by Steve Vernon
ROADSIDE GHOSTS
A Collection
Of
Ghost Tales
By
Steve Vernon
Stark Raven Press
Dedication
You have got to have it
if you want to be a writer
I would like to thank the good folks at Crossroad
for making this collection possible.
I would also like to thank Richard Chizmar and Michael Knost
who both helped with the editing of several of these stories.
I would also like to thank the folks at
Nimbus Publishing
for first starting me on down
the long ghost road
And thanks as always
to my wife Belinda
who keeps my smile always turned up right
Table of Contents
Catcall
Old Spice Love Knot
Where You Gonna Run To?
A Sky Full of Stars and a Big Green Forever
Lost Sole
Memory Stains
Traveling Salesman Story
The Forever Long Road of Olan Walker
The best stories often stretch and ramble at a comfortable contemplative pace – like an easy stroll down a long country road. This first story was originally published in Cemetery Dance issue #36 – way back in 2001 - and it has always been one of my favorite yarns. Folks who know me will recognize an awful lot of my growing up years in this particular story. I have laid all of the pieces out in the following pages, like a jigsaw puzzle that’s been dumped on the floor. You read through it, why don’t you, and see how many pieces you can put together along the way.
Catcall
Nobody really knows just how long the old Funnel mansion had stood empty, waiting up there high on Carpenter’s Hill like a child’s forgotten lunch box, any more than anybody knew how long that old gray cat had squatted in behind the screen of the front porch window.
Just waiting.
All that we knew was that somebody must be feeding that cat, because every now and then we would look in from the shelter of the hedge on the far side of the yard and see the cat nibbling daintily on something that looked to be a whole lot like a steaming heap of raw hamburger.
“Guts,” proclaimed Jeremy Hooter, making a thick juicy swizzling noise with his lips and tongue pressed against his stainless steel braces. “It’s guts, is what it is.”
“Great big gobs of owl guts,” amplified Charlie Roundbert.
Charlie Roundbert was only half of Jeremy’s size and age, but he might as well have been Jeremy’s shadow. The two boys stuck together just that closely and yet as far as I knew the two of them never had anything nice to say to each other.
“Owl guts,” Charlie repeated.
We all took up the chant except Jeremy, who didn’t think it was funny at all.
“Owl guts, owl guts, owl guts.”
Owl was what we always called Jeremy, because of his last name. It didn’t help much that Jeremy wore a pair of glasses that made coke bottle bottoms look like the thinnest of microscope slides. The glasses always reminded me of Dr. Cyclops. You know the guy from the movies? Jeremy was the same way. It always looked to me like Jeremy was staring at us through a microscope, like we were some kind of alien bacteria from Planet X.
I had a microscope given to me on my tenth birthday, not one of those little bitty plastic toys they sell with the chemistry sets you order from the Christmas catalogue, but a big old-fashioned kind that my Dad found in a basement he’d been paid to empty. The basement had belonged to old Doc Hawcomber, and when the doctor saw the microscope he told my Dad to go ahead and take it, he had a new one he used anyways. My Dad always said that the microscope was probably contaminated with all kinds of plagues and diseases and he was likely being ten kinds of an idiot giving the darned thing to a kid like me – but he never took it back.
I told my Dad not to worry. Germs didn’t stick to dead things like microscopes and houses. Germs stuck to people. Germs needed meat to feed on, and he probably shouldn’t worry so much.
I knew he wasn’t being all that serious anyways. He was my Dad, and the only person I had in this world, next to my imaginary figment dog Riley. The only difference was that Dad was real. Riley had been real, but he was what you called an imaginary figment now, ever since the timber truck ran over him.
But worrying was something that my Dad did, just like most people breathed – without even thinking about it. I knew my Dad liked to worry about me, like it was his hobby or something, and I loved him for this worry, imaginary or not.
I got Riley from my Mom when I was two. Riley was a big black Labrador retriever, with feet as big as snow shoes in the pictures we have of him. We don’t have too many pictures of Mom, because it was my Mom’s camera, and Dad never felt that all that comfortable using it. He’s got his own camera now, and he uses it whenever he can, like he was making up for something he’d lost.
Riley was my dog, and when he was alive he would play fetch with me with a worn out baseball from the time the sun got up in the morning until the time it crawled back into bed. He was killed when I was eight, because of a ball I had misthrown. The ball had bounced out into the roadway and Riley followed the lure of the ball like a trout following the wriggle of a fresh-hooked worm. The truck rolled over Riley before I even had a chance to scream.
Let me do the math for you.
I got Riley when I was two, and my Mom died when I was three, and Riley died when I was eight, and I can still remember how I used to stare into his big black jujube eyes and see my mother smiling out from inside those eyes. I loved Riley better than I loved spaghetti, and I loved spaghetti a lot.
Dad said I got my spaghetti eating habit from my Mom. Back before the accident, back when Mom was alive she loved eating spaghetti more than anything. I can still remember seeing her with two long strands of spaghetti hanging from out of her mouth like a Fu Manchu moustache, until she sucked them right back up, giggling all the way, with a big loud shlooooping sound.
