Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories

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Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories Page 9

by Steven L. Campbell


  “Myers Ridge is a large succession of hills outside of the town of Ridgewood. Recently, I became aware of electrical problems here, mainly car engines stalling and cell phones and digital cameras not working. At the same time, I heard reports about mysterious fog formations and red and yellow lights seen at night. My colleagues are, without evidence, claiming that these formations are hallucinations, downright lies, or at best: luminous protean clouds rising from deep within the hill.”

  The fog shifted. Donohue held his breath. When nothing more happened, he said, “Long before Ridgewood was founded, the indigenous people here told tales of a cloud person with three red hearts and a head of gold that visited them after an earthquake.

  “Another quake was recorded in 1702. A European settler, when upon viewing a strange fog in his potato field, killed his wife and two children and stuffed them in the belly of a slaughtered cow.”

  The fog shifted again and stopped. It made no advancement.

  “It’s been centuries since that earthquake and the one we had earlier this year. I believe the fog and the quakes are related somehow. Perhaps the fog was released from underground by the quakes.”

  The fog shifted. Its red lights inside became brighter until Donohue saw that the lights were three distinct pulsating objects.

  “Like living organs,” he said. Then to his recorder: “Daylight is almost gone. I am viewing now, as best as I can, what I believe is one of these cloud creatures.” He stopped. Why had he called it a creature? Why hadn’t he called it a subject?

  “Are those hearts?” His hand holding the recorder trembled. So did his shoulders, sending small wattages of pain through his lower back and leg.

  “A chill is gripping me,” he said. “I need warmth.” He once more tried his cell phone. This time he cursed, his anger directed at the fog.

  “You’re the reason no advanced electrical gadget will work. What are you? Speak to me, damn it. WHAT ARE YOU?”

  The fog remained pulsating but otherwise still.

  Donohue shivered and cried out from the pain. He closed his eyes until the excruciation abated. When he looked down the hill, the fog was still there, its red lights pulsating faster, brighter. Around it, for several feet, the grass and ground looked dry. More than that, it looked warm and inviting.

  Donohue shivered and cried out again. The he crawled backward, inching his way to the warmth.

  The fog stood motionless, waiting.

  Donohue crawled to within a few feet from the fog. Its heat felt like summer sunlight on a wintry day. It entered his wet clothes, steamed his back and felt good.

  He inched closer. His hip stopped throbbing. He felt his knee mending. He crawled closer still; he needed more of what the creature was giving him. He crawled to within inches from the fog, did a crabwalk as he turned to face the fog, and looked inside, past the pulsating organs. There, he saw a heavenly place he wanted to be at. And despite what his scientific mind said as he stood and entered, he saw that it was real.

  #

  A Haunting

  WHAT A CRIME it felt to Reverend Gloria Jackson to believe such a beautiful house could be haunted. To know the place, it looked no different from any other Victorian country house in Ridgewood, Pennsylvania. As Gloria walked the sunny grounds that October evening, she sensed the leftover energy of a time when wealthy Victorians spent an incredible amount of time socializing inside their homes. In Victorian America, nothing displayed one’s status like their house, and the house of a successful Victorian family was more than merely a home; it was a statement of their taste, wealth, and education.

  Fiona Bay’s house was one of them, preserved to remain impressive through time by superb craftsmanship and great care. Standing in front of Gloria and surrounded by a neatly manicured lawn and shrubbery that sprawled over half an acre, the stately house seemed at first glance the most unlikely of places to house demonic spirits.

  “Fiona was calling forth the dead,” Melissa Bay told Gloria after dinner later that Friday night. Melissa, a strong-backed woman, sat across from Gloria at the long table. Richard sat to Melissa’s right inside the spacious dining room.

  “That’s an alarming statement,” Gloria said.

  “It’s true.” Richard sounded ashamed. “She wrote all about her occult doings in her diary.”

  When Gloria asked what diary he meant, he fetched a black leather book atop a china cabinet. Gloria leafed through the diary and listened over a glass of tawny port.

