Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set

by Scott Nicholson

  The big General Electric was nearly empty. The celery had wilted. Something on the middle wire shelf had separated into layers. He didn't dare open the Tupperware container to see what was inside. A half-dozen eggs roosted in their scooped-out places. One had a hairline crack, and a clear jewel of fluid glistened under the fluorescent light.

  He fished out the drinks and closed the door. There was a hiss as the motor kicked in and sucked the seals tight. A fluff of lint shot from the grill at the base of the appliance.

  The drinks chilled his palms. Sensation. He pressed a can to his forehead. Great way to cure a headache. Too bad he didn't have one.

  He went back to the living room. Janie was still coloring, the tip of her tongue pressed just so against the corner of her mouth. Her eyes were half-closed, the curl of her lashes making Darrell's heart ache. He sat down.

  Darrell gave Rita the soda, then pulled the tab on his beer. The can opened with a weak, wet sigh. He took a sip. Flat.

  “See any mice?” Rita asked, trying to smile.

  “Not a single Mickey Mouse in the place. Saw a Donald Duck, though.”

  Janie giggled, her shoulders shaking a little. Her ponytail had fallen against one cheek. Darrell hated lying. But it wasn't really a lie, was it? The lie was so white, it was practically see-through.

  He settled back in his chair. The newspaper had slipped to the floor and opened to page seven, where the real news was located. More stuff on Johnson's mess in Viet Nam . Right now, he had no interest in the world beyond. He looked at the television.

  Gomer was doing something stupid, and his proud idiot grin threatened to split his head in half. Barney was waving his arms in gangly hysterics. Andy stood there with his hands in his pockets.

  Television was black-and-white, just like life. But in television, you had “problem,” then “problem solved.” Sprinkle in some canned laughter along the way. In life, there were no solutions and not much laughter.

  He took another sip of beer. “You want to visit your folks again this weekend?”

  Rita had gulped half her soda in her nervousness. “Can we afford it?”

  Could they afford not to? Every minute away from the house was a good minute. He wished they could move. He had thought about putting the house up for sale, but the market was glutted. The racial tension had even touched the midtown area, and middle-class whites didn't want to bring their families to the South. Besides, who would want to buy a haunted house?

  And if they did manage to sell the house, where would they go? Shoe store managers weren't exactly in high demand. And he didn't want Rita to work until Janie started school. So they'd just have to ride it out for another year or so. Seemed like they'd been riding it out forever.

  He put down the beer and jabbed the cigar in his mouth. “Maybe your folks are getting tired of us,” he said around the rolled leaf. “How about a trip to the mountains? We can get a little cabin, maybe out next to a lake.” He thought of his fishing rod, leaning against his golf bag somewhere in the lost black of the closet.

  “Out in the middle of nowhere?” Rita's voice rose a half-step too high. Janie noticed and stopped scribbling.

  “We could get a boat.”

  “I'll call around,” Rita said. “Tomorrow.”

  Darrell looked at the bookcase on the wall. He'd been meaning to read so many of those books. He wasn't in the mood to spend a few hours with one. Even though he had all the time in the world.

  He picked up the Zippo and absently thumbed the flame to life. Janie heard the lid open and looked up. Pretty colors. Orange , yellow, blue. He doused the flame, thumbed it to life once more, then closed the lighter and put it back on the table.

  Rita pretended to watch television. Darrell looked from her face to the screen. The news was on, footage of the sanitation workers' strike. The reporter's voice-over was bassy and bland.

  “Do you think it's serious?” Rita asked, with double meaning.

  “A bunch of garbage.” The joke fell flat. Darrell went to the RCA and turned down the volume. Silence crowded the air.

  Janie stopped coloring, lifted her head and cocked it to one side. “I heard something.”

  Her lips pursed. A child shouldn't suffer such worry. He waited for a pang of guilt to sear his chest. But the guilt was hollow, dead inside him.

  “I think it's time a little girl went beddy-bye,” he said. Rita was standing before he even finished his sentence.

