Ghost Box: Six Supernatural Thrillers

by Scott Nicholson

  “Queer,” Dad yelled, slashing his saber at the air as if he could cut a path between their great gulf.

  “Don’t go in there, son,” the sheriff yelled.

  Hardy Eggers, high in the bulldozer’s cab, squinted at the Hole as if it were an old enemy, pushing the machine to its limit, black smoke boiling from its pipe. Donnie Eggers–another who didn’t belong–knelt in the mud, head bobbing as if he could still hear the snare over the rumbling diesel motor.

  Vernon Ray imagined Donnie would continue to hear the muster call long after the battle was over, and would wake in the night and seek its direction in the wind.

  Then the cool, comforting embrace of the shadows took him, and he marched backward into the Jangling Hole, home at last, free to be, belonging.

  Drumming his heart out, the sticks dancing in his hands like old friends and lovers, the troops rallying around him.

  Dad was mouthing insults that were drowned by the bulldozer. His last glimpse of daylight was the sheriff yanking Bobby away, and Vernon Ray wished he could say good-bye and tell him of a love lost, or maybe a love never known, but in the end Bobby belonged to that other world.

  The last thing he saw was Bobby struggling against the sheriff’s grip, reaching toward Vernon Ray and the Hole.

  Then the bulldozer blade smashed into the granite boulders framing the cave, a cruel cannonade into the gates of Kirk’s stronghold. Stones loosened, soil spilled down, the phantom soldiers let loose a desperate moan as they prepared to die all over again.

  As the earth showered down around him, Vernon Ray played on.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Halloween had passed, but its shadow clung to the mountain where two boys walked the ridge.

  Dex kicked in the dirt, looking for souvenirs. Dex would love to have a bone, a junky piece of rusted metal, maybe even Vernon Ray’s little Rebel cap, anything to prove he’d trespassed and defied yellow tape that blared “Police Line–Do Not Cross.”

  Bobby wished Dex would find something, because they all wanted proof that the Battle of Mulatto Mountain had actually happened.

  Well, not everybody. The sheriff seemed perfectly happy to make it all disappear, but the reporter made sure it didn’t get buried along with Vernon Ray. Her digital photographs had all been blurred and smoky, and Hardy Eggers, after making bail on a vandalism charge, had invoked his right to remain silent and was likely to keep it for the rest of his life.

  Jeff Davis was the picture of the bereaved parent, so shaken that he’d cancelled the Stoneman’s Raid re-enactment, though he’d been spending most of his time locked away in the room that housed his Civil War memorabilia.

  Bobby had gone over to the Davis trailer once, when his mom had sent him with a bean casserole, that staple of southern comfort in a time of sorrow. Bobby heard Jeff talking to himself behind the door but hustled out before things could get weird. Dad was acting like Dad again, so Bobby saw no need to go questioning lineage and patriarchy. He had enough on his mind.

  Like the pile of rubble around them and whatever path Earley Eggers had walked as he made his way home.

  “So what really happened, man?” Dex said.

  “I done told you,” Bobby said. Dex was getting on his nerves. Life without a best friend was hard on a guy. Dex just didn’t understand the real stuff, and talking to him about emotions was like talking to a chicken about the price of eggs.

  “Yeah, sure, a bunch of baloney about ghosts,” Dex said. “I know you’re just making it up to get in Karen Greene’s panties.”

  In truth, he couldn’t meet Karen’s eyes in the hall between classes. Whenever he did, he thought of Vernon Ray trying to kiss him.

  “I’d rather have V-Ray back,” he said, studying the mounds of heaped dirt, stumps, and rocks. The heavy equipment brought in to search for Vernon Ray–or his body–was still parked around the clearing, though it had been three weeks since the runaway bulldozer had closed the Jangling Hole for good.

  “I got to admit, it’s kind of creepy that they didn’t find him,” Dex said. “I mean, you saw the Hole. It couldn’t have been more than 10 feet deep. Where could he have gone?”

  Bobby had wondered the same thing, but he didn’t know how to explain that maybe some people just weren’t made for this world. They came into it fresh and whole and good, but the world wasn’t ready for them.