  Melissa said, “As you know, reverend, when her husband Charles died this past summer, Fiona withdrew. But she seemed happiest inside her library, so we left her alone to paint and read there. It was the library she withdrew to after the funeral. She barely ever left that room.

  “Then I discovered this morning that she had locked herself inside. She refused to let me in. Her voice sounded agitated … upset, so I called Richard.”

  “I had to kick in the door,” Richard said. “And that’s when, crazy as it sounds, she wasn’t there—and all the windows were locked. I checked.” He stared at his glass standing empty on the table in front of him. “Even crazier was when we found a Ouija board and tarot cards inside, as well as her diary which tells of how she has been trying over the past several months to conjure up my father’s spirit.” Sadness and confusion twisted his features into a horrible grimace. “What’s happening?” he asked. “What has she done?” He shook his head and groaned before Gloria could answer. “Until today, I never believed in the paranormal, the metaphysical.” He searched Gloria’s face for answers. “What happened to my mother?”

  Gloria’s wine glass flew from the table and shattered against the stone fireplace across the room. The Bible she had brought with her—which she had placed the diary on top of—followed her glass. The diary remained unmoved.

  Surprised, Gloria and Melissa yelped. Richard cried out, “Mother.” He jumped to his feet. “Is that you?”

  The air turned frigid and burned against Gloria’s cheeks. She felt a winter-blooming nip at the tips of her ears and nose.

  Richard yelled at the room. “Where are you? Show yourself. Please.”

  Large and heavy books thumped to the floor inside the library across the hall from the dining room. Then the chill left and all quieted.

  Richard settled his nerves with a hearty gulp from the wine bottle—glasses and etiquette be damned, Gloria reckoned, considering the circumstances. Richard went to the library door where either he or Melissa had nailed a cross to the damaged door as Gloria had instructed earlier during their phone conversation. Richard looked at the cross and cursed all that is holy. When he finished, he said, “Exorcise the place, reverend. Whatever my mother has done, fix it. Please.”

  Gloria joined him at the door. It had taken great force to open the large oak door. She fingered the splintered wood. “Tell me about the voices,” she said.

  “Whispers,” Melissa said as she joined them. “Vague chattering whispers.”

  “And laughing,” Richard added. “A woman’s laugh, but not my mother’s.”

  Gloria removed the cross from the door and stepped inside the library. A chandelier lit the room and seemed to turn the oak bookshelves and furniture to gold. She helped Richard and Melissa replace the toppled books, many of them art history texts and artists biographies. Outside the room’s tall, rectangular windows, the night had become pitch black. A clock inside the dining room chimed seven o’clock.

  A painter’s large easel stood near a window. As Gloria looked at the portrait, the unfinished canvas showed the swift strokes of a seasoned painter. Fiona Bay had sketched her subject with lines of umber and sienna, whisked in golden hues next to gentle blues and pink, and had started forming the glow of flesh with buttery mounds of paint. The woman in the unfinished portrait seemed to be dressed in multicolored satin linens and silk scarves. Her face was promising the color of the finest gold, ruby and sapphire. Her eyes sparkled emerald green and sky blue. Her unpainted long hair flowed down a s
eemingly endless body of shapely beauty.

  “Absolutely beautiful,” Gloria said of the painting and the subject. “She looks familiar. Who is she?”

  “I don’t know,” Richard said. “No one has been coming to the house to sit. My mother likes her time alone, even before father died.”

  Gloria looked back at the painting. The cheeks and mouth looked refined, as though someone had added paint to the portrait while she had looked away.

  She turned away and looked back again. There was no mistaking it: The painting appeared to be painting itself.

  Melissa screamed. “The light. At her easel. What is it?”

  Gold light grew suddenly in front of Fiona’s easel. Inside the brightness, Gloria saw an apparition of Fiona wearing a blue denim painter’s smock and holding a large palette in her left hand. Seemingly unaware of the people in the room, Fiona rushed her canvas and painted, and then stepped back to admire her work before repeating the process.

  At Fiona’s side and facing Gloria was her soul-stealing succubus dressed in a multicolored chiffon robe—a female demon Gloria hoped never to see again.