  “Aw, do I have to?” Janie protested half-heartedly.

  “Afraid so, pumpkin.”

  “I'll go get the bed ready, then you can come up and get brushed and washed,” Rita said, heading too fast for the stairs.

  “And Daddy tells the bedtime story?” Janie asked.

  Darrell smiled. Rita was a wonderful mother. He couldn't imagine a better partner. But when it came to telling stories, there was only one king. “Sure,” he said. “Now gather your crayons.”

  The promise of a story got Janie in gear. Darrell heard Rita's slippered feet on the stairs. Her soles were worn. He'd have to get her a new pair down at the store.

  He froze, the hairs on his neck stiffening.

  There.

  That sound again.

  The not-mice.

  Where was that damn dog?

  He got to his feet, stomach clenched. Janie was preoccupied with her chore. He walked to the back door and parted the curtain, wondering if Rita had heard and was now looking out from the upstairs window.

  The moon was fuller, brighter, more robust. Why did they only come at night?

  Maybe they had rules. Which was stupid. They broke every natural law just in the act of existing.

  There, by the laurel at the edge of the backyard. Two shapes, shimmering, surreal, a bit washed out.

  He opened the door, hoping to scare them away. That was a hoot. Him scaring them. But he had to try, for Janie's and Rita's sake.

  “What do you want?” he said, trying to keep his voice level. Could they understand him? Or did they speak a different language in that other world?

  The shapes moved toward him, awkwardly. A bubbling sound flooded the backyard, like pockets of air escaping from water. One of the shapes raised a nebulous arm. The motion was jerky, like in an old silent film.

  Darrell stepped off the porch. Maybe if he took a stand here, they would take what they wanted and leave his family alone.

  “There's nothing for you here,” he said. “Why don't you go back where you came from?”

  A sudden rage flared through him, filling his abdomen with heat. These were the things that bothered Janie, that made Rita worry, that was the fountain of his own constant guilt. These things had no right to intrude on their space, their lives, their reality.

  “I don't believe in you,” he shouted, no longer caring if he woke Neighbor George. If only the dog would bark, maybe that would drive them away.

  The bubbling sound came again. The spooks were closer now, and he could see they were shaped like humans. Noises from their heads collected and hung in the air. The wind lifted, changed direction. The noises blew together, thickened and became words.

  Darrell's language.

  “There's where it happened.”

  A kid. Sounded like early teens. Did their kind age, or were they stuck in the same moment forever?

  Darrell opened his mouth, but didn't speak. More words came from the world of beyond, words that were somnambulant and sonorous.

  “Gives me the creeps, man.” Another young one.

  “Three of them died when it burned down.”

  “Freaky. Maybe some of the bones are still there.”

  “They say only the dog got away.”

  “Must have been a long time ago.”

  “Almost thirty years.”

  “Nothing but a chimney left, and a few black bricks. You'd think something would grow back. Trees and stuff.” A silence. Darrell's heart beat, again, three times, more.

  “It's supposed to be haunted,” said the
first.

  “Bullshit.”

  “Go out and touch it, then.”

  “No way.”

  A fire flashed in front of one of the shapes, then a slow curl of smoke wafted across the moonlit yard. The end of a cigarette glowed. Smoke. Spirit. Smoke. Spirit. Both insubstantial.

  Darrell walked down the back steps, wondering how he could make them go away. A cross? A Bible? A big stick?

  “I only come here at night,” said the one inhaling the fire.

  “Place gives me the creeps.”

  “It's cool, man.”

  “I don't like it.” The shape drifted back, away from the house, away from Darrell's approach.

  “Chicken.”

  The shape turned and fled.

  “Chicken,” repeated the first, louder, sending a puff of gray smoke into the air.

  Darrell glanced up at Janie's bedroom window. She would be in her pajamas now, the covers up to her chin, a picture book across her tummy. The pages opened to a story that began “Once upon a time...”

