Ten Open Graves: A Collection of Supernatural Horror

by David Wood

  Monty took the ticket, slid it into his grocery bag and with an exaggerated sigh, said, “See you at the Ashland fireworks?”

  “If I were going to the fireworks, I’d be on my way already.” Rule turned her eyes to the dark blue sky. “Gonna be dark inside of fifteen minutes. B’sides, you can see ’em fine from right here in town.”

  Main Street arched over the top of a tall hill. From the center of town in front of the First Baptist Church and Memorial Park across the street, the view stretched out for miles to the north and south. And from the rooftops of the few three-story storefronts on either side of the street, you could look over the surrounding pine forest to the west and catch a glimpse of the White Mountains on a clear day, which was most days in Refuge. The easterly view was mostly blocked by Black Job hill, the tallest spot in town with clear views in every direction, upon which sat a single home, belonging to Winslow and Carol Herman.

  Monty glanced at the sky. “Shit. I still have to pick up Susie and the girls.” He flung open the door to his black pickup truck, climbed in and slammed it closed. The giant beast of a vehicle roared to life, and Monty gave it two enthusiastic revs.

  Rule tapped the window twice with her knuckles.

  As the glass descended, Rule placed her elbow on the door. “I give speeding tickets, too. I don’t want to hear any squealing tires.”

  Monty grinned. “Now come on, we all know which one of us is the better driver.”

  Rule stepped back and gave a nod. “We also know which one of us carries a badge. And a gun.”

  With a grin and a casual salute, Monty said, “See you in church, Beck, err, Sheriff.”

  Rule gave a wave as Monty sped off. The man has a boulder for a brain, she thought, looking at the empty lot. Thirty spaces, ripe for the picking, and he took the one handicap spot. He was right, though; there weren’t any year-round handicap residents in Refuge, but with the Fourth of July being tomorrow, she didn’t want to risk one of the old rich people with fancy homes around Newton Lake having a hissy fit when their blue placard, bestowed upon them by the good Lord himself, failed to procure prime parking.

  With the lot to Soucey’s Market now empty, Rule wandered toward the sidewalk. Main Street was mostly empty, too, except down by the bar. There were cars there all year long, at all hours and in nearly all weather. Only a blizzard could empty the bar, and not because the boys couldn’t get there—they all had plows. But it was those same plows that made them extra money come winter, and they got their plowing done before their drinking. Most knew well enough not to drink and drive in Refuge. Not since what happened to Bernie.

  Rule didn’t normally walk the streets looking to give parking tickets. That typically fell under the purview of Deputy Jim Sweeney and Deputy Helena Frost. But Sweeney was in Ashland for the fireworks with most of the rest of Refuge’s fifteen hundred residents, and Frost was...well, she was confined to the office, at least for the night, on account of punching Casey Parks square in the nose. Granted, the seventeen year old deserved as much for pummeling fourteen year old John Bieman, but she should have shouted, “Stop, Police,” before hauling off and clocking him in front of sixteen people.

  The walk will do me good anyway, she thought, purposely putting a little spring in her step. She’d put on a few pounds in the past few years, and her uniform fit a little too tightly to be decent for a fifty-three year old woman. In her opinion, anyway. She wasn’t exactly a hot ticket, but in the north woods of New Hampshire, where the competition sometimes looked like those late 1800s photos of scowling farm matrons, being a flawed woman wasn’t always a problem.

  She paused at a meter where a red compact car she didn’t recognize was parked. Still an hour left. Damn. She checked the plates. California. That’s unusual, she thought, and then moved on. The next three cars were all paid up, and upon reaching the fourth car, she realized she was wasting her time.

  “Parking meters enforced between the hours of 8am and 7pm,” she read from the label. She stood up straight and put away the ticket booklet she’d been holding at the ready.

  “Well then—” she started, but she heard a buzzing sound. Like the hum of those big power lines out by 95. Despite the volume, she knew the sound was distant. She listened for a moment, trying to pinpoint the direction from which the buzz originated, but it was suddenly drowned out by the roar of an engine.

