Hollywood North: A Novel in Six Reels

by Michael Libling

  The front legs of Jack’s chair slammed to the floor. “Our tree does.”

  “We don’t need to hear it falling, as long as we find it after,” I said.

  “Neither of you is making any sense whatsoever.”

  “Jesus Christ, Annie.” Her stubbornness was getting on my nerves. “You’ve read the books. You know how unexplained shit goes. Nobody knows nothing. That’s why it’s unexplained. These accidents, disasters, murders, damn it—this is Trenton’s Believe It or Not!”

  “Stop shouting. Stop swearing at me. My goodness, Gus.”

  Jack scratched his head, stood, and paced. “You know Father Gurney, right? You go to St. Pete’s.”

  Annie softened. “He was the nicest of them. He’s senile, now, poor man.”

  “Well, he wasn’t always senile, that’s for sure. He’s who told me about the Walker Shoe Factory. He’d just moved to the parish. Had been in town maybe a week when the roof fell in. In that one day he gave last rites to more people than he had in all his previous years combined.”

  “You swear on your life, Jack? You swear it was Father Gurney who told you?”

  “You think I’d make that up? I swear on my life about everything I’m telling you.”

  “Me, too,” I said.

  Annie shifted her bag to her other shoulder. She chose her words carefully. “Father Gurney told me something, too, once. It’s silly, really. My mother told me to ignore him, you know, because his memory was failing . . . but then, today, what you’re saying . . . I wonder . . .” She examined our list again, sighed with a shiver. “He said ‘Trenton is the Devil’s playground.’”

  I would have laughed had she and Jack not looked so damn serious. Adult-face is what they had.

  “There’s more,” Annie said. “You know all the fires around here, the people who drown?”

  “Billy Burgess,” I said.

  “Helmut Swartz’s wife,” Jack said.

  “Father Gurney says ‘they’re the Devil’s stepping-stones, the sideshow for the darker plan afoot.’”

  “Holy shit.” I was spooked, excited, spooked, and redeemed. “Holy, holy shit. I knew it. I knew it.”

  “Did Father Gurney say what it was?” Jack asked. “This ‘darker plan’?”

  Annie bit her lip the way she did in art class, tapped the tip of her nose like in math.

  The schoolbag slid from her shoulder, the last of her acrimony slipping away with it. “I’ve got a story for you, too,” she said. “One more for your list, maybe.”

  Sixteen

  The all-you-can-eat buffet of The Unexplained

  “You know the new houses they’re building on Creighton Farms?” Annie said.

  “Jack and I went finding up there. Before they started digging.”

  “And what did you find?”

  “Nothing,” Jack said.

  “Nothing worth anything,” I said.

  “Did you look near the farmhouse?”

  We hadn’t.

  She folded her hands into her lap, stared down, prepping from imaginary crib notes. “My father is supplying the building materials for the project. Lumber and nails. Drywall. Like that. A few days ago, I heard him telling my mother how they had to stop construction because of something they dug up out there. I couldn’t hear what, but Mom’s face, she was really shook up. But when they saw me watching, they changed the subject, put on their happy faces. It was all so fake.”

  “I know the look,” Jack said, his empathy goosed with a shot of glum.

  “Me, too,” I said, not to be forgotten.

  “They’ve been walking on eggshells ever since, always on the lookout for me, shutting doors, extra quiet so I won’t hear. They’re working so hard to act normal, it’s like living with robots. It’s worse now than when my grandmother got cancer and they tried to hide it from me. I couldn’t stand it, so I asked my mother straight out what was going on. ‘Oh, just one of your dad’s silly work things,’ she said, all sing-songy, so I knew for sure she was hiding something. ‘No worries, dear. No worries.’ And then she started talking about her friends and their bird-watching group and how—‘Did I tell you the news?’—they’d spotted a Kirtland’s Warbler and their names were going to appear in some birding magazine, and me—I felt I had ants crawling all over me.”

  “You want a cream soda?” Jack lifted the lid of the cooler parked beneath his table, “Drink Pepsi-Cola” in script on the side. It was the newest of his Fortress’s amenities. He passed me a bottle and snagged one for himself. Annie wasn’t thirsty. She only sounded thirsty.

