by Smith, Bryan
CHRISTMAS EVE
ON
HAUNTED HILL
By Bryan Smith
First Digital Edition
Copyright 2015 by Bryan Smith
All Rights Reserved
www.thehorrorofbryansmith.blogspot.com
Cover design copyright 2015 by Kristopher Rufty
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without the permission of the author. All the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
This one is for Trent Haaga, who gets shit done.
1.
The gray sky started spitting snow again as Luke Herzinger pulled his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 into the parking lot of Sal’s Place. Less than half a dozen cars were parked up in front of the place, leaving two spaces open adjacent to the sidewalk. Instead of pulling into one of those open spaces, Luke opted to park one row back, turning the car about so it faced the street instead of the entrance to the bar.
There were multiple reasons for this. He didn’t want anyone in the place getting a good look at him just yet, for one thing. None of his old cronies knew he was back in town and he wanted to keep it that way a bit longer. If he parked facing the place, he ran the risk of being spotted prematurely by a regular. Luke reckoned the likelihood of that happening wasn’t too high, of course. Anyone inclined to spend their Christmas Eve at a dismal old dump like Sal’s was almost certainly only interested in the glass of booze sitting right in front of them on the scuffed and dented old bar’s surface. Also, he’d been gone so long the current regular crowd might not much resemble the one he remembered.
But he figured better safe than sorry. The joint’s lone pool table was situated right by that big window to the left of the entrance. There was always a chance, albeit a remote one, that a couple of the old boozers in there might get a wild hair up their ass and decide to play a game or two.
And then one of them might well peek outside and see him sitting here. Luke wasn’t quite ready for that. More to the point, he wasn’t quite drunk enough for it yet. As he stared through his windshield at the swirling snow and the occasional car passing by in the street, he worked at addressing that deficiency by draining what was left of the bourbon in the old silver flask he carried with him wherever he went. The flask dated back to World War II. There was a dent at the bottom where, if you believed the story that had long ago become part of Herzinger family lore, it had deflected a Nazi bullet, thus saving Luke’s grandfather’s life.
Luke supposed the story was true. It was a matter of record that his grandfather had served with honor on the battlefields of Europe during the Great War. He’d seen the medals when he was a kid. They were impressive. He stared at the dent, rubbing the ball of a thumb in the slight depression. It was a weird thing to think that he owed his very existence to this otherwise unassuming bit of metal. If the flask hadn’t deflected that bullet, his father wouldn’t have been conceived during the baby boom that followed the war. Luke often thought that might have been for the best.
He put the flask to his mouth again and tipped it straight up, his tongue eagerly lapping up the last few drops of cheap bourbon. Once he was sure the flask was thoroughly depleted, he screwed the cap back on it and tucked it away in an inner pocket of the garish red overcoat he was wearing. After a final moment’s hesitation, he blew out a big breath and got out of the car.
The driver’s side door squeaked loudly as it swung open and did so again when Luke threw it shut. The sound grated on the ears, but the door’s hinges were beyond the help of even the most liberal application of WD-40. It was fair to say he hadn’t maintained the Delta very well since inheriting it from his father ten years ago. A cynic might find some correlation between this and the shoddy job he’d done of looking after his own health over the last decade. And maybe there’d even be some merit to this observation. But it wouldn’t be entirely fair, either. The Delta wasn’t his main ride. Its paintjob was a shade of olive he and his childhood friends had called puke-green. Mostly it stayed in the detached garage behind his house over in Boonesville. He only took it out a couple times a year to make sure it was still running.
But today was a momentous occasion. He was returning home for the first time in almost ten years, having departed under a suffocating cloud of sorrow and tragedy. But that wasn’t the only reason today was important. He was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty percent sure it would be the last day of his life. If it happened, it would be by his own hands. There was no late-stage terminal illness ticking down his clock. Not that he knew of, anyway. Hell, it’d been a lot of years since he’d last visited a doctor. Anything was possible. But that remote possibility aside, the tentative plan was to put a shotgun in his mouth and blow off the top of his head at the stroke of midnight.
In light of this, it’d seemed only right to take the Delta out for a final road trip back home. The suicide option was something he’d been considering for months, and the odds of it actually happening fluctuated many times throughout any given day. Late last night the likelihood had been significantly higher, somewhere north of seventy-five percent. In other words, much more likely than not, but still not a dead certainty.
As for why he was planning to maybe off himself by the end of the night, well, it wasn’t that complicated. Things hadn’t been working out in general for a while. He was having money problems, having been laid off from his factory job six months ago. All these months later, he still hadn’t found new gainful employment. And then there was the wreck that was his personal life. The one long-term relationship of his adult life had ended a bit over a year ago. Peggy had been her name. After putting up with him for almost five years, she’d finally wearied of his ramshackle, unambitious lifestyle and had split in the middle of the night while he was sleeping off yet another drunk, taking with her most everything of real value in the house.
Peggy’s breakup note had been short though not exactly sweet: Fuck you, Lucas, you fucking loser.
