The Poor and the Haunted

by Dustin McKissen

  The Poor and the Haunted

  Dustin McKissen

  © Copyright Dustin McKissen 2019

  Black Rose Writing | Texas

  © 2019 by Dustin McKissen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publishers, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  The final approval for this literary material is granted by the author.

  First digital version

  All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Print ISBN: 978-1-68433-364-6

  PUBLISHED BY BLACK ROSE WRITING

  www.blackrosewriting.com

  Print edition produced in the United States of America

  Thank you so much for checking out one of our Horror novels.

  If you enjoy this book, please check out our recommended title for your next great read!

  Doll House by John Hunt

  “Doll House is a deeply felt and admirably realized tale of an unending real-life nightmare.” –Mallory Heart Reviews

  “I absolutely loved this book.” –Bolton Library

  For Cody and Levi.

  But the stars are burnin’ bright like some mystery uncovered

  I’ll keep movin’ through the dark with you in my heart

  My blood brother

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Recommended Reading

  Dedication

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Note from the Author

  BRW info

  I’m pale as a ghost

  You know what I love about you

  That’s what I need the most

  ~Warren Zevon~

  CHAPTER ONE

  2019

  “Why,” Jessica asked, “do hauntings only happen to poor people?”

  The man they watched on TV was definitely poor and definitely haunted. On their flat screen, Don Decker, the Pennsylvania Rain Man, told his story to the makers of Paranormal Witness. Jessica loved these shows: Ghost Hunters, Fact or Faked, A Haunting, even the one where the family cat could supposedly detect ghosts and demons.

  Though Jimmy hated these shows, he loved spending time with his daughter. Her unshaven knees pulled to her chest, Jessica was still a child, and Jimmy’s opinion still mattered to her. More time with her was worth paying just about any price, including watching the story of the Pennsylvania Rain Man.

  “Do hauntings only happen to poor people?” Jimmy asked. “Is that a fact?”

  “Dad. Amityville? The Lutzes, they were about to lose it all,” Jessica said, pausing the show. “This guy here? The Rain Main? He was in jail for stealing TVs. All these shows, the families are always poor and full of stepchildren. They all have stepdads and stepmoms. Everyone is almost about to go into bankruptly. It’s a thing, dad.”

  Jimmy did not correct his daughter’s butchering of the word “bankruptcy.” This increasingly rare mispronunciation was one of the fast-disappearing reminders of the baby girl he wanted since the day he and Jill got married. Jessica had a fight in her Jimmy loved even when she was a baby. Years ago, Jimmy, Jill, and her older brother, Jonathan, had to make sure the front door was shut; otherwise, Jessica—all eighteen months of her—would race outside to pick a fight with the cactus in their yard. She always lost the fight, but losses did not stop baby Jessica from going back for more.

  “Did you run this theory by Mom?”

  “Yep.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said to ask you.”

  “Ask me? Why?”

  “She said you knew more about these things.”

  “What things?”

  “Hauntings.”

  Jimmy stretched his legs out, putting his feet up on their coffee table before pulling them down and placing them back up again. He could hear the rhythmic sound of a basketball bouncing in their driveway; Jonathan was practicing for high school tryouts. Jill was off somewhere, maybe planting strawberries in their small garden in the side yard. His wife could not make herself sit still long enough to watch one of Jessica’s paranormal shows, and Jonathan made Jessica feel like doing anything with her was a sentence he must grimly endure, like one of the prisoners in the Lockup shows he liked to watch.

  Hard time and hauntings helped his children escape the cushy life Jimmy provided.

  “Dad?”

  “Let me think for a minute.”

  Did hauntings only ever happen to poor people?

  He did not have an answer and wasn’t sure why Jill thought he would.

  “I don’t know.”

  Jessica appreciated what her dad didn’t do. He didn’t tell her hauntings weren’t real, or ghosts and demons are fake. Or what she was watching was trash. He considered her question and did not have an answer and respected her enough to tell her. In Jessica’s eyes, taking her question seriously was the same as taking her seriously, and taking her seriously was the first hurdle any man—including her dad—had to leap before she could love them.

  And Jessica loved her dad fiercely.

  She snuggled her hairy knees and pointy elbows into Jimmy, and hit play. On the television, Don Decker told how, on a weekend furlough from jail in the 1980s, rain started to pour down inside the house he was staying in, which belonged to a family friend. The friend offered Don a place to stay over the weekend, so he could attend the funeral of his grandfather before returning to jail. Everywhere Don went that weekend rain poured down from the ceiling. The rain fell up, down, and sideways—like it sometimes did during an Oklahoma thunderstorm. Jimmy thought of those storms, the way the sky darkened his father’s face, the burst vessels of his nose made redder by the weird shade of daylight that preceded the sound of tornado sirens.

