by Vic Kerry
“Where are y’all going?” Harvey yelled. “It’s thumping.”
They ignored him and got back in the car. Josh turned around and headed down the driveway. He made sure to gun the gas when he passed pimple face and the ugly girl to send gravel flying at them.
As they neared the street, Josh slammed on the brakes. Thomas jerked forward, pushing his hands into the dashboard.
“Dude?”
“Look,” Josh said.
Jessica stood in the middle of the driveway, illuminated by the car’s headlights. She looked more beautiful than he’d ever seen her. Light seemed to radiate from her along with primal sexual heat. He could feel it all the way from the car.
“Get out and stay for the party,” she said without her mouth moving. Her voice sounded like it came from the speakers.
Josh ignored her and let his foot off the brake. The car rolled closer to her, but she didn’t move. Her words kept repeating, getting sweeter and sexier every time. The car drew closer and closer.
“She’s not going to move,” Thomas said.
“I need to get out and check on her. She sounds like she needs something.”
“She’s not saying anything.”
“Of course she is, can’t you hear her?” Josh shifted the care into park. He reached for his door handle.
Thomas punched the button for the moon roof. It slid back as he unfastened his seat belt. Before Josh could even get his door opened, his brother stood out of the top and tossed salt toward Jessica. Bits of the stuff landed on the windshield and hood of the car as the grains sailed through the air. She vanished in a wisp of black dust. Josh came back to himself as Thomas slid back into the car.
“Thanks.”
Thomas refastened his seatbelt. “Think with the big head, dude.”
Josh nodded and punched the gas. They slung gravel into the air as the car turned onto the street toward home.
As soon as they’d put a few blocks between them and the gym, Jessica appeared in the middle of an intersection beckoning for them to stop. Josh kept his wits about him this time and drove through the illusion. Ghosts chased them. At one point, Sue Browning roller-skated from the sidewalk. Before Josh could stop to check if he’d hit someone, the ghost popped up at the window. By the time they pulled into their driveway, the entire phantom group that had been killed forty years ago trailed them.
They ran toward the house. The ghost of Debbie Eva, the one who’d assaulted them the night before, swooped down. Her fingernails scratched at Josh’s already raw face. Thomas yelled out as Tommy Jones wrapped him in a tackle. They both got onto the front stoop. Their dad opened the door and tossed a handful of salt out over their heads as they slipped past him. He slammed the door. The ghosts banged against its wood.
“A door can stop ghosts?” Josh said.
“No, but we discovered sage could.” His dad pointed to a small Ziploc bag of dried green herbs thumbtacked to the door. “We’ve got baggies on all the windows and outside doors. Because the windows aren’t fixed in your room, Thomas, we locked your door and put some on it.”
“They’re having the anniversary dance tonight,” Josh said.
His dad looked very concerned. “Did that lady help you out?”
“She told me that part of the legend is that the old witch Hazel cast a spell to be reincarnated,” Josh said.
“Jessica is Hazel,” his dad said. “Connie Dearborn was her forty years ago, but she was killed before the curse could be fulfilled.”
“What about the time when the tornado came?” Thomas asked.
“The gypsy preacher man was the witch,” Josh said. “I bet the tornado wasn’t part of the curse but a happy coincidence. It killed him before he could get revenge.”
Their mother walked into the living room carrying a cup of coffee. “It sounds like you need to get rid of Jessica.”
“How?” Thomas said.
“I know,” Josh said. “I’ve known all day. I don’t like the idea.”
“What is it?” his mother asked.
“I have to be the bait.”
“No, certainly not. We can stay holed up here,” his mother said.
“It won’t stop.”
“He’s right,” his dad said. “I don’t like it any more than you do, but if we don’t do something, all of those stupid kids at that dance are going to die. There’s a good shot we will, too.”
“Why?” his mother asked. “We haven’t done anything to that crazy girl.”
