I dropped the white sage bundle into the campfire.

The remains of John Burnberry’s alleged cabin made a striking, lonely contrast to the majestic Eagle Caps in this northeast corner of Oregon. He had built it with his hands and his trusty axe and the strength of his body, the people telling tales in Joseph had said.

You’ll need an off-road vehicle to get up there, if you can find it. You might try packing up there with a horse and guide. That shack of Burnberry’s stays hidden. You don’t want to go up there, that’s bear country.

It was both magical and prone to bears? I am become Goldilocks, destroyer of ghost cabins.

The stink of sage should bring the ghost himself out of hiding. My mother had dropped her bundle of white sage in the fire pit. Her last book, the most popular in her signature series, had been based off the encounter she claimed had happened. She had not bothered to record this meeting or write any of it down; she returned to Malibu after camping for about a week in the actual wilderness of Hells Canyon without recording a single detail of her stay.

The start of her last Anna Marsh family chronicles had been hand-written on a notepad she kept for grocery lists or things to tell Vincent she needed or wanted.

Vincent Helms had not returned with Selma Kirby, my mommy, from her excursion slash research jaunt into the wilds of Oregon. He had instead parted ways with her. Vincent, a trained photographer and all-around adoring little toad, had decided to go off to Tahiti to snap pics of endangered turtles.

Did anyone else think this odd, strange and out of character except me?

My mother had remained at her modest Malibu home for a night before flying off to the south of France, Avignon——to write her last novel, The Silky Forest, an Anna Marsh Family Chronicle. Precisely a month after the supernatural romance rolled out for purchase, my mother sent me a text she had uterine cancer.

She died after Christmas, in hospice care in a country quite far from my St. Augustine home in Florida. Of course, she remained spitefully angry over my op-ed in the LA Times about what a Mommie Dearest she was. The editor, fired for that stunt, works now in an Iowa Starbucks or runs the rollercoaster at the MGM Grand there in Vegas. It depends on how much power you wish to grant my mother.

Her sales dipped. She had to do damage control. Her charm and sincere bewilderment worked wonders with her startled, wary fans. They embraced her, sometimes literally at her book tour readings, and forgave her for having such an ungrateful shit of a daughter.

I shook myself.

After all, my very long journey to Oregon, to find John Burnberry’s falling down heap of old boards, mold, and mice nests, needed to end with me triumphant. I would debunk her ghost claim and she would have to admit that on her next book tour.

Oh damn it. I kept thinking she was alive yet. I missed our battles and the big war we fought from our lifelong trenches as mom and daughter.

Her claims to actually meet real ghosts, actual vampires, and shy, gentle werewolves were invented crud to drum up better sales. She had even claimed to meet a real angel while riding to and fro on a West Hollywood bus route. This alleged angel sighting had made it into her fourth book.

My mother wrote romance novels with a supernatural flair. Nothing too smutty, nothing too gory, with a single family featured as the main characters through seventeen books—The Anna Marsh Family Chronicles. She had done so at the expense of all else.

If she had embraced that, admitted she had treated me and her several husbands as annoying clutter, I would have accepted that.

Smoke bloomed and floated upward in the rare, good air. I smelled nothing but sage and pine. Chipmunks darted in and out of a cluster of lichen-smeared rocks. A hawk flashed by overhead. I heard the roar of the little stream that had to empty into the Snake. That narrow, dangerous river had cut Hells Canyon deep into the skin of the earth, deeper even than the Grand Canyon.

Something half-hidden and pale beneath long grasses and lupines caught my wandering eyeballs.

I pushed aside the grass to find part of a long bone. A thigh bone from a deer or elk? It had been broken open and what looked like teeth marks marred the already broken edges. This is a human bone, something in me said, and my hand released it, my hackles raised at such a thought at all. I did not know anatomy at all, least of all enough to tell a human bone from an animal one. I wiped my hand on my jeans.

Maybe it was Vincent, what was left of him.

My mother was a ruthless pro in the writing world, but she would not actually murder anyone, least of all an adoring toad like Vincent. But why would her biggest fan and personal assistant jet off to Tahiti? Why had she not replaced him? How long had she known she was sick?

The hospice workers there in Avignon had found an outline for book eighteen. It had spurred actual conspiracy theories that she had not died, but been murdered, by me at times, but mostly rival writers looking to end her reign.

