Ghost Shadows

by Thomas M. Malafarina

  Once the police had removed what was left of the body and finished their investigation, Nate had the machine moved to a dark and seldom used section of the shop and during the next several weeks had it professionally cleaned to remove all traces of that horrible night. The machine sat idle for the entire next year.

  Eventually he moved the machine back closer to the manufacturing floor and had tried once again to put the machine into production but each attempt was unsuccessful. Every time he assigned an operator to the machine, that person would inevitably end up getting hurt and often severely injured. One time the result was almost fatal.

  During one particular incident a tool holder fell from the spindle while an operator was loading a part and crushed the man's hand, requiring several costly surgeries to repair the damage. In addition there was a workman’s compensation claim to deal with and a great deal of lost production time. Another time a high speed rotating tool broke while in the midst of a milling process and flew across the unguarded space, blinding another operator in one eye. Nate’s business could not afford too many accidents such as those. In addition, after the first several accidents, superstition began to take over and eventually not a single operator would agree to run the machine. Before long, Nate realized the machine could no longer be used. The risk of injury and potential legal ramifications of running what most considered an unsafe machine were simply cost prohibitive.

  Yet for some reason, likely born of sentimentality, Nate could never bring himself to have the machine removed from the factory and scrapped, so he chose instead to move the Mill Monster back to the dark corner of the plant and disconnect all of its electric, hydraulic, and pneumatic lines, leaving it to rust to its present day decrepit state.

  Since the tragic death of Joseph DeNunzio and the subsequent injuries caused by the machine, its reputation of living up to its nickname, "Mill Monster," grew to the point of legend and folklore. Stories abounded of reports of mysterious sounds and sightings surrounding the machine, especially on late nights and weekend shifts when the factory was practically empty.

  Most of the old-timers, especially those who knew Joseph well, believed the machine was haunted by the dead man’s spirit. Many told stories of seeing the transparent ghost of Joseph standing by the machine control as he had done so many years earlier, his glowing white aura shimmering in the moonlight. Others who had heard descriptions of the ghastly condition of Joseph’s corpse when it had been found claimed to see his tattered, practically headless body appear lying on the surface of the machine table.

  Still others told of times when they had heard strange creaking noises coming from the dark corner where the machine stood, while others claimed to have heard moaning and occasionally screaming. Some went so far as to say they actually saw the machine's spindle turn slowly, despite the fact it had been without power for over twenty years.

  Nate knew someday, perhaps when his son, Benjamin, took over the business he might take the initiative to relegate the Mill Monster to the scrap yard where it belonged, but for now it stood as it had done for over forty years; both a symbol of the technology, hard work, and determination, which made Nate’s company great, and a tragic reminder of the fragility of life. And perhaps it also offered a suggestion of the possible existence of unknown, unexplainable mysteries, incomprehensible by the minds of men.

  What's Wrong With Our House?

  The past is never dead. It's not even past.

  —William Faulkner, Requiem for a Nun

  The white-haired woman stood by the window pulling the drapes carefully aside, attempting to sneak a look out into the street. It was October 31st, another Halloween night, and just like every previous Halloween, trick-or-treaters were busy going from house to house in search of the precious goodies they all so desperately desired. But for some strange, unknown reason they seemed to be avoiding her house; almost deliberately so.

  "What's wrong with our house?" Gladys Millbury asked of her husband, Harold, who was sitting quietly in his recliner, reading the sports section of the local newspaper and paying little attention to his wife, as was typical of him. The room was clean and tastefully decorated with furnishings they had acquired throughout their forty-three years of marriage.

  Harold said, "How the hell should I know, Gladys? Who really knows what goes on inside of the minds of young kids these days? Heaven knows I don't have a clue. But what's the big deal anyway? If they show up, they show up and if they don't, they don't. To be perfectly honest with you, I don't really care if they ever come around. Young kids can often mean nothing but trouble these days. In fact, they're often more trouble than they're worth. Good riddance to bad rubbish as far as I am concerned."

  "Oh, Harold," she replied, "that's no way to talk for pity’s sake. You sound like such an old fuddy-duddy. It’s Halloween night and you know the children in our neighborhood are all good kids. We’ve always opened our doors to them on Halloween. In the old days we would have been overrun with trick-or-treaters by this time of night. Remember how they always said I gave them the best candy? I was always so proud of that. But now they won’t even ring our doorbell anymore. I wonder what happened. It’s almost like they seem to be deliberately avoiding us this year. What could possibly be the matter? What in the world do they think is wrong with us?"

  "Funny you should ask,” Harold replied. “I was starting to wonder what might be wrong with you myself. The way you’re standing there staring out into the street. You look like a desperate, starving lost little puppy. For heaven’s sake, Gladys, just let it go. So what if the kids choose to ignore us this year? It just means more candy for me."

  “Like you can eat all of this candy,” Gladys replied looking down into her enormous basket of goodies, “you with your blood sugar issues!”

  Gladys and Harold Millbury had been living in the same house at the end of Maple Street for well over thirty years. And for as long as either of them could recall the neighborhood children always flocked to their house for treats faithfully, every Halloween. So Gladys knew something definitely must be amiss to cause them to behave in this fashion.