  She turned and saw Monty, Susie and their two little girls, Alice and Joy, beaming with innocent sugar-fueled smiles framed by freckles she could see from a distance, all waving from the pick-up’s window. Monty was speeding, that was for sure, but the crafty devil knew Rule wouldn’t give him a hard time with the girls in the car. He gave a honk and disappeared down the hill and around the corner at the far end of Main Street.

  They might just make it in time, she thought, looking at the now purple sky. With her plan to write tickets until the distant fireworks began now ruined, she stood in the middle of the sidewalk wondering what to do. She pulled her walkie and pushed the transmit button. “Frost, this is Rule, please tell me someone has called. Over.”

  The radio crackled, and then Frost’s voice replied, “Sorry, Sheriff, if you wanted action, you should have taken a job in Nashua. But don’t worry, you’ll be plenty busy after the fireworks. We usually nab one or two overzealous drivers after the finale. Over.”

  “Great. Thanks for the head’s up. Over and out.” She buckled the radio back in place and rolled her neck on her shoulders. While she liked giving a good ticket, she wasn’t looking forward to the late night. And she still needed a way to kill time before the fireworks began.

  The sound of shattering glass turned her attention to the bar door. The Brick House Bar and Grill wasn’t known for drunken fisticuffs. Most in town were responsible drinkers. But tonight was the Fourth, so maybe someone new was mucking things up. She glanced at the California plates parked five spaces away and squinted.

  Course, maybe someone just tripped.

  Still, she had ten minutes to kill, and chatting with Walter, the bar’s owner, always left her with a grin. Not just because he had been Bernie’s best friend, but because he had a wicked sense of humor and knew everything about everybody. Including her.

  Wearing a grin she wasn’t aware of, she stepped toward the door, reaching for the handle.

  She stopped, noticing the faint buzzing sound again. What...

  Loud shouting, muffled by the bar’s door, pulled her attention back to the Brick House. She couldn’t make out the words, but the tone held the sharp punch of angry cursing. She forgot all about the frantic sounding hum and took hold of the door handle.

  Chapter 2

  “There it is.” The words came out of Winslow Herman’s mouth as a reverent whisper, like he was an old world explorer discovering new land on the far side of the ocean. That’s how he saw himself, anyway, and it was why he named his backyard observatory, the Crow’s Nest. It was his perch. His lookout tower. But instead of looking at land, he was looking at planets, moons, stars and comets.

  He stepped aside, allowing his wife, Carol, to peer through the telescope’s eyepiece. She drew a quick breath and grinned. “What’s it like there?”

  “No place you would ever want to visit. Not without a specially made space-suit to protect you from Jupiter’s radiation, the absolute freezing cold and the vacuum of space.”

  Without taking her eyes away from the view, she asked, “There’s no atmosphere?”

  “It’s negligible,” he replied. “Most likely just gases seeping from the cracks in the ice.”

  “Do you really think there could be life there?”

  “If there is life anywhere else in this solar system, it’s under the ice of Europa. Scientists and smart science fiction authors have known this for a long time. It’s only a matter of time before we go there and find out. But even then, the chances are slim.”

  Carol pulled back from the eyepiece and smiled at her husband, accentuating the laugh-line wrinkles on her chee
ks and deepening the crow’s feet beside her eyes. She was a beautiful sixty year old woman, whose wrinkles formed earlier than most, primarily because she smiled so much. There was very little that could get her down. It was her faith, she claimed, that gave her peace and allowed her to enjoy the world, no matter the circumstances. “Listen to you. You don’t even have faith in your own theories.”

  “I have faith in the scientific process,” he defended. “Theories are just theories until they’re proven. And I’m afraid, in the case of Europa, that is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes.”

  “Why not just choose to believe the life is there, beneath the ice?”

  Winslow scratched his cheek, burrowing his fingers through his thick, but neatly trimmed, salt and pepper beard.

  “Is that what you do?” he asked. “Are you just pretending?”

