by Steve Vernon
October
Tales
Seven Creepy Stories
By
Steve Vernon
Introduction
The leaves are falling outside of my window.
I like to watch them fall.
Don’t you?
Sometimes they remind me of happy little hang gliders parachuting gleefully down towards the dirt.
Other times they remind me of people trapped in a burning building. They hang onto their lives as the autumnal spark kindles their bright juicy high-chlorophyll green into the candle-colored shouts of red and yellow and a sort of dying rusty gold. I can see them trembling in the breeze hanging onto the twig ends and praying for a few more minutes of life before their grip fails and they plummet on a wind inspired by the pathetic fluttering of angel wings before they crash into the dirt to rot back down into the mulch that they first sprung up out of.
So what have you learned from this?
Writers need our heads examined.
Still, October is my favorite time of year and Halloween is my VERY favorite holiday.
I’m going to tell you just why that is at the end of this book – unless maybe you start reading from the back – which is a god-awful hard trick to manage when you are dealing with e-books.
The following six stories are not NECESSARILY about Halloween – but they all share that single common element – namely a creepy and dark feeling of autumn coming on.
I’ve bent your ears long enough. Stop hanging onto that there tree branch and just let go and let the autumnal breeze whisper you down to dirt below.
I hope that you enjoy these yarns.
CATCALL
Nobody really knew how long the old Funnel mansion had stood empty, waiting up there high on Carpenter’s Hill like a child’s forgotten lunch box, any more than anybody knew how long that old gray cat had squatted in behind the screen of the front porch window.
All we knew was that somebody must be feeding it, because every now and then we would look in from the hedge on the far side of the yard and see the cat nibbling daintily on what looked to be raw hamburger.
“Guts,” proclaimed Jeremy Hooter, making a thick juicy swizzling noise with his lips and tongue pressed against his stainless steel braces. “It’s guts, is what it is.”
“Great big gobs of owl guts,” amplified Charlie Roundbert.
Charlie Roundbert was only half of Jeremy’s size and age, but he might as well have been Jeremy’s shadow. The two boys stuck together just that closely and yet as far as I knew the two of them never had anything nice to say to each other.
“Owl guts,” Charlie repeated.
We all took up the chant except Jeremy, who didn’t think it was funny at all.
“Owl guts, owl guts, owl guts.”
Owl was what we always called Jeremy, because of his last name.
It didn’t help that Jeremy wore a pair of glasses that made coke bottle bottoms look like microscope slides.
The glasses always reminded me of Dr. Cyclops. You know the guy from the movies? It always looked to me like Jeremy was staring at us through a microscope, like we were some kind of alien bacteria from Planet X.
I had a microscope given to me on my tenth birthday, not one of those little bitty plastic toys they sell with the chemistry sets you order from the Christmas catalogue, but a big old-fashioned kind that my Dad found in a basement he had been paid to empty. The basement had belonged to old Doc Hawcomber, and when the doctor saw the microscope he told my dad to go ahead and take it, he had a new one he used anyways. My dad always said that the microscope was probably contaminated with all kinds of plagues and diseases and he was likely being ten kinds of an idiot giving it to a kid like me.
I told my dad not to worry. Germs didn’t stick to dead things like microscopes and houses. Germs stuck to people. Germs needed meat to feed on, and he probably shouldn’t worry so much.
I knew he wasn’t being all that serious anyways. He was my dad, and the only person I had in this world, next to my dog Riley. The only difference was that Dad was real. Riley had been real as well, but he was only imaginary now since the timber truck ran over him.
I knew my dad liked to worry about me, like it was his hobby or something, and I loved him for this worry, imaginary or not.
I got Riley from my mom when I was two. Riley was a big black Labrador retriever, with feet as big as snow shoes in the pictures we have of him.
We don’t have too many pictures of Mom, because it was my Mom’s camera, and Dad never felt all that comfortable using it. He’s got his own camera now, and he uses it whenever he can.
Riley was my dog, and he would play fetch with me with a worn out baseball from the time the sun got up in the morning until the time it crawled back into bed. He was killed when I was eight, because of a ball I had misthrown. It bounced out into the roadway and Riley followed the lure of the ball like a trout following a worm and the truck had rolled over him before I even had a chance to scream.
I first got Riley back when I was two years old. My
Dad said I got my spaghetti eating habit from my Mom. Back before the accident, back when Mom was alive she loved eating spaghetti more than anything. I can still remember seeing her with two long strands of spaghetti hanging from out of her mouth like a Fu Manchu moustache, until she sucked them right back up, giggling all the way, with a big loud shlooooping sound.
It was the only memory I had of my mother. She died when I was awfully young. A car wreck, Dad told me. It was a rainy October night, and the wheels couldn’t hold to the road, and there was a sudden blast of lightning like somebody jumped out and said boo, and then Dad lost control of the wheel and they slid up against that big old beech tree down at the foot of Carpenter’s Hill. Dad had remembered to buckle up his seat belt so he only twisted his back and broke his face against the dash board, but Mom forgot to buckle up her seat belt so she went spilling right through the window glass and into the tree and Dad told me once one late night that he still saw the color of her blood in the leaves of that tree every autumn.