  Jimmy looked back at the TV, his arms studded with goosebumps for the first time that afternoon. He took note of the goosebumps but remained unaware of the single tear that rolled down his neck before being absorbed by his undershirt.

  Though no one has ever explained what happened, Don Decker’s story was corroborated by police officers and jail personnel.

  Trustworthy people. Serious people.

  “I love this story,” Jessica said.

  “Wh
y?”

  “Because it isn’t typical. It’s not another one of those possession stories where some girl starts cursing out Jesus and showing her privates until a priest shows up. I get tired of those. Stories like this make me believe. This one is real. It happened. You can tell by looking at his eyes.”

  That part was true. Don Decker’s blue eyes looked almost alien as he told his story. But Jimmy didn’t need to see the man’s eyes to know his daughter was right. If you wanted to know whether someone was disturbed, all you needed to do was look them in the eye.

  Jimmy and Jessica Lansford sat on a couch in a suburban Phoenix tract home, their house the exact same floorplan as their neighbors on each side.

  It was disorienting to walk into a bizzaro version of your own home. It reminded Jimmy of watching Stranger Things with Jessica. Going to his neighbor’s house was like visiting the Upside Down. The opposite of Jimmy’s world is full of overpriced stuff from Pottery Barn, rather than overpriced stuff from Crate and Barrel—an otherworld designed by developers who consumed wild desert like The Blob in The Blob.

  The furniture supplier of choice wasn’t the sole difference between his and his neighbors’ houses. In Jimmy’s reality, a framed picture of his family sat on the counter next to his fridge. Six inches away sat another picture of his sister, Jessica and Jonathan’s Aunt Kelly. In his neighbor’s reality, the same space was occupied by a cookie jar.

  Housing developments like the one the Lansfords called home were defined by two main characteristics. First, they had pompous, goofy names. The Lansfords’ development was “Estancia Estates at Red Rock Ridge by KJ Homes (Units starting from the $500s!).” The other defining characteristic was the near total lack of interaction between neighbors, fueled by the disorienting sameness of every home and the eight-foot walls erected to separate yards.

  Exceptions existed, of course, including the opulent birthday parties that brought the entire neighborhood together, or at least the neighbors with children.

  When Jonathan was younger, he and Jimmy walked around the backyard, pretending the eight-foot walls kept them safe from monsters living outside their castle. Those days were gone. Jonathan had grown too old and too cool to play games with his dad. Now he was out in the driveway, wearing $120 Kyrie Irving shoes he bought with money he earned mowing lawns. There would undoubtedly be sweat glistening in the scraggly beard his mother hated.

  Despite what Jimmy thought, Jill was not gardening. She was completing her application to work for a startup as their CFO. There were no diapers left to change, no playdates to coordinate. She wanted to put her accounting degree to use. She hung on as long as she could, believing Jonathan and Jessica needed her at home. Jill stopped believing that the first time she felt a hand on her shoulder and turned around to kiss her husband, but instead saw a younger version of him standing before her in a basketball jersey. An almost accidental French kiss with Jonathan was all it took for Jill to realize her babies were no longer babies.

  The startup she was applying to would probably fail, and the money they planned to pay her was less than she could make as a shift manager at Arby’s. Still, not everyone took a chance on someone who stopped working during George W. Bush’s first term. Jill was grateful for the opportunity. Even if she hadn’t told Jimmy.

  Outside, Jonathan ignored the ice cream truck, such childish things being beneath the next Kyrie Irving. Upstairs, Jill completed her application and resume and sent it to the startup’s CEO, who happened to be the cousin of a good friend from her yoga class. Jessica leaned against her father, putting her head on his shoulder. That little gesture always made him forget to breathe. He missed the first tear rolling down his cheek, but suddenly became very aware of the second. He casually reached toward his face and pretended to scratch his smooth, freshly shaved cheeks.

  With tears leaking from one eye and his little girl’s head on his shoulder, Jimmy Lansford watched the story of a man whose life was forever haunted by one unexplainable, horrific event.

  CHAPTER TWO

  1997

  Jimmy was in his room, listening to Tupac and Biggie on a mixtape his friend Brian made him. He also had to use Brian’s old Walkman to listen to the tape. Unless they started putting Walkmans beneath a flashing blue light at Kmart, Jimmy was never going to afford music in his pocket.

