by Shock Totem
Hell Hounds on My Trail
Perhaps the most famous—or notorious—of ties between the blues and the dark side of the supernatural would be the legend of blues guitarist Robert Johnson. He was born in Hazelhurst, Mississippi, on May 8, 1911 to Julia Dodds and Noah Johnson (Julia was actually married to Charles Dodds, to whom she gave ten children). As seems to happen often when researching the legend, there are so many varying reports and stories around that it makes it nigh on impossible to get to the truthful heart of the matter. But it goes that Johnson was fairly well-educated, which was unusual for his time, as those of color were often denied even a basic education. There are other accounts that say Johnson, from his early childhood to his early adult years, toiled in the fields, under many aliases, a practice he claimed was to keep him from blame were a murder to be committed in the areas where he worked.
However, his young adult life was full of tragedy—he was twice married, his first wife and child dying during childbirth. He remarried and began the first steps of pursuing a musical career. He began on harmonica and jaw harp, and after a while switched to the guitar. It stands on record that his early performances were less than stellar, the crowds singularly unimpressed with the boy’s playing. And so it was that, after this particular period of his life, Johnson disappeared for a period of six months—some said he went in search of his natural father, while others insist it was during this time that the young man sold his soul to the Devil.
Where Did You Sleep Last Night?
A large portion of the reason this was so readily accepted was the fact that, upon his return, he commanded a new-found mastery of the guitar, causing blues legend Son House to quip, “He sold his soul to play like that.” Indeed, there were rumors of the man making a midnight pact at “the crossroads” with Satan himself. (Meeting the Devil at the “crossroads” is a common motif in traditional folklore—plus, many unfortunates were hanged from gibbets positioned near crossroads. It is seen as a place where all things and ways intersect, a spatial, spiritual and physical no-man’s land.) Johnson, though, claimed to have received instruction from a man named Ike Zinnerman. At the time, nearly all the bluesmen went by nicknames—Blind Lemon Jefferson, Howlin’ Wolf and Leadbelly, for example—however, none of these greats ever recalled any player named Zinnerman. More unusual was Zinnerman’s method of instruction. Johnson claimed, somewhat spookily, that he played guitar at night, playing in empty churchyards, with only the student and tombstones to hear him. Many accepted that Zinnerman was, in fact, the Devil.
And the whispered dark legend of Robert Johnson was born.
(Another explanation for the legend of Johnson having “sold his soul to the Devil” was that the death of his first wife and child was divine punishment for singing secular songs—in some respects, Johnson took this as a badge of honor and it only consolidated his ambition to become a full-time musician.)
Bizarre incidents plagued the man’s life, and even his death was draped in mystery. Depending on who you spoke to, he was either stabbed, shot and poisoned by a mistress’ husband, or a jealous man. Then there were claims that he was poisoned and went on to suffer three days of intense pain, finally falling to his knees and howling like a dog, before keeling over dead. To add further mystery and intrigue, he is said to have been buried in an unmarked grave, in unhallowed ground—and compounding the mystery still further is the fact that there’s a Robert Johnson grave in the Zion Church graveyard in Morgan City, Mississippi, and one near Greenwood, also in Mississippi, the headstone of which was donated by the seminal blues rock band ZZ Top.
The blues, as a style and genre, is one born of pain and woe, misery and tragedy, ultimately the story of one race’s fight against the injustices of the slave trade, the hatred and prejudice, and the right to be treated equally with others. Of course, not all of it is of a dark or horrific nature; a lot of it is simply about the woes that all of us face on a daily basis, the everyday struggles, the trials and tribulations of love, or just making ends meet. They took tragedy and out of it gave us a cultural force that is still being felt today. The blues is a hearty seed in rich soil, watered with tears and sweat and blood, sunned by suffering and pain. It has just as nurturing an environment today as it did 200 years ago. Sadly.
