Special Smashwords Edition
Midway of Fear
by
J. Troy Seate
Special Smashwords Edition
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Published by
Melange Books, LLC
White Bear Lake, MN 55110
Midway of Fear, J. Troy Seate, Copyright 2011
ISBN: 978-1-61235-302-9
Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
Credits
Copy/Line Edit: Mae Powers
Format Editor: Nancy Schumacher
Cover Artist: Mae Powers
About the Author
Troy has written everything from humor to the erotic to the macabre, and is especially keen on stories that transcend genre pigeonholing. His short stories and memoirs appear in numerous magazines, newspapers, anthologies and webzines. Recent publications can be found at www.melange-books.com with many additional works at www.troyseateauthor.webs.com and on amazon.com.
Author Contact
Website:
www.troyseateauthor.webs.com
Email:troyseate@hotmail.com
Also by J. Troy Seate at
Carnival of Nightmares
Sex in Bloom
‘Clansman’s Folly’, from Paranormal Dreams Anthology
‘Wonderman’ and ‘Wonderman’s Partner’ from R.U.S.H. (Raw, Unbridled Stories of Heroism) Anthology
‘Femme Fatales of the Future’ from Strange Desires 2 Anthology
Midway of Fear
by J. Troy Seate
Table of Contents
I’m glad you have decided to come along on these journeys of fantasy, mystery, and horror because I want to expose you to a few dark corners of the mind and moments of bright revelation. I want to pull you along in hopes that you will find the midway acts adventurous, seductive, and even whimsical.
Stephen King once suggested that in the literary world, his writing was the equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries. If that is so, my efforts could be the equivalent of a Good Times drive-thru. But I like what I like, especially when the trip through the drive-thru is brief.
I’ve compiled two dozen tales based on both the real and unreal. They might be horrible or humorous depending on my characters’ points of view. But characters are usually unreceptive to logic or reason, the murky rascals. And, like Mr. King and me, they are trying to keep the short story from becoming a lost art. I hope you find the journey along the Midway of Fear entertaining and enlightening.
J. Troy Seate
“Have
I not heard her footstep on the stair? Do I not
distinguish that
heavy and horrible beating of her heart?...
I tell you that she
now stands without the door!”
Edgar Allan Poe – The Fall of the House of Usher
“For one reason or another, there’s always a dame involved.”
Detective William Dyke, New Orleans PD - Rhapsody in Silken Blue
Sounds
I awake from the dark narcosis of sleep and hear someone digging.
There is no mistaking the sound of a shovel as it pushes into the ground, fracturing the earth, piling a small part of the universe
with its torn, string-like roots and microscopic creatures
onto its steel blade.
I can hear the sound again repeating over and over,
coming closer…closer.
The shovel is very near, only a few inches away.
It can mean only one thing.
I’ve waited so long for this sound and now it’s arrived.
My love has come to join me.
He breathes no longer.
Here in this cold ground he’ll lie with me forever,
my companion for eternity.
No more loneliness.
But wait…a shovel is taping on my box.
It’s pounding, smashing, breaking pieces of wood above my body.
It’s not my darling.
Greedy, strange hands pull at my rotted clothes and emaciated remains.
They’ve come to rob me even now, six feet below the surface of light.
I’ve been found and defiled once more.
And my loved one?
Buried with another perhaps,
but it matters no longer.
It’s been so long, after all.
Bessie lay the old book aside and listened to the sound of her own heartbeat. She turned her head to the side and glanced over her shoulder, half expecting to see something awful. Why did she read such things, images to haunt her waking hours and make sleep more frightening, especially now? Wasn’t the real world frightening enough? Hadn’t what had happened in her little country community been enough to bear?
Who knows what waits in the darkness? A line in an earlier story had asked. What waits in the darkness for thee?
An agonizing moan rattled down the hallway and through Bessie’s bedroom door. It gave her a customary chill. There had been mostly silence between Clarence and her even before his stroke, whatever emotion between them in the beginning long gone, dead and cold. He was a realist, one whose imagination never took flight. Understandable in a culture where the primary, life giving artery was farming.
Bessie had long since turned to fanciful tales, the darker, the more enticing. She knew enough elementary psychology to know her diligent reading was in part an avoidance of, or an escape from a less than exemplary marriage based on little more than routine, the rites of courtship so faded by time she could barely remember Clarence’s attempts at wooing her. And now, he was an invalid, a sad ending to a less than scintillating coupling which had borne no children, practically a sin in rural settings.
Creeeak!
Bessie sat up in bed. The sound was just loud enough to accelerate her pulse. Was it the house still settling and shifting after nearly a hundred years of occupancy, or did she have an intruder? Had the sound come from outside or inside the house? She cocked her head and listened. Could someone or something be listening back, listening for her? She might be getting old but she wasn’t scatterbrained. She had heard something out of the ordinary.
Unconsciously chewing her lip, she slipped out of bed and padded across the creaking cold floor to a curtained window. Boards groaned beneath her feet as she peeked out. Dawn had not yet come. Nothing was visible except the faint outlines of familiar shapes, still and dormant. The only sounds were the moaning of branches in a light breeze, the hoot of a distant owl, the rustle of dead leaves.
When she was a little girl, such a sight often caused distress. In the dim light, her imagination played tricks. Tree limbs could turn into arms and big rocks could become hulking monsters or tortured souls demanding some kind of reckoning with the living. Her grandfather supposedly had the gift of sight. He used to tell her the countryside was rife with ghosts and shape-shifters. Maybe it was his way of scaring kids into their houses at night, but she had never forgotten, nor totally lost her fear of the unknown that came with darkness.