  “I’ve turned into you, Gus,” she said, “the spying I’ve been doing. Last couple of nights I put a glass to the wall so I could hear what they were saying.”

  She paused. We waited. Her breathing dipped to rocky shallows. “Graves,” she said. “They found graves. Under the farmhouse and out behind. Bones. Skeletons. And I don’t know what else. Too many to count the first day. And I don’t know how many since. My dad is scared. He’s never scared.”

  “People used to bury their families on their property,” Jack said, but it was way too level-headed to put the skids on Annie’s story.

  “Some of the people they found—” She had to stop and start over. “Some of the people they found, my dad says they weren’t—they weren’t dead.”

  We’d hit the jackpot. Burial grounds were the all-you-can-eat buffet of The Unexplained, the dead, the undead, and the better-off-dead. There’d been the devil heads of Bradford County, Pennsylvania—human skeletons with horns sprouting out the top of their skulls. The Chase Family Crypt in Barbados—where heavy lead coffins flew like matchboxes whenever a fresh corpse was interred. The Lake Delavan skeletons—ten-foot-tall giants in the heart of Wisconsin. The vampire skeletons of Bulgaria—iron stakes protruding from where their hearts had been. Now it was Trenton’s turn, oh boy!

  “How not dead?” Jack said.

  “Vampire and zombie not dead?” I said.

  “That’s all I know. Except my dad thought they should call in the police, but Mr. Moroney—he’s the builder—he doesn’t want to delay construction. And my dad, well—Mr. Moroney gives him tons of business—so he’s afraid to rock the boat.”

  Jack and I set our empty bottles on the floor.

  “I want to see for myself,” Annie said, appealing to us with her big brown eyes, like there was a snowball’s chance in hell we wouldn’t go along. “Before Mr. Moroney plows it all under.”

  “He can’t do that,” I said.

  “He’s going to. Any day now, from what Dad says.”

  “Tonight, then,” Jack said. “I’ll bring my camera.”

  Annie reached into the cooler. Popped the cap. Swigged. “Flashlights. We’ll need flashlights.”

  Seventeen

  Night of the living dead

  I was the first to arrive at Pilots Hall. It was nine sharp, as planned, and I worried the others had copped out, or been caught sneaking out.

  I imposed a fifteen-minute deadline for Jack and Annie to show, and bided my time, tapping my foot to the music blaring from inside the squat white building. “The jukebox is the only good part,” somebody said, and there was Mickey Mental himself, not six feet behind me, propping up the building, knee bent behind him, sole of his boot flat against the stucco. “Hey.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “Come for your dad, too?” he said.

  “What?”

  “Your dad? He inside, too?”

  “My dad is dead,” I said.

  “Oh,” he shrugged, and I guessed it was off-hours for bullies.

  The field behind Pilots Hall was a trailhead of sorts to Creighton Farms. The location was also a safe bet on a school night, unlikely to arouse suspicion. You’d often see kids thereabouts after hours, peering through the smoked windows, checking up on their dads at their mothers’ urgings and, if need be, hanging around to escort, as Jack’s mother once put it, “the drunken good-for-nothings home.” Pilots Hall members we
re former longshoremen, Great Lakes sailors, and airmen. The Hall’s professed values aligned with the Lions, Kiwanis, and Kinsmen. The community service the Pilots was most famous for was cheap booze. (In 1968, it would become the only service club in town history to be shut down by local authorities. Today, an auto parts dealer and a tattoo parlour occupy the building. Only clue to the past is the Pilots coat of arms engraved into the cornerstone. A winged anchor rising from what is either stormy seas or a head of beer.)

  Jack turned up a moment after Annie, surprising us with his sisters in tow. “If I didn’t let them come, they would’ve squealed.”

  “We brought our own flashlights,” Abby said, and Issie shone hers in my eyes.

  “Hey, Levin,” Dougie called from his post.

  “Hey, man,” Jack said. “Your dad off the wagon, again?”

  “Yup. You?”

  “Nothing special.”

  “Keeping late hours, eh?”

  “Not really.”

  “Off finding, are you?”

