Ten-Twenty

“Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine.” BOOLEEP.

Nothing.

“Breaker one-nine. Anyone copy?” BOOLEEP.

Glen took a swipe at my hand as I attempted to key up the base station radio mic once more.

“Give it up,” he belched. “You lost another one, man.” He crumpled his empty can of MGD onto the table and left it to sit with the growing mountain of other fallen soldiers.

This was our Saturday night. This was just about every Saturday night for the entirety of our latter teen years. Nowhere to go. Nothing to do. No one else to talk to, really. Unless you counted Glen’s smart-ass twin sister, Marie, which I did not. And, of course, anyone listening on the CB airwaves.

Glen and I were the epitome of introversion. As much as we bellyached about wishing we knew of a party to crash every weekend, we’d inevitably find some excuse for why a night in Glen’s basement with a lukewarm case of beer was a much more preferable plan. Of course, a pair of pubescent boys with nothing but a CB radio and a pre-Internet computer at hand are going to use MacGyver-like ingenuity to turn that seemingly harmless circuitry to entertaining use. And for a couple of dumbass troublemakers like us, I’m not talking about pulling another Jobs and Woz.

Believe it or not, it was indeed possible to meet girls with a CB. Well, “meet” is not quite accurate. I can’t say what any of them looked like, mind you, but remember: We were horny teenagers with an absurd level of imagination when it came to visualizing women. And we weren’t alone. Any rare time a girl’s voice sounded in-channel, you had five, ten guys keying over each other to talk like unruly kids in a classroom. The key was finding the right time and place, then hope you had something cool enough to say to keep the conversation your own, usually taking it to a more private channel where the talk is likely to get hijacked.

What did we talk about? The usual bullshit, I guess. It never got to sex talk, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m sure we wished it had. Mostly we described what we looked like, each time with a growing amount of embellishment on both sides, I’m sure. What were our likes and dislikes; where we went to school. What we were up to at that moment, usually with lies like “working out” on our side.

Eventually, goodnights would be said and radios would be silenced. It wasn’t often we’d hear from the same girl again. Likely they were bored one night and hopped on their dad’s radio for a laugh. For them, the airwaves was not a place to hang out. Not with the likes of losers like us.

We didn’t always troll the airwaves for girls. Sometimes we just wanted to shoot the shit with anyone. More times than I can count, we’d pull pranks. It was virtually anonymous, after all. Glen not only had the massive base station radio in his basement, he had one wired up in the family van. The antenna he’d installed was so goddamn tall, we’d find ourselves removing it anytime we entered a parking garage.

Channel nineteen — or, as CB'ers call it, “one-nine” — was at least known in the day as the highway channel. For the most part, it was the go-to channel for truckers and the like, though people looking for road assistance would hop on there as well. It made sense: Their best chance for help might be a passing truck hearing their call. Channel nine was the one meant for emergencies, though it wasn’t quite teeming with emergency crews at the ready. This was before the abundance of cellphones, mind you. But every now and then, one of us commoners would hop on one-nine and at least initiate a conversation with someone, then carry it on to a different channel, else hear the onslaught of angry, tired trucker curses.

One-nine was where I’d first heard Jo-Jo Baby. That was her handle; I never got her real name. Probably Jody or something. She only knew me by mine: Blue Thunder. Glen and I — well, mostly I — talked with her well into the previous Saturday night. It was going well, or so I thought. We’d moved the talk over to channel seven. Tonight she wasn’t there. After a good couple of hours calling out on one-nine, it was clear she wasn’t there either.

I pushed the mic aside and drained the last dregs from my beer. Glen, ever ready with a reload, handed me another.

“Alright, so what now?” I said. “Maybe we should head out for once.”

“Can’t. Fucking Marie’s got the van tonight.”

As though to add insult to injury, the basement door flew open, and there she stood.

“Fork over the keys, Dumbo. Are you…? Oh my god, Dad is going to kill you if he knows you guys are down here drinking.”

“Uh. No. Who do you think bought it for us?” Glen pulled the van key from his pocket and tossed it to his sister.

Marie sighed. “Look at you two. Is that all you’re going to do all night? Sit there and talk to weirdos on the radio?”

“Not like we can go anywhere,” said Glen. “The van?”

“Like that would matter,” she said.

Glen shrugged.

“Fine. I’ll tell you what. I can bring you and Sean to Sully’s party. I just need to pick up Jill.”

“Sully?” Glen said, irritated. He patted the half-empty case of beer. “He’s a dick. We’ve got a better party here, thanks.“

I gave him an incredulous look. "Dude, we-”

“Breaker one-nine, breaker one-nine,” the radio interrupted. “Sledgehammer for Dumbo. Dumbo, you copy? Over.”

Marie snickered. “Sheah, okay. Party hardy, ‘tardies.”

Glen threw an empty can in her direction. It clanged against the door as she left. “Wench.” He rolled his chair closer to the CB and pulled the mic close. “Hey Sledge. Dumbo. I copy. Let’s take it to one-five.” BOOLEEP.

“Can’t you please turn that damned base-station ‘boo-leep’ shit off and say ‘over’ like the rest of us? Man. Alright, catch you on one-five. OVER.”

Sledgehammer was one of a few other guys we knew with a radio, better known to us off the air as Walt Bowden. He and Glen were known for monopolizing a channel for hours, ranting together about anything from girls uninterested in them to which was the superior antenna. Sometimes I’d chime in. But not this time. This time, I’d rather be at Sully’s party. I’d rather be talking to Jo-Jo. Instead, I half-listened to Glen and Walt as I proceeded to polish off the better half of that case.

Between about my seventh and eighth beer, and in the middle of my friends’ mind-numbing argument concerning radios using quartz crystals versus ICs: ”Breaker one-five. Is that you, Dumbo? Over,“ a female voice said.

”Oh, you don’t want to be speaking with that lame-o,“ said Walt. ”He’ll only talk your ears off over shitty nerd stuff all night while he’s drinking shittier beer. Over.“

"Sledgehammer only wishes he had beer at all. Who’s this?” BOOLEEP.

For about ten seconds, there was no response.

”See, you put her to sleep already,“ came Walt’s voice. ”I bet you even made Blue zonk out on your floor.“

I quickly shut my eyes and hung my tongue out of my mouth before Glen turned around to look. An empty can bounced close to my face. "Whoa! Hey!”

“Hey Dumbo. This is Sassy Kitten. Over.” The music from an unidentifiable boy band poisoned the background as she spoke.

“Who hell’s Sassy Kitten?” I asked, sitting up. Glen shook his head with a shrug, as if to say, "Who gives a shit, it’s a girl, dumbass.”

“Hey there, Sassy. Where do I know you from?” BOOLEEP.

”Well you know I can’t say my real name on here, but we go to school together. And … my girlfriend thinks you’re hot.”

I laughed. “She’s gotta be talking about the cartoon elephant!”

“Oh you … fuck off.”

“What are you doing right now? Over.”

“Uh, me and my buddy Blue Thunder are, y'know, lifting. Working out. Got us some beers. Uh, working out and drinking. Y'now.” BOOLEEP.

“Girl, you don’t have a chance,” Walt interrupted. “Those two geeks are a match made in heaven. Nothing comes between those lovers. You wanna hook up? Talk to the Sledgehammer. That’s me. Over.”

“Fucking Walt,” Glen muttered under his breath to the room.

“So are you guys up for partying? Y’know, after your workout? You can hook up with my girlfriend and … I can hook up with Blue Thunder. Over.”

“Hell yes!” I said. “Tell her yes!”

"Um … no car?”

“Who gives a shit! We’ll figure something out. Just go! Tell her yes!”

“Yeah, we’re up for partying,“ Glen said into the mic. "What’s your ten-twenty?” BOOLEEP.

Preceding a barrage of humiliating, seemingly incessant, girly laughter was the reply, now from a more familiar voice: “I’m … in your perverted dreams, Dum-BO!”

For several seconds, the channel was silent. Walt broke in laughing, mid-roar. ”Dumbo! Burned!“

"Fuck-ing Marie!” Glen yelled to the room.

“Glen — I mean Dumbo — you really are dumb,” Glen’s sister said, all the while more boy band music played in the background, intermixed with another girl’s guffaws. “Seriously? Working out? Yeah, maybe your right hand!”

“You are so dead when you get home, Marie!” BOOLEEP.

”Yeah. Okay, What-ever. You and Blue Balls go and have fun 'working out’. Over and out!“

I fell back onto my ass, dropping my chin to my chest, not so much feeling defeated as I was humiliated. It served to remind me that more likely than not, people using CBs to meet people are impostors. Glen, Walt and I were no different. Marie just chose to be a lot more up front about it. None of that seemed to stop me from clinging onto hope, that there were genuinely honest people out there to talk to and perhaps even meet someday.

I managed to get over myself and left the room to hit the head. When I got back, Glen was no longer talking with Walt. Instead, he was slowly turning through the CB’s forty channels, coming up with not much more than static.

“Come on, dude, can we go do something else?” I said. “TV? Anything?”

Glen’s response was interrupted by a sound from the CB, once its dial hit upon channel fifteen.

“-five. Breaker one-five. Over.”

The signal was choppy, likely somewhat distant. The voice sounded abused; deep and tired, hoarse from likely too many cigarettes, too much booze, or both.

“Breaker one-five. Over,” came the voice again. No response.

A sinister smile then grew on Glen’s face before he cleared his throat and keyed the mic.

“Aw come on, man, don’t do it,” I said, knowing what he intended to do. “Not this guy.”

"Sorry, but y'know, Marie set me off, dude. And maybe I just wanna balance the scales with this poor slob since she’s not around.”

“Go ahead breaker, BOOLEEP” he said, though not in his usual voice. This time, he did his best to sound like a woman, and damn it all if he wasn’t convincing. I’d heard him do this before, only it’d been to prank lonely, teenage boys, not some gruff trucker who’d sooner plug a steel-toe in your ass than sulk the whole thing off.

“Hey there, darling. What’s your twenty? Over.”

“Oh, wouldn’t you like to know. What’s your handle, cutie?” BOOLEEP.

“This is Big Guy. Who are you, honey? Over.”

“Oooh, I like that! Big Guy. So … manly.” BOOLEEP. Glen let out a cackle and took a pull on his beer. I only shook my head and smirked. That was Glen being Glen. Or, rather, Glen not being Glen.

“Your handle? Over.”

“Tell him Jo-Jo Baby,” I said. What the hell, right?

“This is Jo-Jo Baby.” BOOLEEP.

Static. Glen and I exchanged looks.

“You there, Big Guy? Y'know, I could really use a good fuck tonight. You think you could help?” BOOLEEP.

Again, for a good, long minute, there was nothing. Glen shrugged. “Alright,” he said to the room. “I guess let’s see what’s on T-”

“You’re not Jo-Jo Baby.” His voice now was now a lot less friendly and much clearer.

Glen slid back over to the mic. “That’s what they call me, Big Guy.” BOOLEEP.

“What’s your twenty … Jo-Jo Baby? Over.”

“Oh, I don’t know if I’m ready for that, Big Guy. We just barely met. How about I come to you?” BOOLEEP.

“You. Who are you? Jo-Jo Baby? No. What … is your twenty? Over.”

Glen’s voice was shaky now. “Now behave, Big Guy, or I’ll have to leave. You wouldn’t want me to leave already, now, would you?” BOOLEEP.

The voice from the man known as Big Guy grew then from mild irritation to full-on, absolute and honest rage. “WHAT. IS. YOUR. TWENTY! WHERE ARE YOU? I WILL GUT YOU! I’LL GUT YOUR FAMILY! I’LL-”

I reached over and quickly turned the CB’s dial to a random channel, filling the room again with the sound of static.

“Jesus,” Glen said. “What the hell was that?”

My stomach churned. “You never know who you’re gonna meet on there, huh?”

“Hey. You okay? Don’t let 'Big Guy’ get to you, man. It was just some creep. Or not. We’ll never know, right?”

He was right. We were all untraceable. Only found and seen if we wanted to be. If you don’t want to hear from someone, you change the channel. Or maybe you never turn the CB on again. Either way, you move on. Like I guessed the real Jo-Jo had done.

“Big Guy,” Glen continued. “Probably more like Tiny Dick. Turn on the TV. I guess let’s see what’s on.”

Best idea all night.

“Hello? … Hello? Is anyone there?”

My eyes creaked open under eyelids like sandpaper. I pulled my arm out from under my cheek and checked my watch. About two-thirty. I had no idea how long I’d been out. Judging by the hangover already setting in, it’d been a while.

“Hello?”

I sat up. Glen was splayed out on the floor, his hands embracing the empty case like a bedtime snuggy. He always was a lightweight. In front of me, a large digital number eighteen glowed from the face of the CB.

“Anyone? Hello?”

Shit. I fumbled for the mic.

“Y- yeah. Uh, this is Blue Thunder. I copy.” BOOLEEP.

Someone calling for help? This was … rare. You’d occasionally catch a stranded motorist calling out for a tow truck on channel nine, but this … this sounded dire.

”Oh thank God! Please. Please, I need help.“

"Have you tried channel nine? Police are usually monitoring there.” BOOLEEP.

”Yes. But no one’s answering. Please, can you help me?“

Why were there no authorities monitoring channel nine? Saturday night. Most likely they had DUI’s to hand out and a multitude of parties to break up.

”Hello? Are you there?“ came the woman’s voice again.

"I’m here.” BOOLEEP.

”Oh my god! Thank you thank you! You have to help me.“

"Glen!” I called out to the room. “Glen! Wake up! You gotta hear this!” Out cold. I swung the chair around and gave him a kick. A low, loud irritated groan followed.

“Aw! What the fuck, man?!”

“Dude, listen! There’s some chick on here looking for help. This is nuts. Listen.”

“Are you still there?” I called into the mic. “What’s your handle?” BOOLEEP.

”My … my what? My name is Christine. Can you help me? Please!“

Glen kicked at my chair. "Oh, come on! Bull. Shit. She’s on channel eighteen! It’s gotta be Marie, fucking with us again, dude!”

“Does that sound like Marie? Or Jill? She says she came up empty on nine. What the hell, right? Let’s see how it plays out.”

Glen shrugged and sat up.

“What’s your twenty, Christine? I mean your 10-20. Your location.” BOOLEEP.

”I’m broken down off I think exit seventeen somewhere. Off route 2A in Eastboro. I’m stopped near a sign for … Saint Ambrose-something.“

"Eastboro?” Glen said. “Shit, she’s probably stuck out in the middle of the state forest. That’s the cemetery.”

I asked, “Do you need us to call you a tow truck?” BOOLEEP.

”No no. Please, I don’t have any money and I just need somebody to come pick me up and take me home. Please, I’ll … I’ll do anything. I’m so scared.“

Glen and I exchanged looks with our eyebrows peaked. "Hold on Christine.” BOOLEEP.

"What do you think?” I asked Glen. He rubbed his hand under his sorry excuse for a beard.

“Maybe it’s legit. Maybe it’s not. But it doesn’t matter, right? 'Cuz we don’t have wheels.”

He was right about that. There wasn’t really anything we could do. Call the cops? I don’t think that ever occurred to us. Where was the heroism in that, after all? Even if we had the van, neither of us was in any condition to drive. We didn’t have many options.

“Oh! I know!” Glen was now on his feet. He gave me a shot on the arm. “Sledge- Walt! We can have him pick us up and we can all go check it out.”

“It’s almost three in the morning. He still on?”

“Worth a try.”

“Christine? Hold on, okay? We’’ll be right back.” BOOLEEP.

”Okay. Please hurry.“

Glen took control of the radio, switching the channel to nineteen. "Breaker one-nine. Sledgehammer, you copy?” BOOLEEP.

”Yeah. What do you want, Dumbo? You still wanna argue your Realistic against my Cobra? Over.“

"No, man. You need to come pick us up. We need to go check something out.”

“Check what out?”

“Will you just come pick us up?”

“Not until you tell me what it is we’re checking out. Over.”

Glen looked at me, defeated. “Go to one-eight.” BOOLEEP.

"Ohhh-kay. Roger.”

Turning the radio back to eighteen, we caught Christine mid-sentence, sounding frantic.

“-ou there? Dumbo? Hello?”

“Yeah, I’m back. Sledge, you here?” BOOLEEP.

“I’m here. Who’re we talking to? Over.”

“This is Christine. I really need someone to come help me. I’m stuck in the middle of nowhere and I’m scared.”

“Before you ask, Sledge, she doesn’t want cops or anything like that. She just wants someone to come pick her up. She’s over in Eastboro.” BOOLEEP.

“Well I can do that. I’m only a few miles away. Over.”

I threw my head up and cursed at the ceiling.

Glen slammed his hand onto the mic’s transmit button. “Sledge, take it back to the last channel.” BOOLEEP.

Back on nineteen, Glen’s tone grew more clearly annoyed. “Sledge? You there? Sledge!” BOOLEEP.

