Thrill or Shiver

Ghost of a Dream

2011-10-16T15:43:00.000-07:00

I woke up the other night with a ghost in my bedroom. At least that is what it felt like when it was happening. I knew that I was still dreaming because I had been trying to wake myself up in my dream and there are no such things as ghosts, right? So if I wasn’t going to wake up I decided I was going to go with the dream just to see where it went.

This ghost in my room was named Henry, and he was looking for a person that used to live here in my place. A woman named Deidra.

I couldn’t help him much, but I tried. It was the middle of the night, and nothing was open in town after two in the morning.

In this dream of mine I went to the library and looked up the old records for him. The library doors just unlocked and opened up, you know how dreams can be. I told Henry what I found in the records there, that this Deidra had gotten married after he had died. She had three children and was buried in the church cemetery some fifty years after that. And that her death was a good fifty years after the marriage.

What you need to know about me is I’m not the helpful type. I don’t open doors for people, or pick things up that others have dropped, or give to the poor. So I’m feeling quite silly in the library of all places looking up information for a ghost in the dead of night. I hadn’t once stepped into a library since my school years.

Henry had never learned to read and he asked me to read him her headstone, so we walked over to church yard cemetery. And this was where the dream started to get creepy. We were standing, or I should say I was standing with my small pocket flashlight and he was floating in the middle of the cemetery, we were reading headstones, and some of the other occupants came up out of their graves and they came over to see what we are doing.

As dreams often are surreal it didn’t bother me in the least that I was now surrounded by ghosts and they were all chatting and catching up on history while I was reading headstones out loud for this Henry.

I won’t pretend that I wasn’t surprised when some of the specters rose soon after I read their names. If I was standing too close they would go right through me with a cold shivery feeling. Apparently saying their name out loud over their resting place causes them to rise. If only I had know that before I read the stones out loud to Henry I wouldn‘t have done it.

I was ready to give up when I finally spotted her grave. I mean how many Deidra’s do you know? I read it out to him and he sighed waiting for her to rise. We waited for her to come to him and when she didn’t he started to weep, so I called to her on his behalf.

After a while I said to him, “Maybe she isn’t buried here. It doesn’t say how she died.”

The others insisted, “No, she’s there!”

Deidra finally rose up after the whole group started in calling her name.

She admonished all of us for disturbing her, and with the fun over the other ghosts headed for their own graves.

Deidra said to Henry, “I never have been in love with you. You just have to move on, and Please! stop coming to my grave each year on your death day night trying to talk to me. I am not going to talk to you ever again. So Henry, stop bothering the living and the dead with all this hubbub."

As she sank back into the earth Henry tried to pull her back up to be with him. I told him, “Now cut that out, or I will make it my mission to haunt you when I die if you don’t leave her be!”

This Henry ghost was now so distraught I would have worried about him killing himself if he was alive. So I walked him back to his own grave in the public cemetery a few blocks away. I wanted to make sure he was down under the earth again and not about to follow me around. But I didn’t tell him that.

The next day was Saturday and I was at my local coffee place reading my emails when the police came up to me and asked me to come to the police station with them.

They had an odd tale to tell me. It was about me walking around town in my pajamas with a ghost and my breaking into the library, then going into the church yards in the middle of the night. They had me on various cameras around town with a non descript glowy thing floating along side of me, and it appeared that I was talking to it.

Since I didn’t harm or take anything, the caretakers of these places weren’t going to press charges, this police interview was just a warning.

If they hadn’t shown me the tapes I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

I move right out of that old place. Didn’t stay there another night in fact. I moved to the other side of town into a new apartment building. But to this day I am helpful and whistle past the graveyard. I even give to the poor. I’m not taking any chances ever again of bumping into a ghost in the night.

Edit for typo on 11-14-11

The Redneck's Car

2011-08-22T13:37:00.000-07:00

Butch was working on his car again. He was always working on that car. It was the same car he had been working on since he was in high school and now his kids were there. It was his pride and joy up on cinder blocks and rusted jacks in the side yard of the house. This was Butch’s 1957 blue and white Ford Fairland convertible.

It looked like rain so he was under the car to do some work on the frame. With only his lower half sticking out of the side of the car his feet could almost touch the neighbors fence as he was working today. It made for a lot of wiggling to get under there so he didn’t want to have to stop what he was doing if it only started to drizzle.

Butch had been out there for a long time without interruptions this Saturday. The kids were elsewhere at their friend’s houses and his wife was busy shopping for the weekly groceries with a friend of hers. The ball game was on the radio and a cold beer was within reach. This was the male equivalent to the bliss of shopping his wife talked about.

He finally found the wrench he had been feeling around for and started on the rusted nut he had coated with lubricant earlier in the day. He has gone to work on the other nuts and bolts while it soaked in and he was back to give it another try. This one particular nut was the rustiest of all of them so far and the wrench kept on coming off as the rusty coating flaked away. Butch’s knuckle was bleeding and it dripped into his eye. After cursing and sucking on his rusty dirty finger he got back to working on that nut. This time the wrench stripped it completely and he had gotten his finger pinched hard in the bargain. Since no one was around to hear him curse he threw the offending wrench full force as he cursed loudly to make himself feel better.

The wrench hit the cinder block so hard there was a spark and he sighed with relief because Butch had taken out the gas tank for more room under the car for him to work in. He was shifting his weight so he could wriggle out and get another beer while retrieving the wrench when he heard the cinder block crack and the car came down on top of him.

When he came to, he found that the car had knocked the wind out of his lungs and it felt like he had broken a few ribs, but he was alive. Butch was pinned so that he couldn’t move and he couldn‘t even reach anything to bang on the car to attract attention from the neighbor‘s. Now all he was able to do was wait for the family to come home and call for help. He tried not to panic.

Butch thought about a lot of things while he waited. Like how his cigarettes were now crushed in his T-shirt pocket and he couldn’t even have a last smoke before he got to the hospital and had to give them up until they let him out again. He thought about how he had to pee from the two beers he had before he crawled under here. He thought about how he was going to miss the card game with the boys tonight and miss out on making a few bucks for beer from the new guy, Len’s cousin, who hadn’t perfected his poker face yet. He thought about how he was going to have to buy a new radio because the one he had been listening to was now smashed to smithereens and he was missing the end of the game. He thought about his car and wondered if they would damage it any when they lifted it off of him.

After what felt like hours, but was really only about thirty minutes, he felt a tickle in his throat and knew a cough was on the way. He tried everything he could think of to distract himself from the feeling, but the more he tried the worse it got. It started small, but once it got started it wouldn’t let go. He coughed until he lost consciousness again.

Butch woke up hearing his wife talking to her friend about him as she brought in the groceries. “He’s probably over Ralph’s by now.” She said. “If he was here that radio of his would be on.” She couldn’t hear him try to call out to her with what little air he could get into his lungs. She just went into the house with the last bag and started putting the food away and then started to make supper. Junior came racing in on his bike and bumped into the other side of the car using it as a stop, and the car came down a little more. Junior then high tailed it into the house saying, “What’s for supper?“ And he didn’t come back out to put his bike away in the garage like he was supposed to.

Now Butch knew it was getting serious. His breathing was taking most of his concentration. He stopped thinking about the blond down the street that likes to sit on her front steps in a thin night gown to drink her morning coffee and he started to tell God he wouldn’t look at her anymore on his way to work. Butch would even take a different street to avoid the temptation, if the good Lord would only send someone to come and get him out from under his car. He even threw in a plea for forgiveness for watching that porn film at the bachelor party a couple of years ago.

His daughter came home from her girlfriends house and Butch hoped that this meant he was saved. The girl’s father dropped Sissy off, but Carl didn’t stop to see what Butch was up to. He probably thought Butch was at Ralph’s house too since the hood wasn‘t up on the car today. Sissy went into the house by the front way. It was raining a little now and she didn’t like to get her hair wet. Hopefully someone would come out to get him for supper when his wife called Ralph and found out he wasn’t there and then they would find him. There was no note telling them he was gone and he hadn’t forgotten to do that since he was missing with his hunting buddies when Sissy was born. But when the door opened his wife just called his name and went back inside because it had started raining a little harder. Why wasn’t Junior coming out to put his bike away?

The rain cooled off the day and made him a little chilly along with wet from the waist down. He peed himself because now that he was getting all wet he couldn’t hold it in any longer. It started to pour buckets and he figured no one would know with all the rain washing over him anyway. And once he let it go he could breath a bit easier. That more than anything was a relief as the moment.

Butch hadn’t put the tarp back onto the car and since he had taken the top down the interior was getting wet. Butch was glad he had taken out the seats and put them in the garage. After a while drips started to trickle through the frame and onto him making him wetter still. The weight of the water added to the car itself and it sunk a little further onto Butch as the cinder block crumbled further.

His breaths came in gasps. Butch thought about all the times his wife wanted him to go to church with the family. He told God he would go every Sunday from now on instead of working on the car. He told God he would stop cursing in front of the kids. He’d even give up the hunting trips that were really only drinking weekends with the boys. He told God he would get rid of this darn old car like his wife had wanted him to for so long.

Butch’s head was pounding and felt like it was going to burst from the need for oxygen. He felt like he was drowning and was seeing stars and his brain was screaming for help as he lost consciousness for the last time still begging God for help.

The funeral was a nice affair and Butch’s wife sold the car to the junk yard the day after he was put in the ground. But she still hears Butch tinkering and cursing out there every time she sticks her head out of the back door and cans of cold beer can be found out by where the car used to be in all sort of weather, but especially when it rains.

The Castle Tour Guide

2011-02-02T16:17:00.000-08:00

The old castle hallway was cool and dank, such a difference from the heat of the day outside. Ruth Bradford was enjoying the coolness. It swept up the long skirts of her embroidered tunic covered garb as she walked, cooling her after talking in the sun at the castle entrance a few moments earlier. This little tingle of a chill was refreshing at the moment. Of course in a few short months it would be the cold she would be shying from, but that didn’t stop her from enjoying it now.

How many times Ruth had walked down these halls, stepped into these rooms, and still a shiver went up her spine that had nothing to do with the cool in the hallway. It happened every time without fail, no matter the warmth. Would today be the day she would see the ghosts again?

Ruth would tell the tour, “I’m told I look an awful lot like one of the Grand Dames that used to rule here.” as she showed the tour goers the painting. They always agreed.

That was why she had gotten the job. She didn’t have any experience in conducting historical tours then. But for the last five years she had been studying and perfecting her adaptation and taking over the main tours of the castle as the Lady herself.

That was also when the hauntings started in earnest. Grand Balls in the great hall with the music filling that wing of the building. Everything would disappear once anyone came through the doorway. But you could stand in the hallway and watch the festivities for almost a half an hour if you liked. Once the tour had seen the Lord of the castle himself, sitting on the dais holding court. He had been sentencing someone they couldn’t see to beheading at dawn, who it was they never found out, but then the ghost seemed to notice Ruth standing there and everything just disappeared.

There were also cold spots in the rooms on the days when the fires were merrily heating the rest of the space and oddest of all, was the locking and unlocking of the doors, along with items being moved from room to room of seemingly their own accord. But as nothing bad had ever happened, all the tour guides just made the best of it.

In those first days Ruth was often left feeling ill after one of those strange occurrences. She’d have headaches and couldn’t remember things well. She would find herself on the tour talking about things she had no knowledge of and saying it with an air of one that had been there herself.

The people on the tours liked it, but Ruth knew that she was supposed to stick to the facts that they could verify from the historical records, letters and papers in the archives. That had been a while ago, now she just kept the tour going as if nothing unusual was going on.

Ruth didn’t like the strange things going on. But jobs were not easy to come by in their rural community around the castle. It was down to being a tour guide or a maid in one of the Bed and Breakfasts in town. She liked being a tour guide better and the money was steady. Because Ruth did the tour every day whether the groups she guided were large or small. Maids were laid off in the slow season.

The letter Ruth had been waiting for came in the morning mail:

Dear Miss Bradford,

We at the Historical Tour Guide Association would like to congratulate you on winning this year’s scholarship for a year’s tuition to the college or university of your choice as a freshman history major. Etc.

Ruth had been saving her earnings for all these years so she could afford to go away to University and now to have the first year fully paid for was like a dream come true. She could start this very next semester now. A whole year earlier than she ever thought she would be able to. She couldn’t wait to tell everyone at work and thank Mr. Donewell for the recommendation. She also couldn’t wait to spread her wings.

After Ruth left for school Cathleen took over in the ‘Lady of the Castle’ tours and the spooks grew quieter once again. Cathleen did an excellent job, but it just wasn’t the same. Cathy was a perky blond and Ruth was a brooding brunet with more dignity in her walk then Cathy’s bouncy gate.

Ruth worked day and night to finish school in three years instead of four. The whole town was so proud of her that there was a party planned for her arrival home. It was in the grand hall of castle itself.

Everyone was in costume of the middle ages. The feast on the banquette table made it almost groan from the weight of it. It looked like they all had gone back in time together. And it just so happened to be on the eve of the day that the lady that Ruth looked like had died.

The local coral group sang madrigals and a jester roamed the hall making silly faces at people and telling jokes until they laughed. Mr. Wilson played on his mandolin in turns with the singers so everyone had a chance to eat. And the food was eaten with the hands, with ale and wine in tankards and goblets. It was high fun.

Dancing started after the feast. A band of players was hired for the night and they kept up the lively music of the times. The pipers and drummers helped the people attending out of their seats and onto the dance floor. At one point a jig contest was started to the delight of the crowd. The town’s folk started talking in ‘Olde English’ making it feel all the more real.

Ruth was crowned as ‘Lady of the Manor’ and carried on the shoulders of a few of the young men in the room. Everyone cheered. The fun was still going on until way past midnight. Some people walked their weary body’s home, but most stayed on.

As the party was wearing itself down a man dressed like the grand Lord of the Manor jumped up and accused Ruth of being unfaithful with one of the young men at the party. Others join in thinking it was more of the fun in the night and that they could be part of the game.

They took off Ruth’s crown, garland, and party robes, tied her hands behind her and stood her before the Lord of the castle. He pronounced sentence of “…death in the tower at dawn.” They marched Ruth off to the tower room singing and cheering finding themselves in the play. After they threw her into the empty room and shut the door they laughed and jeered through the door for a few minutes. Then with the fun at an end they tried to open the door to let her out.

The group thought that Ruth was now playing a game on them and had locked it from inside, but she called from the other side, “My hands are still tied and there is no lock on my side of the cell door.”

“Wait while we call a locksmith.” Someone said as another was already on his cell phone.

Some of the people stayed to talk with her through the door as they waited for the situation to be resolved. The rest went down the stairs to make room for the locksmith to work when he arrived.

False dawn was lighting the road as the locksmith drove to the castle. He collected his tools and climbed the many stairs to the top of the tower. Huffing and puffing he sat on his tool box until he had caught his breath. “These old locks can be tricky sometimes.” He said. He tinkered about and oiled the hinges. He picked away at the lock for a few more minutes before saying, “I have to get a few more tools for this job. I don’t want to break anything old here.”

