The town was slightly perplexed but, in Sawmill, Ohio in the ’40s, popular entertainment rated a great deal lower than old time religion. So they kept their mouths shut. The one thing the townsfolk decided on was that it was more likely Rosita Johnson was living in hell than Alistair Doos because, two weeks later, Doos walked into Hinkle’s Grocery and bought the same things he’d bought since old Hinkle could remember: a fifth of whiskey, a carton of unfiltered Camels, a loaf of bread, a jar of peanut butter and a jar of apple butter. When he checked out he told old Hinkle, “Reverend said I should rot in hell. The way I figger, this here place’s as close a man can get.” Hinkle didn’t take that to mean his grocery store.
For the next thirty years, Alistair would make the same trip and buy the same things. No one ever talked to him or went to his house because they were, quite simply, terrified as hell. The first year or so, he would occasionally enter the town sporting a garish white face and wearing a blond wig. On these occasions he’d say things to Hinkle like, “Just tryin to fit in.” It was this white face that earned him the title, “The Ghoul from the Holler.” Rumors had it Reverend Kerch had got so freaked out that he skipped the state of Ohio completely.
After that first year, Doos never said anything. Old man Hinkle would say things to him and he would occasionally laugh, flashing a bone white smile, but he never said any words.
Then, in the early ’90s he showed up at the Downtrod Inn, looking not much older than he had when the place was still called the Lookout. He played to a bar littered with five people. The reception was as grand as five people could give. Even though racial attitudes hadn’t changed a whole lot, the old drunks could still appreciate virtuoso guitar picking. Doos came back every night, except for Sundays, and played. It was always the same. He carried his tattered black guitar case up to the stage and placed it by the scuffed brown chair. Then he walked over to the right of the stage and ascended the three steps. He sat down. He opened the case. He slid his belt buckle around to his hip, put the sliding steel over his left ring finger, picked up the guitar and let go. Sometimes he would play for fifteen minutes and sometimes he would play for three hours, never cracking a smile, never talking to anyone. When he was finished, he left by the exit behind the stage.
Slowly, the audience grew. They liked his stuff and some of the really old people thought his name sounded familiar but couldn’t remember hearing anything by him. Eventually, a recording crew turned up. They showed Doos a contract. He signed it without reading it and began playing his set.
The only song he played consistently every night was “Black Rosita’s Man.” He seemed to add new verses all the time and Nathan must have heard about fifty versions of this song.
Nathan stood there, completely unaware he was sweating profusely, and listened to the magic coming from Doos’ mouth and fingers. And visually, it came from his eyes. Nathan felt like Doos must make eye contact with virtually every audience member—extended eye contact. It was like he played and sang almost absently while his eyes searched and probed. When Doos’ near yellowish gaze fell on Nathan, he started wheezing. Nathan imagined that was what an asthma attack felt like. Clamps wrapped around his lungs. And that gaze was impossible to look away from. That gaze made Nathan think there was something about Alistair Doos no one really knew about.
What happened to Jack?
There was a depth, a dimension there, Nathan thought, most people only dream about.
And that’s why they were all there. The locals were pale dirty ghosts scattered lazily around the back of the bar. The newcomers were early arrivals, filling the floor in front of the stage. Nathan knew something he thought none of them did. He knew where Doos lived.
Seeking out Doos’ house had been the furthest thing from Nathan’s mind when he had come down here. A naïve part of his intellect had told him he respected the old man’s privacy too much for that. Something happened amidst the thumping of Doos’ dusty shoe against the floor and the dry molasses moan of his voice and the steel chime of his thick fingernails picking the guitar. A feeling overwhelmed Nathan. It was a weird and beautiful feeling, filled with deep mystery. It was a feeling he hadn’t felt since the summer when he was sixteen and the only black girl in the small town of Oracle, Kentucky, had introduced him to the magic of the moon and sex, the smell of clove cigarettes and the blues. She had taught him to love the blues and then taught him to feel the blues when she ran off with a musician from Cincinnati. But most of all, Nathan remembered the good feelings. The feeling a new world had opened up. Doos’ gaze fell upon him and whined, “Follow me,” and Nathan knew when Doos walked out that back door, he would be behind him.
