The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Where are the kids, old man?” he asked her, and, before she replied, he had gone along to the nursery. He saw the two cots, his boy in one, his girl in the other. He turned whimsically to Mildred, saying, “There are only two, are there?” Such a question did not call for reply, but he confronted her as if expecting some assuring answer. She was staring at him with her bright beautiful eyes.

  “Are there?” he repeated.

  “How strange you should ask me that now!” she said.… “If you’re a very good man … perhaps …”

  “Mildred!”

  She nodded brightly.

  He sat down in the rocking chair, but got up again saying to her gently—“We’ll call him Gabriel.”

  “But, suppose——”

  “No, no,” he said, stopping her lovely lips, “I know all about him.” And he told her a pleasant little tale.

  THE LOST BOY OF THE OZARKS

  Steve Friedman

  A LIFELONG AFICIONADO OF ghost stories who used to scare his charges while a camp counselor by telling them tales of supernatural beings that go bump in the night, Steve Friedman (1955–) was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and graduated from Stanford University. He left his graduate work at the University of Missouri School of Journalism to take a job at the Columbia (Missouri) Daily Tribune, where he worked for five years before becoming editor in chief at St. Louis Magazine and then senior editor at GQ. He has been a full-time writer since 1997, his work appearing in such publications as Esquire, Outside, and The New York Times; he is a writer-at-large for Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Backpacker. Many of his stories have been anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing, The Best of Outside, and, eight times, in The Best American Sports Writing. He has written five books, including Driving Lessons (2011) and Lost on Treasure Island: A Memoir of Longing, Love, and Lousy Choices in New York City (2011).

  “The Lost Boy of the Ozarks” is the first piece of fiction ever to appear in Backpacker magazine. When the editors requested a story with the only guideline being that it had to be mysterious and have something to do with the outdoors, Friedman combined his affection for ghost stories with a book he was reading at the time, Tana French’s Into the Woods, from which he (admittedly) stole the powerful idea of two children walking into the woods and never returning. Adding his own experiences as a journalist completed the tale.

  “The Lost Boy of the Ozarks” was originally published in the November 2009 issue of Backpacker.

  The Lost Boy

  of the Ozarks

  STEVE FRIEDMAN

  GOODNIGHT HOLLOW, MISSOURI—A boy walked into the woods and no one worried. In those days, five-year-olds skinned squirrels and giggled and a child could open a sow’s throat with a single steady swipe. Before they were taught figures, daughters learned how to season steaming possum meat. Sons of slaves plowed the rocky soil and mothers bled to death in childbirth and if a little girl cut her finger, and the cut oozed green and the finger swelled, then her father measured the child and he started nailing together a tidy box of pine.

  In the hidden hollows of Missouri’s Ozark Mountains, which is where the boy lived, times were hard. It was 1903 and the boy had just turned eight, but there was game to hunt, hogs to butcher, and there was no pine box or preacher or slab of limestone to mark the boy’s passing, because there was no boy. The woods had claimed him. Adults paid respect in private, on sagging elm porches, late at night, over lonely, guttering flames. They remembered the child’s pale green eyes, the coonskin cap he always wore. They remarked that his stutter must have made his short childhood more difficult than most. Wives murmured to husbands that the missing boy was surely in a happier place, but what they remembered was that their own children had avoided the boy the way pack animals avoided the diseased and the crippled; that ever since the boy was born, he had carried in his downcast gaze something ghostly and damned.

  Time passed, and when visitors from nearby Chestnutridge and Reeds Spring and Abesville found themselves walking in the woods where the boy had disappeared, they remembered beatings they had suffered when they were young and worse, they suddenly thought of the welts they had left on their children’s flesh. They conjured visions of their little boys’ and girls’ quivering lips. Mothers looked up through the thick, fetid canopy toward a sunny and benign forgiveness they longed for but which the woods made them doubt, and they blinked back tears. Fathers heard the wind make ghastly, forlorn noises in the trees and the men felt cold, and then the strangers hurried out of the woods and after awhile, very few walked in those woods at all, though no one could explain exactly why. More time passed, and then the only reminder of what had happened was the way some of the stooped, white-haired waitresses at Gus’s Diner, hard on State Highway 176, would squeeze their lips together whenever a family with a little boy with brown hair and pale green eyes would sit down at a table. And sometimes if the boy giggled, one of the ancient waitresses would have to take a cigarette break, and tourists would see her outside, sitting on a pine bench, her shoulders silently convulsing.