Ruth had been quiet on her side of the door while the man worked. But all of a sudden they all heard her scream. She didn’t answer them any longer when they called out to her and the crowed grew nervous. They egged on the locksmith to no avail. Soon he left to get the other tools from his shop, but before he got back the door flew open on its own.

The scene they saw was a gruesome one. Ruth body lay hands still tied behind her in the middle of the floor. But her head was not with it. That was across the room under the small window staring up at them with a look of horror.

The man in the Lords clothing was never found. But everyone there that night thought they knew who he was. It was the Lord of the castle seeking revenge once again from the Lady who looked so much like Ruth Bradford.

Halloween Pizza

2010-10-07T15:33:00.000-07:00

I had been a young guy delivering pizza’s for Papa Vince after class for almost two years. The job was hard and people occasionally stiffed me, leaving me to pay their bill. But for the most part it was interesting enough for a college student to paid the bills that were more then my student loans covered.

My car took a beating I had to get it fixed more then I would have, but all in all I was happy with the situation. Tips were real good around the holidays and that made up for the rest.

I had my favorite customers, regulars that got a pie or two every week end or the Tuesday night meetings of the local sport enthusiast club in the church basement. They collectively tipped with the extra from the food fund each week after the pizza was paid for. Those guys always asked me when I was gonna’ join and I’d always cross my eyes and say, “Do you really want me shooting around you guys?” And they’d laugh.

I didn’t want to deliver pizza’s for the rest of my life, but until I finished college and went onto my doctorate this was the best gig I could find.

Halloween was always fun because we got to wear costumes on the job and got lots of candy along with a tip. Juvenile I know, but what did you expect from a college kid? We had a good group at the pizza place and we all tried hard to out do the others in the costume department.

Despite the fact that the boss, Vince, didn’t want me to wear it on deliveries I got the biggest tips the year I wore my costume of ‘The Fly.’ You know the old movie about the scientist that was caught with a fly in the booth for an experiment and he and the fly got their heads switched. I wore a research coat and made a giant fly, with a dolls head on it for its head, that I attached to the shoulder of the coat, and I had a full head mask of a fly on my head. I added a little squeaky voice saying, “Help me, help me!” sounding like it was coming from the doll head. It got a lot of laughs even from the people that didn’t know the movie.

But the worst Halloween was the one where I had to deliver to the cemetery.

The mayor was having a famous local dead people party there. For some reason the caterer didn’t have enough food for everyone that showed up so I was sent back and fourth with pizza’s as fast as Vince could make the extra ones.

I had Zombies and Ghosts, Witches all over me trying to be the first to get at the last order of pies. They had backed me up to a knee high headstone by the time they grabbed the last pie and didn’t see me trip backwards over the stone.

On the other side was an open grave roped off so no one got hurt, but I fell into it from the top, over the headstone of it‘s head to head neighbor. Right away I knew my arm was broken and I yelled and called for help, but the music was much too loud. No one heard me and if they did they must have thought it was sound effects for the party.

So there I was stuck in a hole, six feet down, with a broken arm, and there were people in every direction. Not one of them coming to help me. I managed to get myself into a sitting position in one of the corners and after waiting for the pain to subside I opened my eyes to see a small boy in the hole with me.

“You afraid?” he asked me.

“No, just hurt.” I told him. “Wait a minute. How did you get down here too? Did you get hurt when you fell in?”

“No. Just found myself down in a hole looking at you.”

I asked him what his name was and he told me Jimmy. I asked his age and he said, “Six.”

“Well your parents should be looking for you soon I guess, and they will find us and get us out.”

The party music played on and no one came looking for the boy. I tried to get up and help him to the top so he could get help, but I just couldn’t do it. My ankle was hurting too much and I couldn’t let go of my arm with my other hand. So I sat in the hole with this kid getting tired and wanting his mama for the rest of Halloween night.

The bandages from my undead costume were thinner then I thought and I was getting cold. Jimmy crawled up to my good side, he sang little rhyming songs to me and his toy dog that was the way we helped keep each other stay warm while we waited. There was nothing else we could do.

We woke to find it morning and we could hear the workers sent to clean up after the party. They were milling about waiting for the truck with the dumpster. I called and after some startled noises from the group I explained where we were and that we needed help getting out.

They gathered around the edge and looked down at me kind of funny, but I thought it was my costume. When I was done looking up and talking with my rescuers I looked back in the hole for Jimmy so they could get him out first while we waited for the rescue truck to come and haul me up in a basket, but he was gone.

I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I just dreamt about the kid?’ But when the nurse came in with my clothing so I could go home she gave me the little toy dog that she said was in my shirt pocket when I got there.

Jimmy was the name on the headstone I had tripped over that night. I stopped by the cemetery on the way home. I left his toy dog at the base of his headstone and thanked him for keeping me company that night. And his name appeared on my cast in a childish scrawl.

Autumn Afternoon, Part 1

2010-09-24T08:29:00.001-07:00

My name is Alice Ridges. Alice isn’t a popular name any longer, but the book ‘Alice in Wonderland’ had been one of my mother’s favorite stories when she was a child, so I was named Alice. But I don’t want to tell you about that story. The story I wanted to tell you about happened in the Autumn you see. And every time I smell the aroma of the leaves turning color, like they are right now, I think about what happened then, like it was happening all over again.

I had a job transfer from where I had been living since college, to the town my mother had grown up in. I had often visited my grandparents there as I grew up. A nice town with tree lined streets and children on most every block. The children were a little harder to come by when I was a kid. That generational skip as the kids moved away and the grandkids came back to stay and raise their children. In a word ‘suburbia.’

My grandmother taught me how to knit on the front porch there, while my granddad tossed a ball around with my brother Theo in the front yard. Grandma taught my mom how to knit there too, as my uncle played ball with granddad when they were young. History repeating itself in a way.

Well anyway, my grandparents had died about six years before I moved here. My parents still owned the house and they had a neighbor looking after it. This arrangement was supposed to be a temporary situation, just like when they bought the vacation house in Florida when my brother and I were both in college. But, as you can guess, after that they only came back up north for weddings and funerals.

When I called and told my mother about the job transfer she wrote to the neighbor and sent me the key along with the deed papers saying that I was now the new and sole owner of my grandparents estate. What this really meant that I was given the job of cleaning out and keeping up the old place. Mom wasn’t coming back to do it and didn’t care to. Some memories she didn‘t want to relive I guess. They had given Theo our childhood home when he got married.

I kept the neighbor, an old man named Mr. Wickens, on as a sort of gardener. The boy across the street mowed the lawn, but Mr. Wickens took care of the bushes and flowers. He liked doing it and didn’t have a yard of his own now that he lived in an apartment down the street. I didn’t know a thing about plants and I was busy with the house itself.

I was all moved in by the end of July and spent August working as the new manager of the department store from Friday to Tuesday each week. My weekends consisted of Wednesdays and Thursdays, but I didn’t mind that at all. I worked at cleaning out and repairing the house on the inside as the house painters made repairs and painted the outside. I wasn’t doing too many upgrades yet. I just had the wires and plumbing checked and they were sound. Plenty comfortable for just one person. And I was enjoying a period of reliving my childhood. I made it look as close to how my grandparents had it when I was a kid and just basked in the love and comfort I felt there.

Once September came around I was settled in on the first floor and the one bedroom I had been using upstairs. I was taking a much needed break from working on the house itself. The weather was still warm, but you could feel the difference in the air. There was a coolness to it in the evenings and the smell of the leaves getting ready to change colors.

On this first Wednesday weekend of September I had worked hard cleaning out the last of the old stuff in a closet in the front bedroom all morning and I was knitting in the afternoon shade on the front porch with a pot of tea on the table beside me. I daydreamed of the past as the purple sweater I was knitting grew in my hands.

I don’t know why I looked up… but I think it was the quiet. The kids were now in school and the afternoons to this point had been kid noisy. Jump rope chants, roller skates and bicycles, stick ball games on the corner, squeals from the swimming pools in the back yards.

I looked up to find a small boy at the head of my front walk way to the house. He was just looking at the house in a lonely sort of way as he held onto a teddy bear. I said hello, but he didn’t move or answer at first. This gave me time to look at him. He was about four I guessed. Not old enough to be in school but old enough to walk to a friends house down the block by himself.

He was dressed in shorts and a sweater. The sweater looked hand made, probably from a grandmother or aunt, the pattern was an older style. But he also had on knee socks and brown leather shoes, with a white button down shirt under the sweater like a kid in a story book from the nineteen thirty’s through fifty’s. His teddy bear was old and threadbare, but loved, because it was patched in places.

“Is there children here?” He asked in a small, but not weak voice.

“No. No children, only me.” I answered and then added, “But you can sit here and keep me company until the children get out of school if you like. It won’t take as long to wait that way. Or do you have to ask your mommy first?”

“Mommy has a headache and told me to go out to play, but Sissy is in school and I don’t have anyone to play with until she comes home.”

“Well you can sit here and we can wait for Sissy together. Want a drink of juice?”

“No, I’m not to have food from others. Allergies.” He said with a sorrowful shake of his head.

“My name is Miss Alice Ridges, and you are?”

“I can’t say. But this is Teddy… Teddy Heenmee.” He showed me his bear.

“Glad to meet you Mr. Heenmee Bear.” I said, and the boy laughed as he climbed onto the porch swing.

As I knitted we talked about what school was like for his sister and knitting sweaters and days off from work and headaches and bears until the children came down the sidewalk in groups from school. I poured another cup of tea and when I looked up again he was gone. His sister must have been in the last group of kids, their backs disappearing behind the front hedges of the next door neighbors property.

I went into the house to start dinner feeling that I had at least made one friend since I had moved to town. Not that the neighbors weren’t friendly. I was just too busy up to this point to get to know them for more then a wave across the lawn. I ask Mr. Wickens who the boy was the next time I saw him, but he didn‘t know any of the children by name.

The weather was so beautiful that I repeated the afternoon porch knitting and tea on Thursday and the little boy with the teddy bear showed up once more.

This time he was wearing jeans with the legs rolled up to fit him and a pull over sweater. The bear was still in tow, but his tongue was coming loose… The bear not the boy. I stitched it back in place for him and replaced the one worn eye with an extra purple button from the ones I had bought for the sweater I was knitting, and he thanked me.

I moved to the porch swing to see when the children were coming from the school and he was using my wicker chair with the pillow seat. He had the seat up like it was a car hood and he was pretending to be fixing my car for me while he taught the bear the different car parts that his daddy had showed him.

When I asked him if Mr. Teddy Heenmee Bear like to fix cars too, he looked at me funny and laughed. Then he asked me, “Why do you call my bear Mr. Heenmee?

“Because that is what you told me his name was yesterday. Teddy Heenmee.”

He giggled and rolled on my freshly painted porch floor. “Not Teddy Heenmee. Teddy. He is Teddy and me is Teddy.” He gave the bear a hug and then scrambled up onto the chair and started to give the newly fixed motor a test drive, saying between motor noises, “My mommy said I was okay here, because she knows who you are.”

The phone rang and I went in to answer it, we didn‘t have cell pones back then. By the time I was done talking to my brother about his twins graduating to middle school by the end of this school year, teddy and Teddy were gone.

Autumn Afternoons, Part 2

2010-09-24T08:12:00.000-07:00

These Wednesday and Thursday teddy bear visits went on rain or shine through September. By the time it was turning October I had written my phone number on a piece of paper and told him to give it to his mother. I was uncomfortable with not meeting her after so many weeks of her son spending time at my house. But she still hadn’t called me. And his sister never came up the walk to get him, he just seemed to disappear as he dashed away when the children walked past from school.

Teddy was a well behaved boy and he never asked for anything. Not a drink of water or a bathroom break. He just played in a constructive imaginative way, while I knitted away, and we would talk about whatever came to mind as we watched the leaves change color up and down the street.

The day before Halloween he told me he wouldn’t be able to come back to visit because it was getting colder outside and his mother didn’t want him to play outside anymore. But, he would come in costume to ‘Trick or ‘Treat’ the next evening and I would have to guess what costume he would be wearing. I didn’t guess the right answer and he left without me knowing which kid he was at my door the next night. I suspect it was a ghost because, when I thought about it later that night, it was the one thing I didn’t ask him and the most obvious.

I missed his visits in the afternoons, but his mother was right. The weather had turned colder and I didn’t sit on the porch any longer myself. I’d try to get a look at the kids through the window as they past from school, but they were so bundled up and wind blown it was impossible to tell them apart.

In no time at all it was time to get ready for Christmas. I was done with the cleaning out of the second floor and some of the Attic. I wanted to dress the house for the holidays before it got much colder. My brother and his family were coming for Christmas because I was going to their house for Thanksgiving day. This early November Wednesday, I had climbed the ladder to the attic and I was looking for the outdoor decorations. The wooden Santa and Sled for the porch roof had been found in the potters shed out back, and I found someone at work to hire to give them a new coat of paint. But, I was looking for the candy canes and fake candy garland that granddad used to have on the porch rail and steps. And if I didn’t get it set out soon the weather would turn too cold and I only had so many Autumn days left to get the job done in.

I knew that the things I was looking for were probably gone by now, but I kept on looking through the boxes, trunks and dressers up there in the attic just in case there was enough remnants left, or maybe a picture, so that I could have it replaced. I went through boxes and boxes of my mother and uncle’s things from when they were kids. Grandma kept it all from school work to drawings, broken toys to used up clothes. There were many boxes of junk I had to just throw away each week as I was cleaning the place out.

I was dusty and dirty as I came to the last corner to look into. I had found many memories and trinkets from the past up there, but like I said, most of it was junk. I had found the old Christmas tree ornaments and lights. The lights were too old to trust, but I brought the decorations down stairs and it gave me back some hope. I had a pile of shoe boxes of some love letters between Gram and Gramps to be saved and there were some journals from the early years of their marriage that I had spent some time reading instead of finishing the job and the morning was long gone.

I had learned that the uncle my brother was named for, Theodore, had gone missing on Halloween as a kid and was never found again. My brother and I had though he had died from a childhood illness all these years. I couldn’t wait to show Theo these journals when he got here and ask him how to talk to mom about it.

Back in the attic, I moved to the last trunk tucked away deep in the corner. It had been draped in an old sheet that had been made into a child sized ghost costume long ago. The only trouble was that this trunk was locked. I put the ghost costume on the save pile and I brought the boxes of journals down stairs. I found a screwdriver in the ‘catch all’ draw in the kitchen and went right back up to work at the ring with the lock hanging on it.

I pinched my fingers only once. I was working hard and sweating so much by the time I had broken it open, I had muddy sweat running into my eyes.

When I lifted the lid I was thinking about Christmas, but my thoughts quickly turned to Teddy as I saw what the trunk held safe from harm all these years.

The first thing I saw in the trunk as I wiped the muddy sweat from my eyes was an old well loved teddy bear with a new purple button eye. It was wrapped in the mummified arms of a small boy dressed in the same clothing I had seen on Teddy that first day of my Autumn knitting afternoons. It seems my late Uncle Theodor was finally found.

