Do-Overs and Detours - Eighteen Eerie Tales (Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out Book 4)

by Steve Vernon

  I held the ear out to him.

  “You dropped this,” I said, trying to keep the terror out of my voice.

  He blinked. As far as I could see, nothing more dropped off.

  “Not much for words, are you?”

  Blink.

  I yawned and stretched.

  “Listen,” I said. “Philosophizing with you has been seven kinds of pure bliss but I been sitting in that boxcar the last three days and I’m ready to stretch my legs. You want to walk with me then I don’t mind the company.”

  He finally spoke. When he did it was the kind of sound you’d expect to hear from a snake that had somehow learned to speak.

  “I never mind company,” he said.

  A tooth fell out of his mouth in mid-company. I think it was a molar. I didn’t bother bending to pick it up.

  “You’re just all over the place, aren’t you? A man of many parts and not afraid to say so,” I said. “Maybe you ought to mind your tongue before it falls out of your jawbone.

  He hissed then and I thought — yeah, he’s a snake all right.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  Now I learned the hard way a long time ago that names were just handles people used to get a hold of you and some voice inside me warned that if I gave this piggyback man a name he’d grab on hold of me.

  “I used to have a name,” I said. “But I lost it in my wallet. Call me pilgrim, that’ll do for now.”

  He hissed again and I knew he didn’t care for my answer. Just then a third voice spoke from out of the darkness.

  “Hey! Who the hell are you?”

  A light, as bright as a full noon sun, stabbed me in the eyes. I blinked and for a moment I saw double. When my vision cleared I saw who had spoken. A railroad cop, big and old and fat from too many midnight fried chicken platters and too many swallows of bourbon. His red nose tattle-told that last story. It wasn’t cold enough to blame the gin blossoms on the midnight chill.

  The name tag on his shirt read MCGUIRE.

  “Mcguire,” said the piggyback man, and I heard him grin. The railroad cop turned at the sound of his name.

  “Would that be Charlie Mcguire?” The piggyback man asked playfully.

  Before I could say a word of warning, Mcguire answered. “Officer Micheal William Mcguire, and what’s it to you?”

  “Oh it’s an awful lot to me,” said the piggyback man. “An awful lot.”

  And then it began and was over as quick as it started. Mcguire didn’t stand a chance. He didn’t even see it coming but I did. I saw a whisper of smoke, blurring out of the piggyback man’s eyes and then a little bit of that smoke blew into Mcguire’s eyes, and for a moment it looked like the wind was blowing straight through his old cop bones. Then the body that the piggyback man was riding in dropped to the dirt. From the sound of it, not all the king’s horsemen were ever putting that jigsaw puzzle back again.

  And Mcguire, he looked at me and blinked.

  Twice.

  That’s when I knew for certain. I knew who he was, all right. This was the piggyback man, the one who never walks alone. More spirit than man, made out of hellfire and the stuff that dances in the shadows of atoms. Always looking for a ride on somebody else’s back. Always hanging around the darkest areas of the world, like cemeteries or subways.

  Or train yards.

  “I know what you are piggyback man,” I said. “I just don’t know who you are. Why don’t you give me a name to call you by?”

  It was a stupid try but it was all I had. If he told me his real name, the one he whispered to the darkness when nobody else was listening, then I could tell him where to get off. Once you know a thing’s true name, you owned it outright. You think about that the next time somebody asks you for two pieces of identification, please.

  “I’d be a fool to tell you that, now wouldn’t I, boy?” He drew the words fool and boy out long and slow like a pair of bullets whistling by your ears on a smoke-filled battlefield and I knew by that sound that I’d clearly missed my shot.

  “What did you say your name was?” The piggyback man tried right back.

  I shook my head.

  “Uh-uh,” I said. “Not tonight.”

  The thing that used to be Mcguire smiled.

  “Perhaps another night,” he said. “When this body starts to burn.”

  The piggyback man turned and just about walked away. He’d be gone and into the darkness if I didn’t do something. And I had to, you understand. I had to do something about this monstrosity. It wouldn’t suit me to let him slip on by.