My Dad walks with a limp because of that crash, and his left eye has a strange tilt to it from where his face was broken in. It looks as if he is always getting ready to cry and every October he carries a bouquet of quiet red roses up the side of Carpenter’s Hill to the town cemetery where my Mom is sleeping.
Jeremy, who is older than I am, told me once that he had watched from the bushes as the police ambulance medics scraped my mom off of the trunk of the tree like she was so much hamburger meat. I told him he was a liar, that you couldn’t make a person into hamburger meat.
We got into a fight over that, and he probably would have beaten me up, but I think he felt bad for what he’d said to me.
He’d said to me that some of the pieces of my mom had been so small that the police had needed a microscope to find them.
I liked my microscope a lot.
In the summer I liked to mix swamp water and hay in a big mason jar and let it sit and steep out back behind the old garage where the sun always shines, until my Dad would say something to me about “that unholy stink”, and I would take the water and make as many slides as I could and would dump the rest of it out back in the ditch. The ditch always smelled like swamp water, although I blamed the
smell on Jeremy because he liked to pee in the ditch whenever he came over to visit.
The slides were always different. I liked to see paramecium and amoeba and all kinds of other things that I didn’t know the names of. I asked my Dad once where they’d all come from and how they got into the water. He said some of them were probably in the swamp water to begin with, and some of them were in the hay. Only the ones in the hay were sleeping, like seeds waiting to be rained on and hatched.
Dormant, he called it, like they were waiting behind some kind of door.
I also liked to look at the hydra plants that I found under the lily pads of the swamp behind the school. I would wade out in to the swamp in my big rubber boots that used to be Dad’s until they started to leak. One day I got myself caught in the mud and nearly sucked under and my friends had to run for my Dad. I can still remember the way that Dad had waded out to get me, and then for a while I thought he was going to get stuck too, and then I had this crazy picture in my mind of the whole town being out here stuck in the muck, waiting for the frogs and the leeches and the mosquitoes to suck us all dry, only Mr. Thornton came along with a big old rope and pulled the two of us out of there before the leeches, frogs and mosquitoes had a decent chance to get at us.
After that my Dad told me to stay away from that swamp. He told me that three winters before I was born two ice skaters went down through the ice and didn’t come back up. My Dad believed that because of that the swamp had developed a taste for people and it was just waiting for its next meal to come along, like some kind of giant Venus flytrap.
Jeremy had a Venus flytrap plant that his mother had bought at a county fair. In the summer time, when it was way too hot to do much of anything else we used to watch that Venus flytrap plant take flies, luring them in slowly and then snapping them up like good old Godzilla. I wanted to grow myself a plant just like that for the longest time, but my Dad wouldn’t buy one because he said we didn’t need it at our house. My Dad was the town’s champion fly swatter, and he took a great deal of pride in the fact that he could snag a housefly with his bare hands.
“You’ve got to watch for that hand washing motion they make,” he told me one too many times. “When they make it you know they’re too busy thinking about washing their hands to think about jumping into flight, so you can grab them because they aren’t really looking for it.”
“Right Dad,” I said. “If Chizmar’s Groceteria ever closes down we’ll be able to live off of the flies you catch for us.”
I liked going down to Chizmar’s Groceteria because it always smelled of the fresh pies that Mrs. Chizmar baked every day. Sometimes apple, sometimes peach, but best of all was her blackberry pie. Dad always said that Mrs. Chizmar’s blackberry pie made your belly want to climb out of your stomach and dance itself a jig for sheer joy.
My Dad said an awful lot of stupid things.
I always told my Dad that your belly was ACTUALLY your stomach, but that never stopped him from slapping his stomach every time he walked into Chizmar’s Groceteria and smelling those pies and telling Mrs. Chizmar that her apple pie made his belly want to climb out of his stomach and dance.
The neatest part of Chizmar’s Groceteria was the big meat shop out back where Mr. Chizmar worked. I didn’t really like the sound of the butchering that you heard every Monday morning, and the thick chewy whizz of the meat saw always made my belly want to climb out of my stomach and puke, but the sight of the dancing fly paper, covered in all those flies was really neat. It was like a kind of hanging jewelry, only it was alive and while dad ordered the meat I liked to try and count the flies that were stuck on each strip.
Mr. Thornton used flypaper in the school washroom once, because the old plumbing didn’t work so well. The pipes didn’t suck the water down quickly enough. The water that didn’t go down left a smell the flies liked to follow, so he hung flypaper up to catch them.
Mr. Thornton was the school caretaker. He made sure that everything stayed spotless clean. My Dad always called him a janitor, and when I asked Dad once what the real difference was between a caretaker and a janitor he said to me - “Listen, you can call a cow pie daffodils, if you want to do, but that doesn’t do a thing about the stink.”
Like I said, my Dad said an AWFUL lot of stupid things.