  Then even the old waitresses died off and mountains of Oklahoma dust swirled over the land and noontime turned to night. The Great Depression came and engineers built Bagnell Dam and, later, developers carved Branson out of the state’s blood-soaked red soil and Midwestern millionaires started flocking to The Lake of the Ozarks and in the midst of violin-playing Japanese and joke-telling Russians and cigarette-shaped speedboats that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, people forgot all about the little boy who walked into the woods and never came out.

  Time passed and life wasn’t as hard anymore, and a family from Eureka Springs, Arkansas, just across Missouri’s southern border, drove north to St. Louis to visit relatives, and after an hour on the road, the father, who was behind the wheel, pulled over at a shady spot and he announced to his wife and two children that The Gateway to the West could wait a couple days, because they were going on a little adventure first. The kids groaned and the man’s wife smiled a hidden smile—she was in on the plan and she loved her husband’s belief in the healing properties of the outdoors.

  The little girl, five years old, had long red hair and freckles and wore sandals with sunflowers separating her big and second toes. The brown-haired, green-eyed boy was wearing blue shorts and a blue T-shirt and blue sneakers. He had just turned eight. They were bareheaded, so mom slathered them with sunscreen while dad pulled backpacks and sleeping bags from the trunk.

  Fifteen minutes into the woods, the boy cried out. He shouted that something had grabbed his hand and tried to pull him into the bushes. Dad chuckled and told the child that it was probably a branch—it was mid-April, and the woods were lush—and that even if it wasn’t, if the boy stayed on the trail, none of the monsters in the wood could get to him, because wood monsters didn’t like trails, and that outraged the boy, who said it wasn’t just a branch, it was a skinny kid in a furry hat, and why did no one ever believe him, it wasn’t fair! He said the skinny kid had been following them ever since they walked into the woods.

  “He’s right, I saw him, too,” the little girl said, and the mother decided the children were hungry and it might be a good idea to stop and have some fruits and nuts. But the father thought that children should not be catered to—that certainly their fears should not be indulged—so he insisted they walk another fifteen minutes into the woods. The mother bit her lip and went along—starting an argument wouldn’t help things—and she made sure she kept the kids in sight, because now she was sure her son and daughter were fatigued, too, and when they were hungry and tired, they tended to hit each other, and then, for no reason at all, she remembered hitting her little sister when she was barely old enough to talk, and she thought about the last argument they had, and before she knew it, she felt a sob lodged in her throat and she squeezed her eyes shut to get hold of herself. When she opened them, she caught a glimpse of movement sneaky and swift in the bushes next to her child and she yelped, which made both kids scream.
/>
  Mom broke out the fruit and nuts, and the family sat in a tight little circle on the trail and no matter how much they ate, and no matter how many times the father told the kids about the great marshmallows they would roast that night, and how they would be able to look up and see stars, the kids wouldn’t stop crying. The wind was picking up, too, and it was getting colder. Mom took her husband’s hand and she squeezed it and she raised her eyebrows, and he knew what that meant. They walked back to the car and all of them felt something chilly and damp on the back of their necks, like something was watching them. Maybe next year they would sleep under the stars.

