The Big Book of Ghost Stories

by Otto Penzler

  “Some times,” said Gus.

  “People go hiking around here?”

  Gus looked like he had just eaten a piece of bad squirrel meat.

  “You plannin’ to go into the woods, mister?”

  No one had ever called me mister.

  “Maybe,” I said. (I had promised Sissy I would spend a night in the woods. We knew I wasn’t going to find the kid, who had been gone for three days now. But we also knew that missing children moved product.)

  “Not so smart.”

  “Why do you say that, Gus?”

  “Ain’t Gus,” he said. “You’re not Gus?”

  He spat something behind the counter. “Ain’t no Gus,” he said. “Ain’t been no Gus for a long time. People call me BC.”

  I didn’t sleep well that night. It wasn’t the cars passing on the highway, or the way their headlights cut through my flimsy puke green curtains and flooded my second-floor room with light. It wasn’t the shakes—I had learned to live with the shakes from the other times I’d gone on the wagon. It wasn’t even the tinny, desolate sounds of BC’s television set drifting from behind the counter, up the stairs.

  It was the noise from the woods: It was the river gurgling, and twigs rustling, and the wind through the trees, and creaking. It was a hiss and crack that made me think of a bullwhip snapping, and a low, soft moaning. It was a thin, reedy whimpering that haunts me to this day, an eerie and primal noise that I wish I would have listened to more closely. If I had, if I had been able to comprehend what the thing in the woods was saying, would things have turned out differently?

  “Huh huh huh,” the thing from the woods cried. “Huh huh huh huh.”

  There was longing in the sound, and anger, and fear. It sounded like a person, urgently alive, and yet there was something inhuman about it, too, something older than the sky, sadder than the wind.

  Or maybe this is what the Ozarks sounded like, particularly to someone detoxing from too much booze. I put my pillow over my ears, but it was no use. The sound continued.

  “Huh huh huh. Huh huh huh huh.”

  I called the newsroom the next day morning.

  “What have you got?” Sissy asked.

  I didn’t mention the sounds.

  “Great stuff,” I lied. “Lots of local color, and some fascinating characters. Plus, some local mysteries. There’s a place called Gus’s, without a Gus, and a restaurant where the waitress and the dishwasher—or maybe he’s the owner—look at the woods every time a car goes by and.…”

  “Have you been drinking?”

  “No, I told you. I’m done …”

  “Have you been anywhere other than your hotel and the place you’ve been eating?”

  “You said you wanted a mood piece, right? I’m gathering mood.”

  “Where was the last place the kid was seen?”

  “He was walking out the diner, toward the river.”

  “And what’s next to the river?”

  I didn’t like where this conversation was going. I didn’t like it at all.

  “The woods?” I said. It came out as a question.

  “You planning to go there?”

  “Well, of course I’m planning to go there. But I need to find a guide, and I need to bone up on some of the local law enforcement angles. And I want to survey the land for.…”

  “Call me by the end of the week,” she said. “You better have a story about camping out where the kid disappeared.”

  I walked to the diner to consider my options, and to have some pancakes and coffee. Option one: Cozy up to BC, pull some town gossip out of him, and call Sissy on Friday with some tales of tight-lipped, flinty-eyed locals and the sad knowledge they shared. I had made it a point whenever I was writing about people in towns of less than 5,000, or owners of trick pigs and/or telepathic dogs, to refer to them as “locals.” Or “folks.” But instead of “shared,” I would make it “bound them together.” That would be good. But it would also be dangerous. What if Sissy liked my mood piece and sent a photographer down to snap pictures of some of the bound-together-by-sad-knowledge folks and those folks mentioned, that a-nope, that coffee-drinking fella with the little notebook didn’t take one step into the woods, that he barely made it off the stool one single time, but a-yup, he sure could put away a lot of flapjacks. Option two: Take my waterproof matches and my poncho and down coat that I had packed and cross the shallow stream and then tromp into the leafy dense hilly woods on the other side. Spend a night in the land where even from my hotel room I had heard all manner of screams and moans and what sounded like a bullwhip. That would certainly provide some local color. Downside: I would probably die. Option three: Have a beer. Then another beer. Then another one. And a few more.