—//—
John Boden resides in the shadow of Three Mile Island, with his wonderful wife and sons. He works as a baker by day and writes when he can. His work has appeared in print and online at Everyday Weirdness, Weirdyear, Twisted Dreams Magazine and 52 Stitches, Vol. 2, and is forthcoming in Black Ink Horror #7. He has bad-ass sideburns.
Simon Marshall-Jones is a UK-based writer, artist, editor, publisher and blogger: also wine and cheese lover, music freak and covered in too many tattoos.
THE MANY GHOSTS OF ANNIE ORENS
By A.C. Wise
Annie is five years old and the ghost in her closet is crying again.
“I’m sorry, mommy. I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry. Please let me out.” The little boy’s voice throbs with pain. The sound shivers along the floorboards; light that isn’t light pools under the door. Annie closes her eyes, pulls the covers over her head, and puts her hands over her ears.
But she can still hear him. She’s the only one who can.
“Stop it! Leave me alone!” Annie sits up, sending the bedcovers to the floor.
She glares at the closet door, but the crying goes on and on. She glances at her bedroom door next, hoping for a creak of wood, a footstep in the hall. Deep down, she knows her parents won’t come. They talk in low voices when they think she isn’t listening. They don’t believe her about the little dead boy in the closet whose mommy locked him in there because she was mad and then his lungs closed up, his asthma inhaler on the other side of the door.
The dead boy is scared, and he’s all alone.
Annie’s parents have given up on her. So, right now, Annie is all alone, too.
The crying nestles between Annie’s skin and her bones. It feels like a fever. It makes her cheeks prickle hot, like a slap, except the prickling is everywhere, and it doesn’t fade. It builds until Annie feels like screaming and crying, too. Instead, she slips out of bed and puts her hand against the closet door.
“It’s okay,” she whispers. “I’m here. You’re not alone.”
In that moment, she decides. It isn’t a conscious thing; she lets go. She’s terrified, but the ghost is even more scared than she is, which is what her daddy said about the neighbor’s dog at the end of the road. The dog bit Annie anyway.
Annie lets go. She lets the ghost in. For a moment, she isn’t alone...
—
“Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.” Annie slams the sweating bottle onto the bar, which is already ringed with condensation scars that are ages old.
Every time she goes away—every time she has to fight her way back—it gets harder. The past and the present run together, stitched to now, as inseparable as nerves to skin. She was five years old. Her first ghost lingers, a fresh wound.
Gil hands her another beer, unasked. When the bartender doesn’t leave, Annie looks up, then glances around. The bar is empty. She and Gil are alone with the sticky light that pools red and blue from the neon outside and yellow from the lights overhead.
“Sure you don’t want something stronger?” Gil tilts his head to indicate Annie’s beer.
She doesn’t miss the catch in his tone. He’s waiting for her to ask about Ellie. He’s waiting for her to make some passing remark, any mention that will prove she isn’t as hard-hearted as she pretends to be.
Annie straightens—contrary to the last—and meets Gil’s gaze steady on. Her only concession to Gil’s unspoken questions is that, as she sips, Annie finally admits to herself that she did come here looking for Ellie.
There is no other reason to be here.
Annie and Gil go way back, but they both know she is lousy company at the best of times. She is afraid of flickers, afraid of shadows, afraid of stray glimpses otherwise that will requi
re her to open herself up as surely as a suicide opening her veins. That she is here at all should tell Gil everything he needs to know, so Annie holds her tongue.
She sets her beer down, spreading rings of condensation like ripples across a pond. Gil is still watching her. Then there it is, catching Annie off guard, that ghost-movement she so fears, buried deep in his eyes. Gil knows...something. Guilt—or something else she doesn’t yet understand—is holding him back.
Pushing the brown glass bottle away, she relents. “Okay, what have you got?”
Gil bends down, and disappears behind the bar; Annie lights a cigarette. She breathes smoke, squinting, trying to quell the sudden sensation of panic in her chest. When Gil reemerges, he holds a heavy, dust-frosted bottle. The label is handmade, the ink spider-scrawled across it looks like long-dried blood—Ghost Rum.
