“I don’t care if she’s peddling a tricycle while playing the trombone! The answer is still NO!”
I guess Hocker was too busy being crazy to listen.
“YOU’RE ON!” he yelled at the wraith and stomped on the Thunderbirds accelerator.
We shot ahead and roared into the next curve, with Hocker whooping like a madman and me bravely whimpering at his side. The haunt’s engine screamed behind us and she pulled almost even with us in an instant. She tried to crowd us again, but now Hocker was in racing mode and he gave no ground.
We came out of the turn, sparks flying from where our fenders clashed
“Aggressive, ain’t she!” he yelled enthusiastically over the din of the engines.
We ripped down the next straight stretch of road, edging each other for the lead. I prayed that the farmers in this area had their cows fenced in well tonight, for at this speed we would only have time to glimpse one as it appeared in our headlights before hitting it. It was a mundane concern under the circumstances, but it gave me a real world fear to help round out my terror. The thought that this might be exactly the type of doom the revenant planned for us crossed my mind, and I screamed my concern to Hocker.
He nodded, jaw now set in concentration as we flew toward the double curve ahead, but he didn’t slow down. He hit the first curve a tad too fast, his inertia carrying us to the outside of the bend. The ghostly DeSoto slowed, cut behind us and then took to the inside of the curve. It now pulled up on our right.
I whirled around to see its grisly driver leering at me from only four feet away.
I probably screamed again, but at this point that seemed my reflexive response to everything. For a brief instant the specter glared as if she considered reaching across the narrow gap between our doors and trying to grab me, then the space widened as the road twisted the other way and we pulled ahead again.
Hocker took advantage of the angle to drift back in front of her and we thundered out of the curve toward the crossroads near the Ludlow place. Ahead, a lone yellow light flashed over the intersection in the dark. My stomach sank as one of my worst fears materialized in the form of a pair of headlights that approached the crossing from the side on the left. They were closer to the intersection than us, but moving far slower. A terror fueled bit of mental calculus on my part confirmed that disaster loomed. To my right, the DeSoto moved up on us.
“Hockerrrrrr!”
“I see him! HOLD ON!”
Naturally, he sped up.
We hit the crossing going well over a hundred miles per hour, blasting in front of Orville Wallace as he skidded to a halt, before roaring back into the blackness on the other side. Both cars left a cloud of sparks where their bumpers bottomed on the rise in the intersection. Orville would later report that the two cars that nearly killed him were followed by a wail that sounded like the very cry of the damned.
“Eddie!” Hocker yelled. “Will you stop screaming! It’s distracting!”
“Are you kidding me?”
“No, really. It’s distracting. I’m a little rattled here myself and I’m trying to think. Is that railroad crossing on this side of Potter’s Creek or the other?”
Oh fer God’s sake. Now I couldn’t remember either.
Then things got worse.
“Never mind that, we got bigger problems. Oncoming!”
Another pair of headlights, truck lights, appeared over a low rise directly ahead and we were side by side with the wraith…in the wrong lane. Hocker did the only thing he could and decelerated in an attempt to pull in behind the DeSoto. The oncoming hauler’s lights filled our front window, and I threw up my arm in anticipation of the crash. Fortunately, the revenant accelerated again at that moment and Hocker managed to just squeeze in behind her as the approaching truck blew past us.
The sulfurous fumes of her exhaust filled our car, causing me to cough and Hocker to wipe at his eyes. Pale fire shot from her muffler pipe, and the deranged howl of her engine sounded even louder on this end. Being behind her was even worse than driving along side. But oddly enough, the racket also cleared my head.
“Hocker! Forget the railroad crossing! We’re coming up on the bridge! Potter’s Creek Bridge is right around the next corner!”
For a moment I thought he didn’t hear me. He still furiously wiped at his eyes with one hand while trying to steer with the other. I swear you could actually taste the sulphur in the air, and I know it must have been making him want to gag as bad as me. But he stayed on her tail and in her draft until we were well into the turn. Then, just as I thought we were in danger of passing out from the fumes, Hocker made his move.
At the very top of the turn, while riding in her draft, he floored it and cut into the inner lane so deep that we were almost in the dirt. For a moment I thought he might have over done it, but he held the car on course even though I felt the brief vibration of the tires on his side hitting the edge of the pavement. We whipped out of the turn and shot into the short straightaway, with the bridge dead ahead. Behind us, the engine of the DeSoto howled like a banshee and I could feel it closing fast behind us.
But it was too late.
Hocker took advantage of his position to straddle the center line, keeping her behind us, and a few seconds later we rocketed onto Potter’s Creek Bridge. I confess that, despite my opposition to being involved in this insanity, I felt a surge of elation at our victory. A surge that ended abruptly when Hocker hit the brakes, twisted the wheel, and sent us sliding sideways down the length of the bridge.
I’ve never seen it done better, not even in Hollywood.
I raised my head to see that we had come to a stop at the end of the bridge, facing back the way we came. I’m surprised my fingers didn’t leave marks in his dashboard, my grip on it being so tight. But what amazed me the most was the pale DeSoto parked facing us at the other end of the bridge. Apparently it could stop on a dime because I thought it had been running full tilt, right behind us, when we hit the span.