I could write book eighteen but I doubt her loyal fans would gobble it up. I’d start it with a dream sequence in which all the supernatural characters performed illegal sex acts on the heroine in front of a herd of angels.

My mother would reassemble herself from her classy silver-embossed urn and smite me for such a blasphemy.

Holy shit, I missed her. I missed her. Even a bad mother is better than a dead one.

I used my foot to nudge at the earth and grass and wildflowers.

What looked like finger bones turned up beneath old pine cones and mounds of dead pine needles. Maybe a large raccoon had died here.

My heart thumped too fast. I had cold little bubbles in my belly. I shivered.

“Whatcha find?”

My throat nearly tore itself into shreds as I let out a sort of gaspy scream, my hand clutching at my chest like some old-timey opera diva. A low male voice from somewhere near the fire pit had said that.

I turned around, the skin of my face hot and tight.

The man had to stand six-five, basketball player height. Brawny build, with a rounded bulwark of a belly that those wrestler-type men can get. Big bands of muscle, not the sunken gut of a starved gym rat with a six pack. This man had earned his muscles swinging that big axe he had resting against his leg. A weird Civil War sort of blouse, tucked into jeans that fastened with buttons, covered his upper half. The color seemed somewhere between snot and smoke. For a moment, that chest became churned hamburger and swinging intestines. I could see clear through him to the falling down shack the state of Oregon had let rot in peace.

Each eye had a dot of red in it.

Now, this was either a real ghost or an actor strayed from some Oregon Trail re-enactment. I got my head back on straight, ignored whatever hallucination had been caused by snorting up gallons of white sage smoke.

“Some raccoon bones. I’m looking for John Burnberry’s cabin. Is that it? I heard he was murdered out of jealousy by Skid Row Kate.”

“Honey, he was killed by Scar-Nosed Kitty,” said a woman’s tones behind me and the man gave a nod to whatever stood at my back. “Johnny there, now—he was steppin’ out with Millie and Pearlie June. I didn’t mind that, but I did mind he bragged they were prettier than me and better at making a whiskey pie. He loved to eat, ole Johnny there. He surely loved to eat.” A laugh sounded that raised every hair on my head.

My head swung about so I could see this woman with the hell dimension chuckle. Tall, around six foot or more, with long hair twisted into a single braid and cloth trousers instead of a dress. A long dark blue shirt and necklaces that hung down to her waist, mostly beads and what looked like black feathers, completed her ensemble.

It was her face that drew my attention, as her nose had a deep red scar across it. She was not pretty—a countenance round as the moon, bulging clear eyes, no discernable eye lashes and fierce thick brows that met over that mangled nose. Her grin sent me away from her—she was not sane and she was dangerous.

My instincts picked up on that right quick.

“I’m sorry, that must have been awful,” I mumbled out, trying to keep them both in view, trying to edge toward the rented ATV, parked in the shade of a giant pine tree, my hand going to the keys in my back pocket. Oregon had its share of crazies, after all. Maybe the Joseph ghost story tellers liked to send annoying tourists out to meet the ‘bears’ that lived by the magical cabin no one could find.

I concocted an elaborate fantasy about this Oregon couple, wearing pioneer-era clothes, murdering tourists foolish enough to seek out geographical locations supposed to be teeming with ghosts. It would be a poorly written Hollywood schlockfest, with a C-level cast, shot over a couple days in Canada.

I’d write it, of course. It paid the rent and the bills and my mother’s name opened doors for me. Screenwriter that can pump out the words, sometimes teacher for creative writing and film studies——with my mom’s name used to get past the form rejection emails, if the callous fucks even bothered to send out rejection notices.

Mama Monster had pointed that out in our last actual face to face.

Willy Kirby, you can’t use my name and dick me around in that damn Times rag

I sure can, mom——after which I stormed out, never to see her alive again.

“Bide a spell. I sure do like the stink of this.” John Burnberry yanked a derelict log over. He sat, watching the flames and the smoke, a combination of Gary Cooper, Sam Elliot, and evil Santa. “Don’t mind Kitty. She’s a bit hungry, is all. We haven’t eaten since last year or so. Time gets away from ya round here.”

I gulped a bit, wondering if I should offer them some granola bars. I had brought cans of chili, some beef jerky, granola bars, and water and whiskey. Just in case I wanted to toast my success at not finding any ghosts.

“I guess we should ask what you’re doing here.” Kitty picked up the small bones, let them bounce and rattle in her palms as if she held dice, not something that had once been inside something living. “Poor thing, got scattered to kingdom come. I used to be neat as a pin.”

