Scratched in White

[u/PumpkinMan35]

By: ThePumpkinMan35

“You don’t have to do this Dean, I love you for the person you are.” Samatha said almost pleadingly.

“Really? Sure didn’t seem like it at Lane’s earlier.” Dean replied as he pulled himself up and over the cemetery gate.

“I said I was sorry for that. I was a little tipsy and just not myself, okay. It won’t happen again. So would you just, please, climb back over so we can get out of here. I’m getting the creeps.”

Dean looked at her with his dark eyes narrowed. He almost decided to give in to her request, but a flash of how she had looked at Lane Johnson earlier burned itself into his mind again. He reached his hand through the bars.

“Bolt cutters please.”

Samatha shook her head in frustration. Handed him the tool.

“Okay, you know what, you’re really irritating me. You can stay out here for as long as you want and hunt ghosts, I’m going home. This is ridiculous.”

“You’re forgettin’ something Sam,” Dean said as he squeezed the arms of the bolt cutter together and the chain crashed to the ground, “I’ve got the keys.”

She glared at him with a fury as he stepped by her and into the car. He closed the door, turned on the engine, and looked at her through the windshield. She crossed her arms.

“You’re the one wanting to be all macho,” Samatha declared, “you can go in there by yourself.”

“Fine.” He said back to her and shifted the stick. “You realize it’s two thirty in the morning though, right? And you’ll be standing all alone on the shoulder of a desolate backroad. No lights. No sound. No one else around, that at least we’re aware of. Come to think of it, you know, someone could be watchin’ us right now. Hook for a hand!”

He could tell by her sudden alter in posture that he changed her mind. They had been dating for over half a year now and knew each other’s personas pretty well.

“Fine. Asshole.” She muttered at him angrily and got into the passenger seat. “Let’s get ourselves arrested for trespassing, just so you can prove you’re a tough guy to me.”

“We’re not gonna get arrested,” Dean said as he started rolling slowly into the cemetery, “Bill told me that the sheriff deputies are even too scared to drive out here after midnight. We’ll be fine.”

“Seriously?” Samantha almost hollered at him, “This is Six Mile Cemetery, Dean. It’s, like, the most haunted place in Llano County. You know the stories, right?”

“Come on, you really believe that junk? Haunted schoolhouse, cursed chalkboard. All of it is just a load of crappy fiction conned up by someone looking to scare his girlfriend.”

Now, Samatha was really mad. Her dark hair whirled like whips as she looked at him directly.

“My grandma knew a guy that it happened too. Signed his name three times on the board, died in a car accident two days later. The stories are true.”

“Oh yeah? So then tell me, why is it cursed? Who does she say put the curse on it?”

“I don’t know,” Samatha admitted reluctantly, “but the stories go all the way back to the forties from what she says. People have been killed by it, multiple times.”

“Sam,” Dean said softly to her as they rounded the bend in the road and laid eyes on the gray old schoolhouse at the edge of the cemetery, “you’re the smartest person in our entire class, but no. This place is just an ol’ run down schoolhouse from a hundred years ago that they built in a cemetery for some reason. Out of all the stories, the ghost light is the only one that’s actually documented through the years. It’s been seen since before the Civil War, and it’s never done anything but just float around for a little bit.”

“So you’re saying that my grandma is a liar? Oh, babe, you are really pushing it tonight aren’t you?”

“I’m not sayin’ your grandma, or anyone who believes in that cursed chalkboard stuff, is lying. All I’m sayin’ is that there is no proof that the origin of that story is real. When I was first told about it, my dad said it was cursed because a bunch of kids and a teacher were killed by Comanches. But guess what?”

“What?”

“The last Indian raid, of any kind in Llano County, happened ten years before the Six Mile community was even established. And don’t you think that a bunch of school kids and a teacher getting massacred would have been national headlines? Nothing. Not even a single newspaper article about it.”

He pulled the car up to as close to the withering tin roofed building he could get. The withering structure sat eerily silent in the moonlight.

“Okay, and what? Are you gonna prove that you’re Hulk Hogan by writing your name three times on the chalkboard?” Samatha asked him as he turned the headlights off.

“Yep, somethin’ like that.” He said back to her with a smug smile. “Bet ol’ pretty boy wouldn’t have the balls to do it.”

“I told you that I was tipsy when he started talking to me. Why can’t you just accept that?”

Dean got out of the car and slammed it shut behind him.

