A Dead Ringer For A Black Fox: Part 2

Written by Brian Warf

Genres: Folklore, Ghosts and Hauntings, Gothic, Horror, Occult, Psychological, Supernatural, Weird

Errol Sheridan thought his time as caretaker of Henry Blankenship’s estate would be spent in solitude—until the black fox returned. A sinister omen, the fox leads him deeper into the mystery of the ringing bell, which calls out from Blankenship’s grave even when no one is there to pull the rope.

Only snow covered the top and skirted the bottom of the tombstone. The light then reflected off something just on the other side. Something that was small and shiny, glinting in the darkness.

When I stepped closer, I saw that it was a small bell dangling in the air, suspended on one end of a thin rope attached to a pulley contraption with the other end of the rope going into the ground. The bell suddenly began to ring, shaking and jingling as if by its own accord. I stepped around the girth of the tombstone, and the full sphere of the lantern’s glow fell across the grave. There, standing atop the freshly churned mound of dirt near the façade of the tombstone, was the black fox.

The bell rope was clamped between its teeth as it yanked and tugged, causing the bell to clang incessantly. I was not surprised to see him, for I’d thought of him as soon as I’d seen the tracks.

However, to my surprise, I found that it was this creature that had caused the bell to ring on that night and likely the ringing of the night before.

Though I had a pistol, it was packed away in my bags. I found the contraption to be very bothersome when trying to load with powder and pellet, so I hardly touched the loathsome thing. Yet, it was the second thing I thought of after seeing the black fox again. The first thing I thought of was making it leave.

“So,” I said, deepening my voice as I had the belief that it would make me sound more fearful.

“’Tis you making all this racket with this annoying bell. Hmmm?”

The fox looked at me, eyes blazing red in the sudden light, and it growled avidly, as if it were as annoyed as I was. Had I had the pistol on my side, I do believe that I would have fired it into the air or ground just to make the fox scamper off, for somewhat startled I was, but I did not yet feel threatened. In the very next moment, I did feel a threat from the little beast as I stepped closer to it. It let go of the bell rope, growled angrily at me, and snapped its teeth not once but twice.

“Here, here,” I said. “’Tis I who should be growling at you and snapping my jowls.”

The fox took a step toward me with its head bowed and eyes glaring. I raised my other arm up, even with the lantern, and braced myself, for I was sure that it was going to pounce. Instead, it trotted off.

I watched it run away until I could no longer see it. Relieved, I turned back to the grave and as the light fell on the tombstone, I read the name:

HENRY LEE BLANKENSHIP
1753-1842

I needed only to see the name to confirm whose gravesite it was. I’d already suspected as much from what Archibald had said to me of graves and local superstition and bells. Most importantly, I remembered that he’d said that Blankenship was the last to go at that time in those parts.

The lantern’s light hastily went out. It was as if a strong wind had stridden by. Yet, there was no wind to speak of. There was only the still of the moonlit night.

Unnerved, I began the long trek back to the house, which looked very small to my eyes at that distance. Though it was a large, righteous abode in the sense of aesthetic excellence. I trudged through the snow carrying the lantern that had become useless to me.

I had gone perhaps a hundred feet when the bell jingled for no more than two seconds. I halted and looked back toward the cemetery, half expecting to make out the black fox jumping around in there. I did not and thought it rather odd that the bell sounded out when still I felt no wind upon my skin, only the numbing coldness of the snow at my thin-booted feet. Surely, I thought, I would have heard the footfalls of the creature in between my own if it had gone back to the cemetery.

I walked on when the confounded bell tootled again. It was a series of rings that time, in three successions of several seconds apiece. Again, I stopped and peered blindingly at the cemetery.

I took a couple of steps back toward the cemetery and listened, waiting again to hear the bell. When I did not hear it after twenty seconds or so, I moved on toward the house and traversed the vastness of that snowy field for the second time. I had gone near another hundred feet when again I heard two chimes of the bell. Whereas there had seemingly been a sense of urgency with the first three rings as I’d left the graveyard behind, these two further rings sounded almost weak, for lack of a better word.

Once more I stopped and gazed blindingly the way of the cemetery. Though the moon was nearly full, it was too far to see any details and as I stood looking around in the dark, I surmised that I may as well have shut my eyes and I would have fared much the same.

