When she opened the door Amanda saw a menagerie of odds and ends from various time periods. There was a desk with an old typewriter on it. An old wheelchair that looked like it had come straight from a sanitarium sat in the corner. Tie dyed tapestries hung on the walls, seeming very out off place. There were trunks and chests which were obvious relics from the nineteenth century as well as an old standing mirror covered with a cloth. Of everything in the room though she was most affected by the doll which sat in the wheelchair. It was a wretched thing, rotting and nasty. It exuded a foulness that she could not explain and Amanda took one of the tie dyes down from the wall and put it over the doll so that she didn’t have to look at it.
After the doll was covered Amanda felt comfortable again. She laughed at herself because she wasn’t a superstitious person. She didn’t believe in ghosts or spirits and she damn sure wasn’t scared of some old creepy doll. Even as she told herself that she knew she was lying to herself. It had evoked such a strong reaction in her, she just knew that she didn’t want to be near it, didn’t want to even look at it.
Amanda knelt down by the desk upon which the typewriter sat. She opened a drawer to find a ream of yellowed old paper. “How fortunate!”, she thought. Writing was a passion of her’s and she thought it would be fun to type a poem or a short story on the antique typewriter. As she wound a piece of paper through the feed she realized that it probably wouldn’t work, that the ink was probably dry if the arms and keys weren’t too rusty to operate.
To Amanda’s surprise it worked just fine. She was elated at the sound of the keys hammering onto the page. A sound she had grown up with but as she became and adult the computer took the place of the typewriter. She marveled at how her favorite writers had all used the typewriter, doing manually what she struggled to do digitally. She felt spoiled, thinking of Stephen King writing a seventeen hundred page book on a manual typewriter, hunting and pecking as she had heard he did.
She soon began to write an erotic short story about what she had experienced the night before with Hank. She made it as nasty and visceral as she possibly could and had a fun time doing it. Hank had certainly inspired her. After writing for an hour or so she realized that she had been in quite a deep trance for quite some time. That was the zone that she wanted to be in. That was where the magic really happened when it came to writing. When Amanda got in her zone she could write all day and hardly even notice. She had often thought of giving up stripping for novel writing just as she had given up microbiology for stripping. Something about the old typewriter just really seemed to resonate with her. Amanda felt much more comfortable on the old contraption than she did on her own computer.
As she typed she became aware of a presence behind her. She had assumed that it was Hank and chose to playfully ignore him. When he put his hand on her shoulder a chill ran through her whole body. A chill that touched her heart itself and set deep in the bone. Amanda felt faint and woozy. She reached up to take his hand off of her shoulder, his touch was icy death and she did not want to feel it any longer. She spun around on her knees, knocking his hand off her shoulder and looked up at…it wasn’t Hank. It wasn’t even a person. She would never reconcile her rational mind with what it was she saw, what it was that spoke to her.
She did a double take at the apparition before her. It appeared much as a man from the late twentieth century. He even wore a Pearl Jam t-shirt. Other than that he was completely transparent and shone with an unearthly bluish light that mesmerized and sickened Amanda at the same time. She tried to scream, she tried to stand, she tried to move in any way at all and found that she could not. She was completely frozen with fear.
The spirit swam through the air, coming to rest mere inches from her face, letting out a low guttural growl. Amanda began to whimper but still found herself frozen stiff as her body refused to act as her mind recoiled in woeful terror. It fixed its hollow gaze upon her eyes and she became transfixed as if by some sort of hellish glamour.
“Do not be afraid dear thing. You have called me forth from my prison of dust and solitude. I mean you no harm. That was my typewriter, some twenty years ago,” his voice was hollow and sounded like it was coming from a deep well and not right in front of Amanda.
“I…I didn’t mean to do anything…I’m so sorry,” she stammered as she spoke, trying to remain calm. She had never experienced anything even remotely similar and she had no base line from which to judge a supernatural experience. Amanda didn’t even fully believe that it was happening.
