Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers

by Scott Nicholson

  “Something freaky happened at the Hole,” Bobby said.

  “Yeah,” Dex said, beckoning with the light. “Just wait until you hear what happened after you chickens ran like your heads were cut off.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hardy put down the portrait when Pearl entered the bedroom. He thought about shoving it under the stack of farm bulletins on the night stand, but Pearl didn’t miss much and would make a bigger deal out of the face than it deserved. Besides, memories were one of the few salves of age, a balm when tendons creaked and eyesight was failed and the years shrank like the skin around clouded eyes.

  Looking at an old family portrait is normal, especially when you’re as old as Methuselah’s grave dirt yourself. But what happens when the memories go, too? When it’s nothing but adult diapers and horse pills? What’s the measure of a man then?

  “How’s Donnie?” he asked.

  “Asleep. He barely touched his dinner.”

  “At least he ate some.”

  “The doctor said if he stopped eating on his own, they might have to put him on a feeding tube,” Pearl said, wiping her thick hands on her apron.

  “And you know what that means.”

  “We’ll keep him here as long as we can.”

  “Probably longer,” Hardy said.

  “What you looking at?” Pearl said.

  “Just some pictures. I guess we ought to hang them up one day, since we seem to be settled in here pretty good.”

  She reached for the old daguerreotype in its round frame. The silvery photo finish had faded to sepia over the century-and-a-half since the portrait had been taken, and the subject wore the sober, frozen expression typical of the era. Beetle-black eyes stared up at Hardy, and as his wife took the frame from him, the picture tilted and for a moment the light refracted Hardy’s image over the face. Not much difference he could see, besides the man’s mustache and sideburns.

  Pearl held it in her hands, wiping dust from the rim of the frame. She took pride in her homemaking, and she always grew fidgety after dark anyway. Hardy had begun leaving his socks and underwear on the floor so she’d have something to do. “Corporal Earley Eggers of the Pickett Home Guard. What brought this on?”

  “I’m just getting sentimental in my golden years.”

  “Golden, my foot. If anything, these years are brassy. Or maybe pewter. I go in for pewter, since it’s a little duller and doesn’t take as much polishing.”

  “He’ll be all right,” Hardy said. “God gives us these trials to see how much we set store by Him.”

  “I guess they don’t have any more gizmos to stick our boy’s head in,” she said. “No more shots, no more medicine, no more high-dollar therapists from the health department.”

  She sat on the bed and laid the portrait on the quilt she’d stitched with her own hands. Hardy was relieved she hadn’t pressed him about Earley, but on the other hand, she could have used a distraction. Her resentment went around and around like a waterwheel at an old grist mill, grinding and creaking even after the grain was long gone. Worst of all, she’d lost the glimmer of faith, and that troubled Hardy. Sure, things were bad now, but how would she shoulder the even-heavier burdens piled just ahead?

  “It’s in the Lord’s hands,” Hardy said.

  “I wish the Lord would lift a little,” she said.

  He got out of the wicker chair, his back flaring with the effort, and sat beside her. The bed gave a rusty squeak that might have mirrored the fainter sound of his knee joints. He took her hand in his, noting the blue veins that had swollen to subterranean rivers over the years and the freckles that age had mapped.

  If hands could talk, these would spin a yarn or two.

  “Honey, we’ve been blessed beyond measure,” he said, knowing it sounded lame the moment he spoke. He took his own comfort in the Lord, but he’d never been much for words. All he could do was spout Preacher Staymore’s tidings, feeling like the gaudy, overgrown parakeet he’d seen at Animal Alley downtown that begged for crackers and sported a $295 price tag. Hardy figured the parakeet probably put as much feeling into its memorized lines as Hardy did, and was probably just a tad more warm-blooded, too.

  “I guess I should give thanks that it ain’t a brain tumor,” she said. “Except it would almost be better to know, even if it was something terrible, than to go on like this for years.”

  “He might get better,” Hardy said. “The doctors said since they can’t find nothing wrong, it might—what’s that word they use?—’resolve’ itself.”

