Lost Echoes

by Joe R. Lansdale

  “So,” Jake said, “he’s all right?”

  “Well, there could still be some problems,” the doctor said. “You can’t say for sure about something like this. But he can hear again. The mumps, they affected his hearing, and he had this pocket of pus in there. Got to say I couldn’t see it. I looked plenty, but I didn’t see it. That’s just being truthful with you. It was behind the wall of the ear. It didn’t even make a swelling. Not when I saw him last. But what I think now is the obvious: It swelled while he was at home. And now it’s burst. It was tight with infection, and when he touched it, it was ready to go. He’s his own doctor.”

  Mishman went silent, studied the boy for a long moment.

  Jake said, “Something wrong, Doc? You’re kind of rambling.”

  Mishman shook his head. “No. It’s just…Thing like this, something odd about it. Haven’t seen anything quite like it. It’s nothing big, not fancy in the sense of the medical books, but it’s just not playing by the rules.”

  “The rules?” Jake said.

  “It doesn’t act like a regular infection. But the important thing is, now he can hear, and I think we’re on top of it. Maybe another test or two, but I think he’s out of the woods…. Listen to him.”

  Harry had lost interest in what the adults were saying, and as he sat there on the edge of the examination table, he had begun to hum and sing a few lines from “Old McDonald Had a Farm.”

  He liked singing it because he could hear himself sing with both ears again.

  He thought he sounded pretty darn good.

  They ran more tests.

  Mishman looked for a tumor.

  Didn’t find one.

  The ear looked okay.

  But it was odd, way it had worked out. Mishman couldn’t say for sure why it was odd, but it didn’t feel right. This whole business, it wasn’t playing by the rules. It was a medical anomaly.

  He would remember the problem as odd for a long time, and then, slowly, he would forget about Harry Wilkes and his ear infection. It was something to consider, all right, but when something other than his Spidey sense started to tingle and he started seeing a long-legged nurse, hiding it from his wife, it took up most of his thinking and his time, and eventually it caved in his practice. The nurse left him, and all he had were memories of how she liked to do it naked except for her nursing shoes.

  It was a memory that trumped some kid with an oddball ear infection.

  4

  Harry noticed little things, but it really wasn’t a problem until he was twelve. Age twelve was the year his balls dropped and his hormones rushed, and he really took note of it. Not just the hormones and what they were telling him, but this business with his ear.

  First time he experienced it in a memorable way, Harry was playing in one of the old cars out by the house. He wasn’t supposed to be there, but he often slipped out and pretended he could drive, sitting behind the squeaky old steering wheel. Sometimes he had his friend Joey Barnhouse with him, but other times it was just him. Most of the time it was just him. He had discovered that he liked to be by himself. A lot. He could make up whatever he wanted and do whatever he wanted. He didn’t have to consult with anyone about who was It in a game of tag, or which Ninja Turtle he was, who was Spider-Man, and who was the villain, that kind of thing. He could imagine wheeling about with some girl by his side, Kayla, for example. She had been changing lately, and he liked the change.

  Day it happened, day he got a clue of what was to come, he had climbed inside the old fifty-nine Chevy. It had really gone to hell in the last few years. Its paint was all flaked and bubbled off, and someone—a kid most certainly—had thrown a brick into the already starred windshield.

  His daddy was always saying if the guy who owned the property next to theirs got rid of all that shit, hauled it off, pressed it up, whatever, just got it out of sight of their house, it would be nice. But nothing ever happened and his dad never pursued it, thinking he ought not tell a fella what he should do with his own land, even if he didn’t like what he was doing.

  Harry hoped the owner never cleaned it up. It was a great place to play.

  When he climbed inside this time, closed the creaking, rusted door, pulled it shut hard, he had a sudden rush of revulsion. Lots of noise, like someone ripping several layers of aluminum foil down the middle, and there was a slamming noise, and in his head a combination of shapes and colors flashed and popped, and he screamed.

  Or someone did.

  He heard it clear as the proverbial bell, that scream, but he didn’t remember doing it. Wasn’t sure he had. It filled his head like air filling a balloon.