  Carol squinted at her husband with a wry smile. “Watch yourself, Mr. Herman—” She shook her small fist at him. “—or you’ll be seeing stars alongside your frozen moon.”

  Winslow chuckled and glanced at his watch. “Speaking of that...” He flipped a switch, turning on the single light bulb hanging precariously from the domed ceiling. The observatory wasn’t exactly large—just big enough for four or five people to gather around the telescope that cost more than Carol would ever know. “Sometimes the best view is the wide angle.”

  He opened the four-foot tall doorway and held it open for Carol. She crouched and exited onto the patio that connected the observatory and their custom-designed home. Before retiring to Maine, Winslow had worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California. He designed optics, including those used on both the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. But it had never been a job. He loved the work. It was his passion. And he continued it by building the observatory and allowing visits from school groups, Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts troops and even the occasional visit from the teenage correctional facility in Concord. If he had an audience, Winslow could wax eloquent about the universe until his throat went raw. Most of the time, his audience was Carol, but she didn’t mind. She’d fallen for him at one of his public lectures, and if she could follow him from warm and sunny Pasadena to the more often than not frigid woods of New Hampshire, she could discuss Europa a thousand more times.

  Winslow knew it. He grinned at his wife as he exited with an adoration that the stars above would never experience. Taking her hand, he led her to the grass on the north side of the house.

  “I thought we were watching the fireworks?” Carol asked.

  “I promised fireworks,” Winslow said. “But I didn’t specify the type.” He stepped to the side, revealing a blanket, a wine bottle and two glasses. “Ambrose Bierce once said that an observatory is a place where astronomers conjecture away the guesses of their predecessors, whereas I have always firmly believed that they are most useful for picking up sexy young fillies.”

  Carol laughed, one hand over her mouth, the other slapping Winslow’s shoulder.

  Winslow was about to carry-on with his banter, but something tickled his ear. He cocked his head to the side, trying to listen, but the nearly inaudible rumble didn’t change.

  “What is it?” Carol asked.

  “You don’t hear it?”

  She listened and shook her head. “Only the beating of our hearts,” she joked and began unbuttoning her blouse.

  Winslow caught a peek of his wife’s emerging cleavage and forgot about the sound. “You’re pretty direct for a church-going gal.”

  “We’re married,” she said, removing her shirt and casting it aside. “I can be as slutty as I want to be.” She closed the distance between them, hands going for his belt.

  The rumbling tickled his ear again. Tinnitus? he wondered and glanced up at the stars, so bright above, the Milky Way cutting a soft line across the sky. The view seemed to shimmer for a moment, the way stars twinkle when they’re low on the horizon, their light bent by the atmosphere. But then Carol loosened his pants, found what she was looking for and the whole of the universe ceased to exist.

  Chapter 3

  “Listen, you backwoods hick. Don’t hold out on me. I’ll pay you whatever you want.” She thought she was whispering, but the words came out as something closer to a growl and loud enough for the bar’s five other patrons to hear.

  Cash Whittemore pushed his half-drained beer to the side and leaned forward over the worn brown table that had started out a light shade of maple thirty years earlier. By all outward appearances, he was now a co-conspirator. “Look, Lony.”

  “My name is Avalon,” she grumbled. And she was right, her name was Avalon Butler, but other than her parents, no one ever called her by her actual name. Unless you were blessed with a single syllable name or were well respected, the people in town had a horrid habit of shortening just about any name and tacking on an E sound at the end. Avalon became Lony. Jeremy became Jerry. Richard became Richie, or even worse, Dickie. As a kid, she knew three separate Dickies, and only one of them deserved the name.

  Cash sighed. “Fine. Avalon. I’m not entirely sure what it is you’re looking for, but unless it’s cold and frothy, I don’t know anything about it.”

  Avalon looked him up and down. He wore dirty blue jeans, a torn and paint-spattered flannel shirt—in July—and a dirty Red Sox cap with a frayed bill. He was handsome, but that was hidden by a few days worth of stubble and the dark rings under his eyes. If anyone in this Godforsaken town knew where to score some Oxycontin, it was him. “Bullshit.”