“It’s not her,” Alan said. “It was something my family did a long time ago. We’re paying for their mistakes, the whole town is.”
“But what about the ghosts?” Thomas asked.
“I think they’ve got a vendetta against us too,” Alan said.
“Why?” Josh asked.
“Sim.”
This didn’t surprise Josh in the least. His grandfather had never been a convenient man. There was no reason for him to start being so now.
“Let’s make a plan,” Josh said. “I want to get this over with before I lose my nerve.”
Josh and his family sat down in the living room and started planning their strategy. The sound of the ghosts hitting the windows and walls trying to get in made it feel like they were trapped in a living, beating heart.
Finally, the plan was made. “We go in an hour,” Alan said.
Josh’s body tensed. “I hope that’s not too late.”
“As long as the ghosts keep attacking the house, it’s not.”
Just then, the phantom attacks stopped. Everything became still and quiet.
“Maybe we go now,” Thomas said.
Chapter Thirty-Two
1956
A week after the Massacre
Sim stood on the old wooden bridge that crossed Chipewanna Creek on the dirt road that ran out to an old logging camp years abandoned. No one came down that road except to fish off the bridge or get up to no good. Most folks did the latter. He was the only person who still tried to catch crappie from the bridge. Most folks had moved their fishing over to the new county lake the state had created a few years ago. The state kept it stocked. The fishing there almost came with a guarantee to catch a mess of something.
Fishing, alone with the water, was the only thing that ever cleared Sim’s mind. It was the only thing outside of drinking that calmed him down. Since the massacre and everything surrounding it, he needed some time to himself with a pole and a beer. He had both. Tranquility came as a happy free gift.
“Catching anything?”
Sim turned as a man wearing a wrinkled gray suit and straw-colored trilby with a motley blue hatband sidled up to him. A toothpick stuck out from the side of the man’s mouth. He smiled. The man looked out of place, not because he wore a suit at that location as much as he was a sore thumb among pinkies.
“It’s November,” Sim answered. “Rarely catch crappie in November.”
“Croppie,” the man said, and now Sim was positive he was the detective Sheriff Johnson warned him about. Only Yankees called a crappie a croppie. “I expected you were catfishing.”
“You’re wrong,” Sim said.
“How about nigger fishing? You’re pretty good of catching those on the end of a line.”
“Do I know you?” Sim asked. “You seem to think we are in acquaintance.”
“I know all about you, Simeon Thomas McAdams.” The man pulled a small top-bound spiral notebook from his coat pocket. He flipped it opened. “You are twenty-eight years old and live in Pinehurst, not far from the gymnasium where the massacre happened. You work for Georgia-Pacific lumber company. You are a veteran—Coast Guard.”
“My eyes are green and I have two nuts,” Sim said. “What’s it to you?”
“I’m Jack Garth, a private detective. The Harringtons hired me to get some questions answered. You’re the biggest question.”
Sim almost laughed at him, but instead, he reeled in his line and flung the minnow off the hook into the water. He fastened th
e naked hook to one of the eyelets on the rod and leaned it on the rail of the bridge.
“What answer do you want?” he asked.
“Why did you kill Tobias Abernathy?” Garth asked.
“I didn’t kill him,” Sim said. “I served justice to him.”
“You lynched him.”
Sim picked up his rod and started across the bridge back toward the main road where his truck was parked. His place of solitude was gone, and he had nothing more to say to Mr. Garth. The detective grabbed him by the arm. Sim spun around and shoved the tip of his rod under the detective’s chin.
“I don’t much like being accused of murder,” he said through a snarl. “I like being touched by some carpetbagging Yankee even worse.”
“Touch a nerve, Johnny Reb?” Garth asked, sounding to Sim like some B-movie Humphrey Bogart wannabe. “All you cracker redneck boys down here are hopping to hang a Negro, ain’t you?”
