by Mark Tufo
“I doubt it.”
“Is this scary, because I don’t need anything else to lose sleep over at night,” I warned him.
“It’s not really scary. It just makes you think.”
“So, is it a true story?”
“Supposedly.”
“Okay, tell me it. But if it’s scary, we’ll be sharing your sleeping bag.”
“But mine isn’t big enough,” he answered seriously.
“Then be careful with your story selection.”
“Most people would be fine. You, I’m not so sure. So, there’s this family down in New Orleans, the Keenaghs. They live in this small town right on the beach year round. There’s a father, mother, and two young sons, Robbie and Sammie. It’s mostly a tourist town, the majority of visitors come during the winter months and stay in rental cottages.”
“Not scary so far,” I told Gary, settling in for the rest.
“See, I told you. So all these families come for vacation and there are three other families in particular that also have little kids. The Keenaghs have a little boat they named the Sparrow, which they take out and just let everyone have a good time on. So these three families with their kids, Tabitha, David and Donnie become fast friends with the Keenagh’s kids. Year after year, they come and spend the same two-week period together going out on this boat, fishing and swimming and just making memories. For Robbie’s twelfth birthday, his dad gives him the Sparrow. Robbie cannot believe it. He loves that boat, he and his friends damn near live on it during the summer. After another five years of hanging out, the kids who are all about fifteen to seventeen years old now realize that they are just about coming to the end of these trips with their families. They do what just about every kid does, they make pacts that they will still get together in the years to come. And like the vast majority of pacts, they never materialize. Two of the kids go off to college, one goes in the military and the other two just go on with their lives, but they always remember the great summers together.”
“Sounds good so far.”
“Well, about ten years go by and the older Keenagh brother lives in New York now, I think he’s an investment broker or something like that. He’s heading home from work one night and this guy robs him and stabs him to death for $35.”
“That’s screwed up, getting killed for $35.”
Gary shrugged his shoulders in acknowledgement. “I know, some people have gotten killed for less. Anyway, so that same night Rob gets stabbed and died, the Sparrow slipped its moorings. After they bring Rob’s body home and get him buried, the family spends the next week searching for their lost boat. They even asked the Coast Guard if they could keep a look out for it. The Sparrow had become Rob’s pride and joy in those long ago summers, and Mrs. Keenagh, I think her name was Luci, couldn’t stand that this remembrance of her son was now also gone. She used to be able to look out her kitchen window every morning and smile looking down on the small boat. Rob’s first words every time he called home were, ‘How’s she doing?’ Luci couldn’t even look out the window any more, the loss of the boat a constant reminder of the loss of her son.”
“Man, that sucks,” I said honestly, “Who needs that kind of reminder?”
“I know,” Gary said. “So a few more years go by and the younger brother Sam is home visiting his folks for the holidays. He’s out on the front porch sitting in a big rocking chair having a cold beer.”
“Do you know what kind of beer it is, because that sounds really good right now.”
“That’s not really important to the story.”
“Sorry.”
“Can I go on?”
“Wait, did they ever find the boat?” I asked.
Gary shook his head.
“Any debris from a wreck then?”
Gary shook his head again. “Can I continue?”
I motioned with my hand that he could.
“So Sam is on the porch and this car pulled into the driveway. It’s Tabitha, she was down in New Orleans taking her daughter to her new college for orientation and thought she would show her where she used to go on vacations with her family while she was down there. Before she can even come across the yard and hug Sam, this truck pulls up. Its David. He lived in LA but had to go to New Orleans for a conference. When it was done, he decided to go see the beach he had spent so much time on.”
I was sitting up now.
“Sam, Tabitha, and David are all talking and hugging about what good fortune it is that they all came together at the same time when another car pulls into the driveway. It’s Donnie, the youngest of the group. He had no reason whatsoever to make the drive from his home in Texas. He told them he just felt compelled to do it. So there they all are sitting on the front porch reminiscing when Mrs. Keenagh comes out the front door. She is sheet white. Her son Sam got up so fast he knocked his chair over.”
“Did he spill his beer?”
“Do you want to hear the rest?”
“Well yes, I just figured that was the scary part, him spilling his beer and all.”
“Mike!”
“Sorry.”
“So Sam is pretty concerned for his mother and asked her if she’s alright. She can barely talk she’s so upset. ‘It’s the Sparrow,’ his mom tells him, ‘it’s back.’”
“The Sparrow came back? Damn, that gave me goose bumps,” I told Gary. “So they finally did honor their pact. And that’s a true story?”
“Supposed to be.”
“Damn.”
“Okay, you want to hear another one?” Gary asked, “It’s a little freaky-deakier.”
“Deakier? I’m supposed to be the one that makes up words.”
“All right, so there’s this guy.”
“Wait, is this true?”
“Yes.”
“What is your source of information?”
“What are you talking about Mike?”
“I mean did you read this in a book or did you hear it from a friend of a friend whose uncle it happened to.”
“I read this in a book about hauntings.”