  They drove a few minutes, around a bend, and stopped at Gus’s Diner for lunch, and while mom and dad drank iced tea and discussed mom’s no-good shiftless ex-husband and argued about how much time they had to spend with him and his sleazy, chain-smoking cocktail waitress girlfriend in St. Louis, the little boy said he was bored. Take your sister and go look at the fish in the stream just outside the backdoor, the father said, because he wanted the kids to forget about whatever had given them such a fright in the woods. Fifteen minutes later, after mom and dad had reached an uneasy peace about her no-good ex and his shiftless girlfriend—who had invited the whole family up to St. Louis for a let’s-get-to-know-each-other-better visit, after all—a woman at another table screamed. The visitors from Eureka Springs looked up and there was their little girl, staring into the jukebox. She was barefoot, rocking back and forth, humming. Her parents thought an animal had climbed onto her head, but then they looked closer and they saw it was just a coonskin cap. But what had happened to her sandals? Why was she humming? Was that mud on her legs, and why was it red? And where was her big brother?

  This time, the cops were called. Times had changed, even in the Ozarks, so of course sex offenders were interviewed. Television crews drove from Kansas City and Springfield and St. Louis, and the hoteliers and restaurateurs of nearby Branson refused to appear on camera, because a missing kid was terrible, but business was business. A newspaper editor in Columbia, in central Missouri, saw one of the spots about “Little Boy Blue,” as the missing child was already being called, on the 5 p.m. KSDK news show from St. Louis, and it made her think of something. She had taken a class in “Rural Anthropology and Folklore” at the University of Missouri before she became a newspaperwoman and the news reminded her of a lecture she had heard—an obscure tall tale about a mysterious little boy in a coonskin cap. That excited her, in the way that missing children and creepy coincidences excited newspaper editors, especially back then, in 1980, when newspapering was an exciting thing to do. She pulled her ace cops reporter, a gregarious and chain-smoking Irishman named Kevin Gerrity who typed with two fingers, off his beat and told him to work the search angle hard. She took the statehouse reporter, a bookish second generation Armenian named Edward Alouisious Dorian who wore heavily starched white shirts and spoke with a formality the other reporters snickered about, and whom they all called Deadline Ed behind his back, and she told him she wanted to know everything there was to know about the missing kid’s family, that Deadline should pack a toothbrush and be in Eureka Springs by dinnertime. The editor wanted something on the creepy historical angle, too, and some local color on the woods and the rednecks who lived there, but the only person she had left to send anywhere was a cub reporter with an overactive imagination and a nasty drinking habit, a dreamy mope she had been thinking of firing almost since the day she had hired him.

  That’s where I come in.

  I covered the animal beat. I wrote stories about trick pigs and clever ferrets. I covered jumping frog contests and birthday parties for overweight cats. If there was a fire, and a pet, and survivors, it was my byline on the piece. (“Snuffy the rabbit smelled smoke and bleated. And in that magical moment, with that simple utterance, Snuffy was forever transformed from mere friend to beloved and immortal big-eared hero.”)

  Animals didn’t talk, so I didn’t have to interview them. Animals didn’t sue, so I didn’t have to worry too much about getting facts straight. The animal beat provided a safe place for a reporter like me, who, in his first two weeks on the job, had misspelled a city councilman’s name, reported that a chamber of commerce director had been sued for sexual harassment when he hadn’t, and who had shown up for work late and hungover four times. I had been at the Columbia Daily Tribune for just a year and was already, barely twenty-five, a floridly failing cub reporter. I suspect that Carolyn “Sissy” White, the editor, was hoping I’d become so humiliated at writing about hamsters and puppies that I’d quit. She overestimated my sense of personal dignity.

  “I want atmosphere,” she said, after she had summoned me to her office.

  “Got it,” I said. “Can do.”

  “And leave out the telepathic Shih Tzus, okay?”

  “Hey, c’mon, my Jim the Wonder Dog feature won second place in the Boone County Press Asso——”

  “All I want is a mood piece. A solid mood piece. With actual facts. No animals.”

  “Got it, boss. Can do.”

  “And no drinking. If I even suspect you’ve been juicing, you’re going to wish you were writing about mind-reading squirrels. You think the animal beat’s bad? I find out you’re hitting the bottle, you’re going to be interviewing farmers at the state fair about their prize-winning giant vegetables.”

  “You’re not going to regret this, Sissy. I’m gonna give you thirty inches of gold.”