  Or maybe Vernon Ray was right: if you were different, you didn’t belong.

  Bobby gazed across the ridges that stretched in the distance like brown waves of a dirty sea. Autumn was giving way to winter, and soon even the brown would be a memory as all turned to gray.

  “I guess he went everywhere,” Bobby said. And I hope you fit in there.

  He picked up a rock and tossed it toward the closest gash in the soil. It bounced off an upturned tree root and settled on the black skin of Mulatto Mountain.

  “You read too many comic books, dude.” Dex dug in his jacket pocket and pulled out a cigarette pack. “Want a smoke?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  Dex lit his cigarette and looked at the sky, where a dark swell of clouds were bloodied by the sundown. “Thunder?”

  Bobby nodded again, a stone in his throat. He knew the suffocated rattle of a snare drum when he heard it

  The beat goes on . . . .

  “We better get out of here before it rains,” Dex said.

  “Yeah.” Bobby turned away from the disturbed rubble of the Hole and headed down the mountain.

  Rain would be okay. It would come in silver with a liquid tatta tatta tat, beating its ancient pulse across the skin of the Earth. It would pound like a million drummer boys, so that Vernon Ray’s lonely rhythm could be lost among them. It would bathe the uncertain grave of the Jangling Hole. Rain would smooth the heaps of loose dirt, rain would sweep away the scent of decay, rain would wash the world clean.

  Most of all, rain would veil his welling tears.

  THE END

  Table of Contents

  ###

  Roby Snow has a mission, and he won’t rest until Jacob Ridgehorn is resting in peace.

  BURIAL TO FOLLOW

  By Scott Nicholson

  Copyright ©2008 Scott Nicholson

  ISBN 978-1-907-19095-7

  Table of Contents

  I.

  The Ridgehorn kitchen was a mouth-watering shrine.

  The island counter, made of polished oak and topped with 1950’s Formica, the kind you couldn’t chip with a hatchet, was piled high with the fruits of condolence: a sweet potato pie, with pecan halves floating face-down in its burnt-orange sea; glazed ham, ringed with pineapple slices and brown sugar; green bean casserole, though beans were out of season so they must have come from some basement-stashed Mason jar; gallons of sweetened tea and diet Coke and banana pudding and gravy.

  Roby Snow looked around and made sure no one was watching. Not that anyone would care. At all the death sittings and watch-overs and grievings and gatherings he’d ever attended, food was usually the last thing on the minds of the bereaved but the first act of sympathy by acquaintances. He dipped a pinkie in the gravy, brought it to his mouth, licked the turkey drippings from his lips, and smiled.

  The marshmallows that dotted the sweet potato pie caught his fancy, and he plucked two, popped them in his mouth, then rearranged the remaining four so that no one would notice the gap in the pattern. The ham was growing cold, and gray-white grease congealed in the bottom of its tin foil container. Roby crossed the room to the cabinets, opened them.

  Crystal. Nice stuff, the kind that would hum if you put water in the glasses and rubbed your fingers around the rim. He’d seen a man on TV once who’d played a whole row of them at the same time, the glasses filled to varying depths, the performer wetting and wiping his fingers, raising a series of full notes that hung in the air like the blowing of lost whales. Crystal symphony, the man had called it.

  “Mr. Snow?”

  Roby looked away from the crystal. Anna Beth had ente
red the kitchen. She was the youngest of the Ridgehorn clan, and the prettiest. Years had a way of stealing beauty. Of stealing everything.

  Auburn hair. Her nose was all Ridgehorn, humped in the middle but not yet jagged, as it would be in a decade. She had her mother’s bone structure and, lucky for her, not her father’s eyes.

  Because her father’s eyes were glued shut in the back room of Clawson’s Funeral Home.

  “Hey, Anna Beth,” he answered, turning his attention again to the cabinet shelves, the chinaware, the tea set, the chipped bowls in the back, the plastic fast food cups that the family probably used at the dinner table on weeknights.

  “Can I help you find something?”

  “I was looking for the Saran Wrap.” He nodded toward the counter. “Flies are about to carry off the ham.”

  “Next cabinet over.”

