Black Horse and Other Strange Stories

by Wyckoff, Jason A.

  Though Zach groaned aloud several times at the hazy ‘proof’ referenced and the prodigious intuitive leaps attempted by the authors in the books he now pored over, he felt determined that this course would yield some useful clue. In fact, the result was better than Zach could have hoped for: He exclaimed aloud when he turned to the printed lyrics of the song itself.

  The language was more formal, though the middle verses were substantially unchanged. The earlier version of the last verse explained away the incongruous ‘Better hurry and get you gone’:

  Heed these sounds you ’lone and loveless

  In that melancholy place

  First the bells ring, then the birds sing

  ’Fore you hear that mournful whistle

  Make haste, young man, make haste

  More germane to his search for a source was the revelation in the first verse:

  In the hills of East Ohio

  Waits the town of Pomegrame

  The evolution of the lyric was easy to understand; the unwieldy ‘Pomegrame’ was hardly as evocative as the substituted ‘town without a name’ (which yet maintained the rhyme). Zach’s excitement at the naming of the town was amplified by his confirmation of its existence. Pomegrame lay in a crook of a tributary to the Tuscawaras River in the southern part of Tyler County.

  Zach found little other useful information online. Most links directed him to realtor or map sites, or other search engines. A few local businesses—a florist/wedding planner, a veterinarian, and a print shop—had found their way onto the internet. Zach was about to abandon the search when he discovered two links to the Steubenville Herald Star. Pomegrame was named in a short article bluntly headlined, ‘Man Found Dead’:

  The body of a man was discovered by area boys playing along the abandoned train tracks outside of Pomegrame in southwest Tyler County on Monday. The Tyler County Sheriff’s Department identified the man as Charles Friend of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania from identification found on the body. Deputy Dill Johns said that comparative DNA analysis with a relative would be necessary to confirm the identity as no fingerprints are on file for Friend and dental records would not be useful given the extent of damage to the corpse. Johns said that the cause of death was undetermined, and the Sheriff’s department had not ruled out foul play. The body appeared to have sustained extreme blunt force trauma and multiple lacerations, though some decomposition and predation may have contributed to the body’s condition. The names of the boys who discovered the body were withheld from the press, as they are all minors.

  Given the inspiration for his search, Zach couldn’t help but snicker at the man’s unfortunate fate. As the second link to the Herald Star seemed to duplicate the first, Zach ignored it. Satisfied with the results of his day’s labour, he prepared to leave the library. As he went to close the browser window, he noticed something that stopped him cold: Though the body of the text in the second newspaper link was nearly identical to the first, the name was different. He sat down again and brought up the second story. The article was dated three years later than the other, and the body was identified as that of Henry Connor; otherwise, the text was duplicated nearly verbatim. Zach felt the author might have hued so closely to the original text deliberately, as a wink and a nod, or as a challenge to the reader to recognise the similarity and draw his own conclusions. The byline attributed both articles to staff reporter Sam Rubinot. Zach copied the contact information for the newspaper and telephoned the next day.

  Rubinot had been promoted from staff reporter to features editor since the publication of the two articles. After being transferred by the receptionist, Zach was pleased to hear the gruff bark he considered befitting of an old newsman. Sensing he had little time to engage Rubinot’s attention, Zach hastened through an introduction before asking if the reporter remembered the two articles.

  A dry, dark chuckle rumbled out from the receiver. ‘No one’s ever asked me about those. I’ve got to thinking no one ever would, even when we print the next one.’

  ‘There’s been another death?’

  ‘No. But there will be. Sure’r’n shit, there will be.’

  ‘Pardon me, Mr Rubinot, but are you implying—’

  ‘How did you come across those articles?’

  ‘I’m an ethnomusicologist. I heard a song—’

  ‘Aw, yeah,’ the newsman interrupted. ‘The Bells, then the Birds. That one’s a real rarity. I bought the only recording I ever heard of it—a white-label 78; thought it was a one-off. Didn’t realise there was another recording out there.’

  ‘I don’t know that there is. I heard it performed by a folk singer who had it passed down to her.’

