by Vic Kerry
A small iron bedstead sat against the wall. A table piled with papers and other objects that were difficult to make out in the darkness sat near the window. When he switched the light on, roaches scattered across the floor. A black burn mark was at the foot of the bed. Ashes piled in the center. Josh could see the contents of the table better. There were bundles of dried flowers and other plants lying on top of a few books and scattered papers. He walked to it.
As he rummaged through the papers, he found small baggies of green herbs which smelled nothing like marijuana. They each had a different pungent aroma, but not of pot. Under a book that looked like it was written in French, he found another series of baggies that contained hair. They had names written on them in magic marker. On top of the pile was one with his name and another with Thomas’s. He rummaged through them, keeping an ear out for noise. Things had started to feel a lot like one of those creepy horror movies they’d been showing on television since the start of the month. Below his and his brother’s hair were baggies marked: Marcus Smithson, Jamie Morris, Bill Foreman, and Corey Aaron. Corey’s bag was empty. Underneath all those he found a baggie of old hair marked Simeon McAdams/1956.
Josh dropped everything. He was getting ready to run when he noticed the library copy of Jeffrey Presents 13 Modern Southern Ghosts. A slip of paper stuck up from the pages. The marker held the place for the story about Hazel. Strange markings were around the margins of the book, including a Star of David and a pitchfork. They reminded him of the gang signs painted on the old Cardinal where he’d encountered Sue Browning’s ghost. Josh grabbed the book and ran out of the house. Once back in his car, he noticed how his heart pounded and his mind raced. It was time to go home.
The boys from the gym gave Sim the slip. He forgot how fast teenagers drove. His grandson crept around like a granny in his sporty little car. Every time he rode with Joshua, they barely made it over forty-five miles per hour. He supposed that tricked him into thinking it was a new trend for teenage boys to poke around. In his day, they drove fast too. That was the way he, Marshall, and Johnny had caught up with Tobias, pushing their vehicle beyond the limit.
He tried not to think about that boy, but all his mind could focus on was the ghostly face still staring at him. Sim could see him as clear as day. There was no fuzziness left. Tobias wasn’t even a reflection anymore. The apparition was fully formed, and if Sim wanted to be completely honest with himself, it rode beside him in the truck, staring at him with ghostly eyes.
Sim drove through the neighborhoods of Pinehurst. The numbered streets and avenues were completely empty. There didn’t seem to be any movement on them, but they were festively decorated for that stupid spook holiday. The streets with tree names had a little more activity. The lights were still on in most windows. Occasionally, he could see people moving around in their living rooms. Some people didn’t even have curtains to obscure the view. In those places, he would see what they watched on TV. He looked for the boys’ cars, but couldn’t find a trace of them. Too many houses nowadays had garages. He knew who the boys were, but he had no idea where they lived. When he finally couldn’t stand his passenger staring at him any more, he headed home.
“Can you look the other way?” he asked, turning to face the phantom Tobias Abernathy. “I’m a little tired of your staring.”
The face continued to gaze at him wide-eyed. Sim noticed it breathed. That unnerved him more than anything else. Hallucinations didn’t breathe. His hands shook. It was unusual for him to notice the quaking while holding onto something like the steering wheel. Usually he held something to help hide the fact that his hands trembled, but tonight, nothing helped.
A car horn blared. Sim turned to see a Caprice Classic zooming through the intersection. He slammed on his brakes as the red slip of stop sign passed his vision. His tires screamed as the truck slid the rest of the way through the intersection. It jarred him hard, and his chest hit the steering wheel, knocking the breath from his lungs. Once the movement and swirling lights and sound stopped, he gasped a long draw of painful air. His vision dimmed, but recovered as someone banged on his window.
“Are you okay?”
He looked around to see a black youth staring at him through that window. For a moment, he thought it was Tobias staring at him. The kid kept banging his fist on the glass. When Sim didn’t seem to acknowledge his presence, the boy started to yell. This snapped Sim back to his senses. Although the wreck had been his fault, and Sim always would fess up to his mistakes when they caused an accident, he wouldn’t tolerate being yelled at by a punk nigger.