“We did promise to bury what was left.” John lifted an ass cheek, let loose a juicy blast of gas. My last girlfriend had been that natural and gross with her bodily functions. A farting ghost was new to my list of go-to monsters, ghouls, creeps, and villains. “That your mama? Showed up here with that little man? You look a bit like that woman with the dark hair and the white streak. Come sit! You gonna try to get to that machine over there? Loud awful thing. You hear em all over anymore. Even when sleeping. You can’t sleep deep anymore.”

“Come on, now, honey. Sit. You got a name other than dinner?” Kitty took my arm, tucked it through her arm, and it seemed blood slimed me the moment our bodies bumped. I saw blood cascading down from a ragged gap cut into her hairline and forehead——rather like someone took a chop at her head; white-gray matter smeared with red in that gap.

Scar-Nosed Kitty smiled at me as she led me toward her lumberjack lunatic fella. No blood cascaded down from a rift in her forehead.

I sat. John stared into the fire, watching the sage smoke, and Kitty went to stand on the opposite side, humming beneath her breath as if content and at peace. My entire body hummed with energy and the need to flee this, get back to the Boise airport and go home. Just forget this feud with my dead mother and write a real screenplay that would win me awards and glory for all time. I didn’t have that kind of talent, but a girl can dream big when she’s faced with strangeness.

“I’m Willy Kirby. People know I’m up here.”

“Willy. That short for something?”

“Are you really John Burnberry? Because he’s dead. For over a hundred years,” I countered, willing myself to finish this, survive it and get back to surf, beach, and final notices. I had maxed out my Visa getting here; worth it to win one against mom, just fucking worth it. “Did you two talk to my mom? She’s kinda famous. Was. She’s dead, too.”

A sting in each of my eyes over stating that at all. Both observed me with their red-dotted gazes, which had no color. Clear eyes, like plastic wrap, with a red dot in each center rather than a pupil. Contact lenses could do that. Hollywood tricks could do that. I refused to let myself believe I perched on a log with two ghosts nearby. My sanity struggled to fly away into the blue bowl of the sky.

“She rode up here on a horse, with the little man. We can take pictures of all this, she told the little man. Oh my gosh, it’s just so gorgeous. Set up the camp, Vincent.” John stretched out his hand, let the smoke drift through it. I saw that. I saw the smoke go through his hand, not around it. “That about right, Kitty ole girl? I get mixed up.”

“Yep, you telling it just fine,” Kitty ole girl responded, bending to remove a carving knife from her boot. The blade looked rusty and pitted, until the sun revealed the shiny metal as whole and perfect. “We watched the black-haired woman and the little man for near two days. We laughed fit to be tied over them trying to set up a tent. She wanted to tell our stories, she kept calling out. John decided we should introduce ourselves proper, he’s a gentleman, through and through.”

“I am not,” John laughed and my skin humped into goose bumps. He reached over and patted my arm, as if trying to let me know it wasn’t going to get nasty just yet.

My mouth dried up, my teeth caught at my inner lip. His touch made me feel icky. His touches made me want to shower with a bottle of bleach and douche myself with Lysol just in case some of that icky had crawled inside me.

“Third day of her calling for us and burning the same sage, we showed ourselves. We told our stories, we told her lots of stories and the little man was our price and she paid. We ate the little man’s horse as well. Horse is a tough meat.”

I wet my lips as best I could.

Had he just told me my mother had handed over Vincent as some sort of price for some stories? Why did I feel worse for the horse?

“What sort of stories? Why the horse?”

“You get hungry, you eat what’s there. Stories about living up here. Trying to find gold. Trying to survive the winters. Falling in love with the local girls.” Here John threw a nod and a wink to Kitty, who winked back. Blood poured from the wound in her head. It seemed an endless flow. Surely no person had that much blood in them. It had to dry up. “I even told your mama about cutting up my partner when the meat and beans ran out. I couldn’t find an elk or a deer or even a stray cat. We fought and I won. I hung him between two trees, like you would a hog or a steer. I wept the whole time, but I was hungry.”

“Okay,” I waved my hand, oddly sympathetic to this trite tale yet not wanting details. “You told my mom about that and she still wanted more? She wrote nice love stories with nice ghosts in them. No gore, no cannibalism, nothing like that.”

