by Vic Kerry
“You guys are up?” he asked.
“Momma woke us,” Thomas said. “Josh has to go to school. She forgot I’ve been suspended.”
“You still need to be up. No lollygagging because you can’t go to school. We ought to have given you more punishment, but you did help your brother out.”
Sleeping on the floor made Josh’s face ache. He could only imagine what he looked like. His reflection in the TV screen told him. His eye puffed up large and black. A bruise ran the length of his jaw. If he had a broken swollen nose, he’d look like a prize fighter on the bad side of a contest.
“Is this the ghost from last night?” their dad asked, handing the yearbook to Thomas and pointing to a picture.
“It was Johnny House,” their mother said. “I recognized him.”
“Not him,” their dad said. “The ghost.”
Their mother balled her hands into a fist. “For the last time, there was no ghost.”
“That’s her.” Thomas pointed at the picture and read. “Debbie Eva.”
He showed the picture to Josh. The faded black and white photo looked like the ghost, except Debbie Eva’s picture didn’t have a hole in her torso. He nodded back at his dad. His mother fumed.
“If you all want it to have been a ghost, fine. But leave me out of this crazy Scooby-Doo, Poltergeist crap. I’m going to work.”
“What’s her problem?” Josh asked, finally standing up and stretching out.
“It is kind of far-fetched when you think about it,” Alan said. “An old man hanging from a noose crashes into our teenaged son’s window, and a ghost supposedly did it. That’s too much for her to swallow at once.”
“Do you believe us?” Josh asked.
His father looked very serious and older than he’d ever seen him before. “Absolutely. I think that the closer we get to the anniversary of that horrible massacre, something is tearing a hole in the place between us and them. I think that those dead kids want revenge.”
“Why are they after us?” Thomas asked. “We weren’t even alive back then.”
“Is it because of Aunt Charlotte?” Josh asked. “Or Jessica?”
“I think it’s a variety of things including Charlotte and her, but I think it might be your grandfather.” Alan looked at his watch. “Speaking of which, I’ve got twenty minutes before visitation starts. I’ve got to go.”
“Can I walk you out? I need to talk with you real quick,” Josh said.
His dad nodded. They walked out in the crisp morning air. Josh wished he had on more than a T-shirt and his boxers. Chill bumps popped up all over him. They walked to Alan’s car and stopped.
“What is it?” Alan asked.
“I’m sorry about blowing up about Jessica.”
“You like her, and I approached that wrong.”
“I think you’re right. I went over to her house last night after our argument. She wasn’t there. I broke in and found nothing there. No furniture and no family. All I found was a single bed and some strange stuff, like voodoo stuff.”
Alan looked at his watch. “I saw her or something like her last night at the hospital. She taunted me, and I chased her down the hall only to have her disappear literally through the door at the psych unit where your aunt is. She is part of this. Now I’m positive.”
“I think I’m in a lot of trouble.” For some reason, Josh needed to confess to his father. His old man could help. “I had sex with her yesterday after getting sent home from school. Now that I think about it, she bewitched me. I think she knows I broke into her house. She’s one that sent the ghost and killed Mr. House. I’m next.”
Alan rubbed his eyes. His father let out a long sigh. “I don’t know what to do about that. You should have known better, but she is an attractive girl. You didn’t know she was a witch or a ghost or a zombie, or whatever she is. I’ve got no idea what to tell you except stay away from her, and I hope you wore a rubber.”
“Don’t worry,” Josh said.
“I’ve got to go.”
Josh nodded. He walked back into the house. Thomas sat on the couch. The Today Show blared from the television. Elton John sang some song Josh didn’t recognize, but it sounded like a love song. Apparently he was promoting it.
“Get ready,” he said to his brother.
“I’m watching Elton John,” Thomas said. “Plus, I don’t have to go to school.”
The show went to commercial. Josh poked Thomas in the back. “He’s gone, and I’m not going to school either.”