  As Gladys peeked out the front window again she exclaimed, "Oh my goodness, Harold! You should see this! Several of the kids just crossed over to the other side of the street as if they were making a point of avoiding our house. I even saw a couple of them looking back then quickly looked away. They seemed to have looks of terror on their faces. It was like they were afraid to come here or something. Why would anyone be afraid to come here, Harold? We're good people. What's wrong with these kids?"

  Harold decided to go back to ignoring his wife and continue to read his newspaper.

  Outside, the neighborhood kids who Gladys had seen from the window were doing exactly as she had described, walking across the street, pushing and shoving each other playfully, occasionally giving wary glances back toward the house. Every so often one of the kids would point back toward their house then make spooky gestures with his hands at the younger children and laugh hysterically. The small children would look back at the house quickly before hurrying to be back with the group.

  The house sat in darkness, illuminated only by the pale moonlight shining through the branches of the tall oak trees in the overgrown front yard. The trees had lost their leaves a month earlier and now stood like colossal multi-limbed monstrous sentries guarding the mysterious home with its battered, paint-chipped facade and foot-high weeds surrounding the broken brick walkway.

  The neighborhood children all knew about the Millbury place and they had all heard the many frightening stories surrounding the house. They knew both the real history of the property, which was in itself terrifying enough, but they also knew all of the local legends and those were certainly enough to keep even the most daring of them away.

  As the true story of the house went, a nice elderly retired couple named Gladys and Harold Millbury had once owned the home. Mr. Millbury had been retired from the railroad and Mrs. Millbury had worked her entire caree
r as a nurse at a local hospital. Every Halloween children from all over would flock to the Millbury place since Gladys was reputed to give the best candy in town.

  There was also a false reputation that followed the Millburys. Since the couple had no children, lived frugally, and both had generous pensions, it was assumed they were quite well off financially. This was completely untrue. The two weren’t starving by any means and Gladys was quite generous with her precious trick-or-treaters, but the couple was far from wealthy. Unfortunately, those particular false stories about them being rich had reached the ears of some local undesirables and the result was a horrific crime the likes of which the small town had never seen before or since.

  Twelve years earlier to the day, October 31st, Halloween night, the couple had opened their home to trick-or-treaters as they had done for so many years before. Gladys waited by the window with her bowl of candy, watching for children, while Harold sat in his recliner reading the sports section as always. It had been a very successful evening with many children enjoying their treats.

  However, later that night while the couple slept, persons unknown broke into the house, murdered the couple in their sleep then robbed the house of whatever they could find. The place had been ransacked as if the killers had been looking for caches of hidden money. But of course there was no treasure to be found.

  And there was much more to the story than just two people being murdered in their sleep. Word had leaked that the murderers had conducted some sort of strange, bizarre and possibly satanic rituals with the bodies. It was said the twisted perpetrators had savagely dismembered the couple’s bodies and had arranged the parts in a bizarre manner. Witnesses said the scene resembled something which might be described as a modern art show in Hell. This included limbs from Harold’s body being attached to Gladys’ torso and vice versa.

  It was said that Gladys’ breasts had been hacked off and attached to Harold’s chest. Likewise Harold’s genitals were severed and placed between Gladys’ legs. Their stomachs had been sliced open and the room decorated with their bloody intestines like some unimaginable pink and crimson garland. Both of their heads had been decapitated and placed atop their dresser, as if posed to witness the hideous tableau being staged before them. The room stank like the inside of a slaughter house, which was exactly what it had become.

  The unholy display of mangled and reordered body parts was so horrifying and beyond anyone’s ability to understand, that every investigator on the scene was unable to keep from vomiting. Perhaps the most disturbing part of it all was the writing on the wall behind the bed, as if the killers had wanted to come up with a title for the macabre scene. Written crudely with hands dipped in the couple’s blood were the words “Happy Halloween.”The criminals were never caught.

  If there was any consolation to be taken from the scene of unimaginable butchery was the county coroner’s report suggested the couple had likely been killed instantly and did not have to suffer. He even suggested they had probably died so quickly that they might have not even known what had happened to them.

  So, from the coroner’s single statement the legends began, spread and grew as such legends often did. Stories of late night sightings of Gladys standing, looking out of the front window abounded. And this was especially prevalent on Halloween night, the anniversary of the murders, when it was believed she still stood watching for her beloved trick-or-treaters. There were also tales of the two headless specters being seen floating inside the home.

  Because of the savagery of the murders committed in the house, no one would dare buy it. As a result it soon fell to disrepair and eventually to ruin. And now every year the neighborhood children would make it a point to cross the street on Halloween night in order to stay as far from the Millbury house as possible.

  “I just don’t get it.” Gladys said as she looked out of her living room window, “They are avoiding us like we have the plague or something. I can't figure it out, Harold. Our house used to be a magnet for children at Halloween, but no longer. What's wrong with our house?”

