Whispers of Chantry Flats

Short Story = Leilani and Jameson breathe new life into the urban legend of Iris Ward and the haunted trail of the San Gabriel Mountains

I almost didn’t post this story. I wrote this three weeks before the catastrophic fires sparked in Eaton Canyon, near Los Angeles. Chantry Flats was one of my favorite trails to hike when I lived in Pasadena, and a good portion of this trail system was swallowed by the fire. Since Valentine’s day approaches, and this is a story, not only about an urban legend, but also about love that could have been, I felt it apropriate to post now. Akin to the permanent scars that will be left on the lives and land of LA, this story showcases the way our internal scars manifest themselves once we’re pushed past our breaking point, and the destruction these sleeping giants leave in their wake.

Leilani’s eyes flickered up from her textbook and locked onto mine. I tried to play it off as if I hadn’t been staring long, but her uneasy smile told me she knew I had. She probably thought I was staring at her scar. The jagged, wiry one that wrapped the circumference of her neck, like a branding from a razorblade necklace. But I wasn’t. Not tonight. A throbbing vein roped down her neck, vanishing beneath her collarbone, and all I could think about was wrapping my mouth around it and riding the rhythm of her beating heart, feeling her life force through my lips.

“What?” she asked, pulling a lock of dark hair back from her face.

“Nothing,” I replied. “How’s it going? Anything you’re hung up on?”

She sighed and clapped the book closed. “How about everything? There’s no way I’m passing this final.”

“You can. Let’s work through it together. I can get you there.”

Her eyes and cheeks sank. I knew she felt the lie. We had reviewed every prep sheet for our Neural Computation class, but she just wasn’t getting it.

“Can we take a break?” she asked. “I can’t focus right now, and it seems like you can’t either.”

I wanted to protest, knowing she needed to study an impossible amount if she wanted to pass the final that was merely half a day away, but I caved, because she was right. There was no hope for her. Not today. Not this semester. “What do you want to do?” I asked.

Leilani tossed the book onto the twin bed beside us, its heft caving the center as if the sheer gravity of the mass of information within created a mattress swallowing black hole. I wondered if our bodies could create such force, spaghettifying our limbs as we cradle one another into critical mass, into another dimension.

“Tell me a story,” she said.

I laughed before noting the seriousness on her face. “What kind of story?”

“You’re from here, aren’t you? Tell me about Pasadena.”

“Like, the history?”

She leaned back in her chair. “Oh, God. Not like a social studies lesson, something mysterious, a tale, a legend. Something I wouldn’t find in the history books. Something only locals know.”

“A legend, huh?” I slouched in my chair, matching her posture, adorning my best thinking expression. But all I could think about was that our knees were touching, and she wasn’t pulling her leg away. As they hugged one another, I felt it the most sensible idea in the world to stay there, like that, as long as she would allow it.

Leilani watched me, distracted, struggling to conjure a memory. “For example,” she said, offering a hand. “When I was a kid, growing up in Hawaii, my dad would tell me stories about our ancestors, the warriors and kings of our island home. It was magical.” Her eyes shined like I had never seen. “He always said it was up to us to keep the stories alive.” Suddenly, hopelessness replaced the light in her eyes. “But when I was nine, he died, and the stories died with him. I didn’t have the strength to keep them alive. Not after going to live with my uncle.” She reached for her neck with both hands and ran her fingers along the scar, her gaze long and cold. Then she shook out of her trance and moved her leg away from mine. “So…what you got?”

All I cared about in that moment was restoring the shine to those eyes. “I can only think of one, but it’s not a happy one. It’s pretty dark.”

She leaned forward and rested her cheek on her palm. “I like it dark.”

I laughed. “My brother once told me a story about this place that really stuck with me. There was a Pasadena woman in the early 1930s named Iris Ward. Iris was married to a real estate developer. They were well off, but when the Great Depression hit, they lost everything. Her husband turned bitter and became violent. Iris disappeared one night. The authorities questioned her husband about her disappearance, thinking he may have killed her. But early in their investigation, he disappeared too. Then, week by week, more and more people from their inner circle began vanishing in the night.”

Leilani’s gaze was fixed on mine, her eyes shining once again, riding my every word. I loved to see her like this. “Go on,” she said. “What happened to them?”

“A few months after her disappearance, winter took hold. Some hikers up at a popular trail in the San Gabriel mountains, called Chantry Flats, stumbled upon a camp and found a woman, dead from exposure. It turned out to be Iris Ward. After the authorities searched the campground, they found the body of her husband and the bodies of all the other missing people dumped in a nearby ravine. Rocks perfectly encircled her campsite. They think she was performing satanic rituals over the dead bodies within the circle. One officer said that as soon as he stepped inside the circle, he could feel the evil.”

“I love it!” Leilani said, smiling ear to ear.

“Before my brother moved away for LSU and I stayed here for Cal Tech, we used to hike that trail. We always thought it was an eerie place. Something’s in the air there, for sure. They say if you hike the trail at midnight, you can hear the whispers of Iris Ward, coaxing you toward her camp.”

“Have you ever tried it?”

“The night hike? No. We always said we would one day, though.”