“Yeah, I’m here. What the hell’s wrong with you? Over.”

“Come pick us up, man.” BOOLEEP.

“What? You’re, like, miles out of the way. Why would I go and do that?”

“Just come pick us up.” BOOLEEP.

Walt laughed. “What, you finally find a CB girlfriend and you’re afraid I’ll steal her? Won’t … what’s her name? Jo-Jo Baby? Or Wildflower or Jade Kisses? Won’t they be jealous? Oh right, you two bozos scared 'em away! You’re a sorry bunch, the two of you.”

The channel grew silent for a moment, while we stewed on Walt’s words.

“This girl’s looking for help, and so I’m gonna go help her. I’m heading back to one-eight,” Walt said. “Over.”

Of course, we followed.

“Breaker one-eight. You there … Christine? Over.”

“Dumbo?”

“No, this is Sledgehammer. I’m close, do I’m gonna come help you out. Can you give me your twenty? Over.”

“So … Dumbo’s not coming?”

”Nah, he’s too far out and doesn’t have a car. I’ll take you where you need to go. Over.“

Okay, um, I’m near a place called Saint Ambrose, off 2A. Um. Over.”

“I know where that is. I’ll be there in ten. Over.”

The following ten minutes felt more like twenty, Glen and I spending most of it within the white noise of CB radio static.

“I heard Wildflower maybe moved to California,” Glen mumbled, mostly to himself. “Jade was just … I dunno. Anyway, I barely talked to her.“

Walt’s voice broke in. ”Christine? You copy? Over.“

”Yes, I’m here.“

”I’m passing the sign for Saint Ambrose. Where are you from here? Over.“

”Just a little further. I see your headlights.“

”Roger that. What the-“

For the next minute, there was nothing. Glen and I looked at each other, brows furrowed and jaws slack. Glen keyed the mic.

"Sledgehammer? You copy? What’s going on?” BOOLEEP.

“Uh. Yeah, I’m here,” Walt said, his voice sounding shaky. “Christine? You copy? Over.”

Again, silence.

“Sledge, what’s going on?” BOOLEEP.

“There’s … a truck out here. Like a big rig. This chick driving truck? Where the hell is she?”

“No idea.” BOOLEEP.

“Okay. Guess I’ll go check it out. Be back on in five. Over.”

Five minutes passed. Then ten. Twenty. Static. Only static.

“Sledge? You copy?” BOOLEEP.

Nothing. Thirty minutes. The door to the room crashed open. I almost pissed myself. Into the room poured Glen’s sister, stinking of spent cigarettes and fruity liquor. Strawberry, maybe.

“Oh my god,” Marie slurred. “You two are still trying to get laid on that thing?”

“Fuck off, Marie,” Glen said.

“Whatever. Fine, I’m snacking then crashing.”

“Wait! Give me the van key.”

“The what? 'The hell you want the keys now for? Party’s way over.”

“Come on. Just give 'em.”

After several failed jabs at her coat for a pocket, she managed to slip her hand in and pull the key out. It clattered to the floor at her feet.

“Have at it,” she said, before stumbling up the stairs and sniggering like a stuffed up wino. Glen got to his feet and snatched up the keys.

“Well?” he said. “Let’s go.”

The ride to Eastboro was a decent thirty minutes from Glen’s house. Walt was right in not going out of his way to get us, if this girl Christine was really desperate for help. Throughout the entire ride, I took to using the van’s CB to reach out for Walt, Christine … anyone on channel eighteen. No response. Not a soul. Even our old haunt, channel nineteen, had no one.

Glen slammed his hand onto the steering wheel. “Fucking Walt! The asshole probably turned his radio off.”

“Why would he do that?”

“Who knows? It’s Walt! Selfish-fucking-Walt.”

Nothing was going on. I knew that. At least, I knew nothing was happening in the way Glen thought. If I’m being completely honest with myself, I knew nothing ever could or would happen between a closed-up loser like me and another stranger of the opposite sex, meeting anonymously on a CB radio on a weekend night. Or any night. But it made me feel good, even if just for an hour or two, or maybe over a couple of nights. And so what if they essentially disappeared after that? We both had our fun. Or at least I did. Both pretending to be someone we’re not; someone we want to be or appear to be, at least when only a voice is to be heard and a story with a questionable degree of truth is to be told. And all of us were the same sort of loser. Glen. Walt. Me. All those girls we talked to. We were all the same. In the days before the Internet, it wasn’t silent words upon a screen that gave you anonymity. For us, it was the airwaves, with only a voice to identify you by. That anonymity was at least something you could count on. What came from that voice was as believable as you wanted it to be.

At that hour on a Sunday morning, the roads were clear. An occasional delivery truck blew past heading the other direction. Glen turned the van onto the exit seventeen offramp, passing by only a few houses before plunging into the darkened state forest road. The cemetery, I knew, was under a mile ahead.

I called into the mic. ”Breaker one-eight. Christine? Sledgehammer? You copy? Over.“

Glen slowed the van as it passed by the closed gates of Saint Ambrose. Walt’s car was nowhere. No sign of his car, nor a truck. Beyond the ornate walls was complete blackness, but for the light from the windows of the chapel and mausoleum. A late night for visiting dead loved ones, I thought. Probably a priest preparing for visitors and mass later that morning.

"Drive a little further,” I said. “There’s a parking lot.”

“Sean, he’s not gonna be there. They took off.”

“No! Look!”

Stopped in the middle of the parking lot was Walt’s beat-up Monte. Exhaust till sputtered from its undercarriage as it idled, alone in the dark. Its driver-side door stood ajar, though the car’s interior light was off. Beyond it were empty parking spaces and the bordering woods. No sign of other vehicles. No sign of anyone. No sign of Walt.

Glen stopped the van twenty yards from Walt’s car. “Give him a shout. See if he’s still in there.”

“Sledge- Walt? You copy? This is Blue and Dumbo. We’re behind you.”

Outside, I could hear my own voice echo back to me in the distance. Walt’s radio was still on, with the volume turned up.

Glen rolled his window down and called out. “Walt! Stop fucking around, man! Where’s the girl?”

“Christine?” I said into the mic. “Christine, do you copy? What’s your twenty? Over.”

Glen stepped outside the van and slammed the door shut behind him with pissed-off force. “I’ve had enough of your know-it-all shit, Walt! Stop fucking around and come out!”

As Glen stormed away toward the idling car, Christine’s voice came over the CB.

“I’m here, Dumbo. But don’t worry. I’m okay.” She giggled. It was a feminine, girlish laugh, one of mischief and sex, and felt as though to go on for minutes. As she continued to transmit, her voice gradually deepened, as the giggle transformed to that of a laugh much more sinister and masculine. From the van’s CB; from Walt’s. It was everywhere.

“Who the hell is that?” Glen called back to the van, as he continued to make his way to Walt’s car. I threw my hands up and shrugged. The man on the CB continued transmitting, never stopping for our response.

“You boys are disgusting, you know that? Carrying on with poor ladies in distress. Arguing about who’s going to go and save the day because you think you … What? Might get a piece of ass for doing so? Pssh. Pathetic.”

It was clear now who both voices belonged to: The man from channel fifteen, from earlier that night. The enraged lunatic who went by the handle of Big Guy.

“Glen!” I called out my open window. “It’s that crazy nut ball from earlier!”

“Who?”

“That crazy dude: Big Guy. He’s fucking with us, man! He sent us out here for nothing!”

“The real way to get anything from these girls, fellas, is the way I go about it. They don’t want some stuffed-up nerds in their mommy’s basement drinking poppa’s beer, with barely enough hair on their balls to call themselves men. They want someone … like me. They might not know it right away, but they catch on fast. Missy. Jennifer. Oh, sorry: Wildflower and Jade … Kisses, was it? Yeah, that was it.”

Glen spun around. “What? Did he say something about Jade? What the hell?” He turned back to Walt’s car, picking up his pace. “Walt! Come on, Bowden! This is all bullshit!”

“Joanne was another story. She … well, she really did have a thing for limp-dicked geeks. Jo-Jo … yeah, that was her. Seems you were onto something with that one, Blue. Had to convince her I was you in order for her to come out and meet me. ‘Hi Jo-Jo Baby. I think we should finally meet up. How about at the mall?’ How about that? Was I convincing? Whatever. Not my best work. But it was enough for her.”

I tried transmitting a reply. “Who is this? You are one sick fuck, you know that?” It was no use. He wasn’t going to hear me, and his transmission was overpowering anything mobile. Unusual, even for a trucker’s radio. This was base-station level. Big Guy had the comm, and he wasn’t letting up.

I watched as Glen reached Walt’s open door, then as he stumbled backwards onto the pavement.

“You boys do pretty good impressions yourselves, you know. But you do a shitty Jo-Jo. She wasn’t quite the slut you were making her out to be. But I had to be sure. Maybe she’d made it out of that dumpster? No. I knew that. But if there’s one thing I hate more than loose ends, it’s people FUCKING WITH ME!”

Glen was on his feet now, sprinting back to the van. He held a hand to his mouth, though all it did was delay what came forth onto the ground as he slammed against the driver-side door.

“It- It’s Walt!” Glen said, catching his breath. “He’s fucking strangled by his mic cord in there! His face is all fucking blue and … and his tongue… Holy shit! He’s dead, man!”

“Wh- What?! Are you sure?”

“You must be wondering where I am right now. You want to know my ten-twenty. Am I right? I was thinking the same thing about you, y’know. Trying to nail down just where in the hell you two pencil-necks were holed up. Your pally there … Sledgehammer, is it? He was kind enough to tell me. Kinda had it stuck in his throat for a bit, so to speak, so I helped get it out of him.”

Glen reached through the window and snatched the mic from my hand. “Fuck you! You sick fuck! You killed him! Why would you do that? You killed Walt! He’s just fucking a kid!”

“Glen! He’s still transmitting! He can’t hear you!”

He ignored me. “Is there anyone there? Breaker one-eight! Breaker one-eight!”

Glen let go of the mic, and Big Guy picked up mid-sentence. “-would gut your family? Well, gosh. I was just messing with you. But, y’now … I hear that a SASSY little KITTEN around here could maybe use some company … now that I’ve taken poppa cat outside.”

“Turn to channel nine!” I screamed. “We need to call the cops or something!”

“No. Wait. Sassy Kitten?” Glen said “Is that … is he … is he talking about… But he’s not-”

“I do want to thank you boys for reminding me that it’s time for me to relocate. I don’t need your godforsaken backwood towns. I sure as hell don’t want ‘em. It’s time I embraced the new and say goodbye to the old, you know? Get myself … I dunno, a computer. Fuck this CB horse shit; having to deal with you dumb-ass punks. Then I can be anywhere. Am I right? Can be … from … anywhere. Miles … miles away. A CB … well, it can only carry you so far. And any pervert can listen in on the whole thing. Like now, right? Just like I know where you are … right now, Mister Dumbo. Like I know … you know … MY TWENTY.”

BOOLEEP.

sanguinaryincolor asked: Do you love her?

D:

listless-lohlife asked: Wow I'm really impressed by "Do You Love Her?", a really well written story!

Thanks! Hope you like the other stories I’ve got here too.

Do You Love Her? [Short Story]

(Artwork by Jörn Heidrath - Filtered through Waterlogue. Original here.)

I wrote this one specifically for @thenosleeppodcast (it’s performed in S6E24, and you can hear it for free!) If you guessed I might have a technical background as a sysadmin, you’d be right. But I try to control myself.

I’m on the lookout for a new job. But I think it’s time that I got a job that has nothing at all to do with IT. I mean nothing. No computers. No keyboards, mice, motherboards, wired networks, wireless networks. Definitely no fucking PEBKAC (look it up; you’ll laugh). And, most importantly and most absolutely, definitely: No backup tapes. Degauss them, burn them in a fire and piss on the smoldering ashes. Your monthly fulls and nightly incrementals can go to hell. Oh, what’s that? You want your most precious files safe, up to the minute? Tough shit. Don’t look at me. Not anymore.

Would it surprise you if I told you I lost my job last week? Right, I know. Probably not. But it’s not what you think. I quit. I had no choice in the matter, really. Sorry if saving my own ass from a psychopathic boss ranks higher in importance to me than my next paycheck. A paycheck which helped keep the beer fridge and herb jar full, and my penchant for pizza and gaming satiated. I’d be fine if that was all I had to worry about funding these days, but since my folks booted me out of the hole in their basement – after what happened – I have to add rent to that list. Utilities. And a car payment. And, shit, gas! Otherwise … fuck, I’d be fine not working at all. No job is worth dying for.

One reason I’m having such a tough time finding work is because not only did I quit a paying job with an okay career outlook, I left the next gig – the one I quit the first one for – after only one day. I know, I know; I sound like a spoiled-fucking brat, and I wouldn’t know a hard day of work if it hit me square in the jaw. “Ooo, boo hoo! You had to live inside the basement of your mommy and daddy’s mansion. How dreadful!” But you know what? Fuck you, if that’s what you say. You have no idea what kind of life I’ve led from a few words out of my mouth, so keep your preconceived judgement out of this and hear me out.

There really are very good reasons for both of those employment – well, unemployment decisions. You may not believe me and, hey, that’s your prerogative and all that, but at least I’m laying it all out on the line so that some considerate soul might see that I’m not bullshitting here. If it gets me a decent job – again, not in IT; please God not IT – talking about all of this again might be worthwhile. I may, you know, die a horrible death and all that from telling the world about this, but I’ve got little choice.

Back about a year ago, I graduated with a B.A. in Comp. Sci. out of B.U.. About a month before graduation, I had landed an intern-like job with a law office out of Cambridge. I say “intern-like” because, unlike an internship, I got nothing in the way of college credit for it, and the pay was about what you’d expect. The office had recently lost their sole desktop support admin, and they needed to quickly fill the role until they could find someone permanent. I didn’t ask what happened to the last guy, and I didn’t all that much care. I was just thankful he was gone and left the opening there for me.

The typical work day was pretty much your run-of-the-mill desktop support-monkey stuff. Make sure printers were kept full and unjammed. Dealing with malware, overabundance of spam, wifi issues – that sort of thing. I also had to make sure the tapes from the backup server were rotated out every night. This meant removing the previous night’s incremental backup tapes, storing them in the off-site delivery storage container, and placing fresh tapes back into the jukebox for the next nightly incremental run. Except on Fridays – that was the scheduled full-backup run. My boss, Don Huber, Esquire, insisted on not reusing older tapes, on account of stricter guidelines for data retention in the law office or some-such. The office was on the small side – about twenty-five people, all of them with desktops. I kept them all working and clean, inside and out. And all of them got backed up, including the on-premise email server.

Toward the end of the last month of my employment there, Huber – who, I should mention, is one of the three partners of the firm – called me into his office. Let me tell you this about Huber: I feared that guy. I’m not a small man myself, and I don’t tend to intimidate easily, but this guy gave me the fucking creeps. He towered at least six-seven, thin as a rail. His sixty-something-year-old face was gaunt and pale, except for the swollen nose that the man couldn’t stop blowing into that godforsaken, crusty handkerchief he kept in his pocket. And his breath; dear lord, his breath. I swear to God a cloud of that shit lingered around for an hour after he left the office. And despite his constant coffee binging, he always looked tired and uninterested in anyone, never smiling past those bloody gums of his. God forbid he ever look at you with his two piss holes in the snow.

“Jonathan,” he said. My name is Jonah, but I was not about to correct him. “Close the door.”

That breath. Shit.

Huber continued, in his draw-out, tired way. “Jonathan.” But that’s all he said. Was the guy trying to make me correct him? I didn’t take the bait.

“Yes?”

“Backups. You make sure all of our computers and the email are backed up. Every evening. Am I right?”

I nodded.

“And the old backups are stored out of the office by that … something-Mountain place?”

“Yeah,” I said. “They’re taken every night, about five o'clock.”

“And about how many years of backups would you say they have?”

“Wow. Um … all of them? Say, about seven years worth?”

He considered this a long moment. “I have an important assignment for you. It’s going to take some time. A bit of overtime work.”

Wonderful. “Okay,” I said, hoping to sound more disappointed than pissed-off.

“Will that be a problem?” he asked. Alright, so I sounded pissed-off.

“Nope,” I said. “Let me know what you need.”

Huber glared at me. There was no bullshitting this guy. I mean, he’s a lawyer for crying out loud; I am not. But I don’t think he gave a shit about my feelings, except for making sure that I was sufficiently terrified of him and uncomfortable.

“I’m working on … a case. It’s one that is very personal to me. So I need to trust that you will keep the details of what you are doing to yourself. Do not speak of it to anyone else, inside or outside of this office. Do you understand, Jonathan?”

I nodded.

