Old Man Scratch

by Rio Youers

  OLD MAN SCRATCH

  By Rio Youers

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition Copyright 2014 / Rio Youers

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Rio Youers is the British Fantasy Award–nominated author of End Times and Old Man Scratch. His short fiction has been published by, among others, St. Martin’s Griffin, HarperCollins, and Cemetery Dance. His latest novel, Westlake Soul, was recently nominated for Canada’s prestigious Sunburst Award, and has been optioned for movie by Hollywood producer, Stephen Susco. Rio lives in southwestern Ontario with his wife, Emily, and their daughter, Lily Maye.

  Book List

  Dark Dreams, Pale Horses

  Everdead

  End Times

  Old Man Scratch

  Mama Fish

  Westlake Soul

  Website/Twitter:

  http://www.rioyouers.com/

  www.twitter.com/Rio_Youers

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  OLD MAN SCRATCH

  He was a mean son of a bitch. That’s what I tell myself—what I have to tell myself. Even Melinda—who hadn’t a bad word to say about anybody, most of the time—had called him a miserable shitbag one suppertime, and that had got me laughing so hard I couldn’t eat. Even so, during the nights when the darkness has no end, and the wind blows through the gap in the bedroom window frame with a sound like a child crying, telling myself that Scratch Clayton was a mean son of a bitch just isn’t enough.

  We never slept past five A.M. when Scratch was around, and not because of our age. It was him, son of a bitch, running his lawnmower every goddamn morning at the crack of dawn. He never missed a day. “Regulation three inches!” he’d bellow at me over the rumbling of the mower, as I’d stand on my porch and watch him, bleary-eyed, coffee in hand. Back and forth he’d go, this way and that, and he’d always start at the side of the lawn closest to my bedroom window. It was no better during the winter months; he couldn’t run his mower but his snowblower was just as noisy. Same time every morning, right around five, whether we’d had a dump of the white stuff or not.

  Mean son of a bitch.

  I always believed that when he’d gone (and he has gone, of that I’m certain), I’d be able to rise to the sound of birdsong rather than the god-awful farting of Scratch Clayton’s machinery. I was wrong. I don’t sleep worth a damn now. The bed is precious lonely without Melinda, but that’s not the half of it. I lie awake for hours past turning in, listening to the wind or the occasional rumble of a vehicle on Sideroad 13. I lie and think about Scratch Clayton, and what I did to him. When I finally fall asleep, the images in my dreams are pieced together with small fragments, like church windows. It is a brittle sleep, and you can bet your last dime that my eyes crack open at five A.M. no matter what. Body clock, they call it. But I think it’s Scratch all over again. Only he’s not jumping on his mower or turning the snow from his driveway. No, sir; he’s standing above me, ghost-like, blowing on my flickering eyes.

  Sideroad 13 runs past my property. A slow road, most of the time—paved, but beat to shit by the weather. The ruts and potholes curtail the speeders, but there have been accidents, just the same. It’s deceptively narrow, so that if you have two vehicles running at each other, they both need to slow down and get over if they want to pass without trading paint. I often hear horns blaring and tires screeching, and every now and then I’ll hear the unmistakable crunch of a collision. Never too serious, thank Christ. Fender benders, is all.

  That road’s plain nasty, Melinda used to say. The way she spoke made it sound as if the road were nasty not by design, but by character—as if it were a living, deliberately evil thing. She would sometimes get at me to sell the house and choose a better road to live on, and a better neighbour, too. Unfortunately, it wasn’t that easy. We’d made a good chunk of money when we sold our house in Toronto six years ago, and we used it to buy two properties: the one next door to Scratch, and a cottage in Huntsville for the kids. We didn’t want to pull the cottage from under the kids’ feet (although I’m sure they wouldn’t have minded, if we’d explained the situation), so all we had for money was whatever we could get for our property on Sideroad 13. We considered our options, and decided to stay put. The road was a bitch and Scratch was a bastard, but we weren’t going to let them drive us into a goddamn subdivision.

  The scars and potholes are bad, and that deceptive narrowness is worse, but the nastiest part of the road—and it runs for about twenty klicks—is a hairpin bend that loops hard and tight, so that vehicles heading south are running northeast by the time they’re through. It veers south again through the next ten kilometres, skirting Mennonite farmland, until it intersects with Mathias Line (a kinder road) near the town of Hallow Falls. I don’t care for this bend, for three reasons. Number one: there’s no need for it—no need for it to be so severe. It’s not as if it avoids a cemetery or conservation area. You could lessen the angle by fifty degrees and run through the scrub north of my land. No harm, no foul. Number two: the apex of the bend meets my driveway. I know I sound like an old man bitchin’ (hell, I am an old man bitchin’), but this really burns my banana. I’ve lost count of the number of vehicles that have misjudged the bend and come shooting into my driveway. There are warning signs on the approach, but it’s not enough. That hairpin bend is a genuine doozy, and any car that doesn’t know its nature invariably winds up sitting in my driveway.

  Number three: the roadkill.