The End

The Good Girl

2010-07-13T14:23:00.000-07:00

Jenny Smith took one last look in the mirror before going out the door into the fresh spring air. There was nothing she could find out of place in her reflection, so she left the house and walked to the car.

She hated these yearly reviews at the family court house. The building was meant to look cheery with the flowers and bright colored banners out in front, but she never saw it as cheery in all the years she had been coming there. This was where all her sins were laid bare year after year. Would she never out live that day so long ago?

Her therapist met her on the stairs and walked in with her. This was an informal hearing or more of a review, but it was still going to make decisions for her life none the less. She sat by her lawyer and waited for the judge to come into the room and take his seat at the head of the large conference table. Her husband Jeff was sitting across from her on the other side.

The judge came in and the proceedings began. One side spoke and then the other. Her therapist gave her a glowing recommendation. This wasn’t a custody hearing as they lived together with the children fairly happily through the rest of the year. This had to do with the past. A past from before they were married. From before she was old enough to read or go to school. But it would not go away. The court system wouldn’t let it. So they were back again this year also. Each year it was discussed and gone over until someone always said that it shouldn’t have come this far in the first place, but that never changed a thing.

Jeff knew the whole story before they were married. They both thought that the reviews would stop when she turned twenty one. But they only got more complicated once she became a full fledged adult and worse still after she had the children. What a way to have an anniversary. She wanted to go to the cemetery with flowers for the families graves on this twenty-fifth year since their deaths. There was no one else to remember who they were. Only Jenny was left.

As the hearing slowly moved on, they were up to the part where they were listing her school grades and accomplishments along with her mistakes as she grew up, she let her mind wander. She let her thoughts go back to her childhood when she was just four years old.

.
The family had been sick with very bad spring colds and I was the first to get well enough to get out of bed. My little baby brother had kept my parents up all night with his coughing and Mommy and Daddy just wanted to sleep the day away. I got up and dressed myself as best as I could. Shorts with pink flowers in the print, orange sweater, snow boots with no socks.

I was hungry and was only allowed to make cereal. When mommy asked me what I was doing from the bedroom I answered, “Getting breakfast.”

“Will you bring some in for us too Janie Sweetheart?” Mommy asked.

“Oakie dokie.” I answered feeling all grown up because mommy needed my help. I wanted to make the breakfast good. Just like mommy did. There was no fruit like on the picture on the box in the refrigerator, so I ran out to the backyard and picked the berries growing on the fence. I washed them in the sink from the chair I had pushed over so I could reach. I used the bubbly stuff from under the sink. Then I put them in the bowls. I poured in the cereal and milk over that and I brought it bowl by bowl to my mom and dad.

Mommy and Daddy told me how I was their special Good Girl. They had eaten theirs down by the time I had made some for the baby, but I did good and smushed his with the back of the spoon like mommy did and I fed him his breakfast so mommy could go back to sleep. By the time I was ready to eat my own I was tired again and I spilled my bowl on the floor trying to bring it into the living room so I could watch TV.

There were no berries left or milk either, all the bowls were used, so I ate my cereal dry from the box on the couch in front of the TV. Then I fell asleep.

When I woke up I was cold, so I went to get into bed with my folks. But when I got to their door I knew something was wrong there was bloody throw up on the floor. My baby brother’s room looked the same. So I called ‘nine, one, one’ just like Mommy taught me and the policeman came to the door.

That was the last day Jenny had a family for a long time. She didn’t go to the funeral because she was in the hospital having tests, and the people taking care of her thought a four year old was too young to go to such an event.

From that day on, everyone that knew what she had done had watched to see if she would try to poison someone else again. Janie told them she was just trying to be a good girl, but it didn’t do any good. She was not allowed to play with the other kids, or touch anyone’s food again for a long time. She was never fostered out, but kept in the home and never given a job in the kitchen. She couldn’t get a job when she turned eighteen and was out on the streets when Jeff took her in and they took care of each other.

He taught Janie to cook and how to do a whole lot of other things. She was even able to get her much needed high school equivalency diploma and then went on to the community collage.

When they got married Janie changed her first name too. She is Jenny Smith now, no longer Janie Hunter. She colors her hair and takes care of her children like any other mother in the PTA. But some people at this table, from the prosecutors office, who couldn’t believe that what had happened so long ago hadn’t twisted Jenny through to the heart and soul. They always threw in the possibility that they thought she had done it on purpose. So, here they where back again this year.

With her oldest child approaching the age Janie was when it happened, coupled with the fact that it was twenty-five years, made a few of them nervous. She could see it in their eyes just before they looked away.

Didn’t they believe in all that counseling they made Janie endure for all those years. Janie always had to come back next week, and the week after that, because she hadn’t forgotten what had happened yet. But, how was she suppose to forget when ‘that’ was the reason she was there each week.

The inspections of Jenny’s children were being discussed now. Colds to diaper rash, growth charts and development were reviewed. Had she damaged them in any way as of yet?

Not in any way that could be measured by their tests and suppositions.

Jenny was free to return to her home and children, but never to forget what she did while trying to be a good girl when she was only four.

On the way home Jenny asked Jeff if they could go by the cemetery to have a small visit even though she didn’t have any flower for them. He obliged her even though he wanted to get back home. The reviews got longer each year and the sitter would be getting tired by now.

They stopped for a few minutes and she went to the grave sides of her family. Jenny placed a kiss on the top of each cold gray grave stone and pulled a few blades of grass that had grown too long, from in front of their names and the one stone meant for herself someday. The one on the empty grave that said “The Good Girl” across the front of it.

On her tenth birthday long ago. That day was the first time she was brought to see the graves. The words weren’t there when the case worker and Janie arrived. Mrs. Johnson read out the inscriptions on each one to her and pointed out that the last blank one would be hers some day.

Janie laid the flower carefully on her families headstones. And those words had appeared like magic, carved into that stone, they were there when she was done.

Jenny smiled again today when she read those words set in the stone. Somebody, somewhere knew that she had meant no harm and was only trying to be a good girl like her mommy and daddy wanted.

Seeing those words each year, carved into that stone was enough to get her through the next year until the reviews came again. She smiled and said, “Good-bye until next year. Your ‘Good Girl’ still loves you.”

The Gravedigger - Rewrite

2010-04-28T15:32:00.000-07:00

The Grave digger was a large and strong man. Jonathan Andrews, despite his family’s prestigious name and high standing in the community, was an odd sort. Even as a boy he was known for his unusual strength and apparent need to be out of doors and alone.

Mr. Andrews felt that his son’s strength should be put to some good use so he had young Jonathan apprenticed to the towns blacksmith. But when Jonathan would run away from the close, consuming feeling of the heat of the furnace fires, the family felt the embarrassment of his ill behavior and turned their backs on him. It didn’t help that Jonathan could always be found, at these times, in the cemetery clearing weeds away from the base of the headstones of the people that had no family to look after their plots.

When a person in town died, young Jonathan was there in the cemetery, helping the old gravedigger create the large, rectangular hole in the earth. Jonathan was only fourteen when the old man died, and having done the job before, he took over the duty. Jonathan moved into the small hut at the cemetery’s edge and even though, or maybe in because of, his new profession the Andrews family declined to acknowledge him in public any longer.

Mrs. Andrews did arrange for a meeting with the Widow Henderson.

“As you know Mrs. Henderson.” she straightened up and leaned in. “My son, thou large, is still a boy and in need of some little provision. Good hearty meals, served hot?”

“I believe I understand you, Mrs. Andrews. I do live closest to the grave keeper’s shack... And it would not seem amiss for me to bring him his meals. Twice a day, let us say, and a loaf of bread?”

“There will be money on your account at the grocers, enough for two, and meat will be provided weekly. Will that be satisfactory, Mrs. Henderson?”

“I should say so Ma'am. I thank you for your concern in my welfare. I will be silent as the grave as to our arrangement, Mrs. Andrews.”

Sometimes, Jonathan was hired to dig ditches and wells, but mostly he dug graves and maintained the cemetery grounds. His health was robust, better than most, and when a plague came through the town, Mr. Hanson, the carpenter and coffin maker, hired Jonathan to collect the bodies.

There was no funeral parlor in town and wakes were held at home. One end of a room would be cleared and the coffin would be placed on a table or saw horses. The house would be filled with flowers in warmer weather, to help mask the odor. Family and friends would sit and mourn, and wait to see if the deceased would rise. After three days wait the family would have the body buried in the sweet earth of the cemetery.

If the deceased had no family to sit the wake, or the people were afraid of disease, the coffin was interred at the cemetery straight away and the body had a bell string. This bell was strung through a ‘Y’ shaped stick set upright in the ground at the foot of the grave. The other end of this string had been wrapped around the corpse’s hand before the lid was nailed shut. A watcher, usually a family member, would sit in the cemetery for the next few days and nights to listen for the bell.

Only once was Jonathan awakened by a bell watcher in the night. The young son of a woman buried that day was there to listen for the bell. He woke Jonathan, in his hut, with a shout when he heard the bell ringing. It was only the wind playing with the bell that scared the young watcher, for the string was not moving.

Jonathan uncovered the casket to settle the boys mind, then Jonathan went back to sleep. By the time he woke up the next day, the tale was all over town that a bell had been rung in the night, but sadly not in time to save the ringer. No one in town would sit as the bell watcher any longer and that job was also given to Jonathan.

Three years later, Jonathan was sitting the bell watch in the night. Widow Henderson, who had made him such good meals for so long, had died and been buried that afternoon. She was the third to die that week of the plague, so she had been buried quickly with the bell string tied around her right hand.

Jonathan wrapped a woolen blanket around his shoulders and moved the pebbles out from under his rump. He was tired from digging graves all day, but he didn’t want to fall asleep on his watch.

The next thing he knew, his head snapped up in shock at the sound of a bell. He shook his head to try to clear his thoughts. He looked again at the bell in front of him, but it wasn’t moving. Still he could hear a bell ringing.

Jonathan lumbered to his feet, in order to better hear from whence the sound came. He checked all the bells on the other new graves, but all were still. Yet he could clearly hear a bell somewhere in the cemetery, but before he could track the tinkling down the ringing ceased.

He returned, shaken, to the widow’s grave determined to stay awake. He found a small sharp stone to sit upon hoping the discomfort would keep him awake and alert. He even talked to the widow, “I should have told you before, but I only have now. Your cooking was very good.” There was no reply in the quiet night air, but he hadn’t expected any.

Listening for noise in the quite dark of night is hard work. In spite of his effort, Jonathon found himself drifting off to sleep again.

Suddenly, a bell was ringing. Despite his size Jonathan jumped up to search the darkness in every direction. He listened for where it could be coming from, but before he could take a few steps - it stopped. Now Jonathan suspected that some boys were playing a cruel joke on him. He was not going to let some ruffians disrespect the dead. He walked around the edge of the cemetery for the rest of the night, satisfied that the bell rang no more.

The following day, two others took their last breaths because of the illness. Jonathan, exhausted from the labor of digging graves and nights spent alert, tried to find someone, anyone, in town to do the night watch for him. No one was willing to do the job.

After a long day of struggling through his digging and collecting bodies, Jonathan took a nap. He could do nothing else. After it was already dark he dragged his large tired frame out to the center of the cemetery to the tree by the widow’s grave to begin his watch.

Most of the night passed without any unusual happenings. The night was quiet, save for a fox’s bark around midnight; not even a rustle of leaves could be heard.

On what he hoped would be his last circuit until morning, Jonathan approached the tree when the sound of a bell could clearly be heard. After glancing at the bells in his care and finding them still, he ran to the side of the cemetery between the graveyard and the town in hopes of cutting off the hooligan’s escape. When the sound of the bell didn’t move the gravedigger began to run around to the other side of the graves. The sound of the ringing kept pace with him, always from why seemed to be the other side of the cemetery. Did some boys tie the bell to a dog and let it loose in the graveyard for the night? As suddenly as it had started, the ringing stopped.

Before the day dawned, Jonathan was hatching a plan to trap the anonymous bell ringer. He was not going to let the bell ringer get away if they returned tonight.

Jonathan had spent some of his time that day making a clear path around the outskirts of the cemetery. As he did this, he dug some holes to catch the foot of anyone or anything creeping around in the dark. Jonathan covered these holes with small branches and he put a stake in the ground near by marking the spots so he didn’t trip in them himself.

He napped as the preacher presided over the latest internments. Jonathan prepared for a long night. He closed the graves of the newest residents, hoping to observe someone skulking about in the lowering light, but he saw no one.

Now that the gravedigger’s watch had started, Jonathan put down the lantern and laid his blanket against the tree so it would look as if he was sitting there.

The moon was almost full and only thin high clouds graced the sky. There wasn’t a whisper of a breeze. Jonathan could see well enough to walk his circuit without a light, but anyone not familiar with the graveyard would have trouble getting around the headstones.

The night moved on just like the two before, and the tinkling brass bell woke him tauntingly, but as in previous nights, no culprit was to be found. Jonathan had made a vow not to let another night go by without catching the miscreant. He had rested all he could during the day and was as fresh as could be expected when his night watch had started in the cemetery. He had brought no extra blanket to comfort his shoulders against the chill as he walked, for this night would be the bell ringers last.

So when the bell began to ring, the fury in Jonathan’s eyes would have stopped hardened generals in their tracks. The sound of the ringing brought him back to the tree in the center of the cemetery time and time again. All he could think of was that a ghost bell now inhabited the grave yard.

In all these long years Jonathan had never seen or heard a spook or specter, but he knew there was a first time for everything a person encountered. This bell had an unseen hand ringing it, he was sure. He checked every graveside bell and string and not one was in motion, yet the ghostly ringing could still be heard. He was not going to shirk his duty to the recently buried and their families. Jonathan was tired, but he stayed and he woke himself hourly to check the bells for movement until morning arrived.

The plague at last left town, leaving a dozen dead. All was quite and peaceful again, and Jonathan’s work load was back to only day work. There were no more nights of watching bells. He tried to convince himself that the business of the bells was just his imagination. He even asked the town doctor to check his ears and was found in good health.

A month after the ordeal of the bell, Jonathan’s mother died. She had not been sick for very long. Her wake was well attended. Jonathan buried his mother under the shade of the tree, and he felt that she should have a bell and a proper watch that he himself would do, out of respect. He was, after all, the gravedigger and the caretaker.

The son walked the graveyard nightly to check the bell at his mother’s feet. Suddenly the phantom bell chimed in the night air.

Jonathan was greatly angered that the ringer would disturb his grief. His own Mother! Was there no sanctity? When, as usual, no one could be found, he grabbed the tree’s lower branches and shook them violently. The bell’s ring pealed with a vengeance.

By the light of his lantern, Jonathan saw a small brass bell tangled in a bird’s nest above him. He gave a hearty laugh for the first time in many weeks. The large man climbed into the tree and tried to remove the bell from hell, but the string was tangled tightly around the nest and branch. As he reached his hand out further to remover the whole nest, the branch broke and Jonathan was plunged to the ground.