  “Just hanging out.”

  “Well, see ya, I guess.”

  “Good luck, eh?—your dad and all.”

  “I hope he drops dead,” Dougie said. “Like Gus’s dad did.”

  “My dad was killed in the war,” I said.

  Annie welcomed the girls with affection, corralled them to her side, and moved us on out with a Wagon Train wave. We rolled through the Pilots parking lot and into the field behind, the grass gone to seed, knee-high to either side of the path.

  Annie was her upbeat self, and you’d never know by the show she put on we were marching to a graveyard. The act was for the Levin girls, of course, reaching its dramatic peak with a balletic sweep of her hand that arced from countryside to sky. “‘The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees, The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas, The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor, And the highwayman came riding—riding—riding . . .’” Not a line was sung, yet this was the closest I’d come to life as a movie musical. I wanted to run up to her, hug her, bury my face in her hair and, for God’s sake, kiss her. Hug? Kiss? Jesus! What the hell was with me? I banished the corny thoughts from my head, promised I’d never think such stupid shit again.

  “Wow,” Abby said. “That was so good, Annie. Is there more?”

  “I like poems,” Issie added.

  “‘The Highwayman’ is the most romantic verse anyone has ever written.”

  “I hate poetry,” I muttered, reclaiming my self-esteem. “Except for ‘Casey at the Bat,’ a couple others.”

  Despite my grumbling, Annie’s assessment wasn’t far off. The wind was gusting. Clouds were gathering, though nothing you’d call a sea. And the moon was full, without being ghostly. If luck was with us, the ghostly was up ahead.

  Jack came to a sudden stop. “We’re being followed.” We doused our lights, cocked ears.

  “Mickey Mental?’ I said.

  “Could be anyone,” he said.

  I shortlisted my probables. You know their names by now. We’d be sitting ducks. Not a day went by some Ontario kid didn’t turn up dead in some field. We’d be five more.

  To our left, a hairy swoosh of grass. We crouched. And black against black tore across our “ribbon of moonlight,” and we exhaled relief and laughter. Just another berserk Lab. Not one of us couldn’t identify the slosh of tongue, the frenzied panting.

  At Keating Woods, Jack took the lead from Annie. He knew the territory. “The bullets and buttons I showed you, found most out here,” he told her.

  I won’t dwell on the owls. Nor the hobo we came across, his campfire and lean-to, how he asked if we had something for him to eat, how Annie materialized an orange and tossed it to him. No point, either, in going on about the Ford Fairlane parked without a road in sight, doors open, and a naked boy and girl rutting on the front seat, how Annie situated herself between Abby and Issie to block their view, how she shoved the mesmerized Jack and me to move on, and kept shoving until we did.

  At Creighton Farms, Annie pointed to where she believed the farmhouse used to be. Flashlight beams duelling, we began our final leg across furrowed ground. Maintaining our bearings wasn’t as easy as we’d anticipated. The windbreaks that had once protected the fields and crops had been uprooted. Luckily for us, workers had thrown up a fence around the main construction site, a haphazard assembly of saggy chicken wire and wooden posts, bicycle reflectors affixed here and there. In the foreground beyond the fence, a yellow backhoe sat idle. Here, too, along with the Creighton homestead, the land had been cleared of centuries-old oaks, elms, and ash.

  We cast our lights onto the excavations. The ground was flat, with manmade mounds rising to and fro, deep valleys between. A schoolyard diorama of the Rockies.

  We were on to something, all right. The signs confirmed it. As if we’d ever doubted.

  Keep Out!

  Private Property!

  Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted

  Danger: High Voltage

  Guard Dog On Duty

  Warning: Authorized Personnel Only

  Do Not Feed The Bears

  “I know Mr. Moroney,” Annie said. “He’s done things. . . . He means what he says.”

  “You can stay back here and wait, if you’re afraid,” Jack said. Annie socked him so hard his flashlight went flying, and the fence came down as he staggered to break his fall.

  “Sorry,” Annie said, as she scampered merrily over Jack and the chicken wire and onto the site. Abby and Issie shadowed Annie’s every move and expression. Gung-ho, they were.

