Eli McMorn and the Strange Case of Kill Devil Hill – Part Seven

Lightning flashed, and thunder boomed outside as I continued my interview with Tommy Lawson at the Haines Island mental institution. Lawson, the lone survivor of a mysterious 1988 Halloween incident that left five teens dead, was seated across the table from me. I gave him a few seconds before pressing him with more questions.

“About how long had your group been at Kill Devil Hill before Jimmy Creason’s sister set up the Ouija board?” I asked.

Lawson sniffed and shifted in his metal folding chair. “We’d been there a couple of hours. They’d set up their tents and started a campfire.”

Lawson paused for a few seconds. “Kara. That was her name. Jimmy’s sister. She’d already had a couple of beers before she brought the board out. It folded into fourths, instead of in half like a checkerboard. She had it stuffed in her backpack with those beers.”

Another smile cracked across Lawson’s acne-scarred face. It struck me odd that he had fond memories of a night that ended with five dead teenagers.

“What else do you remember about Kara?”

“She was pretty. Her nose was big, but she had long, black hair. She was an outcast at school, into pagan, wicca stuff. It’s no surprise that she would bring out a Ouija board.”

“What did you think about it?”

“To me, it was a big joke, kids just goofing around.” Lawson paused for another few seconds. “You know, Kara had a lot to do with why we were even there in the first place.”

“Why is that?”

“We all went to high school at Claiborne, so I’d seen her at school before. She was a couple of grades behind me. When her brother asked me to take them to Kill Devil Hill, and I heard his sister was going, I wasn’t about to say no.”

I pulled a manilla folder out of the leather bag at my feet. I set the folder on the table, flipped it open and scanned my copy of the original Sheriff’s department report on the incident.

“The other three people there were Cathy Merriweather, Meghan Caldwell and Brooks Paget,” I said.

“That’s right,” Lawson said. “Brooks and Meghan were boyfriend-girlfriend, and Jimmy liked Cathy. All five of them were friends. I was the outsider.”

“They weren’t just friends,” I said. “Two of the girls – Meghan and Cathy – were related, right?”

“They might have been cousins or something,” Lawson said. “I don’t remember. That was a long time ago.”

“Brooks was the football player?” I prodded, already knowing the answer.

“That’s right,” Lawson said. “If memory serves, Halloween fell on the Monday night right after the end of football season. Claiborne lost at home to Escambia County in overtime. I didn’t attend.”

“What happened after Kara set up the Ouija board?”

“We started playing around with it,” Lawson said. “You know, like you see in the movies. I thought it was a bunch of crap. You know those things used to be sold to little kids all over the country by toy companies?”

I nodded. “When did you know something wasn’t right?”

Lawson seemed hesitant to say more. “The first odd thing that I noticed was that the night sounds had gone quiet,” he said. “The few birds and insects that you hear that time of year went totally quiet. It was also a clear night, but when I looked up from the Ouija board, I couldn’t see any stars. I initially thought that the light from the campfire had screwed up my night vision.”

“What next?’

“We were sitting there with our fingertips on the plastic thing that moves around the board,” he said. “When I looked down from the sky, I looked across the board at Brooks and saw something I couldn’t explain.”

“What was that?”

“His head was missing,” Lawson said. “Where it should have been, there was nothing but a bloody stump.”

(All rights reserved. This story is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.)