  “Much obliged.” He nodded, moved over, and rummaged through the shelves, behind the gelatin molds and paper grocery bags and cereal boxes. He found the wrap and brought it out. Anna Beth stared at him.

  “Sorry about your dad,” he said. The wrap felt as if it weighed twenty pounds.

  “Well, we was kind of expecting it,” she said.

  You never expect it, Roby Snow thought. We all know we’re bound for it, but none of us believe, deep down in our hearts, that it will ever happen to us. Or to the ones we love.

  Anna Beth’s eyes grew moist. They were as bright as the deviled eggs on the silver-plated tray. She was in her Saturday night dress, dark blue with white ruffles. Sunday best would be saved for the funeral. That was only proper. But this dress was plenty good enough for receiving callers.

  “It’s okay,” Roby said. “You can cry if you want. Wouldn’t blame you a bit.”

  She shrugged. “I’m about cried dry.”

  “Reckon so. You folks have the sorrow round-the-clock. The rest of us get to come and go. And after it’s done, when your daddy, God bless him, is tucked in the ground, you all have to come back here and go at it some more. Grieving don’t let up its grip so easy when it comes to blood kin.”

  From the living room, the widow Ridgehorn let out another long wail, this one a little tired and drawn out, as if her heart wasn’t really in it.

  “Poor Momma,” Anna Beth said.

  Roby put the wrap on the counter, rolled out a couple of feet. When he yanked the clear film across the serrated blade, he caught his thumb on the sharp edges. The blade bit the thick meat above his nail.

  He put the thumb in his mouth. The blood tasted of gravy.

  “You okay?” Anna Beth asked.

  “I’ll live,” he said.

  Someone had been thoughtful enough to bring paper napkins, which lay in a sterile pile near the desserts. He pulled one free and wrapped his thumb. The bleeding stopped. He ripped the piece of wrap, fluffed it in the air so the corners wouldn’t stick, then draped the clear film over the ham.

  “Can’t have all this going to waste,” he said. “I know you don’t feel much up to it now, but comes a time when hunger helps feed the grief.”

  “Yeah. It’s been a long time since Aunt Iva Dean passed. That was the last one in the immediate family.”

  “You were seven then. I remember, because you were in the second grade, and some boy had kicked you in the shin and you had a big bruise.”

  Anna Beth’s face grew thoughtful and far away, the sadness momentarily gone. “Yeah. Funny how things like that come back. I’d forgotten all about it.”

  “It’s the smell,” Roby said.

  “Huh?”

  “Smell. See this sweet potato pie? That’s Beverly Parsons’s favorite recipe. But she changes ingredients a little for a bereavement. Uses molasses instead of brown sugar. So the smell of molasses is a little sad to me.”

  “I never noticed. I probably ate dozens of her pies, her being a neighbor and all, and she makes one for every homecoming at the church.”

  “It’s not how many you eat, it’s when you eat them.”

  The talk in the next room had heated up, and Anna Beth’s second cousin on her mother’s side was asking when the burial would be. The cousin was Cindy Parsons, Beverly’s daughter, maybe a future in-law since she was sweet on Alfred, the sole surviving son.

  Roby shook his head, weary. What had happened to manners? You didn’t come right out and ask the burial time, especially of the immediate family. You looked in the local newspaper and read the obituary like everybody else, or, in a pinch, you called the attending funeral home and asked. Unless you were a professional, you never spoke of the burial when you were calling on the home of the deceased. It was practically like spitting on the grave. Or spitting in the face of the survivors.

  “Anna Beth,” someone called from the sitting room. Sounded like the oldest sister, Marlene. The one who liked chocolate. Roby shot a glance at the bundt cake, saw the swirl of yellow that was exposed inside the crumbling brown wedge. Marlene was clumsy with a knife.

  “I’d best go,” Anna Beth said to Roby. “That’s real nice of you to take care of things out here. Most men consider that sort of thing to be women’s work.”

  “I ain’t most men,” he said. “And it’s the least I can do.”

  “Well, you got that stubborn Ridgehorn blood in you. Just like me. I guess I’m more like Daddy than I ever like to let on.”

  She waved a small good-bye and left the kitchen.