“Don’t worry about me. I am more free than I have been in years. I was murdered in this house and I come with a message for you, if it is indeed you who lives in this house,” he waited for her to confirm what he was saying before continuing.
“No, I am just visiting. Hank…he’s out in the garage. He…he’s a…a glassblower,” she didn’t know what to say to the ghost.
“Tell him to leave this place if he values his soul. This house will eat him alive and turn him into a thrall of the worm. We are all its servants, us ghosts of this house. We are all its slaves. There is no saving me, no saving the preacher or the hippies who lived here in the sixties. There’s no saving the soldier and there’s no saving the railwayman. He owns us all and he will own Hank too. Tell him!” the ghost trailed off and disappeared in a flash, flying into the typewriter in a ball of blue light. The smell of sulphur and ozone hung thick in the air.
Amanda could not believe what had just happened. She put a new sheet of paper in the typewriter and typed out everything the ghost had said to her to the best of her ability to remember.
After she was done she took the sheet out of the typewriter, folded it up and put it in her pocket as she went back downstairs, still shaken by what she went through. She was still cold and shaking from it but was also sweating and having hot flashes. Amanda stopped halfway down the steps and took several deep breaths, not continuing until she was done feeling weird and her head was clear.
“There must be some rational, scientific explanation for what just happened”, she said aloud as she got to the bottom of the stairs. Amanda was sure that she had taken a nap while upstairs and it was a dream. No, that only lasted a moment. She wasn’t capable of lying to herself that blatantly. She had to wrap her delusions in a blanket of complexity in order to baffle herself; she knew that is how her brain worked. What had just happened to her was beyond her ability to explain and it was beyond anything she had ever experienced. Still, that didn’t mean that it was without explanation. Even if she never figured it out Amanda knew there was a way to explain her experience rooted in science. Had she snapped? No, she was sure that she was fine after she got downstairs. Maybe there was a gas leak, the house was really old.
As she considered all the options that came to mind Hank and Lief came inside, hurriedly and noisily. Hank was screaming and Amanda ran to the back door where they were coming in. She met them in the kitchen to see that Hank was holding his hand under cold water in the sink. He had obviously burned himself in the glass shop.
Lief saw Amanda standing there, in shock and staring. “He had a seizure at the bench and his hand went right into the torch. I was able to turn the damn torch off, or else he would’ve fallen right into the flame. He also dropped molten glass right on his seat. It damn near melted his dick off. Left a big ole hole in his office chair that he sits in at the work station. It was insane. I’m just glad I was there. He still seems a little out of it,” Lief let her know how severe it all was with the panicked tone he used.
After Hank ran his hand under the sink for a half an hour they put salve and gauze on the burns. He took several pain killers and without even thinking about Amanda went into his room, got out his rig and his dope and cooked himself up a spoonful of heroin. Amanda walked in right as he was spiking his vein and pushing in the plunger. As the drug hit him and he fell into bliss and calm he was a bit happy to see that she was not appalled at all. Amanda took the needle from him as he fell into a nod. She untied the ru
bber hosing he was using from his arm and tied herself off. Taking his rig and his dope off of the nightstand, where unbeknownst to them both Ana Sophia had grasped the scissors from that she would stab Yuri with, Amanda cooked up a shot of her own. She spiked her vein with his needle and shot heroin for the first time in fifteen years.
They spent the rest of the evening shooting heroin and fucking. Hank didn’t know that she had been a junkie and that she had spent twelve years in recovery, but as they got high together he heard the entire tragic story of her life. He was shocked to find out that she had gone through college as a heroin addict. Still, it helped put the fact that she was still stripping into perspective for Hank. But even as the thoughts crossed his mind he felt as if he were being too judgmental of her. Who was he to judge anyone? She had a master’s degree in microbiology. He was a simple weed grower. Even his own grandmother could take a cutting off of a plant and clone it. Suddenly he felt bad and confessed everything he was thinking to Amanda. To his surprise she didn’t care.
