squall and never made the far shore. They found the rowboat in the spring. They never found him, and they never found the lantern.

I looked up the weather from the night I was on the trail. Clear, it said. Calm. There was no wind at all. Whatever kept pace with me crossed half a kilometre of open water without leaving a ripple, and it only moved when I did.

I don't walk that stretch after dark anymore. If you do, and a light comes off the water to walk with you, don't stop. It only wants to know that you can see it.

People in Coldstream will tell you about the bells before they tell you about anything else. Every orchard of any size used to have one, mounted on a post by the packing shed, and at quitting time the foreman would ring it and you could hear them answer each other up and down the valley, one orchard to the next, like dogs at night. Most came down decades ago. Scrap metal, or a nephew took it, or the post rotted and nobody stood it back up.

The bell on the old Renner place is still on its post. I've seen it from the Grey Canal trail, which runs along the bench above the property. The shed roof is half gone and the rows are thirty years past pruning, apple trees gone woolly and strange, but the bell sits up there dark and heavy like it's still on shift.

I walk that stretch of trail most evenings in the fall. The first time I heard it I assumed wind, and then I stood still and listened and understood that wind doesn't ring a bell four times, evenly, with a rest between each stroke, the way a man does when he's calling the rows in for the day.

It was 4:58. I checked, because some part of me already knew that mattered.

I asked around. It took a few coffees. What I got was this: the Renners ran that orchard until 1987, and in the last week of picking that year a hired man went up a ladder in the far rows and didn't come down. Heart, they think. He was sixty one. Quitting time came and the foreman rang the bell and everybody walked in but him. They didn't find him until full dark, still on the ladder, leaned into the branches like he was reaching for one more.

The Renners didn't take the next season. The orchard has been in some numbered company's hands ever since, waiting on a subdivision that never comes.

Here's the part I would call a coincidence if it had happened once. The bell doesn't ring at 4:58 every evening. I've stood on that trail a dozen quiet nights and heard nothing but quail. But the three times I have heard it, somebody was down in the rows. Kids on quads, once. A guy filling a bucket with windfall apples, once. And once, the far rows moved like someone was working in them, though I watched a long time and never saw anybody walk out.

Four strokes, even, with a rest between. Calling the rows in.

The man who told me most of this is in his eighties and picked there as a teenager. I asked him what he figured the bell was doing. He looked at me like I was slow and said somebody's got to ring them in, and the foreman's been dead since 2003.

So that's the second one. If you're ever below the Grey Canal in the old rows at dusk and a bell you can't see starts to ring, count the strokes. Four means quitting time, and you should go. What you don't want is a fifth. The old man wouldn't tell me what a fifth stroke means. He just said nobody's heard one yet, and he would prefer it stayed that way.