Thirteen Shadows: Ghost Stories

by Aaron Polson

  Dexter glanced at the sheet, and then looked at Ralph. “Hey thanks. Uh, what are you doing after school today? I thought maybe...”

  “I can’t today. Chess practice. Sorry.”

  “No sweat. Thanks though,” Dexter said, and he held up the paper. After Ralph walked away he read the article. Five years ago, Eric Denison went missing from Springdale. He was twelve at the time—just like Dexter was now, but the picture bothered Dexter the most. The portrait in the paper was a black and white double of the younger brother in the family photo from the junk field.

  Dexter’s mom found him sprawled on the couch watching TV when she came home between shifts that evening. “Dex honey, are you alright?” She sat down on the couch next to him.

  He didn’t look at her, but scratched his short brown hair. “Yeah, fine.”

  “You aren’t usually home this early on a Wednesady, what’s wrong?”

  “The ankle kept me out of basketball tryouts on Monday. Ralph is busy with chess club. I promised I’d be good.” He smiled stiffly.

  She patted him on the leg. “The junior high years are tough buddy. It sounds like you, Cole, and Ralph might be growing apart.”

  “Yeah,” he said, but Dexter wasn’t thinking about his friends. In his mind, he juggled the promise he made to his mom with the curiosity and wonder that dwelt with the junk. Dexter wanted to ignore the desire that grew to see that thing again. He remembered the tears after his father’s accident.

  “You’re a great kid, Dex. I know it’s tough.” She stood, walked to the stairs, and climbed to change for her second job.

  He wanted distance and time to make the junk monster go away. He wanted to forget the picture of Eric Denison he found amongst the hubcaps. He needed to know if the refrigerator had pulled back. Dexter’s doodles took the form of Eric all day. He pulled the folded Sentinel article from his notebook and sketched the boy during each class. Something floated beyond his understanding; something linked the junk with this missing boy.

  “So, are you going to the scrimmage tonight, Ralph?” Dexter asked his pudgy friend while lacing his shoes after PE.

  “Naw. We have scholar’s bowl practice today. Alternating with chess club, you know.” Ralph’s mouth melted into a frown as he nodded toward the athletic boys in the opposite corner of the locker room. “I don’t really need to see Cole show off, anyway.”

  “Oh,” Dexter stood up and slammed his gym locker shut. “Yeah, I wasn’t going to go either. Stuff to do.” He hesitated for a moment. “Look, Ralph. I saw something in the junk the other day. Something big, moving. Alive.”

  Ralph sat back on the bench and examined Dexter. “Like what?”

  “Like, well like a giant man made out of junk.” Dexter’s face felt hot.

  “Okay.” Ralph bent down and continued to tie his shoe.

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Clearly you’re either fucking with me, which wouldn’t be very nice, or your subconscious has constructed a surrogate to replace your deceased father.”

  “I’m not fucking with you Ralph.” Dexter frowned while trying to understand the second part of Ralph’s rationalization.

  “Look you should come hang out with the scholar’s bowl squad. You could maybe help out.” Raplh shrugged. “I gotta go. See you tomorrow.”

  Dexter watched him leave, watched the jocks leave after him, and just waited in the locker room for a few minutes, alone.

  He needed to know; he wanted someone else to know. Within twenty minutes of the final school bell, Dexter stood at the edge of the junk field. He pushed the images of his mother’s red eyes deep into his memories. “The picture,” he muttered to himself, “if I could find that picture.” Dexter began picking around the hubcaps again, walking in ever-widening circles as he fanned out from the heap of silver disks. No sound found him—the highway noise vaporized, and the breeze died within the tree-lined confines of that field.

  When his circles spread wide enough, the path brought him within feet of the old refrigerator. Dexter stopped walking and examined it for a minute. Last Saturday was on another planet, a place where Cole, Ralph, and he were still friends and junk didn’t come to life. He stepped closer to the door, his fingers twitching as he reached for the handle.

  As his hand wrapped around the hunk of chrome, a sudden chill soaked his bones. This was no breeze, but a premonition, something floating in the air from the junk. He pulled. A distant truck horn sounded on the highway. The door gave, almost sending Dexter sprawling on the ground. He stumbled backwards and reeled at the smell and a puff of dust.

