The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “Charles Walter Galt was born in 1859. He was Initiated into Doric Lodge 323 in January of 1880, Passed in February of that same year, and Raised in March. All of which is noted in our records. My own research has revealed Galt became a major player with the railways around the turn-of-the-century, back when North Bay was still an important train town9…that is until he vanished without a trace in 1927.”

  “What do you mean ‘vanished’?”

  “I mean it like it sounds, son. Charlie Galt went missing eighty-three years ago, and except for the sightings here, he hasn’t been seen since.”

  Outside the wind played an off-key whistle, the tune drifting from some small flaw in the roof.

  The Doctor continued, “At no small expense, I’ve obtained a copy of the North Bay Nugget10 from Friday, December 9th, 1927. There’s an article in it discussing the Galt disappearance. Not much to it really—the story appears a week after his wife reported him missing. Apparently he just never came home from work. A friend at the police department allowed me a look through their old archives. The reports are scant…missing persons cases in 1927 were infrequent, especially in this region. At 5:17 p.m. on December 2nd, Galt was witnessed by his co-workers leaving the Canadian Pacific Railway station11 on Oak Street, walking toward the downtown corridor via Ferguson Street. And that was the last time he was seen. He was never found, and his body was never recovered; and although police kept the investigation open for several months, no further evidence was forthcoming. It would seem Charlie Galt quite literally vanished from the face of the Earth,” he paused to look me in the eye, “that is until he started appearing here around 1929.”

  I shivered involuntarily.

  “What about the wife?”

  Prescott gave a sigh. It came across annoyed.

  “Charlie’s wife—Marion Galt—died in 1940, so no help there. Marion and Charlie did have a son, though. Robert Charles Galt. Unfortunately the poor tyke succumbed to diphtheria in 1915. Both Robert and Marion have graves out at Terrace Lawn. I found their headstones in an old section of the cemetery a few years back. Even took some rubbings.”

  With elderly effort Prescott pushed himself out of the Chaplain’s Chair, “So now you know the gist of it. I’ve kept journals of the various stories over the years. Feel free to come by and check them out. You might also want to have a look at that old Nugget.”

  He headed for the exit. I called after him, following him out, “When was Galt last seen?”

  He hesitated, answering once we were in the anteroom.12

  “The last witness to one of Charlie’s visits was made a Master Mason shortly before your own Initiation. His tale…stands apart from the rest. He…he hasn’t come out to lodge since.”

  “Stands apart? How so?”

  Producing a small leather-bound notebook and pen from an inside pocket, he scribbled a name and an address, ripped out the page, and handed it to me.

  “I’m not really comfortable talking about this. The person in question should be present. His name is Blake McCann. Perhaps you should ask him yourself.”

  And then Dr. Prescott changed the subject to more mundane matters, and I was left realizing the answers had only led to more questions.

  * * * *

  My coat flapped around me as I left the lodge. The day had taken a nasty turn. Fall gusted through the city, and in addition to chilly wind, it now spat icy rain.

  I double-timed to my car, slamming the door against the weather. A quick glance at McCann’s address on the scrap of paper, and I fired the engine.

  Wet leaves danced in dingy light as I drove the deserted streets. The radio played barely noticed bubblegum.

  Questions distracted.

  What did the old spirit want with the lodge? There had to be a method to the madness. Why did Galt always appear in the same spot? Perhaps he was attempting to send a message, a communiqué from beyond the grave. Equally as intriguing was the fact the man had simply vanished. Why? What had happened?

  I was still going over it when I found myself parked in front of a dumpy, rundown apartment building on a neglected corner of Dudley Street. I re-checked the address. It seemed McCann lived on the wrong side of town.

  I turned up my collar. I left the car locked.

  Gathered beneath the entrance’s frayed canopy a group of hooded youths watched the rain steal away the afternoon. They watched me with malevolent boredom.

  After a taped and boarded, once glass-fronted door, I found the number five on a buzzer panel. Through cracking static a woman’s voice came back.

  “Yes?”

