by Vic Kerry
“I’ve been here trying to get a statement from your father, but he is not able to speak at this time. They have him hooked up to a breathing machine,” the officer said. “Can you tell me anything?”
“No, this is the first I’ve heard about it. All the hospital said was that he’d had a stroke and a car accident.”
“I am sorry. I know it’s difficult right now, but would you be willing to answer a few questions for me?”
“I’ll try.” Alan rubbed his eyes and face harder to make sure he wasn’t dreaming.
“Has your father ever tried to kill anyone before?”
Alan looked at the young black officer. The dark blue uniform with all the metal parts shiny like a new nickel made the officer look younger than he probably was. There was something Alan knew about him for sure: the officer was not originally from Pinehurst.
“Sit down, Officer…”
“Jackson. I’m Officer Jackson.” He sat down.
“You must be from other parts if you don’t know who Simeon McAdams is.”
“This is my second week on the job.” Officer Jackson pushed his cap back some. “Quite a way to start.”
“My father is rather infamous in this town for two things. The first is, he discovered a massacre at the old gym forty years ago.”
“That’s him? Apparently, some kids have been planning an anniversary dance. Pretty stupid.”
Alan nodded. “The second thing is that he led the lynch mob that killed the boy most of the town blamed for the massacre. He put the noose around the boy’s neck.”
Officer Jackson’s face gave away his distaste. The truth didn’t sit well with Alan either, but he’d had more time to get used it. A young black man would have his own issues with the lynching.
“Would you consider your father a racist?” Jackson asked.
“Yes, but in his defense, he’s an all-round bigot. He hates everyone. He’s as likely to shoot a white man if he thinks he’s a communist, homosexual, or Jehovah’s Witness.”
“Sounds like a charming fellow,” Officer Jackson mumbled under his breath. “I’m sorry if you heard that.”
“You’ve not said anything that I don’t know or haven’t felt myself.”
“Excuse me, are you Mr. McAdams’s family?” a soft-spoken nurse interrupted.
Alan nodded his head. She beckoned for him to follow her. Officer Jackson handed him a business card with contact information. Alan told the officer he would contact him if he found out anything from his father.
He followed the nurse through the magnetically sealed doors into the beeping, buzzing wonderland of the ICU. She escorted him into the room at the other end of the hallway. His father lay in the bed. A tube was taped into his mouth. Several tubes ran from his arms to various dripping bags. Sim’s face looked pale and drawn on the right side.
“My name is Lucy. I’m your dad’s nurse for the night.”
“What happened?” Alan asked.
“He’s had a stroke. It appears to be fairly severe. Right now, we’ve got him on a respirator to help him breathe. His own ability is severely impaired. He hasn’t been conscious since they brought him in. We found your number in his billfold.”
“Is there anything that I can do tonight?” he asked.
“Probably not. If you want to go back home, we can call you if anything changes.”
“I’m exhausted. I’ve had a rough last few nights.” Alan turned to leave the room. He stopped and looked back at Lucy. “Is it true what that police officer was saying? Did he shoot a kid?”
“As I understand it from the report given from the ER, yes. They had to fly the victim to Birmingham.”
Alan looked at his father, rubbed his temples, and left. He walked down the hall from the ICU to the elevator bank. Hospitals at night were empty and cavernous, creepy. He pushed the button on the elevator again, hoping it would make the carriage come faster.
“Alan.”
He looked behind him. No one stood there, but from the edge of his vision, someone ran around the corner to the next hall. He looked in the direction where he’d seen the movement. A teenage girl jogged down the hall. Her hair flowed behind her as if the wind blew against it. She turned to look back. Alan stared into Jessica’s eyes.
“What are you doing here?” he whispered.
She giggled and ran around another corner. The elevator bell rang, but Alan ignored it. He followed the girl. There was no reason for her to be at the hospital at that time of night, nor should she have happened upon him. Around the next corner, he found her still running midway down the hall. This wing he recognized. At the end were the large metal doors that led to the psychiatric unit.