  There, inside the refrigerator, was a corpse, an awful, stretched-skin mummy. Too thin and beyond gaunt, its frame was about Dexter’s size. This had been a boy about his age. Eric Denison. The corpse clutched the black picture frame to its chest. Dexter staggered backwards, retching, and tripped over a discarded golf club.

  The door snapped shut as the junk rose up again, a swirling mass of knocking metal, It towered above Dexter, throwing a shadow over him. Dexter turned on the ground, and scrambled toward the edge of the junk field, running hard enough to rattle his sore ankle, but feeling nothing but the fire eating at his lungs. The junk clanked and groaned behind him, driving into the earth with heavy, pounding steps.

  Dexter burst from the bushes, wasting no time with bike, and sprinted into the highway, the heavy grill of a large truck roared close, so close that Dexter felt the radiator warmth. A heavy blow caught him across the back, and he tumbled head first across the street and crumbled in the gutter. A large metallic crash ended a deafening squeal of brakes. A few pregnant moments filled with loud voices, confusion, and rushing feet.

  “Here son, let me help you up,” an old man said as he placed his arm behind Dexter’s back. “You had quite a spill. If it wasn’t for that old refrigerator, hell. You’re lucky, is all.”

  Dexter felt a throbbing lump on the back of his head. “Refrigerator,” he mumbled. He looked toward the highway, the crowd gathered around a large, off white object in front of a smashed truck. He dropped his head, noticing the black picture frame of the Denison family photo sitting in the gutter next to him. With one hand he lifted the frame, examining the smile on the younger boy’s face while someone in the street started shouting.

  Billy Boy

  Billy found the keys in his dad’s truck one day, shortly after they shuttered the kitchen store and the place that once sold bargain books. His dad had changed light fixtures, mended walls, and tightened pipes for five years, but without the tenants, the building no longer needed maintenance. Searching for work at the bottom of a whiskey bottle, he didn’t miss the keys. Not until later.

  So the mall was abandoned, a playground in which our imaginations touched other places.

  We rode our bikes after school and stashed them out back, in the high grass just off the trail near the railroad tracks behind the building. Billy was always eager to go on nights his mom worked late. We first entered the dark spaces while the world shed her summer greens for the browns and tans of fall, the dingy grey of winter lurking behind the turn of the calendar.

  The game was Billy’s idea.

  We built a circular wall of boxes in the storeroom of one of the anchors to the mall, the largest building on the south end. In our circle, our sanctuary, we told stories, we pushed our imaginations to the blackened corners to flirt with spiders and dust. Our stories grew arms and legs, fingers and eyes; they flickered just past our musty cardboard fortress. Our flashlights inspired stacks of empty boxes to cast shadows of strange cities on the walls. Games of chicken hung on who could bear the darkness the longest, who could leave his flashlight off in the dead, empty space.

  We made monsters, and Billy was the best.

  Maybe his father was the inspiration: the rasping, liquor tainted voice, scuffed knuckles, and glassy glare. Maybe Billy saw something different through the bruises around his eyes. Maybe he found something in the worry lining his mother’s face. Billy’s beasts crawled ou
t of the darkness and ran their stunted claws over the cardboard boxes on the outer ring of that wall, sending a twist of delightful terror into my bones. Gabe’s expression echoed mine, both of us pale and contorted, hanging on Billy’s voice.

  A tiny voice, really.

  Lost and afraid.

  We heard the sirens, Gabe and I, one night just after supper. We met in the street, both of us all wide eyes and whispering mouths. My guts could have been ice, frozen and scooped by the shovel load from my aching chest. The sirens came from three blocks down, police and ambulance, together.

  “You think it’s Billy’s place?” Gabe asked, breathless.

  “Let’s go.”

  We planned to meet again that night, all three of us, and perfect our tales. We planned to go together into the darkness of the old mall, flashlights in hand, creeping through the silence, lonesomeness of the place. Billy promised mystery that night.

  At his house, lights from the police cruisers and ambulance chopped the night into tiny bits. Billy’s dad leaned face down on a police cruiser, hands cuffed behind him. The paramedics wheeled another body down the concrete steps, thump, thump, thump. I searched the crowd for our friend.