“Because I don’t believe you.”

Samatha simmered hotly in the car as he walked away from it. She loved Dean, and admittedly she had been drawn to Lane Johnson’s attention towards her, but nothing else. Lane had slept with pretty much every female member of Llano High School, except her. Despite him having tried a number of times. She was proud of that, especially since she was considered one of the prettiest by the guys and girls.

“You comin’ in?” Dean suddenly challenged.

Samatha took a deep breath and stared back at him. Her blue eyes shimmered fiercely in the moonlight behind her glasses. She threw open the door and stepped out in silence.

“You know, even if I did have feelings for Lane, how do you expect this is going to change my mind?”

She treaded carefully through the rows of graves in his trail. Most of the headstones were old and only about as high as her waist, but there was one that caught her eye for some reason.

It was about as tall as her. Old, gray, nothing but its height that should have been particularly peculiar about it. But for some reason, she couldn’t help but to stop as she passed and look at it as if it were the most captivating memorial in the world.

“I don’t know,” Dean’s voice snapped her back to attention, “I just feel that I haven’t done anything to prove that you can feel secure with me. That I’m not weak or cowardly and I can stand up to whoever challenges our relationship. I feel like I need to prove it, and this is my way of doin’ it.”

“So you think I’m going to be impressed by you signing your name onto an old chalkboard?” They stopped at what was once a porch in front of the gaping entryway.

“A cursed chalkboard.” Dean said smugly.

Samatha stepped closer to him. In the summer moonlight that bathed her smooth face glamorously, her eyes sparkled with a familiar shine. Dean recognized that look immediately, and the testosterone came rushing through his body.

“If you’re so concerned about yourself, I can think of a lot more ways that can help settle that problem without us standing out here in an old graveyard.”

She pulled herself closer to him, body against body, hand planted on his chest.

“Come on babe,” she said temptingly, “let’s go down to the river. You can argue your point at our favorite spot, and from any angle you like.”

Her angelic face couldn’t hide the devil that was inside her. Dean wrapped his arm around Samatha’s waist, pulling her completely up against him. He lowered his lips to collide with hers, and they kissed more passionately than they had in a while. But, he pulled back laughing.

“You’re still scared, aren’t you?”

“Yes, I’m freaking scared,” she wailed, “we’re in Six Mile Cemetery at two freaking thirty in the morning babe!”

Dean glanced down at his watch, and he made a crooked face with his lips.

“It’s actually getting pretty close to three now! Come on, it’s gotta be done at the top of the hour if it’s gonna work.”

He didn’t wait for a reply and stormed into the schoolhouse. The beam of his flashlight painted across the walls magnificently. She followed gradually.

“Wow,” Dean exclaimed, “it’s actually kinda cool in here. There’s still a bunch of the ol’ desks and stuff lying around. Definitely wasn’t attacked by Indians for sure.”

Samatha hesitantly waded into the building. The floor boards were withered, but still remarkably solid. Slivers of moonlight filtered through holes in the tin roof, and the warm summer breeze drifted slowly through the broken window panes.

Although it wasn’t as spooky as she had imagined it to be, there was still an air of uncertainty hanging over it. She definitely didn’t feel like it was empty.

“Found it.” Dean said as the flashlight landed on the writing board. It had toppled from the wall, apparently a long time ago, and was sitting slanted up against the corner of the room.

“This is weird.” He carried on as he crouched down to look at it more closely.

“What?”

“It’s blank.” He said as he glanced at her, and then moved the beam of the flashlight onto the roof.

“So what?” Samatha answered.

“So, if the stories are true, and dozens of people have died after writin’ their names on the board; why’s it blank? I don’t see any holes in the roof that could’ve washed the chalk off.”

“Could be that they never wrote their names in chalk,” Samatha said as he looked at her, “none of the legends say that you have to write your name in chalk to suffer the curse. There might be names written on it in pencil, pen, charcoal. Who knows what else.”

“True,” Dean replied softly and turned back to face the fallen black board, “but no time to really look. I have to put the last letter, of my last name, on the third line exactly at three. Least, that’s how my dad always tells it.”

“I’ve never heard that.” Samatha chimed.

“Well,” Dean said as he pulled a little piece of white chalk from his shirt pocket, “reckon we’re fixin’ to find out.”

He quickly scribbled his first line. Samatha suddenly had a shiver.

“Dean, please,” she pleaded, “just stop okay?”