“They said he’s going to sing ‘Tiny Dancer’. If you aren’t going to school, what’s the hurry?”
“We’re going to Selma. I’ll dig out dad’s cassette tape with that song on it. We can listen on the way.” Josh walked toward the kitchen.
“Why Selma?”
He stopped and looked back at his brother. “That’s where Kathryn Tucker Windham lives.”
“Who?”
“The lady who wrote the Jeffrey books.”
“Why are we going there?” Thomas asked.
“I think she might know what’s going on around here.”
“Because she writes about ghosts?”
“No, because she wrote about the massacre in one of her books. You remember I found a copy of the book in Jessica’s house. It had a bunch of weird jotting in it. It can’t hurt to ask her.”
“Why not call her on the phone?” Thomas asked.
A phone call would be simpler, but Josh needed a road trip. “That way she won’t know where I am.”
“Who? Mom?”
“Jessica.”
Sim sighed with pleasure. He opened his eyes. Connie straddled him. She moved up and down. A long time had passed since he’d known the pleasure of a woman, too long. He reached up and grabbed her hips above her ample rump. His fingers pressed into the voluptuous flesh, soft and warm. He sighed again with immense pleasure.
“Oh yeah,” he said softly and almost passionately. “That’s it.”
“Do you like it like that?” Connie asked.
“Oh yeah.”
Sim sat up to drive himself deep into her. He buried his face between her breasts and breathed in. The smell of erotic sweat filled his nostrils. He pressed himself full into her. A long groan escaped from her mouth. He moved his hand from her haunch to her face, and he pulled his finger from the edge of her lips. She took it into her mouth and sucked on it. Her tongue ran along the fingertip in a playful circle.
He opened his eyes. Connie no longer writhed on him. Instead, Jessica, his grandson’s girlfriend, had allowed him into her. For a second he felt like an old man, a perverted thing enjoying such a union, but this feeling faded away as she started to press back against him, grinding as hard as he was giving. Now an explosion built up inside him. It would go at any minute. He clinched his eyes together and let out an almost painful sound as he released.
She squealed at the same time. Once the pressure released, he opened his eyes again. They still moved against each other. He remained deep inside her.
“Was that good?” she asked no longer in Connie’s voice but Jessica’s.
“Oh yeah, it’s been too long,” Sim said.
“Kiss me,” she said.
Sim lifted himself toward her mouth and looked her in the face. Instead of the beautiful young woman, a festering, putrid skull stared back. Rotting skin hung off it in green and black strips. A tongue purple and swollen wormed from her mouth like a nightcrawler. Sim screamed, and Jessica laughed a high-pitched horrible cackle.
In the real world, Sim opened his eyes. His right eye didn’t seem to be working very well. Everything looked blurred, like a lens with Vaseline smeared over it. He tried to swallow, but something clogged his throat. For a moment, it was putrid tongue, and he gagged. Straps held down his arms. He couldn’t move them to free the obstruction. A beeping sound changed to a buzz and something like a siren. Someone rushed into the room. He cut his eyes over to see who it was. A nurse in blue scrubs fiddled with wires. Si
m tried to speak, but the thing in this throat didn’t allow that either. He grunted.
“Mr. McAdams? Are you awake?” the nurse asked.
He grunted again. She tapped some buttons above his head. The siren sound stopped. She looked him in the eyes.
“Are you breathing okay?”
He grunted. She put her hand on his chest and under his nose. The monitors around him beeped. Sim smelled the odor of a hospital. The memory of Tobias’s ghost reaching into his chest came back to him. The beeping increased.
“Try to stay calm, Mr. McAdams,” the nurse said. “I’m going to get the doctor.”
She left, and Sim tried to calm down. He focused on other things, but his mind wandered back to the ghost’s attack and to the dream he’d had and back to the ghost. Finally, a doctor walked in. He asked him questions and prodded and poked Sim the way doctors typically did. After a full examination that ended short of thumping him to see if he was ripe, the doctor peeled off the tape over his mouth and pulled a long tube from his throat. Sim swallowed and coughed. His breath seemed shorter, but it felt good to have the tube removed.
