DarkTalesfromElderRegionsNY

by Hieber, Leanna Renee

  That was when the nightmares started. Sometimes I was back at The Farm Colony lost and alone, running through a maze of crumbling, dark corridors in an empty building with a murderous outline of my brother at my heels. He was a small, malformed silhouette with glowing eyes. It’s lonely here, come play with me, Danny. Laughing, the figure would push me through a brick wall or out a window, and I would plummet for miles, screaming. All the while I would hear his shrill voice echo in the darkness above: I win! During other dreams, I would see Peter emerge from his shadowy room, his bloodied face crusted over, his charming boyish smile was twisted into a sinister frown of anger. Peter would slowly limp towards me as I cowered in my bed with the covers pulled up to my neck. I could see his right femur protruding jaggedly from his flesh as he dragged his useless leg behind him. His steps were small and agonizingly deliberate. I could hear his dirty sneaker dragging across the wooden floor. His broken hands hooked into deadly claws reaching for vengeance. Once he reached the threshold of my room, he would spring like a tiger, landing on top of me. I was powerless to throw him off. Looking down at me, he would grin, as the teeth fell from his gums only to be replaced by a mouthful of razor-like fangs. He began to throttle the life from me with his cold, lifeless meat hooks. Often I awoke in breathless terror, still able to feel the pressure of his hands wrapped around my throat.

  I was plagued by these nightmares all throughout high school, to the point of near madness. I knew it was only my own guilt that had haunted me, nothing more. Peter wasn’t some Freddy Kruger style boogeyman. He was dead. Buried. Rotting in a coffin, concealed in a cement tomb six feet in the ground. He couldn’t hurt me.

  The nightmares ceased completely when I went to college in Ohio. Once away from home, from his memorial room, Peter’s death seemed far away. Without the constant reminder of his face in framed pictures staring at me accusingly on every wall, I had almost forgotten all about him. I was able to drown my guilt in bongs hits and six packs of cheap beer. Being away from home I thought my inner torture was finally over. Even coming home during school breaks was without incident. After almost seven years, perhaps, I had made myself suffer enough.

  Then, two weeks before college graduation my world began to crumble around me. I received a call that my parents were involved in a fatal accident on the Staten Island Expressway. They had had a collision with an impaired driver who had reached a speed of nearly 100mph before losing control of his vehicle. My parents died instantly in the fiery crash. According to police reports, the young man driving the red Camaro was high on Meth. He had been witnessed by several neighbors fleeing his home in a panic, screaming about being chased by an invisible assailant. The man’s name was Thomas Doyle. He died in the ambulance on the on the way to the hospital after uttering a single word to the police on scene. It was a name: Peter.

  Shocked and grief stricken by the sudden loss, it would be days before I could wrap my head around that information. But in the days to come, it would soon be an obsession.

  I had Patrick and Eunice buried at Resurrection Cemetery, next to the son I had taken from them. Being at home since the sudden death of my parents was surreal to say the least. Everywhere I turned, there was a painful reminder of them, of their unwavering dedication to their long lost Peter. Although I had grown up here, I now began to feel like an interloper trespassing on sacred ground. With their absence, the house remained as cold and lifeless as the bodies I had planted in the ground. I didn’t want to stay there, yet I felt some unexplainable sense of obligation to do so. Even still, I keep my all my activities contained to the first floor, unable to bear the thought of going upstairs... to see their bedroom. Or his.

  The night of their funeral, after all the mourners had left the gathering at my house, I was left feeling numb. Opening a fresh bottle from the liquor cabinet, I had planned on drinking myself to sleep in front of whatever mindless reality show I could find on television. Perhaps in the morning I would finally begin to pick up the pieces of my shattered life. Even though I had just laid my parents to rest hours ago, again and again my thoughts had turned back to my brother. From the large family portrait on the wall, his smiling face was staring down at me. They’re with me now, his frozen grin seemed to mock, I win again. In a near drunken stupor, I had yanked the frame from the above the mantle, slammed in on the carpet and stomped on Peter’s face with a primal scream. The glass splintered cutting the sole of my bare foot.

