A Long December

by Richard Chizmar

  There were a number of complaints from the older folks who used that stretch of land for daily strolls or bird watching or getting to and from their favorite fishing spots on Hanson Creek, but none of them really made a difference until the local newspaper ran a front page editorial about the issue. That did the trick, though, and soon after, warning signs were posted and the local police added the area to their daily patrol routes.

  The bonfires and drinking went away—simply moved somewhere else, of course; kids will be kids—as did most of the litter and trouble. Most, but not all. Things still happened there from time to time. Bad things. People move away, people forget; but I’ve done neither. I remember…

  A local husband, distraught after he discovered his wife was cheating on him with her best friend’s husband, jumped to his death from the water tower in 1986.

  A decade later, someone climbed the tower in the middle of the night, and spray-painted satanic graffiti all over the damn thing. Goat’s heads. Pentagrams. Inverted crosses. Pretty much everything except a big red 666. It took three weeks and two budget meetings before the town got its act together and painted over the atrocities.

  A few years later, a middle-aged, black woman—a stranger—was found hanging from one of the tower’s criss-crossing metal support beams. Neither her identity—nor an explanation—were ever uncovered.

  Of course, when a series of dark and mostly unexplainable events occur in the same spot over the course of many years, and most especially when these events occur within the confines of a small town, the spot is inevitably said to be cursed or even haunted—and the old water tower was no exception. Stories spread. Legends grew.

  The land around the old water tower was unholy ground; it attracted evil. Ghosts and demons roamed there. It was a backwoods meeting spot for drug runners and gang members traveling on I-95 from New York to Florida. An old witch, her face burned and disfigured, lived somewhere back there in the woods; her cabin hidden amongst the bramble.

  A local high school boy even wrote a term paper a number of years ago that spotlighted the area’s dark history in great detail. He contended that there was once a slave house that stood on that lonely hill. Long before the water tower ever existed. The slave house was burned to the ground one night by a drunken and enraged master, and everyone inside had perished. Then, during the second world war, while the tower was being built in that very spot, it was reported that a half-dozen workers had either died or been seriously injured during its construction. Workers also reported that dozens of dead animal carcasses were found on the property; a reasonable explanation was never found. As a result, the tower was said to be cursed from the very beginning. Then, there was the story of the newlywed bride who, while on an early morning walk the day after her joyous wedding celebration, was bitten by a mysterious two-headed, red snake while resting in the tower’s shadow. The woman died of her wound later that evening, and the snake was never found. There was even a lengthy section discussing the long-rumored worship of devils and demons on the grounds and a handful of witness accounts claiming that the area was haunted by the ghosts of murdered slaves.

  There was more, much more—29 pages in all.

  The fact that there were very few truths to be found in this young man’s school report did nothing to diminish its impact. The boy received a “B+” on his report (he was said to be a terrible speller) and became a hero of sorts to his fellow students.

  And, with the passage of time, as so often is the case, the many stories became truth, the legends became fact.

  I would know. Many of the other old-timers moved away or forgot, but not me. No, sir. I’ve been here since almost the beginning.

  My Lord willing, I’ll turn eighty-four years old when this chill October rolls around, and I spent just over forty of those years hauling the mail around this town. I’ve seen it all, and I’ve heard it all. Trust me, people like to run their mouths and the only person likely to hear more rambling words than a mailman is the bartender down at Loughlin’s Pub. But I’ve learned that drunk people mostly tell lies and folks standing in their sunny front yards holding onto their mail mostly tell the truth—or at least the truth as they believe it.

  Lot of folks around this town think I’m just a friendly, old, senile man. They say their polite hellos and offer up their polite waves and keep right on going when they pass me on the sidewalk.

  And they might be right, you know it.

  But, don’t you forget what I said: I have seen things.

  4

  The second body was discovered in plain sight. In fact, according to police, the whole thing looked staged.

  Our resident home-from-college girl, a bright young lady named Jennifer Ward studying to become a teacher, came jogging around the bend—and stopped dead in her tracks. Her iPod tumbled from her hand down to the ground, yanking her headphones right out of her ears. Justin Timberlake broke the morning silence.

  Everyone in town knew Gina Sharretts. She taught math at the local high school and coached the field hockey team.

  Gina’s limp body lay propped up against one of the water tower’s rusting metal legs, her hands folded neatly in her lap. She could have been sleeping if it weren’t for her hideously bulging eyes and the dark bruising around her swollen neck.

  Jennifer snatched up her iPod and headphones and took off at a sprint. If campus life had taught her one thing, it was that safety was in numbers. Out on the road, she flagged down the first approaching car, and told the driver to call the police.

  The patrol cars arrived a short time later, and once again out came the police tape and the picture-takers and the lookie loos, and this time around, it was a distraught brother and sister—Gina was thirty-seven and single on the day of her death—crashing the crime scene.

  Once again, in the frantic days that followed, the police did their jobs and did them well—but there were still no leads.

  Someone had simply strangled the life out of Gina Sharretts…

  …just as someone had strangled the life out of Bethany Hopkins three years earlier.