Sim pressed the tip deeper in the loose skin around the man’s neck. “That boy killed my sister’s friends and my fiancée. What happened to him was better than what the courts would have done.” He made the sound of meat sizzling.
Garth stepped back. “So you say, but I have reason to believe that Tobias Abernathy was innocent of those killings. The evidence points to more than a single boy being able to do that kind of carnage.”
It felt like Sim’s guts would explode from anger. He smiled, tucked his rod under his arm, and walked down the road, leaving the detective where he stood. The last thing he needed was to lose his cool and do something stupid. He hoped the detective would take the hint and not keep pressing.
“No so fast.” The detective came up behind him. “I would like some questions answered.”
Sim kept walking. “I don’t have to. You’re not a cop, just some dime-store private dick.”
“You killed those kids and framed Tobias Abernathy.”
The words chilled Sim to the core. They froze him to the spot. He turned to face Jack Garth. If he’d had a gun, he’d have shot him dead right there.
“You’re crazy. Why would I kill my own fiancée?”
“According to your own mother, she jilted you. Heartbreak can make a man do some extreme things, Mr. McAdams, even multiple murder.”
Before Sim could say anything, the sound of a car running wide open filled the air. It came from behind him, and he had no idea how a car could be going so fast down the rutted dirt road. Only people with beat-up old trucks even tried it, going slow. Something metallic popped on the car as it crossed a patch of road akin to a washboard. He could tell by the sound the tires made.
Sim flung his fishing gear down and himself to the side, as an early-‘50s model Ford barreled past him. Jack Garth wasn’t as spry. The detective didn’t hit the hood of the car. It drove through him. His guts and innards sprayed out all over the road.
The car stopped. Someone got out of the driver’s side. The engine idled. Sim looked at the driver. He didn’t believe his own eyes. Connie stood over a quarter of the detective that contained a shoulder and a bit of upper arm.
“That was fun,” she said.
Sim sat up, wanting to run but not being able to stand from sheer fear. “Who are you? What are...?”
“I’m Connie,” she said. “Your fiancée, remember?”
“You’re dead.”
She looked at the remains of the detective. “So is this guy.”
“What do you want?”
“Revenge,” she said. “By my own flesh-and-blood hand.”
“Do it. Kill me. Get it over with.”
“I can’t. I’m bound by the rules.”
“The rules? Whose rules?”
“The rules I put in place one hundred and twenty years ago when I first cursed this town and your wretched family. Once I put the magic in play, not even the person who put the curse out can change the rules.” The ghost smiled and walked back to the car. Before climbing back in, she looked at Sim. “Look for me in about forty years. I hope that’s enough time for you to stew in your own juices, Simeon McAdams.”
Chapter Thirty-Three
Sim’s stomach rumbled. The nurses wouldn’t let him feed himself. They pushed liquid down a tube in his throat. Apparently, the rounding doctor, a gook named Kim, reported that he couldn’t swallow well enough for actual food. Starving him was a much better solution. He didn’t even need to be in the ICU. All the nurses talked about how remarkably he was doing. He could see the clock on the wall. A placard below that listed the visitation times in large block letters. The next one was in a few minutes. He would let Alan know about that and tell him to get him transferred either to another floor or another hospital.
“You have company,” said the male nurse—something else Sim found wrong with the world.
“About time,” he slurred out. Before the nurse left or his guest entered, Sim continued. “You’ve got to tell them to transfer me.”
“Why would I do that?” Jessica walked in, sliding the door shut after the nurse stepped out. “I think you’re in the right place.”
Sim tried to make his right hand push the call button. It remained paralyzed, as it had since his stroke. Jessica smiled a sweet and innocent smile like a candy striper bringing around magazines or chewing gum. He saw something far more sinister in her grin. Deep in those eyes, Connie Dearborn looked back at him. Now he began to realize exactly what was going on. He wished he’d put all the pieces of his old memories together before then.
“Connie,” he said.