Sim opened his door before the other driver had time to react. The youth lost his balance and splayed across the pavement as Sim stepped out of his truck. His chest hurt, but he didn’t flinch. He was in tough as old leather mode.
“Are you okay, sir?” the youth asked, who Sim now recognized as the Otis kid from the football team.
“None of your concern.”
“Yes, it is,” Neal Otis got to his feet. “You ran that stop sign. Your truck looks smashed up pretty bad. You hit the dashboard.”
“Don’t you worry about what I’ve done. You need to be worrying about yourself.”
“What do you mean? Are you threatening me?” Otis stood facing Sim. “I was trying to help you.”
The boy looked like some primate he’d seen on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. Sim laughed and put his face right into Otis’s, staring into his eyes. The smell of sweet cigar tobacco hung on the younger man’s breath. Sim didn’t care for it. He smiled and gave Otis a hardy shove. The boy stumbled backward but didn’t lose his footing. He was the crack football player and in much better shape than Sim, probably even when he was that age.
“All right, old man, enough is enough. I’m trying to make sure you’re okay. I’m going to go call the police and maybe an ambulance for you.” He trotted to his car, reached into it and pulled out his keys. “You hit that steering wheel hard. Hope you ain’t got osteoporosis or something.”
An old feeling ran through Sim. It was bitter and brought an acidic taste up from his stomach. He’d not had the feeling for a long, long time. In many ways, he welcomed it because it gave him a clarity and youthful vivaciousness, he’d lacked for forty years. He took two large steps backwards until his thighs touched the frame of his truck’s open door. Without looking, he reached behind his seat and found what he needed by touch alone. As Otis walked toward him, the older man pulled his .38 forward and fired off three shots so quickly that he thought he had an automatic instead of a revolver.
The almost giddy jingle of keys hitting the asphalt preceded Otis falling backward, clutching at his chest. Sim smelled the burnt gunpowder. An old memory pushed its way forward. Smells had a way of bringing those kind of memories back to him. He wanted to walk over to Otis and put a bullet between his eyes, but that seemed over the top for a self-defense alibi.
Feeling very good about himself, Sim turned to put the pistol away. The ghostly figure of Tobias Abernathy sat behind the wheel of his truck. The face turned toward him, showing bared teeth in a death’s head grin. A spectral hand reached out for Sim. The cold fingers of the thing reached deep into his chest and squeezed his heart. The pain radiated from his chest down his arms. His vision darkened at the edges and inward. The right edge of his mouth drew down with a sharp pain. His right eyelid did the same thing. As the pain now overtook his entire body, Sim’s legs collapsed from under him. He hit the pavement on his right side. A hard series of twitches cascaded down his body before the cold painful fingers pulled from his chest. He lay blind and paralyzed. Everything sounded far too loud. The worst thing of all was that warm liquid washed over his face. It was the boy’s blood. The smell of it sickened him. Vomit came up his throat and into his mouth. It wouldn’t exit on its own, and Sim couldn’t swallow it back down. He tasted it, and it made him sicker until he vomited again. This time it forced its way out of his mouth and ran down his cheek to the pavement, mingling with Otis’s blood.
His life started to flash before him, but the memories of 1956 began to play in a loop. He lay there and endured them, praying for unconsciousness.
Light shone from under his parents’ bedroom door when Josh walked inside his house. He eased the front door closed and tiptoed upstairs, trying hard to avoid the one squeaky step. The last thing he wanted at that moment was a lecture from his father about storming out. He walked down the dark upstairs hallway to the small office space at the very end. The family computer was set up there, along with a few other things his dad needed to work from home.