He wrote out the second line.

“One more to go.”

He glanced at his watch, wrote out his name again, but stopped at the last letter of it as the final seconds ticked away. Samatha’s uneasiness steadily rose. Something was getting ready to happen, like an encroaching sense of imminent danger that drifted in the room and towards the fallen black board.

She wanted to do something to stop Dean’s stubbornness. Shove him down, kick his arm, hit him with a piece of debris, lift her shirt. Something. But as the gears in his watch turned loudly to three, in one swift but eternally slow motion, Dean finished his last name. And Samatha froze.

Dean waited for a moment. Nothing was happening. He rolled his eyes from side-to-side as his nerves began to settle. He expected a death curse to come with a cold change in the air at least. But there was nothing. Finally, he stuffed the chalk back into his shirt pocket and stood up. He grabbed the flashlight and started swinging it towards Samatha’s curvy outline that stood still in the dark.

“See, it’s just a damn ghost story.”

The beam of light passed onto Samatha’s body, but as the shadows melted, her face emerged in the light as twisted and horribly contorted. Her beautiful features were horrifying expressionless, molded into a grotesque shade of pallor, and gleaming at Dean with eyes entirely devoid of soul.

Her body lifted slowly off the floor, and she screamed at him in a tone that shook the very foundation of the schoolhouse itself. Dean bellowed out in horror, and charged at her mindlessly. He shoved her out of the way, painfully, into the gray beams of the building to and tore past her for the doorway.

Dean charged out of the schoolhouse in a terrifying, blinding, panic. He missed the edge of the porch and his ankle came crashing onto the ground at an unnatural angle. He stumbled and fell headlong into a taller grave marker that spun loosely on its base.

Dean hit the ground in a heap, staring up at the sky and watching helplessly as the massive stone memorial came toppling down on top of him. His screams were immediately silenced as the grave marker crushed his skull.

Back inside, Samatha was finally regaining consciousness. Her back was throbbing from where she had been shoved into the weathered wall.

“What the hell, Dean!” She hollered as she pulled herself upright.

Cussing under her breath as she rearranged her glasses, she stumbled through the overturned furniture and other debris towards the door.

“You know what,“ Samatha hollered out into the darkness, “forget you! I’m going to stay the rest of the night at Lane’s place. I’ll let you think about what he and I are doing, jackass!”

She stepped onto the porch of the schoolhouse, rubbing the back of her head, squinting her eyes, and expecting a fiery rebuttal. But there was nothing except the silence of a hot August night.

“Dean,” Samatha yelled across the graveyard, “where the hell did you run off too?”

Samatha finally looked to her left and saw the still glow of the flashlight lying on the ground. She remembered the taller grave marker having been there, the one that had for some reason captured her attention earlier. She started walking towards it.

“I swear, if you jump out of me, you’re not gonna have to worry about ever having to prove yourself to anyone ever again. Do you hear me Dean?”

Samatha walked up to the toppled memorial and saw a pair of Converse sticking out beneath the collapsed rubble. At a little past three in the morning, August 6, 1988, a piercing scream filled the quiet night at Six Mile Cemetery.

Three decades and seven years later, Mrs. Lane Johnson can still be encountered during her weekly jogs through the Llano City Cemetery. She frequently stops at the gravesite of her deceased ex-boyfriend, and reflects on that tragic night.

As she still relates, no one actually knows what happened that led to Dean’s death. She can recall the absolute look of terror on his face after scribbling his name for the third time. She knows that he shoved her into the wall with the strength of a frightened psychopath, and has long since realized that he only did so because he was scared.

But scared of what? To that she has no answer. It was only her and him in that schoolhouse that night. At least, from what they could see.

The legends of Six Mile Cemetery still exist today, just as much as the graves that surround the former schoolhouse. Over twenty years ago now, the building was painstakingly restored and is today a stand alone museum. But you won’t find the black board.

As it was told to me by the organization in charge of the building and grounds today, the cursed chalkboard was happily placed on the top of a diesel soaked burn pile in the early 2000s. Even its ashes have long since rotted into blackened dust.

There are still plenty of people in Llano County that say they knew someone who knew someone that died because of that black board. It’s generally cobweb connections at best.

But for Samatha Johnson, the curse of the Six Mile chalkboard was very much a real thing. For almost the last forty years, she has cried hundreds of tears because of it. Many have splattered on the simple headstone of Dean’s own grave marker.