  Ronnie, Diane, Jimmy, and Kelly Lansford lived in a big, old, rundown home on the dairy his father worked at. The house was part of his father’s pay, and it was huge—though not, by any definition of the word, nice. The unfinished basement was always a black and dirty swamp of standing water at least four inches deep. There were mice in the house, and an occasional bat. But the mice were the worst.

  The mice respected nothing.

  This past semester, Jimmy got all A’s on his report card, a first for a Lansford. Knowing their mother and father didn’t care, Kelly scrounged until she found enough quarters to buy him a full-size package of Oreos as a reward. She was proud of her big brother and his good grades. Oreos were a rare treat, and Jimmy ate two and put the rest in a cupboard above the fridge. He thought they would be safe there, hidden from parents who believed everything in the house belonged to them.

  His parents didn’t find the Oreos, but the mice did. The rodents ate all his Oreos, shredding even the packaging. Jimmy was fifteen—practically a full-grown man—and it angered him that the mice thought it was safe to eat his treasure.

  Kelly interrupted Jimmy’s time with Tupac and Biggie—and more important, his time away from his family—by bursting into his room.

  “Try knocking!” he shouted.

  Kelly was staring at him, eyes wide, hand still on the doorknob. Behind Jimmy, the wall was covered with hand-me-down posters from Brian of grunge bands Jimmy didn’t like—but even Kurt Cobain’s once sad and now dead face was better to look at than the house’s decaying walls.

  “Jimmy, did you hear that?”

  He wanted his sister to leave him alone, so he explained a sound he didn’t hear.

  “Yeah. It was the neighbor’s dog.”

  Kelly knew her brother was lying. The dairy was on the outskirts of town and could almost—though not quite—be called rural. Their closest neighbor was half a mile away.

  “It sounded like Mom.”

  “It was a dog.”

  “Jimmy, come with me to the barn. I think I heard Mom out there.”

  “Fine,” Jimmy said. The sooner he got this over with, the sooner he could be alone again. He loved his sister more than anything, but sometimes he just needed space from the constant circus of his home. Kelly was twelve years old, and the only good part of the circus, but like any fifteen-year-old boy, Jimmy still needed time to himself.

  Jimmy and Kelly went downstairs, crossing the floor of their empty living room before exiting the front door.

  They left the porch and headed toward the barn, Brian’s old Walkman still in Jimmy’s hand. They made it to the dirt driveway and stood between their mother’s rusted-out Pontiac Firebird and the flatbed pickup truck their father used—but which belonged to the dairy—when they heard a scream. It was the worst sound either of them had ever heard, including the time their mother threatened to kill their father during what could loosely be called, at least in the Lansford home, Thanksgiving.

  “Stay here,” Jimmy told Kelly.

  “No way! I—”

  “Kelly, I’m serious. Stay here.”

  Jimmy took the headphones off his neck and placed them over Kelly’s ears. He put the Walkman in her hands.

  “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said. “Whatever you do, do not go into the barn. And if the door starts to open, run to the house and yell my name. Yell my name the whole time. Do you understand
me?”

  This was not the first time Jimmy had to come up with a plan to keep them safe, and it would not be the last.

  “Jimmy,” she said, looking at the barn, “I’m scared.”

  “Don’t be scared. I got you. If the door starts to open, run. Even if someone looks hurt.”

  “Kay.”

  Kelly did not scare easy, but when she did she reverted to her elementary school vocabulary, filled with words like “Kay.”

  It was a sunny Saturday morning. Later Jimmy remembered how warm and bright it was, free of pitch-black clouds or summer tornado sirens, how it didn’t feel like a morning for bloodcurdling screams. He squeezed Kelly’s hands, looking at the spray of freckles across her nose, her shiny eyes, the thick eyebrows, her sharp jawline. He knew one day soon Brian would be just fine with Kelly tagging along.

  Jimmy gave her a quick hug and ran back to the house, going up the porch stairs and through the front door. He headed straight toward Kelly’s room.

  To say his sister’s portion of the house was messy was an understatement. There were layers to the stuff she discarded and left on her floor. In their family, Kelly was the messy one, and Jimmy was the clean one. To her credit, though, Kelly wasn’t like her friends. Jimmy knew a girl her age should love boy bands and have posters on the wall of actors from 90210 or whatever it was twelve-year-old girls found interesting.

  Kelly was different. Her favorite singer was Cyndi Lauper, and it wasn’t long before he found the tape with “Time after Time” on it. Jimmy knew it was his sister’s favorite song. He grabbed it and ran back outside.

  Kelly stood in the same spot, looking toward him, rather than keeping her eye on the barn.

  “You okay?” he asked.