“Can you talk, Mr. McAdams?” the doctor asked.
“Water.”
The word slurred, and he had difficulty understanding his own words. Half his mouth didn’t work when he spoke.
“You’ve had a severe stroke. I don’t know if that’s a good idea if you cannot swallow,” the doctor said.
“I just did.”
The doctor nodded at him as if he were a bumbling idiot. His words sounded that way, but his mind worked like it always had. He never imagined a stroke having such a result. He thought victims were not able to think straight and that caused their speech problems.
“We can try it,” the doctor said.
“Alan. Get Alan.”
The words sounded nothing like he wanted them too. The doctor looked very confused. He kept saying his son’s name. Finally, Sim said “Son.” The doctor understood. He told the nurse to see if Alan was in the waiting area since it was almost visitation. Alan walked in, and he and the doctor spoke for few minutes. Sim didn’t pay much attention. It didn’t matter. Nothing could be done to help him out of this state. Too many people he’d seen have strokes stayed the same way.
“Are you okay, Daddy?” Alan asked.
“Listen.” Sim tried very hard to make the good side of his mouth work the best that he could make it work. “Tobias’s ghost did this.”
“Did he say ghost?” the doctor asked.
“I think he did,” the nurse answered.
Sim would have rolled his eyes if his brain would have let him. Instead, he lay in his bed, looking up at the ceiling and hoping that the doctor didn’t think the stroke made him dotty or crazy. The last thing he wanted was to end up on the nut ward with his sister.
“Doctor,” Alan said, “can I talk to my father alone, for a minute?”
“Sure.” The doctor and nurse stepped out.
Alan pulled the sliding glass door closed. This gave Sim some relief. He didn’t have to worry about the doctor hearing what he had to say. His energy could be expended trying to speak as clearly as possible.
“Did you say Tobias’s ghost made you have a stroke?”
Sim nodded as best he could. “His face was the one in the reflection. He wants to get me back.”
Alan appeared to be focusing very hard on understanding him. Sim took patience and let his son process it.
“For lynching him?” Alan asked.
Sim nodded. His son didn’t give him a look like he’d lost his mind. Instead, Alan looked very concerned, more concerned than Sim had ever seen.
“Would any other ghosts try to get you?” Alan asked. “Or us, me or the boys?”
Sim nodded his agreement again.
“And what about Marshall and Johnny House?”
He nodded again. It was easier.
“Johnny?” he asked.
“He’s dead, Dad. Hanged himself at our house. The boys claim that a ghost pushed his body through the window. They identified her as Debbie Eva from an old yearbook picture.”
He hoped that the damage done to his face would hide his guilt. Alan looked him over.
“What about Corey Aaron, Johnny’s grandson? Would a ghost go after him?”
“Maybe,” Sim didn’t feel well now. He needed for his son to leave, but something had to be said no matter how hard it was to get out. “Connie Dearborn.”
“You think her ghost did it?”
Sim shook his head in disagreement as best he could. “Everything. Witch.”
Alan looked at him not with surprise but with a look something like an epiphany.
“How do you know that?”
He didn’t answer. Some things had to remain secret. That one would go to the grave with him. Alan shook his head at him. His son knew that he was being obstinate. Sim closed his eyes and acted like he was asleep. The door opened, and Alan left. While he lay behind dark lids, he dreamed about Connie. He dreamed about the story of Hazel’s curse and understood why Jessica looked like Connie.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
1956
The evening before Homecoming
Blood soaked everything. Sim had never seen so much of it in his life. He turned in a circle taking it in. Everything seemed unreal. As he scanned past the doors from the lobby into the basketball court, he glimpsed a face, barely visible against the darkness of the lobby. It wasn’t like the one he’d seen a few nights ago while he was drinking out near the old cemetery, which he’d blamed on being drunk. This one was solid, not ghostly. This one looked nothing like a mulatto gypsy from a campfire story. It was a black face, a young black face. Tobias had seen.