  It was just a flash of color and images and sounds and discomfort. Real quick. A face vibrating and wobbling in his head. A red explosion. A white rip though the mind, followed by…

  Exhaustion.

  A sweat-beaded forehead.

  Wet pants.

  Nothing much, really.

  Over with quick-like.

  He got out of the car with his knees a-wobble, slowly closed the door, went in to change his pants and underwear, and never played there again.

  5

  Here’s what happened, down there in the honky-tonk below Harry’s house. One night, on a Saturday, after the tonk closed, and all the sights and sounds and parked cars were gone, and everyone at the drive-in theater across the way had long filed out, about three A.M., a half hour after closing, during cleanup time, there was a murder.

  No one knew about it until Monday, about two P.M. when the bar was supposed to open.

  Guy who discovered the body was a customer named Seymour Smithe, pronounced Smith, but spelled Smithe, and Seymour was always adamant about that. “Name’s Smithe, with an e on the end.”

  Most people just thought of him as a drunk.

  He had lost more jobs than a squirrel had eaten acorns.

  Thing he did know was how to sell Bibles. He liked selling Bibles. He didn’t know dick about the Bible, outside of what he’d seen in The Ten Commandments, an old movie, but he could sell the hell out of those damn things, ’cause all the Christians, or would-be Christians, wanted one, liked to pretend they were going to read it.

  He appealed to their fear. Fear was always a good way to sell anything.

  Insurance.

  Politics.

  War.

  And gilt-edged Bibles.

  When Smithe wasn’t selling Bibles, he was drinking.

  Now that was something he was good at. Drinking.

  He was the goddamn Old and New Testament of drunks.

  He was thinking about drinking, about how he had to sell some Bibles this day, and he was thinking of that woman he had talked to yesterday on her front porch. What a looker. And he sort of thought she had wanted him to come back, even if she didn’t buy a Bible or let him in the door.

  But she had smiled. And she had been positive, even if she hadn’t bought anything. Something had passed between them; he was almost certain.

  Almost.

  He wanted to get certain, thought four or five beers would make him certain.

  The door was open and the sign read OPEN, so Seymour went right on in. It was cool and dark in there and smelled the way it always smelled, like beer and sweat and sexual anxiety stirred by air-conditioning. But there was something else. It was faint, but he knew that smell immediately.

  Once, for a summer, he had worked in a slaughterhouse, and once you smelled that odor, you knew it fresh, you knew it dried, and in each form it smelled different, and yet somehow the same.

  It was the smell of blood.

  The hair on the back of Seymour’s neck poked up, and he thought—or imagined—that above the aroma of the tonk he could smell his own fear, a kind of sour stench of sweat and decay. And in the back of his mouth he could taste copper. He turned slowly, almost crouched, expecting someone to leap from the shadows like a goddamn gazelle.

  And he saw someone.

  But she wouldn’t do much leaping.


  It was Evelyn Gibbons.

  The formerly attractive, middle-aged Evelyn Gibbons. The owner of the tonk. The breezy little woman with the dark bobbing hair and the bouncy step and the bouncy ass, the latter usually tucked nicely beneath short black dresses, her buns jacked up by thick high heels.

  She was sitting down by the jukebox, her head against it, leaning farther than it should have on a neck. That was because her throat was cut from ear to ear, and there was blood all over the jukebox, on her, and the wall behind her. Her hair was matted in blood and stuck to the jukebox like a big spit wad. The floor beneath her had plenty of blood too. Her dress was hiked up over her thighs, and Seymour could see her panties. They were dark, and had probably been white before they soaked up a lot of gore.

  Seymour backed toward the door, looking over his shoulder carefully. He figured the blood, dried like it was, meant the murder had happened some time ago. But he looked about just the same, in case some madman armed with a blade should come for him.

  He made it out into the blinding sunshine to his car, where he had a cell phone on the passenger’s seat. He called 911, and while he waited for the cops to arrive, he wished repeatedly that he had a beer. Maybe some whiskey. A little turpentine. Rubbing alcohol. A shot of piss. Damn near anything.