  “Nothing wrong, my foot. Not speaking, barely able to blink, drooling, scratching at the walls until he’s bleeding from under his fingernails…yeah, not a thing wrong with that.”

  Hardy squeezed her hand again, ashamed that his palm was sweating. So much for standing strong in his faith. Since hoofing it up Mulatto Mountain and back, his feet pulsed as if they had nails driven in them. He could barely toe the line, much less walk it.

  Maybe he should tell her the truth. She probably wouldn’t believe him, but at least it might help spread the blame around a little. After all, the secret had bent his spine these last two decades, and the Lord hadn’t lifted that particular sack any, not even to shift its weight.

  “I reckon it’s time,” he said.

  “You know you don’t want to sell.”

  “Bill Willard already put a decent offer on the table. Once Elkridge gets rolling, the taxes will go through the roof, and we never chipped in much to Social Security.”

  “Oh, Hardy,” she said, sliding the portrait away from between them so she could rest her head on his shoulder. She smelled of Ivory soap and woodstove smoke.

  “We got our third of the Elkridge money,” Hardy said. “Even after we pay down the doctor bills, that can get us a place in town, maybe one of them spanking new condos Willard built. Walking distance to the motion picture show and the grocery and the feed store and—”

  “You won’t need the feed store if you sell the farm,” Pearl said.

  “Yeah,” he said. His throat was dry as November corn.

  “We don’t have to decide that yet.”

  “Well, I ain’t looking forward to having a bunch of strangers for neighbors.”

  “People are only strangers until you get to know them. And nothing could be much stranger than what’s already up there.”

  He stroked her hair and put his mouth near her ear. In happier, younger days he might have nipped on the lobe and set off a round of lovemaking, but his teeth were in a jar on the dresser and love seemed to have withered like the arteries in his heart. “I best tend to the critters,” he whispered.

  She lifted her head and nodded, eyes already searching the room for a new way to kill time. She straightened up, making the bed squeak. “Mr. Eggers. I thought I had you broke in good. I’m sure those socks didn’t walk off and plop down in the floor all by themselves.”

  As she stooped to sweep them up, Hardy walked barefoot to the dresser to get a fresh pair. She fussed with something in the bathroom while he wrestled into his boots. As he was heading to the door, she hollered, “Look in on Donnie, will you?”

  She knew he would, but it was one of those habits of language that came with constant companionship.

  Donnie’s room was right across the hall. A simple latch bolted the door from the outside, hardware made necessary when Donnie had started sleepwalking, or what Dr. Mendelson had called “presenting somnambulism,” and Hardy had mimicked that diagnosis over and over in his head like a parakeet until it lost all meaning. Even familiarity had not changed the oddness of the phrase, nor the accompanying “sleep terrors” that Mendelson had added to the chart.

  Hardy slipped back the bolt, swallowing hard. Locking my son up at night like he’s livestock.

  Preacher Staymore had gone on about starvation and hardship one Sunday, dipping into verses from the King James Bible to give people inspiration in lean times. One in particular had stuck out, and Hardy had asked about it after th
e handshaking at the end of service. Staymore, pleased as a peacock that someone had actually paid attention and not drowsed off or flashed forward to images of the Redskins-Cowboys kickoff, had written the verse down on the back of a tract.

  “From the Book of Joel,” the preacher had said, pride evident on his red face. “Anybody can cite from Psalms or Ecclesiastes, but God gave us the miracle of the Internet so we might know Him better.”

  Hardy had read that verse until he’d memorized it as well as he had the word “somnambulism”: How do the beasts groan! the herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; yea, the flocks of sheep are made desolate.

  His son was a desolate sheep, and Hardy was a grim shepherd.

  The door opened with a squeak, letting light spill into the room. Since Donnie had developed what Mendelson had called “photophobia,” the shades were usually drawn in Donnie’s room, unless the day was overcast. Night was no real problem, since there were no lamps in the room, only a single overhead light sunk in the ceiling and sporting a 20-watt bulb. Hardy had moved the switch so that it was in the hall, not that Donnie had enough muscle control to grab the switch on purpose. However, he might go into one of his flailing spells and bump into it, and the sudden cascade of light would send him even farther off the edge.