The details of Huber’s task were pretty simple, but the deed itself was not. Our nineties-era email server stored file attachments on a local file server, separately from the messages. Huber laid out a rule long ago that the attachment storage had to be cleaned out of everything on the first of every month. Every month! You had to have any documents you wanted to retain printed and filed, then allow the system to automatically purge. Probably as part of some sort of legal thing. Don’t ask me; remember: not a lawyer. Now he needed me to go through the past year to retrieve all of his files, for this “case” of his. That meant retrieving a shitload of tapes, then spending hours – make that days – restoring both the full and incremental backups of every system. A major pain in the ass.

“And, Jonathan. Do not under any circumstances view the files you are retrieving. It is of important … legal procedure that you do not view them. Is that understood?”

“Yep. I mean yes. Understood.”

With that, I’d say he was as satisfied as he was going to be.

The following Monday, two crates of eight-millimeter mag tapes filled the desk in my butthole of a back-room office, and I got to work.

Probably most of you have not worked with these old backup-tape jukeboxes. Well, let me tell you: They suck. They’re a pain in the ass to load, and the robotic arm for rotating tapes in and out of the drive is dog-ass slow. I also had to perform the file restores early in the morning, after the nightly backups ran, since I only had the one unit to work with. This is three, four in the morning we’re talking, mind you. It was start then or never get anything done for the people in the office all day. You can be sure as shit I was logging all that overtime and strolling into the office later than usual.

At first, the file restores were pretty run-of-the mill crap. Thousands of Word documents and PDFs. Images, probably photos of crime scenes. There were some audio files here and there, too, most likely from testimony recordings and the like. And just like Huber the uber creep asked, I didn’t open any of them. That is until the video files started to dump out.

It’s like this: Boring does not begin to describe those nights. Brain-numbing. That works. If I was in law school, maybe I could dig into the tomes in the office library, read up on some old cases; something like that. Even then, I was barely able to keep my eyes open, so my head wasn’t so much ready for soaking in knowledge at that hour. The firewall – one that I, sadly, still did not control – blocked access to anything you’d consider fun to watch or read. Managed by some third party or some shit.

And now there are these videos I’m seeing restore back onto the fileserver. Mind you, videos aren’t something seen very often within email attachments at that place. I’m not sure they knew how to operate the cameras on their phones, let alone transfer files from one; they weren’t the most technical bunch. It was coming on two in the morning, I was bored, and I now had something that could pose as entertainment. So, I double-clicked the first one, and I watched.

What popped into the video player window was … fucked up, to put it mildly. A heavy-set woman, in about her late-fifties. She was bound and gagged, tied to a chair, in what looked like some kind of dirty basement. She was dressed in a soiled, white nightgown, her greying hair laying wet and matted against her face and forehead. At first I thought this was just some disturbing crime scene evidence, that the woman was dead and the camera operator took video rather than stills. Only no one else was in the room. No cops. And the woman was not dead. She appeared to be asleep or passed-out, as you could clearly see she was breathing. The person working the camera rotated around the seated woman, making no sound other than the occasional footfall upon the concrete.

The video turned to focus in on the woman’s right thigh, where a smear of blood ran down it from a small wound. The camera came to a stop and clicked into place, presumably into a tripod. A hand came into view then, wearing surgical gloves, holding a syringe. It jabbed into the woman and plunged whatever liquid it held, then pulled away. Some shuffling off-camera, and hands are back again with another needle. Only this one … this one is huge. He inserts this long-ass needle into the woman’s leg, right about at the bleeding wound. The hand moves away, and I can see it’s a blood-drawing needle, filling something I couldn’t see.

About a minute later, the needle is withdrawn. More blood trickles down the woman’s leg. A bag of blood swings into view, with “#000” sloppily written on it in Sharpie.

A click, and the camera is raised up again, focusing on the woman’s face. There’s a soft kissing noise, and the gloved hand comes into view again, pressing two fingers against the woman’s lips. The video ends.

I closed the video player window and couldn’t have gotten out of that place faster than if it’d been on fire.

The next morning, I called in sick. It wasn’t exactly a lie; I really didn’t feel well. Add a sleepless night to what I’d just watched, I felt like complete shit. I was told Huber wasn’t happy about my being out, personally asking about my work on his “special project.” Rather than risk getting outright fired, I told them to let him know I’d make it in that night to make progress.

I wasn’t sure what to do at that point. I had no idea the context of that video, and I didn’t know who it belonged to. As they’re stored on the attachment server, they aren’t labeled with what email message they belong to. Without the accompanying email itself, the attachment is just … there. I’d have to restore the old emails as well, if I wanted to match them up. If I let Huber know I was touching those files, he’d shitcan my ass in a heartbeat. For my own sake of sanity, I just assumed it was disturbing evidence for a case long-since closed and went back to work that night.

Around about one A.M., more files were restoring from the tapes – I was more than halfway done at that point. I take a look at the progress and the expanding list of files. More videos. I wasn’t sure I wanted to chance another one, but of course I did. I’m a dead cat like that.

The video I open this time is yet another bloodletting. Same woman, same place. Only this time the woman is much thinner, and her leg is not looking good at all. The wound looks infected and festering, and there’s a lot more dried blood. This time, she’s not so passed-out, but close enough to it. She mumbles something behind the cloth blocking her mouth, while the unseen cameraman goes to work. This time, the bag he fills is labeled “#011.” I wasn’t watching them in order. Dear God, there were ten more of these? Maybe more?

I opened another video. This time the window filled with something much different; definitely much more disturbing. The camera faces Don Huber’s unoccupied desk. The old man comes into view, holding a steaming mug of coffee and a brown paper bag. He sits at his desk and calmly opens the paper bag, removing one of those fucking bags of blood! He holds it up to the camera. It’s half-full, with the label “#008” written on it. And the old man smiles. He fucking smiles!

That’s not the most disturbing part. Huber takes this bag of blood and squeezes about a half-cup of it into his coffee mug. He seals the bag back up again, puts it into the paper bag. He sticks his index finger into the cup, swirls it around, mixing it all up. Then, in a big gulp, it’s down the hatch. He swallows down what must’ve been half the mug. When he lowers his arm, his lips and teeth are stained red. He looks at the camera, and he smiles. Then he laughs. It’s not just a chuckle; it’s a full-blown cackle of insanity. Tears streaming down the man’s face, the laughter becoming more maniacal. He takes another swig. Another, until the mug is drained dry. Again he smiles, and again he laughs. He wipes tears from his face, then walks from behind the desk, off-camera. The video ends.

I’m not sure how long I sat there at my desk in silence. I couldn’t get the sound of Huber’s insane laugh out of my head. I couldn’t erase that bizarre image of him sucking down that concoction and finishing it off with a bloody grin. Enjoying every last drop. And there were more of them. With the files that continued to restore onto the fileserver were more videos. Lots more. I’d like to say that I refrained from watching them. I mean, that’s what a sane, rational person would do, right? That person would have seen quite enough. He’d stop right there, maybe go to the police with that shit. He might get fired for being wrong, and then for opening files he was told outright not to open. But if he was right? Some imprisoned woman is maybe saved and that … vampire gets locked up. I’d be a hero, one who broke the trust of his employer for justice.

Yeah, that worked out well for everyone else who’s blown a whistle. And, shit, I was barely out of college.

The remaining videos were more of the same. Bags labeled anywhere between “#000” and “#021” were filled, then later consumed. Always with the laughter and smiles. Now it made sense why Huber’s breath was so goddamn bad. As I watched the old man cackle in another video, I felt I could smell the rancid odor through the screen.

No, I actually could smell it.

“Jonathan. How is the project coming along?” It was Huber. There, in the office. It was three in the morning, and I was alone with that blood-guzzling freak. I nearly shit myself.

“Uh, Mr. Huber! Hi! Yeah, I, uh. Yeah the restores are still, uh, chugging along. Should be done in another day or so.”

The old man pursed his lips and nodded slightly, not taking his bloodshot eyes off me. He was carrying a coffee mug. The coffee mug. Dear Christ.

“Just got off the phone with my mom,” I lied. “Told her where I was and that everything’s good, and I’ll be home soon.” I thought telling Huber I’d be missed would keep me from becoming another one of his blood supplies. His lack of reaction told me he didn’t seem to care.

“Uh, so, what brought you around here so late?” I asked. “Or is it early?”

“Late. High-profile corporate litigation I’m working on. Couldn’t sleep if I tried. This’ll be my home for a while.”

“So … Mrs. Huber — your wife — she doesn’t get upset at you being away?”

Huber narrowed his eyes. Shit. I must’ve touched a nerve. Now I wished I had called my mom. Thankfully, it didn’t take long for his look to soften.

“Lydia … Mrs. Huber is … she’s not well. Bedridden. Has been for months. I have someone taking care of her while I’m … occupied with this case.”

I nodded and mouthed a silent “ah” of understanding.

“Anyway, I’m glad you’re still here, Jon. I’m going to head out now, but I need you to print out a list of the files you’ve been able to restore so far and leave it on my desk. I’ll leave the door open.”

“Uh, sure! No problem!” Thank the good lord, I wouldn’t be alone with him anymore. I hoped the elation in my voice wasn’t too apparent.

Huber left, taking most of his dragon breath along with him. Before leaving myself, I got the file listing printouts and brought them into his office. It’s not often I go into that room. It’s kept locked when Huber’s not around, and somehow he’s kept his PC out of technical trouble, which meant little need for me to enter. And that’s why I’d never bothered to notice the photo sitting on his desk before.

It was the woman in the videos. The bloodied, tied-up woman in the chair. Huber’s wife.

The papers fell from my hand. I gathered them up as quickly as they’d fallen, threw them on the old man’s desk and got the hell out of Dodge.

I went over the whole thing in my head as a sped home. Huber — that sick son-of-a-bitch — had his wife tied up in his basement, draining the poor woman into blood bags and chugging her down like some sort of macabre breakfast drink! And then the smiling. The laughing! Tears of laughter, drinking every goddamn drop. What the hell was he? And why in God’s name was he taking videos of the whole process? He had to be emailing them off to someone. But to whom? And why?

The sun was rising by the time I walked in the door at home. Needless to say, I wasn’t much ready for sleeping. Rather than dwell further on what I’d just learned about Huber, I got to work on the most logical thing I could think of: My resume. I was getting the fuck out of that office as soon as possible. Either Huber would be caught and taken to jail, causing the whole firm to crumble and all of its jobs along with it, or that vampire would find me fit to fill more blood bags. No thanks.

Having sent my resume off to as many IT support job postings as I could find and fit into, I finally passed out on my keyboard, at about ten in the morning. By the time I woke up early that afternoon, I had a voicemail from a recruiter from one of the jobs I’d applied for. I called them back, set up an interview for the following day, and headed back to work. I had a little skip in my step, knowing it may not be so long before I wouldn’t be going back there anymore.

Inside my office, the printouts from the previous night sat on my desk. A Post-It note stuck to the top of the pile had Huber’s handwriting on it.

Continue project. MOVE all files ending in .M4V onto USB storage. DO NOT OPEN THE FILES!

The video files. Of course that’s what he wanted. The crazy fucker wanted to keep them all for posterity or something, then probably take the tapes and have them destroyed. Sure, I wanted to get the hell out of that job, but I did not want to let Huber get away with what he was up to. I decided that not only would I copy those videos to a USB key for Huber, I’d make a copy for myself, along with the emails they attached to. I just needed to complete the file recovery that night, then restore and save the emails from the same time period with my own copy. With that, I could send it all off to the cops, anonymously, and hope they nail that creep and save his wife before she’s nothing but dry flesh and bones.

I managed to avoid Huber that entire day. I swear to God I thought I heard him cackling laughter from behind his closed door on a few occasions.

That bony finger, swirling around in his mug. That blood-stained grin.

As the next dawn crept up on me, I had completed restoring the last of the incremental backups. I had fifty or sixty videos stored onto two USB storage keys: one copy for Huber, one for me. As planned, I restored all of the old emails for myself as well. I left Huber’s copy on the desk in his office, which was thankfully unoccupied, and left for home to get some sleep. I had an interview to rest for, for a job I hoped I could start ASAP.

The interview was for ten that morning. After about five hours of shut-eye, I downed a pot of coffee, primped myself up and arrived with a little time to spare. The job was for an IT consulting business that had set up shop within just the past six months. Business was taking off, and they needed to fill some entry-level remote tech positions to keep up with the onslaught of demand.

I nailed it. They made me an offer on the spot, and I snatched it right up. I’d only met with a couple of the lead techs, but I sufficiently impressed them enough to fill one of the spots.

I strolled into my old office that afternoon to find the storage containers — all of the backup tapes — gone. I knew it. Huber got in early; got rid of them all. He was covering his sick and demented ass from being found out. Likely he was toasting another mug of his vile brew to whatever fire melted the tapes down to a nondescript heap of plastic. That night, while Huber was re-watching and reliving his gory glory days of sucking down the blood of his wife, I’d be working to match up my own copy of them to the emails he sent and shut that fucker down.

I used my time at the office to type up my letter of resignation. I threw it onto Huber’s unoccupied desk and checked right the hell out of there. On my way home, I got a call from the new job. It wasn’t one I was expecting.

“Hi Jonah. Hey, this is Steve Paige, from ‘Puter Pros. You seem like a cool dude, thought we might meet up tonight for a couple of cold ones with some of the team, welcome you aboard. What do you say?”

“That sounds fantastic,” is what I said, and that I’d head out that way after their office closed, about seven o’clock. Meanwhile, I had some videos and emails to deal with.

When I got home, I flopped onto the couch with my laptop and threw on some TV. I plugged the USB key with the videos and emails into the laptop, copied everything off, and got to work. Opening the email files was pretty straightforward. All that was left was to match the filenames and dates to Huber’s outgoing emails, and I’d have the bastard by the balls.

After about an hour of searching, I found what I was looking for. Make that half of what I was searching for. I was able to match Huber’s outgoing emails to only half of the videos, those of him doing the blood drinking. And the laughing. There was no email subject. Nothing in the body of the message. Just the video and one recipient: ppkg@gmail.com.

It was when I searched Huber’s inbox that I found the messages attached to the other half of the videos. Huber wasn’t sending the videos of his wife — he was receiving them. From someone else.

Unlike Huber’s outgoing messages, these emails did contain a message. They were all sent from the same address he’d been sending to. I read only the first:

Subject: Do you love her?

Hello Donny. Or should I call you Soulless, Bloodsucking Lawyer Don, Esquire? I like that name better. You should change it.

I’ll keep this short, because I know you’re a busy man and have a lot more bloodsucking to do. And now I don’t mean that metaphorically, as you will see from the attached video.

You may remember that when you took me into your employment, part of that deal was the promise of your firm finding help for my wife. You and I had a gentleman’s agreement. In return for free assistance from me for your office, you would assist us in suing the company responsible for the accident resulting in my wife’s handicap. That is not what happened. Instead, after several years of my free services to your firm, you turned against me and my family. You saw that there was more to be gained by representing the other party, turned around and counter-sued us on their behalf.

They won. You won. I lost nearly everything.

Last night, I lost my wife.

It’s time now for you to lose something. It’s up to you for how long.

For your Lydia to remain alive, your instructions are simple. Firstly, do not forward this message or its contents to the authorities, nor make them aware of it in any way. I still control your firewall and know what comes in and out of there at all times. I will know. You could of course copy the files and send them some other way, but know this: Your wife is kept alive only by my administering her with the basic nutrients to stay that way, so if I were to, say, be killed or go to jail, she’s as good as gone.

Don’t worry, Donny. You won’t be without your wife entirely. I will be sending you that bag of her blood, one every few days or so. In return, you will be required to drink it. All of it, like the bloodsucker you are. And how will I know? You will record a video of yourself doing this and email it as an attachment back to me. But — and here’s the most important part — you must show me how much you enjoy it. Show me how much you’re enjoying every last fucking drop of it, you bloodsucking motherfucker! I don’t care how many cupfuls it takes or what the hell you mix it with, but you will drink that bag dry. And you will smile and you will laugh, and you will convince me you love it!

Your first delivery comes tomorrow morning. I expect your first video within four hours of that.

Tell no authorities. Tell no one.

Oh, and I quit.

Enjoy your breakfast,

The Kenster

The Kenster. I knew I heard that stupid nickname somewhere before. Was it at the office? Yeah, that was it. First day of work. One of the delivery guys who sometimes picked up the backup tapes once asked where “The Kenster” was. I had no idea who he was talking about. Now I knew: He was the IT guy I replaced. Before he left, he’d cleaned up anything and everything in the systems about him. Everything gone. Almost everything gone, I should say.

I still had the restored email.

I checked the time. Seven o'clock. Late. Shit.

Drowning my shot nerves in alcohol sounded like a decent plan at the time. I called a cab and met up with Steve Paige and the other ‘Puter Pros at a bar across town, about a half-hour later. After a couple of hours of us chatting about all-things geek, I was happily on my way to becoming plastered and forgetting about the whole nightmare with Huber. That ended right quick.

Steve said, “Don’t worry if you get stuck with a tough client on the job, Jonah. We’ve all had our run-ins with 'em.”