It was the same thing about the Funnel house. It wasn’t really a house, as far as we kids could tell. It was more like a piece of leftover Halloween decoration, like the old school float that Vice Principal Bindles parked in his garage all year waiting for the Fourth of July parade.
It really wasn’t a float. It was just an old dory that Vice Principal Bindles covered with tissue paper flowers and nailed to a nearly broken trailer. The dory still stank of fish, even though it hadn’t touched an ocean for more years than I was old, but it was our school float, and every Fourth of July Vice Principal Bindles and whoever was crazy enough to help him, made new flowers and repainted the parts that showed and wheeled it out and hooked it up behind Vice Principal Bindles’s old Oldsmobile for the whole town to see.
It really wasn’t much of a parade when you think of it. Just the school float, and a band of marching musicians that sounded worse than cats screaming at midnight, a wagon full of puppies that old lady Cray would drag along behind her with bows around each of the puppies that she was trying to find a home for before she had to take them out and drown them in the swamp, and a big old Model T that sounded noisier and smelled worse every year, and then there was the town mayor sitting in the back of a dirty red pickup truck on a throne made out of moose and deer antlers that was supposed to represent our frontier heritage. Not much of a parade at all, as far as I was concerned. It was more just a habit that folks had never learned to unstick themselves from.
So one hot summer day, me and my imaginary dog Riley and Jeremy Hooter and Charlie Roundbert and a half dozen other kids were up on Carpenter’s Hill in the hedge outside the Funnel House, taking dares on who’d get close enough to spit on the porch.
The hill was kind of a fun place to be, because you could look down from it and see the whole town laid out like a summer picnic. The Funnel House was the highest place in town, next to the old water tower, and that didn’t really count because the house was on a hill, which made it even higher than the tower.
Folks always expected the tower to be hit by lightning one night and there were those who swore it had been struck two or three times since Old Man Funnel was hauled away to the county nuthouse.
“That Old Man Funnel was crazier than a black bear with a bee hive up his bung hole,” Jeremy once said. “My dad once told me Old Man Funnel fed his wife and daughter into a meat grinder, because he thought they were getting ready to leave him. He fed them into a meat grinder, and then fed the meat to his cat.”
So I guess maybe you could make a person into hamburger meat, if you tried hard enough.
Being up here on Carpenter’s Hill was a whole lot better than being at home because Dad would only make me slap one more coat of red paint on our old garage, even though the wood was so dry it reminded me of the desert in those cool Clint Eastwood spaghetti western movies, especially because of the way it sucked up the paint, leaving the whole garage a sort of watered down pink, like cotton candy barf. Dad said it looked like a Mexican cathouse, only when I asked him what he meant by that he got real quiet and changed the subject fast.
The Funnel House was surrounded by one of those big country hedges, the pricklish kind that snagged you like it was trying to eat you, one tiny nibble at a time, like it was sprouting out a thousand branches full of tiny petrified vampire mosquitoes, and when it came to that house that was where we kids felt safest.
“Bet you can’t get up there close enough to spit,” said Jeremy to me.
Jeremy was right. I had learned a long time ago that words like “bet” or “dare” were just another way of asking if you were stupid enough to try, and I wasn’t stupid, that was for sure.
“How about you, Charlie?” Jer
emy asked. “Are you chicken, or what?”
Chicken was another word, just a little bit bigger than dare or bet. Chicken was the line dragged in the dirt, that always had to be crossed.
Although I felt a little sorry for Charlie, I was very glad that Jeremy had used the word on Charlie and not on me.
“I ain’t chicken,” Charlie said, and before you could say spit, the bargain was sealed.
Charlie approached the house cautiously; in the same manner one might approach a bulldog on a chain. Carefully, because you knew that the dog would jump, and you never knew just when that chain might decide to pop, leaving the dog free to rip out your throat and strew your lungs and liver like wrapping paper at a birthday party.
And of course there was the cat, sitting as always high and watchful in that front porch screened window. A big old scruffy gray tom, with streaks of black and silver depending on how the sun shone upon its fur, and despite the cat’s constant preening it always seemed a little mangy, like the time Jeremy’s dad had dressed up Jeremy’s drunken uncle Stu in his best suit and had taken him to church. He had snored through the service, only startling awake as each of the hymns began and then just as quickly settling back down to sleep by the time we reached the second verse.
I watched Charlie creep onto the porch. I could hear the boards creaking as he crept, and I counted each board as it creaked, one, crrreeeeakkkk, two, crrrrreeeeeaaaakkkk, three, crreeeeaaaakkkk.
He tapped the outside of the window sill. I knew the paint would have that awful chalky feeling paint gets after standing too long in the sun; that chalky loose feeling like your skin gets after a really bad sunburn.
“Here kitty, kitty, kitty...,” he began.
The cat patted the window with one ineffectual paw. It was just so cute and so stupid looking that we all had to giggle.
Charlie giggled too.
“Kitty, kitty,” he spluttered through the giggles.