  “Keeley.” The color fell from Gloria’s face. Even the fearful cry of the demon’s name somehow permeated the room with beauty. But Gloria knew that this beauty was fleeting. Her throat tightened as she thrust her Bible at arm’s length. She had to save Fiona, no matter the consequences. “Set her loose, demon.”

  Keeley laughed. Tittered, actually. “The poet is a ministrant. Oh, my long-ago lover, what have I done to you?” She took a step forward and her robe flowed with her.

  Gloria yelled for her to stay back. Keeley advanced slowly, her gaze fixed on Gloria.

  Melissa grasped Gloria’s left arm. “Who are you talking to?”

  Gloria pulled from Melissa’s grasp. “Count to ten, then you and Richard go to Fiona. Get her out of here while I distract the demon. Then lock the door and bar it with another crucifix.” She thrust her Bible into Melissa’s arms.

  “I see no one,” Melissa said, looking at the light.

  “What is it?” Richard cried out. “What is that light in front of my mother’s easel?”

  “Go into the light, Richard,” Gloria said. “Your mother is there. You must pull her out while I distract the demon.”

  Before he could object or ask any more questions and put all their lives at risk, Gloria rushed into Keeley’s warm, tender and passionate embrace. Evil was not always cold.

  “I knew I’d find you again,” Keeley said. Her fervent kiss fell hard upon Gloria’s lips.

  The demon’s spicy smell and taste were more delicious than Gloria remembered. Her long, soft hair—now a gorgeous mélange of burnt sienna, gold, and black—brushed Gloria’s face. It aroused her, but not as quickly as it had done more than twenty years ago when she and Keeley were college students.

  Within Gloria’s concerned gaze, she watched Richard and Melissa pull Fiona from the room. Fiona struggled but Keeley’s hold on her had weakened. Gloria expected Keeley to intervene. She didn’t. Her mouth writhed wickedly against Gloria’s and her eyes fluttered with passion.

  As Gloria’s eyesight weakened with the rest of her body, she heard the door slam shut. Fiona was safe on the other side.

  The kiss ended and Keeley’s embrace softened. Gloria felt Keeley take the cross from her hand. “We won’t need this where we’re going,” the demon said. Her teeth penetrated Gloria’s neck.

  Gloria’s concerns for her own safety fell away as she plunged into a familiar world of darkness she found both sinful and heavenly.

  #

  Into the Void

  RONALD PARKER’S CELL phone vibrated on his leather belt at three minutes of four o’clock that afternoon. He let the call go to voice mail while he stood with Maggie Miller and her staff on the wooden terrace of Maggie’s horse and cattle ranch. The last of the children and their luggage of suitcases and backpacks were packed and stuffed into the big lime green bus that would take them north to the highway, and then forty miles west to Erie. There, the children and their luggage of clothes, books and, of course, souvenirs from Maggie’s store, would depart for home—some as far away as California.

  The children seemed happy and talkative, though some looked doleful as they waved goodbye from open windows. Maggie and her staff waved back as the bus ambled down the long, dirt drive. A tall man, dressed to the hilt in white clothes, apron and chef’s hat stared with watery eyes at the ass end of the bus. He said, “Well, that’s the official mark that summer is over, Maggie.” He lifted a bushy, black eyebrow and added, “They weren’t too bratty this year.”

  “They were good children,” Maggie said. Her small, brown eyes watered as she watched the bus leave.

  Ronald Parker stepped behind Maggie’s right shoulder and put on an act of kindly interest. He watched the bus pass under the arched gate that boasted Maggie Miller’s Double M Ranch in large iron wrought letters. When the bus disappeared behind a frieze of bristlecone pines, his cell phone vibrated again.

  Again, he ignored the phone.

  The staff filed quietly past him as they entered the main quarters. All of them gave him the once-over when they passed. Ronald ignored them and stared at the gate until he and Maggie were alone. Then Maggie turned and faced him. She was a thick woman, a foot shorter than he, and still twenty—she would have been ten years older than Ronald if she were still alive … and human. Shoulder-length auburn hair fell from her white cowboy hat and draped the top of her white, fringed leather jacket. Beneath the jacket was a red flannel shirt tucked into blue jeans that sported a belt with a buckle almost as large as the kind worn by wrestlers on TV. Hers, however, had a bucking bronco stallion on it. Her pants legs were tucked into brown, leather boots with thick heels that drummed—clomp-clomp—on the floorboards as she hurried against him.