“Pssh, no shit! Remember that old bat who insisted on me reinstalling Windows 95?” another Pro named Andy said. “Ninety-fucking-five! I had to torrent and burn some old ISO of the thing. I hoped it wasn’t teeming with a hidden North Korean malware party.”

Steve gave him a punch on the shoulder. “Jesus, Andy! Seriously? You don’t do that shit. Anyway, Jonah, if you get stuck with a nut like that, you come talk to me or you find the boss. Because if you can’t do it …”

They all said in unison: “The Kenster can.”

I choked on my last sip of beer like I was drowning.

“Sorry … The- The Kenster?“ I managed to blurt out between coughs.

"Damn, you okay? Well, yeah, man. He owns the shop. Ken Graham. Goes by 'The Kenster’ in the nerdy circles, like with us. He’s the real pro at 'Pros. Knows how to deal with all types. You go to him with the difficult-to-please ones, and he’s got you covered. He’s … a little quirky, I guess you could say, but you’ll love working for him. Y’know, I wonder what’s holding him up …”

“H- Holding him up?” I asked.

“Yeah, he was supposed to show up tonight. Guess he want’s to meet you, in particular. I showed him your resume and I’ll be damned if his eyes didn’t light right up. Looks like your past experience at that law office paid off. You’ve already got his eye, big guy!”

Steve tried to give me a shot on the shoulder, but I was already beelining for the door. There was some confused yelling from behind me as they followed me outside. Most likely something to do with my skimping on the tab. I threw myself into the nearest cab and shot home.

That was a week ago. So I guess saying I quit my last job wasn’t so accurate after all. In truth, I hadn’t even started yet. I bet there aren’t many people who’ve done that, not without a backup plan on deck at the time.

I have no clue what Huber has planned for those videos he had me restore. Not really sure why he’d have them destroyed, either. If he turns them in, his wife’s likely a goner. Maybe she’s dead already? Maybe he doesn’t care and just wants to stop the blood drinking, making sure he’s got what he needs to make sure The Kenster pays for what he’s done. But the news has been quiet. No reports of a missing or dead Lydia Huber. No arrests of ‘Puter Pros owner Ken Graham.

Me? I’m keeping hold of my copy of those files and emails. That insurance at least helps me get a few winks of sleep every night.

My parents, of course, haven’t understood my unemployment, so I’m out on my ass and basically paying for this dump out of what little savings I have left. That’s not much. Not anymore. I’ve tried calling my mom for the past couple of days, basically to beg for her to let me back into their basement, which believe me is a vast upgrade from this shit hole. But she’s not picking up my calls. It never took very much to disappoint her.

Hm. Getting a text message. God, I hope that’s her. You know, I’m still sometimes surprised she even knows how to send one. Especially … one with a video? Why is she sending me …

Oh … oh dear fucking god.

Do you love her?

The Inscrutable Darius Hobbs [Short Story]

Please bear with me on a little rant here.

This particular story–and the one titled “The Reaping Of Bobby Ward”–was submitted as a contest entry for the @chillingtales podcast. As of this writing, the site has chosen not to release the names or stories of the winners. Not responding to anymore tweets asking about it (I’ve sent two). Complete silence about it on their end. To be completely honest, it feels unprofessional and shady. I get that they state up front that they will not inform writers if their story was not chosen–and I’m totally understanding of that–but to not allow us to see what we were up against is just cruel. I’m no stranger to being turned down, but to have zero communication back at all–and for something we were willing to provide fee of charge–is insulting. I should have known better when I saw that you still have not announced the winners from last June!

I’m sorry guys, I love the podcast and will continue to listen to it, but stop publishing contests if you don’t have time and can’t figure it out.

Maybe my stories suck, but let me see which stories sucked the least.

End rant.

I cannot deny that my chosen profession is one of great fascination and—truth be told—amusement for myself. I am sure the same does not always hold true for the clients I serve, but that is of no consequence of concern for yours truly. I am called upon to provide my services and I set about my work, and I do so with the utmost level of skill and profession. The comfort of my clients is of a much secondary precedence to me.

There are, however, some undeniably hard, cold and cruel facts about my line of business that I have come to accept, and I cannot say they delight me in the least. The unexplained remaining just as such, being the most woeful of all. Being in such a predicament as to abandon an ongoing inquiry is downright and utter failure in the eyes of someone much like myself. Though, I must offer you sincere apologies if you are led to believe I share this unusual occupation with others. I have a reasonable suspicion that I do, though I cannot say for certain where or when they exist.

The name is Darius Hobbs, born and bred of Baton Rouge, Louisiana in the year 1845. I am a chosen-to-be bachelor of thirty-seven years, residing with my dear lady friend and assistant, Miss Sadie Cartwell, thirty-two, within the apartment above the reputable “Office Of The Investigator Darius Hobbs,” along Saint Charles Avenue, New Orleans. My father, a sometimes respected though oft disputed man of science of the southern states, left the office and residence to me upon his passing, some ten years ago. Herein is one such account of which I cannot claim success in understanding nor in its solving. Mayhap those few supposed others with business dealings such as my own may chance upon this record and find it of some level of assistance, though I cannot claim it will be of aid in any explanation.

On the evening of June 13, 1881, after Sadie and I had long since retired, there became a racket of unrelenting knocks upon the office door of the floor below. Now, I must be sure to make you aware here that it is not within the normal course of my business dealings that I make allowances for such an intrusion. It would be within reason and expectation that I simply ignore the foolish commotion and hope to cause them to turn tail and return at a more appropriate time for appointment. There was, I dare say, something I sensed extraordinary in this caller’s purpose and insistence, and it allowed my unduly curious mind to overcome me.

Garbed in night clothes, I went about unlatching the door, to the unspoken though obvious protests of Sadie at my back.

“Don’t worry, dear,” I said. “This will take but a moment. I only mean to end this incessant noise so that we might have a blink of sleep this evening.”

Outside stood an unfamiliar man of approximately fifty years of age, built solidly though not heavily-set. Crowning the fellow’s head was a brown derby with yellow band, of a quality unlike the rest of his garments; though dressed dapperly, his other clothing did appear to be of some age and wear.

He seemed at first surprised to see me. I spoke out angrily before he had the chance to make an introduction.

“What in damnation is the meaning of this? Do you have any inkling of the present hour? You, sir, have quite a nerve in paying the ‘closed’ sign no heed whatsoever, and in intruding upon my own domicile in this manner. This must indeed be of the utmost importance so, do please sir, enlighten me or be on your way.”

“Mister Hobbs? Mister Darius Hobbs? Oh, thank the lord!” His voice was not one from around those parts of the south, more than likely Carolina; Haywood, perhaps. He seemed to speak as though I had not. That infuriated me.

“Get on with it!”

The gentleman removed his hat and said, “Mister Hobbs, I am sorry for disturbing you and the missus this evening, but if would give an honest man like myself a brief moment of your time, I think we’ll come to an understanding.”

“See here, sir. If you are seeking to sell us some of your snake oil, not only will I throttle you with the serious end of my walking stick, I will make certain the constable is made aware of your egregious solicitations.”

“Oh! No no, Mister Hobbs! I assure you, I am not here selling anything! I’m here about a … problem that I was told you were … the kind of man to be of a help with.”

Again I allowed my curious mind to best me, inviting the interloper through the door and into the office.

“You have one minute, sir. Out with it now.”

He nodded with understanding and set about with his story.

“Mister Hobbs, I have quite this problem with … you see, there is this hole.”

“A hole?”

“Well, more like a door, really.”

“A door, you say? Mister…”

“Beaton, Mister Hobbs. Chester Beaton.”

“…Beaton. I see. Well, Mister Beaton, have you somehow mistaken me to be a tradesman in the craft of carpentry?”

“Well no, I-”

“Then why is it, Mister Beaton, that I should be standing here in my bedclothes at this godforsaken hour to listen to a nuisance such as yourself carry on about doors? Or doors with holes in them. Hm?”

I must admit that it was quite unreasonable of me to have unloaded with such displeasure at the gentleman. The interruption in my nightly ritual had gotten the best of my manners, I am afraid to admit.

“This … hole, Mister Hobbs. It’s not on a door. It is the door. It … hangs in the air, above the ground.”

At that, I took a moment to comprehend. “If this is, as you say, a hole–and it floats about in the air on its own accord–then how is it that it can be seen?”

“Because when I peer through it, there’s something. There’s someplace. Someplace else.”

“Hm. Well, Mister Beaton, I will admit that you may have sought out an appropriate person to investigate such a phenomenon, but I do not see why it could not have waited to be brought to my attention at a more decent hour.”

“There is something sinister about that hole, Mister Hobbs. It is not merely some curiosity to ponder. There are … things … that come out of it, from time to time. I have not seen it for myself, but I’m very sure they do. But that is not why I’ve sought you out with such urgency, sir.”

The man then cast his eyes downward and began to weep.

“It’s my son, Mister Hobbs. My fool boy’s gone into the hole and hasn’t returned.”

The coach to the outskirts of Dalcour was a downright miserable experience, but I must say I appreciated Mister Beaton’s gumption in assuming its need. It was indeed of great assistance in transporting my person and necessities to this portal’s whereabouts. I would not have taken near as many of my instruments if traveling on horseback, and, likewise, Sadie with me.

"You say this portal Mister Beaton speaks of … something’s come out of it?” Sadie asked. “Did he say what things?”

“No. 'Things’, is all he said and all that I need to know at the moment. It was sufficient enough of a description that we should be on our way to this place, without delay.”

“I can’t say I believe we’ve ever encountered a case where anyone has experienced travel through these portals.”

“In fact, no, Miss Cartwell. We have not. We’ve been told what manner of things have gone into this particular portal, one being Mister Beaton’s son. I’m curious to know what, in fact, has come out from it.”

The time on my watch read half-past five o’clock when the coach finally came to a stop, and the sun began to light the cloud-filled sky. Outside the southernly window: An open and empty clover field, stretching as far as the distant marshlands. To the north, a most peculiar sight: More of the same field of clover, though set about with a small grove of trees and an uncountable number of what appeared to be unmarked graves.

“This is the place, Mister Hobbs,” called Chester Beaton from his seat outside. “There, to our right.”

Sadie and I withdrew ourselves from the carriage and faced the field with the upturned earth. “What is this place, Mister Beaton?” I asked. “Is this property of yours?”

Mister Beaton stepped to the ground beside us. “It is indeed, sir. Twenty-three-and-a-half acres. Deeded to me by my dear Uncle Forrest when he passed on in the War Between the States. Hadn’t come down to these parts to look into it until last week.”

“Your uncle left you a graveyard?” asked Sadie.

“Well, ma’am, I didn’t rightly know what Uncle Forrest left me until I’d arrived. I must say, it was a troubling sight to say the least.”

At first approximation, I would say there were a good several hundred graves with varying amounts of overgrowth. Those closer to where we stood seemed the freshest, with a dozen or more freshly dug and empty. None were with cross or tombstone, with only a fist-sized, round stone placed upon each with purpose. And then there was, of course, the staircase.

Standing twelve risers high stood a great set of granite steps, situated some distance away, at the very back of the field of graves. Ornate, wrought iron railings ran the length of both sides, raised hip high upon curved, metal balusters. Both railings and topmost stair terminated at nothing at all, merely unoccupied air.

“What’s the meaning of those stairs, Mister Beaton?” I asked.

The expression on the man’s face grew grave. “They lead up to the hole I spoke of, sir. Where Daniel went in and has yet to come out.”

Mister Beaton could no doubt see by my puzzled expression that I saw nothing of the sort. “You’ll be able to see the hole when we get a bit closer.”

“What was it that stood behind it before?” Sadie asked. “Was there once a chapel, perhaps consumed by fire in the past?”

“No, I don’t believe so, ma’am. I can’t say it looks like anything was behind it, at least not for a coon’s age. Field is flat and thick with clover there. Not a stone foundation, no chimney. Just the stairs. And that hole.”

I removed my top hat in respect to the deceased and gestured toward the empty holes. “And is it you who is still burying people in these graves, Mister Beaton? It seems someone has been quite recently.”

“No, sir. Those were already here when my son and I arrived. Though that covered one there was empty two days ago.” He pointed to a plot onto which there appeared to be the freshest soil.

“Well if that isn’t peculiar,” said Sadie.

“Quite. Who else knows of this place?”

Mister Beaton shook his head and said, “As far as I know, not a soul. I’m sure you can see we are quite in the middle of nowhere, Mister Hobbs. The closest parish is miles away. For a person to cart the dead so far, out to this remote spot, seems a bit, well, foolish, wouldn’t you say?”

“I would. And with no markers apart from small stones,” I said. Without another word, I retrieved a smaller satchel of my instruments from the coach and began walking through the field of graves, to the queer set of stairs. Sadie joined my side, while Mister Beaton lagged a tad behind.

Sadie said to me in a hushed voice, “What is your assessment of all this, Darius? Mass graves? Fresh ones left to be filled? I fear the man is deranged and has led us here and means for us to occupy two of them.”

“Nonsense. The gentleman is clearly mightily distressed over losing his boy; nothing more. As for these and who has been filling them, I will forgo my assessment until I’ve taken a closer gander at the true object of interest here.”

Mister Beaton was correct: The portal was most definitely evident as we grew nearer the staircase. Upon first glance, it had similar visual properties to those few I’d encountered in the past. I was most interested the supposed ability for matter to pass through this particular instance.

The stairs were a bit larger than I had supposed when standing by the cart path. They appeared rather new as well, without the weathering of time making its mark; not a bit of rust on the railings, not blemish upon the stone. I put on my specs for a closer look. It was then I noted clear indication of treading upon the steps, dirt clogs in many large, boot-shaped patterns.

I said, “These boot marks, Mister Beaton. Would they be from yourself, or your son?”

The man appeared mesmerized by the peculiar swirling patterns made along the edges of the portal.

“Mister Beaton?”

“Uh, sorry, Mister Hobbs. Those prints? They aren’t mine, though I don’t see how they could be my son’s, either. He’d only gone up them the one time. And those … it’s some ungodly large feet that made those.”

Sadie had already withdrawn one of the instruments from my satchel and was passing it over one clump left on the bottommost step. I approached the staircase and began to climb. Beaton called after me, “Uh, Mister Hobbs! Please, sir, do be careful,” but I paid him no mind.

I did not need to get close to the anomaly to see into it. Through it I could see what appeared to be a small commercial location, though it did not strike me as familiar. Though it was early morning where we stood, the place in the portal was in darkness. The signage upon small buildings was difficult to discern, though they were a most peculiar shape and color, unlike any I had seen before. The signage, buildings and roads were kept lit with an unprecedented number of electric lights. A most striking feature of the portal, as outrageous as it may sound, was its smell. A cool breeze was issuing forth from it, carrying the undeniable scent of something similar to burning coal. Not a soul could be seen nor heard.

I reached into my waistcoat pocket and withdrew a one-cent piece. I took a step downward and threw it into the portal. The coin vanished as though I had thrown it through a window. There came the faint sound from beyond of its fall onto something solid and firm, likely stone.

“Can you see my son, Mister Hobbs? Is he in there? Daniel!”

“Pipe down, Mister Beaton. I see no one. And I don’t mean to attempt stepping foot in there to locate him. It could very well be that this … door, as you call it, is only visible on this side. I would not want any of us to become lost like Daniel. T’would do no one no good, most of all yours truly.”

“Then what can we do? How can I get my son back?”

I lifted my top hat, gave my head a good scratching and thought for a brief moment. “Miss Cartwell, how recent would you say those prints are?”

She adjusted the dials on the instrument and looked bemused. “I would say the most recent are no older than half a day. Though I can never be sure with your … instruments, Mister Hobbs. You are the expert.”

“That’s it then. We will wait for whomever made those prints to return. When they do — as they inevitably will, judging by the recent work here — I will confront this person and get to the bottom of who they are and where your son Daniel might be, Mister Beaton. What is most important now is that you leave Miss Cartwell and I here alone. We can’t have your cart frightening them off. Meanwhile, we’ll wait under the cover of those trees there.”

It took a bit more persuading for Beaton to agree to leave. We gave him instructions to only return for us at nightfall, preferably with more provisions for Sadie and I. We unloaded the remaining boxes and bags that I’d brought along, then watched the coach with Mister Beaton trot off and out of sight. We brought everything and ourselves under the small grouping of trees, a fair distance away from the staircase though close enough to keep close eyes upon it. One of the devices I had with me, an exdimeter, was one Sadie and I had made use of on several investigations. Of its function I will say that it is for detection of the presence of beings not of our particular worldly dimension. I understand that may be a baffling concept for many to comprehend. So, to save time and further confusion, I will not get into the technicalities of its inner workings, nor will I of the magtrap we had set upon the ground some distance away.

