by Andrew Nance
The rhythmic thump of dirt fall continued. I pushed against the lid, but its weight combined with the accumulating dirt made it hard. I shoved again, but the lid barely creaked open. I got angry and thrust up so hard that it flung wide. I stood, grabbed my watch, and saw silhouettes of corpses ringing the grave. Most were misshapen, bent in the middle where they’d bowed before dying. They moved clumsily, stooping to grab dirt and drop it on me. I held up the watch, but it no longer shone. I stuffed it into my pocket and jumped for the side of the grave. I didn’t care that the dead encircled me—I was getting out of that hole. I clutched at the ground overhead, hanging by my hands, and whimpered to see one of the dead right over me. It held the machete and slowly lifted it high.
All skulls grin—that’s common knowledge—but this one had an even bigger smile as it brought the machete down in a slicing arc.
* * *
There’s lots of people wandering these days, looking for work. The men who run this country, the ones who don’t have to worry about food or where they’ll lay their heads, say the Great Depression will be over soon. They say we should hang on and do the best we can. After going through what I did, I can tough anything out.
New Orleans didn’t feel like home anymore. I returned to Quisling’s, and he looked at me with shame on his face. He started to say something, maybe apologize, but he saw the look in my eyes and shut his mouth. I sat at a table and told him to bring me a drink, then paid him with a coin but didn’t drink it; I simply liked ordering him around for a change. I pulled out the gold watch, it was midnight and Bones Man and Bonaparte came in. Bones Man sat across the table; Bonaparte, hat in hand, hovered behind him like a vulture.
Bones Man asked, “Did you get my item?”
I slid the cloth-wrapped hand across the table.
He picked it up, his eyes sparkling within his wrinkled lids. “From the cemetery?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know whose hand it is?”
I nodded.
“Tell me, then. I am curious.”
I lifted my left arm and displayed the stub of scarred flesh.
Bones Man’s eyes widened. “Your hand?”
“Cut off in that graveyard.”
“Who severed it?”
“The dead.”
Bones Man laughed in wheezing bursts. “Tell me everything.”
I didn’t owe him any more, so I left Quisling’s. I thought of what I didn’t tell him, like how the dead returned to their graves after the corpse had sliced off my hand, and how I struggled one-handed from the grave and stumbled to the fire. I couldn’t ever put into words the incredible pain of thrusting my bleeding stump into the flame, cauterizing it like Mr. McGarrity had once explained. I fainted and woke in the morning, then retrieved my hand from beside the grave. I didn’t tell anyone how I got hurt. Still, Mr. Daemon was kind enough to pay for my hospital stay in Maplewood.
I saved enough money that I could’ve afforded train fare back to New Orleans, but I walked instead. And now that I’ve paid my debt to Bones Man, I’m leaving again, walking all the way back to the cemetery at Daemon Hall. I promised Mr. McGarrity I’d move his body. I keep my promises.
“Look!” Demarius shouted. “The sun’s up. We made it through the night!”
“Morning already?” Matt gazed around wide-eyed. “Did my story take that long?”
“Wow!” I laughed. Golden sunlight came through the windows, reflecting off glass and lighting the room. Hold it. Glass? And the room—it was filled with furniture.
The Book of Daemon Hall fell from Matt’s grasp onto a brightly colored oval rug.
Books filled newly made bookcases. A polished mahogany desk stood before the fresh bricked fireplace. Sitting on the desktop were a lamp and writing implements. Plush green curtains hung at the sides of the windows, while paintings of foxhounds and men on horses hung on the wall, above which were perched animal-head trophies.
“When did this…” Lucinda’s voice faded.
“Amazing,” Ian Tremblin said.
Demarius ran to the adjoining room, and I rushed to the hallway door.
“The bedroom is all new,” he called.
The hall was full of light, and for a brief second something flickered and flew past at incredible speed. It was no more substantial than a shadow seen out of the corner of my eye. I swallowed, then turned back to the room. “Everything is new out here, too.”
“This means we can leave, right?” Lucinda grinned.
Relief flooded through me.
“Wait.” Ian Tremblin’s face turned ashen. “Something’s not right.”
“What do you mean?” Demarius asked, laughing. “It’s morning. We can walk out, just like we did when the sun came up last year.”
“Demarius, look around.” Anxiety showed on Millie’s face. “Everything is new.” She whirled to face Ian Tremblin. “What year would that make it?”
I didn’t know what Millie was getting at, but the question stunned the writer. He grabbed at the desk, stumbled around it, and fell into the chair. Staring unfocused at the desktop, he said, “If we leave now, we run the risk of never returning home.”
“Why?” Lucinda demanded.
His gaze found its way to her face. “Because it’s 1933.”
Ian Tremblin, at the desk, head in his hands, mumbled, “I need a moment to think.”
We went into the adjoining bedroom.
“Impossible,” Matt repeated for the umpteenth time.
My stomach was all twisted. I pulled aside the drape by the window and peered out. “They finished building Daemon Hall in 1933. Look, over there. That’s where they’ve stacked the construction scaffolding.”
Matt took another firm step into denial. “There’s no way.”