  Because of the strange epilepsy, the room had little furniture: a thick wooden desk whose corners were rounded and padded, a mattress on a low wooden frame, and plenty of papers and crayons. For some reason, Donnie only seemed calm when he was doodling, and since he could never see well enough to finish and his fingers were nearly as useless as sausages, his black stick figures, box houses, blue clouds, and big orange suns resembled the work of a five-year-old.

  Donnie was 27.

  Hardy wondered if Mendelson had any fancy-assed, twenty-dollar words for “livermush head.”

  But you loved your son no matter what, through adult diapers and rain, tears and expensive medical tests. Since the day Hardy had found his teenaged son on the side of Mulatto Mountain, shuddering under a tree near the Hole as if frozen by the balmy July air, Donnie had been stuck with needles, strapped down and placed in big hollow tubes that hummed and glowed, poked with glass instruments and gauges, and generally treated like the prized pig at a 4-H livestock competition. And the doctors just shook their heads and came up with “somnambulism” and “photophobia,” or Mendelson’s favorite, “catatonia,” until Hardy’s head was maybe spinning faster than his unresponsive son’s.

  After nearly a decade, Hardy had pretty much lost faith in miracles, no matter what he told Pearl. As he nudged the door open, he was ready for anything, because Donnie was as likely to be standing on his hands and leaning against the wall as he was to twist himself in the blankets. Hardy squinted into the gloom.

  He heard a soft tapping sound, almost like a rat running behind the walls. When Donnie was pitching a fit, he usually hammered and clawed at the pine paneling like a man awakening from a coma to find himself sealed inside a coffin. Donnie’s vocal chords had given up on language, and instead he projected a staccato series of barks, grunts, and clucks, all of which amused him greatly and led to parakeetish squawks of laughter.

  But tonight there was only the tapping.

  Hardy eased into the room, careful not to startle his son. Donnie was hunched over the desk, and though his mental level had regressed to that of a kindergartner, his physique was that of a young man raised on a farm, muscles bunching on his shoulders. Sitting on the bed so that his back was to the door, Donnie seemed intent on whatever lay on the desk. He could be coloring, but that usually made a scratching sound as he held the crayons in his fist and scraped their tips along the paper.

  Papers were scattered all over the floor, maybe a dozen pages. Given Pearl’s neatness, the drawings must be newly rendered, because she’d been in half an hour before to get him ready for bed and she would have cleaned the floor.

  “Donnie?” Hardy said in a low voice.

  Donnie kept tapping. Hardy came around the bed and looked at the desk and his son’s head tilted down to stare at the dull cherry surface. Donnie was tapping the wood with the pads of his fingers, rolling them in a coordinated pattern that seemed beyond his abilities.

  His first instinct was to call Pearl, but she’d suffered through so much false hope that Hardy couldn’t bear to bring her more. He knelt on cranky knees and looked across the desk at his son, but the man-child might as well have been on the surface of the moon for all the attention he paid his father.

  Tap tap tap. Tappa tap.

  Too repetitive to be a random muscle twitch. Donnie’s lips moved as if trying to provide vocal accompaniment to his cadence.

  The Lord promised miracles, and though Preacher Staymore said miracles were often hard to recognize while they were happening, Hardy figured this one qualified as much as the turning of water into wine.

  “Donnie?” Hardy kept his voice low and even, though his heart was racing in tandem with the offbeat rhythm of Donnie’s fingertips.

  Donnie shuddered and lifted his head, as if jerked back from a happy dream to the claustrophobic box where he spent most of his day. His mouth pursed as if aware of his return to misery, but his eyes stared ahead as dead as polished coal. Eggers eyes, the same as those in his Confederate ancestor’s portrait.

  Donnie’s fingers tapped once more and then flopped against the surface of the desk. His face went slack and his body slouched like a marionette whose strings had been clipped. Any sign of concentration or awareness was gone, if indeed it had really been there and not just a wishful projection.

  “Muh-wak,” Donnie said, and then gave his parakeet chuckle.