  I guess the animals around here don’t like the bend, either. The traffic doesn’t come fast, but it does come suddenly, and if an animal is crossing or just sitting in the road, it’s apt to get levelled. Hell of a mess, too, because they get hit slow—get the guts squished right out of them. It falls to me to clean up, of course. I wouldn’t mind if it was once in a while, but I’m out there three times a week (except in winter, when snow has made the road inaccessible; the plows don’t even consider it until the main routes have been cleared). I pull on my boots, fetch my gloves and shovel from the garage, and go clean up. Raccoons and skunk, mostly, but I’ve scraped up groundhogs and rabbits, squirrels, all kinds of birds, even cats and dogs. One morning, I looked out and saw a dead deer lying at the bottom of my driveway. Hell of a job—dead weight, and all. It took me an hour to shift the big bastard.

  Whatever the animal, they always fall at the bottom of my driveway. I used to think this strange, but have since learned that all things serve a purpose, however dark and terrible it may be.

  The hairpin bend takes Sideroad 13 away from Scratch’s land (I still think of it as his land, even though the house has stood empty for two months, and the police appear to have stopped looking for him), which means that his driveway is three times longer than it needs to be. Not a problem anymore, but when Scratch was around, and after we’d been hit by a winter storm, it seemed that his snowblower never stopped chugging. I consider myself an understanding man (Melinda would say I was timid
, but I’ve a feeling she wouldn’t call me that if she were alive today), but there was no practical reason for Scratch to run that blower so goddamn early. He was long-retired, so it’s not as if he had to get to work, and I’ve already told you that the plows don’t look at Sideroad 13 until the priorities are clear, so he wasn’t going anywhere, even with an open driveway.

  It was spite, pure and simple. He used to get up at that ungodly hour and shug the snow from his driveway (or ride his John Deere, depending on the season), not because he needed to—or even wanted to—but because he was cold-hearted. He was mean.

  I tried reasoning with him. Many times. I was never hostile (he was a foot taller than me, and three times the width; good sense suggested diplomacy). I took a six-pack with me the first time I went over. The miserable bastard chugged five of them as he listened to what I had to say, then belched in my face and told me to kiss his caboose. I didn’t sleep that night. Not one wink. I lay awake staring into the greyness of our room, listening to the sweet sounds Melinda made as she dreamed. At four A.M.—before it was light, even—I heard Scratch’s mower rattle into life. I climbed out of bed and looked out the window. That mean son of a bitch was riding up and down his lawn in the dark, one hand on the wheel, the other holding a flashlight. Somewhere below the sputter of the lawnmower’s engine, I was sure I could hear him laughing.

  Melinda groaned and opened her eyes. She saw me standing by the window with my head in my hands.

  “Sweetheart,” she said.

  “I’m going to kill him.” This was the first time I’d spoken these words out loud, though I’d thought them often enough.

  “You’re not going to kill anybody, Rambo. You still go green around the gills when you have to scrape roadkill out of the driveway.” She held out her arms. “Now get over here, old man, and give me a huggle.”

  I went to her, and huggled her, and could feel her heart fighting in her chest, just as she could feel mine. We were that close. We didn’t even have to be in each other’s arms. Sometimes I could feel her heart beat in a different room. It is not time that creates this magic, but love. I have learned that love is two circles bound forever. Perfect symmetry. Love is a figure of eight: a beautiful shape, without end.

  Time passed and Scratch continued to be a pain in the ass, so I paid a visit to the O.P.P. in Hallow Falls. I didn’t want the police involved, but couldn’t see an alternative. I spoke with a young cop named Constable Moon. I told him that I didn’t want to make a scene. Scratch was my neighbour, and all I wanted was to get along.

  “Do you think you could have a word with him?” I asked. My voice trembled. I was nervous, I tell you. It felt like I had crossed a line, broken some unspoken rule—old Johnny Gregson, tattletale and yellowbelly, who needed the big boys to fight for him.

  The young constable did little to temper my discomfort. He was too by-the-book. There was no levity in his tone, his questions were methodical, and there was a solemnity in the way he wrote the details of my complaint in his notepad. I tried to appear lighthearted, but I guess he was too young and inexperienced to see that I was afraid. He was going to treat this with due gravity.

  “We’ll look into it, Mr. Gregson,” he said. I couldn’t help thinking that going to the police was a mistake, and that things were going to get worse before they got better.

  Constable Moon and another, older policeman came to see Scratch later that day. I was in the garden when the cruiser pulled into Scratch’s driveway, but I scurried inside and watched from my bedroom window. Scratch had seen them, too. He opened his front door and shuffled onto the porch as they stepped out of the cruiser. He said something to the cops (for once I couldn’t hear him; maybe he was affecting a weakly, old man’s voice). Constable Moon nodded. Scratch smiled and invited them in. As they passed him on the porch, he looked at my house—at my bedroom window, as if he knew where I was and that I was watching. There was no mistaking the icy glint of hate in his eyes.

  Melinda put her hand on my shoulder. I touched the tips of her fingers, wanting to look into her eyes and see that, despite my misgivings, I had done the right thing. But I couldn’t look away from the window. My gaze was locked on Scratch’s front door. I imagined the two policemen sitting in the dusty air of his living room—Moon referring to the notes he had taken, telling Scratch that there had been a complaint. I could see him nodding, scratching his arm or the back of his head, maybe smiling a little … while inside he boiled with hate and anger, like a vicious dog straining at the leash.

