Scary Creek

by Thomas Cater

  “Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” I said.

  “Maybe she jumped bail,” Virgil suggested.

  We were slow getting out of the car. Virgil waited for me to lead. He held the wooden picket gate open. I climbed the concrete steps and crossed the porch. There was a doorbell, but from its deranged position -- hanging out of the socket like a goofy eye -- it couldn’t have possibly worked. I knocked lightly and then more firmly, but no one answered.

  “She’s jumped bail and gone to Mexico,” Virgil said with relief.

  I twisted the knob and the door swung open, something neither of us expected. Virgil took two steps back. I stuck my head in the open door and spoke in a hushed whisper: “hello-o-o.”

  There was stale, muggy warmth about the inside of the house that suggested recent habitation, as if someone had been lounging around in dirty clothes. The rooms were in disarray and hadn’t been cleaned in days. Papers, bottles, glasses, cups and saucers littered every cabinet and table. A harsh odor of cigarettes and alcohol permeated every fiber of the carpet and curtains. The house was awash with the odors of decadence.

  We surveyed the living area and moved quickly to the kitchen where someone had recently dirtied dishes and made coffee. There were crushed cigarette butts with lipstick on them in varied receptacles. The sink was full of greasy pots and pans. It reminded me of home and conjured up visions of Myra. I could not help wonder what kind of alien life forms were taking shape in the refrigerator.

  There was a closed door to another room off the kitchen, which made it all that much more compelling. Virgil followed close on my heels. I opened the door wide enough to let in fresh air and light. It was stuffy, pregnant with stale air and immersed in a tomb-like darkness. The scent of dissolution, spent passion and reeking human flesh mingled with the odors of stale whiskey and tobacco. There was a tangle of arms and legs on the rumpled bed thrown together in a heap.

  “Good Lord!” I shouted, fearing a murder-suicide pact.

  A body on the bed stirred, raised a tangled head of blonde hair and gazed groggily in my direction.

  “Who are you and what do you want?” she asked in a husky voice.

  I was a little disappointed to see that she was alive and well, only confused and hung over. She tried to shade her eyes from the living room light. Mercifully, I closed the door.

  “Didn’t mean to bother you,” I said, “but I need one of Harry’s suits.”

  Her head returned to the pillow. “What we didn’t sell at the yard sale is in the closet,” she said, pointing with an arm. “What do you want it for?”

  “Evidence,” I whispered. She made a grunting sound and tried to wipe the strands of hair away from her mouth and eyes.

  “You want me to get it?” She asked in a voice that conveyed almost child-like naïveté. I could hear her apologizing to jurors for interrupting their day. I knew she was never going to swing for the murder of her husband.

  “No, thanks,” I replied, “I’ll get it and then I’ll be moving on.”

  I crept to the closet so as not to awaken her bunkmate. Fortunately, Harry was a clotheshorse, though a small one. I could tell by the look and feel of the first suit I laid my hands on that he was a little man but of discriminating tastes.

  “Which suit was he wearing when you shot him?” I asked.

  “He wasn’t wearing a suit,” she said, “just jeans and a shirt.”

  I took the blue suit with a matching vest. I couldn’t help but wonder if that fact was important to the efficacy of the suit. I decided to take two just in case. If one trespasser in a haunted house wearing a murdered man’s suit could confound a ghost, then two such suits on trespassers could possibly create pandemonium.

  “My lawyer told me not to talk to you guys,” she said.

  “We’re not talking. I need a suit, that’s all, just to be sure we’re not making mistakes. You wouldn’t want us to make a mistake would you?” My adrenal gland was working overtime. “Why don’t you forget about it and go back to sleep?” I suggested

  She rubbed her eyes, yawned and rolled over.

  “What time is it?” she asked.

  “Nearly noon,” I said. “Too early to get up. Go back to sleep before you wake your friend.”

  I gathered both suits in my arms and started toward the door.

  “Are you sure you’re allowed to do this?” she asked.