Even now, toward the end of her fifth decade upon this earth, if she looked carefully enough, she believed she could see shapes flitting between the trees. Ghosts, goblins, shape-shifters, whatever her imagination was free to conjure. The more certain they were imaginary, the more real they became.
But it hadn’t been phantoms that killed Daisy Cox. Rumors were going around that she had been cut up, certain parts removed, and on top of everything else, gutted. The local constabulary’s investigation was about as tight as a sieve. Bessie had shivered when Gladys Brown had whispered the gory gossip through the phone line. It made her think of Jack the Ripper. Oh yes. Bessie knew about good old Jack. She’d perused everything she could find about him. She might be a simple country woman, but she was well-read. She had read about many infamous characters through uncountable boring nights of rural hum-drum, the real as well as the fictional.
Bessie couldn’t imagine anyone doing to a human being what had reportedly been done to Daisy. At local get-togethers, Daisy stood out from the cluster of older country women discussing recipes or grandchildren. She had been feisty and independent-minded, but sweet nonetheless. Could those traits have been motive for someone to snuff her? Most likely, it was some drifter or some drugged-up riffraff from a larger place which had placed this real life murder mystery practically in Bessie’s own backyard.
“I heard it will be a closed casket for her earthly departure, the poor thing,” Gladys had said. “I wonder if her drunken son will show his face. It would be nice if he paid his respects, don’t you think?”
Bessie would rather have been reading than listening to such prattle, but she dutifully agreed before making the excuse that she had to check on Clarence and try to coax some soup down his gullet.
“Poor Bessie. Always the dutiful wife. Well, you take care of your man. Hopefully he won’t linger on and suffer till kingdom come the way my poor Harold did with that horrible disease. A veil of tears is what it was.” There were women who liked to wallow in suffering. Bessie believed Gladys was one of those women, what the present generation might call a drama queen.
Daisy had indeed had a closed casket. Sonny boy, Buddy, in a rumpled, ill fitting seersucker suit stood by awkwardly as a preacher droned on about the Good Lord calling this faithful soul home and welcoming her into a golden mansion of many rooms. A core of community farmers and merchants stood by patiently over the hallowed ground where generations of locals had returned to be planted beneath the dark soil for eternity after leading humble, honest lives.
Bessie had been there also. Even though she’d never cottoned much to Daisy’s frivolous nature, it was the proper thing to do. But at her window, Bessie’s current thoughts moved from Gladys’s sing-song phone voice to the shapes that steadfastly resided beyond her house.
The light breeze ceased, the owl quieted. All was as still as death over the countryside and along the rural road that passed by her gate. It was a stillness that was eerie more than peaceful. Everything slept, almost everything. But within the scene’s normalcy, she had heard something that bore the quality of her scary stories—a squeak that could be a door opening. She would have to search the house.
She walked from the window to her bedroom door. The boards again protested under her weight. She eased the chair from under the doorknob, a precaution she had taken up ever since Daisy’s murder. A perpetrator was still on the loose and she had little confidence in the local law enforcement. Sheriff Barnard was good at dominoes, but little else.
What makes a human want to hurt another human? What makes a human want to hurt any living thing other than for food? Bessie didn’t understand the impulse, but people did it all the time. The evening news was a testament to the inhumanity inflicted by some human beings on others.
Another question overrode both of these. Why had Clarence wound up bedridden? Why did he have a stroke in the fields and turn into an invalid, and leave her with all the work? If he were well, he could go plodding through the house with his pistol. What defense did she have, an older woman in a house too big to tend properly? But Clarence wouldn’t have done that. “Foolish old woman,” he would have said to her.
Maybe the sinister creak was a fanciful image pulled forth by a mind addled with tales of evil doings, but Bessie felt compelled to check the house. She slowly opened her bedroom door and peered into the hallway. Clarence had his own bedroom down the hall. No reason to change accommodations after all these years. Although he’d had the stroke and couldn’t manage getting to the toilet “to tap a kidney,” he used to say; he remained somewhat mobile, usually when Bessie didn’t want him to be. He’d crawled out of bed a couple of times while she was in the throes of a crime story and managed to scratch at her bedroom door scaring the living daylights out of her. He couldn’t speak; only move his jaws pathetically in that helpless way of stroke patients. She might have considered a nursing home, but she wouldn’t have been keen on visiting a place that held the aroma of ancient farts or dried urine and spoiled milk, depending on the time of day. Besides, the nearest one was far away and they hadn’t the dough-ray-mi for such a luxury.
Bessie ventured into his room several times a day to feed and bathe Clarence, but not normally at night. She padded down to his door and turned the knob. There he lay, the jaw working up and down, trying to utter something or just dreaming the dreams of those lost in Never-Never Land. She barely looked at him, not wanting to dwell on how pale he was or how cracked and dry his lips were. The air seemed to thicken with the atmosphere of a sick room. She walked to his window and peered out over the landscape. It reminded her of how isolated she was. On the outer windowsill, a fallen leaf was snagged. It was brown and gnarled, curled upon itself like a crunchy, dead creature. It gave her a start, a reminder that death was all around.
Clarence’s breathing was too shallow to make noise. The only audible sound was the thumping in her chest. Bessie reentered the hallway and drew a breath. She looked past the doorway to what she could see of the living room. Everything appeared in order as she quietly entered. But deep down, she knew. Some presence was in that room. Waiting for her.
Though bone chillingly quiet, but the air was cooler than in the rest of the house. Only one reason for that. Something was open. Yes. Here gut feeling confirmed. She and Clarence were not alone in the house. She felt her pulse quicken and wondered if someone or something could be hiding along a wall just out of sight, some giggling thing which would reach out and grab hold of her ankle when the time was right.