“Notice anything unusual?” Demarius asked. Lucinda started to make a sarcastic remark, but he cut her off with a glance. “It’s hard to see, but things are moving.”
It was subtle, but I saw it. Everything stayed in place, yet kept shifting.
I decided to bring up something that concerned me. “I don’t want to freak anyone out, but be careful around Mr. Tremblin.” I looked to the door, making sure he hadn’t followed us into the room.
“Why?” Millie asked.
How could I explain this?
“I’m just saying we can’t completely trust him.”
“Why not?” Lucinda sounded put off.
“Last year Daemon Hall kind of possessed him. What if that connection is still there?”
“What are we supposed to do? Run off? Abandon him?” Matt asked.
“No. At least not yet. All I’m saying is keep an eye out for strange behavior.”
Lucinda snorted. “That’ll be hard. He’s a strange man.”
Millie looked thoughtful. “Have you noticed anything in particular?”
“Remember how he laughed when he realized we were in Daemon Hall?”
“People react to scary surprises in different ways, including the giggles, but if you’re worried, then we’ll keep an eye on him.” Millie looked back out the window. “Wait a minute, it’s not things that are moving. It’s the shadows moving around the objects casting them. See? They’re getting longer, too.”
“I better go tell Mr. Tremblin,” I said.
He was still at the desk and looked up when I came in. “All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”
“What?”
“Quoting Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘Dream Within a Dream.’ My way of saying that things aren’t always what they appear to be in Daemon Hall, are they?”
“No sir.”
“I’m planning a book on scientists who take a methodical approach to ghost hunting. So, I’ve developed a haunting grading system, something based on the Close Encounters UFO rankings.”
“Like in Close Encounters of the Third Kind?”
“The scientist in the movie was based on Dr. J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer who conducted UFO investigations for the air force.
The list has grown, but initially he devised three rankings. The Close Encounter of the First Kind is a visual sighting. The second is physical evidence. The third indicates sightings of aliens in or around the craft.”
“How would you do that with ghosts?”
“A first-stage haunting would be strange occurrences: oddities caught on camera, electronic voice phenomena, electromagnetic spikes, that kind of thing. A second-stage haunting means ghosts are seen. They interact with the living for the third stage. A fourth-stage haunting would denote malevolent ghosts who intimidate or harm people.”
“Daemon Hall is a definite fourth-stager.”
He gave a weak chuckle and nodded.
“Mr. Tremblin!” Demarius ran in, trailed by the others. “It’s almost night already!”
The room darkened as if someone was lowering blinds over the windows.
“I know, I was just about to show Wade.” He gestured to the fireplace. An old-fashioned clock sat on the mantel. The minute hand lapped faster than a spinner on a board game. The second hand spun so fast it was invisible. The hour hand marched through each rotation in a matter of seconds. “Time is passing at phenomenal speed, yet it’s not constant. The first hour I timed flew by in less than ten seconds. The next lumbered by at a leisurely forty-eight seconds, and this most recent hour took twenty seconds to complete.”
“You’re losing me,” I said. “An hour is—well—an hour.”
“Yet it is night already.” Tremblin relit the lantern. “Mr. Matthews, I assume you read science fiction.”
“My favorite kind of book.”
“With your intellect, I would dearly love your take on what is happening.”
“Whoa!” I blurted out as a man took shape at one of the windows. He didn’t walk in; he was just there, at the window, with his hands clasped behind his back. The next second, he vanished. “Tell me you guys saw that.”
Lucinda rubbed her eyes. “Who do you think it was?”
“Did you notice his clothes?” Millie grabbed my arm. “They were old-fashioned.”
“I think I understand.” Matt pushed his glasses into place and excitedly said, “Time is passing at its normal pace; we’re the ones out of the norm. Somehow we have been pushed out of the time stream.”
“Hold it, hold it. I read science fiction, too,” Demarius said. “You’re saying that we not only got knocked back in time, but out of time as well?”
“I’m not following,” I admitted.
Ian Tremblin explained. “They’re discussing the time stream continuum. Think of time as a road: Everything on it moves ahead at the same pace. If you get off the road and move either forward or backward, then get back on the road, that would be time travel.”
“Keeping with that analogy”—Matt’s voice took on his computer-nerd-it-all tone—“we have gotten off, traveled back, and somehow ended up on a poorly constructed alternate route. For us, time passes at different speeds.”
Ian Tremblin nodded. “One of the first books to broach this subject is the classic The Time Stream by John Taine, though the book won’t be out for another dozen years.”
“Huh?” Demarius grunted.
“Published in the mid-forties—we’re in the thirties.”
Matt nodded. “I was thinking more along the lines of Michael Moorcock’s time stream series, but yes, the same idea.”
“Hold on there, Scungilli,” Lucinda interrupted. “If that guy whizzes around faster than a hummingbird, then we must be moving like molasses.”
I knew what Lucinda was getting at. “They’d see us. We’d look like statues.”
“Mmmmm,” Matt mused. “Maybe this alternate, intermittent time stream acts as a one-way mirror. We can see them, but not the other way around.”