Several hours progressed without incident. Sadie and I passed the time, each with a downturned head to a book, or conversing about the case at hand and another that had been confounding us for some time. In that particular investigation, we had spent two months in similar circumstances, left alone along the shoreline of Lake Salvador. The clients in that investigation had gotten reports from local townspeople of sighting their drowned daughter, standing along the water’s edge on several occasions and in the same location. Only when Sadie and I had finally caught sight of the girl ourselves, standing across a small inlet from us with her reflection cast upon the water, the exdimeter chimed. This itself was not unusual nor unexpected. It was the sight of the second reflection of the girl beside the first that we were unable to fathom, most especially when the second visage waved in our direction and disappeared, and the exdimeter silenced. When we called out to the girl, she turned and walked into the trees behind her. We haven’t received any reports that she’s been seen again.

It was setting upon supper time when the exdimeter sounded. Sadie silenced it immediately, and we turned eager eyes toward the staircase. Indeed, there was what appeared to be a person exiting the portal. To say that this individual was large would be a monumental understatement. He was enormous, the largest person I do believe I had ever seen before or have since. His head appeared the size of a prized fair watermelon and as hairless as a newborn babe. His clothing was certainly not a suitable attire for the likes of the deep south: A long-sleeved shirt of what appeared to be wool, dyed black and red, with suspenders supporting grey burlap trousers. Over one shoulder, he carried a large, black sack that appeared to strain him no more than a bag of straw to a normal-sized man. We thought it likely that it contained another body for one of the unfilled graves. Indeed, that is just where the behemoth was headed.

“What now?” Sadie asked.

“I believe we will get little progress in this investigation without confronting this giant.” With that, I withdrew my coil revolver and left the tree cover. I determined by Sadie’s intense exasperation that she was none too pleased by my actions.

"Will you at least take a proper weapon with you and not some knickknack?” she said, though I paid her no mind.

The man had already reached the edge of one of the empty holes and stopped, his back to us. “You, there!” I called out, as I pointed the business end of my gun toward the man. “I was wondering if you would please pardon my precautions and be so kind as to enlighten us as to what your business here might be and from whence you’ve come.”

The man’s bald head shot up in a flash. He tossed the large bag into the deep hole as easily as one would drop a sack of grain, and I heard it land loudly onto the earth below. Then the man turned to me. Though the sky around us had grown a shade darker, I was still able to discern that the man’s face was obscured with some kind of mask. As absurd as it may sound, the mask was that of another man’s face. Its steely expression was most disconcerting to say the least. He made no move; said not a word.

I spoke with as much intrepidity as I could muster. “I do not know where you come from, sir, but I do know that wherever that is, it’s through that portal there. Someplace far from here? Am I correct?”

He still said nothing, though now his hands were balled tightly into fists.

I continued, “Regardless of where that is or what your business here might be – and that is business we will get around to discussing, sir, mark my words – there is someone who has gone through that portal who needs to be retrieved.”

“Daniel!” Chester Beaton’s voice boomed from behind. Through the goings on around us, I hadn’t noticed his return. He approached quickly, seething, donning a rifle that was firmly pointed at the masked man. “Where’s Daniel?! You bring back my boy!”

“Mister Beaton!” I said. “Please don’t do anything foolish. You kill this man and that will make certain you never see your son again. I doubt you want that.”

Beaton looked queerly at my coil revolver, then more so at me. I had no doubt he’d never seen anything the likes of it before. He then cocked his rifle and took aim at the large man. “What in the hell are you? Is that … is that some kind of mask you’re wearing? Where’s my son? You have until the count of three to tell me where Daniel is, or by God I will fill you with lead! One!”

The masked man finally made a move and began to walk toward us with some sense of determination. I activated the internals of my revolver with my thumb and it powered on with a hum.

“Two!”

“You stop right there, sir,” I said to the menacing man. I would have liked to have told Mister Beaton to lower his rifle, but I was fearful just the same. The monster quickened his step.

“Three!”

“Mister Beaton, no!” Sadie called from her spot in the grove. It worked in getting the attention of Mister Beaton, who turned his head in a fair smack of surprise. In that heartbeat the masked man had moved with speed I’d never seen from a human. That monster was on Beaton, quick as a snake, and clasped one of his beastly hands around his neck. It came around it as completely as my own grasped the hilt of my gun. Beaton’s legs came a clear foot from the ground, the rifle still in one hand.

“Stop!” I said. “I will fire!”

He paid me no more attention than if I’d been a swamp fly. Beaton’s head flew to one side at an unnatural angle. The sound of its breaking came like the cracking of a branch in a storm wind. Beaton’s body grew limp, his rifle clattering into the grass. The man tossed Beaton’s body aside as easily as he’d done with the black bag.

“Darius!” Sadie yelled.

I took aim and pulled the revolver’s trigger. The air crackled and smelled electrified. The shot of blue lightning came forth from the gun and struck the man broadside. I’ve used the coil revolver several times in the past, and it has felled larger living beings than this with ease. This time, however, it didn’t slow him a lick. He continued his charge my way. It was time I directed his movements toward the magtrap.

“Darius! Let me put him down!” Sadie yelled. She was already brandishing her own set of pistols of the traditional sort. Overly eager, she was, as always.

“Easy, Miss Cartwell! Follow along with the plan!”

The man picked up speed as I darted away to my right, as best I could with my crippled leg. He gained nearly forty feet on me in no time at all, but he was right on target. In my understandable haste, I stumbled and fell flat to the ground.

“Hit it now, Sadie! Now!”

I heard the lever by Sadie slam shut, and immediately a circle of ground at the monster’s feet came alive with electricity. It held fast, working as it should to anchor his feet. He showed no bewilderment of any sort and made no further attempt to move. He remained still, with clenched fists the size of hams.

“Booyah!” I exclaimed, pushing myself to my feet. “Excellent timing, Sadie.” She stepped out into the clearing beside me, still armed.

"You and your booyahs. The things you say are as darned as the things you have and do, Darius Hobbs.”

“Well, I do have you, Miss Sadie Cartwell. Don’t forget that.”

“Not yet you don’t,” she said beneath her breath. She gestured toward the imprisoned man. “Well, you’ve got him. Now what? He killed poor Mister Beaton over there. I’m thinking he’d mean to do the same to us if he gets free of your circle of … sparks.”

As though Sadie’s words were a premonition, the circle of ground beneath the man began to crackle and fade. The sound of the magtrap capacitors that were placed behind the trees gave a downright unhealthy clunking sound.

“That, Miss Cartwell, is not a good sign.”

She pulled back the hammers of both pistols. “You and your damned doodads.”

The man stepped freely from the dimming circle, once again headed precisely in our direction and with decidedly ill intent. Sadie let loose a shot from each of her guns. The result seemed to be no more than holes in the beast’s woolen shirt. Before she could fire again, a sound came from the direction of the portal. A shrill whistle, sounding from the mouth of an unseen man. It came in two tones, one higher than the next. It caught all our attention, most especially that of the lumbering beast who stopped dead in his tracks.

Sadie said, “What was that? Was that someone from the portal?”

The tune came again.

“I do believe t'was,” I said, then watched as the huge man turned from us and made long running strides back toward the portal, like a dog being called home by his master.

“Stop!” I yelled. I fumbled for the coil revolver at my waistband, but it’d fallen from my hand when I fell. “You, there! Stop!” It was a feeble attempt to halt his progress, I know, but a man in desperation does indeed perform desperate deeds.

Two more shots reported from Sadie’s guns. Mister Beaton’s coach horse whinnied in the distance, beyond the edge of the field. The bullets made contact with the man but had no effect in halting his retreat. Sadie very much took the lead from me as we made pursuit.

“We cannot let him pass through that portal, Sadie!” I said between gasps for air. She shot again, one hitting the ground at the monster’s feet and the other sparking off the stone stairs. By the time Sadie had the hammers back again, he’d ascended the stairs entirely and passed through the portal as one passes through a door. Just as Chester Beaton had called it.

And then they were gone. Not simply the portal, but the stone stairs as well. Soundlessly and without grandeur, they had utterly disappeared. To say I was downhearted would be a vast understatement.

Sadie knew. She holstered her pistols and lay a hand on my back.

“You know that I have lived to see most matter of things inscrutable to most. There are experiences that I have provided assistance in explaining, and there are those I’ve been left to wonder about for the rest of my living days. Of a portal that can bring a living thing to and fro, in and out from this plane of existence, I cannot comprehend. But Sadie, I need to try.”

The silence that swept over us as the sun completed its decent below the tree line was broken by another sound from the exdimeter, as it chimed once again from the trees. We turned toward the empty space left by the missing stairs. Nothing.

I said, “What could be-” and was interrupted by the sound of muffled screams from a woman. They were coming from the empty grave. The black bag, left by the monster.

“Quickly!” I said, and Sadie and I set off in the direction of the sound.

Sadie was in the hole before I’d reached its edge. “What … what is this holding it closed? Looks like steel teeth.”

“I’ve seen something of this sort before,” I said. “Pull it by the larger part, there, at the end, then slide it across.”

Sadie did as she was told, and the bag opened as though peeled like a banana. Inside was a girl, tied at the hands like a hog. Her dress was unlike any I’d seen before, especially in the southern states. Her hair was long and golden, though blemished with a bloody gash above an eye. Her face was painted with more make-up than a two-bit prostitute. Across her bosom she wore a shirt bearing three symbols–or, rather, letters–that I believed to be greek. She appeared somewhat dazed though looked at us in utter surprise.

“Oh my god, thank you! Thank you! Thank you so much! That … that thing tried to kill me!”

“Take it easy, ma'am,” said Sadie. “That man is gone now. Can you tell me your name?”

“Uh. Jessica. Jessica Storey.”

“Miss Storey, I’m Miss Sadie Cartwell. That up there is Mister Darius Hobbs. We’re here to help you.”

The woman spotted me atop the mouth of the would-be grave. Her expression turned from relief to downright confusion, then.

“Wh- why are you both dressed like that?”

“Like … this?” I asked, quite confused I must say, as I had the same question for the young lady myself.

“Well, I do not know how to put this to you delicately, miss,” said Sadie. “But the circumstances which brought you here are quite of the … unusual sort.”

“Unusual sort?” she said, with some growing anxiety. “What the hell does that mean? Where the hell am I?”

I gave a look to Sadie that told her that I would take the conversation from this point forward. “Where do you think you are, Miss Storey?”

“I … I was at WSU. I was walking to a party, on Linden Street. Then that … that bald thing came out of no where and grabbed me. And then … then I don’t remember anything. I woke up in the dark, in this … I dunno, a fucking body bag?” She became beside herself with weeping.

“WSU?” I asked.

She took a moment to answer, then nodded. “Washington State University.”

I collapsed onto my backside and took my hat into my lap. My face had become clearly flushed, and I felt as I might become sick.

The world around me darkened.

“What’s the problem, Darius?” Pa asked me. I’d been crying something atrocious since leaving the schoolhouse for home. The lines through my dirt-streaked face was a clear indication of that to my observant father.

“Pa,” I said. “Allan says you ain’t ever had a ma or a pa. Is that the truth?”

Pa propped his spectacles atop his head and placed the metalwork he’d been tooling onto the bench he was seated at. “Who told you that? The Nichols boy?”

“Yes sir.”

Pa laughed. “Well that explains things.” He picked up a part from the bench, a piece of dismantled gun of some kind. “Step over here and help me out with this. You can hand me my tools.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Y'know, I’m not sure yet. It’s something new. Now hand me that piece that looks like a spring. I’m just about done. Then we can go and try it out.”

He dropped his specs before his eyes again and began to push the coil of metal into place with metal pincers. “So Allan Nichols is going on again about your grandpa, is it?”

“Yessir.”

“Well, let me tell you something, Darius. And this is between you and your pa, you understand?”

I nodded.

He snapped the open piece of the gun shut with both hands. “Alright. Hand me that screwdriver first,” he said, and that’s just what I did.

“Your friend Allan is ill-informed, Darius. I do have a mother and father.”

“Have, Pa? Do you mean 'had?’”

“No, I mean 'have.’ They are still alive … or, well … they are alive at the place they are. Or, rather, when they are.”

My father sensed the confusion from my lack of response.

“I’m not from this time, Darius. Remember those stories I told you about the state with George Washington’s name, the place I was once a great teacher of science? Those were not just silly bedtime stories, son. It’s where I’m from. When I’m from. My mother and father are still there.”

I slammed a hand down onto the bench with a fair bit of resentment. “Stop!”

“Darius?!”

“Stop your silly stories, Pa! The children of school poke fun at me! They call you a fool and a liar! They call me a fool and a liar! And now here you are still telling me your foolish lies! Stop it, Pa! Stop!”

My father, as always, retained his calm demeanor and made no answer. He went about tightening the screw of the last piece of the gun together and tossed it gently from hand to hand. He seemed to struggle within as to what should next pass his lips.

“Come on,” he said, finally. “Let’s give this a go.”

I followed him as we stepped outside into the field beside the shed. Surrounding us on three sides was not a thing but swamplands and bayou. Not a blessed soul for a mile around.

“Ready?” Pa said. “Watch this.”

He aimed his fancy gun at a sole greenless tree some fifty feet into the swamp. I heard the gun make a strange popping noise, then a sound I could only match to that of the crackle of burning gunpowder, with a smell unlike anything else. The sound grew louder and the smell grew more foul, when a small bolt of lightning flew forth from the gun and struck the tree, blackening it bark-to-core.

“Booyah!” Pa heartily belted out. My mouth hung open sure enough to catch a swam of flies.

“I’m sorry, Darius. You’re right,” Pa said. “I should’t be telling you any of my stories like they’re the truth. The honest truth is for you to discover for yourself, and you shouldn’t be simply taking the word of anyone without setting out to seek the proof for yourself. Remember that, and maybe you’ll understand your pa a bit more some day.”

“Darius?” came the concerned voice of Sadie, bringing my wits back to the present, so to speak. “Darius, are you well?”

I managed to speak, though I had barely the breath with which to do so. “What year is it, Miss Storey?”

“What?” the girl named Jessica asked. No doubt my question came as a bolt from the blue.

“What year do you believe this is?” I repeated with some heightened urgency.

“Wh- why is he asking me what year it is?” she asked Sadie with a fair bit of understandable concern.

“Just please answer him, miss. What is the current year?”

“Uh … ninety-three?”

It was then that I felt more enlightened to what I until that moment had come to believe was an impossibility. Ludicrous, I would and have said with certainty. All I’d come to learn from my father, before my days as an investigator of the strange and unorthodox, had suddenly been brought to brilliant light. The truth I’d been seeking to refute had become irrefutable. It had incited in me a refueled purpose that until that moment had all but been snuffed out.

“1893,” said Sadie. “You believe this to be the year eighteen-hundred and ninety-three?”

“What? Eight- No, I-”

“Doctor Archibald Gideon Hobbs,” I interrupted. “Do you know of a Doctor Hobbs, Miss Storey? At the school?”

“Professor Hobbs? Y…yeah, one of my sisters has Professor Hobbs, for EE. Electrical Engineering.”

I said nothing. Both ladies’ eyes were upon me, awaiting my response.

“Darius?” Sadie said. “Archibald Hobbs. That couldn’t be. Could it, now?

"Why?” the girl asked. “What’s he have to do with this?”

“Nothing, Miss Storey,” I said. “But it does appear that the things my father told me as a boy had indeed been true. You see, Doctor Hobbs fathered me some thirty-seven years ago, when he unwillingly came to this here time and place from the very time and place you’ve come, Miss Storey, and in a very similar manner.”

Sadie steadied the girl as she sat upright, clearly still dazed from the blow to her head. “Wait, what is he talking about?” she asked Sadie. “What time and place? This is a prank, right? You guys hit me in the head and you put me in a fucking bag, then tell me I’m what? A time traveler? Ha ha! But this is not funny! It’s sick! You’re sick!”

“Darius?”

“She comes from the future state of Washington, Miss Cartwell. From the late twentieth century. Why she was brought here by that … thing–why all of these poor souls were brought to this place and time–I sadly cannot comprehend. Though without another portal to take her back, this is where she is destined to remain.”

“Wait, what? Remain? No. No no no. Where am I? Where is this? Take me home! I want to go home!”

“Louisiana, 1881, Miss Storey,” I said, pushing myself to my feet and taking a gander back to where the stairs and portal once stood, where the girl and the monster had emerged not moments before, and where now there was not a thing but a field of green.

I patted my hat back atop my head. “For better or worse, this is now your home.”

The Reaping Of Bobby Ward [Short Story]

The “monster” in this story is actually something from my own childhood, and that rite of passage was something we did for years in my town.

You can hear this story performed on @thenosleeppodcast​ S06E23, but you’ll need to (and want to!) subscribe!