“Alan,” she seemed to say again, but the words hadn’t come from her mouth.
He ran after her. His footfalls echoed down the hallway. Hers made no noise at all. He gained on her and was at the point of overtaking her. Her hair brushed his fingertips as he reached out for her shoulder. They both headed full steam toward the metal doors. He slowed down; she did not.
“Stop,” he said.
Jessica looked back over her shoulder at him. “Alan.”
Her lips never moved. She ran through the doors like a ghost in a movie. Alan stopped. He gasped for breath, and his pulse raced. He pushed the button to call the nurses station.
“Can I help you?”
“This is Charlotte McAdams’s nephew,” he said. “Did someone run in there from the main hospital?”
“No,” the voice on the other side of the speaker hesitated. “It’s not visitation time. You’ll have to come back tomorrow.”
Alan didn’t bother arguing. He turned and walked back to the elevators. Jessica had to have been a hallucination conjured up by his exhausted mind. Even as tired as he was, the difference between the rational and the irrational didn’t escape him.
“Go away,” Thomas sounded asleep.
Josh barely registered that his brother was talking, but it brought him out of his sleep enough to notice other noises. Someone tapped on the door. It was too early to be morning. He’d just fallen asleep.
“Quit knocking on the door, Josh,” Thomas said, still someplace between sleep and wakefulness. “I’m not opening up.”
“It’s not me,” Josh worked his way to complete awareness.
The tapping became louder. It didn’t come from the door but the window. He roused himself enough to lift up and look in that direction. The room was dark except for the light from the digital alarm clock. The street lamp had gone out. A low greenish yellow light shone into the room in its place. It came from behind the curtains. The tapping now became a bang.
“All right,” Thomas threw the covers off and got out of bed. “This had better be important.”
He made it halfway to the door, when the banging started on the window again. Thomas stopped and looked at it and back at Josh, who had stood up on the bed.
“What was that?” Thomas asked.
“I don’t know.” Josh hopped down and stood beside his brother. The glass pane rattled with the next blow. “We better look before the noise wakes up the folks.”
Josh reached for the curtain, but Thomas caught his wrist. His brother’s hand was cold and clammy. A deep fear in Thomas’s eyes stared back at him.
“Don’t,” he said. “Remember The Lost Boys?”
“There’s no such thing as a vampires,” Josh pulled his arm away.
“There’s no such thing as ghosts and witches either,” Thomas reminded him.
For a moment Josh stopped and considered that fact. Neither of them had a chance to pull the curtain back. The window exploded inward. Tiny shards of glass hit Josh’s bare skin. A thousand pins pricked him. Thomas yelled and grabbed his face before falling to the floor. The curtains blew off their rods. One of them wrapped around Josh’s face, causing everything to go black. He fell to the floor beside his brother. Pieces of the broken glass in the carpet dug into him.
The air in the room grew colder.
Josh struggled to uncover his face. When he did, he screamed. Johnny House hung by his neck outside the window. A braid of orange extension cords held him up. His eyes and tongue bulged out of his blue face.
“What is it?” Thomas yelled. “What’s happening?”
“I don’t know.”
“Is that Mr. House?” Thomas yelled as he finally uncovered his face.
“I think so.”
The hanging man stared at them with his glazed dead eyes. He moved toward them, swinging on the cord. A wind blew into the room, colder than the coldest January. From behind the corpse, a ghostly figure appeared. It was a girl probably Josh’s age. She wore old-fashioned clothes like Aunt Charlotte dressed in when her mind went. A Scottish terrier stood out on her flowing skirt. Her ghostly intestines hung from a hole above her waist.
The bedroom door slammed open. His mother stormed inside. Pulled from sleep by their screams and the commotion, her face glared with wide eyed terror.
“What’s happening?” Thomas yelled again.
