Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World
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Synopsis
"At Last, an Authoritative Compendium to (Fictional) Haunted Buildings for the Delight and Exploration of Reader-Travelers Around the Globe."
For nearly forty years, renowned paranormal investigator Professor Charlatan Bardot has examined, documented, and acquired stories of haunted buildings around the world. Partnered with leading anthologist Eric J. Guignard, and gifted artists Steve Lines and James Gabb, the greatest of Charlatan's discoveries are made available now in this comprehensive travel anthology!
From the Philippines' tragic Ame-Soeur Clothing Factory, to Sweden's reverent Fish Church; from Tanzania's vengeful Unguja Restaurant, to Canada's cursed Crow Island Lighthouse, Charlatan Bardot presents a lifetime of experience and insight into paranormal architecture.
27 feature stories and 36 tiny tales are included of haunted temples, diners, hotels, shops, hospitals, outposts, theaters, and other building types, along with maps, travel notes, illustrations, and more, all designed to provide an immersive experience for veteran travelers and armchair ghost hunters alike!
Enter Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World and explore the strange and curious locales of the globe and of your imagination.
Release date: November 2, 2021
Publisher: Dark Moon Books
Print pages: 608
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Professor Charlatan Bardot's Travel Anthology to the Most (Fictional) Haunted Buildings in the Weird, Wild World
J. Guignard, Eric
OH MAN’S LAND
STRUCTURE TYPE: MILITARY OUTPOST
LOCATION: FERES, GREECE
LAT./ LONG: 40.9682° N, 26.3111° E
BUILT: CIRCA 1915
GROUND ELEVATION: 95 FT. (29 M.)
WRITTEN BY: NATALIA THEODORIDOU
TRAVEL GUIDE NOTES
OPENING STORIES SET the tone for anthologies, and I’ve always considered carefully that for the casual reader, the first few pages of reading will instill an impression that is most likely going to linger with them for the rest of the book.
If the first story is funny, will there be humor in all the following selections? If the first story is gory, will there be blood splatter for all that ensues? If the first story is beautiful and emotionally resonant, can the same be said for all the others?
I say yes.
For such is the contemplation of this kickoff selection by Greek author Natalia Theodoridou, which sets the much-pondered opening tone. It’s a quiet ghost tale, rich in detail, vibrant yet melancholy, thoughtful, ephemeral. Haunting in an honest sensibility.
For the death of family may be the greatest loss we ever experience, and its absence never goes away. Family by blood, by choice, or by circumstance, it matters not when a bond of devotion is formed. It matters not to the pain when that bond is cleaved.
And it matters not when you’d do anything to see them again in “Oh Man’s Land.”
—Charlatan Bardot
ISALUTE A GROUP OF jogging soldiers as I make my way to the outpost at the far end of the camp. They respond with the appropriate deference and carry on sweating in their uniforms, their boots slapping the ground. It’s as hot today as it was back then, that first time. The cicadas are raising hell, crackling in the heat. If I close my eyes, my head feels light, I lose my bearings.
I can see the top of the outpost now, white as bone under the sun. My old legs seem like they’re about to buckle so I give them a moment, take my cap off, rest my palms on my knees and breathe in the fire and dust that’s coming up from the ground. The soles of my shoes burn.
Then I put my cap back on and start walking again, my mind drifting, unmoored.
***
IT WAS A peculiarly warm night. The “German number” shift usually had us bundle up with the night cold of the small hours, especially when our watch was at the last outpost of the Evros river delta before the Turkish border, the shooting range, then the “no man’s land.” I’d made the mistake of looking up the location online earlier that day. Egnatia outpost. Address unknown, number unknown, city unknown. No wonder the outpost’s nickname was Oh Man’s Land. I asked how it came about and the more seasoned soldiers mimicked the usual dialogue: “Where are you posted?” “At the Egnatia.” “Oh, man.”