  Darrell kept walking, nearing the ghost of shifting smoke and fire. He was driven by his anger now, an anger that drowned the fear. The thing didn't belong in their world. Everything about them was wrong. Their bad light, their voices, their unreal movement.

  He reached out, clutching for the thing's throat. His hands passed through the flame without burning, then through the shape without touching. But the shape froze, shuddered, then turned and fled back to its world of beyond.

  Darrell watched the laurels for a moment, making sure the thing was gone. They would come back. They always did. But tonight he had won. A sweat of tension dried in the gentle breeze.

  He went inside and closed the door. He was trembling. But he had a right to feel violated, outraged. He hadn't invited the things to his house.

  He had calmed down a little by the time he reached the living room. A Spencer Tracy movie was on the television. The glow from the screen flickered on the walls like green firelight.

  Rita was in her chair, blinking too rapidly. “Was it...?” she asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, Darrell, what are we going to do?”

  “What can we do?”

  “Move.”

  He sighed. “We can't afford to right now. Maybe next year.”

  He sat down heavily and took a sip of his beer. It was still flat.

  “What do we tell Janie?”

  “Nothing for now. It's just mice, remember?”

  He wished the dog were here, so he could stroke it behind the ears. He thought of those words from beyond, and how they said something about the dog getting out. Getting out of what?

  He reached for his cigar and stuck it in his mouth. After a moment, he said, “Maybe if we stop believing in them, they'll go away.”

  The clock ticked on the mantel.

  “I can't,” Rita said.

  “Neither can I.”

  The clock ticked some more.

  “She's waiting.”

  “I know.”

  Darrell leaned his cigar carefully against the ashtray. He noticed his lighter was missing. He shrugged and went upstairs to read Janie her story. He wondered if tonight the ending would be the same as always.

  THE END

  Return to Ashes Table of Contents

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  ###

  THE CHRISTENING

  The sky gave birth to night without a single moan, but Kelly Stamey knew her time wouldn’t be so easy.

  She wrapped her arms around her swollen belly. How could you love something so much, something that you'd never even seen? How could you treasure this thing that carried the genes of one of the world's all-time biggest losers? How could you go through all of this alone?

  But she wasn't entirely alone. She brushed back the curtains and looked across the cold, dark field. The strange shape bobbed among the sharp shadows of the October trees. The shape looked as if it had been carved out of moonlight with a dull knife. It was as tall as the fence that circled part of the farm's property and half as wide as the potato barrel huddled by the barn door.

  The baby squirmed, and the shape outside wiggled in harmony with the strange rhythm of the life inside her. Kelly shuddered and went away from the window. Bad things didn't exist if you didn't see them. Just like Chet. Out of sight, out of mind.

  Except he wasn't out of mind. And not entirely out of sight, either, if you counted the photograph on the TV set. It was one of those stiff, formal portraits that the Rescue Squad gave to volunteers at the annual fundraising potluck. Kelly, in what she called her “twenty-dollar redneck hair,” looming behind Chet, her lipstick a little too bright, her hands folded over his checkered flannel shoulder.

  Chet, grinning, a dark gap where he'd lost a tooth in a fist fight. Chet, chin up. Chet with the square and dull face that, if you didn't know better, made him look like the kind of man you'd want working the Jaws of Life if you were pinned in a car. Solid and reliable. If you didn't know better.

  She turned the picture face down. She only saved it so that one day she could show the baby. “There's your father,” she would say when the child was old enough to wonder why he didn't have two parents. “He.” She was thinking of it as a “he” even though she didn't know the gender, and certainly couldn't afford a sonogram to find out.

  And when the child asked what his father was like, well, she'd deal with that part when the time came.

  The tangible reminders of Chet were mostly gone. He'd taken his fishing rods, his sweat-stunk sleeping bag, the neon beer light, his thick fireman's coat. But still Chet lingered, insubstantial but stubborn, like that white shape out in the meadow. She expected him to walk into the room at any moment, cigarette dangling from his lips, eyes squinting against the smoke.