  The cops showed up. They looked around. They took notes and photographs and fingerprints and such. They questioned Seymour until he really needed a drink.

  Seymour was the prime suspect for about six months, but that died out. Even those who never gave up on him quit worrying about it when Seymour, full of gin, lost control of his vehicle, slammed on the brakes as he careened off the road, and was struck violently in the back of the neck by a case of gilt-edged Bibles thrown from the backseat. It was a good shot. It snapped his neck and checked him out.

  After that, there wasn’t much shaking in the Evelyn Gibbons case. There were a few who didn’t think it was Seymour at all. They pursued leads, one or two in particular.

  But it resulted in nothing.

  No idea who.

  No idea why.

  A year passed.

  6

  So now Harry, he’s thirteen, and he’s got the horny on bad. If they rated how horny he was on a one-to-ten scale, he’d been about an eleven, maybe a twelve. So he’s got this horny on, and he doesn’t know shit from wild honey about such, but he’s got it going and he thinks he knows something, and what he doesn’t know, Joey Barnhouse tells him. Not that all of Joey’s information is right either, but it’s interesting, all this info from shithouse walls and the mouth of Joey and the technique of artful guessing.

  One day Harry tries to steal a kiss from Kayla Jones, the pretty blond who lives down the road from him, on the other side of Joey, but she whips his ass soundly. After the ass whipping, he likes her even more. Kayla, she’s some sack of dynamite. Thin as a reed, hair yellow as the burning sun at high noon, fists like lead. Pissed off because her father yells at her mother a lot, and vice versa, and though Harry doesn’t know it at the time, he’d think back later and consider maybe they had, like, some kind of link.

  Joey doesn’t like her, or says he doesn’t, thinks she’s too tall and too tough. This because he’s about four feet high and one foot wide and growing like dead grass. He’s got big feet, though, says that’s a sign he’s gonna grow, says he’s got a hammer like something Thor would carry, provided he could swing it between his legs.

  Harry knows better. Joey, like him, darts about in the shower at PE, keeps his back to folks when he can, his hand over his privates, quick to grab a towel.

  He ain’t showing nothing. Not like William Stewart, who has a goddamn python. Flaps it about like it might strike, maybe grab someone in the locker room, squeeze him dead, drag him up a tree for later consumption.

  No, Harry figures Joey isn’t any better than him in that department. But it’s cold comfort.

  He’s got that on his mind. Inadequacy. Stuff that his dad at thirteen probably didn’t think about at all, or didn’t have time to, working most of his kid life away, but there it was. His concerns. The worries of Harry Wilkes in all their glories. Late-night rambles over a girlie magazine Joey had given him and he kept hidden under his mattress.

  Yeah, that was him. A magazine in one hand, himself in the other, doing the dirty deed, feeling guilty because of Sunday school and church, a bewhiskered, voyeuristic, smirking, self-righteous God peeking over his shoulder while he brought the juice to freedom.

  It made a fella nervous.

  No doubt about it, he thought as he lay there in bed. I’ve got one of them…what do they call it…?

  Oh, yeah.

  A complex.

  That’s what I got.

  A goddamn complex.

  On the morning after Harry battled his complex, he awoke with a plan in mind.

  Bravery. That was the thing.

  Stand up against a ghost, do it in front of a girl. A girl like Kayla. You could show you were tough enough to be the boyfriend of a girl who could beat you like a circus monkey. Going after and seeing a ghost, that had to be worth points.

  That said, he wasn’t that brave. Decided he would have to go down the road and find Joey first. Might be best to have reinforcements. He figured—hoped—he could make an impression with reinforcements. He liked to think it could be done.

  ’Cause, you see, there was a ghost, all woo-woo and ectoplasmic. He and Joey and Kayla had heard about it from other kids, older kids in the neighborhood, and he had even heard his mother talking to Joey’s mother about it. Down the hill and in the tonk. A specter.

  Poor old Evelyn Gibbons’s spirit. Trapped in the abandoned honky-tonk, roaming about nights, her head hanging to one side, draped against her shoulder, her neck red as if she were wearing a scarlet scarf.