Ian Tremblin cleared his throat. “I, too, have a theory. There’s a type of haunting called residual, or, the term I prefer, cinema of time. Sometimes ghostly events occur exactly the same each time they’re witnessed. People who venture to the battlegrounds at Gettysburg at night often see Civil War battles. Some paranormal investigators believe that events, due to strong emotional energy, can imprint themselves on the environment and then repeat over and over like a supernatural video. This could be similar, such as Daemon Hall showing its memories. If it’s only recollections of the past, what would happen if we left? Would we walk out the door and find that we’re in our proper time?”
“But”—Matt held up a finger—“if this is time travel, we’d be in 1933. We’d be dead from old age by the time we got to the year we were born.”
“That’s nuts, Scungilli,” Lucinda said.
“I can prove it. That man we saw probably stood at the window for five or ten minutes, his time of course. He was immobile long enough that we could see him, even if for just an instant. It’s night, so the Daemons will be sleeping and lying in one spot long enough to be visible. If we can see them, that proves we’re outside the time stream looking in.”
“Or it means Daemon Hall is replaying its memories of the Daemons asleep.”
They flailed around with theories, and I was losing patience. “Look, judging from what went on before and what Mr. Tremblin, Demarius, and I learned from it, the answer lies inside this mansion, not what year it is outside. Our survival depends on us—in here.”
“Let me guess,” Lucinda said. “Our stories?”
“Do you have a better idea?” I snapped. “Seriously. After each story tonight, there have been—well—dramatic shifts in reality.”
“Wade’s right,” Demarius said. “I mean, no one wants to get out of here more than me, but if we don’t go about it the right way, well, bad stuff happens.”
“It’s too risky to walk out, and where would we go? Another story may provide answers,” the writer said.
“Or more questions,” Lucinda mumbled, and walked to where Matt had dropped the Book of Daemon Hall. She turned pages so roughly I thought she might rip one out. “Here. Next one is ‘The Go-To Guy.’”
Demarius’s shoulders sagged, and he took the book from her. “That’s mine.”
Ian Tremblin looked at Demarius, narrowing his eyes. “The others said their stories came simply. How difficult was yours?”
“It was like you guys said, the easiest I’ve ever written. Why? Is that important?”
Ian Tremblin nodded. “It goes along with a theory that I’m developing.”
“At least we have chairs to sit in,” Lucinda grumbled, and dropped into one.
Demarius stared at the page and waited. “Nothing’s happening.”
“Start the story,” Matt said. “The words will come after that, and you read along.”
“‘The Go-To Guy,’ by me, Demarius Keating.”
THE GO-TO GUY
The doorbell rings and sweat breaks on my brow. It sounds again and I put a hand to the wall to keep my balance.
“Jimmy!” Mom yells from the kitchen. “Will you get that? It’s probably Doris.”
I exhale in relief and go let Mrs. Parker in. We have a brief conversation about how I’m fine and school is good, both of which are untrue. She goes to the kitchen while I stand by the door and wonder how long it will take me to get over what happened that night. It’s funny the little things, like doorbells, that bring back bits and pieces: Shelley, the violence, an ice pick at my eye. I shake my head to clear those thoughts as Mom and Mrs. Parker come into the foyer.
“Jimmy, honey, Doris and I are going to the beauty parlor for about an hour. Will you be all right?” Mom asks.
“Sure,” I say. “I’m fine.”
“The number is by the phone if you need me. Or call your father at the office.”
After they leave, I go and sit in one of the lounge chairs out back. I hope the morning sun will keep the memories at bay. It doesn’t.
* * *
“Craziest release of 1967, ‘The Eggplant That Ate Chicago’ by Dr. West’s Medicine Show and Junk Band. Welcome to the asylum. I’m Larry the Loon, and you’re tuned to
Crazy Radio!” A recorded chorus sang, “Rock and roll on your radio!”
Staying up late to do homework is a bummer, but Larry the Loon on Crazy Radio for the tricities made it a lot more tolerable.
“Hey, hey, you’re talking to Larry the Loon on the Crazy Radio funny phone!”
“I think your radio station is terrible,” a woman said. “Making fun of people with serious mental problems is just awful.”
“Wow, man. That’s really heavy. I never thought about it like that,” Larry said, in a rare show of seriousness.
“Well, you should, especially with Morningside Hospital for the Criminally Insane right outside of Maplewood,” the woman said.
* * *
I gasped at the mention of the mental hospital I’d been in.
Demarius looked up, mouth agape. “Wade, I’m sorry. I didn’t write that, but it’s like that in here.” He lifted the Book of Daemon Hall. “I wrote about Three Rivers Hospital for the Criminally Insane. And the town wasn’t Maplewood; it was a fictional place called Ashton.”
Not wanting to sound like a wimp, I said, “It’s all right. The book changed those things, edited your story. Besides, Morningside isn’t for the criminally insane.”
Demarius looked sheepish. “It used to be. I did some research. Morningside was where the state housed criminally insane patients. They made the switch to a conventional mental hospital in the eighties.”
“Oh.”
Demarius looked at Ian Tremblin. “Should I keep going?”