The thing separated into two parts. From the waist down, the legs went running all about the yard, falling over lawn chairs and slamming into trees. From the waist up, the other part was trying to maneuver along using its arms. It wasn’t doing a very good job of that.
The third sparkling shape was running away, becoming dimmer and dimmer in the night.
Cole stepped up to the torso and hit it in the head with the stun gun. The head blew up, sending sparkling dots flying in all directions. The legs were running down the center of the blacktop road, chasing after the third shape, which by now was no longer in sight.
The bouncing head soared higher and higher, until it hit a power company transformer. A brilliant flash of light lit up the early morning hours as the head and the transformer exploded, then the area went dark.
“Will you please stop playing Wyatt Earp and get in the damned truck!” Katti screamed at Cole.
But Cole was fascinated by the scene taking place before his eyes. When the head exploded against the transformer, the rest of the sparkling dots began fading away, and a human form began appearing on the front lawn. The skeletal form was dressed in a ragged and rotted suit, the fingernails had grown several inches in death. But there was no head.
There was, however, the terrible smell of death. Rotting flesh and internal organs.
The other headless torso of dots was flopping around on the ground, flailing its arms helplessly. Cole walked up to it just as headlights cut into the drive. Jim Deaton sat in his car, mesmerized by the scene taking place in front of him. He watched the torso began to fade, and yet another piece of rotting corpse appeared on the lawn.
“Jesus H. Christ!” Katti came storming up to Cole. “What’s the matter with you? You’re out here playing hero, and I’m sitting in the truck sweating blood and worrying about you, you—Oh!” She threw up her hands in exasperation.
“Well,” Cole said, looking at the stun gun. “At least we know it works.”
“How are we going to explain these rotting bodies?” Jim said, walking up.
“We’re not.” He turned to Katti. “You have any tarps?”
“In the shed out back.”
“I’ll get them,” Jim said. He paused. “Then you can tell me what you plan to do with them . . . or maybe I shouldn’t ask. Yes, I should ask. ’Cause if we get stopped by the cops and they see a couple of headless, rotting corpses, it’s going to get real interesting, buddy.”
“Not to mention smelly,” Katti added, waving a hand in front of her nose. “Phew!”
“We can always tell them we work for the CIA,” Cole said with a grin.“
Jim rolled his eyes and walked off muttering.
* * *
The shock of the early morning visit hit them all about an hour later, as they were having coffee and breakfast in an all-night place on the outskirts of Memphis. Katti’s hands started shaking so bad she had to sit on them.
“Delayed stress syndrome,” Jim said. “Cole and me know it well. We were both just kids when we went to ’Nam. I hate to tell you what we both did in our pants the first time we came under a sustained mortar attack.”
Cole grinned to hide his own suddenly shaky nerves.
“Well, that makes me feel some better,” Katti said, her voice low.
They all looked up as a dozen police and sheriffs department cars went screaming by, lights flashing and sirens blaring.
Jim watched the cars whiz by. “I think it’s going to be real interesting around Memphis for a few hours.”
“Not if we’re really dealing with Satan,” Cole said.
Two heads turned slowly toward him and waited for some sort of explanation.
“This is not exactly the kind of publicity Ol’ Fire and Brimstone desires,” Cole explained.
“Are you serious?” Jim asked.
“Oh, yeah. Dead serious—no pun intended. Lucifer is sort of a low-key guy, I’m thinking.”
“Jim, get real, will you?” Katti said.
“You’ll see in a few minutes. I’ll bet you both a hundred dollars.”
“Hey!” the cook shouted out to the dining area. “There’s all sorts of weird crap goin’ on just east of town. People are reporting seeing strange creatures in the night! Can you believe it? Some are even saying they’re ghosts!”
Cole, Jim, and Katti exchanged glances, but said nothing.
A few minutes later several power company trucks rolled past the all-night cafe, heading east.