  At least he’s not slamming himself against the wall. That little tappa-tap could have just as easily been his skull saying ‘Howdy’ to the desk.

  And it would give Mendelson yet another reason to push for Donnie’s going into a group home. “He’ll get the care he needs,” the doctor would say for the thirtieth time, and Pearl would glare as if her own nursing skills, attention, and love were under criticism.

  Hardy reached a hand to his son and touched his cool cheek. The black eyes flicked over his face, but there was no joy or recognition in them. Maybe he and Pearl were being selfish after all, the way some had suggested. They were keeping Donnie a prisoner here out of their own guilt and shame.

  And Hardy ate a double helping of guilt, because he hadn’t told Pearl about Donnie’s trip to Mulatto Mountain. He’d told her he’d found Donnie lying by the fence, suffering an apparent seizure. And though Hardy had no proof that the Jangling Hole had sent out a messenger to recruit Donnie into the army of the lost, Hardy took some comfort in the notion that he could shift some of the blame to a thing he couldn’t see or know. Better than blaming the Lord, and better than letting the pain eat him from the inside out.

  He helped Donnie into bed, making sure his pajamas were still clean. Donnie was pretty good about the potty, even though he had the occasional accident. He was able to sit at the dinner table, but he often had to be spoon fed.

  Hardy sometimes walked him to the barn and back, but once in a while Donnie would launch into a floppy spell, as if his limbs had turned to rubber, and Hardy was getting too old to haul him back to the house. But sleeping was pretty straightforward, and though Donnie was apt to rise up and walk while his eyes were closed, he was usually safest and calmest in the night.

  Hardy bent and picked the loose papers off the floor, glancing at the swirls of blue and gray. The scrawls looked like tangled skeins of loose yarn. He stacked them on the desk, then decided Pearl might like to see them, make a fuss over them, and maybe even put one on the refrigerator with a big cow magnet.

  “Good night, son,” Hardy said as he paused by the door. “Hope you have yourself a good dream.”

  Dream you’re a normal man and can walk and talk and breed and spit like a man instead of letting it drool down your chin. Dream you can run and jump and tap your fingers like you’r
e beating the drums. Dream you can play the fiddle and whittle and—

  Hardy glanced at the top page. The random squiggles made his brain itch. The patterns whispered of a recognizable shape, but he didn’t think Donnie had suddenly turned into Leonardo da Vinci. The drumming had been a flight of fancy, and there seemed no room for miracles tonight.

  He switched off Donnie’s light as he closed and bolted the door.

  As he eased down the stairs, boot leather and wooden treads creaking, he wonder if maybe he and Pearl should move their bedroom to the bottom floor. It would mean moving Donnie, too, which would require a little renovation. Hardy wasn’t in the mood to make extra work, so he figured as long as he was still able to make it up and down the stairs, things were better left alone.

  Alone, the way Donnie was.

  Alone, the way he was with his shame and his knowledge of the Hole and what it might have done to his son.

  Hardy tossed the drawings on the kitchen table, where the pink pig salt-and-pepper shakers danced with each other in a celebration of seasoning. Their cherubic faces, like those of the happy porkers that adorned signs for barbecue joints, seemed oblivious to their ultimate destiny.

  The end always cut to the bone, and under the blade you died alone.

  He stopped at the back door, put on his jacket, and rummaged a flashlight from the closet. He had livestock to feed.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Sheriff Littlefield stood in the bay lights of the ER exit and dashed the remains of his cold coffee into the gutter. The brown liquid looked like blood in the reflection of the red exit lights.

  My cup sure runneth the fucketh over with that. And the more innocent the blood, the better.

  The hospital was one of the fastest-growing enterprises in Pickett County, spreading like a malignant tumor, and currently a parking deck was under construction behind the west wing, a spindly derrick standing in silhouette over it like a witch guarding a stack of bones. A few spaces near the emergency room were reserved for police, since sudden trauma was often accompanied by illegal activity. Littlefield had technically been off duty, but he figured visiting an officer was good enough justification for hogging one. Besides, the hike around Mulatto Mountain had cramped up his legs.