Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories

by Steven L. Campbell

  “After leaving the hospital, I thought I was strong enough to deal with it,” she said, “but after a few lonely nights at home, I began to fall to pieces. I called mother but she wouldn’t return any of my calls. We were never that close and I think she blamed me.

  “So, I began sleeping during the days and drinking at night to help along the grieving, but the booze never stayed down, so I was miserably somewhere between sober and hung-over and sick to the stomach for a while until last Sunday when I got a call from John. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t coming home after all that happened to me.”

  Brian said nothing. He barely heard the words she spoke. He had heard them so many times before.

  “I’m glad you found me when you did,” she said. “It’s good to be connected to people who care about me.”

  Brian led her to one of the rocks where sunlight brightened its salmon colored surface. Not too far in the distance, he heard the sound of bees buzzing. Angela’s time was short.

  He took off his pack, took out the brand-new camera, and positioned it to face another pink rock. He set the timer and led her to the rock.

  “Say cheese,” he said as he held her hand and smiled at the camera.

  She kissed him on the cheek as the camera’s timer activated its shutter.

  “I don’t want to go,” she said, her lips brushing his cheek.

  The buzzing grew louder.

  She brushed tears from her own cheeks.

  He turned, took her in his arms and kissed her on the mouth.

  Would she remember this tomorrow? Some days were like starting over.

  He let his kiss linger on her lips before he released her. The buzzing sounded like a windy roar now.

  He felt a faraway anger coming to him from the past and waited to see if it would make him cry. It did.

  He felt electricity crawl across his skin. Angela’s body—her dress, too—turned silvery blue like a distant foggy sky. For a moment, she was there. Then she wasn’t.

  The buzzing stopped.

  Brian fetched his camera, returned it to his pack, and started back toward home, embracing tomorrow and aching to see Angela again.

  #

  A Sinister Blast from the Past

  INSIDE THIS COLD and sterile environment, I am a prisoner of time, a prisoner of fate, a prisoner to the cruel circumstances that have left me unable to communicate to the people around me. They pass me and I go unnoticed by them. Without a name I am nobody. Without a voice I am nothing more than a silent pet that must be fed and bathed and taken care of. Unable to move I am less than that.

  Before it happened, it was supposed to be a viewing of a corpse, nothing more. But my journey had somehow strayed me from the straight and narrow and drove me into a nightmare of mystery and horror. If the road had been on a cliff, I would have been wise to have driven over the edge, plunge into a fiery death to awaken from the madness that grips my mind, and be free of the diabolical dance going on around me.

  Instead, I waltz with ghosts. Trapped upon a dance floor that extends beyond my periphery, I exist disturbed and confused between the dancers I knew long ago; I’m out of time, out of step, anxious of the cold hand of death most certainly ready to tap me on the shoulder to let me know I’ve danced my last dance. How terrible to have to die here so far away from Carrie and my children, among these haunting phantoms that chill my blood and shrink my soul.

  Now I, unable to move or speak, find that I must share with someone my tale of macabre circumstances before this evil dance carries me away, for surely it has to end. Thus, I pray for salvation, to return to my proper self and time, to go home to that place of familiarity that enveloped me for years like a comfortable blanket, serene and heavenly and exalting, and elevated to a beautiful shrine I never knew could be missed this much. But I fear I shall never see it again.

  Unable to communicate, I send out these thoughts, and hope that someone may hear my tale upon the winds, and don’t consider me insane. Yet, insanity is where I find myself. How could anyone believe what I am about to reveal?

  It began when my Uncle John died ten days ago. He was more of a father than an uncle. He and Aunt Zela raised me after my parents died when I was four. My older cousins Judy and Donald became like sister and brother, and when Judy called with the heartbreaking news, the two of us wept while we remembered John Foster’s inexhaustible kindness.

  That evening without Carrie at my side (she was in Pittsburgh at an art show), I left my woodsy ranch home on the outskirts of New Cambridge and drove to Uncle John’s funeral in nearby Ridgewood. I felt alone without my wife and constant companion next to me.