  “Hello? I’m looking for Mr. Blake McCann.”

  A pause.

  “Who’s asking for Mr. McCann?”

  I identified myself, and said I was with Doric Lodge 323.

  Another pause. The moment stretched.

  I noticed someone had carved ‘FTW’ into the smudged and sticky metal around the panel.

  “Please, come up.”

  The door made an angry noise. I pulled it open.

  I followed dirty stairs up to an ugly carpet. I followed the ugly carpet until I found a dirty door marked with the number five and knocked.

  An incongruously well-dressed woman appeared. She said, “Come in.”

  Her mouth smiled, but her eyes were cold.

  McCann’s apartment was comfortable, the décor done up fairly funky—the pad of a bachelor in his thirties. The walls were busy with movie posters, most board-mounted, but some actually framed. His bookshelves bristled. A quick scan revealed a fascination with science fiction and the strange. A couple of Masonic masterpieces jumped at me, and next to them a well-rounded theology section; Gnosticism, Buddhism, Sufism, the Koran and a couple of Bibles.

  The woman put her hands on her hips. Streaks of black ran through a severe, mostly white bun, her lined face suggesting an age somewhere between fifty and sixty.

  “Finally,” a hard gaze fixed me to where I stood, “finally I can ask one of you people what happened to my son.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He was fine. At least he was before he got mixed up with Doric Lodge.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow you, ma’am.”

  And then I got it—this was McCann’s mother.

  Jesus.

  She was operating under the impression whatever had happened to her son was a result of Freemasonry, not of Galt’s appearance…it was probable she didn’t even know about Galt.

  “He’s been in a psychiatric ward for the past six months. Now what are you going to do about that?”

  I’d stirred a hornet’s nest. It also explained why Dr. Prescott didn’t want to discuss McCann. But obviously Prescott wasn’t aware the man had been institutionalized; if he had, he would’ve given me an address to a hospital instead of a home.

  I played defense.

  “Look, Mrs. McCann, I’m not sure what we’re talking about here. First of all, I’ve never met Blake. I’ve never even seen him in lodge. I was asked by the Secretary to come ’round and check on him.” I improvised based on the truth, “He hasn’t paid his dues this year, and we just wanted to see if he was all right. We weren’t even aware he was having problems.”

  She searched my face.

  “Problems,” Mrs. McCann gave an indignant snort, “yeah. That’s one way of putting it.”

  And with that she dropped herself onto a couch, and motioned me toward a chair. She heaved a sigh, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

  She held it together.

  “The last normal conversation I had with my son was over the phone. He told me he was going to meet one of the Deacons at your lodge.”

  A tear slipped.

  “Whatever happened must’ve happened there. I came by to visit him the next day…”

  She fished through a purse and found a tissue.

  “He was wandering around this hovel talking to himself,” she gave a sad, nervous little laugh, “except it wasn’t really talking, it was more li
ke screaming. And there was nothing I could say or do to make him stop. He just kept shrieking the same thing over and over, ‘Look to see!’” Her voice came surprisingly loud as she imitated her son’s ravings, “‘It’s there!’”

  The tears came freely now, her voice pleading, “What does it mean? Can you tell me? Or is it one of your secrets?”

  I started to stammer something, but what could I say? There was no way she’d believe the truth. Not that it mattered. Before I could say anything she was off in a back bedroom. She returned pinching a torn sheet of sketch paper by the corner, holding it in front of her as if it was toxic. She dropped it onto the coffee table, wiping her eyes while she apologized for the outburst.

  A drawing stared up at me—a disturbing snapshot into McCann’s skewed perception. The horror of the thing was breathtaking. It was composed in dark colours: mostly black, but some gray, brown, deep red and purple. It was Galt; had to be judging by the clothes and his familiar placement beside what I recognized as the Chaplain’s Chair. He was standing, an outstretched arm clawing toward a hovering, cartoonish rendering of the third degree tracing board. The head was too large in proportion to the body, and it lolled at an abnormal angle toward the viewer. What struck me about it was the way McCann had rendered the face. The eyes seemed burned into the page. A gaping black hole acted as a mouth, the jaw elongating into a scream of the damned.