Another creak echoing in the stillness. Nothing could be as nerve wracking as when an old house seemed to breathe, becoming organic. Within the room was a sense of foreboding like when entering an unfamiliar place as a child. She felt a cold spot where her heart was supposed to be when she saw her front door. It was slightly ajar. She could feel a force that seemed to be all around her, dark secrets clinging to every corner. She sought an adrenalin rush that would give her the courage to reach for a light switch. It didn’t come. She was too afraid that something cold and slimy would reach back.
The telephone sat on an end table in the middle of the room. They didn’t have a cell phone. Clarence didn’t believe in them. Bessie made a beeline for the land line. As quietly as Bessie could, she picked up the handset from its cradle.
Line dead. She wasn’t surprised. Whoever they are, they’ve trapped us in here. That’s what they’ve done, and me with a husband who’s already at death’s doorstep.
Something was about to happen. Something dreadful. She was at the final stage of desolation. She headed for the door to shut it soundly when she noticed what was different. Blending with the gloom, something blocked the outline of a coat tree next to the entrance. A dark shape stood there instead.
Bessie gasped. Bile rose in her throat as she put one hand to her mouth to halt a scream. The shape moved and reached for a light switch. A dim lamp on the same table that held the dead phone clicked on. It was enough light to identify the intruder.
Nothing supernatural stood before Bessie. That was something, at least. “Gladys?” she breathed. But how did Gladys—. Keys. Bessie had given her a set of keys in case of an emergency after Clarence’s stroke. Bessie placed her hands against her chest. “What are you doing here? It’s the middle of the night.”
“There’s going to be another murder tonight,” Gladys answered calmly.
“I didn’t hear your car?”
“I walked over.”
“Why on earth—what in the world has gotten into you? Let me get you a glass of warm milk and we can talk about it.” Bessie flipped a switch on another wall which illuminated her kitchen.
Gladys followed Bessie into the glaring light that seemed too bright, but she didn’t take her usual seat at the table. She stood, her eyes riveted on the hostess.
“You’ve got to calm down, dear,” Bessie advised.
“Think I’m losing my marbles, do you?” Gladys said. She fished around in a pocket of her denims until her fingers found a chain with a locket. “Does this belong to you or to Daisy?”
Bessie glared back, not knowing what to say.
“Think I didn’t know about you and Daisy diddlin’ my poor Harold before he got sick? The man never did have a mind of his own, chasing tramps till the day he couldn’t get out of his own bed.”
Bessie looked at Gladys incredulously. “You’re just confused. Sit down now and let me—”
What was Gladys hiding in the other hand behind her leg? Was it a weapon? Bessie’s world held its breath.
Eeeeiiii! The shriek of a madwoman exploded through the stillness. Gladys launched herself toward Bessie, arm raised, and mouth open in a snarl. Bessie jumped back in stupefied terror, but not quickly enough. The knife blade slashed through her nightgown and caught the meaty part of her upper arm. Hot pain. She maneuvered to the far side of her kitchen table while Gladys raised the knife, poised to strike again. The two women danced around the table like it was a child’s game of musical chairs.
In Gladys’s eyes, Bessie saw a window into a world that frightened her to her core. Gladys’s teeth were clinched like she was going to break enamel. The chords in her neck stood out. Bessie thought she finally understood about murder. Gladys had transformed from a gossipy frump to talisman in a psychotic scheme for vengeance. Suspicion, jealousy, grief, anger—sprinkle them with a healthy dose of dementia and you’ve got a killer recipe. Gladys’s desire for revenge, the grappling hook on which she now clung, dismissed any attempt to reason with her. She was too far gone, reminding Bessie of the grinning cat telling Alice, “We’re all mad here in Wonderland.”
Gladys was circling. “Do you want to hear the scary part, Bessie?” she asked as if going into a trance. “The scariest part?”
Bessie didn’t want to hear the scary part, not tonight, not ever. Her only concern was surviving the moment.
“It was when I took this very knife and sliced off Daisy’s nose. I’d never heard anyone try to talk without a nose.”
Bessie didn’t want to listen, but gabby Gladys wouldn’t shut the hell up.
“The sound of her voice came out of the new hole in her face. She sounded like a squeaky little pig, which she was, of course. Creepy, huh, like the sick stuff you read, Bessie. I did quite a number on her.” Gladys’s eyes were wild with gleeful insanity. “Cut her up just like in those stories you like so much. I plan on doing the same to you, cut off your tits and gut you like the pig you are. You should have stuck to your reading.” Gladys started around the table again. “You might not be the last, Dearie. I got it all out of him.” Gladys was leering now, her face disfigured, a mask of hatred. Bessie thought she might start foaming at the mouth. “Harold confessed. I’ve got a list of the ones that were home wreckers instead of homemakers. Now, what shall I slice off of you first? What part did Harold like best? I bet I know.”
Bessie couldn’t think of anything to say to defuse the woman’s rage. It was now or never. She turned toward the living room and ran as if her life depended on it—which it did, bolting for the hallway, but the passage wasn’t clear. Her heart leaped into her throat as a figure stood in the doorway blocking her exit. She could hear Gladys’s footsteps behind her, approaching with the knife raised high, no doubt, ready to strike again.
Everything happened so fast, it took Bessie several seconds to comprehend. She diverted from the doorway and darted off into a corner then turned to defend herself from whatever might come. A boom as loud as Gladys’s shriek filled her ears followed by the acrid smell of gunpowder.