  I heard a train whistle, blowing in the distant darkness. I put my foot on the rail beside me. I felt the quivering rumble of approaching freight through the sole of my army boot. It was coming close.

  I had me a crazy idea.

  “Yeah, another night, when that body starts to burn,” I taunted. “It won’t be long, will it now? Fat old body like that, it’ll burn like running tallow, won’t it?”

  The piggyback man paused.

  “You want something younger than that, don’t you? You want something tastier. Something with legs that’ll carry you farther than the next whistle stop.”

  The piggyback man stood as still as he could. There was something in the way he stood reminded me of a fat man unsuccessfully trying to resist a freely offered French cream pastry and I knew it was time to take my chance.

  “My name’s Easter Noon!” I shouted. “Capital EASTER, capital NOON and you can spell it just like it sounds.”

  The piggyback man didn’t budge. I could feel his greed for fresh new life licking at my bones like a tongue of flame licking at a brand new log.

  “Easter Noon,” I repeated, a little quieter, like I was casting a dare. “My name’s Easter Noon and I have walked through more shadows than the sun could imagine. I have stood in hollows so deep old Beelzebub would have to crane his neck downward to look me in the eye. I’m calling you out, here and now, piggyback man. I’m calling you out for the lowdown legless son of a bitch that you are.”

  Then I drew a line in the dirt and waited.

  I heard the train whistle howling, a little closer in the darkness. I hoped old piggyback wouldn’t keep me waiting too long because if that train passed before he jumped, I’d be in it as deep as I could get.

  Well somebody must have been listening to my prayer because old piggyback let Mcguire drop stone dead. I felt a cold wind wooshing up towards me, but I was as ready as I could be. I caught him, smoke and wind and all, catching at the nothing that made up his something the way you might catch a wild dog in midpounce, twisting and holding it closer to my bones.

  I don’t quite know how I did it, you understand. I had entered the borders of fly-by-your-seat-land a long time ago. I just grabbed on, and somehow I felt him, like a handful of wet cellophane or something even thinner than that.

  “Come here, damn you, come here!” I shouted.

  Then I heard the whistle howling closer and I squeezed on to the piggyback man a little tighter and stepped on to the track, grinning like a crazy man into the sudden screaming headlamp.

  “Hold on, piggyback man, hold on! I’ll take you with me when I go.”

  That’s when he twisted. I felt him twist somewhere deep inside of me, and it was like trying to hang on to a live buttered snake. I knew it was frightened and that it didn’t want to be inside of me when that train hit me dead on. I don’t know if it knew just what might happen. I think it was just afraid of what could happen.

  Me too.

  I felt cold fingers inside of me, catching at my heart and my brain and my spinal column, catching at something beneath all that, trying to get hold of whatever it was that was my steering wheel.

  It almost had me but I wedged my boot into the notch of the switch rail so that even if old piggyback got hold of me, he probably wouldn’t have time to get away.

  The train was five feet away when I felt old piggyback leave me. I could smell the stink of rushing diesel as I felt i
t leave and I knew that Mcguire was probably not much good to the piggyback man and I hoped that whatever this piggyback thing was, that it could not exist alone on its own two feet.

  So as I felt it leave me, I threw myself sideways, fully expecting to feel the screaming pain of the steel wheels grinding my left foot down to something less than nothing, when the sole of my army surplus boot pulled away and the rusty nails that held the sole to the body of my boot pulled away and I tumbled head over ass into the dirt and cinders lying beside the track.

  The train howled angrily by and I nearly was pulled under the wheels by the slipstream, but I grabbed hold of Mcguire’s meaty carcass and held on fast. The train was gone as quickly as it came, nothing but a bit of dust blowing behind it, the heavy reek of diesel and steel and the cold musky scent of Mcguire’s dead body.

  I carefully stood, giving a silent thanks and an apology to Mcguire, where ever he was now; feeling the uncomfortable roughness of railroad cinder ballast against the work sock on my left foot.