  Rubinot grunted. ‘I can’t say I’m happy to hear that. A song like that is trouble. The whole story is to stay the hell away, isn’t it? But it got you intrigued just the same. I couldn’t say if those fellas that died down by the tracks were following after something or not—probably they just found themselves there and got caught up. But a thing like that is more likely to draw people in than warn them off.’

  ‘I’d love to hear that record.’

  ‘Can’t. Busted it up. I told you: That song is trouble.’

  Zach was dismayed at Rubinot’s cavalier attitude towards the artefact, but he spoke with deliberate calmness. ‘Mr Rubinot, am I to understand you believe that the two men—’

  ‘Two men! Yeah, I guess “two men” is what you got off the internet. Damn internet. There’s six I know of, son. I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a few more that were never found.’

  ‘Six!’ Zach was aghast. He hurried his next sentence before Rubinot could interrupt again, ‘So you do believe that it was a haunting that led to those deaths?’

  ‘Hell, no!’ Rubinot roared. ‘I don’t believe in it and you better not believe in it either!’

  ‘Of course I don’t, but you—’

  ‘I made a choice not to believe in it. I made the right choice. I live in the goddamn modern world and I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna let something like that into my life!’

  Zach became pragmatically defiant. ‘So you can’t think of any reason I shouldn’t go to Pomegrame?’

  Rubinot’s voice was heavy and deliberate: ‘Son, if you haven’t heard enough already, I’ll just remind you of what I said at the beginning: Sure’r’n shit, there will be another man dead at the side of those tracks. If it ain’t real, then you’ve got nothing to gain by going to some sad old town that’s barely scraped by for the last generation since the strip-mining money went away. And if it is real, then you got everything to lose. Do me a favour: Don’t make me write a story about you.’

  Zach reheated half a container of phad thai and sat down to Gregory Peck keeping company with an inebriated Ava Gardner on a porch in Australia. When the sharp hues of a commercial shattered the narrative, he muted the TV and let his mind wander. Why didn’t he believe in ghosts? Such a belief informed so many of the traditions he studied. Was it simply a matter of personal habit that disinclined him towards the supernatural? Zach frowned; it seemed obscene that such a fundamental aspect of a person’s worldview should be based on unexamined routine.

  He speared a rubbery shrimp with his fork and tried to dismiss the matter—it was inconsequential to him and that was why he refused to mull it over. What makes one person more exceptional than another? He chewed rapidly. People leave all the time and are never heard from again. It’s probably better that way, Zach concluded. But still something unsettled him, something hovering in the corners of the room, something he could almost hear in the small spaces between the ticks of the clock on the mantle.

  Well, good! The thought broke the stalemate in his mind and eased his frustration. If Pomegrame has a ghost, then good for Pomegrame!

  Zach put aside his dinner. He dug a roadmap out from a desk drawer and carefully unfolded it onto the coffee table.

  The two-lane highway rose gradually between mounting swells of earth before the road succumbed to the topography and pulled
Zach around arcing curves and sent him down swooping dips. Afternoon sun burned his left arm as sweltry air danced on the pavement and leapt into the car, rushing over his neck. Trees thick with green pressed close by the roadside through the turns and then dropped away to reveal fields of corn and soy lazing in their rows. Soon, another sort of view presented itself: Scattered, irresolute trees wavered up from tangles of weeds on concave hillsides as nature hesitantly smothered a departed industry’s bleak legacy.

  Zach reached a junction with a four-way stop and turned south. Three minutes later, the speed limit dropped; thirty seconds more and Zach pulled off to a gas station at the Pomegrame city limits.

  The gas was cheap but the toll was heavy; Zach’s Mercury Monarch was thirsty. Zach reminded himself again to keep the tyres better inflated, in hopes of improving the old car’s gas mileage.

  As he went into the convenience store to pay his bill, two teenage girls with stiff hair came out giggling. They fell silent as they passed Zach, surreptitiously stealing glances at him, and then burst out in fresh fits of laughter as they moved on. Zach took note of the mascot on the school jackets and sighed at his folly. So much for that idea.