  Without warning the lights began to flicker in the living room and snowy static filled the screen on the television. I suddenly brought to mind the image of Tommy Doyle fleeing in terror from no one only minutes before slamming his car into my parents. My brother’s name had been the final word on his dying lips. I stood in the center of the room with my foot firmly planted on Peter; blood spreading from my wounds and slowly covering the faces of my parents. A thought occurred to me, had I caused their deaths somehow? I rejected the notion instantly.

  An icy chill slinked its way up my spine as the window blinds began to rattle.

  “Peter?” I asked aloud, nearly paralyzed with fear.

  Silence. I could hear my own racing heartbeat thudding in my ears, but nothing more.

  “I’m sorry.” I whispered, but even to me the words sounded false as they escaped my lips. I wasn’t truly remorseful of having caused his death, was I? No. I was merely afraid of infernal retribution.

  Then, the lights flickered rebuking my insincere apology. From the second floor, I heard the floorboards creak. Someone was up there.

  Come upstairs, I want to play with you, Danny. I could hear the voice from my dreams echo softly in my mind.

  No, this couldn’t be happening, I didn’t believe in the supernatural. Vengeful spirits were the product of fiction. Deceived by copious amounts of alcohol, my mind was merely playing tricks on me. These sudden occurrences were obviously manufactured by a combination of my own guilty conscience and the fact that I had seen too many horror films. Peter was seven years in the grave, and the only haunting was his presence in my memories.

  I would allow him to take us residence inside my head no longer. The little turd’s birth and death had already ruined my life so far, but it appeared I needed to kill him again— figuratively speaking, of course. In this house, he was everywhere I turned; his memory if not his spirit, still lingered. There could only be one way to rid myself of his shadow that loomed like an albatross around my neck. Swallowing a healthy pull from the bottle, a plan formed in my mind.

  I don’t remember climbing the stairs, but the trail of bloody footprints leading to Peter’s room confirmed that I had. I don’t remember striking the match either, but here I stand staring into the flame ready to burn away my sins.

  Before it reached my fingertips, I dropped the match onto his bed and watched as the flame caught hold on the colorful blankets. After another gulp, I hurled the bottle into the wall where it exploded showering ninety proof rain all over the room. I touched another match to one of his drawings taped to a wall. Quickly, the entire room was ablaze. I gazed in drunken satisfaction as the flames began to crack the glass picture frames above his bed and eat away at his face. I laughed in my final triumph. Staring into the flames, I could almost see an outline of Peter in the grey cloud of smoke that filled the room and…

  …I am fifteen again and my entire world has been reduced to 70 acres of trees and decaying brick under a moonlit sky. Although outwardly the same, this is not the place I ventured to as a teen. There are no songs of night birds, no chirruping of crickets in this dark place; there are no sounds except the ones that I cause as I fumble through the woods or within the tomb-like buildings. The smell of smoke is pungent everywhere. The broken wheelchairs and rusted filing cabinets that previously littered the rooms like bodies on a battlefield have been replaced with items from my house: the coffee table, the refrigerator, my old bed, my dresser, even my Little League trophies. All of these objects are charred skeletons of what they had once been.

 
There is no escape from the confines of The Farm Colony. I’ve tried. Beyond the fence that surrounds the property there is nothing but a choking black smoke, which only leads back inside of the very building where I pushed Peter through the wall to his death. The typical teen angst and pornographic graffiti on the peeling walls has been replaced by a single word: MURDERER. In lettering large and small, it is accusingly written over and over in child-like handwriting.

  He is always there waiting on me, standing in the shadows like a grotesque assassin. His swollen, dead face is writhing with fat maggots, his brains oozing like rotten jelly from a crack in his skull. I can see my own reflection in his flaming eyes. He drags his shattered leg behind him as he lurches toward me.

  I tell myself it’s just a dream, but I know that this is a nightmare from which I will never waken.

  “I want to play with you, Danny,” his giggles, but there no humor in that childish voice.