(Modified artwork done by @ottertron)

I’ve already lived a life full of stories to tell. It’s true that I tend to get repetitive from time to time, though I don’t think that means I’m losing my marbles so soon, or at least I certainly hope not. Subconscious avoidance is more like it. Cut out disturbing memory, copy-paste something else over it. There are times when I wish some of my memories were less interesting. My wife will tell you that they’re all of the mundane variety; she just hasn’t heard them all yet.

Like the one about the Grim Reaper.

Most everyone’s heard of at least of some kind of embodiment of Death. The Grim Reaper’s a top choice for most folks. The guy who carries a big scythe, who we all imagine stands dark and tall, hooded and cloaked, probably with a fleshless skull where a head should be. Maybe he’s got a bony finger peeking out from his sleeve, beckoning you with it or chastising you or whatever he does when he’s pointing at you.

The Grim Reaper’s a scary guy alright, but he’s not exactly the type of scary guy you might imagine running after you with his blade swinging over his head all propeller-like, screaming like some maniac in the night. No, I think most folks think The Reaper’s presence alone is enough to scare the every-living – or ever-dying, as the case may be – shit out of you. Most of the time, in his most frightening form, he just stands there, motionless.

Most of the time.

Summer vacation from high school in the mid-‘80s in a small New England town tended to be as boring as watching warts grow on a toad. Outside of watching television, home-based electronic entertainment was a luxury most of us couldn’t yet afford, and without access to a set of wheels other than a bicycle, we were more or less forced to be creative for entertainment.

Dave McGrath was a year older than I and, as far as anyone knew, was relatively friendless. I didn’t go out of my way to befriend the guy to the point of best-friendiness, though I certainly didn’t try to avoid him. Dave had just gotten his driver’s license that summer. That made Dave, to me, a convenient acquaintance. Unfortunately, a driver’s license doesn’t automatically come with transportation, so my celebration of that fact was short-lived.

I’d known Dave for a few years while thoroughly warming the bench together for the Peasley High varsity basketball team. We both had something peculiar in common: We were both tall, and we both royally sucked at basketball. The only reason we made the cut at tryouts was because there were no cuts; there simply weren’t enough kids trying out. Our most useful contribution was helping intimidate other schools by increasing the team’s visible height average.

Sitting on the bench for a high school varsity sports team felt a lot like the summer of Dave’s driver’s license. Facing us was possibility of a marked increase in our popularity, but instead we were met with the halting palm of denial.

Popularity does not always beget desirability. As if to prove to us that point, Dave’s asshole of a neighbor pulled up in his own '81 Chevy Camaro one summer night, as Dave and I shot hoops in the street. I swear on my sweet mother’s grave, that bastard could sniff out disappointment and despair from miles away and make sure he’d be present in time to enjoy the show, symbolic popcorn in-hand.

Said asshole, Bobby Ward, never left high school life and mentality behind, despite being a first-year at Harlan Community College. He hated the summer, partly because it meant he couldn’t wear his corduroy varsity letter jacket around the Harlan campus without trailing a stream of sweat in his path. He was still convinced of its ability to show he was a hotter shit than you, even though Harlan was half-populated with fellow graduates from Peasley. “Peasley two-point-oh,” they called it. There was little point it trying to bullshit those who were aware of our school’s varsity standards, but he knocked himself out.

Mostly, though, Bobby hated summer because he was a big guy. He wasn’t as tall as Dave, but he pushed close to three bills, a higher percentage of that not being muscle and bone. That didn’t mean he looked any less intimidating; something he took advantage of on a regular basis. Bobby was fond of insults, pranks and overall general discomfort at any level, especially if he was the one administering it. Unfortunately for Dave, living in close proximity to such a lout meant he was one of Bobby’s primary sources of entertainment.

As God is my witness, the bastard was actually eating fucking popcorn when he pulled up.

The Camaro’s tinted passenger-side window rolled down halfway. I took a half-assed shot from the foul line as Bobby leaned across from the driver’s seat. His fat face flashed a shit-eating grin, his full mouth still munching as he called out to us.

“Hey! You guys want to see something wicked fucked up?“

There were three others in the car with Bobby. His much-younger brother, John, sat back in the passenger seat, shielding his face from the spittle issuing from his left. In the back were two others I didn’t recognize, but they all seemed in about the same age-range as the rest of us.

Dave was usually extremely apprehensive to get anywhere close to Bobby Ward, let alone when he was behind the controls of machinery. Getting within arm’s reach of a quintessential bully like Bobby was seen as an invitation for an instant debagging, or worse. Maybe then it was a sudden onset of delirium brought on by the dry summer heat that caused Dave to call back in reply.

"I guess so.”

My jaw dropped, along with my missed shot.

“Let’s go. Get in.“

The passenger door flew open. The two kids in back slid aside to make room.

"Don’t mind those idiots,” Bobby said, motioning to the back seat. “Those’re my cousins, Paul and Greg. We just got back from seeing Fright Night, and these pussies thought it was scary!” He said “scary” as “scaya-wee,” in that “aw, poor baby” tone that’s specially reserved for parents of newborns and demeaning shitheels.

“Nuh-uh!” protested one of the cousins.

The shaming tone of Bobby’s voice seemed to snap Dave back into his usual, hesitant self and take a slight step back. “Why? Where are you going now?” he asked.

Bobby took a break from shoveling seed into his mouth. “You guys ever hear of the Grim Reaper?”

“What, the band?” I asked.

“The band? You retard! No! I mean the guy, The Grim Reaper. The one with the big axe!”

“It’s a scythe,” Dave corrected.

“Pssh! What-the-fuck ever! Scythe; big-ass axe. Yeah, him.”

“OK,” said Dave. “What about him?”

“Let’s go. Get in. You’ll see.”

###

Approximately thirty seconds later it started to sink in that we’d just crawled into the back seat of this tubby lug’s car and let him drive away with us. Apparently to see Death himself, no less.

The granite quarry was only about three miles from Dave and Bobby’s neighborhood, though the rough ride there felt like twenty. I’d heard of lots of kids sneaking off there to swim, drink and smoke, often times being chased away by town cops. Whether they were rumors or not, stories flew of people from other towns jumping off the fifty-foot ledges into the frigid, spring-fed water below, drowning or never resurfacing. Some said they were diving down too deep, drunk or high, getting stuck in one of the many sunken trucks or various other large pieces of junk. Worse stories told of witnessing seagulls feasting on body parts that had washed up onto stone ridges along the quarry walls. True or not, those tales were enough to keep my ass planted at a beach when I needed cooling off.

Bobby lit a cigarette from a Zippo as he slowed the Camaro to a crawl, taking the turn onto the quarry road. From a cracked and pot-holed road, the car dropped several inches onto the narrow gravel path.

“OK, I have to slow down,” Bobby said. “He’s up along this road somewhere, and we might miss him.”

“Who is?” asked Greg, to my left.

“The Grim Reaper, moron!” said Bobby.

“Bullshit!” said Paul.

“I shit you not! There is this guy, okay? And he walks on this road at night, looks just like him. He’s tall as shit, all dressed in a brown cloak. Carries a big fucking wheat-chopper.”

“Get the fuck out of here,” I said in disbelief.

“Hey, you’ll see. He’s up here somewhere. Keep an eye out. I’ll check the left side. Johnny, you check the right.”

Bobby continued to drive at walking speed while grunting the guitar riff from Smoke on the Water. The rest of us kept our mouths shut and our eyes wide.

Several minutes into the crawl down the path I asked, “Who told you about this guy?”

“Saw him myself,” Bobby replied in almost a whisper. “I took a chick up here last week, y'know, to fuck and stuff.”

Paul burst out laughing at that. “Shyeah, right!”

“Shut up, jerk-off!” Bobby blasted, reaching back in an attempt to swat at his cousin’s head. “Anyway, we come up around a corner, and there’s this huge guy. I mean huge! I didn’t know what he was gonna do – maybe cut my fuckin’ dick off – so I got the fuck out of there faster than Paul spooges beating off.”

“I don’t- Fuck you, Bobby,” Paul said.

“Sshh shh shh! Shut up guys!” Bobby’s brother interrupted. “Bobby, is this the place?

"Oh. Yeah yeah. We’re almost to the spot. He was … right around … ”

When reacting to terror, one can be undaunted and fearless, perhaps even brave; you can be cowering and terrified, or just extremely guarded; or you can be “jump-scared.” Regardless of whether or not you are naturally fearless or terrified, if something catches you by surprise, you’re going to be jump-scared. Case in point: The driver of a carload of wary teenagers blasting into abrupt, chaotic cacophony from near-dead silence.

Bobby yelled with such force that his voice cracked.

“HOLY SHIT THERE HE IS! HE’S RIGHT THERE!”

“THERE HE IS! GET OUT OF HERE!” John joined in. “GO, BOBBY! GET OUT! DRIVE!”

In the back seat we didn’t know what the hell was going on, but we were all jump-scared shitless, regardless. This time I mean the term “shitless” literally, as it was clear that someone in the car had loosened their bowels. All of this happened before any of the rest of us had made visual contact with whatever the Ward boys were carrying on about.

Then I saw him. About fifty yards away, abutting the woods on the right side of the road, was the unmistakable shape of a towering, hooded figure. From that distance, he looked to be eight-feet tall, carrying a very tall staff of some kind. The shape of the cloak was tattered and jagged, its hood covering and darkening anything behind. The car’s headlights filtered through the branches close to the road as they blew in the increasing winds. Shadows swept across the tree line, and the cloaked shape appeared to turn its head in our direction. The persistent, loud yelling and overpowering stench of fresh shit in the air made it difficult to think straight. The rush of adrenaline caused my throat to constrict and my eyes to water and burn.

The Wards continued to scream and point out the windshield. The rest of us pushed back into our seats. Bobby accelerated the car forward.

“What the hell are you doing?!” yelled Greg, or maybe Paul. “Turn around! TURN AROUND!”

The Camaro sped through the dirt, closer to what sure as hell looked like the Grim Reaper, big-ass axe and all. He was huge; taller than he appeared from where we first saw him. The wind continued to whip through the trees. The massive scythe shifted in its grasp. Others in the back seat cowered away from the passenger side, as though shifting themselves over by a foot would help save them from something intent on crashing through an already speeding car with its fleshless hands.

I plastered my face against the window in order to see his full height. With the headlights no longer illuminating him, I could only make out its distinct outline, that of a cloak and scythe. As we passed within a few yards of the thing, Bobby pulled the steering wheel counter-clockwise and fishtailed the car to face in the other direction, slamming everyone against the passenger side of the car.

The Ward brothers ceased their yelling almost as quickly as they’d started, as we sped away from the quarry. Then, joining the sound of the Camaro’s engine, came the sound of their snickering. Bobby punctuated the moment with his own coughed-out guffaw.

“You … you,” Bobby managed to sputter, in between gasps for breath and gagging on cigarette smoke. “You guys … shit yourselves! I mean, you literally, honest-to-God shit your pants, you were so scared!”

For a moment no one else spoke. I think the rest us were letting sink in what had just happened, even though we still were not sure what that was.

“I … didn’t,” said Paul, sounding as though he had first checked himself to make sure.

“Me neither,” Greg said. “But, ugh, someone did.”

The two cousins turned to me, their shirts pulled up over mouths and noses, hoping they’d serve as suitable gas masks.

“Don’t look at me,” I said, holding my hands up.

Dave sat motionless, staring at the floor.

Bobby’s ensuing laughter and ridicule was relentless.

###

To say the ride home was an unpleasant one would be an understatement. Dave silently endured Bobby’s continual indignities; the rest of us fought for room at the open windows. The smell of burning wood and leaves from some nearby brush fire overcame us, to our great relief. There seemed to be enough distractions to take our minds off the question most of us had, though: Who or what was that on the quarry road?

When Bobby’s car pulled up in front of his house, we couldn’t exit fast enough. You’d think a bomb was about to go off, though I guess in some sense one already had.

“My god, McGrath. You’re such a pussy,” Bobby carried on. “And you reek. I better not have to clean my fucking back seat!”

I quickly changed the subject. “Who the hell was that back there?” Dave was already halfway back to his house, with the unmistakable gait of someone with full pants.

“Who was that?” Bobby replied. “Who do you think it was, a giant wizard? It was the Grim-fucking-Reaper, dude, who else?”

“No, really,” said Paul. “Was it one of your wicked-big college friends?”

“Seriously?” Bobby asked. “Out in the middle of nowhere. Near the quarry. In the dark. Just to scare you ‘tards? Please.” He exhaled smoke while he chortled, then with an impressive flick shot his spent cigarette butt sailed thirty or forty feet down the road.

“He’s out there late at night,” Bobby continued. “Every night. You dorks never see him because you’re too chicken-shit to go out there. Probably a good thing though. You get too close, they say he brings that sickle down and BAM! You’re done. Right in half. He throws your bloody body parts down into the quarry. You sink down to the bottom and nobody ever finds you.”

To that, no one had anything to say. We stood around in silence for a bit, probably to let what Bobby said sink in as he flipped his lighter open on his jeans, then struck it lit for the Salem already hanging from his lips.

“Hey, Ken,” John called out to me. “You’d better hurry up and catch up to your boyfriend. He might need his butt wiped!”

“Ha Ha. Screw you,” I said as the others burst into laughter. I had to hold back from laughing myself. While Dave was by no means my best friend, he may have considered me his, and so I felt a friendly obligation to check on him. His situation was funny — at least to the rest of us — but at the same time I felt bad for the kid. As far as I knew, I was his only friend.

Mr. McGrath greeted me at the door. "Hey Kenny. You guys alright? Get in a fight or something? Dave just ran upstairs without saying anything. It wasn’t the Ward kid again, was it?”

“Uh, sorta,” I said, entering the front door. "He and his brother drove a bunch of us out to see something near the quarry, trying to scare us. It scared Dave more than usual, I guess.”

"Hm. The quarry, huh?”

The embarrassment was still cooling on Dave’s cheeks when he came down the stairs, wearing fresh clothes.

“Oh, hey,” he said, eyes darting between his father and me. “I, uh … I’ve got IBS, so … that kinda thing happens sometimes.”

“Okay,” I said. I had no idea what IBS was, but if it was what made the topic drop, I was happy just to let it end with that.

“Bobby Ward took you two out to the quarry tonight?” Mr. McGrath asked Dave.

Dave’s eyes scanned the floor. “Yeah.”

“And you two have never been out there at night before?”

“No,” we both said.

“Hm. So you hadn’t seen the Grim Reaper before, then.”

Two sets of teenage eyeballs were now fixed on Mr. McGrath.

“Wait,” Dave said, holding his hand up. His pinkish cheeks reddened, though now from outrage rather than humiliation. “You know about that guy out there? Why’d you never tell me about him before?”

Mr. McGrath took a seat on the foyer stairs. “You know I don’t like you kids – any kids – going out to the quarry at all, never mind when it’s dark. Too many accidents over there. I know some people who’ve died out there. Always the stupid jocks. I didn’t think I had to worry about you going out there at night until you were old enough to drive. I guess that’s changed now, huh?”

Neither one of us answered. Mr. McGrath took a moment to consider where to begin.

"I was a bit younger than you two when I first saw him; scared the shi- uh, crap out of me. Bobby’s father — Mr. Ward — he was actually with me at the time. This was before he became such a pain in the butt neighbor-from-hell, and we were, believe it or not, friends.

"The quarry was actually functioning at the time, so the only people going out there were stone cutters. Construction workers. There was nobody going there to swim. Adam – Mr. Ward – had an older brother, Richie. Richie had this incredible car – a '52 Olds Super 88. Always kept that thing immaculate. Anyway, Richie would race people at night for money all the time. Adam and I knew about it, but we never knew when it was happening. But we really wanted to see him race.

"One night, Adam rides over to my house and wakes me up, tells me he overheard his brother talking about a race he was doing on the other side of Peasley, near Eastboro. We thought, 'Finally, now’s our chance.’ We’d heard that the quickest way to get to Eastboro was through a path by the quarry, but we’d never been out that way before. It didn’t matter. We got on our bikes and we pedaled our butts off, in the dark, down that long, gravely, quarry road. No houses. No lights. Nothing. Just the sound of two kids huffing and puffing, bike chains rattling.

"We get to where we can barely see the outline of some of the machines and buildings up ahead. And that’s when I saw it. I could see this huge, cloaked figure by the side of the road, across from the quarry pit, along the woods. I stopped dead in my tracks. Adam nearly ran right into me. He saw it too. This huge guy, just … standing there. We watched for maybe five minutes, just watching him. Adam wanted to turn back, but I was pretty determined to see the race. So I got back on my bike and started pedaling. The one gear my bike had couldn’t keep up with how fast my legs moved. I could hear Adam behind me, scared half to death. Just as we’re about to pass that giant at the edge of the road, BAM!”

"What?” Dave asked.

“I hit a patch of loose gravel. Went right down and skinned my left palm nearly to the bone. Adam, that no-good coward … he just kept on pedaling. Left me alone. I was out-of-my-mind scared. And then I looked up.”

“Who was it? What did you see?” I couldn’t get the questions out fast enough.

