Mord McGhee
Mord McGhee
Mord McGhee is the author of Ghosts of the Girl: Anna’s Odyssey (Rezcircle Books USA), Ironblood (Golden Storyline Books UK), and The Stroke of Oars (Nat 1 Publishing USA) and is recently nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award and Bram Stoker Award, while being highly anthologized and published in literary works, he's best known for pioneering work in the cyberpunk genre and work on feature films such as My Dead Friend Zoe (2024), The Man in the White Van (2023), and Fade to Black (in production for 2026-27). Currently South Carolina is his home.
Florets and Scars
A group passes quietly along the footpath, approaching a serpentine bed of beautiful flowers, in blue, pink, red, and yellow. At the front, the leader of a tour holds up a hand and all boots come to a gradual stop. There is a murmur towards the rear of the line of fifteen sightseers, though attention quickly focuses on the guide’s voice.
“At the dawn of spring in the year 1849 of our common era,” they spoke loud and clear, “beneath a sky heavy with storm breath and ancient promise, this plot of land is rarely seen and even less frequently tread. Underneath the watchful Sierra Nevadas there, that serpentine shape, comprised entirely of flowers bore witness to what our historians call an ‘unexplained uncanny event.’ Whatever the truth behind the myth, they say it would forever change the landscape here. For this all was a mining camp, and the earth raw and torn by pickax.”
“Beautiful,” someone said, and the group agreed.
“Why are there flowers here?” someone asked the guide. “I mean, there’s nothing around but rock?”
“Ah,” the guide said. “Come forward and stand with me down here. You’ll see there’s a stream, cool and swift.
“Oh, would you look at that,” said another, and the group laughed and clapped. Looking at the guide, they asked, “So, this is why the flowers grow?”
“Not exactly,” the guide said. “As I just mentioned, they grow here for another reason, and one far stranger than this. If you’ll follow me, we’ll take a closer look.”
The guide carefully climbed across the running water towards the far side, helping the others along, where a vast and empty slope leading right up to what had been the distant woods they’d seen from the park’s entrance, and from there the bed of flowers revealed itself to be more than a hundred feet long, more ten wide at its thickest, with plants growing chest-high so lush that the red rocky floor was entirely lost.
“That’s truly amazing,” said another person taking the walking tour. “It’s not natural though, is it?”
“Gather in, around the corner everyone, very good,” the guide directed, waiting until everyone could see. “That’s it, thank you.” Soon the group grew quiet, all eyes expectantly staring at the guide. “AS I said, this curious piece of the park stood witness to an unexplained uncanny event. According to the old maps we have, that line of trees up there came straight down the banks of the stream and on the other side for a quarter mile.”
“A comet!” someone blurted, and the group murmured and scanned, while the guide waited for the moment to pass.
“Not quite,” the guide said once they were through. “But the story might sound as strange to a miner back then as a meteor crashing down from heaven. What took down the trees were two brothers who came seeking gold, like so many others, to the West.” The group found this implausible, as the slope was clear for half a mile, and they were vocal though polite about this. “I know it sounds crazy to think two people could do so much damage, but according to legend, it's quite true.”
“But why would they leave the flowers?” asked a young boy from the back.
“Very good question,” said the guide.
“Well?” another asked, skeptically.
“The brothers, and their hound, never lived to see them. Allow me to explain what I know of this unexplained uncanny event. You see, the stream runs all along the flowerbed, winding towards the sun as far as the eye can see. I can tell you definitively that the flowers were not here in the spring of 1849 because of a man who patented a camera which used a flexible roll of film.”
“Geroge Eastman,” said someone from the group. “Saw he tested his camera in the park. Where we met for the tour.”
“That’s correct,” the guide said. “Of this very spot we have a photograph showing tree stumps all through the slope, two large sluice boxes where we’re standing, and below this bed of flowers was torn and scarred earth, upended in countless jagged piles of rock all through the snakelike stream. That’s how we know the brothers never saw the flowers. How is this possible? I see doubt in every face, and I admit I laughed the first time I heard the story. But we know for sure because 1849 both brothers died, not long after Eastman took his image, and there at the edge of the flowers is where the hound laid down forevermore.”
People clamored for a closer, and the young boy looked over his shoulder at the guide. “It’s just a rock.”
The guide took out their phone and swiped it with a finger, until showing the group a photo of the park’s entrance. “This is Eastman’s story as seen at the entrance where we met. His placard, and the photo in question, clearly seen. If you look right here, you’ll see the hound laying in the exact spot where that stone is.”
“Whoa!” someone said, and a general murmur followed, with people voicing opinions about practical jokes and Old West legends. How not possible it was that a rock had somehow replaced the hound after it had died beside its people.
“Doesn’t explain anything, does it?” asked a particularly grumpy person. “We came all this way for this?”