I saw hope in her eyes. Like the story stoked a fire that extinguished in her heart the day her father passed. I relished the thought that I could excite her like this.

“Will you take me? Tomorrow night, after finals.”

“I don’t think—“

“Are you scared?” She asked, moving her leg further from mine.

“No. I mean—of course I’ll take you. Tomorrow night at midnight. Let’s—let’s do it.”

Leilani stamped her feet in excitement. “Do you think it could be true?”

I didn’t. This was just another tall tale someone fabricated to make life a little more interesting. But I was okay with that, because it was working. “I do,” I said. “And, just like your dad always said, it’s up to us to keep these stories alive, right?”

Tears welled in her eyes, and I thought I had upset her. Then she moved closer and grabbed my hands. “You’re perfect, Jameson,” she said, and pressed her lips against mine. The soft, slick, wet tissue of our mouths slid across one another’s, then the door to my dorm room flew open.

My roommate, Aaron, stood in the doorway, eyes red as the devil’s dick. The sweet, putrid scent of spiced rum and halitosis wafted from his open mouth into our faces. “You two gonna bone again? Should I leave?”

Fury replaced the desire in Leilani’s eyes as she gathered her things and shoulder checked Aaron into the door frame on her way out of our room.

#

I underestimated the darkness. Our weak headlamps cut a narrow path ahead, leaving what lurked in the surrounding void up to our imaginations, which grew wilder with every crunching step. The desert plants that inhabited the hillsides had baked in the harsh California sun all day, and now cooled in the brisk evening air, filling the canyons with their sweet scent. We traversed the large jutting granite rocks that littered the trail, sliding around in our tennis shoes on the tiny pebbles in between.

We had been hiking the loop for about a half hour. I wanted to tell Leilani that I never told Aaron we had ‘boned,’ as he so eloquently put it. He was just being a drunk asshole, but she knew that, didn’t she? When I picked her up from her dorm, she had a smile on her face, like everything was fine, so I thought it best to leave well enough alone. In return for her assumed forgiveness, I decided not to ask her why she skipped the final exam. Despite our shared ignorance, our misgivings lingered, stinging constant like a dangling scab.

We trudged along the trail, speaking occasionally, only to drown out the awkward silence. Leilani stopped, looked at me with a finger raised to her lips, ears perked, listening for the whispers of Iris Ward, and for a moment, upon the breeze whistling through the canyons, rustling the dry brush, and clapping the succulent leaves, I thought I could hear old Mrs. Ward.

Leilani bolted into the thicket of bushes beside us.

“What are you doing?” I asked. “We need to stay on trail.”

She slipped through the bushes and around an outcropping of boulders until she was out of sight.

“What the hell, Leilani. Where are you going?”

I waited for a moment, hoping she would reappear from behind the rocks, then I went in after her. I kicked my way through the thorny brush, following her trampled path, and after rounding the boulders, I emerged into a small clearing. The smell of burned wood overwhelmed my senses. I swung the beam of my headlamp around, desperate to find some sign of her, but all I saw was a spent fire pit, smudged white with ash at its center. Around it, at about a twenty-foot radius, were rocks laid out in a circle, arching the entire perimeter of the pit.

I heard a whisper and branches crack behind me. Before I could turn, a force pushed me face-first to the ground, sending my headlamp skipping through the dirt. I rolled onto my back, and just as I did, Leilani jumped on top of me. She straddled me and held my wrists tight against the rocky floor. Her eyes were black nothing, haloed by stark white.

“Gotcha,” she said.

“What the fuck, Leilani?”

Before I could say another word, she wrapped her lips around mine, and unlike the kiss back in my dorm, her tongue slipped deep into my mouth. A wave of relief washed over me. We kissed harder and harder, our tongues flying wilder and more passionately, steam billowing from our mouths as we gasped for air. She unfastened my pants and yanked them down hard, exposing me to the crisp air. I freed my hands from her grasp, reached for the button of her pants, and realized she was naked from the waist down. She slammed my wrists back to the ground, slipped her tongue back into my mouth and thrust her body down onto mine. She was so warm. Better than I had imagined. She tugged at my earlobe with her teeth and filled my ear with wet, panting heat.

“Is this what you wanted?” she asked.

I wanted to tell her it wasn’t all I wanted. I wanted to tell her I thought I might be in love with her, that she was the most incredible human I had ever met, that I would take things as slowly as she wanted. Yet, here we were, in the throes of it all, entangled within each other, relenting to our animalistic selves. “Yes,” I said, huffing a cloud into her face. Then I felt the stinging cold of metal at my side, and a sharp, searing pain as it pierced my skin and slipped inside me. Between my ribs, the serrated edge scraped along the bone as it passed. My eyes widened. My failed words coughed out upon the spittle that flung from my lips and clung to her chin. I was paralyzed. The blade’s handle became her joystick, and she was in complete control of me.

“Why?” I asked, the words belting out in a guttural grunt as my muscles heaved in spasm.

She pressed her finger to my lips once more, and her words rode hard into my ear upon her thick breath as she continued thrusting against my quivering body. “It’s up to us to keep these stories alive, Jameson. I promise I won’t ever let them die. Never, ever.”