As his body hit the hard ground, strewn with twisted roots, the bell in the local church began to ring out in the night air. Then, all of the bells in the entire town rang. Everyone rushed from their beds into the streets. What could this be?

The church bell could not be quieted, and so the town was searched from one end to the other. By the weak morning light Jonathan was found with a broken neck under the only tree in the cemetery. He was lying near his mother’s grave.

He was buried that very day with no bell or string. After such a scare of bells, no one would watch the watcher’s grave. So when Jonathan awoke in his coffin only minutes after his coffin was lowered into the ground, the gravedigger was left to die there all alone as the dirt was shoveled onto the box.

He had no bell to save him.

The Guillotine (Part 1)

2010-03-31T17:07:00.000-07:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

There was a guillotine in the town of Fairview. It was left over from another era and resurrected from a local junkyard as a way to bring more tourists into town. The only easily accessible place that wasn’t already in use was a small empty lot on third street next to Sadie-Ann’s Bed and Breakfast. Sadie-Ann Miller was not pleased about this turn of events at all. She featured a country craft and cooking theme for families, and having a guillotine standing on the other side of her superbly manicured garden hedge made her ill. She had been on a crusade to have it torn down and junked once again.

She petitioned the mayor’s office, but the Chamber of Commerce of Fairview out voted her. After that she ran a series of fund raisers to have the thing encased in a building of some kind so it couldn’t be seen from the street or her property because her guests walked past it regularly to get to the ice cream shop across the street. This plan did go over well with the other merchants because the guillotine wouldn’t need as much money in the way of repair from the weather, it was less prone to being vandalized and a small ticket fee could be charged at the door to help pay for a caretaker and any needed upkeep thus practically eliminating a tax hike for the expense.

After months of planning and haggling by the town council a small, simple, yet old fashioned looking wooden building was built around The Patmore Guillotine and the town started to advertise that it could be seen in comfort year round. There was a picture of the one and a half story tall, one room building in the newspaper and on the website under ‘Interesting Attractions.’ Inside the building was large enough that the whole guillotine and its chest high platform, with its small flight of stairs, to fit nicely inside with room to walk around the base. On the outside there was an awning over a few benches to helped keep those waiting for the next tour, out of the sun or rain.

Mr. Dante Rancho, one of the retired town maintenance workers was hired to sell the tickets and give a talk on the known history of the Patmore Guillotine. This information was gathered together by the historical society headed, none other then Sadie-Ann Miller herself. After she had worked tirelessly to gather the information against the guillotine the town used the information to make an accurate historical presentation for the tours and printed it up in booklet form to sell at the souvenir stand inside. Sadie-Ann Miller was fit to be tied and threatened to sue. The information was the property of the historical society, but she did manage to have them stop using her name as author when the next printing came about.

This information along with a list of the names of the people known to have been executed by the guillotine was also posted on the inner walls. There were illustrations of it’s construction under framed plastic sheeting to make it last longer, for viewing. The same information was available on posters or postcards for sale as souvenirs along with mini guillotine pencil sharpeners. This netted more income for the small community as the visitors increased with the services at the guillotine and this pleased the tax payers.

Mr. Rancho would start the tour by tell the story of how the various men of the Patmore family took turns being the executioner with a hood over their head and a shapeless robe so no one in the town or surrounding countryside would really know who had been the person to execute the guilt party, and in that way the family of the executed had no one person to make their retaliations on should they feel the need. After Mr. Rancho imparted this information, he talked about the mechanics of the guillotine and how it had been made to work best for a left handed executioner. Then he would pull the rope and let loose the latch of the guillotine blade. He did this once an hour to punctuate the end of the tour.

The town went back to it’s peaceful existence well pleased with the amount of extra traffic and income from the sightseers. Well, it was almost peaceful.

In the mornings the lock on the door of the guillotine building was always found to be unlocked. The lock itself was changed and the new one was found unlocked in the mornings also. The mayor asked if the owner of the ice cream parlor across the street from the guillotine could have his outside camera moved to watch the guillotine building for a night or two until the culprit could be caught. The camera never saw anyone by the building much less the door itself even though it had a good view, yet the lock was still opened in the morning.

The police were of course involved and after no evidence was found they added a guillotine lock check to their nightly rounds. When they checked the door they found it locked throughout the night, but the door was found to be unlocked when checked again soon after dawn. A high tech firm was hired to install a lock with a timer that could be programmed to relock the door after sunrise each day. This worked for about a week until the sunrise time came after the door was to relock itself. The company who had installed the lock was unwilling to send anyone out weekly to change the settings as the time of sunrise changed through the seasons or give out the code to change it themselves, for as they said, ‘The policy didn’t cover maintenance against a ghost.’ and they had a hardy laugh before they hung up.

For a while the council had the school bus driver relock the door, but that didn’t work out after day light savings time was over and he was out on the road as the sun came up and busy with his route for the next few hours.

In the end they had to hire someone to come just before dawn to listen for the door to unlock and then they would relock the door. This someone had to be unafraid of ghosts and an early riser. A person hard to come by, so it came with a price. The mayor was getting frantic because this was costing more then the guillotine was bringing in as funds. The town merchants didn’t want the ticket fee to go up because they thought that no one would come to town to see it at all if they did. They also didn’t want it to get out that the door was being left unlocked in the mornings because they didn’t want ghost hunters, or anyone else, coming to town and get into the building causing possible damage to the town’s leading tourist attraction.

After a few days of relocking the door as soon as it was unlocked, the door was found unlocked again shortly after the relocking and at odd times through the night. Feeling undone by it all the out going mayor threw up his hands and said, “Let your next mayor take care of it. I‘m not running for reelection again.” and he walked out of the town hall meeting.

Sadie-Ann Miller was back to suggesting that the whole thing should be taken down lock, stock and barrel, but the word had gotten out about the ghost and business in town had never been so good. Everyone who came to town seemed to want to stay at the Sadie-Ann’s Bed and Breakfast so she didn’t try as hard as she had been to have it demolished, but mostly this was because she was just too busy to get to the town merchant meetings.

Ghost hunters came from all over the world setting up their equipment to try to capture evidence of the guillotine ghost. The media followed suit. Was it an executioner or a beheaded specter? The ghost hunters found that they got some readings, but nothing conclusive. All that happened was that the door would unlock itself night after night, while cameras, people and machines watched quietly on.

After a few months of testing by one group and then another, the outsiders left town and things started to settle down to what they had been before. Only a slight increase in out of town traffic from those looking to see if they could commune with the ghost and find out what it wanted was left of the ghost hunter craze.

The new mayor let it be known that some cameras would be installed and two would be facing the door at all times and a split screen of all the shots inside and out would be shown on a local TV channel and the internet at all hours of the day and night that the Guillotine was not open for business, so anyone at any time would be seen taking advantage of the situation and be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. This meant that the anyone could see the guillotine on their computer thus reducing the revenue some what, but the mayor thought it a good compromise.

With the ghost left alone by human interference, dawn was reestablished as the unlocking time and the years marched on with the ghost never missing a day.

After Mr. Rancho decided he was getting too old for the job and wanted to move closer to his grandkids, someone else needed to be found to run the tours. The new trouble to Fairview’s Guillotine Association became that no one in town wanted to take the position. The job eventually went to a group of college students from a near by city, that between them all the hours and dates were covered. It worked out well until the one night when there was some mischief going on and the group lost their jobs for getting into the building and having a midnight séance without permission.

It wasn’t really the break in as much as the fact that they were drunk when they did it that was the issue. Drunk or not they all insisted that they had seen a small left handed person in black executioners cloak and hood with their black eyes glinting with what looked like tears through their mask standing with a gloved left hand on the blade latch pulley robe. The video showed none of the students were on the platform when the blade came down by itself. The students didn’t seem to care about being fired because none of them wanted to come back to work after that anyway.

Part 2 to Follow.

The Guillotine (Part 2)

2010-03-31T17:06:00.000-07:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Sadie-Ann begged for a vote to have the guillotine torn down instead of finding a new tour guide, but in the end little old Miss Marston the retired librarian took the job. It was a joke around town, still she didn’t seem to mind. Some of the people in town took the time to come and see the show as she slowly climbed the steps and pulled the rope back with all her strength and throwing her slight weight behind her small strength she was able to pull the rope hard enough to move the latch. She grinned while breathing hard after each pull, but she had to get one of the guys working at the ice cream parlor across the street to reset it for her each hour. The joke was that the blade of the guillotine weighed more then she did.

After some months of this, Randy, one of the guys from the ice cream parlor, was talked into taking over the job, but that didn’t last either. He was doing the weekly cleaning of the guillotine and the blade came down by itself and cut off his arm. The latch was checked for wear and fit with a safety. Randy’s arm was able to be reattached resulting in good movement. The towns insurance premium when through the roof and Sadie-Ann was on the war path against the guillotine again. But the blood stains were cleaned off and the job was posted on the internet and Mr. Higgins, a historian from Tacoma, came to Fairview to do the job.

All this time, years in fact, Sadie-Ann Miller never once set a foot on the lot with the guillotine. She wouldn’t even walk passed it. She went all the way around the block to get to the ice cream parlor for her weekly order of ice cream for her guests. Some nights she just knew she could hear the guillotine slide in it’s track to the bottom with a heavy thud, but she never told a anyone what she heard, not even her husband.

What bothered Sadie-Ann Corbin-Miller was the secret she kept so closely. Her family name had once been Patmore. The family lineage went from Sadie-Ann, to her father Ernest Corbin, her grandmother Ann Patmore-Corbin, and her great grandmother Sadie Patmore.

It was only by chance that Sadie-Ann’s husband, Barry Miller, wanted to move to Fairview to start the Bed and Breakfast. Years later she found out that the empty lot next to the Bed and Breakfast was the exact spot where the guillotine had once stood and was standing once again.

Sadie-Ann had never told her husband Barry the story of how her great-grandmother Sadie Patmore, was actually the last executioner to use the guillotine. Her grandmother had to execute her own beloved brother for murdering a man. Driven to insanity, this led to Sadie-Ann’s great grandmother’s incarceration in an insane asylum, where she was later raped. Sadie died giving birth to her daughter Ann in the asylum.

Disgraced because their son was a murderer, the Patmore family had moved from the town and the guillotine was left to rust and crumble. What happened so long ago in Fairview was forgotten by all alive but Sadie-Ann herself. She was told the story only when she repeatedly asked her father how she got the name of Sadie-Ann and he told her the sordid tale. Sadie-Ann Miller was determined that the secret would die with her.

Sadie-Ann remembered that all the Patmore’s were left-handed, just like she was. That and her name from her long dead relatives were the only clues left to her lineage and she didn’t want to have to change the her name and the name of the Bed and Breakfast after years of building a clientele.

Mr. Higgins was allowed to go through the old records stored in the basement of the Public Library. Sadie-Ann was concerned that he might find something she hadn’t, but she felt that there was probably wasn’t anything left after she had gone through all of those same records years ago when the guillotine was first put back up. Sadie-Ann burned anything she could find that tied her to the guillotine. But Mr. Higgins was good at his job. He found enough to make the connection and after a trip to Sadie-Ann’s town of birth, he asked her to meet him at the Guillotine the next week on Friday night, after business hours to talk about her family tree.

Sadie-Ann was so upset she couldn’t eat for days. She hadn’t been sleeping well either. She would pace back and fourth on the widows walk at the top of her Victorian Bed and Breakfast for hours looking at the small building down below.

Barry tried to get her to go to the doctor, but she would just point to the guillotine building and say, “The doctor doesn’t have a little white pill for that now does he?” He stopped booking rooms for the next month and started making plans for a vacation far away.

Sadie-Ann was making herself sick with worry by the time Friday morning came around. The doctor had come to her house and given her something to help her sleep and settle her stomach. She woke in the late afternoon to find a note from Barry telling her that he was out picking up a surprise for her.

Dressed in the first thing she could find she didn‘t even pull a comb through her graying hair. Looking a bit like a wild old crone Sadie-Ann walked over to the Guillotine for the very first time in her life as the sun went down. She told herself that she was a reasonable person and that most people were quite reasonable also. That Mr. Higgins would see just how much the information would hurt her business and she would pay him whatever it took to bury and forget about the information he had found.

The interview didn’t start off very well. Sadie-Ann couldn’t keep her eyes off of the guillotine and hardly even heard what it was that Mr. Higgins had to say to her. She was shaking violently by the time she demanded he keep his mouth closed or else.

She was uncontrollable when Mr. Higgins told Sadie-Ann he wouldn’t keep his information quite. Something inside her just snapped and she had the power of three men. After knocking the man out with one punch to the face, she wrestled the unconscious Mr. Higgins up the steps and into the guillotine. All the while the cameras were broadcasting everything. But just as Sadie-Ann was about pull the latch rope the ghost appeared and the camera caught a flair of white and when the picture returned to focus, Mr. Higgins had been pulled out from under the blade and Sadie’s body was collapsing against the side of the guillotine.

Old yellowed papers with the edges singed and burned were falling from the ceiling slowly like snow which obscured the view from the cameras for a second here and there. They fluttered down from the ceiling then landed on the floor and both bodies as the papers scattered themselves around the room.

As the police got there Mr. Higgins was just coming to consciousness and Sadie-Ann’s body with the pull rope still in her left hand was slumped against the side of the guillotine‘s uprights, but her head was now in the guillotine’s basket.

From that day on the door of the guillotine building was never found unlocked again, but the town now had a new story to go with the guillotine. The one where Sadie-Ann Patmore/Miller was driven crazy by the ghost of her great-grandmother and when Sadie-Ann tried to keep the story from coming out about her relative being the last executioner and the enraged ghost killed her.

The video is there for viewing along with the stolen papers Sadie-Ann had once burned. The burnt edged documents confirmed the facts of the story. You can go to Fairview and see the guillotine for yourself and see that the blood stain from her severed head still there in the basket, if you want to take a peek inside of it. They’ve never been able to get the stains out.

The End

Blogging Information

2010-03-31T17:04:00.000-07:00

I am putting the next story in the blog in two parts. It is a longer story then the others so far, and I have decided to but it in ‘second part first’ so that it can be read through in order from the top to the bottom of the page.

Sorry for any confusion when it shows up on the follower lists in the wrong order.
Lady Euphoria

Mack’s Room

2010-02-18T14:37:00.000-08:00

Mack. It sounded like something you called a person that you didn’t know, but that was his name. Not that I ever used it. He was in the nursing home that I use to volunteer in. I was rarely in his room and he was never out of it that I knew of.

His room was the same as all the others, but it just felt different. Dark and menacing, the air felt thick even when the windows were open and the breeze came through the doorway.

Mack was a violent man. The story was that he had an accident and his brain was damaged leaving him in a constant angry state. The only way to take care of his needs was to sedate him first even though he was tied down all the time.

