“That’s my name, don’t wear it out.” Clara managed to sit up, leaning on the backpack and probably doing more damage to Great-grandma Beryl’s crystal ball. Her head hurt and she was dizzy.
The girl was circling around her, far enough away that her edges faded into the firelight and then so close that Clara’d have felt her body heat if she hadn’t been so hot herself. The girl moved like Clara, jerky and clumsy. Was she making fun of her? Or were all the same things wrong with her body that were wrong with Clara’s?
The girl leaned down toward Clara on the ground and held out her hands, then pulled them back out of reach so that Clara couldn’t grab them even if she wanted to, which mostly she didn’t. The girl’s face looked red and white and kind of stiff. Any minute now she was going to fall on top of Clara or drift away.
“Dance with me.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Dance with me.” In the big flowing dress, with the oily shine, with the drumbeats and the sunset and the greater and lesser bonfires in the background, what she was doing did sort of look like a dance.
“Duh. I can’t dance.” But if this chick who looked so much like her and moved so much like her could dance, could Clara, too?
“Duh. Sure you can.” Clara found herself reaching for the outstretched hands, though she didn’t want to. Her hands were so cold she didn’t really feel the girl’s hands, but somehow the girl was helping her up, and the two of them danced a few steps together to the music from the party that she was already late to. Then the other girl was gone and Clara was dancing by herself, and she accidentally kicked the backpack and the crystal ball clinked and clunked again, and her mother was yelling at her to hurry up. Clara hurried as fast as she could, which wasn’t hurrying by anybody else’s standards except maybe, she thought, that girl’s.
Clara stumbled a little but made it to her house and inside and to her place at table. Great-grandma Beryl’s place was at the other end where she could barely see it, but there was a shimmer around it. Here next to her was the empty place for her cousin Spencer who’d been killed in Afghanistan. Clara didn’t miss him. He’d never grown up enough to quit being mean to her. Last year, just before he deployed, he’d played this bizarre trick on her where he claimed he wasn’t Spence, he was Spence’s ghost, and then he’d said he was the living Spencer again and he’d seen his own ghost, and he acted scared, all wide-eyed like a cartoon of scared.
She’d thought she was the only one he’d done that to, just messing with her mind, and it’d made her mad. She might be sick but she wasn’t stupid. Then, after they got the news, she’d heard Pa tell Ma he’d known Spence would die within the year because he’d met his own ghost. That gave Ma something to use against Reba. Clara wondered if she had.
Now Reba was crying and making everybody eat her cakes for Spencer. Ma teased loudly that Reba never got the recipe right, and the two of them got into one of those sibling arguments that made Clara glad she was an only child. Having tons of cousins was exhausting enough. She couldn’t tell if Spence was here or not. Maybe Reba hadn’t left the westward window open right for him, either. Reba was sort of a ditz.
Clara passed the zucchini casserole. Zucchini was disgusting.
Maybe that chick she’d danced with had been somebody’s out-of-town visitor here for the party. But she didn’t see her at table, and she reasoned that it wasn’t very likely the girl had been a stranger; strangers didn’t come here without being approved and introduced all around, and, besides, she’d known Clara’s name. Maybe it had been some cousin dressed up in costume and make-up. She had looked so much like what Clara thought she herself looked like: same crooked body, same face both younger and older than she was, same boobs getting bigger every day so that Clara couldn’t bring herself to look at herself in a mirror.
The backpack was getting uncomfortable between her and the chair, but getting it off would mean leaning and twisting and turning and creating even more of a scene. The big bright dress ballooned out around her, and she felt ridiculous. She drank a tiny bit of Pa’s good amber ale when the bottle came around. Busy chatting and laughing, Ma wouldn’t notice anyway, so she let herself make a face.
Ma called out to Auntie Reba, “He doesn’t have to come, you know. I bet he’s not coming.”