2–4 a.m. was a brutal time to be awake, even in summer, even for someone as young and resilient as I was back then. But that night, the air felt viscous. There was no breeze, just a humid hand that made the roots of our hair ooze water, our skin loose and clammy, a strange, feverish shiver in the teeth.
I was supposed to keep watch with a new recruit named Leventis so I, the more experienced one, seeing how I had made it through half my mandatory service, waited for him outside the dorms. The path to the last outpost was treacherous, the ravine yawned too close, and it was always better to navigate that route with two pairs of eyes than one. After a few minutes, I gave up and made my way there alone.
The outpost was near the deepest gaps in the ravine, but you could still hear the water gurgling below. It was a simple structure, like most outposts: a small, squat box set on a barred platform and propped up on steel legs. A tin roof, a rusty ladder. The barbed wire of the camp’s edges was visible from the outpost window—no real window, just a cutaway on the thin white wall, like a gouged eye. Beyond the wire, a tiny chapel, inaccessible through the camp and right on the edge of the ravine, but well preserved, with its candles always lit, though no one ever saw people visit it, and nobody could tell you which path would take you there and spare you a death by a steep, mouthless fall into the deep.
When I got to the outpost, the other soldier was already there.
He stood up as soon as I stepped in. There was something heavy in his demeanor, as if he’d already kept watch for a while. “What took you so long?” he asked.
“Are you Leventis? I was waiting for you, back at the camp.”
He looked at me with a dark eye. “Oh, man. Sorry. I was posted here. I didn’t know. I’m Costas.”
“Alexandros.”
“Welcome to Oh Man’s Land.” He laughed.
We shook hands. I remember it well. His were cold and dry, the skin cracked. Mine sweaty.
I noticed he was wearing a jacket, a solid khaki, not the usual camo. “Aren’t you dying in that?” I asked. “It’s sweltering in here.”
He shrugged. “I don’t mind.”
We settled against the outer wall with the stars for a roof and shared a smoke. There is a special bond that comes from sharing these small hours with another body, under the naked sky. I’ve felt it since then, again and again, but never as strongly as that night.
We could both sense it, like an animate thing, growing between us, but we papered over it with small talk, as we are wont to do. Where are you from, what do you want to study, what job are you going to do when you’re released.
“I’m thinking of staying on,” I said. “Take the exams.”
“Ah,” he sighed. “A professional military man. I never got the appeal.” He rubbed his shoulder as he pondered the riddle of me. “You from a military family?”
“Far from it. My father was dismissed for health reasons. My brother was a conscientious objector, even.”
“Was?”
The cicadas paused for a moment, letting the question hang in the air.
“How did he die?” he asked again, sparing me the answer.
“He drowned in a river.”
“We have a river here, too,” he said.
“Yes.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes.”
He took another cigarette from the breast pocket of his jacket, lit it, and offered it to me.
It tasted stale, like old paper, or like nothing at all.
***
WAS I REALLY surprised the next morning when I found out Leventis never showed up for his watch? That there should have been no one else out there at the outpost with me?
I still wonder why I wasn’t, sometimes. And what would be the point of lying about that, these days, after everything?
The next time I was posted there, I reassured my tired watch-mate that it was okay if he napped, and promised I would wake him up well before the next shift arrived. He also asked me to alert him if anything strange happened.
He didn’t mean visitations from friendly spectral soldiers, of course.
Costas appeared as soon as I settled outside with my back to the cool wall. His cigarette was already lit and hanging from the corner of his lips as he approached. He sat next to me, the smoke from his ghost cigarette drawing rings that he blew like small lassos toward the flickering stars.
“So you know, now,” he said, and I nodded.
“It explains the weird uniform,” I replied. They hadn’t used those in the army for decades, and it was too warm for the season, anyway. “Was it cold when it happened?”
He nodded. He opened his jacket and showed me the bleeding wound there, on the side of the heart. Then, he pointed at the edge of the camp, toward the no man’s land.
I looked, but all I could see was the empty field, glowing faintly under pale light. “I can’t see anything.”
“Look,” he instructed. “You’re not looking.”