“Cute,” Annie says against the fear prickling her spine, the dread touching each vertebra as it climbs.
“Private reserve.” Gil tries to smile, but the movement looks more like a nervous tic. He pours. Annie doesn’t touch the glass, not yet.
The rum is so dark it absorbs the light. She sniffs the contents—burnt sugar and fire. It smells like Ellie’s breath as she murmured restlessly in her dreams, right before she disappeared. Annie could have shaken Ellie awake, could have asked her about her nightmares, but she didn’t. A faint, buzzing pain starts in Annie’s jaw, the inaudible ghost-whine only she can hear.
“Just one sip,” Gil says. “That way you can still change your mind.”
“What do you know, Gil?” Annie’s muscles clench against the whining pain.
“I know when someone is in pain.” Gil’s tone is defensive. Annie doesn’t back down, letting her stare bore into him.
“Ellie came in here, right before...” Gil trails off. He swallows, and gives Annie a whipped-puppy-dog stare. “You don’t think she’s—”
“No.” Annie shakes her head, a movement so whiplash-sharp it sends hot pain spiking up the back of her skull. “I don’t. If Ellie was dead, I would know.”
The moment the words pass her lips, Annie’s hand starts trembling. She flattens it against the bar. Would she know?
Of all her ghosts, what if Ellie is the only one who didn’t come back to her? The thought is a blow, stinging her skin, stealing her breath. It shatters her armor, and the pieces crash down around her in a terrible crescendo only she can hear. She has kept herself from love for so long...
“I have to find her, Gil.” Raw fear scars her voice, makes it tremble. She hates the sound.
Gil nods toward the glass, the Ghost Rum. “Then drink up.”
“What is it?” Annie lifts the glass. Warmth travels from her fingertips, up her arm, which is dragged down in turn by the unnatural weight of the glass.
“One sip and you see ghosts.”
“I already see ghosts.” Annie presses her lips into a thin line. “What else?”
“Drink a whole glass, and you can step into their world.” Gil’s eyes search for doubt; Annie keeps her features still, says nothing.
“And?” she asks.
Gil sighs. “Drink the whole bottle, and you never come back.”
Annie lifts the glass, peers through the dark liquid. It blocks out the room beyond, swallows the light. She sniffs again—heat and cinnamon. She lowers the glass and looks Gil in the eye one last time; she needs him to understand.
“Tell me something, Gil. How many loyal customers do you have? How many people come back night after night?”
“I don’t know. Maybe three or four. Why?”
Annie takes a deep breath, tries not to let it shudder as she lets go. “What about the ones who come in and talk your ear off, look deep into their glasses and unburden their souls, do you ever see them again?”
Gil hesitates. Annie can see the impulse to lie, but it dies before it reaches his lips. A lie would leave Annie alone, and deep down, Gil is a kindred soul. “No, Annie, I never see them again.”
“Of course not, because that’s the way it works, isn’t it? The broken ones never stay. They make their peace and move on. People like you and me, we’re the ones left with all the shit they wash off their hands before they walk away.”
Gil opens his mouth, but Annie shakes her head. What she’s seen in his eyes is enough. Annie lifts the glass, miming a toast, and takes a healthy swallow.
Black fire fills her mouth, rolls across her tongue. The world shifts. Blood roars in her ears; far away, Gil says, “I’m sorry.”
Burnt-out white replaces the gloom. Annie sees the bar in negative; shadows filled with restless motion smudge and blur. Ellie stands at the end of the bar. Her eyes pool with black ink. She fractures. Her skin trails white fire as she lifts her arm in a jerky, disjointed motion, downing the echo of a glass, twin to the one in Annie’s hand.
Annie lurches forward, reaching for Ellie, catching herself just before she falls. The vision fades; the bar snaps back into true.
Annie tries to keep her voice under control. “Where did she go?”
“Are you sure you want to do this, Annie?”
Annie nods, neck stiff, pain creeping up her spine and wrapping her skull. This is the most honest she’s ever been; her pulse flutters against her skin. “Yes.”