Mr. McGrath leaned in. “No one.”

Dave said, “Wait, what are you talking about, 'no one’?”

“I mean no one,” his father said. “It was just an enormous tree.”

Dave’s head flung back. “A fucking tree?”

“Hey!” Mr. McGrath said. “Yes, a tree. That big, hulking guy along the side of the road isn’t a guy at all — just an old, rotten, hollowed-out tree.“

Dave’s father continued his story, about how the “Grim Reaper tree” had already been a sort of right-of-passage for newly-licensed teen drivers for years, before he and Adam Ward happened upon it. The tradition eventually tapered off, then seemed to resurface in recent years, likely once Mr. Ward introduced the old tradition to his son. A sadist like Bobby Ward no doubt cherished the opportunity to christen kids to the Grim Reaper.

It was getting late. I said my goodnights and pedaled home in the dark. Though I now knew that the thing we’d seen earlier was a tree, and though I was nowhere near the quarry, I kept to the center of the roads, far away from the bordering woods.

I beat my personal best time on the route home that night by ten minutes.

###

The rest of that summer was more of the same: Hot, dry, and painfully uneventful. In August, the McGraths helped Dave spring for a barely-working, piss-yellow ’76 Chevette. Its floorboards were so rusted through that Fred Flintstone could’ve started it. Its engine begged for being rebuilt or, more appropriately, being put out of its misery. Dave was desperate to push the car past state inspection and spent the remainder of vacation with his lanky frame working underneath that shitbox.

Bobby Ward gave Dave some respite from further ridicule, thanks only to Bobby somehow landing himself a girlfriend, something I wouldn’t have ever believed possible if I hadn’t seen the delusional girl for myself. There was no more talk of that night in Bobby’s car or of Dave’s IBS, thank the good lord. And there was no more talk about the Grim Reaper tree.

When September and the new school year rolled around, so did basketball practice. And so did Bobby Ward. He slouched in the gymnasium stands during the first day of practice, switching from picking his teeth to repeatedly flicking his lighter open and closed with an echoing “click-snap,” usually timed for when a player attempted a foul-line shot. With the more tolerable fall weather, he once again stuffed himself into his Peasley varsity jacket, completing his usual picture of despicability.

Dave McGrath took the line for free-throw practice. He dribbled the ball three times and took position for his shot.

Clink-snap!

Dave released the ball in what was much more a straight line than an arc. The echo of Bobby’s lighter was interrupted by the thud of Dave’s brick shot against the backboard.

Bobby catcalled from the stands. “Briiick!” His girlfriend giggled in response.

“Keep it shut up there, Ward,” Coach Hancock called out.

Dave took another ball and did his best to ignore the distractions from the stands.

Clink-snap! Clink-snap!

Dave’s shot sailed in a perfect arc toward the basket, though that was the only thing perfect about it. The ball angled downward and well short of the rim of the hoop by at least six inches.

“McGraaath!” Bobby called out, mixed with his usual brand of cackling. “McGrath the giraffe! Air ball!”

“Shut up, Bobby, you fat piece of shit!” Dave yelled through clenched teeth. Only the sound of the air ball’s final bounces killed the ensuing silence, as if to trail Dave’s uncharacteristic outburst with an audible ellipsis.

“Or, what, McGrath?” Bobby finally chimed in. “You gonna crap in my car again? Hey everyone, McGrath the giraffe crapped his pants in my car last summer! He was so scared he shat himself! It’s true! Ask Kenny!”

“Alright, you two, button it up!” screamed Hancock.

“Tell ‘em, Ken,” said Bobby. “You were there.”

“Ward!” the coach interrupted. “Out of here! Now!”

As Bobby grabbed his girlfriend’s arm to walk out, the eyes of everyone else were on me.

I am a horrible liar. My father used to tell me that if aliens ever landed on Earth and I had to convincingly lie to them in order to save all humanity from enslavement, we’d all be polishing flying saucers before two words passed my lips. Not that being able to easily determine whether I was lying or not was a bad thing to my father, mind you. If I can’t find a way out of answering a question where lying is in the best interest of either myself or someone else I’m close to, my mouth resorts to stammering and my eyes will drift anywhere other than straight ahead.

I let my shrugging shoulders do the talking this time. Sometimes silence is the only safe way to lie.

###

I lived only about a mile away from the high school, so most nights after practice I usually hoofed it home rather than wait for my parents or someone else to give me a ride. That night, after I got about a quarter-mile away from the gymnasium parking lot, headlights approached behind me, attached to a car with a muffler so loud that one might have thought an airplane was bearing down on me. The sound slowed as the car pulled up beside me. Slowing down and matching my walking speed, on my right, was Dave McGrath, sitting behind what could barely be called an automobile. A Frankenstein’s monster of machinery, its creator at the controls.

“Hey!” Dave called out from the open window of his resurrected Chevette. It was now more Bondo grey than yellow. He spoke up more than usual, to be heard above the growling, hole-riddled muffler.

“Passed inspection?” I called back.

“It passed my inspection,” Dave said, pulling the car to a stop. “Come on, I’ll give you a ride.”

Against my better judgement, I walked around to the other side of the car and got in. Thankfully the floor was intact, or at least the new floor mats provided a convincing cover-up job. Dave struggled with the shifter as he threw it into gear and brought the accelerator down hard, filling the air once again with muffler racket, joined with the acrid smell of spent, cheap fuel.

“Thanks,” I said, as we made our way up the road. "Listen, I’m sorry about that in there, I-”

“Yeah, no problem,” Dave interrupted, brushing off the rest of my sentence. “I’ve got another thing I have to do first.”

“O … kay?”

“That piece of shit Bobby Ward. I’m gonna make him know what it feels like to shit his pants. Right now. Tonight.”

“How… ?”

“I’ll tell you in a minute. Roll down your window.”

We’d come to a stop light, and as I cranked the squeaky window down and thought to myself how bad of an idea it sounded to fuck with Bobby Ward, a familiar sound flooded the air and joined that of Dave’s car. Bobby Ward’s Camaro.

“Hey!” Dave called across from me. “Hey, Ward!”

Bobby’s head snapped to look, and his eyes burned holes through the both of us. He rolled his window down.

“The hell you want, McGrath?”

“I wanna see that Grim Reaper again. Meet me there in an hour.”

Bobby’s girlfriend joined him in an uproar of laughter. “What, so you can crap yourself again?” he said.

“Just meet me there. You’ll see.”

Bobby eyed us suspiciously for a moment while the light turned green. “Okay. Alright. I’ll meet you there. I’ve gotta hand it to you, McGrath, I didn’t think you’d have the balls to go out there again. We’ll see if you can control yourself this time. See you in an hour, pussies.”

At that, the Camaro took off ahead of us before Dave could put his own car in gear.

“Um. Well now what?” I asked.

Dave made no answer. Instead of heading straight ahead and toward home, Dave turned left, toward the quarry road.

###

When we pulled off the paved road and onto the leaf-covered gravel path, I couldn’t let Dave’s silence sit for another moment.

“Hey, what’s the deal?”

Dave stopped the car. “Get out.”

“Wait. What? Get out? Here?”

“Alright, here’s the plan. You’ll stay here and wait for Bobby to show up. When he does, you jump around and wave your arms, panicking. You tell him I wimped out, kicked you out and went home.”

“And…?”

“And he’ll pick you up and take you with him, because he doesn’t hate you like he hates me. And when you guys show up, I’ll be hiding inside the hollow tree. I’ll move it around, make some creepy noises. You start that whole yelling bit he does. He will freak the fuck out!”

“You think that’ll work?”

“Yeah. Well, probably. Don’t worry. Trust me, I’ll be convincing. Later, you can tell me all about his reaction.”

The plan sounded funny, I’ll admit, but I knew Dave would have to be incredibly convincing to scare that lout Bobby Ward. He already knew that the Grim Reaper was nothing more than an old tree, so seeing it move around was more likely to get him curious than scared. But I was up for seeing how it would play out.

With an outburst of screaming metal, my door flew open upon its rusty hinges. I exited the car and Dave drove away, sputtering into the dark. The usual under-tire crunch and pop of crushed stone became instead a white noise of crumbling, dead foliage that swept out in waves from beneath the car’s undercarriage.

I didn’t have to wait in the dark for long. Five minutes later, the rumble of Bobby Ward’s car approached the quarry road. I immediately started waving my hands over my head and jumping, blinded by the Camaro’s high-beams.

“Kenny? What the fuck?”

“Dave chickened out, man! He got pissed because I laughed, then he kicked me out. Can I get a ride?”

Bobby bellowed with laughter. “I knew it. What a pussy. Whatever. Get in.”

Bobby’s girlfriend sat next to him, so I climbed into the back seat. “Hey, can we still go see the Grim Reaper?” I asked.

“Seriously? Man, you’ve got balls, Kenny. Not like your buddy the Giraffe! Alright, let’s go.”

A few minutes later, just before where we’d stopped on my first trip to this same place in August, I saw the Grim Reaper. I started into my act before Bobby could.

“HE’S THERE! OHMYGOD, HE’S MOVING! LOOK!”

Bobby glided the car a few feet more before hitting the brakes.

“He’s what?” Bobby asked. “Did you say moving? Are you high, Kenny? It’s not moving.”

But Bobby was right. The tree was not moving. It remained as still as it had before, with only a few tricks of light to give the appearance that a cloak billowed about in the wind.

“No, no. Look! He’s … he’s moving! Listen! He’s yelling or something!”

Bobby cut the engine and rolled his window down. The only sounds that greeted us were the “ting ting” of a cooling engine and the skitter of blown-about leaves.

Bobby chuckled. “Kenny, you asshole. Are you seriously trying to fuck with me? Really?”

Bobby started the car back up and pulled up to within twenty feet of the towering Grim Reaper. At that distance, it was plain to see the truth of what it was. A familiar wind sent the overhanging branches into a frenzy, sending shadows once again into a dance among the Reaper’s cloak of rotted bark.

Bobby exited the car and strutted over to within a few feet of the Reaper. Even at Bobby’s six-foot height, the decaying thing rose another two feet above him, seeming to stare above his head and into the darkness beyond the quarry. Bobby pulled his Zippo and a cigarette from his letter jacket pocket.

“Here! Now you see, Kenny!” he called out, laughing and turning toward us. “It’s just a dumb, old, rotten stump! That’s all it is! McGrath Giraffe is scared shitless … of a stupid. Fucking. Tree!”

He struck the lighter open. Clink-chick!

Something happened then: The Grim Reaper — the hulking husk of what looked to have once been a mighty oak of Peasley Town Forest — began to move. I was speechless at how realistic it looked, at how well Dave was playing the part. The branches that hung by its sides began to rise, shedding dead leaves and reaching upwards and outwards toward the unknowing Bobby. I had no time to go back into my act before Bobby’s girlfriend started into a frenzy of her own.

“Oh my God! Bobby! He’s right! That thing is moving!”

Bobby had little time to react. He lit the end of the cigarette dangling from his mouth. He was just able to mumble an annoyed, “What?” out of his pursed lips before everything went to hell.

The branches moved quickly. Like giant tendrils, they extended and seized Bobby around his chest, then lifted the fat oaf from the ground. Bobby’s girlfriend shrieked. My jaw dropped. It wasn’t possible for a skinny guy like Dave to do this. There was no way in hell.

Bobby struggled to break himself free, but it seemed his thrashing only got himself further caught up in the vines that entangled the branches.

“Wha- What the fuck?! Let the fuck go of me!”

The branches only pulled Bobby in tighter. In the midst of it all, the two became enveloped in a sudden eerie fog that materialized out of nowhere. I pulled myself together and got out of the car, if for nothing more than to make a run for it. But that wasn’t fog.

It was smoke.

While Bobby tussled amongst a mass of branches and knotted vines, he’d dropped the lit Zippo onto the ground, into the piles of dry leaves at the base of the Reaper. Flames began to lick the bottoms of Bobby’s feet as he remained embraced in the tree-branch hug.

“Dave! Dave, if you’re in there, get out, man! The woods are on fire!” I yelled.

Bobby’s eyes widened. “Dave? McGrath?! You mother fucker! I’ll get you! I’ll fuck you both!”

But there was no letting go. The branches held fast and only seemed to further tighten with every struggle Bobby made. His face reddened with a mix of range and panic, the fire continuing to grow around them.

“Dave!” I yelled again. “Give it up, Dave! Let’s go!”

The engine of Bobby’s Camaro thundered, and gravel and leaves left from under it as it backed away from the scene. Bobby’s girlfriend had taken the wheel. She spun the car around, nearly sending it off into the woods before punching it forward and speeding away down the road. With the car gone, the only sound now was that of crackling brush and Bobby’s strained grunts. Then a voice.

“Wh- What the hell happened?”

It was Dave. He approached behind me, coming out of the forest, his eyes wider than my own. I could say nothing.

A sound of rotten wood cracking, and I turned back to look just as whatever thing the Grim Reaper really was uprooted itself. Like no noise I’d ever heard before, the thing let out what I can only describe as a growl of something ancient and angry, a throaty animal roar that spoke of both torment and fury. Fire draped the entangled two as the ungodly shape lumbered across the ground and toward the deep quarry’s edge. As the flames climbed Bobby Ward’s jeans and began to ignite his corduroy jacket, he screamed. He screamed as one screams not of pain but of pure terror.

Both the roar and the scream died off as a distant echo, as the two tumbled sideways, falling into the quarry and out of sight.

###

That was not the last we saw of Bobby Ward.

The girlfriend eventually returned with police and fire vehicles in tow. While the fire became contained, an officer began asking us of Bobby’s whereabouts. Bobby’s girlfriend hadn’t seen all of what had happened. It was up to me and Dave to tell.

I started to explain. “He-“

“I was messing around with him and we got caught up in some trees,” Dave interrupted. “Then he dropped his lighter. I got out of there, but … Bobby panicked and jumped into the quarry to put himself out.”

Before we were asked anything more, another officer called out from the quarry. “We’ve got something down here!”

Ambulances were called in, and we saw what had been found. Bobby Ward, barely recognizable. He’d become a twisted mass of scorched, blackened and bloodied skin, naked but for a fragment of his jacket, the letter “P” of Peasley High, adhered to his chest within overlapping, melted skin.

The official assessment of Bobby’s death was severe burns and drowning. An accident.

Dave’s crappy car had broken down that night, far past the quarry. He’d never been able to execute his plan. To become the Grim Reaper. To scare Bobby Ward into shitting his own pants. To this day I’m betting Dave still wonders to himself: Did all that really happen? Was it all just some fucked up dream? Because I know I do.

Why else would the Grim Reaper still be standing there today?

Chyandour [Short Story]

The theme of a lonely place on a lake has been that of a couple of my stories. Yes, I have a small place up in the woods of New Hampshire, and yes I’ve had a couple occasions when it’s creeped the hell out of me. This particular story came to me on one night I had to spent there alone with my dog. Thankfully, the rest of the true story is nothing at all like what happens here.

You can also hear this story read on the @thenosleeppodcast S06E21 episode.

—

Morning has not been kind to me lately. I’m not sure I can say we’ve ever quite seen eye to eye, morning and me. She’s just being more of a bitch than usual these days. She’s a vicious reminder that my desperate attempt at sleep has ended; daylight is here, and, with it, the rest of the waking world. Expecting things from me. Expecting my full attention. Because, after all, I’ve had a restful sleep, haven’t I? That’s what they assume. That’s what they have to assume. Otherwise, I’ve got nothing. I’m out on my ass.

But the morning isn’t all bad. For her, night makes way. For me, night has been the cruelest bastard of all.

Ginger, I know, feels the same way. Though, unlike me, she gets to sleep all day.

Ginger is my three-year-old Shepherd. Since late last November, she and I have more or less been on the same sleepless, nighttime schedule. There are times when knowing she’s laying alert at the foot of my bed gets me a few moments of eye resting, but not often. My wife, meanwhile, sleeps through the night like a stone. As far as she’s concerned, I’m dealing with an extended bout of insomnia, most likely due to stress of the job. If that were only true. But I won’t tell her the real reason. I can’t. Our son can’t afford to have us both losing our minds. Not again.

She can’t know what happened last time at Chyandour.

Katy fell in love with the place. The moment she crossed the threshold, that was it. Five years ago. It was a summer so hot and dry the lake dropped nearly a foot, and swimming in it felt like a bath. The house belonged to my grandfather, who’d passed away that spring and left it for my mother and her sister to grapple over. It wasn’t much of a fight, really. Aunt Rita wanted nothing to do with it. She said Chyandour was a closet of bad memories she was keen on keeping shut. My parents, meanwhile, had since moved to Florida, and while they didn’t outright gift the house to me when they left, I’d been given license to make use of it any time I liked. Thirty acres. The entire western coastline.