Reba howled, jumped up, grabbed the plate of her gross cakes for the dead that nobody would eat any of, dashed around the table crashing into people and chairs, and dumped the whole thing including the plate on her sister’s head. Like practically everybody else, Clara laughed. These fights between Ma and Reba were pretty ridiculous. But they were also embarrassing, and somebody always got hurt. Pa moved in to break it up, and then both of the sisters were fighting him, and then other people got into it, and everything just sort of blew up. No wonder Spence didn’t want to come home. She saw the shimmer that maybe was Great-grandma Beryl leave the empty chair at the end of the table, too.
Clara started to feel sick. Her head swam, and her hands and feet felt as if they’d come loose from her body and were floating around like sparks and smoke. She was going to faint. She was going to throw up. That would be embarrassing. She struggled to her feet, swayed, steadied herself on the back of Spence’s empty chair, started on her own version of hurrying out of the room. Ma yelled after her, sort of absent-mindedly. The good amber ale made Clara’s name sound weird coming loud out of Ma’s mouth, and she was more interested in fighting with Reba and kissing Pa than finding out what was going on with Clara.
Clara kept going, not fast and not steady, but determined. She was relieved that nobody tried to stop her or ask what was wrong. It also hurt her feelings.
She almost fell a couple of times, and she banged the backpack with the crystal ball in it against the door frame, but she made it outside. The cool air and quiet cleared her head a little, but she still felt sick. It was probably just Pa’s good amber ale and the cakes for the dead. She’d probably feel better pretty soon.
The cool air did clear her head a little. Darkness had come down like a tent over the town. The big toothy bonfires on the hilltop grinned. Clara followed the lesser fires away from the house. She was cold and hot, shivering and sweating. Her face was stiff.
Going up the hill, she stepped on the hem of the too-big too-bright dress again and fell. The crystal ball in the backpack clunked and felt like two or three jagged pieces now pressing against her back. She couldn’t keep track of where all the pain was, leg and back and head and stomach.
“Don’t worry your little head about it,” Great-grandma Beryl said. “It ain’t real.”
Clara’s head was swimming so she wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that Great-grandma Beryl was shimmering in one of the gentle, flickering lesser fires that could show the way if you didn’t trip over them and catch your costume on fire. “Are you real?” She couldn’t believe she was asking that. Ma would have a fit. Being sick was her excuse. Everybody knew that ghosts were real, and the veil between the worlds was real, and when the veil was thin like this, ghosts were realer than ever, realer even than the living.
“You betcha.” The fire that was Great-grandma Beryl was steady and low to the ground and warm but not too warm. Clara let herself lie down by it. “So’s Clara real.”
“Well, yeah,” Clara managed to say. “Never thought I wasn’t.”
“Clara,” said Great-grandma Beryl. “Meet Clara.”
The chick with the body like Clara’s and the over-sized tie-dyed dress like Clara’s was squatting beside her. Their costumes drifted over each other’s knees. “We met,” the girl said. “Clara just didn’t recognize me. I don’t know why.”
Great-grandma Beryl hissed and crackled. “They never do. Mine didn’t at first neither. It shouldn’t be that hard, we look just like ’em. I mean, who else would we look like, I ask you.”
“Didn’t expect me, did you?” The girl named Clara nudged Clara, but she didn’t feel it.
“They never do. Not yet.” Great-grandma Beryl sort of sputtered. “Not
ever yet.”
Clara was too hot and too cold. High up on the hill the great bonfires snagged the edges of the thin thin veil. She wondered which west window they’d leave open for her next year, if it would have to be low and wide so she could get through it or if that wouldn’t matter anymore. Would she have to walk in front of everybody to get to her empty place at table? At least it wouldn’t be Auntie Reba’s turn to make the cakes for the dead so they’d probably be okay.
Clara might come back if they invited her right. Or, she was sorry, she just might not.
Steve Rasnic Tem’s newest story collection is Celestial Inventories (ChiZine), to be followed by Twember (New Con Press) in October. Next year will see publication of his new novel Blood Kin (Solaris) and the novella In the Lovecraft Museum (PS Publishing).