  He wanted my throat. I couldn’t see him, but I knew it.

  Ten minutes later, the front door opened and Scratch walked the policemen to their cruiser. There was something about this (it was too comfortable, too goddamn familiar) that set me more on edge. Scratch’s granite face was painted with a rare shooting-the-shit smile. Even Constable by-the-goddamn-numbers Moon was smiling. As they got into the cruiser, I heard the older cop say, “Thanks, Scratch. I’ll see you later.”

  What I had wanted to hear was, “Thank you for your co-operation, Mr. Clayton. Let’s hope this is our first and last visit.” Something like that. Something … official.

  Thanks, Scratch. I’ll see you later.

  The cop didn’t even use his real name. “Scratch” is the nickname he’d earned after falling into a patch of poison ivy when he was eight years old (the rash had long since disappeared, but he’d been scratching ever since). His real name was Hill, and the fact that the cop didn’t call him Hill, or Mr. Clayton, unsettled me no end. It stank of small-town horseshit, and I didn’t like it. I thought all that local back scratching had stopped when the town cops moved out, but I guess I was wrong. Hell, I hadn’t wanted them to address the issue with too strong a hand (that’d be like poking a hornets’ nest with a sharp stick), but I hoped they’d apply some tact and authority to find a resolve.

  The cruiser backed up, swung around, and rumbled down Scratch’s overlong driveway. Scratch gave them a single wave, then turned and looked me dead in the eye. The painted smile was gone, replaced by a sneer that had turned his lips waxy-pale. He was agitated, scratching his chest and neck like an ape with fleas. His eyes were squinted to dark ticks and even from this distance—at least fifty yards—I saw the thick vein in his temple jumping.

  The vicious dog had jumped its leash. It was loose, and coming for me.

  “Crap,” I said.

  I have since learned that Hill “Scratch” Clayton is a man both revered and respected in the town of Hallow Falls. He’d spent his entire life in the area, except for four years in Europe during WWII—three of which were spent in Stalag 8b, after he’d taken a bullet and was captured during the doomed raid on Dieppe. But it wasn’t the German hardware he’d taken, or the bars and medals he’d been awarded on his return, that had won this respect. His father had elevated the Clayton name before Scratch was born: Ernest Clayton was a God-honest Hallow Falls farm boy who, in 1915, volunteered for the Canadian Corps, and a year later was fighting in the Dirty One. He’d splashed gunfire over The Somme and charged at Vimy Ridge, then found himself chest-deep in mud and bodies during the nightmare of Passchendaele. This was one of the most appalling battles of the First World War, and Scratch’s daddy was there. He took a licking, though—crawled away from the battle full of holes. He returned to Hallow Falls an all-Canadian hero. They gave him a crate full of medals in exchange for the blood he’d spilled on that Belgian wasteland, and named a street after him … perhaps to make up for the nightmares that would shake him from his sleep in the years to come.

  Ernest Clayton died in ’63, the same day that Kennedy was assassinated. There were about fifteen hundred people living in Hallow Falls back then (there are close to twenty thousand today—how’s that for progress?), and just about every one of them, young and old, turned out for the funeral. Even Lester Pearson, the Christ-Almighty prime minister of our fine nation, sent a letter of condolence, which Mayor Lonnie Bean read at the service. My father used to say that you can
judge the quality of a man by how many people attend his funeral. Using this axiom, it would be safe to suggest that Ernest Clayton was held in high regard.

  His only son inherited this respect in the same way he’d inherited the house and that crate full of medals. True, he’d taken a bullet for his country in ’42 and had seen the rest of the war from the confines of a P.O.W. camp, but the overriding feeling I get, speaking to some of the older townspeople, is that Scratch wasn’t half the man his daddy was. They sure as hell won’t name a street after him, and his picture doesn’t grace the walls at the Legion. Charlie Elson, who runs the taps and has probably heard more war stories than any other man in Canada, described Scratch as the kind of guy who would shoot a lame deer, then claim the kill as if he’d earned it.

  “I’d be willing to bet every sweet memory in my head,” Charlie also said, “that when the time for Scratch’s funeral rolls round, this town won’t stop—won’t even blink. And there won’t be no f’chrissakes letter of condolence from the prime minister, neither.”

  Their esteemed name will have faded into the dusty walkways of history in another thirty or forty years, when anybody who knew Ernest or Scratch will be either dead or senile. Few people will know why it is called Ernest Clayton Street, and fewer people still will care. But for as long as Scratch was drawing breath, his name would hold sway. I’m not suggesting that the long arm of the law couldn’t touch him. I just think it would have to stretch a little, that’s all.

  Which is why my life didn’t get any easier after those O.P.P. boys paid him a visit. In fact—and just as I feared—it got a hell of a lot worse.

  The vicious dog was howling at my front door before the cruiser had disappeared from sight. I stood away from the bedroom window and looked at Melinda.