I thought that it had to be the black fox again ringing that bell for whatever reason. I was tempted then and there to go back, run the fox off again, and take the bell for myself, yanking it free from the rope as if it were an unwanted weed amid a flower bed. As I stood there, contemplating whether to take the bell or not, I was getting colder by the second.

“Damn the little beast,” I thought.

I decided to hell with that fox and bell and resumed my path. Soon, I came near to the house, just outside a stone’s throw to the back door when I ran almost directly into the black fox. As I approached the back lot, I saw it sitting off to the side. I supposed that it must have taken a long route back across the field to the house without me noticing it in the dark. I was rather startled at the dark shape lumbering not fifty feet from me in the field as it stood up on all fours. As still as a doorstop it was, and though not very large, it was quite imposing in the dark.

I took a few steps more, halting near the rear veranda and just as the crunching sounds of the snow ‘neath my feet left my ears; the jingling and jangling sounds of the far-away bell entered them once more. Very faint it was this time and only lasted for perhaps two heartbeats. I looked back toward the cemetery, barely able to make it out in the moonlit void of the great field. I then looked at the shape that was the fox and something colder than the night sent a shivering chill up my spine. It was a thought.

If the black fox sits there, then who rang that bell?

This I contemplated for the remainder of the evening as I found myself sitting and stoking the fire in the parlor, too unnerved to go right back to bed.

Nearly a fortnight came to pass, and I did not see the black fox, nor did I hear the tootling of the bell. I had fallen into a routine of performing my daily duties and reading in Mister Blankenship’s library, for he had an extensive collection of books, many of them from foreign lands. I sometimes read in bed at night until I fell asleep, and it was on one of those occasions, some thirteen days after I had arrived, that I saw something that remains etched in my mind to haunt me unto my dying breath.

Now, I am not much for drink, other than a sip or two of wine at social gatherings; so, it was out of pure boredom when I had a bottle of whiskey delivered to me along with my regular goods from the general store. It was brewed by J.W. Wadsworth, a fellow out of New York who had just recently started pushing a sauce he’d invented for slathering steaks. A sauce for steaks? Who had ever heard of such a thing? My point is that the bottle of whiskey had come from a highly reputable place. It was also tightly-corked, so I do not believe it was tainted with any mild poisons. I do not believe that there was anything in the bottle added to the straight whiskey to make me have the first of several hellish visions that I saw starting on that night. It came to me much like a fever dream. Though, I was not sick and thus, had no fever. This first terrible vision I will tell you of now.

It began, I suppose, with the uncorking of the whiskey bottle and pouring myself a few drops. I sipped on the spirits for no more than a half-hour or so in the parlor next to the crackling fire with a book in my hands. Having had only a few sips, I was far from drunk, only sleepy and relaxed I became and so went upstairs to the master bedroom to retire. All was quiet until I heard a sound that interrupted my slumber and jarred me slightly awake.

The bedroom door creaked open as if the hinges themselves were yawning. I heard a pattern of footfalls tapping and scraping across the floor from the door to the foot of the bed. Still, I was not awakened fully and it was then that I heard the distinctive sound of a man clearing his throat in an ‘ahem-harumph’ not once, but twice.

Even still, I could not fully awaken. The blankets were then lifted from my upturned feet, and I felt ice-cold fingers poke both, for I was lying flat upon my back. My eyes stirred ever so slightly, the lids seeming to me then heavier than they had ever been in all my days. When I opened them, still not fully aware if I was asleep or awake, I could see the orange, flickering glow of the fire in the room’s fireplace staving off the darkness.

At the foot of the bed, there stood the black shape of a man. His staring eyes were shimmering like two small burning coals floating in the air. I was terrified, but still, I could not fully awaken or even move. Though, the black shape could move, and it did, walking from the foot of the bed to just beside me before coming to a halt. Into the glow of the fire, this thing came, and it no longer reeked of shadows, for I could see its form as it truly appeared.

It was the spirit of one Henry Lee Blankenship. I had never met the man, but I knew in the depths of my soul it to be true that it was him. Rather, what was left of him. I recognized him from the oil portrait of Blankenship that hung in the parlor above the fireplace. The form beside me stood tall and thin, but hunched in a fancy, black burial suit. White hair capped his head, his eyes sunken within dark circles. His jaws were also sunken, the skin as pale as a cloudy afternoon. He smelled of musty earth and death.