Gil touches the bottle, pushing it across the scarred wood. The ghost-whine shivers in Annie’s bones. If she was kinder, she might ask Gil where he came by the bottle, she might ask what sorrows are locked up inside his head. But all Annie can think about is Ellie. There is nothing Annie can say that would be adequate against Gil’s pain; there is nothing he could say that would be adequate against hers. They understand each other.
He nudges the bottle closer, nodding, almost imperceptibly. Annie hopes the gratitude shows sufficiently in her eyes.
“Take it,” Gil says. “Take it and go home. It’s on the house.”
—
Annie is thirteen, and she’s never been in love before. In the bunk above hers, Dal is crying. Annie imagines Dal’s face pressed into the thin camp pillow, trying to muffle her sobs. Wood, a mattress, and a space of darkness are the only things separating them—that, and Annie’s fear.
Light seeps around the edges of the bunk and drips down the walls. Annie is the only one who sees it.
Dal burns.
Even Dal doesn’t know she’s dying—Dal with her paper-lantern skin and bruised eyes. Her ghost’s need is so strong that it calls to Annie even from within Dal’s living flesh.
“Dal?” Annie dares a sound.
The crying stops. Loneliness wins over the guilt of being caught, and Dal peers over the edge of the bunk.
“Are you okay?” Annie asks.
Dal sniffles. “I want to go home.”
Annie doesn’t know what to say. She wants to hold the burning girl, comfort her while she’s still alive, but she’s afraid. She loved the little boy in her closet. He needed her, and Annie was the only one who could help him. She let him inside her skin; she would have held him forever. But almost as soon as he slipped inside, he begged her to let him go—“Help me, Annie. Help me move on.”
Annie says nothing at all. Dal draws back; the bunk overhead creaks, but her voice drifts down through the darkness. “I’m scared of the ghosts.”
Annie bites her lip. Yesterday, roasting marshmallows around the fire, the camp counselors told stupid stories about the haunted woods, the haunted lake.
The stories made Annie want to scream.
She could tell Dal that the woods aren’t haunted, and there’s nothing in the lake. Annie is the one who is haunted; the only ghosts here are hers. It’s the same at home, in her living room, at school, in the mall—Annie is surrounded by ghosts, the ones who have moved on and broken her heart, and the ones who are waiting to. She could tell Dal this, but she doesn’t think this is something Dal wants to know.
The truth is, love is the ghost, and Annie is the house that wraps around it, binding it to this world.
Anni
e holds her breath. Eventually Dal gives up, rolls over. Annie closes her eyes, basking in Dal’s fever glow, and comes as close as she ever will to saying a prayer. Maybe Dal will be different. Maybe this time she can hold on. Annie is so tired of being alone...
—
Annie opens her eyes, unclenching her fingers from the leather of the reclining chair. Dal isn’t burning up in the bed above hers; Annie is at home, alone, in her empty apartment. She only closed her eyes for a minute, but the past was there, waiting for her, hungry and reminding her of how many times she’s failed. She has no right to go after Ellie, no right to call her back. What can she offer against whatever Ellie is seeking in the ghost world?
Light pools around Annie like melted butter. This is all she has to give: the fact that she doesn’t even know why Ellie ran away, her own fear, her own pain. But then, despite her fear, Annie was never very good at letting go.
She pours a measure of the Ghost Rum straight and drinks half the glass in one swallow. She tastes chalk this time, as though the rum is laden with dust. Beneath the dust lies cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves, lingering on her tongue long after she swallows. Further down still, Annie tastes raw, green sugar cane, tinged with the dirt it grew in.
The world shifts, a subtle shrug this time.
“Annie, do you love me?”
Annie opens her eyes, unaware of closing them. She’s lying in bed, next to Ellie, propped up on one elbow. Ellie’s back is turned, the bones of her spine a ridge pressed against her skin. Light from the window shows the faint scar on Ellie’s shoulder—a crescent moon to echo the one outside.