I don’t know the why’s or how’s, all I did know was he couldn’t be trusted not to hurt you if you got too close. The only reason I was ever in his room at all was that the Home’s policy stated that no one went into his room alone. The last person who had, left with a broken arm. He would grab holed of you in a tight crushing grip and not let go. Even with his restraints he was dangerous. So when the staff had to take care of his daily needs sometimes they would ask for me to stand by the door to call for help if it was needed.

Now there are all different types of people in the world and if you live long enough at one time or another you’re going to need help taking care of yourself. So, knowing that I might someday need nursing home care, I was paying it forward and volunteering.

I would go around and talk to the different people who lived there or read to them in the day room. I’d even play cards with the ones that could. You know, I’d just let them know that they were not forgotten.

But like I said, I stayed clear of Mack’s room most of the time. I did have my favorites of course. Though I tried not to play favorites when there was such need for companionship all around. One day a week, that was where you could find me, in the only nursing home in town. I didn’t know everyone there, but I did know a few of them from before they came here to stay.

Anyway, after I had been volunteering at the place for about a year strange things started to happen about once a week or so. Things were moved that couldn’t be moved without help. Full heavy dressers were found away from the wall and up against beds. Maintenance was called in to bolt them to the walls before anyone got hurt. After that it was other heavy things in the kitchen, housekeeping or maintenance. But before it got too out of hand it all stopped and the only thing that had changed was that Mack had died.

His room was cleaned out and made ready for the next person needing care and about a month later the room was filled again.

But every person that was put into that room was harmed in some way when no one was there to do it. Bloody scratches raked down someone’s face. Cuts and bruises were found on others. Surveillance cameras were installed to find the one who was doing it. No one was seen in the room at the time of the incidents, yet the assaults kept on happening to anyone that was given the room that Mack had once lived in.

It didn’t take long for the room to be changed into a storage area. The home was libel for any injury to their residents and if they didn’t want to be shut down, there was nothing else that they could do. From then on that room held only broken wheelchairs, bed frames and things left for parts.

I retired and moved away around the same time the nursing home was bought by a larger company who didn’t see the need to waste the space of a room that could be turned into revenue. But I saw on the news the other day that an elderly resident was mysteriously killed in their room in that nursing home I used to volunteer in. Crushed by the bed and impaled through the heart by a wheel chair spoke. I knew how and where it must have happened. It was the ghost of Mack or the evil that lived in his room with him and had never left that did it.

Moonlight Walking

2010-01-13T19:39:00.001-08:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

My mother called them my nighttime rambling but my father called them my moonlight walking. I’m talking about getting up in the middle of the night and going to the out house.

I never got out of the habit since I was a child like everyone else I knew had. Grandpa, Papa’s father came to live with us, and he got up a few times in the night too when he was older before he died, but being infirmed made him get that way. I had never stopped.

Other people felt a fear of the night that I didn’t share. Grandpa knew about that also. He had grown up on a farm and they often did work by the moon light, and he would tell me that there was nothing that beat putting on a shingle roof in the night. “The shingles lasted longer and didn’t warp as fast.” he’d say. Papa worked in the saw mill. You needed good eyes and day light to see by for a job like that. I had what they called weak eyes. I had glasses to read by. I could see a rabbit at a good distance though, and was a fare shot so the other school children didn’t give me too much ribbing about it, but that was all when I was a child. I usually didn’t wear my glasses outside in the night until I needed to wear them most of the time.

I have a healthy respect of the dark. There are things that use the dark to hide in and do their mischief and I’m not leaving some people out of that group. But I always wondered why others found the night so very strange and frightening. If you were careful just like in the daylight there was nothing to be scared of.

I think that part of my love of that time of day was the difference of the world at night. It was so very different. It had sounds and things to see that just weren’t about in the daylight. As a kid one of the first thing I remember being different was the moon flower. It only bloomed at night. Like the morning glory only bloom in the mornings. Different things just have their own time and the night time was my time to explore.

Me, I liked the dead of night. It has a stillness that has nothing to do with the wind in the trees. On a still night you can hear for miles further then in the day. It has a rhythm and cadence unlike anything I’ve found in the daylight.

In the day there were cycles too. With the arch of the sun in the sky marking time and the seasons also. But at night there was a different meter, the moon. The sun didn’t have a new, quarter or full adding to the changes of the night. It got so I could tell the waxing and waning of the moon even when the weather got between the moon and me.

I had the habit of going to bed early with the younger children so I could have a bit of time to myself in the middle of the night. There wasn’t a place to call my own back then. I even had to share the bed I slept in with a big family in a small house. The house had been in my mother side of the family for generations so there was no moving to a larger one even if we had the money.

We all got up before the sun each day to be ready for work or school. Even before it was time to leave for school we needed time to get our morning chores done before we left. But the night of predawn was different. Critters and birds were on the move either finishing or starting their day and it was noisy by comparison to the middle of the night. I liked to practice being as quite as the night creatures as often as I could. I liked most everything I learned about the night.

But there was nothing so glorious as a full winter moon on a snow covered clear night. It has its own kind of lighting. Magical. I could stay up for hours and never tire of it despite the cold. I didn’t do it often. It left the next day on the poor side of working and the older I got the more I had to do in the daytime. Grandpa understood I think. He would ask me about talking to the creatures of the night. But I never talked to them. I only listened.

When I was a twelve years old, there had been a new snow and everything was blanketed in white. The wind had blown away the clouds and the deep bitter cold left everything frozen and still in a quick freeze. It was just as I liked it. You could hear so far that you could almost hear the Angles sigh in heaven. I was ready and raring to go. I had laid out my outerwear all ready. I didn’t even care that the snow had been disturbed by my brothers in an impromptu snowball fight while doing their evening chores.

When I woke in the middle of the night it was so very cold, even inside the house. The cold was pressing in and stealing the warmth that the furnace and daylight had collected inside. I used the privy pot so I didn’t have to get undressed in the out house to do my business in such cold. I had to add a layer or two before leaving the house. I had on three pairs of socks in my older brothers boots, long johns and two layers of clothing, a sweater, a long coat, two pairs of gloves with mittens over that and my wooly earflap hat with a shawl over my hatted head and neck with a scarf to hold it all down and cover my lower face. It was hard to move well, but I wasn’t going to miss this.

I took one last look out of the frosty window and the chimney smoke of the house across the street was still going straight up. I’d have to be careful not to stay out for too long. But it would be worth every second to be able to hear the sound of the snow squeak and crunch under foot.

The cold made it hard to breath. Not too much on the lungs. It was the frost collecting on the scarf over my mouth and nose that made breathing hard. I had to knock it off on a regular bases to keep on being able to breath at all. I was glad I didn’t have to wear my glasses or I’d have been blinded from the frost that would have coated them too.

I had walked out to the center of the back yard, but the snow didn’t sound right with it all tamped down already from my brothers, so I headed to the front yard. The crunch and squeak was so satisfying after some warmer winters of little sloshy snows. I remembered a story my grandfather told me about tiny, little, man like creatures making tunnels under the snow and screaming in anger as all their work was collapsed by our gigantic feet. I laughed out loud letting out a large puff of steam through my scarf.

It obscured my view for a few moments and I took the time to break up the fast forming frost layer on the outside of my scarf, but when I could finally breathe and see again what I did see confused me.

There was a cloud of steam moving slowly toward me coming up the street. The steam I had released was still hanging in the air in front of me and just off to my left now. Whoever let it out must have been panting hard. It was more solid looking then what I had expelled and it was moving faster and in a different direction then my steam was.

I watched this cloud barely blinking with the cold air making my eyes sting and the frost layer thickened on my scarf once again. When I could take another breath the cloud was close enough for me to see it more clearly. It took shape and became a woman in a long skirted dress with flowers in her hair and her parasol held high against the nonexistent sun. The moonlight made her glow and the brightness made it all clear as day.

For once I was glad for my far sightedness. I could see it all in detail. The buttons and lace, the print of the gown and the shine of her shoes as they peeked out from under the hem of her skirt with each step she took. She was plain and wore pair of glasses on a chain around her neck. She was squinting to see where she was going and stumbling a bit as she went. The woman’s vanity and fashion kept her from putting them on and seeing where she was going. She started to cross the street just before she got to me and was hit by something unseen and tossed out on the road back in the direction she had come from. She was killed by the impact and her parasol floated to the ground behind me.

I needed to breathe again and broke the frost once more. She was gone when I looked back, the snow undisturbed where she had landed. None of her footsteps had left tracks. Turning to go back inside I tripped on the parasol and fell to my knees in the snow. I scrambled back away from it and I ran into the house.

In the morning Mama asked me why I had taken Great Aunt Ellie’s parasol out of the trunk in the attic and left it out in the snow on such a cold night. She held it out in her hands, bent the ribs back into shape and Mama closed it. She wrapped it up in a clean cloth and tied up with string, but it was unmistakably the parasol I‘d seen last night. I didn’t want to touch it, but she said handed it to me and said, “Put it back in the trunk in the attic with Ellie’s glasses and sewing things. And please, don‘t take the family things out again if you are not going to care for them once you do.”

I didn’t tell her I hadn’t even remembered that they were up there or what I had seen in the night. I just asked her how Great Aunt Ellie had died and she said she didn’t remember ever knowing. “The family Bible only said she died young.” Mama told me.

On Saturday morning Mama and I checked the old records in the town hall basement and found out that Aunt Ellie was killed by a runaway horse and cart in the street out front of our house. She was coming home one summer day from a sewing circle meeting. There was a picture of her from a yellowed old newspaper article in the same dress. It was taken the day she died. It was of all the women at the sewing circle meeting and the only things missing from the woman in the picture and the one I saw that night, were her glasses, her basket of sewing on her arm and her parasol.

The Rider in the Woods

2009-05-13T04:42:00.000-07:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

The boys were playing in the woods. They weren’t supposed to be there because a rain storm was forecast for that afternoon. But they were doing just that, playing cops and robbers or pirates, I can’t remember which, when they all heard the sound of horses hooves pounding through the woods right past them. They heard the horse’s breath and a rider holler “Whoa!” They all felt the cold air on their skin. ’The Ghost Rider!’

Tony was the first to react. He dropped the stick he was using for his weapon as he ran for all he was worth back home.

Our house was the closest, and when they all got back to our garage, I was working on my bicycle. You could tell without asking that something was wrong. Their eyes were big and they were shaking, faces white and voices weak as they told me what happened to them.

Being Tony’s older brother I couldn’t resist poking fun at them for acting like babies. But when they wouldn’t let it drop, I knew they really did believe they had heard the ghost.

There wasn’t a kid in town that hadn’t heard the stories. A rider dressed in black on a jet black horse by day and glowing white at night, would appear in the woods south of town. Most kids thought it was a way to keep them out of the woods and closer to home. Some older folk’s claimed to have seen it when they were younger. None of these kids had believed them before that day.

It was part of the town’s history. A rider came to town long ago trying to outrun a thunder storm. He and his horse were struck by lightning, killing them both before they could find shelter. They were buried in a grave marked only by a stone saying ‘Rest in Peace.’ This grave was on the furthest edge of the woods where the stream passes the old oak tree. The exact place where they were said to have been hit by the bolt.

Most people thought the stories that were told about the ghost were just to keep the story alive around the campfire. That or to scare the young people in town like they themselves were frightened by the older folks story telling when they were children. But the people in town that had seen or heard the ghost themselves knew it to be true.

Harry and Sam didn’t want to talk about it at all after they had come back from the woods. But the others could not keep quite about it. In fact they wouldn’t talk about anything else for weeks. Charlie started to sleep with a nightlight in his room. Roger wet the bed after a bad dream about it. And Jeffrey couldn’t drift off to sleep without his mother in the room humming a tune. Tony would whimper in his sleep. I could hear him in the upper bunk bed. They all avoided the woods from then on.

I couldn’t help but be a little curious. After a while I gathered up the guys and we would ride our bikes on the well worn paths through the woods but we didn’t see or hear a thing. Soon school was going to start and the guys and I had better things to do than look for ghosts, so we let it go.

“Hey Ronny! Wan’a ride through the woods on the way home from school today?” John asked me as we unlocked out bikes from the bike rack in front of the school.

“Why? It’s not exactly on the way. And besides, don’t you have piano lessons?”

“Well not this week. Mrs. Harrison is out of town ‘cause her mother’s sick or somethin’.”

“Yeah, Okay. I don’t have anything better to do. Larry has to get his hair cut and Rob has wrestling practice until five.”

When I got home Mom made me clean out my side of the bedroom and take out the trash. After dinner I went to do my homework and couldn’t find my math book. I knew I had it when I got on my bike at school but I couldn’t remember having it when I put my bike in the garage. It wasn’t dark yet so I hopped on my bike again to see if I could find it on the ground between here and the woods. If not I’d have to call Larry for the equations.

The book wasn’t on the sidewalk or the street. I looked hard even under the parked cars all the way to the woods. I did see something on the trail just before it turned out of sight, but it was hard to see what it was because it was darker under the trees.

It wasn’t quite dark yet and Mom would be mad if I’d lost the book only a few weeks into the school year, so I took a chance and rode in for a closer look. It was my English book. My math book was further along the path around the bend in the path where my English book had sat. I was this close and nothing was around so I rode up to it. I got off my bike because it was in the ditch and I couldn’t reach it from my bike seat like my I could reach English book.

That‘s when it came. Glowing in the half light. A horse and rider black yet not. Coming towards me on the path at full speed!

Being in the ditch I knew I couldn’t get to my bike before he did so I threw myself under a bush at the side of the trail, hoping he would just pass me by.

I don’t know if it was the bike standing across the pathway or the fact that I didn’t run away, but he stopped and looked down at me. I was never so scared in my life. I think I stopped breathing because the next thing I knew was my Dad and a bunch of neighborhood men with flashlights were there helping me up. I was still clutching my books to my chest. My bike had been trampled, the spokes were broken and bent, and the men kept asking me who had hurt me. I told them about coming for my books and the ghost.

“That was hours ago and you weren’t on the trail the first time we came past.” My father said in his concerned voice. “And look at the dirt in your clothing and hair. You look like you were underground, but the leaves in the ditch are hardly disturbed at all.” They scanned the ground around my feet again with their flashlight beams.

As Dad brushed off the dirt from my cloths, my books slipped out of my arms. They fell to the ground along with the dirt in my arms and some old horse teeth stuck to a decaying piece of jawbone that was burnt on one end.

I was helped home and put in the bathtub. The water got so muddy I had to change it to get clean. But more then just the dirt went down the drain. My hair was white as snow from that day on. My mother thinks it was from the shock of what I had seen, but couldn’t remember of the time I spent with the ghost in the woods.

The strangest thing about that night wasn’t found until the next day. My homework was done in an odd, old fashioned hand writing and it was sticking out of the freshly turned earth of the riders grave. It was signed “Jonathan Grimmes, school teacher.”