  “Forget it,” Harold said. “Look. This is all pointless. I’m tired anyway. I think I’ll head up to bed for the night. “

  So, Harold stood and set the newspaper down on the end table and went up the stairs to bed. The date of the paper read October 31st but the year was not the current year; it was twelve years earlier. He read the exact same paper every October 31st. And this was the same scenario, which he and Gladys had played out every Halloween night since the horrific event had occurred. But to them, it was always be the first time, always new, always fresh, and it would be eternal.

  Grundies

  Adapt or perish, now as ever, is nature’s inexorable imperative.

  —H. G. Wells

  Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished.

  —Lao Tzu

  Chad looked out through the windshield onto the dark slick expanse of highway ahead of him and suddenly realized he had absolutely no idea where he was. Up ahead a road sign reflected in his headlights through the fog and misty rain, becoming more visible the closer he got. The sign read “Erie 50 MI.” Chad was suddenly perplexed.

  The last road sign he had remembered seeing had indicated that he still had eighty miles to travel. And now this sign said only fifty miles. He wondered if the previous sign had been wrong or perhaps he might have read it incorrectly. But he was almost certain the sign had said eighty miles. If he were right, then it meant that for the past thirty miles or roughly forty minutes, he had been essentially driving on autopilot, completely oblivious to his surroundings. Chad looked at the clock on the dashboard display and confirmed that forty-five minutes had actually passed.

  He was not completely surprised by such a concept, since Chad was quite certain that at one time or another everyone found themselves driving on autopilot. He assumed nothing had happened of any note worthiness or most certainly he would have snapped out of his trance; at least he hoped that would be the case.

  He remembered having experienced similar events on several occasion in the past. But this was the first time in his many years behind the wheel that he had zoned out so extremely as to not be able to recall one single detail of the past three quarters of an hour. He was beside himself with confusion.

  Chad supposed it was his own fault. Usually when he drove from eastern Pennsylvania to the far northwest side of the state he traveled via the turnpike, taking it past Pittsburgh, almost to the Ohio border before heading north toward Erie. This route took him on all main highways, most of which were set up to accommodate four lanes of traffic or better.

  That particular route was longer in terms of miles traveled as it formed the left and bottom sides of a right triangle. However, with the higher speed limits those expressways offered with such an open roadway it often made the trip go quickly; however it was also an extremely boring driving experience. Chad would often listen to audio books to help him deal with the monotony, but sometimes it just got to be too much for him.

  For that reason, Chad had chosen not to take the turnpike on this trip. He had instead gotten the not-so-ingenious idea that it might be more interesting to get off the turnpike after Somerset and head northwest along the hypotenuse of the triangle, thereby taking the theoretically shortest route to Erie. At the time it made perfect sense to him because everyone knows the shortest distance between two points is a straight line. But although it may have been shorter in terms of miles traveled, the trip ended up being much longer in terms of hours spent on the highway.

  Unlike the turnpike, most of the roads Chad took along the scenic route were country two-lanes, which wound through rural areas, small towns, and vast forestlands. He couldn’t recall how long it had been since he had seen a familiar fast food restaurant. There were few if any gas stations along the route either and those he did see appeared to be of the Mom and Pop variety; looking frighteningly like those run-down shacks often depicted in horror movies about deranged hillbillies. He suddenly ha
d a flashback to a scene from the 1970s movie Deliverance, which caused his stomach to tighten just a bit.

  Chad recalled with displeasure how just before he zoned out he had stopped at a local combination gas station and general store. It was the sort of place that kept fish bait in the same cooler as popsicles. He remembered the deplorable condition of the store with peeling paint on its exterior and the well-worn dusty wood plank flooring inside. The place had a dank and musty smell common to such old buildings.

  And the old man working behind the service counter was equally as disheveled in appearance. That character had been a scrawny old coot in a stained and yellowed wife-beater, wearing a soiled camouflaged trucker’s cap with a brim blackened from filthy finger smudges. The old-timer looked as though he had not showered for days nor had he shaved for weeks, apparent by the grizzled stubble which covered his face in irregular patches.

  Across the room from the service counter an odd looking overweight young man, perhaps thirty-five, was precariously perched on a rocking chair and staring slack-jawed at Chad who stood sopping wet, dripping water onto the aged plank floor. When Chad first walked into the store the rocker had been in motion but it stopped as soon as he approached the counter.

  It was apparent to Chad from the odd man’s demeanor he was a dullard, perhaps mentally retarded. Although Chad knew both of those terms were considered politically incorrect, they seemed to fit that particular individual. Chad thought to himself in words that would be considered even less socially acceptable, What a bunch of inbred mutants. This idea solidified Chad’s earlier Deliverance impression even further in his mind, which made him feel very uncomfortable. He recalled how that single movie had bothered him in ways no other movie had ever done before or since.

  But despite his many misgivings and his discomfort with the place, Chad completed his transaction without incident. He could not however, seem to shake the unusual sensation slithering down his spine as he walked out of the store. Even though he didn’t bother to look back, Chad was certain both the owner and his subhuman associate, perhaps the man’s own offspring, were still staring at him. He could almost feel their eyes boring holes in his back. Chad had climbed uneasily behind the wheel then quickly drove away, deciding not to stop anywhere again until he saw some signs of real, honest-to-goodness civilization.