Where We Live and Die

by Brian Keene

  So why is it bothering me now? Why, after all this time, am I dwelling on it?

  Anyway, enough about that.

  My son, who is nineteen months old, looks at the top of our driveway and waves to somebody who isn’t there. He always greets them with “Hi.” Then he smiles. Occasionally, he giggles—the same little laugh he does when Cassi and I make faces at him. When I turn to look at who he’s talking to, the driveway is empty.

  I am not crazy.

  ENTRY 4:

  I guess I should start at the beginning. That’s the only way I’ll make any sense of this. I went back and re-read the previous entries again tonight, after I was finished looking for a short story I could let Stephen Jones reprint for an anthology he’s putting together, and what I’ve written so far is nothing more than the incoherent, self-indulgent babblings of a madman. That won’t do, especially since I’m trying to prove to myself that I’m not insane.

  So...

  In the beginning, I started making enough money as a writer that my wife and I were able to move out of our small home on Main Street in Shrewsbury, and buy a place out in the country instead. I like our home very much. It reminds me of the type of area I grew up in, and those kinds of places aren’t very easy to find anymore. Everything is suburbs now—suburbs marking the distance between the next cluster of Home Depots and Walmarts and Burger Kings. Everything is sidewalks and homeowners’ associations and McMansions and housing developments with names like Whispering Pines that don’t have a single fucking pine tree, whispering or otherwise.

  Our place isn’t like that at all. It is distinctly old school. We have three acres of rural land. There are lots of tall, old-growth sycamore trees growing in our yard, and at the far end of our property, there is a swift, cold trout stream about twelve feet across and knee-deep in most places. In the spring, the creek often floods. We’ve got a neighbor on one side of our property. We share a driveway with him (the driveway is important and we’ll come back to it in a minute). The other side of our property borders a vast marsh. Beyond the swamp is four miles of state-owned game land—a lush, thick wilderness that, by law, can never be developed or forested. Beyond these woods lies the Susquehanna River, which our trout stream also feeds into. There’s an old logging road that runs from the edge of our property and through the woods, all the way to the river. Once, when Tim Lebbon was visiting, I took him for a walk back through there. He proclaimed it one of the most beautiful places on earth.

  And it is.

  A brief aside. I just cheated. It’s late and I want to shut this laptop off and go to sleep, so I took a shortcut. I copied and pasted the description of the house from my novella Scratch into this document, and then changed the tense and a few other things. That’s because the house in Scratch is this house, and their landscapes are the same. Both are beautiful, and I love this place as much as the character of Evan in Scratch loved his. That’s why it concerns me that Cassi has recently floated the idea of buying a house somewhere else. I’m not sure what has prompted this desire. It makes no sense, certainly not in this economy. I have to wonder if she’s seeing some of the same things I’ve been seeing. I know that in at least one case, she has, but I wonder if there’s more. Perhaps she’s keeping secrets from me, just as I’m keeping them from her. Maybe she’s seen and heard more than she’s letting on. Maybe I’m not crazy. Or maybe she’s just as crazy as I am.

  Anyway…the driveway. The driveway is an important part of this story, so let’s talk about that. As I said before, it’s a shared driveway, meaning me and Cassi and our neighbor and his wife all use it. It’s all uphill, and a real bitch to shovel in the winter. It empties out onto a winding, two-lane back road that is frequented all day and night by speeding dump trucks, speeding tractor trailers, speeding teenagers, and speeding commuters trying to find a shortcut on their way to their jobs in Baltimore, Lancaster, Harrisburg and York. The posted speed limit is forty-five miles per hour, but I’ve never seen anybody go slower than sixty-five. Since we’re right on the township line, we’re not an ideal area for speed traps. By the time a cop on our side of the line pulled out in pursuit of a speeding car, the violator would already be in the next township.