Music suddenly filled the cafe. Music from out of the fifties. A truck driver, a man in his mid-fifties, looked up and smiled. “It’s been years since I heard that one. Now that brings back a lot of memories for me.”
Kay Starr was singing “Wheel Of Fortune.”
“Yeah,” another man said. “Tell the cook to turn up his radio. I like that song.”
Cole, Jim, and Katti looked at one another.
The cook came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. “The cook ain’t got nothin’ to do with that. That song ain’t comin’ from my radio.”
One of the waitresses walked over to the jukebox and stared. “It’s not coming from here, either.”
The music grew louder, the invisible wheel spinning, spinning, spinning.
Jim’s hand was slightly trembling as he lifted his coffee cup to his lips.
The waitress pulled the plug on the jukebox. The music did not stop. The cook turned off his radio. The music continued.
“Bernie!” the waitress by the jukebox called. “This is not funny. What’s going on?”
The cook stepped out of the kitchen. “I don’t know, Rose. Weird, ain’t it?”
The song faded away.
“What the hell?” Bernie said.
The voice of Hank Williams filled the cafe, and the plaintive words of “Ramblin’ Man” touched them all.
“I think some of them ghosts is here!” the truck driver said. The waitress by the jukebox whirled to face him. “That’s not funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be,” the truck driver replied.
Hank was singing about what to do with him when he died.
A couple seated across the room stood up. “We’re out of here,” the man said, tossing money on the table. “This is just too weird for us.” The man and woman walked to the door. It would not open. The man shoved at the door. It would not open. He turned around. “Hey! This damn door’s stuck.”
Cole noticed that the glass of the door was green-tinted. “I bet I know what’s coming next,” he whispered.
The cook and the waitress pounded and shoved at the door to the cafe. It would not open.
The voice of Hank faded away, to be replaced by an old song titled “What’s Behind the Green Door.” The words and music blasted the air of the cafe.
“I guessed right,” Cole whispered.
“Call the cops!” a woman yelled over the loud music. There was real fear behind her words.
Jim walked to the door and shoved at it. It would not budge.
“The damn phone’s out of order!” Bernie yelled.
A waitress jerked up a pay phone and held it to her ear. “So is this one. What’s going on around here?”
The truck driver picked up a chair and hurled it through a large window, then used another chair to knock out what glass remained on the bottom sill.
“By god, you’ll pay for that!” Bernie yelled.
“Screw you,” the truck driver said. He climbed up on a booth and stepped out through the window.
He came back in a lot faster than he exited. Some invisible force picked him up and hurled him back inside the cafe. He bounced off a table and slid across the floor, coming to rest against the counter. Cole got up and walked to him, squatting down. The driver was unconscious, but his pulse was strong. “He’s alive. The impact knocked him out.”
“What threw him back in here?” a waitress asked, her voice shrill with fear.
The music had stopped. The silence was loud.
&n
bsp; The cook had stepped back into the safety of his kitchen. Suddenly he started screaming. He ran out into the dining area, his face ghostly pale. “There’s a stinkin,’ rottin’ body in there!” he yelled. “It don’t have a head.”
Then he bent over and puked on the floor.
The two corpses from Katti’s front lawn had been wrapped in tarps and dumped over the side of a bridge and into a creek.
The three of them wondered where the other corpse might be. They didn’t have to wonder long.
It appeared on a stool at the counter, the bony elbow in a ragged and rotted suit coat propped on the counter. “Gimmie a cup of joe and a short stack,” a disembodied voice rang out. “Heavy on the syrup.”
One of the waitresses fainted at the sight and sound, and the woman customer by the door started screaming hysterically.
A female voice backed by a big band began singing: “I Don’t Stand A Ghost Of A Chance With You.”
The hysterical woman by the door had her dress suddenly pulled up over her head and her panty hose jerked down. She frantically tried to cover herself. The man with her had his trousers and underwear torn from him. He stood naked from the waist down, a bewildered look on his face.
An unseen Dixieland band began hammering out: “They’ll Be A Hot Time In The Old Town Tonight.”
