It started when they put in the forms. That’s when he realized it was going to be hard. The concrete was drying between large slabs of wood and the bulldozer was passing through the sand that would eventually be the parking lot and somehow it had come across a pile of unused rebar, twenty odd feet in length. One side got caught in the ground, the other was flush against the oncoming wheel, and the bars coiled like snakes until abruptly they snapped loose and hit McDaniel in the forehead.

There was a horrible sound; it was actually his skull fracturing and his teeth breaking. He only taken his hard hat off for a moment, there was dirt somewhere in it irritating him. It was roughly then that Braxton started to get that unsettling feeling that things weren’t going to go smoothly in this building project.

Everything that could go wrong did. Every time they wanted to lay asphalt or concrete, it rained. Back home the company changed ownership, and they performed a three month audit of the building plans. When they were done, they decided to remove the decorative brick from the outside of the complex. Roughly ninety thousand had already been laid. Fuel prices soared and soon inflation ran rampant on every bottom line cost: materials, machinery and labor. Some of the bushes cleared away from site were found to have contained deer ticks, three landscapers had contracted Lyme disease and were filing disability claims.

Through it all Braxton had taken everything stoically, but he was at his limit.

There were bright spots though. It was a pleasant little town, completely alive now that his crews were there. There was an ancient dock, seemingly stolen from a painting, where lobsterman laid traps and swapped stories, and there was a local bar that everyone went to.

He had the exquisite pleasure of staying in a bed and breakfast, a site away from everyone else, and occasionally he was able to indulge himself in humble pleasures there. Tonight, he sat by the fire with a mug of hot cider, but there was someone there that he had never met. He was an old man, tall, stately, with puckered cheeks and mild liver spots. His eyes were lively, like light blue sparks, and he smoked a pipe that smelled of apple tobacco.

“You don’t mind me smoking, do you,” the man asked, and Braxton indicated that he quite liked the odor of it.

They said nothing for a while, and let the wind rattle the windows in their sills. Everyone else settled in and went to bed, but the man put more wood in the fire, and Braxton didn’t feel inclined to move.

He may have slept. He didn’t know. He was aware that time passed, quicker that was supposed. For some reason, the man spoke again.

“I should have introduced myself,” he said. “My name is John Stanwich.”

“I see that name everywhere around here,” Braxton said.

“We’re a very old family,” Stanwich said. “My father and grandfather were both military men, like me, and we went around the world, but somehow we knew we would end up back here. It’s a nice place if you don’t get too ambitious.”

“I wish I could enjoy it,” Braxton said.

“You must be with those fellows who are clearing out Deer Run to build that complex,” he said. “Town needs the work, but I’ve heard that things aren’t going too well.”

“It’s not much of a secret,” Braxton said. “I’m actually running the project, but it’s more than I can handle. I think I would be relieved if they kicked me off the project.”

“Not your fault,” Stanwich said, taking another puff of his pipe. “You’re not the first, won’t be the last.”

“I don’t understand,” Braxton said.

“Every now and then, someone tries to build on our land,” Stanwich said. “It never turns out.”

“Why is that,” Braxton asked.

“You’ve rode around town a while now, haven’t you,” Stanwich said. “Probably know every inch of this place. Didn’t you notice something? Something very strange for a small town?”

Braxton thought. The wind whipped a dead branch against the side of the wall.

“There aren’t any churches,” Braxton said finally.

“Exactly,” Stanwich said. “Its not that people don’t fear God around here, it’s just that they can’t get the building up. Only a few buildings have been constructed in the last half century and they’re places good men shouldn’t go, reservation casinos, bordellos and the like.”

“So why is that,” Braxton said again.

“It’s because the ground is cursed,” Stanwich replied after a long pause. “Probably hard for you to believe, I’d expect. People from the city, lot of times they don’t believe in the supernatural, they aren’t that close to nature, you see. But when you’re out here- it’s different. The thing about Maine is that the farther north you go, the fewer people there are, top third or so is all timber country, an unbroken stretch of forest. I’ve worked up there before, when I was young.

“You hear things in the woods at night. Things cry out, creatures that don’t sound like anything anyone has ever heard of before. You see tracks, footprints that you can’t find in any book. Sometimes in the camps, a man will die for no reason, no reason at all. But of course, this is all just an old man talking.”

“I’m a man that requires evidence,” Braxton said. “But I don’t shoot down a lot of ideas. I can’t imagine we know all there is to know about this Earth. But I’ve built a lot of buildings in a lot of places. This build is difficult, but I don’t see how it’s any different than any other place I’ve been.”

“But this is different,” Stanwich said, sitting forward in his chair. “This town, it goes back further than most American towns do. We remember the Manhattan purchase; think about how unfair it was to the natives, but the history books don’t talk about what happened up here. Up here we had Puritans, like they had in Massachusetts, and just like them we had our own witch hunts, except the people weren’t hunted for consorting with the Devil, they were picked because their land was desirable. So the mayor and his people were busy accusing folks and taking their land, but they didn’t want those people being hung and buried on the very land they were stealing, so they brought them here. They did this for years, until they stopped burying them, just left them dangling from the trees.