  I stood there for a long time listening to the wind and every now and then touching the rail with my sock foot, just to be sure. I thought about the engineer and wondered if the piggyback man had a chance at him. I decided that he hadn’t because he hadn’t had a chance to ask the engineer his name. Hard to ask a question like that when you’re smoke without any tongue.

  I thought about that big old train, thought about the way sometimes engineers have nicknames for their diesels and about how they sometimes paint the name on the nose of their trains and I wondered if the piggyback man had somehow got inside of it.

  I decided I didn’t have an answer to that one and it made me shiver like the wind was suddenly colder than it needed to be. I stood there alone and shivering until the sun began to come up. Only one thing left to do.

  When I was done with that, I limped my way towards the city, grateful for the feeling of the sun on my own skin and the touch of a dead man’s boots, thankful that Mcguire hadn’t very small feet.

  The Last Stand of the Great Texas Packrat

  When a Congo Pygmy dies the tribe ceremoniously pulls his hut down on top of his body and moves their camp, carefully choosing a circuitous route to prevent the spirit from visiting their new home. The relatives wail along the journey, casting the name and belongings of the deceased away to the winds of the veldt and from the moment that construction of the new camp begins the dead person’s name is never mentioned again.

  Texas Jack Page, on the eave of his forty-eighth birthday, emptied his last seven cartons of books, placing them volume by volume across his front door, amontilladoing himself inside a trailer sized tomb of tomes.

  Should I count them, he wondered? I really ought to count them.

  He reached and placed another book, an Arkham House compendium of Lovecraft. A frayed graying shirt cuff tore and snagged on a bit of loose splintered shelf.

  Damn. Mary would have fixed that or at the very least she would have bought him a new shirt.

  He yanked it clear. It tore with a chewing sound that growled surprisingly loud in the stillness of his homemade Airsteam sarcophagus. He shook his head, dismissing past memories and slid his gaze across the tight rows of rigid spines. At least they never changed.

  Manly Wade Wellman.

  Robert Bloch.

  Clark Ashton Smith.

  The great old ones. The makers of word and myth. All of them assembled together in in an uncatalogued and uncounted monument to pure chaotic order, in the aluminum trailer library and last resting place of Texas Jack Page.

  “Amen,” He said to nobody in particular.

  His books never changed. Their stories never changed. He’d be twice damned to an uncatalogued grave before he ever bothered to.

  “So let it be written, so let it be done,” He said, in a pretty good Yul Brynner imitation.

  * *

  The bartender leaned the cushion of his over-upholstered belly against the slick of the hardwood varnished bar, his arms braced and his back bowed as if he carried the weight of the world of whiskey upon the yoke of his roundish shoulders. Beads of sweat crawled out of the pores of his high tide forehead. He mopped at them with a rag he used to polish the glasses whenever he felt the least bit cliché.

  “This bar is famous for its high quality clientele,” He told the reporter who busily scribbled it all down in tight little scratchy shorthand marks. The scribble looked like so many bugs hieroglyphicked onto cheap steno paper to the bartender but this was history in the making, a little more posterity than was offered by the fading ghost-rings that were left behind by the thousands of uncoastered drinks that he had served over the years, so he kept on talking.

  “Sinatra sang here,” He went on, lying his head off. He loved to tell lies, loved to keep people guessing. What else was life for? “He sat on that very stool and blew his big Italian nose on that napkin up there. Then he autographed the napkin just for me.”

  He pointed at a signed and framed napkin, hung like a post office wanted poster about three inches above the lid of an unopened Maker’s Mark bottle. The inscription read in big red letters – TO MY GOOD FRIEND. The bartender had forged the autograph himself but why should he bother telling that to the reporter. The truth was always too damn strange to stand up for very long beneath the merciless eye of scrutiny.

  “Jack Dempsey duked it out bare knuckles with a man who insulted his mother, right over there in that far corner,” The bartender said, pointing to where the jukebox now stood. “And Gene Kelly danced a slow country waltz to a tune on that juke box. You look close enough and you’ll see his fingerprints.”