That stare, that feeling was dangerous. He thought of other things, sliding steel liquid thoughts. Like where was Jack Napier? He had disappeared was all, Nathan told himself—convinced himself. Jack had come to Sawmill, intensely scrutinized a man living out life exactly the way he wanted to, nothing but solitude and music, and had decided to follow suit. Maybe Jack was holed up in some other small town, writing the Great American Novel he’d always talked about. The royalties from the Doos biography and the jazz textbook he’d sold a year earlier would certainly allow him to do that. It was Jack who had told Nathan where Doos lived but he didn’t mention anything spectacular about it.
“The man goes inside. He comes out the next day to play,” Jack had said. And yet this exercise in banality was something Nathan would have to observe for himself because he was here and he was alive and he was listening to that old man wail and he was looking into those eyes and he was so… alive, drunk off the moon and the smell of clove cigarettes and the blues the blues the blues.
Doos wound up his set, nodded his head in thanks, and folded up camp. There was no hope of getting past the crowd and following Doos out the back door. By the time Nathan squeezed past the lingering patrons and found his way out the front door, cutting quickly around the building, there was no trace of Doos.
You don’t need to follow him, Nathan thought. You know where it is.
Nathan remembered that conversation, his last, with Jack very clearly.
“There’s an opening in the woods behind the bar. Follow that and, after it starts to get really bushy, just try to stay as straight as you can. My guess is old Doos walks that path every night and then shoots off in some slight other direction so no particular path gets worn down. Keep going straight until you reach the clearing. It’s a long way.”
Then Jack had said: “I know I can trust you with this, Nathan.” That was one of the only times he could remember Jack ever using his name in conversation.
Was there something panicked in that last conversation? Was there any hint Jack was going to disappear off the fucking planet?
Nathan’s mind raced, emotions chasing themselves in circles.
He hasn’t been gone that long, he told himself. And no, Nathan knew Jack and he hadn’t sounded panicked in the least. He had sounded completely blissful. Nathan remembered, after getting off the phone with him, he had thought Jack sounded like someone who’d had a near death experience or found God or… or something else. Something that meant much more to a staunch atheist like Jack.
Cars were parked four rows deep behind the Downtrod Inn and Nathan wormed his way in between. The moon was a night away from being full and Nathan’s vision was greatly helped by its purplish glow. He found the opening in the woods after only a minute’s search. Once inside, he knew he would be away from the moon’s nurturing glow. His vision reached no more than a couple of feet into the woods but he could sense its secret world. The insects with their secret language chirped and hummed, scurrying. He could smell the damp wood, resting up for another day of growth, however slight. And he could smell the sweet decay of the leaves, layered on the ground from a hundred sad and magical autumns.
He took a deep breath and began walking. He listened for the sound of the man in front of him but didn’t hear so much as a broken twig or the soft swish of a leafy branch. No am
ount of paranoia could stop him, Nathan knew.
This world was far removed from his apartment in New York. There were no blaring horns or screeching trains or squealing cars or sirens and, perhaps most unsettling, there were no people. The woods were like nothing and everything, timeless.
More to keep himself company than anything else, Nathan began playing Alistair Doos’ music in his head. The time flew by as quickly as it had at the bar.
Soon he reached the dead end.
“Keep walking straight,” Jack had said.
Where are you, Jack? Nathan asked himself and the question was followed by that night’s “Black Rosita’s Man,” still fresh in his head; there to comfort him, to ward away paranoia. Follow me. To guide him into something he hadn’t felt in a long time.