The Gravedigger

2009-03-31T11:15:00.000-07:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

The grave digger was a large, strong man. His name was Jonathan Arnold, and despite the families prestige and standing in the community he was an odd sort. Because of his strength, even as a boy, the family had him apprenticed to the blacksmith. Jonathan didn’t like the heat of the furnace. He would run away from the forge and later would be found in the cemetery. He would be clearing the weeds away from the base of the headstones of the people that had no one to look after their care.

When someone died in town, young Jonathan could always be found helping the old gravedigger make the large squared off hole in the earth. When the old man died, Jonathan was given the job, even though he was only fourteen years old. His family, although they still acted kindly towards him, wouldn’t acknowledge him in public. He moved into the old shack that had been the old man’s house on the edge of the cemetery grounds. His family made it comfortably livable for him and hired the Widow Henderson to provide him his daily meals. She was chosen mostly because she lived the closest to the gravedigger’s small house, but the meals were hardy and hot.

Although Jonathan dug ditches and wells at times, mostly he dug graves and maintained the cemetery grounds. His health was good, better then most, and when a plague came through town he was hired to collect the bodies for Mr. Hanson, the coffin maker.

People in town had their wakes at home. They would clear the end of a room and put the coffin on a table or saw horses. The house would be filled with flowers in the warmer weather to help hide the odor. If the deceased didn’t rise again in a few days, the family would bury the body in the cemetery and all was done until the headstone was made ready. But if there was no family to sit the wake with the body, or they were afraid of becoming ill and dieing themselves, the coffin went straight into the ground with a bell string. A watcher, usually a family member, would sit in the cemetery for the next few days and nights to listen for the bell. This bell was strung through a ‘Y’ shaped stick set upright in the ground at the foot of the grave. The other end of this string had been wrapped around the dead person’s hand before the lid was nailed shut.

Only once was Jonathan woken to save the ringer. The son of a woman buried that day was there to listen for the bell. He woke Jonathan with a shout when he heard the bell ringing, but it was only the wind playing with the bell that had scared the young watcher. After quickly uncovering the casket and finding her still dead, Jonathan went back to sleep. By the time he woke up the next day, the tale was all over town that a bell had been rung in the night, but sadly not in time to save the ringer. No one in town would sit as the bell watcher any longer and that job also was given to Jonathan.

Years later, Jonathan was sitting the bell watch in the night. The widow that had been making his meals these past years had died and been buried that afternoon. Since she was the third to die that week from the latest deadly illness, she was buried with the bell string wrapped around her hand.

Jonathan wrapped a woolen blanket around his shoulders and moved the pebble out from under his rump. He was tired from digging graves all day but he didn’t want to fall asleep on his watch.

The next thing he knew, his head was coming up and he was waking to the sound of a bell. He shook his head to try to clear his thoughts. He looked at the bell in front of him but it wasn’t moving, yet he could still hear a bell ringing.

Jonathan rose up on his feet to hear better. He checked the bells on the other new graves but all were still, yet he could clearly hear a bell in the cemetery. Before he could track it down, the ringing stopped.

He made his way back to the widow’s grave and sat under the tree again after finding another pebble to sit on to keep him alert. He fought harder to stay awake this time, but found himself nodding off.

After a short time the ringing started again. He jumped up to search in the dark. He looked in every direction for the sound, but before he had gone a few steps it stopped. Now he suspected that some of the boys in town were playing a bad joke on him. He walked around the edge of the cemetery for the rest of the night, but the bell was silent. Jonathan was not going to let some young ruffians disrespect the dead.

The next day two others died from the same illness. Jonathan, exhausted from digging graves, tried to find someone in town to do the night watch for him. No one wanted the job.

After dinner, he napped because he didn’t have the energy to do anything else. Once it was dark he went out to the center of the cemetery under the tree by the widow’s grave to start his watch. Jonathan was not going to let the bell ringer get away if they returned to the cemetery that night. He left one lantern at the tree and took the other on his circuit around the outskirts of the cemetery. Most of the night passed without any unusual noises. He heard a fox cry out around midnight, but then it was quiet for hours. Not even a breeze ruffled the leaves.

Jonathan was coming back to the other lantern at the tree when the sound of a bell could clearly be heard. He took a quick look at the nearest bell, but it hung still and quiet from it’s string along with all with the other bells he was watching. During the day he had made a clear path around the cemetery. Jonathan began to run around the outskirts, only to find that the ringing kept pace on the other side of the graveyard from him. Did some boys tie the bell to a dog and let it loose in the cemetery for the night? The ringing stopped by the time he was almost back around, so he sat panting under the tree.

In the morning light he hatched a plan to trap the bell ringer. He spent most of the day digging graves, but found the time and energy to dig some holes here and there in the cemetery to trip up the someone or something running with a bell. He marked the holes with a stake at the side and covered the holes with branches from a nearby bush. Tonight he was going to put a stop to this foolery.

After napping, as the preacher oversaw the most recent internments, Jonathan was ready for a long night. He closed the graves of the latest residents, hoping to find someone skulking about in the lowering light. No one came.

The night moved on like the two before when the brass bell tinkling woke him, taunting him, but no culprit was caught. Jonathan made a vow not to let another night go by without catching the miscreant. He rested all he could during the day and was as fresh as could be expected when the night watch started in the cemetery.

He brought no blanket to comfort against the chill, for this night would be the bell ringers last.

When the bell began to ring, the fury in Jonathan’s eyes would have stopped hardened generals in their tracks. The ringing brought him back time and again to the center of the cemetery and to his starting place under the tree. Now all he could think of was that a ghost bell now inhabited the grave yard.

In all these long years he had never seen or heard a specter, but there were first times for everything one encountered. The bell must have an unseen hand ringing it. He checked all the bells still hanging by their strings from the graves and not one was in movement while the ringing could be heard. Jonathan slept fitfully against the tree. He wasn’t going to shirk his duty to those recently buried and their families. He would wake himself time and again to check the bells for movement until morning.

The sickness left the town with little more then a dozen dead. Things quieted down and Jonathan was back to his business as before. But a month later his mother died and even though she had a wake, he had insisted that she also had a bell, just in case the wake wasn’t long enough for her to revive. He walked the grave yard nightly to check the bell at her feet. The phantom bell still rang out at times in the night air.

This greatly angered him that the ringer would disturb him in his own grief over his mother‘s death. With no one to be caught, he grabbed one of the lower tree branches of the tree above his head and shook it violently. The bell peeled out it’s ringing with a vengeance.

He looked up and saw by the light of his lantern a small brass bell. It was dangling from a birds nest by a string. He gave a hearty laugh for the first time in many weeks. Climbing the tree, Jonathan tried to remover this bell from hell. The string was entangled tightly around the branch along with the nest. He reached further out to remove the whole nest and the branch broke, plunging him to the ground.

As soon as he hit the ground, the bell in the church started to ring out in the night air. Then all the bells in the whole of the town began to ring. People rushed from their beds out into the streets. When the church bell could not be quieted, the town was then searched and by the morning light Jonathan was found with a broken neck under the tree in the grave yard at his post.

He was buried that day without a bell and string, for no one would watch his grave. So when Jonathan awoke in his coffin minutes after being lowered into the ground, he was left to die there all alone as the dirt was shoveled onto the box. He had no bell to save him.

The Playroom

2009-03-17T04:32:00.000-07:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Mrs. Hillary Wiggins could hear the children cheerfully playing in the playroom upstairs. Their four distinct voices were giggling and cooing.

Six year old Benny fancied himself a soldier, but was playing the father to Gracie’s Momma part. Freddie and Lilly were crawling about on the floor. In her minds eye, Mrs. Wiggins could see all the dolls, stuffed animals, and kitchen playthings set about the room with the children intent in their games.

Freddie will be crying for a late morning nap soon, with Lilly fussing not far after. Benny will defect from his father part since the babies will then be gone and Grace will want to eat. Yes, best to enjoy the peace now. The older two should go outside to play while the little ones slept if the rain stayed away. They would all play again together later in the afternoon. Yes, after lunch they will do just that. While the children are out of the playroom Hillary would go up and straighten in there, then choose a book to read to them in the evening before bed.

All the children liked to be read to in the evening. In fact they won’t sleep well at night without it so a book must be chosen. On the nights Mrs. Wiggins had forgotten to read to the children, they didn’t sleep well at all. They would fuss in the night until a book was read a few times over and they had all fallen back to sleep. She tried to keep them on a schedule, because it was better that way.

Mrs. Wiggins thought about the difference in the house since the children had arrived. Before they came the days ran together, quiet and still. Now there was laughter and many things to do. Lilly was her child, born three years ago this past spring. She never learned to walk but that didn’t stop her from getting around by crawling everywhere. The others were the children of relatives. The country house had been in the family for generations and was where the children in the family were sent for their health when the summers grew too hot in the city.

Mrs. Wiggins liked children, so it didn’t bother her to care for so many that were not her own. Children needed care and she didn’t have anything else to do. They didn’t cause much fuss so she took care of them all. She made them clothing when their play clothes wore out and darned their little socks.

The Wiggins’ housekeeper Mary came to the door of the sitting room and announced that luncheon was served. Mrs. Wiggins went to the dining room and sat at the head of the table and ate her meal all alone. She listened to the children eating their own lunch upstairs. When she heard the older two on the stairs and heading out the door to the back garden, she folded her napkin.

Mrs. Wiggins went up to the playroom to pick up the toys. There was milk spilled on the floor and a puddle in the corner. Someone needed to learn how to use the potty again. She peeked out the window to see the tree swaying with the motion of the swing. It looked like rain again so she returned to her work in case they came back inside earlier then they usually did, she wanted it tidy for them when they returned.

Once all the toys were back on their shelves, she stood before the bookshelf on the wall that was too high for the children to reach. ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ was chosen again for tonight. The children all enjoyed that story and by now Hillary knew it by heart. She placed a snack of cookies for them on the play table and left the room. She put the book on the night stand in their bedroom for later and listened to the babies sleep, breathing and cooing in that baby way. She tiptoed out and went back downstairs to work on the mending.

When she heard the children come in, she put away her sewing and went into the hall. Muddy footprints were left behind on the polished wooden floor. Hillary cleared them away. She could hear the children playing again upstairs and she went to the kitchen to see when dinner was to be served.

Mary told her that ‘The Mister’ would be late again. He worked long hours to keep them fed in these hard times. Hillary asked for her meal to be served at seven. From upstairs there came a scream. Mrs. Wiggins rushed up to find blood droplets on the floor. Benny had picked at his scabby knees to make Gracie cry when he bled. Mrs. Wiggins wiped up the blood and told them that if they didn’t behave she would not read to them before bed. She went back down the stairs, taking the now empty cookie plate to the kitchen.

“Are they trying your patience, Miss?” Mary asked.

“No, not really, boys will be boys.” Mrs. Wiggins replied.

“Benny then?”

“Yes, Benny picking at his scabs.” Mrs. Wiggins sighed. “Since I have the time, I think I will go shopping and see if I can find some yarn to make more socks for my tribe. I’m re-darning the same holes again and again.”

“Yes Miss.”

Mrs. Wiggins put on her coat and hat, not forgetting to pick up her umbrella in case it showered again. On this cool, damp autumn day, she walked down the lane the few minutes it took to get to the shops.

There wasn’t much of a selection. She was hoping for something bright but only found un-dyed ‘seconds’ wool yarn, so she bought the whitest yarn she could find. Hillary made plans to save onion skins to make it a sunny yellow when she had enough of them. She had dyed yarn before when she had to. It was not a pleasant job but was worth the effort. Lilly liked yellow and some of her socks had gone missing again. “How do babies lose socks in the house that were never found again?” She thought to herself. Mrs. Wiggins planned on getting better yarn in the spring, after the sheep were sheared.

When she returned home she asked Mary to save the onion skins so she could later dye the yarn. Mary told Mrs. Wiggins that there was already a bag of them hanging in the basement stairway.

Hillary checked the bag and found more then enough onion skins to dye the yarn that she had just bought. She listened from the hallway and could hear the children playing quietly. Benny and Gracie had awakened from their nap while she was gone. She got out the copper dye pot and filled it with water, placing it on the back of the stove. When the water was hot she added the onion skins and boiled the color out of them. She carefully skimmed out the spent skins and added the vinegar and the pre-wetted yarn. After a while some dull yellow yarn was drying on a screen in the pantry by the open window.

After Mrs. Wiggins had finished with her work, Mary opened the other windows in the kitchen to air out the pungent odors before preparing dinner.

Hillary was tired but happy as she climbed the stairs to change for dinner. As she passed, she listened at the playroom door. Benny was telling the others a story. It was a war story in which he was saving the day again but the others didn’t seem to mind.

She went to her room and changed her now yellow stained house dress. She put on her dusty pink, the one her husband liked, forgetting he would be late. After eating dinner by herself, she waited for him by reading a book in the sitting room. She quickly looked up at the clock when she heard the key in the lock. The children must have fallen asleep long ago. She came out into the hall and walked with her husband up to their bedroom. The children were quiet so she didn’t even look in on them.

They dressed for bed and went to sleep for the night.

In the middle of the night, the door of the bedroom opened, and the light from the hall came in. A book, ‘The Velveteen Rabbit’ floated across the room a foot off the floor and landed on the night stand with a bang. Mr. Wiggins shook his wife’s shoulder. “Your children are back and they need you. You’re the only one that can settle them down.” He pulled the covers up over his head as she got up, finding her slippers and the flash light.

She put on her heaviest robe and collected the book from the night stand, pulling the door closed to shut out the hall light as she left the room.

Out in the yard on the cold stone bench, she read the book aloud twice by her flashlight beam before the children stopped their crying and fussing. She straightened the flowers and brushed off the leaves of the four little graves huddled there. She kissed the headstones of Benny, Gracie, Freddie, and baby Lilly.

This had been her whole world for the last year and a half since the fire took their small lives as they slept in their beds. They hadn’t moved on, so she continued to care for them, as she would to the last day of her long lonely life.

Ghost of a Dream

2009-03-06T10:18:00.000-08:00

8-22-08
By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

I woke up with a ghost in my bedroom… or at least that is what it felt like. I knew I was still dreaming because I had been trying to wake myself up in my dream. And besides that, there is no such thing as a ghost. So If I wasn’t going to wake up, I was going to go with the dream just to see where it went.

This ghost in my dream told me that he was named Henry and that he was looking for a person that used to live here at my apartment. A woman named Deidra. I couldn’t help him much but I tried. It was the middle of the night after all.

In my dream I went to the library still dressed in my pajamas. I went to look up the old town records for him. As we approached the building the doors just unlocked and opened up, you know how dreams can be.

After what felt like hours of looking in big old books with yellowed pages that smelled of dust and age, I found what he was looking for. I told him that she had gotten married a year after he had died. During her lifetime she had three children. Forty years later she was buried in the church cemetery. Her death had happened fifty years ago from the present year.

What you need to know about me is that I’m not the helpful type. I don’t open doors for people, pick things up that others have dropped, or give to the poor. So I’m feeling quite silly in the library of all places looking up information for a ghost in the dead of night. I haven’t been inside a library since I got my first computer. There are people there and I’m rather antisocial.