“I told her the truth, Willy. I took her inside that cabin and let her see me. I let her see all of me because she was afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“Dying,” Kitty supplied when John Burnberry returned to staring at the smoke. “She told Vincent to stay here and she went away. Obedient little dog, that one. Now, Vincent, you stay here, your ma told that little man. You come back down when they’re done with you. Tell em I went to Tahiti, he told her back, tears dripping down his face. I always wanted to go there, he said.”

My mind short-circuited. I had not heard that. This was not happening at all. Acid had been added to the white sage bundle or some other substance, that when burned, produced vivid hallucinations. That made more sense than this.

John’s hand gripped my arm, his fingers cool and powerful. “It was quick. I don’t like making dinner suffer. He didn’t have time to do much more than grunt, truth be told. Kitty skinned him out and we ate proper that night and several nights after. I never stop being hungry. I wish I did. I wish I knew how to stop being hungry.”

I had lost track of Kitty. I had been watching John, distracted by his hand on my arm, by his low deep voice almost putting me to sleep with his deadly version of fairy tales. By the way the sunlight let me see he had the substance of a bubble.

The knife blade glanced off my rib.

My scream punctured through whatever spell John had cast on me. I twisted about and up, trying to knock that big knife from Kitty’s hands. I heard the swish of an axe being swung and I ducked, just in time, before John took my head.

I thrust myself backwards, nearly stepping in the sunken fire pit, but I made it to the long grasses and wildflowers; sprawled out, bleeding, my hand pressed to my left side, my blood warm and disgusting against my palm. The two smiled down at me, each armed and ready to gut me or behead me or whatever they wished to do. They had time. They had this lovely, hard-to-get-to place. They had trees to tie me to so they could better work out how to turn me into a casserole.

John Burnberry licked my blood off Kitty’s knife, their red-dotted eyes fixed on me. I sat up, my side throbbing where I had been stabbed—a teasing stab, not a stab meant to end my life. He kept licking that knife, eyes closing. I watched a ghost nearly orgasm from licking my blood off a knife blade.

Get out of here, my mother whispered in my ear.

I heard her voice. My eyes caught sight of shadows that should not be there. Shadows in the open, standing in the long grass, standing among clumps of wildflowers. I saw Vincent Helms gathering up his own bones, his little rosebud of a mouth pursed in that way that told the world he had work to do, don’t bother him.

I had to make it to the ATV. I had the keys in my back pocket. I had removed them because I’ve lived in cities all my life and that’s just what you do. Get back to Joseph, get home, get a job slinging coffee to bring in some money while I waited for a teaching gig or a writing gig.

Get out of here, Willianna Vivian.

I stood as the two parted to stalk me. The sadness in John’s face scared me into near catatonia for a bit. He had to chop me up and turn me into a casserole. He had no choice at all. Scar-Nosed Kitty had embraced being a cannibal ghost, he had not. But I saw sorrow on her face, I saw regret and anger and a grief so deep I nearly fell toward it, to let them do what they wished so they could find some sort of peace.

Something slapped the back of my head. My mother had done that when I pissed her off. A light tap meant to startle more than physically hurt me. Vincent found his own skull half-buried near a clump of bright orange flowers. He pointed at the ATV before he disappeared, just vanished, the skull now gone, the flowers still there.

I ran toward the vehicle, trying to get the keys out of my back pocket, as the two ghosts walked after me. I fumbled the key into the slot and the machine roared to life, instead of that movie stereotype of the engine refusing to turn over. I screamed, I laughed, I floored the thing and it sent me into a tree.

Park in the shade, which meant you parked under trees, and if you forget to put the thing in reverse, you go forward. Stupid panicked me.

I flew off and landed on my stabbed side. The ghosts stood over me, looking over me, with the axe and the knife ready to go.

“Wait,” I lay there, stunned, in survival mode, catching glimpses of my dead mother in her favorite little black dress, and other ghosts stopping to watch my imminent murder. The entire clearing filled with spirits. Children stopped playing or tossing rocks. A little girl holding a corn cob doll, her eyes clear except for red dots in the center, nodded to me. An Asian man holding one of those pans you use to find gold in streams or rivers tilted his head, his long ponytail falling over his shoulder. A horse, with chunks missing here and there from its frame, bent that long head to graze.

My mind ticked away. Stories. I had stories to offer the world. I was my mother’s daughter.