It was the only memory I had of her. She died when I was awfully young. A car wreck, Dad told me. It was a rainy October night, and the wheels couldn’t hold to the road, and there was a sudden blast of lightning like somebody jumped out and said boo, and then Dad lost control of the wheel and they slid up against that big old beech tree down at the foot of Carpenter’s Hill.
Dad had remembered to buckle up so he only twisted his back and broke his face against the dash board, but Mom forgot to buckle up so she went spilling right through the window glass and into the tree and Dad told me once one late night that he still saw the color of her blood in the leaves of that tree every autumn.
It might have been his imagination, I suppose.
My Dad walks with a limp because of that crash, and his left eye has a strange tilt to it from where his face was broken. It looks as if he’s always getting ready to cry and every October he carries a bouquet of quiet red roses up the side of Carpenter’s Hill to the town cemetery where my Mom is sleeping.
Jeremy, who is older than I am, told me once that he had watched from the bushes as the police ambulance medics scraped my Mom off of the trunk of the tree like she was so much hamburger meat. I told him he was a liar. I told him that you couldn’t make a person into hamburger meat. We got into a fight over that, and he probably would have beaten me up, but I think he felt bad for what he’d said to me.
He’d said
to me that some of the pieces of my Mom had been so small that the police had needed a microscope to find them.
*
I liked my microscope a lot. In the summer I liked to mix swamp water and hay in a big mason jar and let it sit and steep out back behind the old garage where the sun always shines, until my Dad would say something to me about “that unholy stink”, and I would take the water and make as many slides as I could and would dump the rest of it out back in the ditch. The ditch always smelled like swamp water, although I blamed the smell on Jeremy because he liked to pee in the ditch whenever he came over to visit.
The slides were always different. I liked to see paramecium and amoeba and all kinds of other things that I didn’t know the names of. I asked my Dad once where they’d all come from and how they got into the water. He said some of them were probably in the swamp water to begin with, and some of them were in the hay. Only the ones in the hay were sleeping, like seeds waiting to be rained on and hatched. Dormant, he called it, like they were waiting behind some kind of door.
I also liked to look at the hydra plants that I found under the lily pads of the swamp behind the school. I would wade out in to the swamp in my big rubber boots that used to be Dad’s until they started to leak. One day I got caught in the mud and nearly sucked under and my friends had to run for my Dad. Dad waded out to get me, and then for a while I thought he was going to get stuck too, and then I had this crazy picture in my mind of the whole town being out here stuck in the muck, waiting for the frogs and the leeches and the mosquitoes to suck us all dry, only Mr. Thornton came along with a big old rope and pulled the two of us out of there before the leeches, frogs and mosquitoes had a decent chance to get at us.
After that my Dad told me to stay away from that swamp. He told me that three winters before I was born two ice skaters went down through the ice and didn’t come back up. My Dad believed that because of that the swamp had developed a taste for people and it was just waiting for its next meal to come along, like some kind of giant Venus flytrap.
Jeremy had a Venus flytrap plant that his mother had bought at a county fair. In the summer, when it was too hot to do much of anything else we used to watch it take flies, luring them in slowly and then snapping them up like good old Godzilla. I wanted a plant just like it for the longest time, but my Dad wouldn’t buy one because he said we didn’t need it. My Dad was the town’s champion fly swatter, and he took pride in the fact that he could snag a housefly with his bare hands.
“You’ve got to watch for that hand washing motion they make,” he told me one too many times. “When they make it you know they’re too busy thinking about washing their hands to think about jumping into flight, so you can grab them because they aren’t really looking for it.”
“Right Dad,” I said. “If Chizmar’s Groceteria ever closes down we’ll be able to live off of the flies you catch for us.”
I liked going down to Chizmar’s Groceteria because it always smelled of the fresh pies that Mrs. Chizmar baked every day. Sometimes apple, sometimes peach, but best of all was her blackberry pie. Dad always said that Mrs. Chizmar’s blackberry pie made your belly want to climb out of your stomach and dance itself a jig for sheer joy.
I always told my Dad that your belly was your stomach, and that it couldn’t really jump out of itself but that never stopped my Dad from slapping his stomach every time he walked into Chizmar’s Groceteria and smelled those pies and told Mrs. Chizmar that her apple pie made his belly want to climb out of his stomach and dance.
The neatest part of Chizmar’s Groceteria was the big meat shop out back where Mr. Chizmar worked. I didn’t really like the sound of the butchering that you heard every Monday morning, and the thick chewy whizz of the meat saw always made my belly want to climb out of my stomach and puke, but the sight of the dancing fly paper, covered in all those flies was really neat. It was like a kind of hanging jewelry, only it was alive and while Dad ordered the meat I liked to try and count the flies that were stuck on each strip.
Mr. Thornton used flypaper in the school washroom once, because the old plumbing didn’t work so well. The pipes didn’t suck the water down quickly enough. The water that didn’t go down left a smell the flies liked to follow, so he hung flypaper up to catch them.