Josh walked across the small room in the dark and sat at the computer desk. The monitor flickered on, illuminating the room like a small table lamp. The random gibberish of the startup screen scrolled through. Finally, the Windows icon popped up, as did the desktop. His dad always kept up with the latest in technology, and they had upgraded to Windows 95 not long after it had come out. He was one of the few people to have the new operating system. Josh made sure to turn off the external speakers before clicking the icon that looked like two computers connected to each other. The window for the dial-up box popped up. He clicked on the start button and watched the little connection box do its thing until it confirmed that the connection had been made. The home page opened to Excite.
The Internet remained mysterious to him. The few times Josh had used it, he typed what he wanted to find in the search engine. It would pop up. He and Thomas had mostly used it for looking up naked pictures until their folks got wise and put some kind of block on those kind of websites. Tonight’s search involved no such thing. He wanted to know about Kathryn Tucker Windham, the lady who wrote the Jeffrey ghost books. Several links came up when he typed in her name. Josh looked at the first one. It listed a contact number for her through the University of Alabama and a little about her history. He jotted down the number and switched over to search for the ghost story about his town. Nothing came up. He tried the symbols Jessica had written in the book. Most of the information he found there was about a gang called the Folk.
Josh closed down the browser and logged off the net. He turned the computer off and tucked the piece of paper into his pocket. With the same clandestine maneuvers he had used to get upstairs, he sneaked back to his bedroom. Sometimes when he was in trouble or had stayed out beyond curfew, his dad would lock his bedroom door. He half expected this, but it opened easily. When the lamp came on, the bed was still in shambles from the romp he’d had earlier in the day. It made him sick to think about it. His sweet experience now felt like bestiality.
Only a few hours ago, he’d been on cloud nine about Jessica. Now a cold terror took hold of him. His stomach flip-flopped. The notion of lying in that mussed up bed was too much for him to take. He walked back across the hall and tapped on Thomas’s door.
“What?” his brother’s sleepy voice asked.
“Can I come in?” Josh asked.
“What for?”
“Let me rephrase. I’m coming in.”
Josh pushed into his brother’s room. The streetlight outside gave him enough light to step around the random stuff Thomas kept laying in completely random places. His brother hadn’t moved on his bed. He didn’t even lift his head.
“What do you want, Josh? It’s super late. Are you sneaking in?”
“Yeah,” Josh took off his shoes and pants. “I’m sleeping in here with you.”
Finally Thomas propped himself up. “What?”
“I can’t sleep in my room.” His shirt come off.
“Why not?” Thomas turned on the lamp. “You couldn’t have changed over there?”
“I wanted to get out of there as quickly as I could. The bed is still all out of sorts from where Jessica and I did it.”
“Remake it. You’re not sleeping with me.”
“That won’t work. I think she’s a witch.” Josh crawled over the foot of the bed and slid between his brother and the wall.
Thomas had a double bed just big enough for the both of them. Josh slid under the comforter but on top of the sheet. That way they wouldn’t be exposed to each other.
“Get out,” Thomas protested.
“I’m serious. I’m scared to stay there, okay. I broke into her house after something Dad told me, and I found some weird stuff.”
“Like what, her angry parents?” Thomas asked.
“Like a completely empty house except for a bed, table and some witchy stuff. It’s like a hobo lived there. No one was there. I don’t think she has parents.”
“She’s homeless and embarrassed. She’s probably a prostitute too,” Thomas said. “You’re going to have VD or AIDS.”
“She had little baggies of our hair. You remember her pulling yours out? She kept it and now it’s labeled.”
Thomas rolled over and looked at him. His eyes were wider and he seemed more awake. “What?”
“Not only ours. She had hair from Marcus and his buddies, and Grandpa Sim. There was an empty baggie with Corey Aaron’s name on it. I found that Jeffrey book she brought over, and it’s got a bunch of weird symbols and stuff in it.”
“Voodoo stuff?” Thomas asked.
“Maybe. I don’t know, but don’t say anything about this tomorrow. We need to act like nothing is wrong. It’s going to be hard after what we did, but we can’t freak out or anything.”
“She’s a voodoo hag,” Thomas said. His voice seemed a bit frightened. He smiled. “You screwed a voodoo hag.”
