Haunted: Dark Delicacies® III

by Del Howison

  It was one of those large passenger vehicles like Greyhound used, except the front and side windows were not just tinted but blacked out. Music was blasting out of some hidden speakers, so loud it was almost distorted, yet the beat of it coincided with what she was hearing in her head. A random thought, so faint and distant that it seemed to come from a well inside her that was a mile deep, said that something was off about the whole thing, but she didn’t have time to wonder about it. The bus headed straight for her, and she jumped back just as it pulled up in front of her and the side door folded open.

  Sparkle immediately became enveloped in a burning cloud of scent not unlike dope—the good stuff, not the Mexican crap the beaners and the niggers at school were selling for a quarter a joint, but the quality Jamaican stuff she had been able to score once or twice from the guys who hung around the college when she was able to hitch a ride down there: the type of shit that gave Bob Marley brain cancer. She took a deep breath of it, letting it settle into her lungs, feeling the ganglia open, the synapses sparking.

  Nick got up on the first step of the bus, made a mock bow, and held his hand out to assist her up—courtly like a gentleman, grinning at her all the while. Sparkle noticed for the first time how pointed his teeth looked, how sharp, and wondered why they hadn’t cut her while he had been sucking on her nipples, on her clit. For just a second, her feet almost seemed to jump off her, running away of their own volition, but she overrode the impulse and stood there, wondering what was causing her to freak on some level.

  She suddenly remembered a dream she had had a couple of months before, about a magic bus coming out of the desert and taking her away from everything: her mom, her school, the boys who were always looking at her tits and never at her eyes. And here it was, right in front of her. There was dope—and it was good shit, heavy and sweet and totally, absolutely intoxicating—and now there was Nick, who looked like he had stepped right out of her wish book, standing at the top of the stairs leading up to the bus, one hand holding hers, the other on the old-folks rail, standing there, all of the answers to all of her problems.

  Sparkle stepped past Nick into the bus. The door folded shut and Nick was suddenly gone, swallowed up by the dark interior. She could barely see the driver, who smiled at her over a white shirt and dark tie and jacket, giving a jaunty wave and a “Welcome aboard!” even as she felt the bus begin to move beneath her.

  The odor of the ganja was overpowering and caused her to stumble as she made her way down the bus aisle. She turned around and Nick was gone, not just out of sight but gone, and she was standing alone in the aisle. She could make out dim shapes on either side of her, fuzzy and indistinct, and there was another smell now, one she was trying not to think about.

  Somehow, Nick was in front of her again, and he had her gently but firmly by the arm—almost as tight as Rod, she thought—and was walking her down the aisle, slowly. The aisle seemed to go on for a mile or two, and Sparkle thought that it must be the effect of the secondhand smoke from the dope; she wondered what it must be like to actually smoke the stuff. Nick seemed to know what she was thinking and winked at her, holding his finger up to his lips and smiling, playfully raising his eyebrows and wiggling them. It reminded her of that comedian, the one with the bushy eyebrows and mustache and cigar who was in the old black-and-white movies.

  The music was even louder now, dark and moody, like Bauhaus or Marilyn Manson, thumping so loud that it felt as if it was coming from within her instead of from the floor- and ceiling-mounted speakers she could barely make out in the corners of the bus. Sparkle wasn’t focused on the music, however.

  The other smell she had been trying to ignore was almost scrubbed out of the air by the odor of the marijuana, but it was something that bespoke of things dark and foul, and for just a second the odor got down into her stomach and flipped it over, almost making her want to throw up. It seemed to be coming from the seats on either side of the aisle, or rather, from the shapes in the seats. To Sparkle, the shapes looked like people sleeping, but there was something off about the whole thing. The seats looked as if they were stained with something dark in big splotches, and the people weren’t sitting in them, not exactly. It was more like they had been … stuck on them.