Gladys was no longer pursuing her. She had fallen back, a red circle growing in the middle of her chest. An incantation of words spewed from her like snow from a blower, scattering aimlessly without direction. The figure in the hall doorway was none other than Clarence. He shakily stood in his undershirt and striped boxers. His sunken features and his boney knees gave him the appearance of something skeletal.
Gladys sprawled across the couch making strangled gasps for air. Bessie wasn’t in the mood to provide her with any. The hole in her thorax was making a sucking sound. Then the sound died away in a gurgle. The threat, Bessie assumed, was over. Clarence’s arm had gone slack. The pistol lowered toward the floor, his finger caught in the trigger loop. Bessie took the gun from him not wanting it to discharge accidentally. Without warning, she collapsed next to him.
* * * *
Gladys Brown was buried hastily only a few days after Daisy. Her coffin would also be closed. It was felt mourners shouldn’t be given the perverse pleasure of gazing at the corpse of a murderess. She was dropped into a hole next to Harold who, in the big calendar of time, hadn’t preceded her by much.
Bessie didn’t attend. Clarence hadn’t ventured from his bed since the night of the attack, not even to scratch at her door and scare the beejesus out of her. He had weakened to the point that a wheelchair was needed. Bessie wondered if he would ever leave the bed again except for when she wheeled him to the bathroom for cleanups beyond a spit bath or bedpan duty.
The morning after Gladys’s attack, Bessie’s wound had been bandaged properly in town and she had given a statement to the authorities. A deadly melee had taken place right before her eyes, but it was over now and she could go back to her stories in relative safety. The human killer had been dealt with. As long as the shape-shifters and ghosts staid where they belonged…
A true horror had sullied her little community, one which couldn’t be put down to vicious rumors. She wondered if her mystery and horror tales would continue to thrill after facing her own mortality at the hands of a raving neighbor. Bessie hadn’t told anyone of Gladys’s accusations and she had retrieved the telltale locket. Let the officious Sheriff Barnard and his thick-necked deputy figure out the motives of a woman gone bonkers.
Several days passed and although the phone lines buzzed with gadflies expressing sympathy and digging for details of the attack, the landscape had settled into its relative dullness. On one cool evening as dusk deepened into night, Bessie went to close her window before climbing into bed. But she stopped. In the yard, something had definitely moved. Not the trees or rocks of her childhood. It was too big for any varmint scouring properties for food. She shuttered again like that fateful night when she expected the ghosts or ghouls her grandfather had described only to find a wild-eyed Gladys waiting. Might Gladys’s notoriety bring someone else to snoop, or worse? If someone wished her harm, there would be no heroics from Clarence this time. He was dying a little more each day.
For the second time in a week, Bessie walked from her room to the living room in a nightgown. She jumped at the sudden knock on her door. Bessie had no weapon. The sheriff had taken Clarence’s pistol as evidence. She picked up a fireplace poker.
“Who’s there?” she called.
“Buddy Cox.” The voice sounded slow with drink.
Daisy’s worthless son? “I’d gone to bed, Buddy. It’s late.”
“I need to talk. Have to tell you something.”
First Gladys invades her home, now Buddy. She wondered if the Mad Hatter would be along next. Although Buddy was considered to be a one-person train wreck, the worst thing he’d been known to do was pass out in someone’s house. Still, she kept the poker concealed at her side as she unlocked the door. Buddy’s brooding presence floated in and walked to the middle of the room. His eyes, set close together in his moon face, were dark and dead looking. Bessie was convinced he was crocked from Irish penicillin, but she remembered he had just lost his mother. He didn’t ask her for anything and she didn’t offer. Whatever his problem, she wanted to get it over with and get lost in her book, the only place her mind could escape the reality of recent events.
Buddy pursed his lips. The slow cogs of his thoughts were turning, but ponderously. “That woman, Gladys. She was nice to me once. Gave me a little money when my own mom wouldn’t. I guess I was a little drunk one night and I told her I’d seen her husband in our house. She didn’t like that much.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Bessie interrupted.
“Because I told her I’d seen him with you, too.”
“You never saw any such thing, Buddy Cox.”
Buddy grinned. “I was down by the culvert one night. Guess I’d had me a few too many beers. And here comes you and Mr. Brown toolin’ along in his pickup. I saw everything you two were doing. I told Mrs. Brown about it.”
Bessie listened, not sure where Buddy was going with this story. His eyes were watery and she thought for a minute he was going to bawl.
“Well the old bird took the news pretty calmly as I remember. She gave me a few bucks so I could get some medicine. But there was this look in her eyes that wasn’t pretty, you know. I guess it all got to her after old man Brown kicked the bucket. I imagine his passing got to you some too, the way you two were goin’ at it in the back of his pickup.”
“Get out of here, Buddy. Get out before I call the sheriff.”
Buddy laughed out loud. “Don’t think so. Country folks get all het up about cheatin’. Maybe they’d think you and my mom had something comin’.”
Bessie’s hand tightened around the poker. She remembered a small part of a disconnected dream the night after Gladys’s attack and death. She was on the edge of her roof. She believed if she took one more step toward the edge, some unseen force would place an invisible hand against her back and nudge her off into space where she would remain suspended for a moment, like an acrobat, before plummeting down…down onto the hungry cement walk. Maybe the dream was a premonition. Maybe Buddy was here to give her that nudge.
“I’m a little short of cash,” Buddy schmoozed. “If you can give me a few hundred, we can just keep what I saw between us. Sure wouldn’t want anyone else to get riled up like Gladys did,” he added with all the tact of a fart in church.
Blackmail for whisky money and his mother barely cold in the ground. The phone had been repaired. Should she call for help, or do what she knew she must. “I don’t have any money. You know what it costs to take care of my Clarence?”