“Kitty,” I sat up, my hands palm-out, ready to pitch to murderous ghosts. “Why not a book about you? Why can’t you be saved? In book eighteen? Your great-grandson will die in Korea if he doesn’t stay home or whatever! He’s an orphan cowboy. No. Stay back. Listen to me.”

My mother walked between me and the two ghosts. Her kitten heels made no dent in the earth or grass. I could smell her perfume. She had switched to Elizabeth Arden’s Green Tea ten years before her death. Sweet green notes floated up my nose. The same smell that marked our last meeting.

“Take an arm, John Burnberry. Let her write that story, Kitty. I’ll make sure my daughter will be allowed to write book eighteen in a contract someone will find soon. Deus ex machina, my dear Willy. I’m not a ghost for nothing,” and she looked at me with her clear eyes, the red dots like the side of a bing cherry. “I was going to let them kill you and trap you here in this damn meadow. Like my poor Vincent.”

I kept my lips closed rather than yell or scream at my dead mother. Had she planned this? Goaded me to expose her sad tricks at ghost hunting? To end my life and win the mother-daughter duel between us? I could not breathe or think. Her fingers ran over my lips, over my cheeks, through my short, filthy hair. Her perfume stuck to the hairs of my nostrils. I would smell it now for the rest of my life.

“I’m sorry, mom,” I whispered, the slime coating my soul telling me I’d survive this. Slime washes off, even souls. I told her what she wished to hear.

John Burnberry took my left arm with his fire-heated axe, the wound sealed shut with that same blade as Kitty carried off my twitching arm, raising it high in triumph. I fell downward and downward.

I woke up in the Baker City hospital, with my left side heavily bandaged. I flexed my right hand, my left hand no doubt scattered all over that clearing waiting for me to collect my own bones when my life ended. I would return to that place; my mother and her pet ghosts had damned me.

A nurse, cheerful of face and chubby-cute of body, bustled in, purple scrubs marking her as some sort of medical wizard. Her dark eyes swept me, her gaze ending on the drip that fed into my right arm. A needle in my vein that had to be straight morphine dulling the immense pain.

“Well, hey there. Can you tell me your name?”

“Willy Kilmer. How did I get here?”

“Ah. Some people camping nearby heard the engine rev. And then screaming. Police said you must have been in drive instead of reverse, you severed your arm, got to the fire pit, cauterized what was left and passed out. It’s front page news here. Let’s check that ticker. Mm.”

She listened to my heart, she tucked me in, she got me water and assured me I would live.

It’s been almost four months since then.

I dictated and mother typed. I applied for benefits and help, all of which got turned down, but I applied again. I wrote about a silly love story set during America’s Golden Age, as it were, as my stump healed.

My mother’s agent found a contract that had been put in the wrong folder or some such convenient shit. A percentage of sales will go to me, but most will go to the Oregon Historical Society, which helped her so much in her last few years understand the grand tradition of Oregon’s gold rush history.

My dead mother stood on the sidewalk in front of my apartment building, her face lifted to the near hurricane rains, her little black dress flapping just so in the fury of the winds. She vanished, as if never there at all. Her perfume soaks the walls of my apartment. Her book will go into final editing soon. It was never my book.

John Burnberry sat on my other folding chair, the chair creaking under his bulk. He held out his hand and I took it, his fingers like cool iron as they closed over mine.

“Willy,” he said, tugging me toward him a bit.

“I know. Overcome, bootstraps, fame and fortune out of tragedy, blah blah.”

His axe took my head. I felt the blade sever through my spinal column.

The press wrote that some “crazed fan” of my mother murdered me. Book eighteen became The Book to get. My mother, always with the PR stunts.

Selma Kirby and I sit in Burnberry’s lovely meadow, the shack collapsed now from snow and neglect and time. Vincent Helmes looked yet for his bones, but I felt no such compunction to find what had become of my left arm.

Death is a strange dream, a sort of misty existence, and I’ve yet to find heaven or hell.

“Did you know, Willy,” my mother shifted on the rocks we used for a perch. “I based Anna Marsh on you.”

“Great.” I watched as Kitty and John stalked a small herd of elk into the pines. “Did you send John to cut my head off?”

Her clear eyes, with the red dots, fell on me. She smiled. She laughed, banging her Jimmy Choo kitten heels against the rocks.

I will find a way to tell this story. I will find a way to be heard. I will not be some sensational segment in some true crime documentary that will be the number one streaming wonder for a day or two. I’m not a ghost for nothing, as my mother once told me.

I’m not a ghost for nothing.