  We’ve lived here five years, and in that time there have been over twenty serious accidents (that I know of) within two miles of our driveway, plus countless fender-benders and other vehicular mishaps. Indeed, our first winter at the house, an ice storm turned York County’s roads into Slip ’n Slides and our road was wall-to-wall fender-benders that morning. Automobiles were smashing into each other like bumper cars and lining up in front of our house. I stood out there and directed traffic and brought folks coffee until the fire department arrived.

  I know of four fatalities that have occurred in the time we’ve lived here. I personally witnessed one of them. A couple on a motorcycle rear-ended a pick-up truck that was making a left turn. Both riders were ejected from the bike. The woman’s head cracked like an egg inside her helmet. There wasn’t much the truck driver, my neighbor, or myself could do for her. She was dead before the paramedics arrived. I never found out what happened to the guy that was on the bike with her, but I remember that his chest looked like raw hamburger.

  One of the other fatalities happened about a mile from our house. A machine operator from the Harley Davidson plant was coming home after second shift and hit a tree. The tree won. Speculation is that the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The third fatal accident happened fifty yards from our driveway. A lone driver ran down an embankment at three in the morning. The accident was quiet enough that both my neighbors and my wife and I slept through it. We didn’t know anything was amiss until we heard the sirens outside. By then it was too late, although, judging by the condition of the car and the body, it would have been too late long before they arrived.

  The fourth fatality occurred at the top of our driveway.

  And that was how I met the girl on the glider. And that is where our story really begins.

  ENTRY 5:

  I wasn’t home when it happened. It was mid-January, and I was a Guest of Honor at a convention in Missouri called VisionCon. After Saturday’s book signing and Q&A were over with, I spent the evening hanging out in the hotel bar with Mike Oliveri, Cullen Bunn, Val Botchlet (who used to moderate my old message board forum), my friend Richard Christy’s cousin Adam, playwright Roy C. Booth, and the guys from Skullvines Press. I was pleased to note that the hotel bar, upon learning that I would be back in town that weekend, had Basil Hayden’s and Knob Creek on hand (the year before, they’d only had Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam available, which are like the Coors and Budweiser of bourbon). Needless to say, we had a good time, and I didn’t get to bed until after 3am.

  When I woke up the next morning, I called home to talk to Cassi. She sounded tired and I soon found out why. She hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. She told me there had been another accident. Four kids, all of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty, had wrecked their car right at the top of our driveway. Three walked away from the accident. One did not. The accident happened just after midnight. Emergency vehicles, firemen and paramedics had been on hand until well after dawn. Had Cassi experienced some kind of crisis, and had to leave our home, she would have been unable to get out of our driveway. The emergency crews had it blocked off, along with the road. I asked her if she knew the details and found out that she didn’t. All she knew was what one of the paramedics had told her—the wreck, the number and ages of the people in the car, and that one of them had died. I asked her if Coop had been on the scene, since he works as an EMT and our road is along his ambulance route. It turned out he hadn’t. While all of this was going on, Coop and the rest of his ambulance crew had been down at the river, fishing a suicide out of the half-frozen water near the Columbia-Marietta Bridge.

  My flight home from Missouri was delayed until Monday night due to inclement weather. I didn’t land in Baltimore until nearly midnight and didn’t get home until after 2a
m Tuesday morning. I didn’t bother to look for damage from the accident or markings on the road. It was dark and foggy outside, and I was focused solely on giving my wife, my son and my dog all a big hug. I didn’t see anything that night, supernatural or otherwise.

  I wonder now, looking back, if I might have seen something then had I been looking for it—and if I had seen something, would I have known what it was?

  The next morning, after I woke up and unpacked and told my wife about my trip, I remembered the accident and decided to walk up to the top of the driveway and survey the damage. Yes, I’m one of those people who slow down to gawk at accidents on the highway. I’ll stand and watch a burning building. I’m fascinated by such things. To be fair, though, I’d like to think that I’m also the type of person who will stop along that highway and offer assistance, or run inside that burning building and pull people out until the firemen arrive. This is what I tell myself, at least.