“Not the way you took care of Mr. Brown, I reckon.” Buddy looked around the room as if a pile of cash might be setting in plain sight. “Country people always have money around. Where is it?”
Bessie sighed heavily and shrugged her shoulders. “I guess I’ve got no choice. I’ll get it.”
He put his hand out. “Uh uh. Just tell me where.”
“A box at the bottom of the ceramic flour jar on the kitchen counter,” she said.
“How quaint,” Buddy replied and turned from her.
A dark, cold, oily fear welled inside Bessie. She was much older than Buddy, but not as yet frail. The fear of humiliation was too much. The threat had to be cut out like a cancer. Before analysis could hamstring her will, she swung the poker at Buddy’s head with all her might like a ball player trying to swat a home run.
Swackk! Contact. Buddy yowled like a child who had been pinched, but he didn’t go down. As his hand came up to the side of his head, Bessie whacked him again then a third time. He dropped to his knees and toppled over to one side. He was still, but drunks have a lot of resiliency. Bessie swung for a fourth time. Whack!
Buddy’s skull cracked. The hooked point of the poker had caught on brains and bone and Bessie had difficulty extracting the weapon. It was obvious Buddy wasn’t going anywhere under his own power ever again. Head injuries were the worst bleeders so Bessie grabbed a large towel from the bathroom and carefully wrapped it around Buddy’s bloody head. Another nightgown ruined, she observed.
For a moment, Bessie was slammed with a wave of revulsion by her actions, but something else soon took its place, an animal satisfaction which wasn’t entirely welcome for she considered herself a civilized woman. But the sensation was there nonetheless.
Reasons to injure and kill. If she hadn’t comprehended them with her psychoanalysis of Gladys, she understood them now. Self-preservation was one of the most powerful drives given to us. People were built to survive, even if they had to kill to do it. Fear, pride, and self-preservation were forces that could permeate anything. What she would have thought impossible only days ago she had now perpetrated. There would have been too many questions about the purpose of Buddy’s visit, everything coming back to her and Harold. Could any of the dead rest in peace? Yes, she decided. She and Harold deserved to have their little secrets to themselves for eternity.
For Bessie, her rare meetings with Harold had broken the dull, snoring repetition of her life, reshaping it into something new. Instead of each day being essentially the same as the one before, she had looked forward to the few stolen moments of awakened passion. Even when the time was taken away due to Harold’s sickness, she had the memories with him…and an escape route through her dark fiction.
Was it true about Harold and Daisy and others? Bessie contemplated. Could the old toot have been a Reynard—a male fox, looking for vixens—female foxes? She refused to believe it. He’d told Bessie he loved her. Bessie had lost the locket Gladys was packing in the Brown’s study where Harold had peeled her like a banana and made her the vessel of his passion the final time they were together. Fortunately, Gladys had delivered it the night she died. Bessie was convinced she had grieved more than Gladys when Harold fell ill and passed because she knew he’d loved her more than his gossipy wife. So there was truth in Gladys’s ravings, but she should have been glad that someone was willing to tend to her husband’s needs. He’d sworn to Bessie there hadn’t been any love lost between him and Gladys for years, and now Gladys was as dead as he was, and so was ‘the other woman’ if Gladys and Buddy were to be believed.
With Buddy lying dead on Bessie’s floor, it would have been easy for her to break down and cry over all she had been through, but she wouldn’t allow herself the luxury. She had to be strong now. She looked out her front door and saw the outline of Buddy’s truck down by her gate. He had a habit of disappearing for days, off on a drunken toot. A dozen scenarios from stories she’d read raced through her mind until she settled on one.
It would be a long night and hard work, but if she could find his car keys, she could make it right. All stories finally come to an end. She just hoped getting rid of Buddy would be the end of this one.
* * * *
Bessie reconnoitered Clarence’s dolly from the tool shed. She wrapped Buddy’s hulk in plastic and loaded him onto the device. From her living room to his car then to a distance she could walk back from. She cleaned house during what remained of the night, interrupted only by an occasional, mournful grown from the near-corpse down the hall. The cleaning might not pass a forensics test, but there was no reason for a search.
Consequently, Bessie trembled a tad when Sheriff Barnard and Deputy Dog pulled up in front of her place three days later. They informed her that Buddy’s dead body had been found in a culvert not far from his mother’s place. It appeared someone had come across him and bashed in his skull while he was in a drunken state.
“That’s just the saddest thing,” said Bessie. “You’d think we’d had enough misery. Was it some drifter looking for someone to rob?”
Barnard pushed his hat back on his head. “This here murder sort of puts a new light on everything. It may be that someone besides Gladys might have killed his maw. Someone after that whole family, the mother and son.”
“But Gladys—”
“Gladys was just plain bug-nuts. Out of her gourde,” Barnard interrupted. “And she liked to exaggerate things.”
“She wasn’t exaggerating the length of that knife she stabbed me with,” Bessie said, a bit indignant, lifting her arm to show off her bandage. “She tried to kill me.”
“Maybe she was just trying to scare you and took it further than she’d planned.”
Bessie couldn’t believe what this yokel for a sheriff was saying. “So you think there’s another killer on the loose?”
“Somebody killed Buddy and here’s the thing. We found a scrap of paper in his shirt pocket. It was kind of a list of things to do. One of the items said, ‘Go see Bessie.’ I don’t suppose he showed up here?”
She considered concocting some bullshit story about Buddy’s dropping by, but why rock a boat that’s already in choppy waters. “No,” she said calmly, praying the two men didn’t notice her hands shaking or the beads of sweat forming in the fine hair above her lip. “Don’t know what he would want to see me about. I hardly knew him.”
