CL: Ha. I hear ya. I do like MonsterQuest for the monster info and historical accounts, but the parts where they show researchers going out on expeditions or whatever are not very accurate. Like every other reality show, those parts are staged and scripted by the producers, so they are made to be entertaining, not scientifically accurate. Several friends of mine were featured on various MonsterQuest episodes, so they’ve told me stories about how those things went down. It’s definitely not a good example of how you should go about hunting an animal of any kind. So yeah, real bigfoot researchers would not be so loud, nor would there be camera crews and producers around. But most of what goes on in a hunt for an undiscovered animal would end up as hours of boring footage on television, so I suppose they have to make it more exciting somehow.
I would rather see more of a documentary style approach where they just tell the history of the monster and talk about some of the cool reports. There’s so many more credible sightings and stories that they never covered on MonsterQuest. Maybe I will launch a Monstro Bizarro show where I can do that.
After I get done with some of these other projects, that is. Ha!
KW: So what lurks over the dusty horizon? What’s next for the band?
CL: The main thing now is to make some videos for some of our songs that never had videos. In the modern Internet age, it’s important to offer something that can be viewed online to go with the music. We have some great songs, like “Werewolves on Wheels,” “Walkin’ Through the Desert with a Crow,” and of course, “Drink with the Living Dead,” which never had videos.
KW: So you’re going to do videos for older songs? Obviously most bands focus on the current album, but it’s not a bad idea to continue promoting older songs and albums, especially when they’re strong. Which the older Ghoultown material is, of course.
CL: I know that might seem strange, but I think we have some strong songs from the last two albums that really needed videos. If fans are putting the songs on YouTube themselves, with just the album cover sitting there as an image, I think that’s saying something. I would rather have something cool that’s done by us, at least for our most popular songs.
Fans always say that “Walking Through the Desert with a Crow” is one of their all-time favorites, so I regret that we couldn’t make a video for it at the time. Doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t ever be done. Now we’ve met some really good video producers, so we have more of an ability to realize the potential of those great songs and perhaps expose them to more people by doing a video. We can’t tour in every town in the world, but our video can be seen by anyone that has an Internet connection.
We have new fans joining the Ghoultown posse all the time, having just heard the band for the first time. They go back and buy all the past releases. I think that still makes those songs relevant. We’re not going back beyond the last two full albums, so with the exception of “Walking Through the Desert with a Crow,” the videos will all be from Life After Sundown.
KW: Any timeline set for a new album?
CL: I’m not sure when or if that is going to happen. As it stands right now, I haven’t written any songs for it. Due to some personal things that have happened this past year, I haven’t been able to find any Ghoultown inspiration. I sit down with the guitar all the time, but I can’t seem to come up with a single riff. It’s like a fire that has gone cold. I’m hoping that by going off and doing something totally different for a while, like writing, it might reignite things, but at the moment I seem to be bone dry of musical ideas.
In the meantime, I’ve been thinking about releasing some sort of “rare and unreleased” type collection. We have so many old songs that never got released, or ones that were only on compilations or movie soundtracks, that it might be something cool for our long-time fans. We get e-mails asking about this track or that all the time, so I know some people would like to have our entire catalog. But at this point it’s just an idea.
KW: Well, I think we’ve all hit that wall at times, especially when personal issues come into play. Hopefully sinking your teeth into some other things will reignite that fire.
That said, the idea of rarities album has me excited. And who knows, maybe that’ll be the spark you need and you’ll pen a new Ghoultown song or two for the album. Either way, as a fan, a rarities disc would be killer.
CL: I did want to record a new song to include with the rarities album, so that’s one thing that is holding it up. Once I get done with the latest video, I’m gonna try to work on this.
KW: Anyway, brother, I appreciate you talking with me. Looking forward to whatever you do in the future.
CL: You bet. Thanks for taking the time to support Ghoultown. And thanks for not asking questions like “Give me a brief history of the band.” Our history is anything but brief. Ha!