  (My dearest Carrie, I miss her dearly. We married the year she graduated from New Cambridge University. I was twenty and she had just turned twenty-three. The wedding ceremony turned out better than how we had rehearsed it. Even the cake turned out just right. Although Aunt Zela lamented that I had married too young, that my destiny was college and a profession as a teacher, she shared my happiness anyway when I became a writer for the New Cambridge Gazette. She and Uncle John ended up loving Carrie and the children dearly.)

  During the drive to Uncle John’s funeral in Ridgewood, I realized that I had forgotten my wallet. I considered turning around but a sudden storm came on and dropped rain and hail on me south of the little town where the surrounding woods are thick with pines and the road too narrow to do a U-turn.

  The rain and hail burst through the canopy of trees, and brisk winds and sheets of rainfall caused me to pull over and wait for visibility to return. My cell phone searched for a signal while I sat alone inside my cramped Toyota Camry parked dangerously along the highway.

  A few yards behind me, a naked tree that had lost its bark and branches long ago toppled and splintered onto the road. Then, as I looked through the turrets of rain striking the sunroof and flowing down my windshield, I saw bolts of lightning strike beyond Myers Creek to my right. Suddenly, a whistling bolt of lightning struck the hood of my car and rocked it like a boat taking a large wake to the stern. My ears popped and a deafening ringing filled my head. My hands tingled and felt like they had been too close to a raging fire. I stuck my fingers in my mouth to relieve the burn. When the ringing stopped and the burning in my fingers had subsided, the storm was gone.

  I got out and inspected a large scorch mark across the hood of my car where the lightning had turned portions of the metallic blue color to an ashy gray. Nothing I couldn’t fix I reasoned as I got back in. As I looked in my rearview mirror before driving off, something seemed amiss. By the time I had driven another mile, I realized the tree that had crashed onto the road had not been there when I pulled away.

  A headache knifed at my eyes and the evening skylight seemed especially bright when I entered Ridgewood. I put away all thoughts about what could have happened to the tree as I made my way to the funeral home. When I arrived, no one was there, so I tried calling Aunt Zela, but my phone still searched for a signal. I left downtown Ridgewood and drove east to Uncle John and Aunt Zela’s house—the place where I grew up. As I turned on Hamilton Street and approached the house, a thin teenage boy darted out in front of my car. I stopped quick enough not to hit him and he was athletic enough to dodge the speeding white Mustang coming at him in the other lane. He turned and looked at me and I stared dumbly into a face I hadn’t seen for a long, long time.

  A girl around the same age and a boy no older than seven came across the street next. They passed in front of the car and I watched my cousins Judy and Donald catch up to the boy—a boy that I had been in another time. Then I saw Uncle John come to the driveway, climb into his old, red ’66 Chevy pickup truck, back out onto the street and drive past me.

  I don’t remember how long I sat there on my old street with the engine of my yet-to-be-built car running and my mind locked in disbelief. I turned on the radio to distract me and keep me from thinking. The Pittsburgh Pirates were playing the Cincinnati Reds and the announcer’s voice sent chills through my numb b
ody. It was a familiar voice, one I had listened to on many summers while growing up on this very block.

  I yelled at the radio, told it that what I heard wasn’t real. It was all I could think to do. Then I changed stations. Many played anti-war songs, and Watergate was still a hot topic on the news. I slid a New Age CD into the CD player and drove madly away, but the strangeness in Ridgewood remained. I saw late 1960 and early 1970 classic cars everywhere, even some from the 1950s. The streets were agleam with its insane road show. Their Pennsylvania license plates looked plain—authentic yellow and blue like the ones nailed to the wall inside my garage back home, not like the colorful and fancy wildlife one fastened to the back of my small, aerodynamic-designed Toyota.