  ‘Nice car,’ drawled the man behind the counter. He looked to be sixty; a pleasant, sleepy serenity swam about his eyes.

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘They don’t make ’em like that anymore.’

  ‘No, they don’t.’ Zach pulled out his wallet. ‘So—the Cardinals.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘I noticed the patch on those girls’ coats—Cardinals. That’s the mascot for the high school?’

  The old man hesitated before he answered. ‘Sure, yeah. You a football fan?’

  Zach smiled. ‘Are we in Ohio?’

  The old man laughed.

  Zach handed him a credit card. ‘Are there a lot of cardinals around this area?’

  The old man stiffened. ‘Not so’s you’d notice.’ His hand shook slightly as he ran Zach’s card through the reader. ‘Just a mascot, I guess.’

  Zach was intrigued by the old man’s evasiveness. Maybe this wasn’t a wasted trip, after all. He tried to sound casual, ‘Say—did you ever hear a song about a girl named Eulalie? She was supposed to have lived in Pomegrame.’

  The old man made a big show of thinking the question over. He shook his head to finish the bad bluff. ‘No, can’t say as I have.’ He chuckled as he handed Zach’s card back. ‘Who’d want to write a song about our sleepy little town? Well—I guess you’ll be moseyin’ on.’

  Zach ignored the dismissal. ‘It’s a ghost story—the song, that is. It says—’

  ‘I reckon every town has its ghosts.’ The old man shrugged. ‘Of course, they’re never much interest to anybody else. Thanks for stoppin’ through, though.’

  Zach smiled. ‘Thanks. Say—is there a library here in town?’

  ‘Yeah, sure. There’s one in the basement of Town Hall, on the corner of Main Street. It’s got a separate entrance on the side. I don’t think it’s open today, though—it’s only open certain times. Small town, you know.’

  ‘Sure. Thanks again.’

  He went out the door and climbed back into his car. After starting up the engine and shifting it into gear, he glanced back into the convenience store and was unsurprised to see the old man talking on the phone and looking back at him.

  Main Street was only four blocks up the road. The Town Hall had a small parking lot where Zach stowed his Monarch. Zach found the side entrance down a small flight of steps. It was dark on the other side of the glass door. A sign hung on a suction-cupped hook informed Zach that the library was closed, despite the stencilled hours of operation informing him it should be open. Zach smirked. Must’ve burnt holy hell getting out of here.

  Zach walked down to the intersection. He shaded his eyes and looked up and down the jumble of two and three-storey brick or wood-panel edifices lining the streets on the central block. Beyond that, the buildings broke and separated, becoming more isolated and variable in form. He wondered if maybe he shouldn’t have asked about the library and given the attendant time to warn of his arrival. More than one bored librarian had responded to his charms with a surfeit of information. Still, the reaction piqued his curiosity: Either some people in Pomegrame believed in the story, or else they were adept at pranking anyone who investigated the myth. Either way, Zach expected to find his departed librarian in that haven where silence is an anathema, and into which no man dared to go. Zach wiped a droplet of sweat from his hairline and crossed the intersection.

  A clean but cloying smell of perfume and chemicals washed over Zach as he stepped through the shop door. The chatter was flying so freely that it took the ladies inside Darly’s Salon a minute to notice that Zach had invaded their sanctum. Whatever secrets they may strive to keep, Zach expected his presence to be well tolerated. He imagined some of Darly’s patrons were married to men who wouldn’t notice any changes from their visits to the salon beyond the balances in their bank accounts, and he was counting on the attentions of a handsome young man loosening a few tongues. There were five inside: One woman sat in the first chair while the elder of the two beauticians worked on her. Another patron supposed to be drying had apparently pushed the dryer away so that she could hear. The younger beautician leaned her elbows on the back of a second, vacant chair. Zach guessed that the last woman, looking hot and breathless on the edge of a waiting chair, was not there for an appointment—the librarian.

  ‘Pardon me, ladies,’ Zach flashed his pearly whites in the sudden silence, ‘I’m wondering if you can help me.’