But Chyandour was never my thing. Chyandour: A name my grandmother gave the house, decades ago, when my grandfather first had it built. That’s the sort of thing people sometimes do with houses along bodies of water. Like boats and ships, they’re given names. You could suppose it gives a house some quaint character, making it more of an exclusive destination than simply calling it “the lake house.” But a name. A name gives it a soul. For better or worse.

From the outside, the house isn’t very remarkable. Being in the middle of nowhere, it really does’t have to be. Northern weather resiliency is all that’s key. Its facade is shingled in unpainted cedar; its roof, aluminum panels with the stains and dents from years of wear. A large, screened turret sits adjacent to the kitchen, overlooking the wooden footpath, the large dock and beach far below. And beyond, the Pakniwat, a hundred-acre lake surrounded mostly by uninhabited conservation woodlands, and then the large, lonely plot Chyandour sits on. The surrounding area is what contributes to the beauty of the location, not the accommodations.

For such a large piece of property, the house is rather small. About nine-hundred square feet, which is certainly respectable for a part-time home. But when you’re up to inviting friends and family to spend the weekend, it can get rather – let’s just say – cozy. And that’s just how Grammy wanted it: Cozy. So that’s how my grandfather built it. For a rather introverted couple like Katy and I, and not up for inviting people along on our trips, it was just about right. Kids on one floor, adults on the other. Cozy when we wanted to be, blissfully distant when not.

Still, woodland living was never for me. I’m not a city boy, by any means, but to be so removed from the rest of the world feels disconcerting, to say the least. Sometimes, when the air becomes still and the birds haven’t yet woken, it’s not just quiet. It’s silent. There is nothing. And while I’m fine being alone, I am not fond of being lonely. And that’s just what being at Chyandour alone made me feel: Lonely.

Though the house isn’t mine, per se, I hold all of the responsibility for its upkeep. It’s only fair; we’re the only people making use of it. Winterizing the place was the last item to be checked off every year, and I’d been doing it for four. It’s not something I ever look forward to doing. I loathe the cold. Though this past year, after what had happened last summer, I was up for avoiding it altogether. I was up for never going back to Chyandour again.

Ginger and I pulled into the dirt driveway very early on a Friday. I had to burn a day of vacation in order to beat the northbound traffic, hoping to avoid the carloads of leaf-peepers that’d be clogging the highways and making the already miserable trip worse. I had the office reschedule all of my patients for the following week. I hated the fact that I was blowing a vacation day on something like this more than how swamped I’d be when I got back.

The ground was thoroughly littered in leaves. Every tree apart from firs and pines were bare to the bark. This far north, autumn had already passed through. The roof of the house was also a blanket of colorful foliage. Cleaning it off to prevent ice dams and roof collapse was one the chores on my to-do list for the weekend. I had plenty to keep myself busy for a couple of days.

When I opened the front door, Ginger got right to work sniffing about the place, as usual. The house had its own smell to it, one I can only describe as “stale cabin.” I guess every new house you enter, or one you hadn’t seen the inside of for months, has its own smell that you tend to get used to and not notice over time. Like boiled cabbage that’s seeped into the walls and carpets for over a century, or flowery air fresheners that waft throughout every room and cling like oil to every surface. Chyandour was stale cabin.

It was a mild day for November, and I was glad for the opportunity to throw some windows open and air the place out. I opened the door to the turret porch and stepped outside. Warm air filtered through the floor-to-roof screened walls, and through my nose I welcomed it deeply and filled my lungs. Early morning sun glittered upon the lake like diamonds dancing upon the water. Far below, the wooden dock extended outward, twenty feet from shore, its planks somehow kept bare and free of the fallen leaves.

I could see him laying there. Not presently. This wasn’t summer, and it wasn’t five months ago. In my mind I could still see Jake as I’d seen him last. Arms crossed behind his head as a makeshift pillow, legs linked at the ankles with one foot dancing to music only he could hear. The cords of headphones snaked from his ears to the small music player laying nearby. His usually pale skin already bronzing from the long stretch of cloudless days under a hot, July sun. We’d told him countless times to wear sunscreen, but on vacation you tend to let up on the rules. He was thirteen, only a fragment of worries of the world in his head.

Ginger sidled up beside me, interested at the moment in what was taking my attention. She stared down below and whimpered, as though she knew what I was feeling, or recalling her own memories of Jake. But this wasn’t some movie where things like that tend to happen, and I know dogs better than that. I swiped my jacket sleeve across my eyes, unpacked her bag of kibble and filled her bowl. I took the other bowl to the sink to fill with water. When I returned, the food bowl was still untouched and Ginger was still where I’d left her in the porch. But she was whimpering.

###

I spent the morning raking leaves, pine needles and fallen pinecones. A blanket nearly a foot thick clung to the roof, despite it being angled. The deck was much worse, and rain from the previous week made everything wet and heavy. And dirty. Ginger joined me outside, no doubt desperate for a walk but enjoying biding her time gnawing on the largest stick she could find. The work sounds miserable, and for the most part it is, but you don’t get many fall days like that. Looking down at the beautiful palette of colors scattered about the ground, some carried away by the growing winds of an incoming front, it gets you remembering why some say this is the best part of the world to live in. If it wasn’t so goddamn isolated, I’d be saying that myself. So I enjoy of it what I can, when I can.

With the leaves clear, the last bit of outside work was putting the canoe into storage. Just as we did all summer, it’d been left upside-down near the small beach. If I was being lazy, I could leave it there and it would probably be in the same place come spring. Probably. There was always the real risk of the lake rising higher than anticipated due to heavy snowfall, which would take said canoe on a ride of its own. That happened to our last canoe, and we never saw it again. Taken to the depths of the lake.

Ginger and I took the walk down to the dock together. I brought a few of the sticks she was chewing with me, and she hopped in anticipation of me throwing one of them for her to fetch. She loved the water, and the swimming would do good in tiring her out. I cranked my arm back to throw, and Ginger took off in the direction I was aiming. I released and the stick sailed end-over-end toward the water, just far enough out for Ginger to make a safe swim to it, but not too close to be easy. She reached the end of the dock and leapt in without hesitation. A cold chill ran through my body, in thinking of how frigid that water must be. There’s no testing of the waters for a dog. It’s dive right in, water’s fine.

I got to the end of the dock just as I saw Ginger’s head gliding above the water, about five feet from the stick. As though distracted by something, she turned around and started to head back to shore. I thought, maybe she couldn’t see it.

“Girly-girl, get the stick! Go get it!”

Her ears perked up and she turned back around. This time she got closer to the stick, but again she turned back around and whimpered. It wasn’t as though it was too far for her to reach.

“Go on! Get it, Ginger!”

I threw another stick. This one splashed down within her path, closer to shore. She wasn’t interested. She passed the stick and made her way to the beach.

“Ginger! What’s up?”

She paid me no attention and turned to face the lake. She sat down in the wet leaves and sand, staring out to where ripples still lapped away from her wake and the sticks I’d thrown. She hadn’t even taken a moment to shake off the water that matted down her fur. She cried again. Maybe the cold water had gotten to her after all. Or could it be that she remembered? Could a dog replay the day in her own head like I’d been cursed to do for the past five months?

Damn you, girl. Now I see it too. Still none of it makes sense. Jake is a skilled swimmer for his age. We trust him to know what he’s doing. He must have had enough of the sun and jumped in. One desperate yell for help, and then he’s gone. Ginger leaps in. I follow. We tread water for so long we almost go under for good.

He doesn’t comes up. Not minutes later. Not hours. Not days. Not ever. Other than the wet puddle he’d left upon the dock where he’d been laying, we never see sign of our oldest boy again. Not unless it’s like now, in memories sometimes best forgotten.

“Where did you go, Jake? God damn it, where did you go?”

More whimpering. This time it’s me.

###

The opposite shore was still bright and warm as it undertook the last of the daylight. True to a northern autumn, the cold fell fast upon the shadowed western bank. I brought an armload of firewood inside the house and in twenty minutes had the stove roaring. Ginger had since dried off. After finally eating, she coiled herself into a tight ball by the fire and promptly passed out. Being back at this place must have taken a toll on the poor girl. I felt like passing out myself. But it was still early, and I had more things to do before turning in. I was intent on getting out of there the next day and not spending another night. If I had my way, I’d be happy not going back ever again.

I finished most of the interior winterizing by about ten o’clock. All that was left was draining the pipes to prevent them from splitting in the eventual sub-zero temps. But I still had another morning to come, and I preferred a flushing toilet. Though isolated, the house had its own water supply, a cistern situated up on the hillside, kept full with rain water, melting snow and the occasional gas-powered siphoning from the lake. What we didn’t have was electricity, except when we threw the generator on in desperate times. With the exception of cell phones with weak signals, we were kept completely off the grid. Katy considered us blissfully incommunicado. To me, we were disconcertingly secluded.

I wish I could say I crashed for the night; that I slept like a log. Or a dog, as the case may be. It just wasn’t going to happen. Not without help. I pulled the bottle of Laphroaig cask strength out of my stash in the closet, emptied it neat into a glass. Three fingers. Closer to four. I knocked it all back in one go. It was a shame to treat it that way, but I was ready to be knocked on my ass right quick. There seemed to be no other way.

###

Splash.

“DAD!”

My head flew up from the table and my arm caught the empty whiskey bottle, sending it flying onto the floor.

“Jake?! Jacob?!”

The unbroken bottle continued to roll about on the hardwood while my own voice still echoed in my throbbing head. My throat was on fire. How long had I been yelling?

Damn it. God damn it.

I wanted to call Katy. I needed to. I wiped the string of spittle that clung to the table to my mouth and pulled out my cell. The time read about two-thirty. No signal. It wouldn’t matter, though. She slept like the dead and would wake up for nothing. I couldn’t let it get to me again, though. I’d have to forget what had happened. I had to sleep.

I managed to make my way to the sink, splashed water on my face and took long gulps of it with cupped hands. The house, the water — all of it is freezing cold. I pack the fireplace tight with new logs. Soon it’s again dangerous and hot, and the uncomfortable chill begins to dissolve.

The bed was already occupied by the dog. I let it slide, as I always do. She knows this and doesn’t budge. Katy’s not there, or sometimes it’d be Jake or Wil when one of them couldn’t fall asleep. I’m happy to let her stay.

I killed the only lantern I’d lit and slid between the glacial bed sheets. Bronze shadows dance upon the living room walls by the glow through the soot-stained window of the stove. It didn’t take long to feel the onset of sleep again. I rest and think of nothing other than welcoming it, as Ginger already had.

I’m awoken not long after by what I believe was a light. I could sense brightness as my lids reddened over my shut eyes, though once I cracked them open, there was nothing. I faced the sliding doors to the outside, the moonless sky beyond and the still lake far below. No sound other than the muffled crackling of burning wood from the stove in the next room. I brush it off as nothing. I’m overtired.

Minutes later, as I’m just drifting off again, Ginger’s head shoots up, ears perked, on alert. She’s heard something. That’s got my attention, and now my eyes are saucers. And I’m listening. But there is nothing. Nothing for a long while. Ginger shuffles off the bed and walks into the living room to investigate. I figure that’s what dogs are for and let her be. The tip-tap of her paws upon the floor grow distant, toward the front door by the kitchen. Maybe she’s just cold, I think, and she’s back by the fire. More likely she has to pee.

I wait for her usual scratch at the door, but it never comes. Instead, a low snarl. It’s my girly-girl, not some wild beast of the night or a thing unexplained. What isn’t explained is what’s upset her, and like a coward I keep the bed covers pulled tight to my chin and lay silently in wait. Her growling continues for minutes more, never escalating to a bark. Just a raccoon or opossum, rummaging in the trash I’d left outside to take home? This time of year, it could be a deer, perhaps, or even a bear. In normal circumstances, I am not such a pussy. In normal circumstances, I’m not alone – not at Chyandour. I’m not normally so exhausted by an afternoon of beating back vivid memories of my missing child, of so many fallen tears my shirt could be wrung out of them.

Ginger quiets. I can only assume that whatever she heard is gone, and I’m for the moment relieved. The bed lurches as she leaps back into it. This time she crawls closer beside me, prone against my back. She lets out a drawn-out sigh, and that alone is the comfort I need to feel at peace. She snuggles closer, and I sigh of contentment myself.

The growling starts again. Not from the bed. Just outside the bedroom door.

Tip-tap. Tip-tap.

It’s my girly-girl. It’s Ginger. And I think, how did I not notice her getting off the bed again? Except she didn’t.

The body next to me moves. I’m suddenly frightened to the point I could vomit, and I feel the bed begin to dampen beneath me. I consider my options. Pretend I’m asleep and let my dog scare away whatever is in the bed with me? Toss the blankets aside and make break for the sliding door? I’m not going anywhere. Fear paralyzes me.

“Come…” it says, and it is a voice that is of command, not suggestion. The air is suddenly fetid.

I hate this place! I hate it! I hate it! Go away!

The thing beside me makes a sound like a hiss, as though displeased with my thoughts. A weight is lifted from the bed as whatever it is slides away and onto the floor. But there are no footfalls, only Ginger’s continued growls. A long shadow grows upon the wall. It’s tall, not like one the dog would cast or any other sort of smaller animal. The form seems human.

Please just go away. Leave me alone. I want to say all of this, but I only dared to purse my eyelids shut.

Tip. Tap.

Ginger was just inside the room. She started barking, with a voice that said, “get the fuck out of here now or I’ll kill you,” that this was no warning, but a very sincere order. I heard the sliding glass door open, then shut. Ginger barreled into the room, still barking with increasing ferocity. Standing on her hind legs, she pawed at the glass door to be let out, wanting to make sure whoever or whatever had intruded on us was gone for good. It’s then that I had the nerve to get out of bed, to chance at seeing the trespasser flee off the side of the balcony and into the night. It was much too dark to see a thing. Then I heard it.

Splash.

In an instant and for a quick moment, bright light filled the room from every window. It seemed to come from all directions, with an intensity such that I had to shield my eyes from being blinded. Even Ginger was stunned, and she whined with shock. Without a sound it was gone, before either of us had time to adjust.

I immediately set about the house locking the doors and windows, something I hadn’t felt the need to do before, as removed from civilization as Chyandour was. I discovered the front door ajar. My hands were shaking so badly they were barely able to operate the deadbolts. My legs were rubber, clothes soaked. I steadied myself against my knees and caught my breath, and stared longingly at the empty bottle on the floor. I wished it was full.

I fell backwards onto my ass, pulled my legs up to my chest. Ginger sat beside me, as I wept until the sun came up.

Roughly an hour later I was able to pose as someone pulling themselves together. The bed, I saw, was still a mess, just as I’d left it. Still wet. The comforter, the sheets, the mattress — even the box spring — were drenched through to the floor. That wasn’t from me. Along the opposite side of the bed I slept on: The unmistakable, wet silhouette of a person. I’m baffled as to what to make of it. Ginger sniffs at it and whimpers. She walked over to the glass doors and stared out at the lake for a moment, then looked back at me expectedly.

“What’s up, girly-girl? Need to go out?”

She cried again. I went to the back door; unlatched the lock. Ginger pushed her way past me, through the door and outside, before I had it open an inch. I watched her scramble down the footpath, not to the nearby woods where she usually did her business. Instead, she made her way to the end of the dock and sat, facing the open water that was as still as a mirror.

I can’t get over how she misses him. She was Jake’s dog, after all. And Jake was her person. But she’s not by the water because she missed her boy. Not this time.

Her ears are pinned back, the hair on her back is raised. I can hear her growling again.

###

I packed up what I needed and hit the road. Physically and emotionally, I was spent. In my condition, driving was not the best of ideas, but there was no way I would stay longer than I had to. Ginger crashed in the back seat. I’m sure she was just as glad to be gone.

Relief washed over me when the tires finally hit the pavement of highway. My cell began to ring. A still image of Katy’s smiling face graced my dash screen.

“Hey.”

“Hey. You already on your way home?”

“Yeah. I’ve got one more thing to do first. Should be home in a few hours.”

“Okay. Wil and I are anxious to see you. You … feeling okay? You sound exhausted.”

“I am exhausted. But I’ll be fine. Can’t wait to see you guys.”

“Please drive safe, okay? Pull over if you have to?”

“Okay. I might do that. See you soon.”

I hung up and glanced at the empty passenger seat beside me.

I wish we didn’t have to go home. I wish we could stay there forever.

“I know you do, buddy.”

Dad?

“Yeah, Jake?”

Why do you hate the lake house so much?

I thought back to what Aunt Rita had told me long ago. The truth of why she hoped to never again set eyes upon that place. What my mother had so long denied happening and refused to believe. That, should we return, to be sure to never be alone while along the shore of Lake Pakniwat. To never be taken in by that greedy, evil place.

“Because Chyandour takes those that love it too much, Jake. Never lets go of them. Like it took you. Like it took my Grammy. And I won’t let it take your mom.”

The first gas station was another mile ahead. Filling the three empty canisters in the trunk should be enough to do the job.