  And left them both there at the base of the water tower.

  This clear pattern escaped no one’s notice, of course. Most especially that of the police and the press. But even this discovery seemed to lead nowhere. Just one more dead end street in another dead end investigation.

  5

  This time it took longer for the town to return to normal.

  People were angry and paranoid. Old grudges and suspicions gained new life. Brand new grudges and suspicions were born. There were more drunken fights down at Loughlin’s Pub on Friday and Saturday nights. More arguments and mean-spirited gossip between sunburned moms at the community pool.

  Interestingly enough, it was the adults responsible for most of the bad behavior. It was summer break, and most of the teenagers chose to hang out together at the quarry or the Dairy Queen or over in Fallston at the new shopping mall. They seemed to feel safer together, and whether they were a fan of Miss Sharrett’s math class or not, there was an unspoken agreement that they had lost one of their own.

  It was a strange time to live in Edgewood. The constant police presence made it so, as did the daily newspaper headlines and the local television updates. There was no new information, so the news folk simply chewed up the old information to tiny pieces and spit it back out.

  Most days were too hot and humid for an old man like me to spend outside, so I usually sat in my glassed-in back porch and drank iced tea and read my paperbacks. Old oaters, mostly, with the occasional spy novel thrown in for good measure. I used to like mysteries and thrillers, but I was a younger and braver man back then.

  On mild evenings, I liked to walk down to the park and sit on one of the benches and watch the town wind down for the day. I’d watch the shop owners flip the OPEN signs to CLOSED (or in most cases now, they simply turned off their glowing red electronic signs). I’d watch the lovers stroll down Main Street hand in hand or arm in arm. The mothers an
d fathers hurrying after their racing children to stand in line at the Dairy Queen. The tired factory workers shuffling into Loughlin’s Pub to drink their paychecks as the streetlights blinked on behind them.

  To a stranger, it may have appeared to be a Norman Rockwell-ish scene of small town serenity; the kind of golden-tinted picture that makes city slickers wish they could pull up roots and move to a place like Edgewood. But if you stopped and looked closer, really looked, you could see the lovers holding onto each other a little tighter than was necessary; the moms and dads hurrying after their children, not with relaxed smiles on their faces, but expressions of worry and concern; the workers looking more defeated and angry than tired; and what kind of stores closed up for the night at 7 p.m., before it was even dark outside? And then there were the patrol cars making their way up and down Main Street with a much higher regularity than anyone would believe necessary for such a small town.

  I saw all this—and more—from my park bench. Most evenings I spent in solitude; a silent observer. But some nights folks would do more than just flip me a wave or mutter a hurried “hello.” Sometimes, they’d stop and chat for a moment or two, and once in a great while, someone would even sit down next to me on my bench and chew my ear for a time. Usually it was just Mrs. Brown from the library or Frankie from the barbershop, but it was real nice to have company on those nights.

  Company kept me from letting my gaze wander…over to the western outskirts of town…where the water tower stood like some kind of dark sentinel.

  Company kept me from thinking too much, and remembering…

  I used to sled there as a child. I shot my first squirrel in those woods. I used to play kids’ games there at night, the air filled with the laughs and screams of happy children. We used to climb the tower’s lower beams and dangle from our legs like toy monkeys on a playground. Kids were kids. Knees got scuffed. Bodies got bruised. The occasional bone got broken. But no one died. Not when we were kids. I never even had an inkling that the place was bad.

  Until many years later.

  I moved away from Edgewood when I was eighteen years old. Six long, miserable years in the Army, and back home I scurried just as fast as my legs could carry me. My Momma was still alive then, and my baby sister, Amelia, too. I settled back into my old bedroom and took a job at the shoe factory, which was a blessing because that’s where I met my Beth Anne, God rest her soul. It would be another four years before I started delivering the mail; that didn’t happen until sweet old Ralph Jenkins passed in his sleep, leaving the job opening for me to step in and fill.

  Anyway, it was probably a month—a happy month, too, believe me—after I came back home from the Army that I found myself standing at the base of that water tower staring up at its expanse. To be honest, and despite seeing the tower outlined in the sky every damn day on my way to and from work, I had mostly forgotten all about the old thing and the times I had spent there.

  But that evening I was on my way to Hanson Creek to try my luck for catfish when I stumbled upon it. I stopped and glanced up, and then I slowly turned and looked around me at the woods and the wild bramble—and the tiny hairs on the back of my neck went all tingly. I’ve read about that kind of thing happening in countless paperbacks, but I never believed it until that night.

  I spun in a slow circle, looking all around, suddenly sure that someone—or something—was hiding there, watching me. I started to hurry away, but then something else stopped me. I stood there, trying to figure it out: was there a smell? was the light somehow different? why was it so quiet all of a sudden? where were the damn birds?

  And then it struck me—there was something wrong with the air. I know how that sounds, but I swear to you it’s true. There was a thinness to it, almost like being two places at once, like there was another world underneath this one.