Melanie Tem’s work has received the Bram Stoker, International Horror Guild, British Fantasy, and World Fantasy Awards, and a nomination for the Shirley Jackson Award. She has published numerous short stories, eleven solo novels, two collaborative novels with Nancy Holder, and two with her husband, Steve Rasnic Tem. She is also a published poet, an oral storyteller, and a playwright. Her stories have recently appeared in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and the anthologies Supernatural Noir, Shivers VI, Portents, Blood and Other Cravings, and Werewolves and Shapeshifters. The Tems live in Denver. They have four children and four granddaughters.
LONG WAY HOME
A PINE DEEP STORY
Jonathan Maberry
Author’s Note: This story takes place several years after the events described in the Pine Deep Trilogy, of which Ghost Road Blues is the first volume. You do not need to have read those books in order to read—and hopefully enjoy—this little tale set in rural Pennsylvania.
-1-
Donny stood in the shadow of the bridge and watched the brown water. The river was swollen with muddy runoff. Broken branches and dead birds bobbed up and down—now you see ’em, now you don’t—as the swift current pulled them past.
The river.
Jeez, he thought. The river.
He remembered it differently than this. Sure, he’d lived here in Pine Deep long enough to have seen the river in all her costumes. Wearing gray under an overcast sky, running smoothly like liquid metal. Dressed in white and pale blue when the winter ice lured skaters to try and cross before the frozen surface turned to black lace. Camouflaged in red and gold and orange when early November winds blew the October leaves into the water.
Today, though, the river was swollen like a tumor and wore a kind of brown that looked like no color at all. It was like this when Halloween was about to hit. You’d think a town that used to be built around the holiday, a town that made it’s nut off of candy corn and jack-o’ lantern pumpkins and all that trick or treat stuff would dress up for the occasion. But no. This time of year the colors all seemed to bleed away.
The last time he had seen the river was on one of those summer days that made you think summer would last forever and the world was built for swimming, kissing pretty girls, drinking beer, and floating on rubber inner tubes. It was the day before he had to report for basic training. He’d been with Jim Dooley, he remembered that so clearly.
Jim was going into the navy ’cause it was safe. A red-haired Mick with a smile that could charm the panties off a nun, and a laugh that came up from the soles of his feet. You couldn’t be around Jim and not have fun. It was impossible, probably illegal.
They’d driven twenty miles up Route 32 and parked Donny’s piece-of-shit old Ford150 by Bleeker’s Dock. The two of them and those college girls. Cindy something and Judy something.
Cindy had the face, but Judy had the body.
Not that either of them looked like bridge trolls, even without makeup, even waking up in Jim’s brother’s Boy Scout tent in the woods at the top of Dark Hollow. They were both so healthy. You could stand next to them and your complexion would clear up. That kind of healthy.
And with Jim around they laughed all the time.
Nothing like pretty girls laughing on a sunny day, as the four of them pushed off from the dock and into the Delaware. Way up here, above the factories down south, way above the smutch of Philadelphia, the water was clean. It was nice.
On that day, the water had been slower and bluer. It hadn’t been a dry summer, but dry enough so that in shallow spots you could see the river stones under the rippling water. Judy swore she saw a starfish down there, but that was stupid. No such thing as freshwater starfish. Or, at least Donny didn’t think so.
Didn’t matter anyway. That was the last time Donny saw Judy. Or Cindy or even Jim for that matter. The girls went back to college. Jim went into the navy.
Donny went into the army.
It all seemed like a long time ago.
Way too fucking long.
It was no longer summer. October was burning off its last hours. Even if the river looked like sewer water at least the trees were wearing their Halloween colors.
Donny stood by the bridge and watched the brown river sweep the broken, dead things away. There was some message there, he thought. There was at least a Springsteen song there. Something about how nothing lasts.
But Donny was no more a songwriter than he was a philosopher.
He was a man who had spent too long coming home.
Donny climbed up from the bank and stepped onto the creosote-soaked planks of the bridge. It was a new bridge. The old one had been destroyed in the Trouble.