Instead she found it to be endearing. After they both came out of a deep nod, drifting away on a sea of heroin bliss and feeling closer to him than she had yet, she confessed her experience in the upstairs to him. She thought they were on a level where they could tell each other anything, but he went ballistic, even as high as he was oh heroin, pills and cannabis.
He ran upstairs in a panic, screaming incoherently about not touching anything in the room of antiques. She was able to derive that the items in the room had all belonged to former tenants but he was up the stairs before she could make out much else.
Amanda got to the top of the stairs and noticed that Hank was in the other room already and was swearing up a storm. She stood in the threshold and saw that he was hanging the tie dye back up, but was shocked to see that there was no doll in the wheelchair. He put all the paper back in the desk and took her page out of the typewriter. Without even looking at what she had written he put the page and all the others in the drawer with the empty sheets. He then stood up and exited the room, walking right up to her as he pulled the door closed behind him.
“Now what was it that he said to you again Amanda?” Hank asked impatiently and she could tell that he felt the situation was dire.
“Hank you don’t believe that there was really a ghost in here do you sweetie?” she asked him in a way that he immediately identified as condescending, even though he was so high that the world seemed like a fantasy.
“I don’t know what I believe anymore Amanda. I just know that I’m crazy if I believe what has happened since I moved into this house. And if I don’t believe it, well then I am having major hallucinations. One thing that I think is interesting is that you saw the doll…that thing…well I’ll tell you about it some other time. But you say you saw and talked to the ghost of a writer. I haven’t met that one yet, but you also said that he mentioned the hippies and the preacher and the railwayman. I know the railwayman. Sometimes I can hear him and he talks to me,” he opened up a little too much, he could tell she wasn’t buying it.
“Hank I’m a scientist. I am a rationally minded person. I believe in the scientific method. None of this makes sense, but there is a good explanation for it. It might just be hard to see since we are in the middle of it. I want to believe you, I really do, but there just has to be a normal explanation for this shit,” Amanda said as she could see that her logic was getting through to him.
He gave up the fight, not wanting to argue and seeing that he wasn’t going to convince her either way. Hell, he hadn’t even convinced himself. He knew he was totally crazy, but it was beginning to seem like way too much that both Amy and Amanda both talked to ghosts in the upstairs. He had never mentioned Larvamog to Amanda and for her to tell him that a ghost in his house sent him a warning about “the worm” seemed way too close to Hank’s own personal insanity to suit him. The option that the Great Old One was indeed real and had chosen his house as its residence began to cross his mind again.
Hank was more confused than ever. He didn’t know if he was living in a dream or dreaming in reality. He only knew that between the heroin and Amanda he was feeling great and didn’t want to mess it up in any way. He suggested they leave the ghosts be and got back to living their own actual lives. As a way to celebrate their experiences they decided to watch one of Hank’s many horror DVD’s.
When they got downstairs they made some microwave popcorn and coffee to drink. They rolled up some joints and both injected another load of Hank’s dope. Curling up on the couch the two invited Lief out to the living room to watch the B-movie Dead Alive with them but he was too beat by the long day and just wanted to hit the hay. After some time, about halfway through the movie, they could hear the loud sound of Lief snoring in the other room.
Hank and Amanda laughed their way through the gory nineteen eighties horror comedy. It had much more gore than most movies in the genre and it made for a great time. As Hank sat on the couch, watching one of his favorite movies with a woman he’d fantasized about for twenty years or more and high as he could be he realized that he was truly happy. For the first time in years he was a happy man. For the first time in years he felt like he deserved to be a happy man.
As all of those revelations set in Hank heard the all too familiar voice of Quan Fong cutting through the air. He could tell that Amanda did not hear him.
“When you gonna tell her ‘bout me Hank? When you gonna tell her ‘bout ole Quan?” the spirit taunted him.
Hank breathed in through his nostrils deeply, showing his annoyance to Quan, who he could not see.