  Her kiss was direct, her mouth hard against his, her hold as strong and capable of any worker who spent fifteen hours a day, cleaning stables, caring for horses and cattle, and helping to feed fifty children and three counselors June through August with three five-course meals a day. But Ronald knew that her strength came from more than just exercise.

  Despite her firmness and determination, he pushed away.

  “That’s not why I’m here, Maggie,” he said and tried to cough away the green smoke-like tendrils that swirled from her and entered his nose and mouth. The floor of the terrace had begun to tilt. He swayed now and fell into her embrace. She felt soft, the way he remembered.

  Everything seemed to happen instinctively and at once, though he would realize later that he had succumbed easily to her magic. When he reached and placed a palm firmly onto one of her breasts, she gripped his hand and led him around the main house—clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp-clomp—until they were inside her quarters and naked behind the locked door of her bedroom.

  In bed under the blanket, lying back, she gazed up at him with a look of silent pleading. Then her arms and tendrils were locked around him. He fell upon her and she felt soft and warm and very much like a living woman.

  Her tendrils entered him until he lost himself again. When his head finally cleared, he was on his back and she was sitting at the edge of the bed, her back facing him. Her shoulders shook. When he asked if she was okay, she turned and faced him. Terrible wet tears ran down her cheeks.

  “Why didn’t we make a proper go of it?” she said. “All those times growing up, why didn’t you fall in love and want to marry me?” She wept giant sobs.

  Ronald felt her control over him weaken enough for him to come to his senses and remember. He said, “Because you’re … you know … not human.”

  Maggie stopped crying. “It’s all been such a misery and a mess,” she said. “And now that I have you again, I have to use force. FORCE. Because you don’t love me, Ronny. After all these years of wanting you, waiting for you to return, I still don’t have you. Not unconditionally.”

  Ronald felt Maggie’s magical hold slip further. “I need your help,�
� he said. He started to sit up, but her tendrils billowed, filled his lungs and held him.

  “Maggie. Listen to me,” he cried out. The bed seemed to list then. He closed his eyes. “I didn’t come to you for sex.”

  “But you wanted it,” Maggie said. “I know you still dream of me, of how I seduced you back then.” She lay down next to him and ran her long tongue across his mouth. She said, “You may not love me, but we belong to each other, Ronny, united by our actions then … and now.”

  “You raped me, Maggie Miller,” he managed to say. The bed stopped moving. He opened his eyes and dared to look at her. She looked curious, not angry at his words. “But it wasn’t you … it wasn’t your fault,” he added. “It was the magic that made you do it, I know.” He squirmed and felt her hold tighten. “If I hadn’t insisted on going to Myers Ridge, you would still be alive.”

  Maggie peered up at him. “I love you, anyway,” she said. “I have always loved you.”

  “But it was me who caused it to happen,” he said.

  “Don’t.” She gave him a long sad look that made him drop his gaze.

  “No. This is wrong. This isn’t what I want,” he said. He tried to pull away. She pressed her forehead against his and there was a flash in his eyes. Suddenly, he was in the woods. He was sixteen years old again, and the misty green light swirled around her naked young body that stood before him. The green tendrils—not yet belonging to her—wafted their way to him and seemed to pull him to her, into her arms.

  He broke from her and somehow sidestepped the memory and returned to the present. He opened his eyes and saw that he was still in bed with her, still within her clutch. Despite the tinny taste of fear rising in his throat, delicious warmth radiated from her that he knew no other woman—alive or dead—possessed. All frustration, all antagonism dissolved.

  She said, “I’ve thought of that day often, how it could have been … how our lives could have been if you wouldn’t have become frightened and ran away.” She gazed into his stare. “Your fear … that frustration you caused … at the very moment of what could have been our consummation for life … it set us against one another, made you hate me.”

 

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