“It’s a small community. Everyone seems to know about one another’s dirty laundry.”
Both officers looked at Bessie. The thick-necked deputy stared at her reproachfully, implying some kind of guilt, looking through her, trying to see into her soul.
“Well, don’t let it worry you,” the sheriff finally said. “I always expected Buddy to kill someone with that old truck of his. Just goes to show you.”
Goes to show you what? Bessie wondered. That someone got him first. Maybe she saved a life, performed a public service. She liked that rationale even if it had no legs.
“Hard to tell what’s what with a boozer,” Barnard added, reducing Buddy to an ugly metaphor. “I know you’ve been through a lot, taking care of Clarence and all. Would you mind if we looked in on him?”
Bessie didn’t want them inside her house, not now, not ever. “He’s sleeping now, but he couldn’t tell you anything if he was awake. You already know what happened…with Gladys, I mean.”
The sheriff pulled his hat back down on his forehead. “We’ll come back another time then. We’ll need to follow up on any leads. It could be that we come back with a search warrant, considering Buddy’s note and all. We’ll try to be considerate of Clarence. Have a pleasant day, Bessie.”
Bessie watched until the two men drove to the end of her road and pulled onto asphalt. They drove oh so slowly, it seemed to her, like they were discussing the situation. She halfway expected the sheriff to turn around and come back. What would she do if they did? Her arms broke out in gooseflesh. Might they have enough brains to figure it out? She closed the front door behind her and bolted it. As she passed the fireplace, the poker seemed a beacon of guilt, as circumspect as her future.
Twilight, deceptive in its softness, would be arriving soon. Bessie was mentally and physically exhausted. She had planned to climb into bed with a new volume of short mystery stories. Was there anything more she could do? Nothing she decided. Nothing to do about what might come, so she stuck to her plan to shut out the world by reading. She only hoped she could shove the last week to the back of her mind now that law enforcement was suspicious. She supposed she could write her own story now, but it didn’t have an ending, yet. Might it end with an expose about her and Harold? Or might she be led away in handcuffs for Buddy’s murder? Or stranger still, might she be a suspect in Daisy’s death because of his demise, everyone believing her to be some fiend like Jack the Ripper? She didn’t like any of those scenarios.
Within her was the gnawing, accelerating fear that something more needed to be done; further action taken. The refuge of a long, steamy bath might help her to think. Or better yet, not to think. She didn’t bother to look in on Clarence. This was her time. She stripped off her clothes and stepped into her tub as the warm water rose, careful not to slip. That would be the limit. Slipping and cracking her head after all she’d been through.
While she soaked, she plucked the old book of poems from a stand next to the tub. She perused the pages and found the one she was looking for. The poem was called, The Stairway.
Three old women stare at me.
Why do they look at me so,
as if I am a stranger in a strange land?
They all wear black with scrunched black hats
atop their silver heads.
Their thick, opaque stockings disappear
into their black shoes as they stand at the precipice
of the subway entrance wondering who I am
and what I’m doing here.
Do I appear as something inhuman?
Is that why they look at me so?
Surely, they don’t know I am death,
come to claim one of them.
Before they descend the stairway,
I will befriend one and lead her to the other side.
Now, they look away as they enter the bowls of the earth,
but one has an earthen plot that awaits
next to her departed husband, so recently gone.
I stand at the head of the stairway
where the light of the earth still shines
and watch the three descend, too quickly for their years.
One trips and falls.
The others gasp.
Did my vision create her haste?
I never know these things,
only that I am called for the moment of passing
to guide the soul across the abyss.
Don’t cry, friends.
You’ll be joining her soon enough…
soon enough.
Bessie rested the book on her bare breasts with the knowledge that they would never again be touched by a loving hand. Could the three ladies in the poem be Daisy and Gladys and herself? For a moment, the faces of Daisy and Gladys seemed to appear above, looming over her between the wall and the shower rod, floating like ghosts. They didn’t look like happy phantoms. Bessie moaned. It was all going to end very badly. She had no doubt now. It was only a matter of time…
Wait. Maybe there was another way.
Pills. She had plenty of pills. Not for her, but for Clarence. She would have to let him go. He had saved her and she had planned to keep looking after him, but wasn’t this better, everything considered? A chance to write an ending to her personal story that was far more interesting than turning to a large dose of pills for herself and her husband. She had her tit caught in a wringer, as they used to say. That was for sure, but what would the rest of her life be like if none of this had happened? Taking care of Clarence until he was put in a hole and covered up. Then what? Listening for more bumps in the night. Waiting for the grandpa-fueled fears of her childhood to overtake her. Marking time. Waiting to die during her own resolute march to the grave. A constellation of thoughts swirled around her.
No. Clarence would want it this way, she decided. This was better, taken from this world by her own hand. This was much better.
Her actions had been validated. Independence Day had arrived. She felt as if she was having a hot flash, although all of that nonsense had supposedly ended years ago. It crossed her mind she might have to explain her actions in whatever form of afterlife there might be, but it didn’t deter her. If a traditional Christian form of the pearly gates or the fires of hell existed, so be it. She reckoned she and Gladys and Harold and Clarence and Buddy and all the rest could fight it out in the latter.
Once she’d decided what to do, a strange quiet settled around her. She wasn’t going to be that old shriveled up, third lady in the poem. She scampered from the tub and tied a towel around her waist. “Our love will die with me, Harold,” she said as she gathered all the sleeping pills she’d horded for just such an occasion. “I don’t believe for a minute you caroused with others. You loved me. Screw Gladys and her ranting nonsense. Ghosts be damned.”