  “Hey! I got a court order here, you want to see it?”

  I pulled a wrinkled envelope from my pocket, but she was no longer looking. “You have my word on it, believe me. I’m leaving a receipt on the table. If you have any questions, call my office. My secretary will be in all day.”

  I closed the bedroom door. Virgil was gone. For a moment, I thought I'd left him inside. He was like that. He could be so silent and still you wouldn’t know if he was in the same room. The curtains on the outside door I noticed were moving. I could see Virgil sitting in the car. The motor was running. I took the steps in a single bound, slid into the car and pointed down the road. The tires spun and the car, squirmed out of the drive and down the street. In less than five minutes, we were approaching the interstate. In five minutes, we were out of town and on our way to Elanville.

  “When I heard her voice, the next thing I thought I would hear was gunshots. You got balls, Case. I couldn’t stand in that room and talk to her while stealing her dead husband’s suit. You got balls.”

  “Maybe,” I said, unable to explain my own behavior, “but I’ll bet a lot of things are happening to her that have never happened until now. It isn’t everyday you shoot your husband and the cops let you go home to think about it for a few months. I think I could probably walk in there and ask her for a pint of blood and she’d give it to me.”

  Virgil was garrulous and full of questions.

  “Yeah, I think so. Did she seem sorry?”

  “Sorry?” I said, screwing my face up in contempt. “For what; killing her husband? I didn’t go in there to counsel her. I don’t know how she feels, but she was in bed with some guy, probably her insurance agent. Don’t ask me if she was sorry; I have no idea.”

  I felt sorry for losing control, but sometimes I found it difficult to understand why people placed so much emphasis on reconciliation. It’s okay to steal and murder as long as you regret and repent.

  “Take a look at these threads,” I said. “What do you think?”

  The label on the inside jacket pocket had the name of a local clothing store that seemed to impress Virgil.

  “Your size?” he asked.

  “A little tight for me,” I said. “I wear a 44 regular. They ought to fit you, though.”

  I could see the idea had occurred to him even if not consciously.

  “I thought you might like to go into the house with me. I made it out alive and I wasn’t even wearing a murdered man’s suit.”

  He gave the idea a moment thought and narrowed his eyes, as if he were visualizing prowling through the corridors of the house.

  “I like the blue one,” he said

  *

  We drove to his office and changed into our protective clothing. The gray pinstripe suit fit snug through the chest and shoulders; I was not able to button the jacket or pants. The trousers were at least two inches short around the waist. I concealed the gap with a leather belt. The dark blue suit fit like Velcro on Virgil.

  “What are you going to do with these suits when we finish?” he asked, brushing lint from the lapel.

  “If we get out of the house Ryder house alive, you can keep them.”

  He kept the smile off his face, but not out of his eyes.

  I was impatient to get back to the Ryder house, but Virgil wanted to visit the courthouse, pick up the tax receipt and record some papers.

  “I don’t want you to think I’m being ghoulish or foolish,” I said, “but I would like to stop at a local cemetery and rob a grave.”

  “Rob a grave?” He repeated and remembered the grave dirt. “There’
s a cemetery on the Elkton Road. We shouldn’t have any trouble finding one that’s ‘fresh dug.’”

  On our way out of town, we stopped at the Salvation Army’s second-hand junk shop and bought two of the oldest and slouchiest hats we could find. I discovered a forties Fedora, and he found a black and battered felt Stetson that looked like it once belonged to Hopalong Cassidy.

  A clock was ticking annoyingly inside my head; it was either white noise or Arcadian rhythms. Even Virgil sensed the urgency. He was driving like a teenager with his first can of beer flooding his bladder.

  “Do you get the feeling that something is pushing us?” I asked. He was oblivious of my question. “What’s the big hurry?” I said.

  He eased off the accelerator. “I don’t know,” he replied. “It just seems important that we get there as soon as possible.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m beginning to dread that feeling.”