  I saw places from my childhood restored. Sam’s Diner and the movie theater were back. The little shopping mall the town officials had torn down for a Wal-Mart in 1990 was still there. Same with Chester Bailey’s farm that had become Wal-Mart’s parking lot.

  I hurried away from Ridgewood and headed back to New Cambridge. Along the way, I wondered what would happen to me if my out-of-place car and I were discovered by the state police. Nowhere on the highway looked safe, so I drove the back roads toward New Cambridge and home.

  Night came early as stormy clouds quickened the darkness. When I returned to the highway for the final three miles home, I could tell by the large round and yellow headlights that passed me that I was not getting closer to where I wanted to be. The strangeness had reached New Cambridge and I saw that the BP filling station where I fueled up every weekend had changed its square green and yellow signs to red and blue oval ones with AMOCO AMERICAN GAS in white letters across their blue centers. Amoco’s gas was 47.9 cents for a gallon of regular, and I laughed like a loon as I turned on the road to home and drove toward the house I knew would not be there. It wasn’t.

  The road I was on came to a dead end next to the creek that wound its way behind where my home would someday stand surrounded by walnut and maple trees with a dog house and two swing sets and three tire swings below. Someday, three children would grow up at this undeveloped property. Andrew would go to college and become a sculptor and teach college art classes at San Diego, California. The twins, Haley and Becca would become geology and nursing students respectively at New Cambridge University, and Becca would fall in love with a guy that her old man would think wore too many tattoos on his arms.

  After I stopped laughing at the absurdity, I cried. After I cried, I sat alone trying to figure out what to do next. For sanity’s sake, I knew I had to find someone and some place familiar. The once beautiful woods that I loved had now become ominous tree shapes silhouetted by a large spooky looking moon drifting in and out of view by dissipating storm clouds.

  I turned around and drove toward downtown New Cambridge not sure of where I was going but wanting to see a familiar place. I started over the railroad tracks on Dearborn Avenue when I realized that the signal lights were flashing red.

  When had they started using the abandoned railroad again?

  That was my only thought when the train struck my car and shattered my world and me.

  Now, I’m broken, alone, a prisoner to cruel and sinister circumstances that have left me in a vegetative state, making me unable to communicate to the medical people around me. I am Patient John Doe, nobody; no one knows who I am. I left my wallet on the dresser where Carrie has no idea that I’m here, trapped in the past.

  A feeding tube and ventilator keep me alive.

  God, take away my misery.

  #

  Ghost Lights

  CHARLES DONOHUE FELL. He was on his back and for a moment he thought he was floating. Raindrops hung in the silver air all around him, which seemed weird because rocky cliff sides were rushing past him and upwards. He closed his eyes.

  His sudden plummet into wet and bristly boughs of pine and spruce trees jarred his senses and caused him to open his eyes to his green attackers.

  He tumbled from limb to limb, snapping small branches with his grabbing hands as he searched dizzyingly for one that would stop his fall. But the rain on every branch was like oil. He slipped through them quickly, too heavy to be cradled like the goldfinches that had been there seconds ago, roosting from the rain. As the birds flew noisily off, his left hip made contact with solid ground before his forehead did.

  His landing was bristly, yet softer than he expected. Still, he saw stars and the air had been knocked from his lungs. He rolled over on his back, lying on an almost dry mattress of pine needles, and gasped for air until his lungs and stomach hurt. When his breathing became normal, he closed his eyes and rested. When he opened them, his head, lungs and stomach ached less, and the storm had lessened, though cold rain dripped on him through the towering canopy of pine and spruce branches stretched over him.

  It was the rain that had caused him to slip on the smooth marble stone atop Myers Ridge and fall off the edge. If Melissa had been there he probably wouldn’t have ventured so close to the edge.

  A whooshing sound caught his attention. It was far off, but definitely the sound of an automobile’s rubber tires passing over State Highway 497’s blacktop, or what the locals had named Russell Road.