  I walked up the driveway and was out of breath by the time I reached the top. This happens a lot—more and more these last few years. When I was a kid, I could ride my BMX Mongoose all over York County, pedaling down to Spring Grove to buy comic books at the newsstand, and not get winded. In the Navy, I could swim a mile and not be out of breath. I used to run cross country in high school (the only organized sport I ever played, and I did it just to make my old man happy). But now, at forty-one? Forget about it. I gasp for breath after walking a mile through the woods and vigorous sex sometimes leaves me winded and on the verge of passing out. There are times when I lay there on the bed, wheezing and panting and waiting for the room to stop spinning. I told Cassi she should consider my breathlessness a compliment, but she doesn’t see it that way. It concerned Cassi enough that she made me go to the doctor. I hate doctors. I could cut my arm off in a horrific threshing machine accident and I still wouldn’t go to the doctor. But I went for her. The doctor said there wasn’t anything wrong with me. No heart trouble (at least, not yet). No lung trouble. In plain terms, I was out of fucking shape. I asked him how this could be. He asked me what I did for a living. I told him I sat around in my underwear and made up scary stories all day long. He frowned, as if to say, “Well, there’s your answer.”

  I was never the athletic type. Sure, I can hold my own in a fight (and I am mean enough to win), but I’m not much for playing sports or exercising or things like that. Under orders to get in shape, I went to the one person whose advice I trust in such a situation—Wrath James White, former World Champion kickboxer, UFC trainer and fighter, horror novelist, and one of my best friends. He told me to run every day. He said I should start out running, and when I felt like I couldn’t go on, that instead of stopping, I should walk. Then, after a little bit of walking, I should start running again. Wrath told me to do this every day, and I’d be in shape in no time. I did it once and it almost killed me.

  I’m certain this was Wrath’s idea of a practical joke.

  Anyway, I stood at the top of the driveway and looked around while I caught my breath. It was easy to tell what had happened. The car had been coming north and heading southwest when, for whatever reason, the driver lost control. It had swerved up the embankment on the far side of the road, missing our mailbox by inches. Then it had flipped over onto its roof, slid back across the road, and slammed into the guardrail next to our driveway. There was debris and markings everywhere. The tires had gouged huge trenches in the embankment, and a piece of the muffler had come off on a chunk of granite sticking up out of the dirt. The pavement was scratched and scuffed, and covered with fragments of windshield glass and shards of plastic from the headlights, taillights and elsewhere. There were a bunch of other tiny parts. I don’t know shit about cars, but I bet Coop could have identified them easily enough (Coop once took it upon himself to teach me how to fix a car. Within an hour, he’d grown annoyed enough to tell me that the timing belt ran the digital clock on my dashboard. I believed him. It was my wife who eventually set me straight).

  Some of the junk was lying in our driveway. I’d probably driven right over it the night before. I wondered why the cops hadn’t done a better job of cleaning up after the accident. Maybe it was because there were just so many crashes on this road, and they knew they’d have to do it all over again soon enough. There was more debris scattered around the crumpled guardrail, along with bent and broken saplings and vegetation.

  There were black and brown stains on the road. The heaviest concentration of them seemed to be about ten feet away from the guardrail. The black stuff was oil. The brown stains were blood. Around these, the State Police investigators had spray-painted arrows, circles and numbers. Number one corresponded with the embankment. Number four corresponded with the largest of the bloodstains. These modern day hieroglyphics told me a story. Someone had been ejected from the car when it flipped over onto its roof. That person was thrown further down the road while the car and the other three occupants slid toward the guardrail. I wondered who came to a stop first. I was pretty sure, judging by the visual evidence, that the person who’d been ejected was the one who had died.