Henry asked me to read Deidra’s headstone to him because he had never learned to read, so we walked over to the church yard together. Well, he kind of floated along and I walked.

This was where it started to get creepy. We were standing, or I should say I was standing, and he was floating in the middle of the church cemetery. Another place that I don’t frequent. I had my small pocket flash light that I had for some reason picked up from the night stand by my bed to read the headstones with, when some of the other occupant’s ghosts came up out of their graves to see what we were doing.

As dreams often are surreal, it didn’t bother me in the least that I was now surrounded by ghosts who were chatting and catching up on history while I was reading headstones out loud for this Henry.

I won’t pretend that I wasn’t surprised when some of the specters rose soon after I read their names out loud to Henry. If I was standing too close they would go right through me with a cold shivery feeling.

I was ready to give up when I spotted her grave. I mean how many Deidra’s do you know? I read it out to him and he sighed. We waited for her to come to him and when she didn’t he started to weep so much I called to her on his behalf.

She finally rose up after the whole group started calling to her name. Deidra admonished all of us for disturbing her. The other ghosts, after being reprimanded, headed back to their graves. She told Henry that she was not and never had been in love with him, that he must move on and stop coming to her grave each year on the anniversary night of his death to talk to her. She said that she was not going to talk to him ever again, so he must stop bothering the living and the dead with all this hubbub.

As she sank back into the earth, Henry tried to pull her back up to be with him. I told him to cut it out or I would make it my personal mission to haunt him when I died if he didn’t leave her alone.

He was so distraught that I would have worried about him killing himself if he was alive. So I walked him back to his grave in the public cemetery a few blocks away. I wanted to make sure he was down under again and not about to follow me around. But I didn’t tell him that.

The next day was Saturday and I was at my local coffee shop reading my emails when the police came up to me and asked me to come to the police station with them.

They had an odd tale to tell me. It was about me walking around town in my pajamas with a ghost and breaking into the library and church yard in the middle of the night. They had me on various security cameras around town with a nondescript glowy thing floating along beside me. Since I didn’t harm or take anything, no one was going to press charges, this was just a warning. They showed me the tapes or I wouldn’t have believed it myself.

I moved right out of that apartment. Didn’t stay there another night, in fact. But to this day I am helpful to others and I even give to the poor. I’m not taking any chances ever again. I never want to see another ghost. And I always whistle past the graveyard.

Random Circus

2009-02-17T04:53:00.000-08:00

9-21-08 edit 03-06-09
By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

When I was younger my grandfather would come to visit and he would tell me this story every time. According to him it happened in the town where he was born.

The circus was neither the largest nor the best that anyone in town had seen but you were sure to see a show and anything could and sometimes did happen when the circus came to town. In fact any circus was always worth the price of admission. This was the town of Random and the only thing that Random was known for was that it was the place where the circus elephant died.

You see, many years ago, before cars and trucks, the circus walked from place to place and horses along with other work animals pulled the circus wagons. And Random was the place that the old elephant decided to up and die. She just stopped in the road and wouldn’t move and two days later she was dead. The circus moved on without even looking back at her and the towns people had to bury the carcass themselves. So right there where she lay getting all foul and smelly next to the town square, they dug up the square park and heaved the elephant in. It took all of eight days and every man and boy was needed to help. Using every shovel and even boards they moved the earth and stones with wheelbarrows, carts and even sacks. Mothers and wives made soothing ointment for the blisters on the men’s hands. It took three teams of oxen to pull the elephant into the hole. They didn’t even stop for Sunday services either because the smell on a hot summer day was just awful.

Eventually the mound of earth sunk back into place and people kinda’ forgot about it in their day to day lives. But every year when the circus came back to town it was all that they could talk about. Strange things started to happen with every circus show from that day on. Nothing you would expect, like hearing an elephant trumpet in the still of the night or seeing an elephant walking down the street by itself. No, they experienced things like high wire performers that would fall from their tight ropes but not get hurt, falling far too slowly to be in real time. Tents would blow up into the air like a cyclone had picked them up but not one thing inside the tent would be disturbed. Wild animals would get loose and be found sleeping in someone’s chicken yard with all the chickens accounted for and not one person harmed. You just didn’t know what would happen but it would certainly be a head scratcher.

After a while the circus’s didn’t come around as often. Going to the circus wasn’t as popular as it had been and it was too hard for most of them to turn a profit so a lot of them just closed down. And the ones that did still travel weren’t coming to small towns anymore. The town of Random was down to a small third rate circus every five years or so.

No one thought about the elephant buried under the town square anymore. Some kids didn’t even know about the story of its death or the circus mystery miracles. Old folks sat on the park benches and dozed in the afternoon sunlight over the elephants bones as bees buzzed over the summer flowers planted in the park.

Marcus Williamson was the first to realize that the trucks and vans driving around the square were from a tired, run down, fourth rate, one ring circus and that they were heading for the empty lot next to the supermart store.

Not one word had been forwarded of their coming. They just showed up like it had always been that way and acted like they should have been expected. In fact that is just what they said when someone asked. That they were supposed to come here again but no one in town could remember that particular circus ever being in town before.

Mr. Warner owned the empty lot and let the circus park there but didn’t want them to set up their tents on his property. The lot had recently been black topped and he wanted the macadam to settle without large tent pegs being driven through it. The only place left with room for the tents was the town square itself, so they set them up there.

The people on the square scrambled home to tell the others and to get their money ready for a ticket. By the time the show started the next day almost everyone in town was crammed into the large, well worn, patched up circus tent. Some bought tickets for both the afternoon and evening performances. Word had spread like wild fire that this wasn’t a show to be missed. The old stories were being told in every house and on every street corner. No one wanted to miss a chance at seeing an elephant miracle for themselves.

Everyone was on pins and needles wondering just what would happen this time around, flying people or tame tigers on the loose? Maybe it would be something never seen before.

People strained to see around the people in front of them as all the performers came into the ring and lined up in a circle to start the show to the sound of trumpet music over the loud speakers.

Jumbo’s circus had a lot of things but mostly it was full of used up circus people and animals. It did not have an elephant. The first circus to be without an elephant since the day the old elephant had died on the road around this same square.

As the fanfare music ended, the ground started to rumble and tremble under the tent as the circus people bowed to the applause. The tent pegs slipped out of their moorings. The rigging came down first, only moments before the tent canvas itself and the earth belched the smell of sulfur. People were coughing and their eyes were tearing as they scrambled to safety.

When the towns people finally make it out from under the tenting and pulled it back to try to rescue the circus people trapped under it, what they found instead was a crater with a dead elephant. The elephant was wearing the word Jumbo printed on a tattered and faded material sash on it’s back laying at the bottom of the hole. Not one circus performer was ever found. They had disappeared. Their belongings on Mr. Warner’s lot were searched to find someone to inform of the calamity. The only information they could find were some very old papers that told Random that the circus people were the direct descendants of the circus that had left the elephant behind for the towns people to bury so very many years ago. And now all the town could do was to bury the elephant in the hole again for it to rest in peace.

The mayor got up a collection for a one fourth scale statue of an elephant to be placed on the center of the square and the children in the town of Random play and ride on it’s back to this day. Only they don’t know that it is anything but a plaything to keep them happy on a summers day, and the elephant in the ground underneath them doesn’t seem to mind. Just to be on the safe side the town of Random doesn’t have a circus come to town anymore. But no one misses going to the circus when it comes to a town close by, because it just might be close enough to see an elephant miracle for themselves.

Out of the Blue

2009-02-03T07:27:00.000-08:00

8-29-08
By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Andy had left work for the day and walked down the street without a care in the world. The sun was shining and the breeze was just the right temperature. Birds sang in the trees while squirrels ran up and down the bark. He couldn’t help himself and started whistling a tune, something he hadn’t done since he was a boy. In fact he felt like a boy again on this golden afternoon.

Harriet had the day off and was walking down the same street to shop. She was going in the opposite direction and could see the storm clouds on the horizon coming towards them. The sheer dreariness of the coming storm made her sick inside. She grumbled under her breath as she made her way toward Andy waiting for the light to change so he could cross the street.

As the sun shown down on the corner of Main Street and Park Avenue they met crossing the street. Harriet growled at Andy’s whistling and Andy gave Harriet a friendly wink. Flash Crash! Lightning out of the blue. They were both hit and knocked to the ground. People ran up to them and tried to revive them.

Andy found himself in a strange place. It was a dark and misty forest like place. There were forms just out of range that he couldn’t quite make out that watched him and skulked about. He hoped, wished, wondered about the small weak light in the sky, wanting it to grow into the beautiful warm sun again and burn away the darkness all around him. He screamed and shouted at the things on the periphery to no avail. He felt cold and scared. He didn’t want to move but felt that he had to follow the light.

Harriet was now looking up into the sunshine. It hurt and her flesh felt like it was burning. The people around her looked like they had halos from the brightness. She closed her eyes to the glare. She could hear them trying to help her, she just couldn’t answer back. The pain was too much. She only wished that they would leave her alone and stop hurting her.

The ambulance driver told the police officer on the scene that only one of them seemed to be making it so far. The police officer held the crowd back so the paramedics could do their jobs.

Andy waited for a long time before he felt up to moving and to look for some shelter in the mist for the night that must soon be coming. At times the light in the sky seemed to be getting larger, at others he was sure it was smaller than at the start. He told himself that the mist was making it look that way. He walked through thick brush and briers, all the time keeping the weak light in sight.

Harriet could feel the cold shaking start from deep inside her. “Shock” she heard someone say. She had her eyes closed against the brightness and the pain. The shaking was making the pain turn into agony. She tried to stop the shaking but she couldn’t control anything any longer. The siren started to wail and it strangely calmed her, like it was doing the screaming for her.

Loaded each into separate ambulances, they made their way at top speed to the nearest hospital with a burn unit. The police had cleared the road for them.

Andy was getting tired of fighting the brush and slowed his movement toward the light. He used all his strength and concentration to make a narrow path. He was hurting and tired but he just had to get closer to the light. Small as it was he knew it was where he needed to be. When the greenery opened into a clearing he ran for all he was worth for the other side, afraid that the light would fade into night.

Harriet was bathed in white warm light. The shaking had stopped. They must have given her drugs for the pain because she couldn’t feel anything any longer. Her eyes were still closed and she let them do whatever it was that they needed to do to her. It felt like floating and she just let her body ride the waves of warmth. The voices didn’t concern her any longer. The words didn’t make any sense to her anyway. If only the light would fade and she could sleep like this.

The stretchers were brought into the emergency room one after the other and a separate team of doctors and nurses worked on each of them with all the skills and equipment they had. The young adults in their care were going to get every chance to regain a life to live in full.

Andy heard the bugs of night starting to make noise. It sounded kind of like beeping in this strange new world he found himself in. He checked to see if it was his cell phone, but he had lost it a while back. The light was getting closer and lower in the sky. Night would be falling soon and he still hadn‘t found a place to stay. He didn’t want to. All he could think of was getting to that cool pale light.

Harriet was getting a headache. The meds must be wearing off. She tried to open her eyes but they wouldn’t work. Nothing worked in fact. Everything she tried to move on her body stayed still. She started to panic but couldn’t make a sound. Would they think she was dead and send her to the morgue, then bury her alive? ‘No, they gave her meds and that was what was keeping her from moving. It would wear off any minute.‘ she told herself.

The gurneys were moved one to the morgue and the other to a room in the intensive care unit of the hospital. The families and friends gathered in the waiting room were told of their respective conditions. Unable to visit, they were left crying and clutching to one another. They drifted off to make arrangements according to their loved ones status.

Andy waited holding his breath as the last of the light faded from view. In the darkness he sat where he had stood and cried in sheer frustration. When he was done crying out all his anger and pain he was resolved once again to try all the harder in the morning. He sank into the cold darkened greenery and slept.

Harriet was in a drug induced coma but her mind dreamed on. She found herself with a lantern in her hand looking down at Andy sleeping on the forest floor. After a while she got tired of waiting for him to wake on his own and poked him with her hospital slippered toe.

Andy woke with the light of the lantern just inches from his face. He could feel the warmth of it on his cheek. His body was chilled with the damp into his very bones but he didn’t want to move and frighten Harriet away.

“I’m not standing here all night.” she said to him and waited for him to rise before pushing the lantern into his hands. “You can carry this for a while, I’m tried to death of the brightness of the thing. I hope I never see it again.“ And she turned and walked into the darkened misty woods.

In the doctors lounge, two very tired doctors sat and talked about the day they had encountered. The two people from the same lightning strike had them both too busy to talk before this.

“I still can’t believe what a day I had. We tried to keep her alive, we really did, but she just stopped trying and died despite the fact that she had the lesser injuries of the two. I just came from finishing the paper work. Twelve o’clock midnight was the time she expired. Now that doesn’t happen often.” said the first.

The second shook his head. “That is funny. But I can do you one better. The guy I had was dead and sent to the morgue when he woke up on the table and scared the devil out of the coroner getting ready to prep him for autopsy. I had to pass him on to the next shift because I was swamped with paperwork for sending him down there in the first place but I know for certain he was gone when I pronounced him and signed the papers.”

The door opened and the still white lipped coroner slumped down in the nearest chair. All he said was, “Midnight! It had to happen to me at the strike of midnight.”

Molly’s Train

2009-01-20T04:13:00.000-08:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Molly Ferguson headed to the bus station. Her short hair was sticking to the back of her neck on her small frame as she struggled to carry the bags. All that she now owned was in two beat up suit cases and a tote bag. Once she had almost everything she needed and some extras to feel good about. Now all that was left was here in her hands. This latest flood had taken all the rest.

She had wanted to take a train out of town. Molly had dreamed about it for most of her school years, but the trains weren’t running yet and wouldn’t be for a while but the buses were. There was nothing left for her here and it was time to leave town.

She had lived with her grandfather until he broke his hip then she was sent to the Foster Homes. After that she had her little apartment and a job in the local video store.

The flood had washed away her past and Molly was off to start over some place new, maybe in the mountains above where it could flood. As soon as she could find a moving train she was going to get on and keep on going. Molly was tired of waiting. With all the money, which wasn’t much, that her grandfather had left to her when he died and his little house on the edge of town was sold, she was made to wait until her eighteenth birthday and that was the day of the flood. So she was forced to wait some more.

When Molly was younger and lived with Poppop in his little house, she could hear the trains from her bedroom. Their rhythmic clickity clacking on the rails, the low rumble of the engine and the wailing whistle as it left town. Molly liked it all like a lullaby in the night. She wanted, thought about and dreamed of traveling on a train. She wanted it even more when she found out that her parents died on a train. Molly never knew the whole story, Poppop told her that he would tell her the details of how her parents died when she was older but that day never came. So all she had was a faded picture of them and her dreams of trains in her sleep feeling the rumble of it under her in her bed.

Whenever she felt sad or bad as a child she would tell herself that a train would answer all her questions and it would calm all her fears. To the child that she once was a train was all she needed. Molly didn’t believe that any longer but she still wanted to take a trip on a train away from the only town she ever knew but was the loneliest place on earth for her now. The picture of her parents was gone with everything else when the muddy water came through.

