Free Soul Seekers by Dean Crawford

forest. For a moment Cas remembered the woods through which they had fled the Hessian soldiers and found himself looking over his shoulder expecting to see horses and soldiers with bayonets.
    Above, the clouds broke up a little to reveal a pale moon glowing in the night sky that illuminated the forest in a ghostly blue light.
    ‘It’s up here,’ Siren whispered in the darkness as she shut off her flashlight.
    The dense woods were thickest in the middle of the forest, out to the East of Flint’s Pond. Cas crept up alongside Siren as she came to a halt behind a huge fallen tree trunk and peered over the top.
    ‘There it is.’
    Cas saw a battered looking old shack standing alone in the midst of the woods, its walls cloaked in vines and creepers as though the forest had come alive and tried to take the shack back as its own.
    ‘No place like home,’ Jude whispered. ‘What the hell are we doing here?’
    Cas turned to face them.
    ‘We keep seeing the past,’ he explained. ‘And this place has been here for two hundred years at least, maybe more. This morning I saw a bunch of girls dancing around a tree that wasn’t even there. One of them saw me and waved.’
    Emily’s face, already looking pale in the moonlight, turned white as she stared at him with eyes wide. ‘It saw you?’
    ‘Not
it
,’ Cas said. ‘I saw a person, a young girl, and she saw me too.’
    Siren glanced at the shack and Cas saw her figure it out. ‘You think that you can talk to somebody here?’
    ‘It’s worth a shot,’ Cas replied. ‘Everybody says it’s haunted, right? We need to do this for ourselves or your father and his soldiers will never listen to us. We need
evidence
so that we can get back into the base and figure this all out.’
    ‘Why come here though?’ Emily pleaded. ‘In the dead of night? Couldn’t you just wait until you see another ghost and ask them then?’
    Cas shook his head. ‘If it is ghosts we’re seeing then they’re too unpredictable. We don’t know what we’re going to see next or when it will happen. Coming somewhere that’s haunted will up our chances.’
    ‘Great,’ Jude uttered. ‘This way we can really make sure we scare ourselves to death.’
    Cas looked at Siren. ‘You’ve been inside, so you show us the way.’
    Siren didn’t move. She stared down at Cas for a long beat before she replied.
    ‘I haven’t been inside.’
    ‘You
what
?’ Jude snapped.
    ‘But your friends said that you had!’ Emily protested. ‘They said they saw you!’
    Siren scowled at her. ‘They’re idiots. I just went around the far side of the shack, hid for a minute and then tossed a couple of stones at it to make it sound like I was moving about inside.’
    ‘Well,’ Jude murmured, ‘so you’re not quite as hard-core as you’ve been pretending.’ Siren’s head swivelled to glare at Jude, who flashed her a quick smile. ‘Which is totally cool of course.’
    Cas ran a hand through his hair in disbelief as he got in Siren’s face. ‘You want to get in there now and redeem yourself?’
    ‘Not so much,’ Siren replied.
    Cas looked questioningly at Jude, who chuckled at him. ‘Yeah, good one. Only way I’m going in there is if you kill me first and then carry me.’
    Cas sighed and grabbed Siren’s flashlight from her hand. Then he stood and clambered over the tree trunk. He had barely made two paces when he heard somebody behind him. He was surprised to see Emily following him.
    ‘You sure?’ he asked.
    ‘No, so hurry up before I change my mind. I don’t want you to have to go in there all on your own.’
    Cas felt a rush of gratitude toward Emily. He turned and flicked the flashlight on as he crept toward the shack, the beam of light playing on the shattered door. He could see that the iron locks had rusted away, the door latch hanging loose from the frame.
    Cas stopped near the door, one hand holding the flashlight as with the other he reached out for the door. The wood felt old and brittle