  The cemetery was an old one. There were headstones with birth dates on them that went back nearly 200 years. It was silent save for one old and dented pickup truck in the narrow drive. An awning -- to keep rain off the exposed earth -- was covering a gaping hole, while a worker continued to vanish and re-appear in the hole.

  “There’s our fresh dug grave,” I said.

  Virgil drove to the site over a path that had gone to weeds and potholes. The gravedigger stopped working long enough to watch our approach. We stopped and climbed out; he resumed his work at a much faster pace. We stood at the foot of the grave, Virgil in his dark blue suit and I in my tight-fitting pinstripe.

  “Afternoon,” the man in the dusty blue jeans jacket and pants piped, barely taking time to pause between ladling shovel’s full of earth.

  “Afternoon,” Virgil replied.

  “You gentlemen come to pay your respects?” He asked.

  Virgil hunkered down, told him we’d come to have a look around and then casually scooped up a handful of fresh-dug dirt, as if he were conducting some kind of soil test.

  The gravedigger mumbled something about ‘nothing to see here but carking bones,’ stopped shoveling and watched Virgil fondle the dark soil.

  “Looking for anything in particular?” he asked.

  Virgil picked up more dirt, sifted it through his fingers and put a portion in his pocket.

  “No, nothing in particular,” he replied, brushing the excess soil from his hands.

  “You fellers feel all right?” the gravedigger asked.

  We nodded, glancing at each other, like windsocks blowing in the breeze.

  “That’s good,” he said, watching carefully as I ran my fingers through a handful of soil.

  “Do you mind if we borrow a little dirt from you?” I asked.

  A pained expression flitted across his face. He got a firm grip on the shovel and moved to the far end of his hole.

  “I knowed you was a’ comin’,” he said, enthusiastically. “I could feel it in my bones. You boys are goin’ ghost chasin’ to the Ryder house, right?”

  I nearly fell into the hole. “How did you know?” I asked.

  He smiled and loosened his grip on the shovel.

  “I can tell by the clothes you’re wearin’. It’s not every day a man puts on that kind of finery to visit an empty fresh dug grave.”

  “So tell me what else you know about graves, especially the graves at the Ryder house.”

  He gazed at the bottom of the hole he was digging. “When you dig a grave, you dig it deep, six feet at least. Less would surely hold a body down. There’s something about the weight of dirt on a corpse that keeps it calm and peaceful. It's like a security blanket. The graves on the back of that hill behind the Ryder house are too shallow. The coffins nearly rose out of the ground one spring. They threw dirt on ‘em, but only enough to cover ‘em up and get ‘em out of sight. If everything is goin’ to be all right, those coffins have to be planted deep.”

  This was the natural way, the way of a man of the soil, I thought. It would not work for men of sophistication who searched for natural meanings to life and death.

  “Is that all? You mean all that is required is to bury a few coffins deeper and everything will be all right at the Ryder mansion?”

  “No, that ain’t all,” he continued. “There’s more. The woman who lived in that house weren’t no ordinary woman. She lost her mind when she was a young gal, lost it because her pappy was in league with the devil. He filled her mind with all kinds of terrible stories about things that lived in the world and things that entered into a body when it was sleepin’ I can’t say as I blame her, living way out there in the middle of nowhere and nothing but a dumb colored gal to lead her around. Once she lost her mind, she became like two people,” the gravedigger said, “One on the inside and the other on the outside.

  “They say she never knew a man’s love, but I heard things were different. I heard that if a man went to the old mine entrance and put his ear to the ground; he could hear the sounds of a man clawing, trying to dig his way out of the mine. I heard there was a man who found his way from the mine into that house, while her pappy was away making his self rich; and he and Elinore laid together…in fact…Oh, nothin’, it’s just gossip.”

  The old man had fired up our imaginations and suddenly whizzed on the coals.

  “Go on, man, tell us,” Virgil said.

