Shiny Turtles.
(a short ghost story from last month based on a prompt from @manojalpa over on my patreon)
When the turtles were shiny, they called The Preacher.
Melonie wasn’t actually a preacher. She was a biologist, like the rest of them. But she had gone ghost hunting a few times in collage and her great uncle Jojo was a priest before he ran off with Julian the dance instructor and started an exotic animal sanctuary. So she was elected to deal with the shiny turtles.
The shiny turtles were not a common sight. She’d been working in the field for ten years and had only seen nine living ones. Five had been simple exorcisms (as simple as an exorcism could be), but there were four cases that were really strange.
Her first case was a box turtle. It was turned over to the collage after the previous owner, a local pediatrician, fell ill and asked one of the professors to look after her for a bit. Her shell was strange, all smooth and glassy like a mirror, and uniformly colored. She was also a biter.
The weirdest thing about her though was definitely the ghosts.
There were five of them, all kids aged four to twelve from the looks of it. Their faces swam in and out of focus on the pearlescent shell. Sometimes they appeared as sickly phantoms covered in angry red lesions, but mostly they resembled healthy curious children. Melonie had to call uncle Jojo for that one, but ended up putting away the sage and bibles when the owner came back and voted down the exorcism. There was suspicion at first, as there will be when someone seems overly attached to a gaggle of dead children. But after he pulled several worn but lovingly cared for photos of a large rural family with six smiling children out of his wallet with hands dappled with faint smallpox scars and lectured them on the importance of childhood immunizations, no one had the heart for it.
Her third case was a sea turtle found tangled up in some garbage off the coast of Florida. The young woman reflected in its shell was beautiful, spending much of the observed time combing fingers through her long dark hair and fluttering eyelashes at herself. Sometimes she would be seen with a large knife, which was a little alarming, but she otherwise seemed harmless. The exorcism went pretty smoothly but had to be redone after the turtle was released and later found covered in images of handsome young sailors with bound hands, lipstick smeared mouths, and slashed open throats. They found their bodies in the cluster of sunken boats, the knife sunk into the mast of what seemed to be the most recently wrecked. A serpentine skeleton, long picked clean by the ocean life, coiled through the wreckage. It was thought to be some kind of massive eel but studies were inconclusive as every bone brought above water immediately crumbled into dust. Melonie has not really been a fan of the ocean since.
The seventh find was an old mata mata in Brazilian village. Found napping in its own private pond, its shell reflected around 30 people and animals. Clearly the most haunted turtle Melonie had ever seen. When questioned about it, locals merely called him ‘The Road Man’. An exorcism was politely turned down as from their claims the haunting wasn’t really a big deal, and it was nice to see family every once in a while. Besides, every five or so years The Road Man would leave his pond and float down the river, returning after a week with a clear shell. The locals assumed he took the spirits to wherever spirits go next. Melonie almost questioned why a turtle was entrusted with this duty but decided to keep her mouth shut. It made as much sense as anything else really. He seemed like a dependable guy.
The most recent encounter was with a giant snapping turtle. Melonie had no idea what the angry shadow writhing across the craggy shell was supposed to be. It moved in twitchy heaving motions, blinking a multitude of almond shaped eyes and reaching out with long twisted tendrils. Every so often a mouth would appear, splitting open like a wound, and soundlessly howl. The lake where the snapper made its home was a local legend; a cursed site of multiple grisly deaths, disappearances, and rumored fits of madness. These days it was quite peaceful, but Melonie and her team still declared it cursed after they tried to wrangle the aforementioned turtle. That guy was an asshole and she was pretty sure whatever that horror terror reflected on his back was? It was probably done in by the same beast that took a sizable chunk out of Jeremy’s leg and slashed the front tire of the van.
She did not go in for a second try at exorcising that one. Those two demons deserved each other.
Melanie hasn’t been alerted to any sightings of shiny turtles since then. She’s hoping for one soon, the pay bonuses for dealing with them are fantastic and she needs new tires for the van. There’s also the thrill of adventure, but it’s mostly about the tires. In the meantime she carries on with science business and occasionally dreams of uncle Jojo happily salsa dancing on the back of a mata mata.
Yes! YES! Yes, turtles, yes.