The terrain rose uphill a little more, but Doos’ music was there in his head, biology’s iPod, to carry him on. Fallen sticks barked his shins, thin limbs scratched at his cheeks. That music, thick and sweet.
And there it was. Gleaming as white as the teeth in Doos’ head, his house sat humbly in a large grassy circle.
Nathan stayed at the perimeter of the woods. The whole clearing seemed to glow, the moon reflecting off the house. The bargain iPod had turned itself off and Nathan tried to concentrate on what his next move would be.
Okay, you’ve seen it. You can go home now.
“The man goes inside. He comes out the next day to play.” There’s nothing to see, right?
Except it seemed Doos hadn’t just gone inside.
What happened to you out here, Jack?
Nathan heard the slow refrain of “Black Rosita’s Man” coming from somewhere in that illuminated circle. It sounded almost too clear to be coming from within the house but Nathan couldn’t see a trace of Doos.
He moved slowly to his right, crouching down into some of the smaller foliage. He continued moving cautiously and the music got closer. The night was almost chilly. Nathan found himself drawn to this sound, feeling brief flickers of warmth in his stomach. Nathan wanted to feel wrapped in it like he had back in the sweaty bar, like he had in the arms of the girl who’d graciously taken his virginity. He continued to move to his right.
Nathan found out why he had come.
The secret that lay behind Doos’ slightly hooded eyes unfolded itself right there in front of him. It had all the elements of a completely fucked up dream but Nathan felt the warmth of the music and the chill of the night and he knew it was really happening.
Doos sat on a chair, plucking and singing away. He sang to a small tombstone at his feet. Nathan knew if he could read the tombstone it would say, “Rosita Johnson.” The grass on top of the grave quivered. The air around Nathan was changing. It felt like the moments before a thunderstorm when the wind kicks up and the temperature is a schizophrenic swirl.
Doos played on.
Nathan couldn’t tell if what he saw next was some sort of ghost or the real thing but there was Rosita Johnson, slowly taking form on top of her grave. She wasn’t coming out of it the way zombies did in the movies. She was slowly becoming more… substantial, thicker, more there. And then, Nathan would have had to touch her to be a hundred percent certain, she was there.
She was Doos’ music made flesh. All the beauty. All the pain. Nathan knew this was what Doos lived for. This was why he still played music. It wasn’t for those adoring faces at the Downtrod Inn. It wasn’t to be known as the best at anything. It was for love. For the love of Rosita Johnson.
He put down the guitar in the open case beside his chair.
What the fuck was Jack talking about? There’s nothing to see! What the hell was this?
Doos laughed. A sweet sound, rich and loud.
“I missed you, old girl,” he said.
It was Rosita’s turn to laugh, shrill but filled with joy—“I missed you, old man,” as though they had said this countless times before.
They embraced, turning in circles under the moonlight. Doos picked her up, cradling her in his arms.
Nathan turned to run. Not out of fear but out of guilt. He felt like he shouldn’t have, no, he felt like it wasn’t his right, to see what he had just seen. He tried running but his heartbeat slowed and thickened in his chest and his legs rubberbanded him to the ground.
He threw his head wildly up at the moon. The moon mocked him and he lowered his head to see a hundred other leering moons coming toward him from the dark mass of the forest.
Some of them were faces he recognized from the bar. And in the front, grinning wildly, was a face Nathan knew very well.
“Jack?”
“I found it, Nathan,” Jack said. His blondish hair was longer than Nathan remembered, hanging almost down to his shoulder.
All those moons were coming closer.
“I swear I didn’t tell anybody else, Jack.” Why was he suddenly so afraid of Jack?
The eyes, Nathan thought. They contained a touch of Doos.
“Now you’ve found it, too,” Jack said.
Jack put his hands on Nathan’s sweaty face and turned it around, back toward the house. The rest of the people moved in tightly, forming a crescent around him.
Nathan’s muscles, already stiff with fear, tightened even more.