The pills wouldn’t take long and it seemed so rational now. The aftermath of Clarence’s stroke wouldn’t get him. No lingering like Harold. She’d see to it, a true act of mercy to be performed. Then she could go on with her life. She still had enough energy for one final, grand gesture in her personal mystery. She’d read enough stories. She knew what to do.
* * * *
There were names for it. One was body snatching. Going from pacifist, to defender of secrets, to murderess, to grave robber was quite a leap in the span of two weeks. But Bessie was way beyond worrying about being caught in some act she’d never be able to explain. After leaving Clarence’s room, she retreated to her sanctuary and hastily dressed in black slacks and shirt. She found what she needed in the tool shed and drove past the dark specters of the night which surrounded all rural homesteads. The threat of trees growing arms or rocks becoming monsters wouldn’t dissuade her this night.
It was dark, but it wasn’t a stormy night. Thank goodness for small favors. The small country cemetery was perched on a hill with mostly simple, weather worn stones of marble or granite. A few angels and lambs watched over some of the dear departed, but not many. Bessie took her shovel and walked to Gladys’s fresh grave that lay next to Harold’s.
She’d read that some serial killers started out with corpses before moving on to living beings. What a horrible thought. She could never do anything such as that. Digging up Gladys was a necessary evil for her alibi. Nothing ghoulish in that.
The soil of the graveyard. The soul of the earth not meant to be disturbed. Those phrases turned themselves over inside Bessie’s psyche. Her emotions could have been all over the map, but she didn’t want to give her imagination any openings while she dug. Though she wouldn’t have been able to articulate it, she understood she could not allow her mind to crumble under the weight of supernatural thoughts. Keep the door that holds back the flood of suggestion tightly shut, she told herself.
In spite of her best intensions, tricks of moonlight and shadow have a way of becoming beasts, or shape-shifters lurking behind the stones, or cold winged statues vacating their moorings, inching closer to protect the bodies of lingering souls. The image of that slimy hand inside her house tickled the fringes of Bessie’s mind, patiently waiting until she exposed herself on its home turf, being given another chance to grab her and pull her to the other side.
Something moved. Bessie froze. A figure rose above a black gravestone. Its body undulated and then crawled to the side of a stone revealing its spiked pelt. It jumped down and scurried away in the dark.
“A gosh-darned porcupine,” she said to the cold markers.
Dig, Bessie, Dig.
With a pair of Clarence’s work gloves and the shovel, she set to her task. Two feet down the dirt clods became wet and sticky making a mess of her shoes and pants. A prickly feeling invaded her. Not surprising considering her intentions. Her gaze fell on dense shadows around the headstones and she had the feeling of being watched by something more than cold markers. The night itself was watching.
A cool breath of wind crept across her face, the fingers of night reaching across the land to touch her. The beating of a night bird’s wings swooped somewhere in the darkness above. Had this been one of her lurid stories or poems, the wind would pick up to a nasty whine and rotting corpses would undoubtedly stir, preparing to walk about, dark and ragged figures rising from a long, dark sleep.
Sure enough, the breeze picked up some steam and fluted between headstones whispering a promise of creepy things to come. Were the infamous undead out there somewhere? Too many ghost stories in her personal library. Don’t succumb to paranoia and crack under the strain of becoming a grave robber, she warned herself, all the while thinking that with the advent of a whistling wind anything horrible was possible. Maybe this enterprise hadn’t been such a good idea, but the die had been cast and she wasn’t about to turn tail now.
Keep digging, Bessie.
She thought of the joke about the drunk who falls into an open grave. Another drunk comes along and asks, “What’s going on down there?” The first drunk says, “I’m cold, so cold.” And the second drunk says, “Well, of course you’re cold. You’ve kicked all your dirt off.” Ha ha.
Humor, as hard as it might be to come by, helped. In the end, Bessie managed to concentrate not on the repulsion of her act, but rather on the strengthening adrenalin rush that had come with taking hold of her future, thank you very much. A new sensation crawled through her marrow—empowerment. Her neurotic fears crawled back into their nighttime holes.
Eternal rest next to Harold for this old gal? Bessie thought. “Not hardly, Gladys,” she said. Gladys didn’t belong next to Harold anyhow. He had belonged, in the end, to Bessie.
Physically, the digging was the hardest thing she’d attempted in years, but the ground was still pliable and the shovel work hadn’t exhausted her as much as expected. The exhilaration of becoming a madam of mystery kept her going.
Could Gladys hear Bessie approaching like the woman in the poem about burial? Bessie wondered if Gladys had a distraught spirit due to the approaching disturbance of her mortal remains, but it didn’t impede the night’s progress. The shovel finally struck wood. Gladys rested in a simple, inexpensive wooden coffin. Bessie managed to spring the catches with the shovel.
Open Sesame.
There lay Gladys, the shell of the woman who tried to snuff out Bessie’s life. Well, Old Gabby looked peaceful enough in repose, no worse for wear except for the gnarled, dead petals of the corsage pinned to her dress, certainly a pleasanter sight than the corpse of poor, nose less Daisy. Her slackened mannequin looks was an advertisement for the tissue-thin plane which separated one world from the next. Still, Bessie was glad she didn’t have to peer into coffins every night of her life.
“Here but for the grace…” Bessie might have remarked, but didn’t finish the thought. It was too frightening. Unlike in the poem, Sounds, Bessie wasn’t here to pillage a corpse; she just needed a relatively fresh body and she deserved disturbing more than Daisy.