  How strange, he thought, that a vehicle was able to operate this close to Myers Ridge despite the high level of electronic disturbance he had found. He slowly took out his cell phone from his buttoned-down shirt pocket and prayed that the slim black phone would work. It did not. Of course it didn’t. That was one of the reasons why he, professor of sciences at the nearby Penn State campus, was here: to find whatever was jamming electronic devices on and around Myers Ridge.

  He put away his phone, then turned his head to get his bearings when pain knifed through his lower back and left hip. His left leg was numb and upon slow inspection, looked twisted at the knee and ankle. He took his time and used pine branches to pull himself into a seated position so he could examine his leg. It didn’t feel broken, but the kneecap was out of place. He held his breath and yanked the patella back where it belonged. Pain shot up his leg and a sick heat filled his stomach; he almost vomited. He hiccupped instead and sent pain stabbing through his lower back and down his leg. He fell back, cried out like some wounded animal, and felt ashamed.

  When he could tolerate the pain again, he sat up again. The valley felt colder. Another bout of rain began to fall. It was June and the day had been sunny and warm, but now he wished he would have worn a jacket—or a long-sleeved shirt, at least. Melissa would have reminded him to bring a jacket.

  A spring-like chill latched onto him and attacked his leg with mind-reeling pain. He closed his eyes and waited for the red behind his lids to leave. When the pain subsided and he opened his eyes, lightning blinked in the distance; thunder laughed at him from above.

  It was late in the evening, perhaps eight o’clock. His watch had stopped at the same time his car had stalled upon his arrival that morning. He pulled his legs up until his knees were below his chin, and then he gently worked on his twisted ankle, hoping it wasn’t dislocated. It wasn’t. He straightened his legs and felt the left kneecap lurch out of place again. He undid his pants, lowered them past his knees, and saw that the patella had shifted left again. Once more, he held his breath, forced the kneecap into place again, and screamed from the pain. What else could he do?

  Upon examination, he saw that the skin at his hip had darkened to the brownish-purple color of eggplant. He babied his hip along with his swelling knee and ankle while he hitched up his pants and tried to stand, but the pain roared unbearable in his knee again and brought him down. He searched the ground for a branch long enough to use as a crutch. He found none, so he rolled onto his buttocks, and, using his good leg, he crawled backward toward the highway. Every slide across the ground felt like his lower leg was being torn from the damaged knee.

  An hour later, or as best he estimated—he had crawled and rested six times and daylight was almost gone now—he reached the stream that feeds into Myers Creek north o
f Ridgewood. He rolled onto his good side and drank. Much of his strength returned as soon as the cold water filled his stomach. A noise in the brush reminded him it was time to move on. He crawled into the stream’s icy water and urinated for what seemed like several minutes. Then he crawled onward. The stream’s stone bottom sliced his elbows, and its chill clawed into his hip and knee and caused his whole leg to scream out in pain. When he climbed the embankment on the other side of the stream, enormous lightning flashed. For a moment, night became day. He saw that he had reached the wooded edge. A sloping field ran uphill. He was certain that the highway was on the other side.

  When he reached the hilltop, he saw that the highway did indeed run along the valley, perhaps two hundred yards away. He looked for houses, a farm, anywhere there might be people. But this part of Ridgewood was desolate. His car, he estimated, was two miles south—a long way to crawl.

  His cell phone still would not work. In his shirt’s other pocket was his digital recorder that he had brought along to take notes. The recorder worked now, which puzzled him. What was so different between the two electronic devices that one worked and the other didn’t?

  “The batteries,” he said “I’ll have to experiment that.”

  As he began to put away the recorder, he saw a column of silver fog settle upon the field between him and the highway. It stood, almost opaque, part of it swirling, sometimes pulsating with dim red light inside and yellow light along its narrow top that at times looked almost like a human head surrounded by a halo. Donohue pressed the record button. He said, “I speak this alone somewhere within the outer bowels of Myers Ridge. Hopefully I will survive the night to get this to publication.