Sim ran across the basketball court into the lobby. The main door closed as he made his way to it. By the time he got to the outside, the nigger’s taillights lit up as he drove down from the gym to the street. Sim chomped down on the Doublemint he was using to try to stop smoking. He had to take care of that spearchucker and quickly. The boy would go back to the Harringtons first and tell them. A colored person would never go directly to the sheriff. It would be futile. Marshall and Johnny would be a welcomed help with this one. They could tail the kid and make his drive home long enough for Sim to tie up loose ends and get to the sheriff first.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“What’s the plan?” Thomas asked as he and Josh drove through a residential street in Selma.
“I’m going to go to her house, knock on the door, and tell her that I’m a reporter for our school paper,” Josh turned onto a street lined with standard-looking houses.
“We don’t have a school paper.”
“She won’t know that.”
“You think this will work?”
“Mrs. Windham was a reporter for a long time. I’m sure she’ll be impressed that I tracked her down to do a story.” Josh slowed the car as they approached a house with a large porch with white rails around it. The copper house number shone in the sun. “This is it.”
Thomas studied the house through the windshield as they pulled up the driveway. He squinted and cocked his head to the side like a dog trying to understand where a noise came from.
“Are you sure?”
“It’s the address from the phone book.” Josh put the car into park.
“It looks too happy.”
“What did you expect, the Addams Family house?”
“Kind of. It is a haunted house.” Thomas got out the car.
Josh stepped out after him. The smell of dried leaves wafted toward him. The tinkling of wind chimes floated down from the porch. He agreed with Thomas a little bit: the place didn’t match his imagination. Although he didn’t expect the creepiness of something akin to Norma Bates’s homestead, he had thought it might be a little more Southern Gothic. The white bannister along the porch and hanging pots full of bright yellow mums made it hard to believe the woman responsible for scaring a large number of Alabama schoolchildren lived there.
The screen door opened, and a small, gray-haired woman walked onto the porch. She wore a broad brim sunhat and large glasses. Brown cloth work gloves covered her hands. A flowered apron covered her blue dress. She looked at Josh and his brother with surprise.
“Can I help you boys?” she asked in a long slow drawl.
“Are you Mrs. Windham?” Josh asked.
“Yes.” She stayed close to her door.
“The Mrs. Windham who wrote the ghost books?” Thomas asked.
“The same. I don’t make autographs at my residence,” she said.
“I’m sorry. We’ve not introduced ourselves. My name is Josh McAdams and this is my brother Thomas. We’re from up in Pinehurst.”
Mrs. Windham screwed up her eyes in thought. “Seems like I remember one of my books talks about that town.”
“It does,” Josh said. “That’s why we’re here. I’m a reporter on the Pinehurst High newspaper. I was hoping to interview you for the paper. It’s a special Halloween feature story.”
She seemed a bit skeptical and eyed them more. “Why’s he here?”
“He didn’t want to drive all the way down here by himself,” Thomas said. “It’s a long drive from Pinehurst. Look at his face, people might mistake him for Frankenstein.”
“Indeed, he does look the worse for the wear, but you ain’t Cary Grant for that matter,” she said.
“We’ve had bad weather. A storm damaged our house,” Josh lied.
“Windows broken, flying glass, cuts on the face, you know,” Thomas added. “He got into a fight. Three guys jumped him.”
“I’d believe that. I hope you got the better of them,” she said.
“I held my own,” Josh said. “Can I please interview you? It’s important.”
“I didn’t anticipate entertaining anyone today,” she said. “I was planning on raking my leaves.”
He looked to the side of her house. A large elm had shed a yard full of yellow and brown leaves. A rake leaned against the trunk of tree, and a small pile of the leaves had already been raked. His foot was in the door, now if he could convince her to talk to him.