  Darly, the elder beautician with a quick, smart eye and a sunburst of colour atop her head, who had encountered more than a few charmers in her time, was less impressed with Zach and recovered more quickly than the other women. She straightened the head of her client who had turned to look at Zach and went back to combing and clipping.

  ‘Well, I can give you a trim, but that shave you need you’re going to have to get somewhere else!’

  Zach chuckled. ‘Thank you, no—actually, I’m hoping someone can help me out with a little local history. I’m an ethnomusicologist—’

  ‘What’s that?’ the lady who’d been drying asked.

  Zach didn’t answer right away, letting the question linger to draw out the librarian.

  ‘It’s someone who studies the traditional music of other cultures,’ she chirped.

  ‘That’s right.’ Zach stepped forward and tried to catch her gaze, but the nervous librarian kept shifting her eyes back to the floor. ‘But it can also mean somebody who studies the traditional music and folksong of our own culture, and that’s what I like to do most of all.’

  ‘Folksong?’ Darly played it dumb. ‘Like Bob Dylan?’

  ‘My dad liked him,’ the younger beautician chimed in.

  Zach avoided the digression. ‘I’ve heard a song recently about a girl named Eulalie—’ the girl in the chair unsubtly sucked in her breath, ‘supposed to take place here in Pomegrame. It’s a ghost story—’

  ‘Have you ever been in love?’ the drying woman asked.

  Zach was taken aback at the sudden inquiry. He was even more surprised to see that everyone seemed anxious to know the answer: Darly had ceased her cutting and all eyes, including the librarian’s, were turned in expectation.

  Zach stammered, searching for a quip. Realising he’d lost whatever upper hand he thought he had, Zach decided to answer honestly; ‘I think so. Once, in high school.’ The ladies all relaxed and exhaled (except for the younger beautician, who had no idea of the subtext and was growing disinterested). Zach finished his thought, ‘But she died.’

  The conclusion of his confession had the opposite effect from the first part. The woman in the chair moaned, while the librarian fretted and twisted in her seat.

  Darly combed the same lock of hair repeatedly. ‘Better to have no love at all,’ she muttered.

  The younger beautician became annoyed at being left out. ‘Dar, I�
�m going out for a smoke.’ She grabbed her purse from underneath the counter and stomped past Zach.

  ‘Look, I don’t understand—’

  Darly interrupted Zach. ‘If you know the story, then you understand just fine, don’t you?’

  ‘So you all believe in the story? You all think it’s true? You think those men who got killed by the railroad tracks were led to their doom by a ghost?’

  No one answered him.

  ‘Let me ask you this, then—how do any of you know it’s true unless you know somebody who heard the bells and the birds and didn’t get killed?’

  Darly put her hands on her hips. ‘Now you look, young man. There ain’t no good—’

  ‘Gerald heard them.’ The sound from the librarian was meek but it silenced Darly immediately. ‘He told me that’s how he knew it was over. He said he knew if he heard them, then that meant he was right thinking that he never loved me.’ The librarian sniffed and dotted her eye.

  The lady in Darly’s chair sat up straight. ‘Oh my God, Francine, you never said anything about that before.’

  Francine went on: ‘He said it felt like he had to go for a walk. And he didn’t even think about where he was going. But then he heard the bells ringing behind him, and then he heard the birds singing all around him. But of course, he knew the story, so he knew he had to turn around and go back to town.’ She looked up at Zach with red-rimmed eyes. ‘So there’s somebody for you.’

  ‘Hey. Hey, I’m sorry.’

  Darly stepped towards Zach. ‘I guess it’s about time you were on your way. On your way back home.’

  There was a shuffle of solidarity as the woman in Darly’s chair leaned back, and the other woman put her head back underneath the drier.

  ‘Sure,’ Zach assented.

  Outside, the young beautician leaned against the building a few steps from the door, letting a smouldering cigarette droop between two fingers. She looked Zach over with that mix of hostility and yearning he’d seen in the eyes of many young women who felt trapped in their small towns. ‘You done wadding up their panties?’