  I chose option four. I always chose option four. Option four had long been my fallback option. Option four took some time, but it bought time. Option number four was my speciality: More research and reporting.

  When the blue-eyed waitress brought me my pancakes, I asked if I could ask her a question.

  “You’re a reporter,” she said. “Isn’t that what you do?”

  “How’d you know I was a reporter?”

  “Everyone around here knows you’re a reporter. Since that poor child went missing, that’s the only people been coming round here. Ain’t no tourists anymore. Certainly not any families.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’m a reporter. Have you heard anything about what might have happened to the ki—… to the little boy?”

  “Probably got lost in the woods. It happens.”

  “It does?”

  “You’re funny, Mr. Reporter,” she said. “You think you’re going to find that little boy, do you?”

  “No, I’m just here to do a moo—… I mean, to write something about the area. You know any place within a few miles that might sell trail maps of the area?”

  I heard a sharp hacking noise and looked into the back of the restaurant. There was the dishwasher/owner/bald hairy armed guy, bent over and coughing. Or laughing.

  “No trail maps around here,” Blue Eyes told me. “You want to know about trails, or anything to do with those woods, you need to talk to Mrs. Loomis, the retired librarian who lives down in Goodnight Hollow, not far from Walnut Shade.

  I pictured a grey-haired, muffin-faced crone. I saw piles of knitting needles and gangs of house cats.

  “How do I get in touch with her?” I asked.

  “You don’t have to,” the waitress said. “I already did.”

  The river road was empty and quiet, and I drove through patches of blinding sun and shade dark as night, until the notion of a sunny day seemed a distant, hazy memory. I saw the hand-lettered sign for Country Road EE, and pulled off the pot-holed, single-lane pavement onto what looked like a driveway, but was another paved road. That gave way to gravel and the gravel to dirt. The dirt was hard-packed, and ahead smoke curled up out of the brick chimney. Dead petunias were scattered on the side of a white frame house.

  She opened the door without looking through any peephole that I could see, or asking who had knocked, or doing any of the other things that might have been prudent for a woman living in a region where kids went missing and things cried in the night.

  She had braces and slim ankles, and the rest of her was covered in a long navy blue skirt and an expensive-looking black cashmere sweater. She could have been thirty-five, or forty-five. She turned the corners of her mouth up, and showed just a little bit of metal and tooth, but I wouldn’t call it a smile. She had brown bangs as fashionable as any magazine model I’d ever seen in a magazine, and they framed high cheekbones and hazel eyes. In the white of her left eye was a popped blood vessel that made a tiny explosion of red, perfectly matching her lipstick.

  I was staring at the flash of red in her eye when she said something.

  “What?”

  “I said, ‘Can I help you with something?’ ”

  She didn’t know who I was.

  “I’m the reporter,” I sa
id.

  “The reporter?”

  “Uh,” I said, “the one who’s reporting the disappearance of the little boy?”

  She coughed. Or was she stifling a giggle?

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Beatrice called me about you. I’ve been out of sorts. I had meant to have some things to show you, but my prints were late, and, well, you can imagine. Can I get you something to drink? English Breakfast tea? Coffee?”

  She turned, did something to a vase on a table. The hair at the back of her neck had been hacked off.

  She turned again, put her hands on her hips and smiled. Her eyes were like marbles—lovely, cold, and lifeless.

  “What do you think?” she asked, flouncing what hair was left.

  “It’s great,” I lied.

  “You’re lying, but that’s okay.” Before I could answer, she’d taken my hand and pulled me toward the kitchen. “Let’s have some tea before we talk,” she said.

  I told her tea would be fine, as I wondered what had been getting her out of sorts, besides disappearing children and spooky woods. I also wondered what prints she was talking about, and what a nice looking woman with braces and tea was doing living in the muddy, malodorous backwoods of the Show Me state. And where was Mr. Loomis?