Pretty unambivalent. Luke hadn’t bothered trying to track her down or make her change her mind. He reckoned she wasn’t entirely out of line for feeling the way she did. Didn’t mean he liked it or didn’t miss her, but he knew she’d be better off with practically anyone else.
A lot of people would see these things as perfectly understandable reasons for committing suicide. Understandable, not acceptable. Big difference. He was well aware that the majority of folks looked down on people who did themselves in, but they could usually wrap their heads around the idea when the person who did it was suffering hardship of some kind.
And yet these things were not why he was pretty sure he didn’t want to live anymore. They were just the final things pushing him over the edge. No, what it all came back to was what his father had done on this very night ten years ago. He’d never gotten over it, not even close, and the sadness he carried with him as a result never went away, tainting everything else in his life.
He was just tired of it.
And he could think of no more effective means of finally dispersing that ever-present gray fucking cloud of sadness than a shotgun blast to the head.
Luke took a wobbling first step toward the bar’s entrance and almost toppled over. He wheeled his arms about and got himself back in balance. Despite having been salted, the parking lot was still slippery from the recent snowfall. And now more snow was coming down, exacerbating the situation. But most of the blame for his wobbliness was the bourbon he’d consumed. He was already tipsy, but he planned to be shitfaced by the time he emerged from Sal’s in a few hours.
This was the other big reason for parking the way h
e had. With the Delta pointed toward the road and parked away from the other vehicles, he wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky mechanics of backing out of a parking space and getting the old boat turned around while sloshed. He didn’t want to get into a wreck and wind up in jail on a DUI on the possible last night of his mostly miserable existence.
Once he was sure of his footing, Luke let out another big breath and went on into Sal’s Place.
2.
The billiards table near the window was not in use, and Luke had to wonder how long it’d been since anyone had taken down one of the old cues from the rack on the wall. Probably a while. Same went for the dartboard in the same deserted section of the establishment. No one here looked like the sort interested in games, at least not anymore. Things had been different once upon a time, when Sal’s clientele had been younger and more optimistic about life in general.
As expected, most of the joint’s few Christmas Eve patrons were seated at the bar rather than at the handful of tables in the center of the main room. The sole exception was a silver-haired old boozer at the table nearest the bar. The geezer was slumped over the table, passed out with his right hand clasped loosely around a nearly empty glass of whiskey.
None of the men at the bar turned on their stools to look at Luke as he came into the place. It was possible they hadn’t heard the door open. There was no bell above it to signal the arrival of a new customer. Also, the jukebox in a corner by the bar was playing a mournful Hank Williams tune, so maybe they were too focused on the hard luck lyrics to take much note of anything else. Or maybe they’d heard him enter and just didn’t give a shit. Somehow that last possibility seemed the most likely, given the overall depressed vibe of the place.
The apparent lack of interest remained in effect as Luke made his way across the main room and sat himself down on a stool at the end of the bar, near the jukebox. No one looked his way, not even the bartender, whose attention was focused on an old paperback pulp novel. The slim volume looked almost absurdly small clutched in his meaty right hand, its yellowed pages splayed open by a thumb pressed hard to the book’s cracked spine. Its garish cover showed a typical femme fatale. She was clutching a gun and looked like she was trying hard not to fall out of her clothes.
Luke cleared his throat and pitched his voice above the volume of the music coming from the jukebox, which had transitioned from Hank Williams to Waylon Jennings. “Little help over here?”
The bartender didn’t visibly react to the sound of his voice and kept right on staring at the page in front of him for at least another ten seconds. Just as Luke was about to voice some degree of agitation, the bartender turned down a corner of the page, set the book down on the bar, and approached Luke.
He was a tall man with broad shoulders, close-cropped salt and pepper hair, and a round belly that strained the fabric of his flannel shirt. His ruddy expression and bulbous nose strongly suggested he liked to imbibe as much as any of his customers. He gave Luke a slow once-over and grunted, a corner of his mouth twitching briefly in what might have been a grudging smile. “Well, shit. It’s Santa Claus. What’s your poison, Santa?”
“Double bourbon on the rocks, just for starters. Give me a beer to go with it.”
The bartender lifted an eyebrow. “Planning to get tanked?”
“Yep.”
“Okay then. What kind of beer you want?”
“Pabst Blue Ribbon.”
“Comin’ up.”
The bartender opened a cooler under the bar and took out a longneck bottle of Pabst. After twisting the cap off the bottle and setting it on the bar in front of Luke, he went about preparing the liquor drink.
Luke picked up the Pabst bottle and took a long first sip, sighing and shivering in pleasure as the cold brew went down the hatch. Taking another sip, he saw that the boozehounds seated at the other end of the bar had finally taken note of him. One of them was a fat guy in his early forties. He was easily the youngest person in the establishment on this frigid evening, with the exception of Luke himself. His face was round and jowly and he had a thick mustache that made him look like a porn star from the 70’s. Only fat.
He smirked as he made eye contact with Luke and said, “Better not get too plastered, Kris Kringle. You’ve got a long night’s work ahead of you, after all.”
The much older gentleman to the fat man’s immediate right chuckled. “Gotta be sure you’re fit to drive your sleigh. Don’t want to get an SWI. That’s ‘Sleighing While Intoxicated’.” His chuckle was significantly louder this time. “Ya get it?”