The jukebox was ripped apart and records started flying all over the place, smashing against the walls and the ceiling. Jim and Cole hit the floor, Cole jerking Katti down with him.
The cook jumped behind the counter and bellied down on the floor. The woman with her dress over her head found herself completely naked as her clothing was pulled from her.
A cop pulled into the drive just as dawn was breaking. He stepped out of his unit and stood quite still for a moment, staring at the diner, an unbelieving look on his face. He saw the big commercial refrigerator come sailing out of the smashed windows and jumped out of the way just in time to avoid being crushed. The heavy fridge landed on his unit, wiping out both hood and windshield. The horn and siren suddenly started honking and wailing, adding to the confusion. The emergency lights started flashing. The cop drew his pistol, but there was nothing to shoot at. He crawled to his unit and grabbed the mike. “Officer needs assistance!” he shouted to dispatch, then gave his location.
Pots and pans and dishes and cups and saucers and flatware were whizzing around in the diner. Music was playing, but it was out of time, out of tempo, and out of tune. The melody was unrecognizable.
The music stopped.
The pots and pans and dishes and flatware stopped sailing about the diner.
The records from the smashed jukebox fell to the littered floor and were still.
Cop cars from the MPD, THP, and the SO began moaning and flashing into the drive, the men and women getting out, staring in disbelief at the wreckage that lay before them.
A Tennessee trooper looked at the huge refrigerator on the hood of the cop’s unit, and then looked at the totally bewildered city cop. “Did you get a little impatient for breakfast, Ralph?”
Eight
The stinking, rotting, headless corpses had vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived in the cafe.
All the patrons of the diner (except for three and the still unconscious truck driver) were talking at once, and no one was making any sense.
The naked man and woman had blankets wrapped around them and were sitting at a booth.
“Jimmy,” a local cop walked up to Jim Deaton. “What the hell happened here?”
“My guess would be a freak tornado,” Jim lied. “I can tell you this: it sure scared the hell out of all of us. The place just suddenly exploded.”
“Uh-huh,” the veteran cop said. He looked at Cole. “A friend of yours, Jimmy?”
“Old army buddy of mine. We were in ’Nam together. He’s visiting from Louisiana. He just retired from the sheriff’s office down there. Cole Younger.”
“Cole Younger?” the cop said with a smile.
“My father had a weird sense of humor,” Cole explained.
“You know what happened here, Mr. Younger?”
“Sure don’t. But it happened real fast.”
“Uh-huh,” the cop said.
“Hi, Bob,” Katti said. She knew the cop from her newspaper days. “Don’t ask me what happened here. I was too scared to do anything but duck.”
“Uh-huh,” the streetwise cop said. “Right.” He sensed all three of them were lying, but had no basis to pursue that hunch. But he wondered why the hell the three of them were at a diner before dawn. The Memphis cop also knew he wasn’t about to get jack-crap out of Jim Deaton, and the retired cop with him looked tough as a tank. He also knew that Katti Baylor could be as stubborn as a mule.
“Any of you see these headless corpses these folks are babbling about?”
Cole, Katti, and Jim smiled and shook their heads.
“Uh-huh. Everybody else saw the bodies, but you three.”
“We were under the table,” Cole said.
“Right,” the Memphis cop said drily. “Katti, a transformer blew in front of your house a few hours ago. It blew with such force, it took the top of the pole out.”
“I know,” Katti said. “Cole is staying at my house. We had just been awakened by a call from Jim. His office was broken into earlier. Jim and Cole are helping me with a book I’m writing, and we were going into the city at first light to see if any of the notes and material were missing after the break-in. We stopped in here for breakfast. Big mistake, I guess.”
“Uh-huh.” Pure bullshit, the cop thought. You’re all lying. But why? “Did any of you see any sparkling lights on the way in?”
“Sparkling lights?” Cole asked. “What kind of sparkling lights?”