So I did and, finally, I saw.
The tall figure awash in moonlight, standing alone near the wire. On our side? Or on the other? And was wire enough to tell them apart?
The figure raised his arm and waved. In camaraderie, I thought. In haunting. Costas waved back.
“You see, I had a brother, too,” he said.
“What happened?”
“The army ate him like it eats us all.” He paused. “Like it will eat you, too, sooner or later.”
I asked and learned about it after that. The soldiers on either side of the border would sometimes exchange small gifts: cigarettes, feathers, pretty pebbles from the river. Costas and Selim had become friends—more than friends; brothers, even, fingers sliced and pressed together to mix their blood.
Then an incident in the Aegean spread tension across the entire border. Someone made a mistake; a shot was fired. Then another, and another. Costas and Selim had killed each other. “Oh, man,” everyone who knew them had said. “Oh, man.”
***
I WASN’T SENT to the outpost again after that. I don’t know if my shift-mate had heard me talking to someone outside and reported it, or if it was chance that spared me. There were rumors about me, regardless; was it my shift-mate that started them, or something mumbled in my sleep, or, perhaps, something in my face, the corners of the lips, the eyes? Others went and often came back muttering about strange lights in the night, the sound of digging, the smell of old cigarette smoke in the air. I never said anything, neither confirmed nor denied the rumors. People picked on me, and there was even that time with a sheet and some woo-woo sounds in the night meant to scare or ridicule me, or both. I still said nothing. Laughed at their jokes, shared my cigarettes, man, oh man, such a good sport.
When my mandatory service was over, I passed my exams and was sent to Corinth, then Crete, then Lemnos. I went wherever without protest, to all the postings no one else wanted. I never had to shoot anybody. I lingered near rivers in my free time, hoping for a glimpse of my brother’s ghost walking into the water, his pockets full of stones. He never indulged me.
When I heard a young man had killed himself with his rifle at the Egnatia outpost, I put in a transfer request. It was easy; what senior officer would ever choose to go to the border of their own accord? Only drifters and daredevils, running from ghosts, or chasing them. They said the boy who took his own life had been stationed at the outpost every night for an entire week. He spent his last hours rambling about a figure in no man’s land with a hole in the middle of the forehead.
***
I KNEW THEY had ordered the outpost blocked off, but I had to see for myself.
Now, finally here, under the unforgiving light of the sun, it is worse than I imagined: the windows bricked, concrete poured to fill the interior so no one could use it as a hiding place. But then why does it feel more like a tomb, a mausoleum meant to keep someone in rather than out? When I asked why they did it, they told me it didn’t seem right to tear it down.
“Why not?” I had asked.
“Oh, man,” was all they would say, with a shrug. “Oh, man.”
***
WITH TIME, I almost feel happy here, or at least content. I rarely leave the camp, driving to the city only for necessities, never for company. I often wonder what happened to Costas. At night sometimes I sneak out of the unit and visit the dead outpost. I light a cigarette and wait, breathing in the cool night, though I’ve long quit smoking. He never graces me with his presence. I put my ear to the wall and listen for his shuffling steps, his deep sigh, but there’s nothing. I think of him palming his bleeding heart, alone. Was he trapped there? Or set free?
I do see his brother across the field, though. He stands there under the lenient moonlight, the ghost of a bullet hole in his head. I raise my hand; in greeting or farewell, I’m not sure. In camaraderie, maybe, in haunting.
He doesn’t wave back.
DID YOU KNOW?
NATALIA THEODORIDOU is a World Fantasy Award-winning author, a Nebula Award Finalist, and a Clarion West graduate (class of 2018). Natalia’s stories have appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Uncanny, Fantasy & Science Fiction, Black Static, Nightmare, and The Dark, and have been translated in Italian, French, Greek, Estonian, Spanish, Chinese, and Arabic. An immigrant to the UK for many years, he has recently returned to Greece. For details, visit www.natalia-theodoridou.com or follow @natalia_theodor on Twitter.
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