“For decades people shied away from here, the smell was terrible in the summer and in the winters there was no food, no farmers to sow crops. After a while, we got resettled, but they had problems building anything more complicated than a tent. Oh, if they tried long enough they could build a house, but the more people that came the worse the curse got. It has been within my lifetime that construction in this area has nearly stopped.

You see, this town was basically dedicated to the dead. It was their place. And as long as people continue to live on it, they are infringing on the claim the dead have to this place.”

“I will say one thing,” Braxton said. “That was a great story. You really know your history.”

“That’s the great thing about winter,” Stanwich replied. “It gives you time to think. Remember what I’ve said to you, lad. You’ll see signs. Just don’t ignore them.”

It was later that week that Braxton found the ropes, while they maintained the edges of the property. The rains had cleared away the overlaying dirt, and there they were, soggy, rotten, nearly as dark as the earth they were in. He pulled on one, for some reason curious, and it squirmed free of the mud, like a giant earthworm.

He was holding a noose.

It rained over the next few days, hard rain and cold wind, and nothing much got done. The shed where the wood was stored began to leak, and he got the men to patch it, but he started to feel like he was actually up against some unseen force, a will that didn’t want him to accomplish his task. The video conferences from the home office were getting more intense, he was over budget, over time, and for the first time in his career, he wondered if he was up to the task at hand.

Was it the old man and his ghost stories getting to him? Was that why sometimes at dusk, at the very edge of his vision, he saw figures flitting through the woods?

It was later in that month that he found the casino, tucked into the woods, the men at the door still as statues, only their yellow eyes moving. The front door hung unevenly. This was not like casino he had been to, more like a pool hall. He kept driving. Despite its quality, it was fairly new. What did they know that he didn’t?

Nighttime.

A flat ebony sky crowded the clouds out of sight. It was like an unfinished mezzotint, it soaked away the light from his flashlight, made it wan and almost ineffective. He was checking on the site, making sure the guards were awake, that the materials were put away and safe from vermin or moisture. In the dark, in front of the guard tower, he heard something rustling through the trash. He saw a flash of something bone white in the dark.

What was it?

He didn’t want to step forward but it was his job. The flashlight was a foot and a half long, solid steel. Enough for anything smaller than a moose or bear. Of course, whatever it was didn’t move like a bear. He thought of dead men hanging from the gallows, bodies emaciated, with teeth bleached by rain and wind.

It was a skunk. Before he could react it had sprayed him, and he stumbled backwards. Great. Now he wouldn’t be able to directly talk with his foreman or supervisors. More time lost as they would have to find an alternate way to communicate.

They cleared out a trailer for him and he worked there. One day, he heard the bulldozer engine rumbling and metal grinding on the scoop. He opened the door.

“What’s going on here,” he said.

“They’re trying to straighten that post up on the fence,” the man said.

Braxton craned his neck. There was a man in the bulldozer gently pressing the scoop against the corner post of their barbed wire fence. Braxton heard it first, a hundred yards of barbed wire starting to protest the strain.

“That idiot,” he cried, “If that wire snaps, it will decapitate them all!”

There was a sound like a baseball player hitting a home run and he stopped running and hoped. Someone cried out.

He had been scalped, and the bone had been shaved but he was alive, and he was the tallest of all the men. No one had died. Braxton gasped an inarticulate prayer. Someone was yelling for help, and they pressed a rag against the man’s head as he yelled in pain. He saw a man fingering a small cross, and murmuring a prayer.

“I want to speak to whoever is in charge,” he said and they patted him down and let him into the casino. They led him upstairs, and he ignored the gamblers and their devices. He didn’t like uncertainty, which is why he loved his job.

In the back room was a fat man with pock marks and a vest. As he wrote, he chewed on a straw that occasionally dripped saliva. He didn’t look up as Braxton was led into the room.

“What do you want,” he said.

“This might sound crazy,” Braxton said. “I’m heading up that new project in town, I’m sure you’ve heard of it, but I’ve had nothing but trouble since I’ve gotten here. People keep telling me- they tell me the land is cursed.”

The man raised his head. He was unreadable.

“You have possibly the newest building in town,” Braxton said. “I want to know how you did it.”

“Why should I tell you anything,” he barked.

“Because I’ll be bringing jobs here when I’m done,” Braxton said. “People need money to be able to gamble, right?”

The man nodded, leaned back in his chair.

“This must sound crazy to you,” Braxton continued. “But I’m starting to believe this place is cursed. Lately, I’ve started having nightmares, the worst nightmares- and I can’t build. I can’t build. Something is always happening. Am I nuts? Am I wasting your time?”

The man didn’t move for a moment. Braxton wasn’t sure what to do. His position was indefensible logically but still-

“You ain’t crazy,” the man finally said. “The ground is cursed. The shamans told me, the mayor told me, and I didn’t believe it, but they were right. There’s something you gotta do before you build, and everybody knows it.”