“I thought you said this wouldn’t be scary?”
“It’s not really,” Gary said.
“But by its definition ‘haunting’ is a scary thing.”
“It’s not.”
“You know, because I’m pretty maxed out already with this whole zombie thing. I don’t need another genre to keep me awake at night.”
“Mike, I don’t remember you always being this difficult.”
“I’ve been away for a long time Gary. I’ve developed all sorts of neuroses.”
“Did you seek professional help?”
“Why? Do you think I need it?”
“You tell me. Can I get on with the story?”
“Don’t let me stop you.”
Gary looked at me with a sideways glance and began his story. “So there’s this guy.”
“What’s his name?” I asked. Gary looked like he was going to hit me with his canteen. “I’m just saying, it’s a lot easier for me to visualize the story if I know the people’s names.”
“Fine, his name is Rob.”
“Really? He’s got the same name as the kid in the last story?”
“JAMES, his name is James.”
“Like Bond.”
“Sure, whatever. So James is married to Tricia and they have a son together, his name is…” Gary paused trying to think of a name, “Mickey and they live in Wyoming.”
I didn’t agree with his name choice, but I let it go for the sake of the story.
“It’s about five years later and the three of them are going through life as best they can when the dad gets laid off. He’s falling behind on his bills and the mortgage and he panics and robs a bank.”
“Damn, I thought you were going to say he robbed an investment banker for $35 and then stabbed him to death.”
“No, it was a bank and he got caught. Spent the next seven years in prison. When he got out he got an apartment within the Cheyenne ci
ty limits. His wife and kid were about a half hour away. James had paid his debt to society and wanted to try and rebuild his family. He had visited Tricia and Mickey a few times and had asked her if she would be willing to take him back. His wife told him that it wasn’t just her decision to make. They had been on their own for so long she would have to ask Mickey too. So she and her son went out the next day to do some hiking, clear their minds and talk about the decision they needed to make. While they were climbing up the hill, they came across an open crevice which led into an abandoned mine.”
“That’s not a good move if they went in.”
“Afraid of being buried alive?”
“Who the hell isn’t?” I asked, not believing that I wasn’t on the side of the vast majority in this.
“They went in, they’d gone about ten feet when Mickey leans up against one of the support beams, problem is it’s all rotted out and the ceiling gives. The cave-in was devastating. At the same time as the ceiling collapses, James hears a frantic knocking on his door. He immediately answers it and standing there is a bloodied battered and bruised Tricia screaming at him that she needs his help, Mickey is trapped in a mine collapse. James grabs some tools and hops in his truck with Tricia. They drive for forty-five minutes to get to the site and James starts digging like crazy to get to his son. He tells his wife that she needs to get to the roadway and get some more help. Sure enough, after about ten or fifteen minutes two guys come up in different cars. They are all helping each other and they finally find the pocket where Mickey is trapped. They dig out a hole big enough to pull him out and Mickey is screaming at his dad to go further, that his mom is a few feet past him. James is trying to tell him that his mother is safe, that she came and got him and that she’s fine. Mickey is having none of it. He’s frantic, starts digging at the rocks with his hands. James and the men who came to help start digging and in a few feet they come across Tricia’s body.”
“Holy shit,” I said.
“Yeah, for the love of her son, she went to get the help of his father. What is really weird, when they interviewed the two other men, one of them said what he heard could have been the howling of the wind but felt compelled to check it out. The second one said he definitely heard a woman screaming for help.”
“Man that just gave me the chills.”
This was a different night with Gary but in its own way it was way scarier, at least to me.
“Do you want a drink?” Gary asked handing his canteen over.
“No, I’m fine man. I’ve got my own,” I told him.
“This isn’t water.”
So I’m figuring Vodka or some other such libation. “I’m good, I don’t want to drink. I’ve got watch in a few hours.
“Mike, it’s Kool-Aid.”
“I’m good,” I said, feigning that I was getting ready for sleep.
“It’s really good,” he said, placing it under my nose coaxingly.
“Gary, I really don’t want any.”
“This was your favorite as a kid. I remember making it for you all the time. I especially got this for you.”
“I appreciate that man, but I still don’t want it.”
“Oh hell, it’s that whole germ-a-phobe thing isn’t it? We’re family, germs don’t count.”
I smiled wanly. I begged to differ.
“I haven’t drunk from this since I made the mix.”
“Since when do germs have a shelf life?” I asked him.
“You just take this canteen, let me get something to drink out of so I can have a little.”
He handed the canteen to me which I accepted gingerly. Then he began to scour the area we were in, finally grabbing an old Coke bottle that was laying on its side. Dirt and possibly a small nest of dead bugs were on the inside and he scraped a small cobweb off the opening.
“What are you doing?” I asked, horrified beyond measure.
“Make-shift cup,” he replied smiling.
“You can’t be serious?” I asked, finding myself backing up unwittingly.
“The more germs the merrier,” he said still smiling.
“Are you kidding me? Get away from me with that thing.”