The ghost screamed, and the pitch grew higher and higher, until it sounded less like a human and more like a steam whistle. Josh clapped his hands over his ears to muffle the din. It did little to help. The ghost exploded into ectoplasm, leaving behind only an eerie green glow and dead Mr. House staring into the bedroom.
His mother screamed. Thomas followed suit. Josh added his own voice to the chorus without even realizing it until moments later.
Their voices faded to nothing. Josh’s whole body stung from the pelting he’d received. Thomas bled from some long, shallow cuts on his face. One ran from the edge of his eye to his ear, another at an angle down his cheek. Josh looked at himself. Tiny trickles of blood ran from a few pinholes torn in his arms. Other places beaded with small droplets of blood.
“I need to call 911,” their mother said. Her legs trembled so much that Josh feared she might topple down the stairs.
“What happened?” Thomas asked.
“I think Jessica figured out I broke into her house,” Josh answered.
“What are we going to do?” His brother wiped his hand across his cheek, smearing blood across his face like war paint.
“I don’t know.”
Josh had no idea, but for some reason he was sure that Mrs. Windham would. As soon as he could, he was going to get ahold of her.
“You need to try to stop the bleeding on your face,” Josh said.
“I hope I don’t need stitches,” Thomas said. “I don’t want any gnarly face scars.”
His brother left him alone in the bedroom with the hanging man. Jessica called to him like a banshee in the night. Her siren’s song tempted him. His insides ached for her. He hurried to find his mother, not daring to look out of the window. If Jessica were there, he might not be able to resist her.
Chapter Twenty-Six
1956
Night of the Massacre
The stolen Mercury Monterey skidded to halt on the northern outskirts of Pinehurst. It was the farthest point from the Harrington place. As Sim and his buddies drove through town after hauling it from the roadblock, they’d jumped out at different people’s houses, rousing the men and some of the women to their cause. By the time they stopped at the giant old white oak tree on County Road 13, a small caravan of pickup trucks and cars followed. Dozens of people rode in those vehicles.
Sim climbed out of the back of the car to face the mob advancing toward the Monterey. He threw up his hands and pushed the air as if shoving them back. Like the Red Sea did for Moses, the crowd stopped for him. In the beams of the headlights, they looked like a faceless mass, a mob intent on doing what he wanted them to do. He waved for Marshall and Johnny to get out of the car. They flanked him.
“We told y’all what we have in this trunk,” Sim said to the crowd. “We told you that the sheriff tried to keep us from serving justice. I know that you are all here to see that it is served properly.”
“That’s right,” a man yelled.
“Let’s see the blue-gum,” a woman yelled. “Get him out here.”
“Give me the keys,” Sim told Marshall.
He unlocked the trunk and lifted the lid. Tobias lay curled into the fetal position on the bottom of the trunk. His cheeks were wet with tears and his eyes red. Sim could make out the trembling of the black mass. It was like looking at a trapped rabbit—a trapped jungle bunny. Sim nodded for Johnny to pull Tobias from the trunk. It took Marshall and Johnny to do it because the boy resisted.
Once in view, the crowd roared outrage at Tobias. They started to surge forward but Sim threw his hands up again. They obeyed. The power he welded at the moment filled him with an overwhelming sense of righteousness. Sim smiled.
“This is him. This is the no-good darkie that has tried to forget his place in society and become one of us. This no-good darkie defiled my sister, a raging black bull in a virgin white lily field. To cover up his wretched tracks, he killed all those kids at the gym.”
“I did no such thing,” Tobias yelled out. His voice was shaking but defiant.
“Shut up!” Marshall punched him in the stomach to the cheering approval of the crowd.
“No good, lying coon,” someone in the crowd yelled out.
“Don’t pollute us anymore with your nigger lies,” another cried.
“What should we do with this boy?” Sim asked.
“Kill him!” a woman yelled.
“Hang him from that oak,” a man bellowed from the faceless mass of Pinehurst townsfolk.
“I got a rope,” another yelled.
“Hang him, hang him,” they started to chant.