Josh gave his brother a punch in his shoulder, but he didn’t do much else. He didn’t want to go back and sleep in his room, because he may have slept with a voodoo hag. Deep inside him, he hoped that he was overreacting and maybe Jessica was a homeless runaway or a prostitute. Tomorrow he planned on trying to get hold of that Windham woman and see if she knew anything else about the legend of Hazel and the massacre. Thomas started to snore a little. Josh stared at the ceiling.
As he started to drift off, the phone rang. Thomas kept on sleeping, but he reached across his brother to answer it. The ringing stopped as soon as he put his hand on the receiver. His brother nudged him in the gut with his elbow. Josh settled back on his side and stared at the ceiling again. When the day had started, he would never have imagined the turns it would take. He was happy the roller coaster ride was over.
Chapter Twenty-Four
1956
Night of the Massacre
Sim, Johnny, and Marshall pulled up to the roadblock on the other side of Pinehurst. The blue lights on top of the patrol car cast a weird light on everything. They idled the Mercury Monterey on the shoulder as Bud Johnson waved for them to stop. Sim hopped out of the back seat.
“We’ve got him, Sheriff,” he said.
Johnson chomped down on his unlit cigar. “Got who?”
“That nigger who killed those kids at the gym. He’s in the trunk.”
“That’s his car,” the sheriff said. “I’ve seen him driving it around town. How come Marshall Williams is driving it?”
“We caught up with him heading back to the Harrington place. We shot out the tire. We put the spare on, shoved him in the trunk, and came to find you.”
The blood rushed through Sim so quickly his heart might explode. Sheriff Johnson rolled the cigar to the other side of his mouth and hitched up his pants.
“Let him go,” he said.
“What do you mean ‘let him go’? He’s the one that killed those folks.”
“Due process. He’s got a right to a trial.”
“Like hell he does. You know good and well I saw him driving like a demon away from that gym not long after shots were heard. By my recollection, he had enough time to kill them and jump back into his car.”
“That’s probably the case, and you’re right that no jury in this county wouldn’t say hang him, but there’s the Harringtons to think about.”
Sim narrowed his eyes and stared at the sheriff hard enough to punch holes through his face. A mean grin crossed his lips.
“Do you k
now what that spearchucker did to my sister?” he asked.
“There’s rumors.”
“I ain’t having none of this due process. You can try and stop me to put on a good show, Sheriff Johnson, but you know what I got to do has to be done.”
The sheriff nodded his head. “Yeah. I’m going to take a shot at you, but it won’t be anywhere close to that car.”
Sim nodded and ran back to the Monterey. He jumped into the back seat.
“What’s happening?” Marshall asked.
“Get us out of here. They ain’t going to do shit. It’s up to us,” Sim said. “Hurry before they can stop us.”
Marshall hit the gas and turned the car around. They headed away from the roadblock as fast as the car would go. Sim watched through the rear window the whole time. True to his word, Sheriff Johnson shot a single bullet. The sheriff pointed his revolver at the ground.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Alan sat in the ICU waiting room. The nurses hadn’t let him back to see his father yet. He wished his brother wasn’t in Denver. He’d spent too much time dealing with all of this kind of stuff lately and hadn’t had a good night’s sleep in days. His eyelids hurt from fatigue. He could have used Mike’s support, but his brother’s hate for their father was stronger than his sense of familial obligation.
The hum of the overhead lights lulled him to sleep as he waited. His head hit his chin only to pop back up. When he opened his eyes, a police officer stood over him. The officer wore the look of the owl shift—no joy.
“Are you Mr. Simeon McAdams’s son?” he asked.
Alan rubbed his eyes. “Yeah, I’m his son, Alan McAdams.”
“Your father may be in serious trouble,” the officer said.
“Don’t they usually send a nurse or doctor to tell that kind of news?”
“I’m not talking about his medical condition, Mr. McAdams. Your father shot an adolescent after running a stop sign and causing a wreck.”
Alan woke up like someone had given him an intravenous dose of espresso. “What?”