The guide slipped their phone away, and said, “We are as far as our walking tour goes along the trail, so in a way, I suppose we did come all this way to see Hound Rock. However, before we go back there is one more thing I’m going to show you. Our brochure promises that on the day before the night of a full moon, you can take the most breathtaking pictured of this bed of flowers.”
“But there’s no moon, is there?” asked the young boy.
“Not yet, but tonight there will be, and if my hunch is correct, if you take a picture today, you’ll see a ghost.”
Laughter filled the air. Voices called out, “Ghost of a dog rock?” and the laughter intensified.
The guide spoke to the young boy aside from the group while the heckling persisted. “Do you have a camera?” the guide asked.
“Yeah,” said the boy, pulling phone from their pocket.
“We have to be quick and catch the light just so,” said the guide. “Climb up on Hound Rock.”
“What?”
“Go on,” said the guide. “Don’t worry, it’s only a rock.”
“But you said there’s a ghost,” said the boy nervously.
“What’s he doing?’ someone said as the boy drew himself onto the rock then came to his feet.
“Now,” the guide said. “Point your phone over the flower bed and watch the screen carefully.”
The boy snapped a picture and magnified it, turning it to the group. “Just flowers,” he laughed.
“You didn’t listen to my instructions,” said the guide. “Point your camera over the flowers and watch the screen carefully.”
The boy, still smiling, complied. After a moment he said, “What was that?” The guide smirked as the boy pushed his face closer to his phone’s screen, and he craned out above the flower bed, holding the phone higher. “What was that!”
“Good,” the guide said. “Come down and let someone else try. Who’s next?”
“I’ll do it,” said the skeptic, yanking the boy down and replacing him at once. With a phone in hand, they rolled the camera’s lens across the snaking flowerbed. Halfway through they stopped and checked the front of the camera as if the guide were playing tricks. “What the hell did I just see?”
“What is it?” people from the group pushed closer, though the skeptic was standing their ground atop the rock, looking at the camera’s screen again with a grim look set on their face.
“Don’t push,” the guide said. “You’ll each have a turn, I promise. It only shows once, so when you see it, come down and let the next person have a turn.”
The skeptic climbed down at last and marched right to the guide. “Care to explain whatever trick this is? It’s an extremely expensive smart phone; you’d best not have caused some… internal damage.”
“I assure you,” the guide smiled genuinely, “your phone is perfectly fine.”
“Well, what just happened?”
“Once everyone is done, I’ll explain,” the guide said, walking around towards the last people who had not had a turn yet. After they had each gasped, each even more surprised than the next, the guide raised both hands and called for calm. It wasn’t instantaneous, but eventually an unsettled silence won. “What you have just seen is the ghost of Hound Rock.”
“That was no dog!” cried the skeptic. “More like a cat?”
“Yeah, had pointed ears and big eyes,” another agreed. “But it was a person.”
“Not quite,” the guide said. “It’s easier if you hear the rest of the story,” they glanced at the skeptic. “Shall I continue?” And the group concurred that the guide should very much continue.
“It began one day when the brothers and their hound found a gold nugget lying in the stream, sparkling under the waning sun. Their full names are lost to history, but it’s thought they were twins. While the ghost you’ve each just met is not one of them…”
“Not the dog either?” the young boy chirped, and the group let loose an uncomfortable chuckle.
“Not the dog, either,” said the guide. “I can’t tell you what it is, but I can tell you that it is no human. I’ve tried my whole life to take a picture or video of it, but the thing never appears in the image except during the brief time when we look without any expectation that something is there. That’s right, now that you’ve seen it, you won’t ever see it again.”
“Poppycock!” the skeptic stamped, fist raised. “What kind of nonsense is this?”
“I assure you it’s not nonsense but instead something far more ancient, and whatever it is, it’s the reason these flowers grow here,” the guide said.
The skeptic dismissed the guide with the wave of a hand and started walking back down the trail. A minute later another followed. Then another. A few minutes later only two people, the young boy, and the guide, remained in front of Hound Rock.
“Finish the story,” the young boy said.
“Please,” the couple echoed.
“Sure,” the guide said, watching the group disappearing down the trail. Turning to the flowers, the guide spoke softly. “The brothers were filled with unending ambition and the finding of a gold nugget lit a fire in them that led such an effort that they cut down all these woods, and built their crude machines to sift the stream and dig deeply of the banks, that they stopped the stream’s flow momentarily and awakened what trees they had not yet sawed down.
“Shadows stirred in the woods, shadows still surviving to this very day, and among these something old as the earth itself came back to life. A strange being with pointed ears, thin fingers, and a pair of bulbous eyes. Humanlike though not quite human. One day this being slipped out of the trees and came down from the hills to confront the brothers, and it must have been pleased to meet them because it stood right here, eyes gleaming back from their camp. I could only imagine the conversation between this creature and our brothers.”