  “Well, a long time ago, there was a story that Elinore had a child…” He paused and waited to see what effect his words were having. “They say she had a baby that weren’t no baby at all, they say it was some kind of creature, or animal with long red hair all over its body and teeth like a dog. Her pappy covered it up pretty good. They say he snatched it out of the cradle one night while Elinore was sleeping.”

  He paused and re-positioned the shovel.

  “Yes, go on,” Virgil urged.

  “Now mind, I told you this is gossip.”

  “Please continue.”

  “They say he took the little critter out of its crib and buried it alive.”

  We waited silently for him to continue.

  “No one knows for sure. It’s just a story that started many years ago by some old black gal who was taking care of Elinore while she was in the hospital. She said she heard her talkin’ in her sleep about a little baby child that someone had come and stole from her. No one paid any mind to anything that woman said, not since her mind seemed to be filled up with so many frightening things.”

  “Is that possible?” I asked Virgil.

  He shrugged. “It’s the first time I ever heard anything like that.”

  “Yes, but you’re not a student of the Ryder family history. You don’t know what could have gone on out there.”

  He shrugged again. “What other gossip have you heard about that place, old-timer?” Virgil asked.

  He shook his head. “That’s it, I told you all I know. ‘Cept I think you’re wasting’ your time filling your pockets with dirt. Whatever is stalking through that house ain’t goin’ to be put off by a handful of dirt.”

  “And what do you think will put it off?”

  “A proper burial,” he said.

  “You mean a six-foot deep hole?”

  “I mean someone has got to lay those spirits to rest properly. If it’s Elinore, it ain’t the spirit of the old woman, but of the blind child that’s livin’ in fear of life and death, in fear of all those demons the old man put in her mind and whatever may still be livin’ in that house.”

  I reached down to offer my hand. He was making sense in a way I could appreciate, simple physical actions, rituals to placate restless spirits. The souls of the deceased can't be turned out; they have to be prepared for what lay beyond.

  “If what you say is true, I’ll do my very best to help Elinore find peace,” I said.

  The old man’s eyes began to fill with tears. “God bless you, son.”

  He turned quickly back to the task of making the grave even deeper.

  “You know that guy?” I asked.

  “
Never saw him before,” Virgil replied.

  Chapter Thirteen

  We turned onto Cherry Hill Road and drove for ten minutes. Eventually, we came to a weathered gate propped against two locust posts tangled in rusting barbed wire. There were grammatically flawed signs hanging from trees and fences expounding the wonders of ‘the man of the woods’ miracle cure for everything from blindness to toe-jam. One weathered sign itemized twenty-nine natural ingredients that went into the blending of his celebrated tonic.

  “Sounds like there may be some physiologically redeeming value in that blend of potables,” I said.

  “Not much in the way of flavor, though,” Virgil replied, “but there are those who swear by it.”

  We climbed through a hole in the fence and followed the narrow path to the woodsman’s cabin, a dilapidated building stuck together with tarpaper, corrugated steel and mildewed plywood. A sign on the door proclaimed, ‘gone cat-fishin’.

  Attached to the back of the cabin was a wrecked greenhouse half the length of a football field. Rows of plants grew in thick clusters, one next to the other, limbs entwined. The weeds were high around the greenhouse and threatening to take over the herbal patches and everything within range. Jars, tins and plastic bags stuffed with an endless variety of weeds and plants surrounded an ancient herbal mill and grinder. The effects of the woodsman’s labors were clear.

  We walked around and through the pharmaceutical mill, reading the misspelled or abbreviated labels on the jars and cans. I found a metal tin with the inscription ‘thorn apple’ scrawled on masking tape. We continued our search and eventually found a plastic garbage bag filled with drying weeds inscribed as ‘nightshade’.

  We took sprigs of thorn apple and stuffed them into the jackets and pockets of the suits. By all occult powers and maledictions, we were prepared botanically to re-enter the house.

  “I’m glad you’re coming with me,” I said. “You’re not going to believe the condition of the Ryder house. It’s not bad at all, everything is in good shape. It looks as if someone moved in yesterday. It’s very impressive.”