For more information, visit www.ghoultown.com.
WANTING IT
by Aaron Polson
Megan doesn’t ask where I go at night anymore.
She knows. I’m sure she does. I hope she does. If she suspects something else—maybe an affair—I wouldn’t want the hurt on my heart. Now that the kids are grown, it’s just the two of us, and I’ve never loved—never needed—her more. But Megan can’t take away the truth. She can’t take away the nightmares, no matter how many times she squeezes my shoulder and whispers, “It’s okay.”
Nothing will ever be okay.
• • •
Joel and I started going to the pond in the sixth grade, two years before Robby moved to town. I was twelve and invincible: old enough to scoff at Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, but young enough to let my imagination fill with the legends old men wrought as they sipped coffee at Daylight Donuts. Haunted, some would say. A boy drowned there, back in the fifties. They dragged the pond but never found his body. His parents killed themselves right in the old farmhouse over the hill. Invariably, a worn face would lean closer and whisper, I heard he crawls out of the pond when folks go fishing up there, just to see who’s troubling his water. Joel and I listened, circling their broken, grizzled voices like summer moths.
We had been dreaming big dreams for years by then, dreams of ghosts and monsters and death. Sometimes, in our shitty little town, those dreams were all we had to avoid the real monsters of drunken parents and divorce. We had supped full of horror most of our childhoods, found escape with late night B-movies and old comics, Creepy and Famous Monsters, and as soon as we were old enough to win our parents’ permission to ride our bikes alone, we made weekly trips to the pond and the old farmhouse.
But we never told them where we were going—never told them the truth.
We were the first to share the stories with Robby, and his gaping mouth and wide eyes said he was a kindred spirit.
“They say he comes out sometimes,” Joel said, “to grab people when they’re fishing.”
I did my best to echo the old men. “Yeah. And the house—that’s haunted, too. The kid’s parents died there, and they’ve been looking for their boy for, like, forever.”
Robby’s face washed as white as the back of a postage stamp. “You guys ever see the dead boy?”
Joel and I exchanged a look.
“Not yet,” Joel said.
• • •
I often dream of fishing at the pond with Joel. In the dream, our fishing tackle morphs into pulp comics with grotesque monsters on the covers and titles which include the words Haunt, Fear, and Horror. Joel looks up from one of the magazines, smiling. I dream until the dream bleeds to black, and I feel a giant’s hand wrap around my heart and squeeze. Sweat stings my eyes as they open to my dark bedroom.
“What’s wrong?” Megan asks.
“Nothing.”
I lie. I can’t tell her I choose the dream. Every night, I conjure the pond, the farmhouse, just before sleep—because a piece of me is always waiting there, wanting the impossible. I stare at the dark ceiling until Megan rolls over, her breathing slows, and she falls asleep. My clothes wait for me on the
back porch. I’ve planned ahead. The drive out to the farmhouse takes only fifteen minutes, even in the dark.
• • •
We convinced Robby to come with us one weekend in early September of 1975. He didn’t have his own fishing pole or bike. I loaned him my old Zebco 33, and Joel let him ride his Huffy while he stretched his ropey muscles on his father’s ten-speed. We snaked along our usual path through Greenwillow Cemetery, rubber tires churning the gravel, a rough hum filling the space beyond the limestone gates.
We dropped the bikes and pressed under the loose barbed-wire fence at the back of the cemetery; Joel went first, I followed—each holding back the rusty links long enough for the other to step through—and Robby brought up the rear. Our imaginations spilled over into the shadows, bringing the breeze-blown tree branches to monstrous life. Robby’s pale face turned at every sound, every snap of twig or brush of leaves.