“Why do you say that?” the young boy asked. “It’s just a story, right?”
“Is it?” the guide grinned. “What if I told you that Eastman took more pictures that day, and he, too, met this being. And he wrote about it in a journal and that journal is in the care of the park to this day, along with the rest of his images.”
The young boy didn’t say anything, but the color drained from his face.
“So… you have proof,” said one of the others still there. “Because I should tell you that this feels like a scam.”
“It’s not hard to think that the brothers were right here,” the guide said showing Hound Rock. “Explaining what they had done. Perhaps it went like this: ‘I… bought… this land… legal-like…’ Meanwhile, the creature only knew what the woods had told it. What gold fever had done was irreparable, and they must have seen the creature talking to the dead stump for hours?” Here the guide drew out their phone once more and held it anxiously. “Before I show you, swear you won’t ever do any harm these flowers.”
The last of the sightseers agreed, exchanging disbelieving looks.
“I know the creature was here whispering to trees that the brothers had hacked down, and I know that it stood next to the crude machines, its big eyes glistening as it secretly considered what it needed to do to appease the anger of the surviving woods. I know because photographs and writing support my conclusions. But what I don’t understand is why the creature brought that first bouquet of flowers.
“Because while the hound sat there guarding the brothers, somehow, they both died the night after Eastman left them. One sluice box collapsed on top of a brother and the other was crushed by a tree falling up that way. I know this because Eastman came back the next day, not realizing that he’d taken the only photograph of the creature.
“The hound would not go away with him, and Eastman lamented leaving it here, though he took that photograph I showed you before. In his notes he said he restored the flow of the stream and to his surprise, that strange being came to treat with him after the deaths of the brothers. These are his own words:
“This person from the forest was more skittish than before I left, and I was suspicious it had caused the deaths of the brothers who introduced themselves to me as ‘Adam’ and ‘Isaac.’ But it was the person’s question which made me think it was not natural to our world.
“You are mortal?” it inquired of me, so I told him I was. Just as the brother were.
“The forest is awake,” he said. “And red bubbles left his lips,” it told me of the brother dead beneath his broken sluice box. “I brought him water but that did not work. He simply spluttered more red.”
I asked him if he saw the accident that claimed the brothers, and he said that he did. “Why, then, bring water if he was under the broken machine?”
“He said he was in real trouble,” he told me. “Where were you?”
I explained why I had to replenish my camera’s film, and that I had to do it in perfect darkness, and he looked at me curiously though did not ask for anything more of me. Here he said that the hound was crying all through the night, and he went for flowers which he laid on his chest. Then he said, “That also did not work.”
“Work at what?” I pushed back.
“To awaken him, of course,” he said as though I was daft. “I had resolved to help them clean this mess and get the woods growing again, but the flowers did not work. So, I brought more. And I will continue to do so until they join me in righting the damage they have done.”
I would have told him that the brothers were dead and that they could not awaken again, but the strange man had vanished before my eyes. I took this last picture with my camera’s new film and left at once. I told the sheriff but never heard from those brothers or the stranger from the woods ever again.”
The guide lifted their phone and showed the screen to the remainder of the group.
“Oh my God,” said the couple together. The young boy inhaled sharply, “That’s the thing we saw! But it can’t be real?”
“The photograph is blurry, and a modern analyst says that the ‘ghost figure’ was a result of bad lighting that that thing is there at all, and it was a photo mirage because of the shining stream behind the sleeping dog.”
“I want to see it again,” the young boy said. He produced his phone and scanned the field of flowers. “Hello! Hello?”
“You can’t see it again,” said the guide. “Once you expect to, it’s no longer there. It never photographs, as I have snapped thousands here of flowers and have not since seen it but that first time I was shown by my predecessor. But for whatever reason, Eastman’s first flexible film captured this one ghostly figure and stands as the proof to the story I’ve just shared with you. However, …”
All eyes fell upon the guide.
“However,” the guide started again, “every day of the night there’s a full moon, another bouquet of flowers appears here. And they lay there all day unmoving but instead of rotting away, they take root and grow with the rest. Now you know the truth behind Hound Rock.”
“The dog just died here?” squeaked the young boy, tears welling in his eyes.
“Eastman said in his notes that he stayed and tried to feed the hound, tried to lure it away with him, but it would not move from its spot along the streambed.”
The young boy laid a hand atop Hound Rock and said, “Whoa.”
“What do you think it was?” asked the couple.
“I don’t know what it is,” said the guide. “Like I said before. But it did not seem to know what it meant to be mortal, especially if it’s still bringing flowers to awaken those lost brothers. And can’t you feel it?”
“Feel what?”
“Up there, the trees,” said the guide. “Whatever it may be, it is still watching.”