It now waited down there, half shrouded in a spectral bank of steam and thinning dust.
“Hocker, you won. Now let’s get out of here. I don’t think she can cross the bridge.”
“Hold on a minute, Eddie. There’s something more going on here.”
He stared at the car with a speculative frown…the first time I had seen him not smiling all night.
“What do you mean? We raced a ghost and we lived to tell the tale. What more is it than that? You’re a legend, Hock. Now let’s get out of here!”
“That’s just it. If she had wanted us dead, all she had to do was hold position when that truck was coming at us. But she didn’t. She moved up and let us in.”
I chewed over the meaning of his words.
“Are you saying she let us win?”
“No.” He stared at the car as the steam parted further, revealing a figure standing by the hood. “She wasn’t going to let us win. We had to earn that. But this was never about revenge or trying to drive anybody to their doom. She‘s a racer girl…so it couldn‘t just be anybody, now could it.” He muttered that last part to himself.
The last of the steam and dust parted, and Betty Jo Bedford stood by the front bumper of the car. Not the horrific specter of the race, but the pretty young woman who got into the wrong car all those years ago. She no longer looked frightening at all. Just sad…and perhaps a little lost.
“Yeah, that’s what I thought.” Hocker opened his own door and stepped out of the car.
“Hock, what are you doing?”
“It’s okay, Eddie. The keys are in the ignition. Go ahead and take my car back to your place. I’ll pick it up sometime tomorrow.”
“Are you nuts! I can’t leave you here! You don’t know what she’s up to! You don’t know what she wants!”
“Yeah, I think I do.”
He gazed across the bridge at the ghost with a look of such sympathy that I thought he had lost his mind.
“What are you talking about, Hock?” I didn�
��t trust this situation for a second.
“She only wants what every other girl around here wants tonight.”
“What’s that?”
He leaned into the back seat of the car and pulled out an old duffel back that he kept his car tools in.
“She just wants somebody to drive her home.”
Tools clanged out on the backseat floorboard and then he slung the empty bag over his shoulder.
“Eddie, don’t tell nobody what happened here tonight. Just go on home, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”
He turned and started walking toward the idling DeSoto, and the dead girl who now waited in the passenger seat.
“Hock! Are you sure about this?”
He paused, and looked back over his shoulder at me.
“I’m sure, Eddie. However this turns out, I’m sure.”
With that, he strolled down to the phantom car at the other end of the bridge, opened the door, and got in just like it was any other car in the world. I saw him lean over and talk to the girl, then a second later that engine wailed to life and it burned rubber reversing back from the bridge. I guess Hocker just couldn’t resist putting it through its paces. He turned the car to the right, then roared down a gravel road that ran down along Potter’s Creek.
A mere minute later and I sat alone in his car, with nothing but the song of crickets to keep me company on a bridge in the middle of the night. Two minutes later and I was taking the long way back to town. I had had enough of Pritchard Road for one night.
###
The next morning Sheriff Gartner came in to work, only to discover an old canvas duffel bag sitting by the front door to the Sheriff’s Dept. It contained a collection of mud-stained human bones, and a short anonymous letter.
Betty Jo Bedford had finally made it home.
Hocker didn’t say much about it. I guess in the end he didn’t need to.
As for me, I don’t dwell on that night as much as you might think. I’ve been kept too busy keeping up with my new sweetheart, Sally Dupree. I took a swing in a game way out of my league and somehow hit a homerun. Now I’ve got to keep up my side of the game. I keep feeling like I’m playing way over my head.
Hocker just laughs at me and says I still miss the whole point.
But at least now I know how to be sure, even when I don’t know how things are going to work out.
The Mushroom Man
Tamara Quail stared at the body for a full fifteen seconds before she was sure what leaned against the tree in front of her.
It didn’t look like the bodies she saw on television, or even the ones in the slasher films her former boyfriend, Todd, used to drag her to. It didn’t stare in wide-eyed shock at the suddenness of death, or stretch its mouth in some final scream of protest. Nor did it drip with blood, or sprawl in some agonized contortion of rigor mortis. It simply slumped against the mossy bark of the oak like a sack of loose laundry.
At first, it didn’t even appear human…just a moisture stained suit of clothes stuffed to the bursting point with rags or garbage. The features and skin were so swollen and discolored that Tamara could neither make out age nor race. The bloating made gender a mystery that she only managed to solve by looking at its shoes. Everything bore the same tannish color of brown, even the cluster of mushrooms growing across its shoulders and down its hanging arm.
Out here, alone in the dripping woods at the back of Herschmire Park, Tamara felt a twinge of vulnerability at being alone with this…thing.
But upon further examination of the body itself, that feeling passed.
She still had a hard time equating it with a person, as nothing of “personness” remained about it. It was more like something that had been discarded, or washed up to where it leaned, like a grimy old newspaper that had blown off the highway and been caught up against the tree.