When we ran out of bait, we hiked around the pond, past the overturned rowboat, and up over the rise. We stole into the old house through a loose door, opened Joel’s backpack, and read his comics on the dusty floor until the shadows threatened our budding courage. We’d lived on the edge between adult knowing and childhood believing for two years. The stories those old men told at Daylight Donuts could have frozen our bones, but it didn’t matter much to us. We wanted it. We wanted the dead boy to crawl out of the muck. We wanted the ghosts of his parents to whisper across our necks. We wanted it more than anything.
And we wanted Robby to feel the thrill, too.
He channeled our excitement that day—a sense of wonder which, for me, had become faded with time, just like the washed-out pages in Joel’s comics. It was Robby who convinced Joel to take the boat out onto the water.
“It looks fine. It’ll float just fine,” he said. “Maybe we could see something out there. Maybe, if the water’s still enough.”
Joel looked at me. “Maybe.”
“No,” I said. “You guys are nuts.” In my memory, I saw a rock leave Joel’s hand, tumble through the sky, and strike the white plank hull. We’d dared each other to hit the boat with stones in the past, hoping to stir the dead boy from his muddy slumber. “That thing isn’t going to float.”
• • •
I park just outside the farmhouse. Inside, I stretch out on the floor, eyes pointed toward the ceiling. I lie there the remainder of the night. Uneven floorboards pinch my back, and my muscles stiffen by morning, but I don’t move. I wonder who lived in the house. I think of the conversations which might have seeped into the walls and the stone foundation. What anger and love and sadness leaked into the plumbing and the shards of glass strewn across the floor. The old house seems to breathe.
But it’s only the wind.
The moan of the old wood.
No voices come, no phantoms. Only daylight and a trip home.
• • •
I watched from the opposite bank as Robby and Joel turned the boat over. Joel kicked it, testing its integrity. They heaved it into the water.
“Hey, Talbot! It floats!” Joel flipped me off from across the water. “Floats just fine, chicken shit!”
It floated fine until they paddled to the center of the pond, using their cupped hands as oars. Robby stood up, and the boat teetered. Joel tugged at his jacket, but Robby didn’t sit down. My legs wobbled as though I were standing in the rocking boat with them. They capsized, dropping into the water with a thunderous splash and spray of water.
I closed my eyes, trying to see a boy, all alone, fall in the water twenty-five years before and drown. I tried to conjure his spirit, invite him to join us as my friends thrashed against the chilly water. I begged for it.
“Help us,” Joel cried out.
I opened my eyes and waded into the pond past my waist. Water and mud bled together, obscuring the bottom. The murk encircled my legs, cradled my butt and testicles, and swallowed my shoes. I struggled against the pond as if it were a living thing. But then, as I reached Joel and Robby and found myself in water up to my chest, I realized it wasn’t alive. It was dead, not even deep enough to swallow a body and never give it up. I thought of old men and their lies, and a glimmer of childhood wonder sank to the bottom with the mud. Grabbing each other’s hands, we staggered to the pond’s edge.
“Damn,” I said, panting on the shore.
Robby looked at me. “Be real easy to die out here. Bet that’s what happened to that kid.”
Doubt sank its sharp claws into my thoughts. I looked at the pond, at Joel and Robby, both drenched and reeking of decaying pond matter, and at the little boat which managed to drift across to the opposite shore after capsizing. Even the words “opposite shore” now seemed like a lie. The pond was tiny, not much more than a drainage ditch in an old field. I felt cold, the same awful, empty sensation that gripped me after I saw Mom sneak Christmas gifts under the tree when I was seven. The same hollowness I felt when I caught Dad with Mrs. Reed at the park before the divorce. If there ever was a time for the dead boy to rise...
But he didn’t. He never had, and he never would.
“There’s no kid,” I said.
Joel’s surprised face turned up toward mine.
“But you said...the pond was haunted. Everybody knows.” Robby held out a hand like a beggar hoping for a coin. “Everybody in town knows.”
“Just stories,” I muttered. “Just old men and their bullshit.”
Wading into that pond, I’d peeked behind the curtain of those old men’s stories, and seen the truth. The knowledge hollowed out my guts, made me an empty shell, a cold, numb bag of skin and bones.