  I walked back down to the house, went out into the garage, and got a broom and a snow shovel. Then I trekked back up to the top of the hill and swept the debris out of our driveway. When I was finished, I went out to my office and settled in to do some work. Nothing relaxes me more than sitting in my office after I’ve been out on the road, and this was my first chance to enjoy it since coming home from VisionCon. I started writing, and didn’t think about the accident again until the next day, when the cross showed up.

  ENTRY 6:

  The only newspaper I read is USA Today, and the only time I read it is when I’m traveling. I’ve tried twice to subscribe to it, but each time I was told that we lived too far out in the country for them to deliver it. We don’t subscribe to either of the local papers. It’s nothing personal. I have good friends at both the York Daily Record and the York Dispatch. Indeed, before I went full-time as a novelist, I used to supplement my income as a freelance writer for the York Dispatch/York Sunday News. Both papers have given me reasonably fair coverage over the years (other than the time they mistakenly reported that I was quitting horror to write a Civil War novel). I have nothing against either publication, but I don’t subscribe to either. I read the news online when I wake up in the morning. By the time the local paper would arrive, I’d already be working, so it doesn’t make sense for me to subscribe.

  Both papers had, in fact, reported on the accident, but I missed the coverage.

  I also don’t watch the local news. Unlike the local newspapers, our two local television stations—WGAL 8 and WPMT Fox 43—are both run by monkeys. At least, that’s the way it seems to me. Channel 8 spends fifty-five minutes of every news hour extolling the benefits of their Super Doppler Weather Radar. The remaining five minutes are usually devoted to a special feature regarding whichever advertiser paid them the most money that week. I’m not kidding about this. Fox 43 isn’t much better. To their credit, they do attempt to report the news, but their idea of reporting involves sending pretty female news anchors out to the local dairy farm or Cub Scout meeting for some ‘slice of life’ events. If Iran does eventually build a nuclear bomb, you won’t hear about it on either station, because Channel 8 will have local weatherman Doug Allen jerking off over the goddamn Super Doppler Radar and Fox 43 will be reporting live from some craft fair in fucking Hanover.

  I don’t know if either of them reported on the accident. I somehow doubt it, but if they did, I missed the report.

  And don’t even get me started on the sorry state of our local radio stations…

  In truth, even though it was only twenty-four hours since I’d swept up the debris, I’d already forgotten all about the crash. After all, it had happened while I was gone, and none of the victims were anyone that I knew, and our property hadn’t been damaged, and the wreckage was gone, so it didn’t really impact me that much. It was something that happened, a momentary distraction, but t
here were other things to focus on, important things like writing and trying to figure out if it was possible to add yet another novel to my list of deadlines in order to pay for the baby’s daycare.

  Perhaps that sounds callous. Someone had lost their life. Perhaps I should have been a little more concerned. Caring. Sympathetic. But I wasn’t. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I think it just makes me what I am—a flawed human, just like everybody else.

  Around noon, I walked up to the top of the driveway to get the mail. I noticed a rustic, white picket cross and a beautiful floral arrangement mounted on the smashed guardrail. I’ve driven by these crosses countless times. You see them dotting our roads and interstates. Sometimes, they seem almost as abundant as McDonald’s, Exxon and other highway staples. I’d never actually seen one up close, though. Up until that moment, I’d only experienced them as a passing glance through the windshield, there but for the blink of an eye and then gone as the next mile marker rolled past.

  Curious, I quickly pulled the mail out of our mailbox and then hurried over to the cross for a closer look. The flowers were fresh and professionally arranged. There was no tag or any indication of which local florist had put them together. Nor was there a name on the cross. Not even the old standard ‘R.I.P.’ It was just plain white—two thin slats nailed together in the middle.

  I turned away and started back downhill. The mailman had brought no royalty or advance checks. Instead, there were only bills, catalogs and my monthly issues of National Geographic, Soldier of Fortune and The Fortean Times (all of which, for some inexplicable reason, seem to arrive on the same day each month). I was flipping through the bills, wondering how the hell we were going to stay caught up on them, when the wind began to blow. I heard a rustling sound behind me.