Mr. Thornton was the school caretaker. He made sure everything stayed clean. My Dad always called him a janitor, and when I asked Dad once what the difference was between a caretaker and a janitor he said - “Listen, you can call cow-pie daffodils, if you want to, but that doesn’t do a thing about the stink.”
It was the same thing about the Funnel house. It wasn’t really a house, as far as we kids could tell. It was more like a piece of leftover Halloween decoration, like the old school float that Vice Principal Bindles parked in his garage all year waiting for the Fourth of July parade – which really wasn’t a float. It was just an old fishing dory that Vice Principal Bindles covered with tissue paper flowers and nailed to a nearly broken trailer.
The dory still stank of fish, even though it hadn’t touched an ocean for more years than I was old, but it was our school float, and every Fourth of July Vice Principal Bindles and whoever was crazy enough to help him, made new flowers and repainted the parts that showed and wheeled it out and hooked it up behind Vice Principal Bindles’s old Oldsmobile for the whole town to see.
It really wasn’t much of a parade when you think of it. Just the school float, and a band of marching musicians that sounded worse than cats screaming at midnight, a wagon full of puppies that old lady Cray would drag along behind her with bows around each of the puppies that she was trying to find a home for before she had to take them out and drown them in the swamp, and a big old Model T that sounded noisier and smelled worse every year, and then there was the town mayor sitting in the back of a dirty red pickup truck on a throne made out of moose and deer antlers that was supposed to represent our frontier heritage. It was not much of a parade at all, as far as I was concerned. It was more just a habit that folks had never learned to unstick themselves from.
*
So one hot summer day, me and my imaginary figment dog Riley and little Jeremy Hooter and Charlie Roundbert and a half dozen other kids were up on Carpenter’s Hill in the hedge outside the Funnel House, taking dares on who’d get close enough to spit on the porch.
The hill was a kind of a fun place to be, because you could look down from it and see the whole town laid out like a summer picnic. The Funnel House was the highest location in town, next to the old water tower, and that didn’t really count because the house was on a hill, which made it even higher than the tower. Folks always expected the tower to be hit by lightning one night and there were also those who swore it had been struck two or three times since Old Man Funnel was hauled away to the county nuthouse.
“Old Man Funnel was crazier than a black bear with a bee hive bumped up his bung hole,” Jeremy once said. “My Dad told me Old Man Funnel fed his wife and daughter into a meat grinder, because he thought they were getting ready to leave him. He fed them into a meat grinder, and fed the meat to his cat.”
Now I knew that what Jeremy had said was nothing more than a story but I also knew that most stories have a little something or other of the truth buried down deep inside of them - so I guessed that maybe you could make a person into hamburger meat, if you tried hard enough.
Although I would recommend adding a little ketchup to the mix.
*
Being up here on Carpenter’s Hill was a whole lot better than being at home because if I were home Dad would only make me slap one more coat of red paint on our old garage, even though the wood was so dry it reminded me of the desert in those cool Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movies, especially because of the way it sucked up the paint, leaving the whole garage a sort of watered down pink, like cotton candy barf. Dad said it looked like a Mexican cathouse, only when I asked him what he meant by that he got real quiet and changed the subject fast.
Sometimes grownups d
on’t make any sense at all.
The Funnel House was surrounded by one of those big country hedges, the pricklish kind that snagged you like it was trying to eat you, one tiny nibble at a time, like it was sprouting out a thousand branches full of tiny petrified vampire mosquitoes – but when it came to the Funnel House that prickly pinchy pointied-up hedge was where we kids always felt safest.
Which was where the whole thing started.
“I bet you can’t get up there close enough to spit,” Jeremy said to me.
Jeremy was right. I had learned a long time ago that words like “bet” or “dare” were just another way of asking if you were really stupid enough to try, and I wasn’t that stupid – at least not most of the time.
“How about you, Charlie?” Jeremy asked. “Are you chicken, or what?”
Chicken was another word, bigger than dare or bet. Chicken was the line dragged in the dirt that just always had to be crossed. Although I felt a little sorry for Charlie, I was very glad that Jeremy had used the chicken-word on Charlie and not on me.
“I ain’t chicken,” Charlie said, and before you could say spit, the bargain was sealed.
*
Charlie approached the house cautiously; in the same manner one might approach an angry bulldog on a chain. Carefully, because you never knew just when that dog would jump, and you never knew just when that chain might decide to pop, leaving the dog free to rip out your throat and strew your lungs and liver like so many shreds of wrapping paper in the middle of a kidded-up birthday party.
And of course there was the cat, sitting as always high and watchful in that front porch screened window. A big old scruffy gray tom, with streaks of black and silver depending on how the sun shone upon its fur, and despite the cat’s constant preening it always seemed a little mangy, like the time Jeremy’s Dad had dressed up Jeremy’s drunken uncle Stu in his best suit and had taken him to church. He’d snored through the service, only startling awake as each of the hymns began and then just as quickly settling back down to sleep by the time we reached the second verse - which went a long way towards proving what my Dad always said about cow-pie and daffodils.