I wanted to ask him what he wanted of me just as much as I wanted to know whether I was dreaming or not. Being unable to move, I was also unable to speak. I then heard the hollow voice of Blankenship’s remains.

“You sleep in my bed?” the spirit asked angrily with a scowl. His voice was equally as cold as his hand.

I could only move my eyes, and they stayed fixed on this pale ghost, never wavering. I could not even gasp.

“You sleep in my bed?” the spirit repeated. “And you did not answer my bell… You did not answer my bell… You did not answer my bell.”

Blankenship’s specter leaned over and lifted his arms toward me with his long, crooked fingers outstretched. The hands slowly came toward my neck.

“You did not answer my bell.”

Upon closing my eyes and gritting my teeth, I felt those cold, dead hands of Mister Blankenship wrap tightly around my neck. As soon as I felt the thumb bottoms press firmly against my Adam’s Apple, the sensation subsided. I opened my eyes again, and the specter was gone. So too did his smell leave after it lingered in and out of my nostrils for perhaps half a minute.

I am not ashamed to admit that I was too frightened to move at first. However, move I did, and I raised up in bed and looked around the room. Save for the immediate vicinity of the fire, it was most dark and drafty in the vastness of that bedroom. I stood crossing my arms and holding them tight as I went about the room.

Nothing seemed to me then to be out of place. I sat down on the edge of the bed, at a vigil I suppose, for half the night until I fell asleep, and it was unbeknownst to me when I did so. I woke up sometime after daybreak, feet flat on the floor, slumped over on my side with a stiff neck and sore back.

I dismissed the occurrence as nothing more than a ghoulish nightmare brought about by the consumption of the devil’s dew. It was the drink and the fact that I’d eyed the painting of Blankenship quite a number of times since I’d spent so much time in the parlor with a book. Though, the presumed, imagined spirit of him, I thought at the time, appeared just a bit older and frostier; it more than resembled Blankenship’s portrait. I thought at the time that this oil on canvas imagery also influenced my vision. How wrong I was I would soon come to find.

In the days to come, the snow moved on further North. It remained cold for those dry and windy days. So cold in fact that I had gone through more firewood up to that point than I had initially estimated.

Just three days removed from the Blankenship ghost incident, I decided to chop more firewood whilst it was rather sunny. By the time the sun began to dip down in the West, I had amassed a good pile of chopped wood. When I finished, I stood straight to soothe my aching back and looked at the woodpile, proud of myself for the burn-ready accumulation of small logs.

As I rested I saw something move in the field not far from me. I turned and saw none other than my frequent visitor from just over a fortnight before. It was the black fox once again. I presumed it was one and the same animal I had seen before since ‘tis such a rare occasion to see one.

It sat undaunted and still as it stared my way. I too stared back at it, which I probably should not have. Wild animals, they say, do not like it when a man makes eye contact with them, and its yellowish-orange eyes seemed to stare right through mine. I looked away and decided it best to look at him with glances instead. Then, it did the strangest, damned thing imaginable; it wrinkled its muzzle and growled at me not once, but twice. And with no provocation whatsoever on my part. Up until then, I thought we’d had a sort of mutual rapport. It turned up its bushy, black tail then and promptly headed for the woods.

That night as I slept warm and snug in a dead man’s bed, I was awakened by a chill in the air that ran lightly across my face. I opened my eyes and looked to the foot of the bed. Seeing nothing but the glow from the fire, I lay my head back down on the pillow. No sooner had I closed my eyes than I felt a wind again.

I looked across the room between the door and the fire. It was there in the flickering light where stood six small figures. Four girls and two boys, dressed in tattered rags, stared down at me with shimmering eyes and pale, blank faces that bore no expressions other than that of somber melancholy. I estimated their ages to be between six years and twelve years, a blonde girl looking to be the eldest. There was something else of them I noticed that was as strange as them being in the same room with me. When the light from the fire played on the wall behind them prominently, I could see through them.

I could also move freely, unlike the time of several nights before when the specter of Blankenship paid me a visit and I was frozen with shock. However, I was equally as shocked on this occasion, but chose only to raise up in bed. Though, just as with the otherworldly visitation by Mister Blankenship; I was unable to speak, as if the ability to do so was momentarily suspended. I could only gasp and even then I found it very difficult to take in a breath to do so.

“We have no bells to ring,” the eldest girl’s spirit muttered in a far-off tone.