  “Just get your ass down there, and don’t screw up.”

  “Can do. Hold page one, above the fold,” I said, and Sissy sighed.

  I drove through long stretches of flat land and grey, hard sky. The roads were newly paved, but the houses alongside were sagging, peeling. I crossed two rivers, listened to a local call-in show where a listener drove the host to sputtering by insisting that Christmas was nothing but a pagan ritual with roots “that had nothing to do with baby Jesus and everything to do with cold, dark, and frightened losers who badly wanted some grog and song.” I reached for the six-pack I always kept underneath the front seat, until I remembered that I hadn’t brought it this time.

  I had the road mostly to myself, and the occasional hawk circling overhead, and gangs of large black crows that descended, picked at some unlucky skunk’s remains, then flapped heavily away. The few cars I passed could have come from the same church service, bought their cars at the same used car lot, descended from the same bitter, wind-beaten pioneers. The children in the backseat were blonde, puffy, moon-faced. I counted eight cars in one hundred twenty miles.Eight weary and resentful, vaguely malevolent-looking families. They all squinted. By the time I arrived at Gus’s diner, I needed a drink.

  Instead, I ordered a burger and a cup of coffee. I said “please” and “thank you” to the waitress, who didn’t say anything back, or call me “hon” or do anything I thought rural waitresses were supposed to do. She was slim and had pale blue eyes and I wondered if she had been working when the couple from Eureka Springs lost their son. I wondered what they said when they saw their daughter, with blood-smeared legs. I wondered what song was playing on the juke box, whether the freaked-out little girl had even heard the music. I wondered what kind of tests the cops had done on the coonskin cap and if anyone besides me and my folklore-loving editor knew about the spooky kid from 1903. I didn’t ask the waitress any questions, just ate my burger and drank my coffee and looked around the place. I saw Formica tables, and knotty wood walls and in back a bald man in a dirty white T-shirt muttering and moving jars from shelf to shelf. I made a note to myself to find out what kind of wood the walls were made of. That would help with the atmosphere.

  It was dusk, and the gravel parking lot was fading into nothingness and the only sounds were a gentle breeze slithering through the woods outside, and, occasionally, the whispery rubber of a car passing on the highway. When that happened, the bald man and the waitress would both look out the front window, and then—was it my imagination?—they would both check over their s
houlders, toward the back of the restaurant, and the river, and the woods beyond.

  The waitress refilled my mug.

  “Best not go in there” she said, jerking her head toward the back of the restaurant, toward the woods.

  “What?!??”

  “Anything else?” she asked, in a normal, pleasant, I’m-just-a-waitress-and-not-some-hillbilly-from-a-horror-movie voice.

  “Don’t go in where? Why? What’s going on?” I said.

  She stared at me.

  I noticed her looking at the counter and I followed her gaze. She was gazing at my hands, which were trembling.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah, yeah, fine, I’m fine,” I lied. Then, because I needed to say something and because I didn’t think it was the best time to be revealing the real reason for my visit—that I was here to investigate a missing little boy, and to tie it to another child’s disappearance that happened almost one hundred years ago and while I was at it to write a story and to reclaim a prematurely wrecked career and oh, yeah, somehow stop drinking—I told her I was down for some rest and relaxation, and that I was looking for a place to stay.

  “Only place to stay around here is Gus’s,” she said.

  “I thought this was Gus’s.”

  “This is Gus’s diner. I mean Gus’s hotel, a hundred feet up the highway, just ’round that corner. Easy to miss, so look out for the sign,” she said.

  The peeling sign said “rooms” and I asked for one.

  “A-yup,” said Gus, or Gus’s employee, as he pulled a key from a wooden slot behind him. Knotty pine? Walnut? Elm? I would have to check that out.

  “Pretty country here,” I said, trying to establish my wilderness bona fides, which I sorely lacked, having spent exactly one night outdoors, when I was a Cub Scout. I contracted poison oak on that trip, and my mother yanked me from the organization, right when I was on the verge of becoming a Webelo. That’s when I started my clarinet lessons.