  Roby looked at the sweet potato pie. If only someone had the nerve to mention to Beverly Parsons about the molasses. Maybe it was some old Appalachian tradition. He’d never heard of it, and he was big on tradition himself. He made sure the lid was secure on the bowl of Cole slaw and slipped it into the refrigerator before the mayonnaise turned.

  That Anna Beth was a silly girl for being in her late teens. She wasn’t like her daddy at all. She was still breathing, for one thing. And she and Roby didn’t have anything in common except this house and this wake and this monumental tribute of food. They certainly didn’t share any Ridgehorn blood.

  Roby took a knife from his pocket, eased out a sliver of Beverly Parsons’s pie, and slid it into his mouth. As good as her other death pies, molasses and all.

  He swallowed, wiped his hands, put away the Saran Wrap, and went into the sitting room to hear tales of the late Jacob Davis Ridgehorn’s honorable and God-fearing life. Every sinner got to be a saint, at least for the three days between departure and burial. Yet every saint rotted just the same.

  From the inside out.

  From the heart first.

  Roby would offer what comfort he could. He knew there were worse things than losing a loved one, and there were worse things than dying. His knowledge of those things made him swallow again. The bite of pie went down like a stone.

  II.

  Widow Ridgehorn sat stiff and unyielding by the television. It was a big boxy RCA, a relic from the era of vacuum tubes. A fine layer of dust lay on it like loose skin. The decedent’s photograph leaned backward on the top of the television, framed by a corroded gilt rectangle. Jacob’s celluloid eyes were hard and dull, the face severe, like a mortician’s handiwork done twenty years too early.

  Roby sat across the room on the sofa, where Alfred had eased over. Alfred’s polite gesture not only gave Roby room, but it also moved Alfred closer to Cindy, daughter of the famed pie-maker. Alfred’s eyes were suitably haunted, edged with dark lavender, but something about the lines on his forehead gave the impression that he was unsure of his emotions.

  The widow wiped at her nose with a tattered handkerchief. “Shame about the timing of it, but I reckon there’s no good time to meet the Maker,” she said. “When the Lord calls, and all.”

  “Late harvest was coming up,” Alfred said. “Corn first. Daddy always looked at home up there in the seat of the Massey Ferguson, his hat pressed down to his ears.”

  “What about the tractor?” Marlene said. She had taken the chore of sorting things out, scheduling arrangements, seeing to the practical matters. “You going
to sell it, Momma?”

  The widow looked at the photograph on the television as if seeking advice. “Don’t hardly know yet.”

  Sarah, the middle sister, stood with a rustle of her patterned dress, a sleeveless rayon thing from off the rack at Rose’s Discount. It was a spring dress, really, not fit for early September, all light blue and yellow and pink. Roby felt sorrow for the family. In these parts, people couldn’t afford to go out and invest in an entire wardrobe of black just for a short period of use. They mourned in their best. How come their best was never good enough?

  He supposed that maybe all that really mattered was how you felt inside your heart.

  “Let’s not worry about that kind of thing,” Sarah said. “It’s like grave-robbing, to start splitting up the goods before Daddy’s even in the ground.”

  Buck, her husband, nodded in agreement. Buck had twenty acres on the back side of Elk Knob, four of it cleared for crops. He could use a tractor. He’d been making do with a walk-behind tiller, the kind that fought you when the tines hit a rock.

  Buck had asked Roby about the procedure for getting a tobacco allotment. All Roby knew about it was that the government was involved, told you how much to grow and how much not to grow, and the allotment could be passed on down as an inheritance. It was the same government that had sued the cigarette companies for millions. Damned if Roby wanted any piece of such nonsense, and had shared that opinion with Buck.

  “Reckon the will spells all that out,” Alfred said. “Who gets what, and all.”

  “If you don’t mind a lawyer getting a big fat chunk of it,” Marlene said.

  The air in the room was heavy with perspiration and cheap perfume. Marlene’s blonde hair clung to her neck in damp strings. She was a natural blonde, all over, Roby had been told. She didn’t meet his eyes, as if she were somehow aware of his secret knowledge.

  “Well, there’s the whole funeral thing to pay for,” the widow said, wringing her leathery hands.