  Gabe looked at me.

  I nodded.

  The October air numbed my cheeks and my hands, frosting my heart while it hammered against my ribs. I felt every bump, every jostle of the pocked asphalt in the streets, the grass that snapped against my legs as we arrived behind the building. We rode through the dark at other times, but never with so much fire, so much recklessness.

  Panting, Gabe and I found one service entrance open, the key still in the lock. Neither of us brought a light.

  We staggered into the darkness, the abyss, Billy’s world, groping against the painted cinderblock walls. We stumbled toward the end of the line, the big storeroom, our ring fortress of empty cardboard and stories. A single, stationary light reflected on the ceiling, casting square shadows in looming distortion.

  “Billy?” Gabe’s voice was a tiny thing, prey swallowed by the predator darkness.

  No answer.

  I followed the glow and found Billy’s flashlight on the floor next to a crumpled pile of his clothes. Our friend was gone, naked and alone into the other places. We knew. On his words, the shadows had swallowed him. He joined them.

  Billy’s face was printed in the paper, and they spoke of him on the evening news for weeks.

  The smaller minds called him a runaway, just another missing boy. All too common.

  Gabe and I knew the truth. We had heard the tap of claws on cardboard and tasted the frosty air from Billy’s words. We lived his world in that dark, lonesome place.

  Heroism and Hot Dates

  Phillip Rothman suffered a massive coronary embolism as Mr. Gillingham lectured about the funeral pyre in Beowulf. Sitting in their English classroom, Joel and Danny were oblivious Rothman’s death. While he lived, he did so four houses down from Danny’s place, and the boys wouldn’t discover his body for another two hours. In the classroom, Meghan Bristol, with her tight sweater and within-an-inch-of-the-dress-code miniskirt captured their attention more than Anglo-Saxon poetry.

  The bell roared, sending Meghan and the rest of the class in a rush for the door.

  “Don’t forget: Beowulf essay exam tomorrow,” Mr. Gillingham said as he dodged the mob.

  Joel, a pasty lump of a boy who had yet to teeter into manhood, loitered, not wanting to be the awkward third wheel for his friend, not wanting the jealousy that tied his stomach in knots to show on his face. Twenty paces ahead, Danny laughed and joked with Meghan. She tossed her head, letting maple curls dance on her shoulders. Joel couldn’t hear their words, but he knew from Danny’s lunchroom boasting that his best friend had landed a date with Meghan for Friday night.

  Meghan, queen of the school.

  If only I had some guts… I would have asked her out, first.

  “Mr. Gonzalez—do you need something?”

  “Oh.” Joel bristled at the mention of his name. “Sorry, Mr. Gillingham. Test tomorrow. Right.” He slumped his shoulders and lumbered toward his locker.

  After school, the boys smoked marijuana in the tool shed behind Danny’s house, filling the dark space with puffing tendrils of sweet-smelling smoke. They often toked in the shed after Danny’s father skipped town with a waitress named Mandi, “with an i”. Danny’s mom was at work, and they were eighteen and immortal, far away from the cooling corpse down the street.

  “You know who’s a hero?” Danny asked as a grin spread across his square face. He wore a man’s broad shoulders and closely cropped brown hair in contrast to Joel’s curly mop of black and lumpy frame.

  Joel shook his head. His brain swam with disconnected images of Meghan Bristol and Beowulf. Warriors on horseback, crying for their slain leader as a funeral pyre rose to the sky from a pile of dragon’s gold. The queen of the school, locked with Danny in the back seat of Danny’s Mustang.

  “Me.” Danny laughed and passed the joint to Joel. “I’m getting laid tomorrow, bro. Meghan Bristol.” He closed his eyes. “Damn, she’s pure honey.”

  Joel coughed and stared at the smoldering joint. Closing his eyes, he sucked in another hit, trying to burn the image of Danny with Meghan from his brain.

  “Hey.” Danny sat up. “I gotta go up to Rothman’s place again this afternoon. Take his mutt for a walk. You wanna come with?”

  Joel’s eyes narrowed. “Again? Gawd, all the time, walk the dog.”