Another moon face was quickly constructing a makeshift gallows from a tree beside Doos’ house, behind the tombstone.
Doos and Rosita were dancing off to the gallows’ right, singing a mock jazz duet.
“We’re gonna live for eternity,” Doos sang.
“Just you n me,” Rosita sang.
“Bay-beee,” they sang together.
Nathan shivered violently. He heard his teeth clacking in his head like some form of mad music behind the lovers’ duet.
Jack pulled him up by one of his arms. The crescent moved in on him, lifting him up, carrying him toward the gallows.
“The mystery is darkening,” Jack said.
“I told you that sky was filled with holes,” Rosita sang.
“Don’t waste yer breath on me, I’m out collectin souls,” Doos half-sang, half-laughed.
The mob carried Nathan past the tombstone and he noticed it said, “Rosita Doos,” not “Rosita Johnson.”
“Why don’t we get married, baby?” Doos.
“Just you n me...” Rosita.
The noose over the branch creaked.
“None of us should have done this, Nathan,” Jack said.
“No,” Nathan didn’t know if he was protesting or agreeing. He screamed. He heard his scream rolling over those hills.
“Kerch will take care of you.”
The Reverend Kerch placed the noose around Nathan’s neck.
Doos laughed and began strumming, “Black Rosita’s Man.”
The crowd stepped away.
Nathan dropped.
He felt his neck snap and he felt the red shivers of pain bursting in his skull and he waited, but he didn’t feel death. He felt fire. But it was just a feeling and he opened his eyes and everything he saw was hallucination red.
The hands tore away the clothes from his body.
The teeth bore down on him and he could hear the punctures more than feel them.
He looked down and Doos’ mouth was clamped on his left wrist, Rosita’s on his right.
“Let these two be joined!” the Reverend Kerch shouted. “Let these two be joined!”
The next night, Nathan looked at the fresh faces that had come to the Downtrod Inn. He was pressed back against the bar. He turned and looked toward Doos’ eyes but those eyes didn’t meet his. They looked at the sea below the stage, searching. Outside, the moon was full. The faint smell of cloves drifted in from outside, drowning out the sweat and the beer smells. And, in the slow coursing of his veins, Nathan felt the blues.
Rayles
They stacked the skulls on the south side of the tracks.
They didn’t know what else to do with them.
Nissa grimaced with the weight of the skull-laden bag slung over her left s
houlder. Sarot had an easier time dealing with his. Sarot was Nissa’s younger brother. Younger but stronger. Dressed in dirty gray rags, Nissa sat her heavy canvas bag down and gestured for Sarot to do the same.
“Why are we holding up?!” he shouted. The train, Rayles, circled the town constantly and, here, so close to it, normal conversation was impossible. Everything was a shout.
“We should rest for a few minutes before going up! It’s a long climb!” Nissa shouted back.
She looked across the town. The sad, depressing town, cloaked in perpetual gloom, the huge and angry black train circling it, surrounding it, the engine car always chasing the caboose, separated only by inches. Since the train never stopped, it made escape impossible.
Impossible, maybe, but tonight escape was exactly what Nissa and Sarot intended to do. These last two bags of skulls, these were their tools. They had practiced for this night. All they had to do was carry the skulls to the top of the mountain—the same ritual that had been performed for years—and then... Well, that was the mystery. They didn’t know what came after that. No one did. Except maybe Rayles.
Sarot cleared his throat. He was an exceptionally serious and morose boy even for a town that turned out hardly anything except serious and morose boys. “Why hasn’t anyone just built a ladder or something like that to get out?!” Still the shouting. It added a sort of jocularity to a very serious question.
Nissa looked guiltily at the ground. She should have told him the whole story. She should have told him the whole story a long time ago. Now, it was too late. And she would have to shout the whole thing anyway. The story was far too serious to even attempt conveyance by shouting.
Pray You Die Alone: Horror Stories Page 6