  “You like being a reporter?” she asked, as we sat down.

  “Yeah, for the most part,” I said. It was my standard answer to people who didn’t know me or my work, equal parts world-weariness, sensitivity to others’ pain, and a doomed but undying determination to make the world a better place. I didn’t mention Jim the Wonder Dog, or Snuffy the Miracle Rabbit.

  She smiled, but her eyes were still inert hazel aggies. I tried to smile back, but there was sweat beading on my forehead. I wiped it away with my left hand and almost gagged. I smelled something rotting and maggoty. It was a humid odor, ripe, like a body left too long in a hothouse, or a swamp. Was it coming from the librarian, or my hand, that she had held? “This will make you feel better,” she said, as she pushed a steaming mug toward me.

  “I had a long night,” I said, “and I’ve been putting in some long hours on this story.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said, “the story. Have you found the little boy yet?”

  “No, and I’m not going to. I’m not here to find the lit——”

  “What if I could lead you to him?”

  Maybe that’s the moment I should have called the local cops, or at least checked in with Deadline Ed, or Kev. Maybe I should have called Sissy. Maybe I should have told the weird librarian she scared me, and I didn’t know what she was talking about, and the hacked hair and dead flowers and all the print talk and the bad smell in her house was starting to creep me out, and I should just leave her alone and get back to town. And maybe if I had done any of that, things wouldn’t have turned out how they did. I’ve always pondered the maybes of my life. It’s never helped.

  “Lead me to him? Sure, lead me to him. Right. Let’s go.”

  She took my hand and pulled me out the back door. Black clouds had piled upon each other and they sat, bullying and sullen, on the western horizon. We walked around the farmhouse, to a small path in the woods that abutted the backyard. My shirt stuck to my back. Streaks of lightning cut through the clouds, but I heard no thunder.

  I watched her walk ahead of me.

  “My ex said I was hallucinating,” she said. “He told me no one lived in the woods, that it was just coyotes. He told me I was hearing what I wanted to hear.”

  She said this in the same tone of voice she’d used to tell me that she was waiting on her prints. I looked at the back of her haircut. What was the deal with that? That’s when I heard the huh-huh-huh sound again.

  We had walked fifty yards down the path. What had seemed like a cute little trail had turned into an overgrown, weed-choked passage into a dark, dank jungle. I knew there couldn’t be a jungle in mid-Missouri. I knew that the huh-huh-huh couldn’t be a monster’s growl, that it was more likely the mating grunt of some smallish Ozarks rodent. In a minute, Mrs. Loomis would show me the animal and I would note its fuzzy ears and its cute wet nose and its funny little paws. It would help my mood piece.

  Sweat dripped into my eyes. The jungle was getting darker, and more dank. The huh-huh-huh was getting louder. This was more mood than I needed.

  After a quarter mile, the trail ended at a small pile of ash, what looked like a rudimentary barbecue pit, at the northern tip of an oblong clearing twenty feet by fifteen feet.

  I saw blood. I smelled meat.

  The wind had picked up. I thought I heard small and not so small animals chattering and shrieking. I tried to get a fix on the clouds, but the horizon had disappeared. We were deeper into the forest than I’d thought. Fat, cold drops of water fell on us. I had never felt such heavy rain.

  “Huh-huh-huh-huh,” the woods cried. I heard movement in the bushes.

  She grasped my hand again. When I turned toward her, she was peering into the woods. I followed her eyes and thought I saw a flash of fur, a shy, greenish quivering.

  “What’s that?” I croaked.

  “What?”

  “In the woods.”

  She turned to me. What was the expression on her face? Amusement? Regret? Despair? “It’s okay,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Everything will be okay. Don’t worry.”

  She took my face in her hands. They were like ice. I couldn’t remember why I was here. Why had we come this way? Why was she looking at me so strangely? The rain continued, heavy as sin, loud as a guilty conscience. Cutting through the sound of rain, something worse. Something remorseless: “Huh-huh-huh HUH.”