The bus traveled through the devastated flood zone. Mud and muck painted everything with the same dead looking gray brush. What once must have been beautiful countryside was ugly caked with muck and piled with debris. Having nothing to look at out the window she read from the tattered novel she had gotten at the shelter from one of the Volunteer workers. It was about a boy named Johnny and his dog, Rufus, trying to get home. Not her type of book but there was nothing else to do. She didn’t even know the title or author because the cover and first few pages were missing and the binding was falling apart it was so old and yellowed. Once she got to someplace that sold new paperbacks this one was getting tossed she told herself.

Once the landscape started getting green again and showed signs of life Molly started looking for train tracks and train stations. At one town she found out that the nearest passenger train was in the next state north and she changed buses to get herself in the right direction. To Molly’s surprise it had worked. There was a train at the station as she got off the bus.

Molly hopped on the train just in time. She wasn’t even sure what direction she was heading in, but she paid for her ticket and just sank into her seat, sighing all the weight of the last few months away. She closed here eyes and absorbed it all into the space where the tension had been inside or her. Molly filled herself up with the smell, feeling and sounds of the train. For the first time in years she felt the feeling of home. Everything else that had once been her life was left behind at the station.

Happy for the first time in a long time Molly set about making herself comfortable for the duration. She changed her clothes and headed for the dinning car. She hadn’t eaten a good meal since the flood and she was finally hungry.

On the way through the cars she smiled and nodded at the other passengers that looked her way. She found the dinning car and ordered her first meal by train. While waiting for her food to be prepared she pulled out the old book again but another couple started asking her about herself and her destination. After she told them she wasn’t sure where she was going they moved over to her table to talk better with her.

They made helpful suggestions and told her that they hoped to see her again in the days to come as they traveled and they left her to eat her meal in peace, but not before Jacky told her that the book she was reading was one of his favorites. “Some day I’ll get myself a dog and name him Rufus too.” he said.

Molly slept so well in her folded down train bed that she felt like she had never known what real sleep was before this.

The next day she looked around for her new friends but the conductor wasn’t sure just who she was talking about when she asked about them. Finally she saw them in the observation car. Helen and Jacky were sitting looking at where they had been instead of where they were headed. Helen shrugged and said, “Just looking for another perspective.”

Jacky asked Molly if she had thought about what they had told her about good towns to get started over in along the way.

Molly told them both ‘yes’ and she asked a lot of other questions to try to narrow the list down to a reasonable few. They chatted most of the afternoon away before leaving her to watch the sunset colors forming in the sky by herself.

Molly sat wondering about them, Helen and Jacky. Did she like them because they were friendly and helpful or because their names were so much like her parents? Hellene and Johnny. They looked a lot like her parents too, but most people of that age did to her. She didn’t remember them much at all only the picture. She was too young when they died, only two. They of course were too young to be her parents. They were almost Molly’s age, just a little older she guessed. But you couldn’t miss their enthusiasm about trains.

They knew the whole line. Every suburb and hallow, town and city, burg and watering hole. She was impressed and a little confused by it all. She couldn’t remember where they said they lived. But that didn’t really matter since they also said that they spent most all their free time riding on the train. Most of the places on the line didn’t interest her much at all. She needed to get a job and find a place to live first. But Molly couldn’t help hoping to be able to hear the train go by at night wherever she found to call home.

On the third day she was nearing the end of the line. Molly had decided with the help of her new friends to start at one end and work her way up the line until she found a place that worked best for her. She went to bed early to rest up for the new world she would be finding waiting for her in the morning and her stop was coming early in the day.

The clickity clacking of the wheels under her and the soft swaying of the train car lulled her into another deep sleep despite her nerves. When she woke in the morning she was surprised to find herself sleeping in her clothing on the ground between the tracks. The tracks themselves were rusty and obviously unused. Brush and grasses grew and died there undisturbed. Nothing she could think of was missing from her belongings when she looked at them.

She collected her bags and walked into the nearest town. It was where she wanted to be but according to he people she asked not one train came through town for many years but a number of them had heard a train early this morning.

Molly got a newspaper to find a job and a place to live only to discover that the date was three days earlier. The day after she had stepped onto the train in fact. June 21st. Somehow she had traveled hundreds of miles on a train that didn’t exist any longer in one night. She knew things about the town and the people here that she shouldn’t have known if her train ride and the people on it weren’t real. Molly knew where most everyone lived and where most everything was in town from what Helen and Jacky had told her.

Molly started to work in the video store because the owner’s son had just decided to take off on his motorcycle to see the world the day before. Soon she was the night manager. She liked her new apartment and made friend easily so she stayed. There was a stray dog that had adopted her and walked her home from the video store each night. Molly named him Rufus like in the book and felt safe here in her new home town.

A year later while walking the dog in the early morning Molly heard a train for the first time since the day she arrived. She followed the sound until it stopped and she found herself on the tracks further down from the spot on the day she arrived. The dog pulled her along until she was off the tracks again and into some over grown bushes.

The dog stopped when he got his leash tangled around a broken stone pillar. By the time she got the dog untangled she had to flip the broken part of the stone over. The writing carved into it said. ‘Hellene and John Ferguson died on this spot in the train wreck of 1992. Helen and Jacky loved their daughter Molly and the cross country train she was born on. May they rest in peace. June 21, 1992’ Now Molly understood all of what had happened to her in the last year. Molly’s parents had helped her find her way back to them. On the anniversary of their death Molly’s train had brought her home.

The Trouble in the Closet

2009-01-06T05:28:00.000-08:00

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

9-12-08 re-write 1-18-09

Benny had a problem. Not a common problem and certainly not the kind of problem he was going to try to get much help with. He had learned when he was small that no one believed him about this conundrum. Benny had a Ghoul in his closet.

When Benny was small there was no Ghoul. The family lived in a house with no yard to speak of down the street from the cemetery and when Benny went outside playing he would run very fast around the grave stones in a kind of race with himself to see how fast he could run.

One day when Benny was about eight he tripped and skinned his knee on a low stone in the cemetery and bled all the way home. He didn’t run for a few days because his knee hurt, but by the time he was ready to run again something smelly had moved into his closet.

At first he thought it might just have been a ghost from the cemetery that had followed him home and that it liked to frighten him. It looked rather nasty but Benny called him a ghoul because this ghoul told him that he ate the rotting flesh of the dead. And then there was the foul odor of something rotting that always seemed to be coming from the thing. He found the definition in the large old dictionary in the bookcase by the stairs when he was ten. Benny’s mother thought the smell was Benny’s old shoes because his father had a foot odor problem.

Once, when Benny was feeling a bit brave, round about the age of eleven, he asked the ghoul what it’s name was? The ghoul didn’t seem to understand the question and Benny wasn’t feeling brave enough to take the time to explain. So Benny never did have a name to call him, he just called him Ghoul.

At thirteen Benny poured a bottle of his mothers best perfume into the closet to try to stink the ghoul out but the Ghoul stayed. Benny had to stay in his room for a month and the kids at school teased him something fierce for smelling like a very stinky girl.

Benny had hoped that when he was old enough to move out of his parent’s house he would leave the ghoul behind. But soon after he had his own apartment, the ghoul was in the new closet again. Since no one else seemed to be able to see the ghoul or rather the ghoul didn’t show itself when any one else was there, Benny had himself checked out for being nuts.

Dr. Navorski was an older gentleman with glasses and a mustache. Benny went to him for a few weeks before bringing up the ghoul. It was hard to admit that you thought you had something following you that most children stop worrying about ‘round about the age of fourteen if not before. Benny was now nineteen and had long since graduated high school by then.

The session when something like this.
Benny: “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I need to have music on or I hear noises coming from my closet and they wake me up.”
Dr. Navorski: “And what do you think these noises are from?”
Benny: “Well a Ghoul that has been following me since I was a kid.”
Dr. Navorski: “When did you start hearing this ghoul?”
Benny: “When I was eight and I used to run around the headstones in the cemetery for fun.”
Dr. Navorski: “Did you feel guilty about running and playing in a place of grief and mourning? Disturbing the dead so to speak?”
Benny: “Well no, I was a kid and didn’t care as long as I was having fun and using up that extra kid energy. You know?”
Dr. Navorski: “Well there you have it. You were feeling guilty underneath your happy exterior and this is the way you have dealt with it all these years. Give yourself the permission to have once been a thoughtless child and your ghoul will go away. You are as sane as anyone walking the streets. You are just having a little trouble letting go of a childhood fantasy. But now that you know where it is coming from you won’t be needing it any longer and it will go away.”

Benny told the shrink that fantasies were nice things and the ghoul was definitely not nice. He didn’t go back for any follow up sessions.

The Ghoul was not a good house guest. It made his closet smell offal. He couldn’t keep his clothing in there. As a kid he had a free standing wardrobe and a dresser for his clothing and a shelf for his books and games. There was also a toy box for his toys. Nothing but broken, unused and outgrown items ever went into the closet. The ghoul made noises at times and also left things in the closet himself, the smelliest of these Benny buried in the small back yard at night.

The ghoul complained a lot about being so far from the cemetery, any cemetery, once Benny moved from home. Benny did tell the Ghoul he could always move out, but the Ghoul chose to stay.

Finally Benny couldn’t stand it any longer and he moved to an apartment house just across the street from the largest cemetery he could find in the area, only to find out that it was also one of the oldest so there was rarely any new meat. The ghoul was not happy about that at all. Benny started to collect road kill and bring it home for the ghoul.

He would stop at the side of the road whenever he saw a dead animal there. Benny kept some rubber gloves, a shovel, some plastic bags and a great big plastic storage box in the trunk of his car. His friends thought he was a bit goofy but liked the fact that he was so civic minded and felt that if someone had to do clean up of that kind of thing it should be someone with a iron nose like Benny with his foot problem.
The Ghoul didn’t exactly like the road kill and was picky about the condition of the carcass’. If they were too fresh he would throw them back out into Benny’s bed room and make a mess of the carpet. The meat had to have an odor of rot to it for the ghoul to even consider eating it.

All this time Benny wasn’t worried that the ghoul would want to eat him because Benny wasn’t dead. But despite it all, Benny had a fairly normal life. He dated, had friends, and liked to go hunting and camping. Mostly he liked camping because the ghoul generally stayed at home. Benny was moving on with his life.

And then there was Julia. Julia liked everything Benny thought a good girlfriend should like. She could drink beer with the best of them. She had four older brothers and they had taught her everything from burping the alphabet to car maintenance. They had met at one of the hunting trips he went on with his friends to get more meat to leave to rot for his closet guest and it was love at first sight. And what a sight. Julia was one good looking woman.

One night Benny opened the closet after knocking on the door and had a talk with the ghoul. Benny wanted to marry his girlfriend Julia and he needed some answers. Would the ghoul stay hidden when his new wife was in the room? No, came the answer. At first Benny was dismayed. He didn’t want her to be frightened by the ghoul. Then it turned into elation. Someone else would know about the ghoul and it wouldn’t be his secret to carry all by himself any longer.

When he told Julia about the ghoul she got all soft and smiled like his mother had so long ago when he told her about the ghoul. Julia thought it was something from Benny’s imagination like his mother and the psychiatrist. That or a strange excuse for the smell of his old shoes in the closet and she thought she could live with foot fungus. The store isles were full of no end of deodorizers and medications for just such things.

But the ghoul was real and since she had already agreed to marry him anyway, Benny was sure she would soon find out that fact for herself. He only hoped she would still want to stay married to him once she met the ghoul.

On the night they came home from their honeymoon Julia thanked Benny for having the closet in the bedroom cleared out for her and she proceeded to fill it with her belongings. He tried to talk to her about the ghoul but she just pushed him out of the room telling him to let her take care of a few things in peace.

Benny was nervous by the time he heard Julia call his name in that way he knew meant she was ready for some fun. And for the first time in the week since they were married he didn’t feel like answering her call. Benny got up and walked to the bedroom wondering just how long it would be before the ghoul showed up.

Things went better then Benny had expected. The ghoul hadn’t bothered them thou the smell in the closet made Julia move her clothing to the new larger freestanding wardrobe he had gotten for her. Every morning she would spray a new product into the ghoul’s closet just before she left for work and Benny would leave a half an hour later with the ghoul cursing loud and long from behind it’s door.

After a few weeks of trying to get rid of the smell herself she called in a professional cleaning team. One whiff of the smell coming from the ghoul’s closet had them calling in the authorities. After a thorough search including tearing open the walls of the closet itself, nothing was found. But they were keeping an eye on Benny in case he was involved in something they didn’t know about.

Julia was sure that if they just moved they could leave the smell behind. Benny tried to explain again but the closest he came was in having her believe that he had a smelly cheese loving ghost following him around. They moved and the smell moved with them. She wanted to try an exorcism. Benny finally relented, but after the priest left and the smell didn’t Julia was so upset she was ready to leave Benny and the foul smell that followed him. She begged him to stop bringing home the road kill because she thought it just might be adding to the odor in the closet.

Benny showered her with gifts and told her they would buy a house so large that she would never have to go near or smell the ghoul again. All she needed to do was wait until the right house could be found and they would start the search right away. He went to the computer and started looking for a large house close to a fairly new cemetery and Benny found that another newer cemetery had opened up close to a large old Victorian house on a hill in an older section of town. This new cemetery had once been the side gardens of the house.

Benny had been storing all the gold jewelry the ghoul had been leaving behind in the closet. He had just enough to buy the place outright. The price had been lowered because of the amount of repair the old house needed.

It was a longer commute to work, but worth it. Julia was happier in the new house as they fixed it up together by themselves and a baby was coming along in the spring. The ghoul happily resided in an attic room of it’s own. It didn’t like the smell of sweet soft baby products coming from the small bedroom off the master suite anyway.

One night Benny found the Ghoul in their bedroom and sniffing around Julia’s side of the bed. Benny told the Ghoul to go back to it’s own room. The next day that Julia had a doctor appointment they found out she had lost the baby. Benny should have guess.

A month after Julia came home from the hospital Benny had gone up to the ghouls attic room to see how the ghoul was doing. He kind of missed the Ghoul after always being there after so many years. The Ghoul was telling Benny what he had been up to since the baby died and they had last spoke. That was when Benny learned that the ghoul had feasted on his own son in the cemetery.

Benny couldn’t believe it. The ghoul he had come to think of as almost a brother had eaten his child. Benny only saw red and just lost it attacking the Ghoul with his bare hands. Being one of the undead the Ghoul didn’t die but he did killed Benny by pushing him out the fourth floor window and Julia too because she had tried to come to Benny’s aid after hearing the noise up in the attic were Benny had gone.

The police never did find the killer of the new couple living in the big old house up by cemetery hill but they never stopped trying because they could never get the picture or smell out of their heads of the two half eaten bodies found in the house a few weeks after they went missing. And no one could ever live in the house again because of the smell. But the Ghoul didn’t seem to mind. He now had the house to himself.