  I stood there and I swear on my Momma’s family bible that I could almost see glimpses of movement in the shadows; that I could hear whispered snatches of words in the empty air right beside me.

  I thought of the Ray Bradbury stories I loved so much as a young man, tales of faraway worlds and the mysteries that existed right next door to all of us. It could have been a magical experience…

  …but this was different.

  I realized that I was frightened.

  This was a bad place, and I had just had my first real glimpse of it.

  I remembered all this sitting there in the park at dusk, but I didn’t want to. Lord, no, I didn’t.

  I have seen things in my lifetime.

  And I have done things.

  6

  Reverend Parker never made it to the church last night to give Evening Mass. There aren’t a lot of secrets in a small town, so most people knew that Reverend Parker was a drinker. He would occasionally be a few minutes late to Mass or Wednesday night bingo, and on rarer occasions you might even catch a whiff of whiskey on his breath when he passed you on the street—but he had never missed Mass before.

  Still, most of his parishioners weren’t overly concerned. Sure, that old bitty Clara Lotz was put off by his absence and told everyone within earshot exactly that; she had better things to do than wait around for someone who didn’t even have the decency to show up to do their job. And poor Hannah Pinborough was visibly worried that she might go to hell without her usual Thursday night worship. But most folks just shrugged their shoulders and went on their merry way.

  If it weren’t for Sophie Connolly, the church secretary, and a renowned worry-wart, the police probably wouldn’t have been notified until long into the next day. Instead, after repeated calls with no answer, Sophie drove to the Reverend’s house, used her key to open the front door, and upon finding the house empty, called the police to report the Reverend missing.

  She happened to glance at the kitchen clock when she hung up the phone and noticed that the time was 7:13 p.m.

  According to official reports, the police discovered the Reverend’s body at 7:29 p.m.

  They had obviously wasted little time before searching the woods surrounding the old water tower—as if they expected to find something there.

  And they did.

  Reverend Parker was tied spread-eagle to the four foundation posts of the old water tower with four lengths of thick robe. His eyes and mouth were open obscenely wide, a smudge of dried blood crusted his nostrils, and there was severe bruising on his neck. He was still dressed in his preaching clothes, but the gold crucifix he always wore was nowhere to be found. His Bible lay on his chest.

  The press had a field day. Why hadn’t the water tower been staked out? Why were there no leads? Was it a serial killer? Why in a place like Edgewood? If the Reverend wasn’t safe, who was?

  Stores started closing their doors even earlier. The police and town council were said to be considering a curfew. The Dairy Queen laid off two of the summer help because there weren’t enough hours to keep them working. A front page editorial in the newspaper called for the Sheriff’s firing.

  In the end, the town council called for a Town Meeting on Friday night “to clear the air and inform the townspeople of the appropriate measures which were being taken.” Those were the mayor’s word, not mine, let me tell you.

  Friday night was almost a week away, and most folks weren’t buying the “appropriate measures” story. They knew the Sheriff was just trying to buy some time, and who could blame him?

  Something very wrong was going on in our town.

  Something very bad.

  I thought I had a good idea what it was, but there was no one I could tell.

  There was no one who would believe me.

  7

  I told you before…I’ve seen and done things.

  Things I’m not proud of, nor fully understand.

  I thought I’d forgotten most of it; that the passing years and the burning shame and guilt had erased it from my memory, leaving me a simple old man living out the rest of my days in the town that gave birth to me.

  I kept to myself al
l these years, read my books, minded my business, prayed every night. I tried to be a good person and live a good life. I didn’t dare pray for redemption, only peace.

  I knew I wasn’t that man anymore.

  That man who had been infected by whatever evil dwelled in that miserable stretch of land beneath that old damn tower.

  That man who had been cursed to hear its calling…and proved too weak to ignore it.

  That man who had not only heard its calling, but listened to it…

  Finally luring a stranger there under the pretense of liquid and carnal sins—only to bludgeon her soft skull until it cracked like an egg from my Momma’s coop. I buried her that night in the soft, dark soil behind the tower and went home to my own bed.

  Only to awaken and complete this horrible act again…and again…and again.

  But not without remorse; not without judgment.

  I dreamed many nights of killing myself. Or leaving this town and never coming back. I even considered turning myself in to the police. Once, I went so far as to write my own confession, but I burned it to ashes before I could find the courage or conviction.

  I realized that I didn’t control my own thoughts anymore than I did my own actions.

  These thoughts—and my soul—belonged to someone else. Something else.

  Until my Beth Anne somehow saved me.

  I did not—could not—confess my sins to her, but she knew I was struggling; she somehow knew I was in a battle for my soul.

  I don’t know why my prayers were suddenly answered or why the voices suddenly vanished. I can only believe it was the immense goodness in my wife’s heart and her undying faith in her Lord and in me that was responsible. Beth Anne led me back to God and saved me; she saved my very soul. I have no other explanation.

  I only know that the things I saw standing there in the thin air surrounding that wretched old tower were not of this world; not of any world that contained even a sliver of goodness.