  I helped Jack to his feet. “Good thing it wasn’t barbed wire.”

  “She’s dangerous,” he said.

  “No need to tell me.”

  “Oh, my,” Annie cried. “Over here, over here.” And Abby and Issie echoed, “Over here, over here.”

  I asked Jack if he’d explained to his sisters where we were going, what we hoped to find. “Yeah,” he said, “but I don’t think the dead and graveyard parts sank in.”

  The bones were everywhere. Hell, they were as plentiful as the dirt that had been dug up with them. Big bones. Little bones. Fragments. Slivers. Confetti. Resting atop and about the mounds. Poking out from the mounds. All over the mounds. And in the pit at our feet, a garden of bones.

  “How many you think?” I said.

  “Too many,” Annie said.

  “Are they people bones?” Issie asked.

  “Over there.” Jack’s beam strayed to a ditch farther up, the light reflecting off the shiny surface.

  “Watch where you walk,” Annie cautioned.

  You could see a few bones here and there, but you could tell the second pit had been excavated with greater care. It was square, thirty by thirty, and shallower, four feet deep at most. Plastic tarps were laid in sections across the bottom of the pit. Jack ordered his sisters to hold the fort up top. He did not ask Annie if she wanted to wait with them. “Here goes nothing,” he said, and the three of us slid down the dirt walls into the pit.

  The tarp was secured with iron spikes. Unlike the sloppy workmanship at the fence, they’d been driven deep. We had to tug and jiggle before a corner came loose, and then another and another, and the wind whipped under the tarp and wafted it upwards, a pterodactyl taking flight. Four smallish skeletons greeted us, each wrapped in ragged and weathered shrouds—dirt, bug turds, and what a runaway imagination might conclude was dry blood.

  “Like Jesus and that Shroud of Turin thing,” I said.

  “Look closer,” Annie said. “It’s cheesecloth.”

  “What my mom uses to make blueberry syrup,” Jack said.

  We stayed close, moved to the next tarp. Here, three crude wooden coffins, lids unsecured and askew. Jack lifted each in turn, examined the undersides. As feared, the narrative was the same as those buried in shrouds.

  “Drag marks,” I said, pointing my light at the dirt. “They’ve been moved from where they were dug up.”

 
; “Back there, too,” Jack said.

  “So they could use fewer tarps,” Annie theorized. “Grouping them together.”

  We braced ourselves for the third tarp, though I didn’t see how it could be any less horrifying, but then Abby and Issie were at our backs and in our ears and freaking and screaming and hollering to high heaven, thrashing to get the hell up and out of there. And for a couple of seconds, we were freaking and screaming and hollering to high heaven, too, not knowing who the hell or what was up.

  “I told you to stay back. I told you,” Jack yelled. “Happy now? Think you’ll ever get that out of your heads? You’ll never get that out of your heads.”

  Annie calmed Jack down and, with her help, the girls calmed, too.

  “What are they?” Issie asked. “Who are they?”

  “I want to go home,” Abby whimpered.

  “Don’t you dare move again,” Jack said, guiding them to a corpse-free corner of the pit.

  “Listen to your brother,” Annie said. “You’ve got to.”

  None of us were going to let a couple of baby-faced interlopers blow our opportunity.

  By the fourth tarp, we’d had enough, seen enough, yet we pressed on, if only for the stomach-turning perversity of it all.

  The first had clued us in on Annie’s dad and his concerns. The second, third, fourth, and fifth showed how low Mr. Barker was prepared to go to hang on to Moroney’s business. He must have needed the money pretty badly. By the sixth we more than understood why Mr. Barker had said the people they had found were not dead. By the seventh the revulsion weighed so heavily upon us, we could barely move, barely talk.

  The dead had been buried in makeshift shrouds, cardboard boxes, or crude wooden coffins. One had been folded into an apple crate. We could only guess the ages, a good many looked to be kids, borderline or early teens like us. But not all. There were several adults, too. And none of this, I tell you, was the worst of it.

  Skeletons don’t frighten. Skeletons are fun. It’s what we’ll all be someday. What frightens, what isn’t fun, are the hideous routes some of us will take in becoming one.