Jessica’s smile beamed larger. It looked like a shark’s mouth ready to devour him. Sim lay helpless before her. She would kill him. The only thing he hoped was that it would be quick.
“You don’t need this,” she said, pulling the plug on the call light button from the wall.
She began looking over all his various tubes and electrical attachments. Her tongue clicked as each thing got a small exploratory tug. Finally she reached above him and gave the fluid bag attached to his IV pump a hard squeeze. It burst, and the saline spilled down on him and the machine.
“Oops,” she said.
“They’ll hear the monitors go off and stop you,” he said, hearing his voice very slurred, but he knew she understood him because she could read his thoughts. “You aren’t going to be able to get away with this.”
“Oh, really?”
The entire ICU started to buzz and ring with heart monitors and other warning sirens. Even the fire alarms screamed and flashed—all of them except in Sim’s room. Here, everything pulsed and beeped like it was supposed to. From the periphery of his good eye, the nurses ran around outside his room in a great flurry. The overhead speaker squawked. Someone yelled “Code Blue, ICU!” over and over again.
“Why?”
“You know perfectly well why. But maybe you mean why I am going to destroy your family. Remember that old ghost story about the witch woman named Hazel?”
The story came to him as soon as she mentioned it. His family had lynched that old woman like he had Tobias Abernathy. At that moment it clicked.
“I am Connie Dearborn,” Jessica said, “and I am the Reverend Junkins killed in the tornado of 1916, and I am the old voodoo lady Hazel who Silas McAdams, your granddaddy, lynched in 1876. Now for you, I’m the angel of death. You knew all this. You were too stubborn to admit it. This time I had help, all those souls you took in the prime of life. They were more than willing to bring about your downfall, Simeon McAdams.”
At that moment, she became the Connie that broke his heart. Connie turned into a middle-aged mulatto man in old-timey clothes with a hat like parsons wore in Western shows. Finally, she was a dried up old black woman. The final version, the Hazel version, reached out and ripped all the cords of his monitors and support systems out of the wall. The old, black hand turned back to the alabaster white of a teenaged girl as it covered his mouth. The fingers felt like ice, and something not solid but not insubstantial wormed down his throat.
The icy th
ing in his throat wrapped around his heart and squeezed it like some kind of constricting snake. His life crushed out of him from the inside. A gasp tried to escape from his mouth but became trapped in his throat.
Chapter Thirty-Four
1956
The evening of the Massacre
Sim stood in front of the Pinehurst High School gym. A cigarette burned down, and the smoke haloed around him. Marshall and Johnny sat on the hood of the car they’d come in. They smoked as well.
“I don’t know about this,” Johnny said. “I’ve got a wife and some kids. If we get caught—”
“We ain’t going to get caught.” Sim flicked his cigarette to the ground. “Don’t forget, I got kids too. Doing this is the only way to make sure they can live in a town free of niggers, communists, and queers.”
“I get the Tobias thing,” Marshall said, “but why Connie? She’s your fiancée.”
“I told you that she’s a communist. I found the stuff in her house,” Sim said. “That Tommy Jones is a queer.”
“How are we not going to get caught?” Johnny asked.
“We ain’t going to leave any evidence. They ain’t ever going to be able to figure out who did this.”
Marshall held up the shotgun that lay beside him. “These things are loud, Sim. Folks around are going to hear them.”
“Let them. Only old people live around here. They ain’t going to do anything.”
“I don’t think I can do this,” Johnny said. He slid off the hood of the car and took his shotgun. “I’m going to walk home.”
Sim pulled an old automatic pistol from the waistband of his pants and pointed it at Johnny. “We’re going in. Unless you want to be part of the carnage, understand?”
Johnny swallowed hard and pumped his shotgun. “I don’t see Tobias’s car. I don’t think he’s here.”
“Probably rode up here with Charlotte,” Marshall said and giggled a little.
“I don’t like how you worded that.” Sim pointed the pistol at Marshall. “Are you implying something?”