  Despite my tears and pleas for mercy, Peter begins to count. “One… two…three…four…”

  His words are as slow and deliberate as his movements.

  Overcome with mounting terror, I run as fast as I can knowing that as soon he gets to one hundred, he’ll come looking for me again.

  I hide, cowering in fear. Sometimes it’s under a pile of moldy clothing or behind the dirty ceramic toilets in one of the destroyed bathrooms. Other times I seek refuge outside, amidst the thorn bushes and poison ivy praying for daylight that never comes. But after a while I can always hear his approach as he leaves more destruction in his terrible wake and I am forced to run and hide yet again.

  “I win!” He calls after me as I race away in panic, desperately seeking some nook, some cavity where he will not find me. His laughter continuously echoes through the leafless trees and in every dark corridor.

  How long has it been? Days? Weeks? Months? Years? We’ve been playing this game of hide and seek for longer than I dare to remember. Eventually, Peter will find me. And what will be my fate when he finally does catch me? I shudder to think what will happen when he’s tired of playing and the game is finally over.

  ~~END~~

  Ghosting

  by Jessica Burke

  ~I~

  “I wonder if we should try speaking with this lot.” Bethany grumbled, asking the question they all had been thinking but didn’t want to utter, even those who lingered back in the shadows of the many doorways lining the narrow gallery. Speaking came easier to some and Bethany was not one to keep her thoughts to herself, even now.

  The thick armed woman stood leaning over a dark wooden balustrade, looking at a group of people down below on the building’s first floor. She crossed her round, muscular arms over her expansive bosom, leaned out a bit more, craned her head out farther to watch the scene down below. A young man all in black – trousers, cap, shirt, and shoes- ran, what looked to her like a small, dark box, over the walls and air around him. Two additional men, similarly dressed, wandered about the great hall. One had a comparable box, but with some cord attaching the box to a wand he held in his other hand; every so often, the box emitted a piercing sound that reminded Bethany of a child’s tin whistle, only more uncomfortable to listen to. The other, a long haired man much taller than the first two stood a little apart from his fellows, repeated the same motions, only with his hands alone, which he moved along the walls, over doorknobs, keeping just an inch or two above any surface he passed. The men behaved, to Bethany’s sense, the way the blind do, trying to feel the shape of the world surrounding them in the dark.

  Two women were also down there, one Bethany could not see, but heard. Every few minutes a shrill voice that actually hurt Bethany’s head from the height of two dozen feet above, remarked from one of the many rooms adjacent to the great hall, “I’m getting something! A spike! Here!” A scant breath after that outburst, the shrill woman would squeal. Then the woman shrieked what Bethany supposed was a question but was in actuality a command that made Bethany and the others wearisome and distressed as they had heard more than their share of such commands: “We’re here for you to speak with! Tell us your name!”

  And yet, they did need to speak to someone to sort this all out for once and all. Bethany truly hoped it was not the shrill one.

  The last member of the merry little band searching the first floor was a small lump of woman, sitting on the floor without moving and without speaking. It was hard to see much more than her head, closed eyes, cascading hair, and the general impression of a body, since the woman sat huddled in a heap. Bethany only knew the woman was relatively young, but still seemed older than the others. For a good time, Bethany thought the woman was asleep. From time to time, though, her head would tilt to the side as though she were listening to a conversation just beyond her hearing. Then she would hunker down tighter as though trying to make herself disappear.

  When the woman came into the building, a short time ago, she walked immediately to the center of the room and looked up at Bethany. When the older woman met the younger’s gaze, the young woman sat on the floor with such violence, Bethany thought the girl was having an apoplectic fit. She wasn’t. She simply sat on the floor with her head in her hands. As the others around her went about opening bags and fiddling with a host of contraptions, the young woman seemed to relax momentarily, glancing back up toward Bethany. But, the younger woman quickly cast her eyes down and drew her knees up to her chest, her chin resting on her kneecaps.

  “Mayhap she’s touched,” Bethany muttered, shaking her steely grey head, stepping back from the railing, smoothing her white apron and heavy dress, a shade darker than her hair. “Confound and confusticate the lot of them.”