  Sparkle’s eyes suddenly focused in on the seats that were not seats; they looked more like teeth, with bodies in various states of rot and decay on them. They suddenly jumped into focus, as if a veil had lifted, and the shapes began to look familiar: one looked like Rod, and those two, across the aisle, looked like Cristos and another Native. All of them didn’t sit upright so much as … jiggled, as if they didn’t have any bones holding them together. Sparkle’s stomach lurched, and a scream rose up in her throat, but it died as Nick put his hand on her shoulder and turned her slowly to him.

  The light in his eyes caught her, impaled her, and from far away she heard him say softly, but somehow over the roar of the music, “You’re my starlet, and I’m your spaceboy.”

  Something soft broke inside of Sparkle, and then there was nothing, nothing but Nick and the music, the beautiful, loud, roaring music. Sparkle smiled at him and closed her eyes. She loved him so much. But she did not want to watch as Nick’s jaws closed over her head.

  A NASTY WAY TO GO

  ARDATH MAYHAR

  BEING A CONSTABLE in a bump in the road like Hackberry, Texas, is mostly boring. Drunks and wife beaters and kids who steal watermelons are about the worst criminals you ever set eyes on. Burglars wouldn’t find anything worth stealing here in the middle of the East Texas woods in the middle of a Depression that busted even the single local millionaire. Old Buzz Gurley never spent a dime anyway, so nobody missed any business he might have sent their way, and nobody else had much more than a nickel for a can of Levi Garrett Snuff.

  The Pindars, though—nobody had a clue how they were making out. In a town of two hundred people, everybody knows everybody else’s business, but the Pindars had been a mystery ever since the old man’s grandpa moved here over a generation ago. Nobody knew how he got the money he used to buy their farm, but there must have been enough to allow his widow to control her sons and their wives for over fifty years. And she drove those people like a hitch of mules, as if they had no say in their own lives. Long as she lived she held the whip hand over her grandsons too.

  The question of the Pindar money, whether it existed or not, about drove a generation of old geezers at the barbershop crazy. Their sons were still at it when I was a boy, jawing away with guesses and getting no answers, and it looked as if their grandsons might still be doing it when they got old—if we all didn’t starve to death in the meantime. There were four Pindars still living, but two of those moved away up north as soon as their grandmaw died and never came back. We were left with Dennis Pindar and his wife, Gladys, and she was a pistol, you’d better believe.

  She used to beat the bejeezus out of Dennis every Wednesday night after prayer meeting at the Baptist church, that being almost the only time they ever went off their own land. What there was about prayer meeting that always set her off, I couldn’t tell you. Nobody else could, either, because that was the only time they showed up, though the way the preacher kept mentioning tithing and offerings and slanting his eyes at them, we were all pretty sure they never gave him anything.

  There’s nothing in the world, I’d guess, that frustrates folks like something they can’t have—or can’t find out. What little the Pindars bought in Hackberry they paid for in old, wrinkled, musty-smelling greenbacks. As not one of them had ever had a lick of work except on that farm, and as they never produced anything extra to sell, the townsfolk couldn’t figure where those greenbacks came from. There was talk of a trunk full of money somewhere on that farm, but as nobody ever succeeded in getting past the front porch, or at the most the front parlor, they couldn’t even guess where that trunk might be. If it existed at all, of course.

  Being a kid in the early days, I didn’t pay much attention to the gossip in the barbershop
or on the porch in the evening. Not until I was twenty-six and they got me appointed constable was there any reason for me to pay any attention to such things. But when the county decided to put a constable in Hackberry to cover the twenty miles of surrounding farm and woodland, the three old guys who ran things in town didn’t want that man to be an alien, which anybody from outside our exact area was considered to be.

  I was the right age, the right size (big and strong), and not bright enough to realize what a bore the job would be. I was cutting firewood at the time to trade for garden produce or corn or whatever foodstuff folks could spare, because there were just no jobs to be had. I’d even thought about moving to one of the bigger towns, like Tyler or even Dallas, and I jumped at the chance to make that fifteen dollars a month. I have to admit that my job began pretty excitingly, too, thanks to Gladys Pindar.