Only for a fleeting a moment, Jesus and Pontius Pilate came to mind. That crowd yelled for the death of an innocent man, so said the Bible. Sim dismissed the Sunday school fairytale from his mind and egged the crowd on. As he looked back at the black boy, Tobias’s face became desperate. Fear carved it into something grimacing and grotesque like a gargoyle.
“Pass me the rope,” Sim yelled.
The rope passed hand over hand from the rear of the crowd to the front. Sim walked to the closest person and took it. Whoever owned the rope had already fashioned one end into a noose. The rest would be long enough to toss over one the oak’s limbs. He turned around and showed the method of execution to Tobias. The boy’s expression deepened more with wide-eyed terror.
“Get him over to the tree,” Sim told his buddies.
They wrangled Tobias to the oak. Sim slipped the noose over the slender dark neck and tightened the knot. He threw the other end of the rope over a limb, and nodded for Johnny to take the end.
“I don’t know what to do,” Johnny whispered. “I ain’t ever done this before.”
“Neither have I,” Sim said, “but I know you have to take up the slack.”
Johnny nodded and pulled the rope tight. Tobias hissed as the rope’s fibers cut into his skin. The crowd surrounded them. Sim turned back to face them.
“You say hanging?” he asked.
The crowd agreed with rousing yells of yes. He smiled.
“I need some fellows to help out Marshall and Johnny. They can’t lift him up alone.”
Men nearly trampled over each other to take up a length of the rope with Marshall and Johnny. The town had never experienced anything like the murders. With the fresh blood of innocents still stinking in the night air, the townspeople wanted the Old Testament justice of an eye for an eye instead of the government’s due process.
“Got any last words, boy?” Sim asked, mostly mocking the terrified teenager.
“I didn’t kill those people. It was Sim and his buddies. I caught them. That’s why they come after me.” Tobias rattled the words off with the cadence of sheer horror. “I didn’t do nothing to his sister either. Ask her. She’ll tell you.”
“They can’t. She’s so traumatized by what you did that she’s a retard now,” Sim lied. “You did that to her. You made her a retard. How can you act like you care about her?”
“You got to believe me. It was Sim that did that killing. How could I do it alone?”
Sim gave the motion for the men to pull the rope. Tobias’s voice choked off as the noose first stretched his neck upward and then lifted his feet off the ground. The men behind the rope grunted with the effort of raising the boy. He gargled as the rope cut off his breath. Once his feet were high enough, his legs began to flail, and his body started to swing back and forth. The men started to lose their footing. Sim wrapped himself around Tobias’s legs and pulled down with his weight. The other men pulled harder. Tobias’s vertebrae popped, and the movement stopped.
Sim let go, panting for breath. “Tie the rope off around the trunk. Let them get a look at what happens to murderin’ niggers in this town.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Josh’s mother woke him up at the usual time for school. The morning light that peeked into the living room burned his eyes. Thomas sat on the floor rubbing his eyes as well. They had slept a few hours in the living room.
“Can’t we skip school today?” Josh asked. “We barely slept last night.”
His mother walked through the living room. “I have to go to work. Your dad has to go back to the hospital.” She pointed at Josh. “You have alternative school, which you can’t skip.”
“After what happened, I think we could all take the day off,” Thomas said. “A guy crashed through our window, and a ghost hanged him.”
Their mother stopped and turned to face them. “That didn’t happen.”
“I’m pretty sure it did,” Josh said. He’d seen the ghost of Sue Browning a few days ago. The ghost that shattered the window had looked like the same sort of thing. “Why else would he hang himself off our house?”
“That’s for the police to decide.” His mother sounded almost frantic. “There is no such thing as ghosts.”
“Dad and I saw one at school the other day,” Thomas said.
“Hogwash,” she said. “That old man committed suicide and for some reason decided to do it here. Period. End of discussion.”
Their dad walked downstairs and into the living room. He carried an old high school yearbook. His expression was one of sheer exhaustion.