In a way, I was the first to die.
• • •
The adult me knows what the child never wanted.
There’s no body in the pond. No ghosts in the old farmhouse. I lie on the hardwood floor and wait all night, sometimes sleeping, sometimes awake. At dawn, it’s Megan’s face I think of, and I drive home.
We don’t speak of the house anymore. She’s happy I bought the place; happy I might finally put the past behind me.
But some memories have teeth, and they bite deep.
• • •
On Halloween night, Joel and I would watch old movies on Varney the Vampyre’s Horror Emporium, a local cable rip-off of Morgus and Elvira. We thrilled to Boris Karloff in heavy spirit-gum and Bela Lugosi with his accent, thick like the mud at the bottom of the pond. Robby was going to join us at Joel’s house our eighth-grade year.
We huddled in Joel’s basement with bowls of buttery popcorn and nachos. We were both wired from cans of soda, caffeine humming through our veins—a sure guarantee we wouldn’t nod off until the third film of the evening. The title credits for The Black Cat flickered on screen, both of our vintage horror heroes with starring roles.
“When do you suppose Robby’s going to get here?” he asked.
“He’ll come,” I said.
Light from the television danced in Joel’s eyes like stars on the dappled surface of a pond at midnight. Neither of us spoke for a time, both all too aware of the mutual unease which grew in our chests like hidden mushrooms in the spring. We remembered the argument from school, the dare which played out between Robby and me.
On the TV, Lugosi raised a scalpel in one hand, ready to exact revenge on his nemesis, when the phone rang.
“Joel,” his mother called from the top of the stairs. “Telephone.”
The fungus burst in my chest, and its poisoned spores found my voice. “It’s Robby’s mom,” I said. “Something’s happened.”
The look on Joel’s face seared into my brain—the way his mouth dangled open and the shadows blacked out his eyes like pits pressed into black soil. He would have the same look four years later at the football stadium, hours before he would hang himself. “Bullshit,” he muttered. “Bullshit.”
But it wasn’t bullshit. Robby took my dare, he took the challenge.
“If the pond’s haunted,” I’d said earlier in the week, “then prove it.�
��
Robby’s face brightened, and he said, “I’ll go at night.”
“Not alone you won’t,” Joel said. “That’s a stupid idea.”
“Check out the farmhouse, too. Nobody lives there anymore.”
Robby smiled with narrow eyes. “Halloween night.”
The phone call was Robby’s mother. She was looking for him, of course. Joel and I knew where he was. Thought we knew, anyway; we tried hard to convince ourselves it wasn’t true. The Sheriff’s department pulled his body out before dawn, fat and bloated, like a worm on the sidewalk during April rains. There was a taint of blue to his skin, the cold blue of death, of stone, of the grave. Robby almost had a smile on his lips.
His mom moved away the next week, taking Robby’s body with her. He had only been ours for a few months and he vanished like smoke.
Four years passed. Joel grew out of his old skin and found a new one, thick as leather and swollen with broad shoulders and heavy muscles. I always imagined the knuckles of his father’s whiskey-soaked fist toughened him for football. He received scholarship offers in the mail. He signed with Kansas State. We didn’t talk about Robby anymore, and we had watched Varney for the last time on that long-ago Halloween. After Robby’s death, the exact ownership of the pond and surrounding property was disputed in local court, but the deeds of neither land nor house were ever found. The county took possession and erected stouter fences, put up NO TRESPASSING signs. Our Friday afternoon trips became distant memories. Joel’s mom even threw out the comics.
Megan moved to town during our junior year. She was tall and lovely, with soft, natural tumbles of brown hair. Hazel eyes which you could reach into—push your whole body into and never find the bottom. Joel and I both chased her, nearly flaming out in our idiocy; in the end, she chose GPA over all-league linebacker.
Shock Totem 3: Curious Tales of the Macabre and Twisted Page 12