  You have to remember that this was 1933. Nobody that far out in the country had telephones or electric lights or any modern conveniences to speak of. So when little Uneeda Ralston came pounding up to Ma’s front door that Wednesday night, his eyes wide in his mahogany face, and yelled that Miz Pindar was likely going to kill her husband if somebody didn’t come right quick, I was pretty happy to be needed. I took Papa’s old Colt .45 and set out after the boy through a big patch of woods, across a creek and a field, and onto the Pindar property. Near as it was, I’d never been there before, because Ma didn’t like Gladys one bit.

  That meant that I saw for the first time the famous windmill that pumped water into a tank on a tall metal frame, giving the Pindars running water inside the house. I had heard the rumors that they shit inside the house! Which seemed unreasonable to a boy raised with the old reliable privy, though Pa had explained the principle of a septic tank. It still seemed unsanitary to me.

  I didn’t have time to gawk at the windmill, though, for it sounded as if a war was raging inside the big house with the dog-run down the middle. Screams, some of rage and some of pain, were mixed with bangs and clatters and the sounds of breaking glass. If they did this every week, I couldn’t see how they might have anything breakable left. Still, I gulped once, got out the Colt and checked the load, and moved toward the scene of battle. The boy crept behind me, at a safe distance.

  As I climbed the steps, a fruit jar came whizzing out of the open door and shattered against one of the porch posts. I figured it was time to stop this, so I yelled, “Mister and Miz Pindar, this is Cal Hampton, the new constable. Please quiet down so I can talk to you. This is no way to settle anything. Come on out here—or I’ll come in, if that’s all right with you.”

  There was no answer, but the noise stopped, so I took that as an invitation to come in. That room was a mess! Broken glass, furniture upside down, they’d spared nothing. It was a good thing the coal oil lamp that lit the place was way up on a shelf or they’d have burnt the house down. I squinted through the dimness to find some human shape, but one poked me in the chest. I looked down and there was a tiny little woman, still young, who weighed maybe eighty pounds; she was glaring up at me with black eyes that could have drilled through cast iron.

  “What business is it of yours, boy?” she shrilled.

  Behind her there was movement, and a lanky young man dragged himself onto a battered sofa and groaned. “How ’bout savin’ my life?” he croaked. “That seems to be somethin’ the law should take some notice of.”

  I never really heard anybody grind their teeth before, but she did, and it wasn’t a nice sound at all. She drew back her arm, and I didn’t like the look of her fist. I could see its marks all over her husband, and I didn’t want to carry her brand on my hide, so I reached down and lifted her and set her down beside Dennis. It was like handling an angry cat, but I managed without getting scratched or bit, which was something of a marvel all by itself.

  Well, that was my first encounter with that pair, and I managed to get them settled down without any more bloodshed. But I knew it wouldn’t last, and it didn’t. Dennis wouldn’t leave his family farm, and she wouldn’t quit wiping up the floor with him every Wednesday night, so I quit bothering with them at all. I figured if they killed each other it would be a good thing, all around.

  Things rocked along normally after I quit trying to tame the Pindars. The public works programs began to hire men to build some roads and bridges and even put up nice little roadside parks, with stone tables and benches, and people stopped having to live on catfish and possums and garden sass. I got married and moved into my own home, had a few kids, and kept an eye out for moonshiners and watermelon thieves.

  ’Course there were always families like the Peddys and the Venders, who took advantage of every chance to make trouble, but I knew how to handle those. I’d just grab the first Peddy or Vender I could locate and whip the bejeezus out of him, and the rest would settle down for a month or two. It was a shame I couldn’t do that to Gladys Pindar, I often thought, but the one thing that was knocked into me from my first birthday was that you couldn’t go hitting a girl or a woman. Just couldn’t seem to get over that, though I knew many a man who whipped his wife regular and never got any jaw about it.