  Actually, you’d see a lot of fingerprints. The bartender cleaned the bar a lot more than he bothered cleaning the juke box buttons. He never cared much for music. He was tone deaf, which along with his inability to successfully carry a tune had been the only obstacles that barred him from following a career in the grand opera.

  “Listen up,” He said. “Its gospel, I tell you, none of this is true. Just old rope and tall tale cobwebs, spun by a master tale spinner. It’s the gunk that holds the universe together, a web of lies and wishful thinking. From cave-paintings to Egyptian hieroglyphics to the Dead Sea Scrolls; mankind has always steeped its existence in stories. Legends are the bones we rest our melting flesh against. Believe me, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  The reporter kept on scribbling. He lied for money, the bartender for fun. When it came down to it there wasn’t a whole lot of difference between the two of them.

  “Here,” The bartender said, planting a glassful of blended whiskey down onto the counter top. “Sip on this.”

  The reporter obediently took a swallow. The bartender thought it was interesting how many colors the man’s face turned in the process. A perfect rainbow of uncommon discomfort, he wished he’d had a camera to capture it.

  “Some of this whiskey has been aged for centuries,” The bartender explained, taking the glass back and pouring it into the top of the keg. “You don’t drink it all. You never drink it all. I always save a swallow to mix back in. There’s a little of your soul imprinted in that whiskey now, and by pouring it back into the keg I’m mixing it with thousands of other wayward souls who were gullible enough to take a sip. One day I’ll drink it all down and transcend and transform myself, riding a cosmic wave of psychic backwash into a higher state of existence.”

  There was a drunk poured over the vinyl and chrome plinth of a corner revolving stool. He kept peering into his glass, not daring to sip, just shaking it in soft spiraling circles. He was conjuring up a private kind of memory that only he could treasure, a one-of-a-kind keepsake that he kept padlocked away in some tight forgotten never-to-be-used brain cell.

  The bartender kept on talking.

  “There was one night that I remember as clearly as my first drink. It was the night when Texas Jack Page himself sat over yonder there in that booth and read himself three good books, one after another without ever moving his lips.”

&
nbsp; “What books were they?” The reporter asked.

  “What books?” The bartender said. “I don’t rightly remember but they must have been good ones because Texas Jack Page himself sat and read them there.”

  He polished the bar one more time, not even looking as he performed his act in an habitual time-worn fashion.

  “I watched him,” The bartender said. “I ought to know.”

  *

  In the beginning there was the word.

  Texas Jack Page was a legend among bibliophiles across the Southwestern states and beyond. His mass of unobtainable collector’s item paperbacks was whispered about in the inner circles, sanctums and internet web-rings. They knew him as a giant amongst book collectors. They spoke and typed in soft hushed fonts about his trailer full of dreams and memorabilia; entering awe struck rumors and oft repeated hints of his legendary wall of books.

  A wall of books; this was the monument Texas Jack Page lived for, long stretches of quiet printed order, stacked in tight thick rows. Books culled from the grab bins of a baker’s dozen used book shops, a half hundred yard sales, Clarkesworld, Amazon, Shocklines and even a few five finger discounts from the Harris County Public Library in Houston. A paperback volume of Kafka, pilfered from the bedside stand of John F. Kennedy, reputedly while he was banging the stardust out of one Norma Jean Desmond. Texas Jack Page was above any mortal code of ethics. If his collection needed something, it was his mission to fill that gap. His shelving system was simplicity itself. Nothing but books, with a long straight pine plank laid between each row. Books jammed from corner to corner of his aluminum trailer, from the floor boards to the rafters and straight around the room.

  Square perfect geometry, aping the neat lines of a long pine box, composed of pulp and glue and softwood shelving, evergreen and immortal. There was an alchemy of line and science and order that made him want to stand up in his boxer shorts and snap out a stern salute.

  A silverfish squittered out across a shelf like a fast running inkblot on legs. Texas Jack Page squashed it under his thumb, murdering it neatly between a hand bound copy of HP Lovecraft’s The Outsider written in a murderer’s blood and the rough draft of Skipp and Spector’s Book of The Dead.