  That was the story. There were those who claimed to have seen her. Some said you could hear her scream from time to time. Joey’s older brother, Evan, who beat them all up now and then, even Kayla, though she gave a good fight, said he had heard Evelyn Gibbons scream a couple times, and both times it had pricked the hair on his neck and made him run.

  Evan could have been lying.

  He liked to jack with them.

  But on this matter Harry chose to believe him, because it suited his plans.

  He had to believe in the ghost.

  Mainly, Kayla had to believe in the ghost. Down there in the tonk, floating and moaning and screaming about.

  Down there. Waiting.

  The night was oozy-rich with velvet darkness, moonlight and moon shade. Their shadows darted across the ground as they ran, outlined by the silver rays of the moon.

  When they got down the hill, near the honky-tonk, they paused to catch their breath.

  “My daddy finds out I slipped off,” Joey said, “he’s gonna give me a worse beating than I got last week.”

  Joey was talking about his eye. His father had punched him in the eye. Joey often had a black eye or a fat lip or a lump on his jaw or a bump on his head.

  Harry had seen Joey’s father slap him alongside the head once. For hardly nothing, leaving a drawer open, something like that.

  Harry’s father said James Barnhouse was a bitter old bastard. Mad because his leg had gone bad in high school. Football injury. Too many big guys on top of his kneecap. Before that he was hot shit, gonna go pro. After that he was lucky he got a caddy job, toting rich dudes’ golf clubs, living on a little wage and a few good tips. Reading crime magazines and old sex-and-bondage magazines, beating his boys if they found them and read them. Hitting his wife once in a while just to keep his arm loose and stay in practice.

  Coasting. That’s what Mr. Barnhouse was doing, Harry’s dad said. Coasting. Feeling sorry for himself.

  Joey’s old man didn’t scare Joey enough, though. He was always willing to take a chance and stand a beating. But he was nervous; Harry could tell that.

  “I’ll get grounded,” Kayla said. “No TV. No phone. Nothing.”

  “
It ain’t the same as a punch in the eye,” Joey said.

  “I’d rather get hit than be grounded,” Kayla said.

  “That’s the way it sounds till you get hit,” Joey said. “Till my old man hits you; then you’d rather get grounded. You can trust me on that. Harry, here, he’d just get a talking-to, wouldn’t you, Harry? No grounding. No punch in the eye.”

  “My parents aren’t much into spanking,” Harry said. “And they don’t do punching. But I could get grounded.”

  “Yeah,” Joey said, “like when?”

  “Grounding or no grounding,” Harry said, “I don’t want to get caught.”

  “Your parents don’t punish you for anything,” Joey said.

  This was pretty true. Since he got bad sick as a child, since the ear infection, his mother had been as protective as a hockey goalie. Worrying about asthma, which he didn’t have, allergies, which he might have, falling down, which he did a lot—just about everything. He and his dad went outside to play ball, she insisted on knee pads under his pants, wanted him to wear a bicycle helmet.

  A bicycle helmet to play ball. Now that beat all. The idea of it—him out there in knee pads and a bicycle helmet to toss the ball around with his dad—well, that just wasn’t done.

  Bad form, as he heard an English actor say on TV.

  He was glad Dad had talked her out of it, ’cause if he did stuff like that, might as well have had a sign painted on his back that said: I’M THE BIGGEST PUSSY THAT EVER LIVED. PLEASE KICK AND HIT ME UNTIL MY BRAINS FALL OUT.

  They stood for a while at the base of the hill, looking at the back of the dark, abandoned honky-tonk. Across the way the drive-in screen could be seen. Kung fu personnel were leaping about the big white square, mouths wide open, yelling silence.

  “We come to see a ghost or not?” Kayla said.

  “Yeah, sure we did,” Harry said.

  “I don’t really think there’s any ghost,” Kayla said. “My daddy says there aren’t any such things, and he’s a policeman.”

  “My brother says there are,” Joey said. “A policeman, he might know handcuffs and doughnuts, but he ain’t nothin’ more than anyone else when it comes to ghosts.”