“When you gonna tell her it was me fuckin’ her wit’ your dick Hank?” Quan’s words cut Hank’s ego like a knife cuts butter.
During one of the darker scenes in the movie Hank dared to let a tear fall down his cheek, thankful that Amanda did not see it. He knew that his mind was shattered and that he had his own demons, but Quan taunting him was more than he could take in the wake of the revelations he was having concerning Amanda’s experience.
Hank awoke the next afternoon on the couch to find a note telling him that Lief had given Amanda a ride back to Lexington. She had tried for a half hour to wake him up and say goodbye to him, to no avail, but would be looking forward to seeing him. Hank lit his morning cigarette and before he even made his coffee he went for his syringe. He shot half a load that was still in the needle. It gave him a slight high, but he craved more, needed more. Frantically he looked about for his heroin. It was gone. There wasn’t a bit of dope in the entire house. He tore apart it from top to bottom. When the realization set in that Amanda had taken it he looked through his weed and his pills and his money as well.
She had hit him on all fronts. Every single dollar that he had, except what was in his private safe. She got at least five thousand dollars. She got hundreds of pills, only leaving his seizure meds and a single bottle of Valium.
“Fucking strippers,” he muttered to himself under his breath, feeling betrayed and on top of that stupid for not having seen it coming a mile away.
17
The Victims and the Warriors
Hank had no luck in tracking down Amanda Wexler. He couldn’t find an address for her and she had quit her job at Pure Gold. He figured that she probably just left town, she sure had enough money and drugs to make it happen. She was probably on a bus halfway to California. Hank was hurt by her actions, but felt bad for Lief who had driven her all the way to Lexington and didn’t even know that she had ripped them off. Lief seemed to take it pretty hard and felt like the whole situation was his own fault, even though Hank often reminded him that she was just a “scandalous ho.”
Still looking for Amanda gave Hank a reason to go into Lexington and go to strip clubs. He had no problem with that. After a month of frequenting a club called Solid Platinum Hank became quite the regular and everyone loved it when he walked in. He’d often tip the door man and the bartenders in marijuana. He was always low key about giving it to them, so as not to raise
suspicion. That got him a certain celebrity status that had benefits far beyond knowing that door man or getting hooked up on drinks. When word spread that Hank was the guy with all the good weed he was neck deep in strippers throwing themselves at him for a taste of his wares. It soon became common for Hank to go with a girl or two back to their place, although he had learned his lesson when he brought Amanda back to Gravel Switch. No more strippers would ever come back with him again, that was his new rule for himself and he didn’t find it hard to follow.
One night after spending the evening with a young woman from Indiana and shooting heroin Hank dozed off at the wheel on the way home. He remembered waking suddenly, a loud crashing sound like the world exploding and metal wrenching apart. He remembered crawling out of the window of his overturned Jeep Cherokee, he remembered there was blood all over him and he remembered the blackness taking him.
When he awoke he was in UK hospital, lying in a bed, hooked up to machines that monitored his vitals. It took him a while to open his eyes and as he did he could tell that his face was bruised up pretty badly. As his head swam from pain and painkillers Hank found his first coherent thought to be about the irony of wrecking his Jeep from nodding out when he had always been paranoid that he would wreck while having a seizure.
He cleared his throat. Then he heard Amy’s voice, soothing a calm.
“Hey there. How you feeling Hank? You had a pretty bad wreck, we weren’t too sure that you were gonna make it at first. Doctors were worried, but you pulled through. Can you talk?” she had been sitting in a chair next to his bed. After she spoke she leaned over and kissed him on the forehead. It felt amazing to Hank, but when he smiled it stung his still bruised face.
“I don’t know what happened. I was driving, then I was covered in blood. I dunno…” Hank seemed concerned, as if he needed to correct something. It was then that he saw that he was handcuffed to the bed.
Gravel Switch: the black goat chronicles book 1: a Weird Tale of Extreme Horror Page 15