Luke took another big gulp of Pabst. “I get it,” he said, smiling indulgently.
The ribbing didn’t bother him. You couldn’t walk into a bar on Christmas Eve dressed in a Santa suit and not expect to hear such remarks, not unless you were a total idiot. And while Luke figured a wide array of uncomplimentary adjectives could accurately be used to describe him, idiot was not among them. He had made a number egregiously bad choices in his life, but he wasn’t actually stupid. His grades in school had been middling, but that hadn’t been due to any lack of smarts. It was a focus problem. He scores on the yearly standardized tests had always been well above average, good enough to get into a good university. Of course, he eventually flunked out of college, but that was down to that inability to focus issue rearing its ugly head again.
Luke was a bright guy. He’d always known that.
Problem was, he just didn’t give much of a shit about anything. Not since that snowy Christmas Eve ten years ago.
The bartender set the whiskey drink on the bar. “You paying as you go or do you want to start a tab?”
Luke dug out his wallet, extracted two rumpled twenties, and handed them over. “Let me know when that runs out.” He tapped the now empty bottle of Pabst on the bar top. “Oh, and bring me another of these.”
The bartender smirked. “First one took you, what, three minutes? Four, tops?” He shook his head. “Keep going at that rate, that forty bucks won’t last you very long.”
“Plenty more where that came from.”
This was true. Luke’s wallet was stuffed full of cash. For his probable final journey home, he’d drained much of the remaining funds from his checking account. The account was now lodged somewhere in the low double digits, dangerous territory if he didn’t replenish it soon. At the account’s current low ebb, it’d take just one of those bastardly monthly maintenance fees to send it spiraling into overdraft hell. For once, though, the joke was on the bank, because he wouldn’t be around to pay those extortionate fees.
Probably.
The bartender nodded. “All I need to know.”
Luke smiled after a sip from the double whiskey. “What’s your name, barkeep? Been a long stretch of years since my pretty face last graced this fine establishment and I don’t remember you from back then.”
“Stu Lombardi,” the bartender said, taking a fresh bottle of Pabst from the cooler beneath the bar. He twisted the cap off the bottle, tossed it in a waste basket, and set the bottle in front of Luke. “No relation to the coaching legend, before you ask.”
“Luke Herzinger.”
“Nice to meet you, Luke.”
“Same.” Luke knocked back a gulp of whiskey and followed it with a sip of Pabst. He wasn’t that deep into his planned final bender yet, but already a warm glow of mild inebriation was spreading throughout his body. His only hope was to remain just sober enough to get himself out to the old house on the hill come midnight. And once he made it up there, he could have his last ever drink and prop that shotgun under chin. Maybe. “You run this joint these days, Stu?”
Stu nodded. “Took the place over from Sal Jr., that’s my daddy, a few years back. You remember him?”
Luke remembered Stu’s father beating the living shit out of him one night many years ago. The memory was hazy—so many of them were—but the thing that triggered the fight was a complaint from a female customer who accused Luke of stealing money from her purse. That de
tail he did remember. Whether he’d actually done the deed was another matter. That memory resided somewhere in the more booze-pickled recesses of his brain. Either way, he’d reacted to the accusation in a less than even-tempered manner. Those details were also a bit hazy, but he believed he might have repeatedly used a derogatory term rhyming with “runt” to refer to his female accuser. Tempers flared in every direction. Fists flew. Bottles were thrown. Someone whacked him across the back with a chair. The whole thing culminated with Sal dragging him outside and decking him with a solid punch to the jaw.
Making an executive decision to keep this particular anecdote to himself, Luke lifted a shoulder in a shrug meant to indicate uncertainty. “Think so. Like I said, it’s been a while.”
Stu’s eyes narrowed some and he was silent a moment as he appeared to study Luke more closely than before. “You say your name’s Herzinger?”
Luke gulped Pabst, wiped moisture from his mouth. “Yep.”
Stu’s brow furrowed as he scratched his whiskery chin. “Huh. I’ve heard that name before.”
Luke’s hand shifted to the whiskey glass. He drained it and thumped the empty glass on the bar. “That’s interesting. Refill, please.”
Stu took the glass away and set it in the sink at the back of the bar. While the barkeep set about preparing a fresh double whiskey for Luke, the fat guy with the mustache rapped his knuckles on the bar. “Herzinger. I know that name, too. Oh, wait. Herzinger as in…”
The fat man’s rosy face paled slightly and his mouth dropped open.
Luke sighed. “Yeah.”
The fat man shook his head. “Holy shit. You’re the one whose daddy--”
“That’s right,” Luke said, cutting him off. “Rather not talk about that, if you don’t mind.”
His second double whiskey was in front of him now. He picked it up and knocked back half of it in one go. Exhaling heavily, he put the glass down and closed his eyes, waiting to see if the fat man would press the issue. He was unsurprised when the man allowed the conversation to lapse. Prying into a man’s private business was frowned upon in these parts. If someone told you they didn’t want to talk about a thing, you damn well left well enough alone.