  There was rattling behind the tree, then primal, urgent moaning.

  “We’d better go,” she said. “Leave him be.”

  The dizziness got worse, until I thought I might fall into the ashes, and I clung to her hand. I followed her down the path, out of the woods.

  That night, as the dank haze of the Ozarks gave way to thick blackness, I laid down in bed, and listened to BC’s television. It was a sitcom, and canned laughter had never made me feel so sad, or lonely, especially the way the metallic chuckles and machine-generated hilarity bounced off the lobby’s walls. Knotty pine? Birch? I had to check that out. I tried to think of what I might do the next day, but couldn’t come up with a plan. I tried to think of what I would do when I got back to Columbia, but all I could see in my mind’s eye were watermelon-eating coyotes and salamanders who liked bluegrass music. Just as I had worked myself into a hopeless despair about my future, I heard something that drove out any emotion other than reflexive, unthinking terror. It came from the woods.

  “Huh Huh Huh Huh.… ”

  The next morning, as I was stumbling through the lobby on my way to the diner, BC looked up from behind the desk, then thrust a lumpy brown envelope into my hands. There were no stamps and no return address. Scrawled across the front of the envelope, in what looked like brown chalk, was “Reporter.” The printing had been done by someone old and arthritic. Or a kindergartener.

  I asked BC where it had come from and he gave me the bad-squirrel-meat look again.

  “No idea. It was leaning against the door this morning.”

  When I opened it, a puff of dust floated out and settled on the counter, just missing my flapjacks. Inside I found a black, leather-bound notebook, 8½ by 11, thin as a hymnal at a failing church. In faded red type, across the cover: “Oral Traditions and Folk Lore among the Early Settlers of the Missouri Ozarks.”

  I read chapter one, The Weeping Woman, the tale of a grey-haired wraith in a nightgown who wandered the hollows and hillsides, pitifully calling for her baby, who had died from smallpox decades earlier. In chapter two, I made the acquaintance of The Old Man of the Ozarks, a petty thief who was imprisoned for vagrancy and then, when the town jail was torn down as part of some ill-conceived urban renewal program, was promptly forgotten, and lived out his years trapped in the rubble, feeding only on rats and cockroach
es and the occasional small child who got too close to the condemned property. I flipped through other ghost stories, skimmed legends, read more nonsense that had brought shudders of delight to any kid who has ever spent a night at sleepover camp.

  I passed the morning shoveling forkfuls of Bea’s excellent pancakes into my mouth, drinking her strong coffee and enjoying the exploits of The McDonald County Backbreaker, The Stranger at The Door, and The Man with the Hook. I met The James Strangler, the slithery and lithe creature who lurked at the bottom of the nearby James River, and wriggled and writhed until curious fishermen waded in after it,—only to be found later washed up on the shore, terror in their empty, staring eyes (in some versions of the tale, their brains had been sucked out through the ears). As I mopped up syrup, I chuckled and felt myself relax. The missing kid from Eureka Springs was sad, of course, tragic even, but it wasn’t my job to find him. My role was simply to write something evocative. If there’s one thing an animal beat guy needs to be good at, it’s evocative. These stories from this odd little book would help.

  I was going to give the Tribune readers a mood piece, all right. I would etch some portraits of BC, and Beatrice the sexy waitress and certainly the wackjob of a librarian. I’d throw in The Old Man of the Ozarks, too. I would describe the knotty pine walls (or maple, or whatever they turned out to be). I would leave out the bloody meat in the ashes, and the crying I heard in the woods at night, because no one would believe that stuff. Plus, for the purposes of authorial credibility, I needed to maintain a certain flinty-eyed persona. So definitely no huh-huh-huhs. But mood? Oh, yeah. With a capital M.

  I returned to the book, read in the afterword how tall tales had been part of the Ozarks culture for as long as anyone could remember, how “these tales have been handed down for generations, used as instructional devices to impart lessons about human nature and to dissuade children from societally unacceptable and risky activity.”