  “My bet would be on the little ‘un in the middle,” interrupted a man standing beside her, of a height and build to Bethany.

  “She’s daft that one, I tell ye,” Bethany chuckled, a dry sound and without humor. “For aught I know she be as soft in the head as a rotten tater. Be it what it would, we must try one of them. They’re on their lonesome without the bedlam and spectacle from All Hallows. We must choose one, mauger me’ doubts.”

  “I’ll be a rosewater sailor if she’s not the one.” He leaned unskillfully over the banister, looking down below, gawking at the woman huddled on the floor. “She’s takin’ note, I tell ye. Me mam always said ginger tops had the far seein’ eye and that tells me, she kin hear us. She’s a right owl in an ivy bush, enuff ginger locks for the lot of ‘em. Even seein’ how them two with the doodangles and whizzy-whoosits are nigh on bein’ bald.”

  “One is bald Sean O’Flannery you gullyfluff,” Bethany barked, “t’other got his tresses tucked up under his cap, like I used ta’ do when I was a lass and had tresses to tuck under when I was washin’ the linens.”

  Bethany and Sean were so much alike in frame, ruddy coloring, and shape of their face, they could have been twins, save for the fact that Bethany looked a good handful of years older and her voice was accented from the midlands of England, while Sean had the muddied accent of an Irishman who hadn’t been home since he had been a small boy.

  Sean had sailed the world’s seas and picked up whispers and lilts from his past shipmates. Despite his sea-wizened skin and broken body, Sean couldn’t have been much past his mid 50s, if that. Standing up, he shuffled his low, wide-brimmed tarpot hat on his head, and scratched his close-cropped white-speckled auburn hair. The dark blue suit that he wore had the left sleeve pinned to the lower front of his matching, woolen waistcoat in such a way that to the passing glance it looked as though he had his hand clumsily on his hip. If the eye lingered, it would see the almost flattened, hollowed sleeve before glimpsing the pins securing it in place. His arm had been crushed by an errant line during a squall in the South Pacific. He was lucky his mates were able to free him, but the ship’s surgeon—who was also the cook—couldn’t save the arm. It had been a clean cut though, and for that Sean was grateful. Sean had had enough favors saved that he managed to find passage on several ships over the coming yea
r that it took for his arm to heal. He could never again climb a mast, but he was able to pull his weight. Eventually he found himself on a brig bound for New York. He had heard that a place for old sailors was being built, finally after years of false starts, in New York City; it was a chance Sean had been willing to take.

  Bethany and Sean stood on the second story gallery of the first building erected at Sailor’s Snug Harbor. On the north shore of Staten Island a mere stone’s throw from New York harbor, in it’s heyday, Sailor’s Snug Harbor was a home for old and worn out seamen. Building C, or C-Hall, was finished in 1833 when Snug opened its doors to the first handful of resident sailors. C-Hall had been the general meeting hall, library and reading room, administrative offices, and upper floor dormitory. It was a grand, old building, with creaking wooden floors, dark wood balustrades, and an impressive cupola with a richly decorated skylight in the center of the hall. In the first years of Snug Harbor, C-Hall was the focal point of the institution with wings that connected to the other buildings. As the years mounted, when so many of the campus’ other buildings fell into disrepair or were brazenly torn down, C-Hall remained fairly well taken care of.

  As Bethany and Sean stood there, they saw in their minds the impressive wooden desks, red velvet cushions, reading chairs, the little embellishments set for the residents’ comfort. Now there were glass cases replacing the cushions, gaudy framed pictures on the walls, and signs proclaiming various art exhibits or emergency exits. Because it was near Christmas, meretricious and hideously festooned trees stood where the reading chairs once did. The glass cases contained artifacts, ledgers, letters, buttons, and the like, proclaiming to Bethany and Sean and the others silently watching with them that Snug Harbor was their home no longer. It hadn’t been for a long time. It was a tourist attraction that tried so hard to erase them from memory.