“Yes I’m serious, the more germs you introduce into your body the better it can cope with them. Sanitizing wipes are horrible for people.”
“Bite your tongue! Are you the Anti-Christ?”
He wasn’t messing with me. This wasn’t the whole big brother teasing his younger brother with the spit-and-roll-up procedure. He grabbed the canteen from me and filled that bottle almost to the top. He didn’t wash it out first, he just gulped it down, added protein and all. My stomach was roiling for the next eight hours. Every time I thought about what he did I thought I was going to heave. Gary on the other hand was as right as rain, so which of us has it right?
“I miss Glenn,” Gary said to me pretty much out of the blue one night. We were about three hundred miles from the Maine border, and we were both homesick.
Glenn is/was our brother. The order went Ron, Gary, Glenn, Lyndsey and myself. I hadn’t seen Glenn in years, but the pain of his loss was still acute.
“Me too,” I told Gary noncommittally.
Gary looked at me askew. I think he caught more meaning in my answer than I had intended to give away.
“Do you think we should look for him while we’re down here?” Gary asked, scrutinizing my face.
“We could, I guess.”
“Alright, what gives?” Gary asked, standing up and coming over to me.
“Glenn’s passed,” I told him.
“I thought so, but you seem to know for sure. How?”
“Listen, you might think I’m nuts if I tell you.”
“I might, but you can tell me anyway.”
“Great, all right. I don’t know if you know about this or not, or even if you believe in this sort of thing, but I can astral project.” I stopped right there, looking at Gary for any indications that he was going to get me some heavy medication. When he sat back down, I took that as a sign that he wanted me to continue.
“Astral projection, that’s where you float out of your body, right?”
“It’s a little more complicated than that, but that’s the basic idea. From what I’ve done and read there are two types of projections. The first is on the astral plane which has nothing to do with the world we live in, and the second is the ability to travel within our own world. I usually can’t control it, and the night I found out about Glenn was no different. I had gone to sleep relatively early because I was pulling a late night shift on the ladders.”
“The ladders?” Gary asked.
“Yeah, it was an early form of torture when I still lived at Little Turtle.”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m sorry, my legs cramp up every time I think of them. They were just crude guard towers we used to watch the walls at Little Turtle.”
“Gotcha.”
“So I’m lying in bed and as soon as I fell asleep I found myself in our old home on Cefalo Road.”
“Really? Are you kidding me? What was it like?”
“To be honest, it was awesome,” I told him, and it was. I hadn’t been back to my childhood home, well, since my childhood.
“Was anyone there?” he asked.
“Not at first,” I told him. I have never encountered anyone on my path when I am on the earthly planes, it just doesn’t work that way for me. “The house was exactly as it had been when we were kids. I ‘appeared’ in Lyndsey’s room on her bed. The same white bed with flowers she had when we were growing up.” My sister’s room was at the top of the stairwell and my parents’ room was further to the left. To the immediate right was my brother Ron’s room, and then there was an ell and then mine, Gary, and Glenn’s room and then a bathroom.
“You’re freaking me out,” Gary said.
“Yeah, well, consider it payback for your stories.”
“Was it day or night?” Gary asked.
“It’s al
ways a sort of twilight when I’m on these planes. Light enough to see but would probably be pretty difficult to read by. And that’s another thing I need to make clear, when I’m on these journeys the great abundance of what ‘leaves’ my body is saturated in ‘feeling’ and ‘instinct;’ higher reasoning does not tend to make the transfer. I went on a ‘trip’ once and could not figure out how to work a doorknob.”
“What did you do?” Gary asked fascinated.
“I went through it.”
“Oh,” Gary said cupping his chin with his hand. “That’s possible?”
“I’m basically a living ghost, so yeah.”
“That’s kind of scary when you describe it that way. Can you get trapped outside your body, like maybe not be able to find your way home?”
“I don’t think so. I’ve read some stuff that says it could be possible, but damn near almost everything else says it’s completely impossible.”
“Still, that would be pretty scary. It’d be like you were in a coma, only your spirit is wandering around the world aimlessly.”
“Great, one more thing to worry about. Can I go on?”
Now it was his turn to motion me on.
“So I’m in our house and I’m thrilled. I loved that place, I never really got over that we moved away. I got up off of Lyndsey’s bed and went downstairs, took a quick look in the kitchen and then went into the great room and from there into our playroom.”
“Remember how we used to put Pledge on our socks and play hockey there?” Gary asked fondly.
“I remember up until the point that you broke Mom’s lamp with your hockey stick and then threw me under the bus for it.”
“You were younger, she wouldn’t hit you as hard. I taught you a valuable lesson that day.”
“What, not to trust anyone?”
“No, how to take one for the team.”
“Great. So anyway, I’m down in the playroom and there was no broken lamp, at least that I could see, and I started to sense someone else was in the house.”
“You said you don’t encounter other people.”
“I don’t.”
“Who was it?”
“It was Mom.”
“Was she there about the lamp?”