  “Why are you sweating, Lon—Avalon?” he asked. “Walter keeps the AC cranked. Must be sixty-five degrees in here. You feeling okay?”

  She wiped the sweat from her forehead and looked at her shaking hand, which came away slick with perspiration. Her heart pounded in her chest, making her feel like she’d just run a few miles carrying a hungry anaconda. She gripped the table with both hands, oblivious to the old bubble gum her left ring-finger compressed on the underside. When she was collected—in her mind, to everyone else she appeared as an overheating steam engine—she spoke clearly and concisely, no longer concerned about anyone hearing, because the only person that currently existed was the man in front of her, whom she believed could end her suffering. “I’m fine. Now do you have any Oxy or not?”

  After a moment of thought, Cash winced and asked. “Is that like the tub cleaner?”

  He knows, she thought. Damn him, he knows! And he’s just mocking me. He wants me to suffer!

  Avalon’s fingers scraped against the bottom of the table. The nail of her ring-finger, now embedded in the unmoving gum, folded back, peeling away from a few millimeters of skin before popping free. She didn’t notice the sharp sting that would make most people hiss in pain. “You son-of-a-bitch!” Her voice rose in volume and pitch with each shouted word. With hooked talon fingers, she hauled back and swung at Cash’s cheek.

  Moving faster and with more agility, Cash leaned away from the swing, caught hold of her arm and turned her away from him. Before she knew what was happening, he’d planted his big, muddy, steel-toe boot against her backside and shoved.

  It wasn’t a hard push, but in her current condition, Avalon lacked the wherewithal to slow herself and avoid the table where Pastor Ken Dodge sat with a woman she didn’t know. As she flipped, ass over tea kettle atop the table, taking drinks and pretzels with her, she thought it was strange for the pastor to be out at a bar with a woman, but then, he wasn’t a priest and even Jesus imbibed.

  Then she hit the floor.

  Hard.

  The room fell silent as Avalon stared up at the ceiling. Bright track lights blazed in her eyes, their glow magnified by the effects of Oxycontin withdrawal. Her eyes filled with tears, partly in response to the light-induced sting, partly because of the deep welling despair gripping her body—not because she’d become a shell of a person dependent on a drug to feel normal, but because she knew she wouldn’t be getting any tonight, and come morning she’d have to once again face the real
world and all its real problems.

  A bell above the door chimed, announcing the arrival of another bar patron. Heavy boots clomped across the wide wooden planks of the bar’s floor, vibrating in the back of Avalon’s head.

  A figure leaned into view above her, obscured by the blur of her tears. Avalon squeezed her eyes shut, pushing the tears out onto her cheeks.

  “Well, as I live and breathe,” the woman above her said. “Avalon Butler. That explains the California plates.”

  Avalon looked up with cleared vision. “Mrs. Rule?”

  “Been a while since you’ve been home for a visit,” Rule said and then tapped the badge on her chest. “It’s Sheriff Rule, now.”

  Avalon giggled. “You follow all the rules...Rule?” She winced as a sharp pain lanced through her head and sucked away her laughter.

  “You trying to ask me something?” Rule asked, and then turned to the bar. “She been drinking?”

  Walter shook his head, no. “Not here, at least. Came in like this. ‘Bout five minutes ago.”

  Avalon slowly writhed on the floor for a moment, lost somewhere between withdrawal, a lump on the head and confusion from seeing her childhood babysitter dressed in the tan uniform of a sheriff. “Mrs. Rule...”

  The sheriff leaned closer.

  “You have any Oxycontin?”

  Chapter 4

  Joshua Wilson nearly threw up. He managed to hold it down primarily because he knew it was perhaps the worst response he could have to a first kiss. But his nerves were a mess and were playing havoc with his body. He was clammy and cold and sweating profusely. He’d doused himself with copious amounts of his father’s Old Spice before heading out, but he wasn’t sure if the cologne could completely mask his growing nervous odor. Rivulets of cold perspiration tickled his sides. He stepped back, rubbing his T-shirt against his skin.