  By the time the Second World War came along, I was just beyond the draft age and had a family, so the draft board let me be. Nobody else wanted my job, as I now made only about thirty dollars a month, which was just about survivable if you raised your own vegetables and meat. All in all, I was better off than anybody I knew had been for a long time, and though there were now kids who drove their dads’ cars too fast on our dirt roads and wound up in ditches, things were fairly calm.

  Then the government decided to put a prisoner-of-war camp in the middle of the woods about six miles from Hackberry. In a way, that was good. They needed workers to build the road to it as well as a narrow-gauge railroad line to carry away the timber those prisoners were supposed to harvest. There were a lot of mixed feelings about that. The old geezers in the barbershop, all of them past doing any work to speak of, were mighty skeptical about lodging a bunch of young, strong Germans way out here where our young women had never known anybody but neighbors and kinfolk. Most of us married cousins of some kind, simply because there wasn’t anybody else to marry, and gasoline was rationed so nobody traveled much. And with the draft taking all the young men into the army, even I could see that having so many strangers so near might be a problem the government never thought about.

  I never dreamed what a problem it would be. I spent a lot of time rounding up girls who were out picking blackberries (even when they were out of season) and got themselves hung up in sawvines and thickets. I spent some time locating POWs who had no problem getting out of the stockade around the prison camp—one reason it was placed out here was that there was noplace to go. Once they were in the woods, they had no idea how to handle themselves in the sort of wild woods East Texas produces. Even the ones who had been country boys were used to tame forests, and they were mighty glad to be taken back home to their camp, believe me. They might have been hunting girls, but what they got was chiggers and water moccasins and bobcats.

  All this meant that I didn’t get around to the barbershop and the Baptist church nearly as much as I used to, and for a year I didn’t think once about the Pindars. That was why it came as a shock when Mattie, my wife (and third cousin), said one evening at supper, “You know, Cal, the Pindars haven’t been to prayer meeting for a month. Miz Carey even suggested we send somebody out to check on ’em, but we couldn’t get anyone to volunteer. Gladys is such a mean little woman, we can’t know what she might do.”

  That came as a bit of a shock. The weekly Pindar appearance at prayer meeting and the follow-up beating were as much a part of our world as the mosquitoes and the heat.

  “You want me to go out there and see about ’em?” I asked her. “That would be a nice change. I’m just about worn out with chasing girls and Germans through the woods, I have to admit. It will surprise me if we don’t have a crop of big blond babies in the next year, ’cause there’s no way o
ne man could keep up with what’s goin’ on.”

  She leaned over and squeezed my hand. “I’d appreciate it, Cal. Somehow when something that has seemed as regular a sunrise all of a sudden stops happening, it shakes you up. Maybe one of them is sick, or she has finally killed him….” She went silent, as if her own words had scared her.

  The next morning I set out for the Pindars. I now lived in Hackberry instead of on Papa’s farm, so it took me a while to drive the 1930 Plymouth over the rutted roads and through the wagon track that led through the woods to their house. It was around 8:30 when I pulled up in front of the gate and honked the horn. That isn’t polite, I know, but too many of the country folks keep a dog that’ll eat your leg off while you’re trying to introduce yourself. No dog showed itself or barked, and nobody came to the door, so I got out and went into the yard.

  “Miz Pindar? This is Cal Hampton!” I yelled, not knowing just what sort of firearms she might have in the house. “Mister Pindar? You all right?”

  There was a long silence. Then feet tap-tapped toward the door, which opened a crack.

  “We’re fine. Go away!” that unforgettable voice snapped.

  “Folks kind of got worried about you when you quit comin’ to prayer meeting,” I said as soothingly as I could.

  “Tell them we’re just fine. We need nothing at all, now or ever. Now go away.”

  I did, because that woman had more authority in her little finger than General Rommel did in his entire body. And there things stood for several months, because my work got more complicated when they assigned me to help out with Precinct Three, whose constable had been drafted.