  My God. Was this what he’d witnessed?

  “Maybe—if nothing else—you can tell what that…” she glared at the drawing, “…that nightmare means.”

  Truth was I didn’t know. I could only assume it was a warped depiction of Galt. So I said, “I have absolutely no idea. But I am truly sorry your son finds himself in such distressed circumstances. If there’s anything we can do—”

  Mrs. McCann cut me off.

  “Actually, there is something you can do.”

  She was crying again.

  “You can leave,” she stabbed a finger at the picture, spitting, “leave, and take that with you.”

  I fired apologies. At the same time, I rolled up McCann’s drawing and made my way toward the door before she changed her mind.

  * * * *

  The Baycrest Mental Health Facility13 widened in my windshield as I followed a narrow asphalt road bisecting forty treeless acres of fenced brown grass.

  Situated five miles outside of North Bay, the main building had been constructed in the Thirties, an additional wing tacked on in the Seventies. The two styles clashed. The hospital proper was classic—stone and brick arranged into a three-story rectangle with a peaked, jutting entrance. Windows lined up three high, three aside symmetrically around the grandiose if not gothic doors. Centered above the entry, at the highest point on the roof, a mammoth granite cross overlooked everything; a cold, dreary monument to madness.

  Attached by a raised, comparatively modern glass and steel crosswalk, the new wing seemed flimsy by comparison. And the design, like everything else produced in the Seventies, seemed conceived by architects with a penchant for bizarre geometry, circles and diagonal wood.

  With McCann’s drawing carefully tucked beneath my arm, I jumped through the necessary bureaucratic hoops to be allowed a few moments with the man. Eventually a nurse led me to an artificially bright, sky-blue room, explaining, “Blue is a calming colour.”

  McCann waited at a bare table. His bathrobe matched the walls. I took a seat across the table. He sipped at something in a paper cup, and regarded me with bloodshot eyes.

  “Now—who are you?”

  I guessed the man who’d raved at his mother was controlled by heavy medication. I unrolled the drawing, spreading it in front of us on the table. Part of me expected McCann to go ballistic. It didn’t happen. Instead he bent over the drawing and sniffed, “Not my best work.”

  “But this is Charlie Galt?”

  I tapped a slowly curling corner.

  “Sure…if you believe in that sort of thing.”

  He scratched at a day’s growth of beard.

  “I was under the impression you and one of the Deacons had witnessed an appearance of Mr. Galt.”

  McCann leaned back in his chair and gave me a shrewd, cocky smile, “So, are you with the lodge?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew it.” Smirking, McCann ran a hand through unkempt hair, “I don’t know what you’ve been told. First of all, I was alone. The Deacon wasn’t there. Secondly, there is no Charlie Galt. The whole thing is a shared psychosis or something. Dr. Hale says I’ve made a lot of progress in this area. When I arrived here, I was convinced Galt was real. I’ve come to understand I was the victim of a myth, and I became a slave to a creation of my own mind.”

  He finished whatever was in the cup.

  Confusion. What had he been screaming…?

  (Look to see! It’s there!)

  But if the Deacon hadn’t been there…

  “I understand you were quite vocal following your experience. You kept repeating the same phrase. If there was no one there, who were you talking to?”

  McCann chuckled, “I wasn’t talking to anybody.” He shook his head, “Look, I’ll tell you what I used to believe. I used to believe Galt was screaming when I saw him. I used to believe he had a message to share. And when I was brought here, I was only repeating what I’d been told.”

  He pushed the drawing back at me, “You can have this. It’s a fitting gift for a man chasing an hallucination.”

  I thanked him. McCann gave me a sad, knowing smile, “Be careful with your ghost. It must be spoken to before it will explain itself.”

  And then a nurse appeared, leading me out of the sky-blue room.

  * * * *

  I found myself alone in lodge and it all seemed wrong.