After the initial shock of recognition for what it was, Tamara realized it didn’t radiate horror so much as it did a detached sense of lost potential. Much like a flattened animal in the middle of a roadway, one understood it had once been much more than what it now was… but absent the idea of its former role as a living person, it now existed as an unraveling collection of sinew, bone, and rags.
As she stared at the mass, Tamara finally appreciated the word “remains” on a level she never understood before. This…object…was like debris or wreckage. It simply represented what got left behind.
It also represented a problem.
She had come out here to practice her photography, and to capture something of nature to share on the internet. Now she realized a long afternoon of questioning and dealing with the police stretched before her. That would mean ditching the bag of pot in her car somewhere before calling them, and then there remained the matter of her being half stoned as it was. She could already hear the question being asked in that officious tone now…
Ma’am, have you been drinking, or are you under the influence of any drugs?
Oh yeah, that was certain to go well…Not!
Not to mention, with a body involved the cops would probably bring a canine unit. Tamara could already picture the dog going nuts all over her and her car, and some stray joint turning up under the seat. And then the drama would begin in earnest. There would be the arrest, the booking, the phone calls home to the parents, the record, and all the other grief.
A twinge of civic responsibility still urged her to call the police, and she considered risking it. She had read somewhere that drug dogs and body dogs were different things anyway…but after further consideration she felt almost certain it would be her luck to get a real overachiever who could multitask.
Nope, best to walk away from this.
Tamara adjusted the strap to the camera case on her shoulder, her eyes darting around the trees surrounding her. People seldom came back this far in the park, and nothing but the occasional drip of dew or peep from a morning bird broke the hush. Even the soft brush of her retro bellbottoms against the damp carpet of leaves sounded brash in the quiet.
Seeing her way clear to leave without being noticed, Tamara turned to go…
…then stopped.
Looking back over her shoulder, she chewed her lip as she gazed at the thing slouched against the tree. Her eyes narrowed, and her hand fell with unconscious familiarity to the flap of her camera case. Gently drumming her fingers on the case, she surveyed the area again.
Nothing moved here.
The stillness had an almost cathedral hush…a sense of the portentous that she had come to recognize with time and instinct. She was in a moment. And it was in these rare, pure moments that those once in a blue moon, purely transcendental shots were possible.
She lived for these rare occurrences, for they defined her art like the spires of a church defined its roofline. They were the brief, fleeting instances where nature and reality conspired to create a tableau of meaning that would leap right through the camera lens and into the eye of the viewer. And it would strike a chord in the observer, whether exalting or disquieting, that could not be ignored.
The “shot” was here.
But only for this brief sliver of time…
Tamara had just become aware of this when she realized her feet were already threading their soft way back toward the corpse. For one brief second her conscience rebelled at her plans, but she pushed that aside as her art took over. Keeping her distance, she paced a wide circle around the remains, noting the fall of the light through the trees and how it blended the earth tones of the weather stained corpse with its surroundings.
She didn’t pay much attention to the face. The hanging head caused its shortish hair to fall across the thing’s distorted features anyway. On the other hand, her eyes kept returning to the strip of mushrooms growing across the slumping shoulders and down the arm. A few small ones even sprouted from the back of the hanging head. Her gut told her that was the element that made the shot.
“Okay, Tam,” she whispered. “It’s magic time.”
Taking
a few sideways steps to her left to get the light she wanted, she knelt and snapped her first shot. A quick adjustment to aperture, and she snapped off three more. Now moving without hesitation, she changed the angle of the camera and clicked yet again. For the next three minutes she stood, knelt, and leaned in different positions as she went through the dance of her art, constantly adjusting her exposure, flash, and resolution.
And then, like the breaking of a spell, it was over.
Tamara stared at the sack of laundry and decomposing meat and felt nothing but a vague sense of nausea. A change in the air brought a whiff of rot to her nostrils, and it surprised her how she hadn’t smelled the thing so far. Up until now, there had been no stench that one normally associated with death; although she attributed that at least partially to the fact she had never really ventured that close to the body.
But now the thick odor surrounded her, as if it rose from the very leaves beneath her feet.
The young woman gagged and fought to push her camera into its pouch as she backed away. The smell seemed to encircle her like a putrescent fog, and her stomach heaved in rebellion. She stumbled and turned, retching aloud in the morning silence. The reeking miasma hung like a presence around her as she fought to put distance between herself and its source.
She made it about forty feet before succumbing to the inevitable and coughing up her breakfast on the trunk of a nearby pine. Tears squeezed out of her tightly shut eyes as her insides clenched like a knot, causing her to projectile vomit all over the leaves in front of her. The force of her convulsing insides alarmed her, and she feared the next bout of vomiting would bring up blood. Fortunately, nothing remained for her to throw up and she fell into a fit of dry heaves.
Those were almost as bad.
Tamara’s gasps for air filled her own hearing, leaving her deaf to her surroundings. The world seemed to contract around her…just her, the tree, and the sound of her own ragged breath. She clutched at her throat and fought to regain control. As she doubled up against the tree, her heaving stomach finally beginning to settle, she got the most horrific mental picture…of the corpse silently rising and making its way toward her while she retched.
Ghosts, Monsters and Madmen Page 6