He’d missed that, too.
He’d read about it, though. Probably everybody read about it. That shit was how most people first heard of Pine Deep. Biggest news story in the world for a while. Bunch of militia nutjobs dumped all sorts of drugs into the town’s water supply. LSD, psychotropics, all sorts of stuff. Nearly everybody in town went totally ape shit. Lots of violence, a body count that dwarfed the combined death tolls of Afghanistan and Iraq. Eleven thousand six hundred and forty-one people dead.
So many of the people that Donny knew.
His folks.
His cousin Sherry and her kids.
And Jim.
Jim had come home on leave from the navy. He hadn’t taken a scratch in boot camp, had been posted to an aircraft carrier, was halfway through his tour and filling his letters with jokes about how the worst thing that happens to him is the clap from getting laid in every port in the Pacific.
Jim had been stabbed through the chest by a drugged-out corn farmer who claimed—swore under oath—that he was killing vampires.
How fucked up was that?
The massacre in Pine Deep changed the world. Like 9/11 did. Made the great big American paranoia machine shift its stare from everyone else in the world to its own backyard. Domestic terrorism. No one was safe, not even at home. Pine Deep proved that.
Eleven thousand people dead.
It had happened ten years ago. To the day. The militia goons had used the big Pine Deep Halloween Festival as its ground zero. Thousands of tourists in town. Celebrities. Everyone for miles around.
If the militia assholes ever had a point, it died with them. The press called them “white supremacists,” but that didn’t make sense. Most of the people in Pine Deep were white. WASPs, with some Catholics and a handful of Jews. Except for a few families and some of the tourists, there wasn’t enough of a black or Latino or Jewish or Muslim presence to make a hate war point. It never made sense to Donny. The people in town were just caught up in the slaughter. Either they wound up taking the same drugs, or the red wave of insanity just washed over them.
Donny had been in Iraq, midway through his second tour.
He’d been over there, killing people, trying not to die from insurgent bullets or IEDs, fighting to protect the people at home. But the people at home died anyway.
Donny never did figure out how to react to it, and standing here now on this new bridge didn’t make it any clearer. The death of so many at home, neighbor killing neighbor, felt like a sin. It felt like suicide. Even thou
gh he knew that with all those drugs in the water no one could ever be held responsible for what they did. Except those militia dickheads, and Donny wished there was at least one of them alive that he could hunt down and fuck up.
“Damn it, Jim,” he said to the air.
He stared across the bridge to the thick stands of oaks and maples and birch trees. From here, in the sun’s fading light, it was hard to tell if the trees were on fire or if it was just the red blaze of dying leaves.
Donny adjusted the straps of his backpack and stretched out one foot. Somehow taking this step would be like crossing a line.
But between what and what, Donny had no idea.
He was no philosopher.
He was a soldier coming home.
-2-
It seemed to take forever to walk across the bridge. Donny felt as if his feet were okay with the task but his heart was throwing out an anchor.
He paused halfway across and looked back.
Behind him was a million miles of bad road that led from here all the way back to Afghanistan and Iraq. He was amazed he’d made it this far home. Donny always figured he’d die on a cot in some dinky aide station in the ass-end of nowhere, way the hell out on the Big Sand. God knows the world had tried to kill him enough times. He touched the row of healed-over scars that were stitched diagonally from left hip to right shoulder. Five rounds.
Should have died in the battle.
Should have died in the evac helicopter.
Should have died in the field hospital.
Lost enough blood to swim home.
The dead flesh of the scars was numb, but the muscle and bone beneath it remembered the pain.
And beneath that suffering flesh?
A heart that had ached to come back home, when there was a home to come back to. Now that heart beat a warning tattoo as if to say, this is not your home anymore, soldier.
This isn’t home.
All the way here, with every mile, every step, he wondered why, after all these years away, he was coming back here at all.
HALLOWEEN: Magic, Mystery, and the Macabre Page 10