  Always dim, the room appeared to have been abandoned for years; cobwebs hung in the corners and clung to the old fixtures, the carpet had deteriorated to a threadbare covering, and a layer of dust cloaked everything.

  I was in the south, sitting in the side benches. A logic-defying digital clock rested on a nightstand beside me, its red, liquid-crystal numbers no longer the time but rather unreadable gibberish. Part of me wondered about this—clocks were frowned upon in lodge.

  The silence was suddenly a presence.

  A shadow moved within the shadows…was somebody in the Chaplain’s Chair?

  I froze.

  Naturally, Charlie Galt shuffled into the gloom.

  “Now we’re in that twilight time.”

  It was McCann. He was in the seat in front of me wearing his sky-blue robe smoking a cigarette. He turned to me and bobbed his brows, his smile bordering on malicious.

  Galt screamed a tormented, subhuman noise, shattering the unnatural quiet. He’d moved to the expected spot in front of the Chaplain’s Chair by the third degree tracing board, and it was in this moment I realized the tracing board had always been his focus.

  Then he spoke, his voice reaching out from the abyss, scratching itself across the surface of my mind, “Look to see! It’s there!”

  McCann twisted himself around, “See? I was only repeating what I’d been told.”

  He paused to drag from his smoke.

  “He’s doing this all the time, you know. It’s all he does. Only occasionally does he breach the barrier to become visible on our side.”

  Galt plodded back to the Chaplain’s Chair, and resumed his seat in the shadows.

  (Muzzle flash. Napalm-strike white in tandem with a blink. Abrupt blood-spatter across wood. A split-second still of shining silver. Greed gleam.)

  After a moment which may’ve been an eternity he rose, caught in his hellish cosmic loop, and the scene played out again. And then I was in the Chaplain’s Chair, the lodge brighter, and a familiar bedroom dresser in place of the altar. The first degree tracing board in the south no longer existed, exchanged for a framed print of Bosch’s The Wayfarer. In the east, Sunday sky and a field of childhood green stretched into the horizon, and I was six, running into the
forever summer—

  The clock on the nightstand beside me came alive with a too loud voice, “…and cloudy. Meanwhile, it’s raining in the city this morning, so you might wanna bring your umbrella. Stay tuned for the news at eight, followed by a six-pack of rock classics…”

  * * * *

  The dream perplexed. I re-ran it over eggs and bacon. The radio chattered background noise.

  If nothing else, I was convinced Galt was trying to communicate with the living, and I believed the focus of his message was the third degree tracing board.

  The ‘why’ of it all remained a question mark.

  Part of me still mocked the idea of ghosts, laughing at my gullibility—and my obsession—with this so-called spirit. Perhaps McCann had been right, perhaps these appearances by the long dead Charlie Galt were nothing more than a shared psychosis created by a group of men who were seeing what their history had programmed them to see. After all, apart from a creepy dream, I’d never witnessed the apparition.

  Toast popped.

  I sipped coffee and argued with myself. I’d read several explanations for haunting,14 some suggesting certain buildings act as “psychic sponges”, holding the energy, or essence, of events which have occurred within their walls the way our minds hold memories…the more traumatic the event, the greater the impression.

  But what triggers the memory? What causes it to replay in reality? McCann’s experience had been unique. Was it a certain personality type? A certain time of year?

  A look at Doc Prescott’s journals might reveal a larger pattern. Besides, I was anxious to share my theory concerning Galt and the tracing board.

  I left my breakfast dishes unwashed. I took a final sip of coffee, and I slipped into my coat. I didn’t even consider the time of day until halfway up the man’s walk. A glance at my watch suggested it might be a bit premature. Nevertheless I gave the knocker three sharp raps.

  Prescott answered the door wearing reading glasses and a cardigan over silk pajamas. He seemed only slightly surprised to see me, ushering me through a modest yet elegant living room into a wood-paneled study. I apologized more than once for the hour of my entrance. Prescott told me I didn’t understand old age, “Although,” he confessed, “I am curious as to the reason behind this welcome, albeit early visit.”