  “Twenty-five bucks a week, pal. Tax free.” Danny smiled. “I’ll take the old geezer’s money. How else do you suppose we find ourselves with bud today?”

  Joel watched smoke rise from the tip as he passed to Danny. He closed his eyes and saw flames rise from a funeral pyre. The old man had been dead for more than an hour, his corpse waiting for them in the dark, but their heads were far from death—filled with smoke and Meghan Bristol.

  “Yeah,” he said. “All right. Let’s go.”

  Danny hopped onto Rothman’s back porch and jammed the key in the lock, jiggled it a bit, and popped the door open with a puff of stale air. His face shot back at his friend, a crooked smile scribbled across his lips. “Like a tomb, right?” With one hand cupped at the side of his mouth, he called, “Here Max... C’mon boy.”

  Danny’s face went black as he slipped into the house.

  While Phillip Rothman was alive, he had packed his home with all sorts of little model ships, plaques, sculptures, and other assorted kitsch. The old man had an affinity for valuable items and trinkets in gold, silver, and pewter—a regular dragon’s horde. There were photos, too, black and white snapshots from the war: an impossibly young Phillip Rothman in army fatigues with other young but grim-faced men. Men that were Joel’s age, Danny’s age, when they squatted in the jungles of the Pacific and fought the Japanese, mosquitoes, and malaria.

  The house was dark, hot, and smelled like cat litter although Rothman didn’t own any cats. The rich woodwork echoed the shadows. In the middle of the afternoon, sun shining outside, the house lay under a shroud. Too much house for a shriveled old man, Joel thought. Too much junk for anybody. He floated though the back hallway after his friend, but stopped at the rows of photos.

  “He ever talk about the war?” Joel asked.

  Danny wheeled. “What?”

  “The war.” Joel’s finger touched one of the frames and it wobbled on the wall. “I guess World War II.”

  “Who gives a shit?”

  Joel’s eyes were lost, reflected in the dim glass of one of Rothman’s pictures. Four men in uniform stared back, their helmets cocked at odd angles, wide grins marking their faces, and dark elephant ears surrounding them like dwarf palm trees. “I just wonder…”

  “If you want to make friends with the geezer, knock yourself out. I don’t ever talk to him.” Danny face twisted and he walked to the end of the hallway. “Where’s that damn dog, anyway?”

  “I wonder if he has some kick ass war stories.”
Joel withdrew his finger.

  At the end of the hallway, Danny stopped as his eyes scanned the dark living room. His body shuddered. He glanced at Joel, his eyes wide and white and surprised. His gaze slowly rotated back to the room ahead.

  “Shit,” Danny muttered.

  Joel hurried to the doorway and looked over Danny’s shoulder. The first dead body a boy sees has a way of rooting itself in his brain. Granted, Phillip Rothman was ancient and practically made of wax when he was alive, but seeing him sprawled in his living room, the blinds drawn and just a smear of light poking in from above the door and little cracks by each window, was different somehow. Max, Rothman’s black terrier, scampered away as the boys came closer. Rothman’s arms bent inward, smashed under his chest, his legs were folded like he just dove from the chair. His head was cocked off to the right, eyes wide and glassy.

  The eyes were the worst: open but blind.

  “Dead.” Danny stepped into the room and tapped Rothman’s leg with his shoe.

  Joel backed up a few steps, suffocating inside the warm, dark air. He wasn’t floating anymore. “What do we do?”

  “Get the fuck out. We didn’t do it.” He pushed past Joel into the hallway.

  Joel was fixed on Rothman’s eyes for a few, slow ticks. Black eyes. Empty and dead. His stomach lurched around like something long and cold slid around down there, a great snake that just woke in his intestines. His trance snapped, and he followed Danny. In the hallway, he waited—all the bitter and angry parts of Phillip Rothman left behind after death.

  Smiling too wide.

  “You little bastards. Afraid? You going to leave my body in there? Some heroes.”

  Joel pressed his eyes shut. A dribble of urine soiled his underwear. His eyes opened and the thing was gone. He rushed forward. His lungs froze. He slammed the back door and yanked the key from the lock. Danny was in the alley, slowly walking away from the house. His back was hunched, his shirt doubled over, holding something.