Buoyed by the fact that she wouldn’t be dealing with rotted skin, she placed a rope under Gladys’s arms and tied the ends to the bumper of her car. Gladys was hoisted out of her not so final resting place. Her corpse endured some damage as Bessie maneuvered it around the double marble stone, but all in all, not too much indignity, not like a tin can tied to the bumper of a car, thank goodness. After hauling the body to her car and lifting it into the trunk, she filled in the plot as good as new.
Bessie pulled off Clarence’s gloves sighed deeply. “There, that wasn’t so bad,” she said to the refilled plot. The aches and pains she knew would eventually come weren’t tormenting her as yet and she thanked her imagination for staying strong. She hadn’t defiled Gladys’s remains. She just needed to move the old girl.
The corpse had its final journey through Bessie’s house and into her room. Bessie removed Gladys’s clothes. She’d never before seen the parts of a cadaver that were hidden from the public. She never wanted to be trapped underground, dead or alive. She vowed then and there she would someday leave instructions to be cremated when her time came. But it wasn’t Bessie who would burn this night. It was the corpses of Gladys and Clarence that would go up in flames.
She dressed Gladys in one of her nightgowns, the very one in which an alive Gladys had drawn Bessie’s blood. It seemed delightfully apropos. It clung to her like a shroud. In fact, Bessie thought the batty old hen had never looked better. She managed to prop the corpse against the bed’s headboard and placed one of her books on top of the layer of chiffon that covered the sewn up hole in Gladys’s chest. Gladys’s remains could study the story for eternity.
All Bessie had left to do was wash the evening’s unholy dirt off herself, write the note that would say she couldn’t go on with the sadness of all the community’s deaths while the Grim Reaper approached her helpless Clarence. She would admit to setting the fire in their bedrooms. She would give them that much. She felt certain the bodies would be destroyed beyond recognition and analysis. She trusted that arsonists and criminologists wouldn’t delve past the obvious rigmarole. She smiled a little at the idea of Barnard and his thick-necked deputy scratching their heads and probably their butts while making stupid remarks at the scene.
Bessie walked to the kitchen and took the family stash from the ceramic flour jar on the kitchen counter. “How quaint, indeed,” she murmured. She would put it in the pocket of clean clothes after her shower.
The adrenalin had worn off. Bessie’s eyes were so tired they stung and her muscles were starting to bark at her. She reached for the bottle of Tokay wine on an upper kitchen cabinet shelf and poured a full glass into a tumbler. She carried it back into the bedroom and toasted Gladys’s corpse. “Thank you for being available,” Bessie said mimicking Gladys’s chirpy voice. “You didn’t take my life, but hopefully you will save it, Dearie,”
Bessie almost choked on the first sip. For a moment, just for a moment, she could swear one of Gladys’s eyelids had lifted a bit and closed again. She knew it was unlikely. Dead eyelids were generally glued shut or sown, but in the haste to plant this murderous female, who knows what the mortuary did or didn’t do. Bessie turned away, not about to let her euphoria be deterred by a dead wink. “Screw you, Gladys,” she said under her breath.
Although she had spent countless years under its roof, Bessie wouldn’t miss the house. Too many unmet needs and repressed desires. And now the aura of death thrummed through the place. It had become a mausoleum rather than a home. And, although slight, there was a new aroma about, something repugnant like a dead rodent decomposing within a wall. Surely Clarence wasn’t becoming odiferous so soon. Bessie sniffed again and it was gone. She was convinced she had imagined it. Still she needed to get on with the night’s work.
Bessie carried her drink into the bathroom, turned on the water, and peeled out of her soiled garments. For a second time in one evening she found herself in the safe haven of her tub, but it would be the final time. The water from the shower ran over her weary head and around her breasts in rivulets. It was warm and helped dull the ache in her overworked back, knees and arms. What was left would be easy, she mused. She’d taken a detour outside the bounds of civilized etiquette, but not so far she couldn’t return somewhere else and start anew. Characters in stories did it all the time. The only thing she feared now was letting her imagination take hold of her again before the job was complete. She could fool the humans, but please, no more specters floating above her or wraiths whispering imagined thoughts.
No more reading for a while either. She planned on filling her own life’s unwritten pages with a bit of adventure. Her nipples stiffened at the thought. Even though she lived in a country that worshipped youth, maybe there was still that kind of adventure for the old girl out there somewhere. Her past had been one of passivity, pathetically mundane. Her future would be like a spring rain and fresh roses. She was mistress of her mind she would exorcise all her grandfather’s shape-shifters and ghosts once and for all and that would be the end of them. She would get life right this time, meet it head-on. It would be like looking for the prize inside a box of Crackerjacks. You don’t know what you’re going to get until you start digging. Unless it’s in a graveyard, of course.
She looked down at the plainness of her feet while the last vestiges of soapsuds washed away and remembered a story she’d read about a woman who had the most beautiful feet, small and dainty with perfectly shaped toes. Everyone told her how they admired her pretty feet. The catch? The woman had no arms.
“I’m going to start painting you bright red the way city gals do,” Bessie told her ten toenails. “I wonder if Harold would have liked that, or even noticed. Someone will notice.”
She welcomed this new challenge. Pushing thoughts of the past few hours out of her head, a romantic tune played there instead. Buffeted by waves of possibilities, she reached around the shower curtain for the tumbler resting on the pile of books. It was time to toast a new beginning beneath her private waterfall.
Ziipppp.
Bessie’s foot slipped on the tub’s slick surface. She desperately grabbed at the plastic curtain as her legs flew above her torso, but it was too late. Her head crashed down on the edge of the iron tub. A brilliant whiteness leaped across her world before she fell into the oblivion of a black hole.
* * * *