The Memphis cop shook his head. “Probably just kids pulling a stunt of some sort. But both the PD and the SO got flooded with a lot of frantic calls. What about this ghost music everybody heard here in the cafe? I guess you three didn’t hear that, either.”
“Oh, we heard that, all right,” Jim took it. “It seemed to be coming from outside. Somebody probably left their radio on.” He smiled. “We all enjoyed the music.”
“Uh-huh. Right. Did you report your break-in, Jimmy?”
“Sure did.”
“Well, we’ll probably be talking again about this . . . incident. Nice to meet you, Mr. Younger. See you, Jimmy, Katti.” He walked off.
“He knows we’re lying,” Jim whispered.
“Sure, he does,” Cole said. “But he can’t prove anything. Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
Outside, standing by the vehicles, Katti asked, “What was all this show about, Cole?”
“Ol’ Nick letting us know he’s around, I’d guess. He was just having fun with us, that’s all.”
“Fun!” Katti blurted.
“Sure. The devil himself isn’t going to hurt us. It’s the people who worship him, those who have sold their souls to him that we have to look out for. But there is only one problem with that.”
“Just one?” Jim asked sarcastically.
“Yeah. The old devil is pretty slick. We won’t have any way of knowing who serves him and who doesn’t.” Cole opened the door for Katti, and she got in.
“Wonderful,” Jim muttered.
* * *
The news media reported that freak and unexpected high winds caused the damage to the cafe, and those same strange high winds were responsible for the power outage. Local professors and other so-called experts suggested that the many reports of sparkling lights that same night were no more than a freak of nature (which meant they didn’t know what the hell really caused the sparkling lights). Nothing was said about the two headless corpses that appeared in the cafe.
Jim Deaton’s office was shut down for a few days, until carpenters could repair the damage done during the break-in.
And Cole and Katti made plans to return to the site where her brother had disappeared.
* * *
Chief D
eputy Sheriff Win Bryan closed the door behind him and took a chair in front of Sheriff Pickens’s desk. “You’re not going to believe who just checked back into the motel.”
“I bet I can guess,” the sheriff said, leaning back with a sigh. “Ms. Baylor and Mr. Younger.”
“You got part of it. This time they got three others with them. All P.I.’s out of Memphis. Jim Deaton’s crew.”
That straightened the sheriff’s chair with a thump. “Jim with them?”
“You bet. Cole Younger and Jim Deaton are old army buddies. Friends for years.”
“Shit!”
“I had a buddy with the ASP check out this Younger. He’s a straight shooter, and no one to fool around with. He can be damn rough, and won’t hesitate to drop a hammer on you. Retired a captain from a Louisiana SO. His background is damned impressive.”
“Jim Deaton is no one to fool around with either,” the sheriff said glumly. “How about the others?”
“Gary Markham and Beverly English.”
“I know about Gary. He’s tough. What about this English woman?”
“She was in here a short time back, posing as a land buyer and nosing around the county. She talked to a lot of people.”
The sheriff was silent for a moment, thinking hard and fast. Al Pickens had been sheriff of this county for years, and he planned on remaining the sheriff. But lately he’d been suffering bouts of conscience about the ghost club. He knew that what he and the others were doing was wrong. Oddly enough, Sheriff Pickens was a very competent lawman and ran a good county. He had made only one terrible blunder in the past ten years, and that concerned his son, Albert. But blood is thicker than water and Sheriff Pickens wasn’t yet ready to put his son in prison for his part in what happened to that school teacher, Tommy Baylor. Al Pickens had spent many a sleepless night over the years.
And as far as those . . . well, things, that popped up every now and then out at the old County Line . . . what was he supposed to do about them? Put a bunch of ghosts in jail? He had spoken with Sheriff Reno of the county just above his, and to Sheriff Paxton of the county just to the west. They both belonged to the club, so to speak, and they both knew some really weird events had taken place in their counties over the years. But damn it, they were events that no human had any control over. So how the hell could people blame them for something that had been done by . . . well, spirits? It just wasn’t fair.
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