He got up, began to waddle over to him.

“Follow me,” he said. He went to the stairs and then through the people talking as he went.

“I don’t have to worry about you keeping your mouth shut,” he said. “The people that know about this aren’t going to do anything, and the rest of the town wouldn’t believe you. It’s not easy to do, but it’s something you have to do. You have to think about all the people whose livelihoods depend on you, all the benefits the town gets from what you do.”

He opened the door to the basement, and they plunged into the relative darkness, past rows of shelves and kegs of beer. At a certain point, the basement ceased to become overflow storage and became bare.

There was a room in the back where there was nothing but four filthy peeling walls and some boxes with records in them. The men began to move the boxes, exposing a grate in the middle of the floor. The man handed Braxton a flashlight, and he began to pull up the grate. He nodded at Braxton and he shone the beam down

Down

Down

-into the murky darkness, and things half digested

by the water. There was a dark slime on the walls of the grate, and the fabric of a long rotten garment. Braxton’s eyes narrowed in focus. There was a familiar lump, and then a sound died in his throat as he realized he was looking at the body of a child, curled up in a fetal position.

“It’s called a foundation sacrifice,” the man said. “I had to look it up. Turns out different cultures have been doing this for years, even in Western Europe not too long ago. Hell, India just outlawed it fifty years ago. To consecrate the ground, or appease the gods, or whatever, you have to wall in a child while it’s still alive before you can build. That’s the only way to build anything around here.”

He dropped the grate, wiped his hands on a handkerchief.

“I found the kid in a cancer ward,” he said. “Didn’t have to the heart to do it any other way. Pumped him full of drugs and put him down here. I’d like to think the drugs killed him before time did.”

Braxton backed away from him and his guards and leaned against the wall for support.

“It all depends on if you put your heart into what you do,” the man said after a while. “If it’s just a job you can walk away from it all, you can let others call you failure for a while, and you can lose some money and wait for another chance at a better time. But if you’re anything like me, if you stay up nights lookin’ for a better way to do things, and if you put your pride, your very soul into what you do, and you ain’t gonna quit until this thing is done…well, then there is no choice.”

“I can’t kill a child,” Braxton said weakly.

“If you keep trying its going to get worse,” the man said intensely. “You think it was easy for me? You think I’m some kind of animal? My men started dying. They had families that depended on them, this town depended on us- there was no choice for me. And if you stay here, there is no choice.

“It’s the dead, you see. They were just left here, left on the ground like trash, and they want to be acknowledged, and if you don’t do it, the problems will get worse. You can’t beat the dead, kid.”

He made a motion, and they moved the boxes back over the grate.

He couldn’t remember the nightmares when he woke up anymore, he just kept that unsettled feeling longer and longer in the day. The accidents became more intense, and a sense of inevitability began to haunt him. He had lost weight; eating on a stomach tight with anxiety was becoming impossible. Sleep fled him, and the phone calls from the home office were becoming omnipresent.

The building plans were in another a room, an informal shrine to something more and more unreal.

Something thudded against the side of the trailer. He came out slowly to Ashford frowning.

“Kids,” Ashford said. “Don’t know ‘em. Don’t know where they came from, but they’ve been throwing rocks at us all day.”

Braxton looked at them, in the woods laughing. It would be so easy. They were so slow-footed, and no one knew whose children they were, and the men were getting hurt daily, and help was becoming impossible to get, even with no other work being available in town. There were so many ways to get hurt at a construction site, heights, blades, electricity, so many ways. No one would prosecute, they knew better. There was a burlap sack by the table that someone had left, and part of the forms was unfinished a space about two by two feet wide.

He shook his head. This was crazy. To believe that the dead wanted revenge, to believe that old pagan customs still applied. This place was getting to him, he just wanted to go home. But…he couldn’t go home until the project was done-

It was warm for Maine when D’Angelo came, wiping dust off of his sleeve sporting a winter suit for a spring day. He shook hands with Braxton like he couldn’t wait for it to end. He looked around the office briefly, and with obvious displeasure he sat down.

“Well,” he said begrudgingly,” This was a project that looked like it wasn’t going to happen for a while, but you pulled it out, Braxton.”

‘You wanted me to fail,’ Braxton thought.

“Thank you sir,” he said.

“We anticipate the move beginning next month,” D’Angelo said. “The IT people will be in three weeks after that, and then we have rough timetable for everything after that.”

A man stuck his head in the trailer, utterly unaware of D’Angelo.

“We’re cleaning up out here,” he said, “I thought I saw a burlap sack or two in here a while ago. We’re out of trash bags, thought I’d grab ‘em.”

“No sacks here,” Braxton said. “And we should have trash bags, check with Tim.”

The man nodded and closed.

“So how did you do it,” D’Angelo said. “How did you turn this project round?”

Braxton did a humorless smile, shuffled his feet.

“It was no problem, sir,” he said finally. “It just took a little sacrifice.”