  But he hadn't walked these floors in months. The only walking he'd done lately was the away kind. Wasn't no woman going to strap him down with a baby, no way in hell. If it was even his, more likely a “Daddy's maybe.”

  Chet didn't believe in fidelity. He didn't think humans could love, and sleep with, the same person for an entire week, much less a lifetime. So of course he would accuse her of straddling his fishing buddies. Every time he emerged from a drunken blackout to find her side of the bed empty, he immediately assumed she was working the springs of somebody's Chevy. Hell, she was so low in his mind, she'd probably do it in a Ford.

  Kelly turned off the lights and went up the creaking stairs. Her groin throbbed with ligament pain, and the baby elbowed her intestines to punctuate the other aches. She was breathless by the time she reached the top of the stairs. A draft blew across her face, like cool, soft flowers brushing her cheeks.

  The house was over a hundred years old. The Stamey Place was crumbling and musty, but at least it was rent free. Other family members had worn out these floors, scuffed the stairs, chipped the door jambs. But they were all gone now. She was the last Stamey, not counting the one that twitched inside her.

  The baby kicked again, harder, sending a sharp pain through Kelly's bladder. Kelly didn't want to go to the bathroom so soon after the last trip. The toilet seat was frigid. The heating oil had run out, and she didn't have the money to refill the rusty tank out back.

  From the bedroom window, she could see most of the farm. The moon spilled silver over the dark skin of the Earth. A stand of brush marked the boundary of the creek, and the old Cherokee ceremonial mound was stubbled with cornstalks. The barn stood black and empty beside it. The Stamey graveyard was on beyond that, on a little rise near the forest.

  The white shape hovered along the fence line, immune to the breeze. Kelly knew the thing didn't belong here. Not on the farm, not on this Earth. But she wasn't afraid. In a strange way, the shape was comforting. They both haunted this same stretch of ground, both were bound to the Stamey place by the same invisible chains.

  She'd first started seeing the shape around the time the morning sickness hit. Only then it had been a thin smud
ge, transparent and nearly invisible. The shape had grown thicker, brighter, and more substantial as her belly expanded and her breasts swelled and Chet turned sullen.

  She'd even tried to point out the shape to Chet. She'd almost called it a “ghost” but knew Chet would have nearly laughed himself sober. He made fun of her for going up to the family cemetery and paying visits to the dear departed. Even a prayer drew a cuss and a laugh. He had no use for spiritual matters. To him, if you couldn't smoke it, drink it, or stick part of yourself in it, then it didn't add a damned bit to the day.

  As Kelly watched from the window, the thing bobbed closer. Eight months old. But that wasn't right. Ghosts couldn't age, could they?

  Her belly buddy squirmed. She began singing. “Hush, little baby, don't say a—”

  She left the melody suspended, the creaking house adding useless percussion. Because the next line started with “Daddy.” Chet. He wouldn't buy anybody a mockingbird, even if their lives depended on it.

  She could always change the gender, make it “Momma's gonna” do thus and such. But she'd lost the mood, and the baby had settled. Outside, the ghost also settled, a sodden sack of spirit.

  Kelly climbed into the cold bed. She rolled into the cup of mattress where she and Chet had once cuddled, played, made a baby. She wondered if she would dream of her baby's gender. Some women did that.

  The quilts were nearly warm by the time she fell asleep.

  Kelly walked the frosted morning on her way to feed the chickens. She tugged up her oversize sweat pants as she went. Her breath hung in front of her, a silver miracle that died away to make room for the next. Breath like a ghost.

  The chickens gathered around her feet, pecking the kernels she thumbed from hardened corn cobs. There might be a couple of eggs. The baby would like that. He always gave a kick of joy when that food energy flowed through the cord.

  Kelly wondered if the ghost kicked each time she ate. Or did it feed from somewhere else? An umbilical cord for the dead, with energy flowing to them from the living. Invisible, with soul juice pumping into the amniotic sac of the afterlife to keep them from fading into nonexistence. Were they connected to one another?