Dreams The Ragman

Authors: Greg F. Gifune

Join The Delirium Novella Book Club

Save 20% off all digital editions
24 original horror novellas per year for $96
All major formats available: EPUB, MOBI & PDF
Take part in the Delirium Readers' Choice Awards

FIRST EDITION

Dreams The Ragman
© 2011 by Greg F. Gifune

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

DELIRIUM BOOKS

P.O. Box 338

North Webster, IN 46555

www.deliriumbooks.com

For Tom Piccirilli

“I wish you could swim
Like the dolphins
Like dolphins can swim
Though nothing
Will keep us together
We can beat them
Forever and ever
Oh we can be Heroes
Just for one day.”

—David Bowie,
Heroes

ONE

Near sunset, long shadows spread out on the ground before me, as if to mark clandestine pathways set forth by the trees, restless spirits and immense clouds drifting sullenly overhead. They lured me closer until I came upon the family plot. A granite headstone marked the spot, the name RICCI carved into its face. Of the four individual plots, only one was occupied, and that by my father, who had died of cancer years ago when I was just a toddler. The one to his right was reserved for my mother, who was still alive though not well at a long-term care facility in Florida. The two plots on the opposite side of the stone were for my wife Jill and me. At least that was the plan when my mother bought them. Jill and I were still together then, and my mother still knew who and where she was. So many things had changed in the years since, some days it didn’t even feel like the same life.

I watched the stone a while, picturing my father the only way I knew him, from old photographs and stories other people had told me. I looked instead to the nearby plot where my grandparents were buried.

A soft wind drifted through the trees at the far side of the cemetery, rustling the branches and disturbing dead leaves gathered into thick drifts on the ground.
Just like Grandpa to let me know he’s here
, I mused. It was a nice thought, but also a troubling one. I rarely had one without the other when it came to my grandfather, though it wasn’t his fault, really, it’s just the way things were, the way they’d always been.

When I was a little boy, my grandfather used to tell me a story about The Ragman. An impossibly old man crippled with various ailments, his body curved and bent with arthritis, The Ragman rode a derelict, horse-drawn wagon along the city streets of my grandfather’s Italian immigrant neighborhood, eerily calling out “Rags!” in a gravel-laced monotone, a whip in one hand and a rusty bell even older than he was in the other. First my grandfather would hear the steady clip-clop of horseshoes along pavement, and then, very slowly, the wagon would round the corner at the top of the block, rickety and shaking and making all sorts of horrid squeaking sounds. The echo of the bell came next. Like a death knell, it signaled the Ragman’s arrival, and his wraithlike voice would call out to the neighborhood, summoning those from their homes with rags, newspapers and assorted bits of junk to sell. The old man was filthy and dressed in rags himself, and my grandfather swore the Ragman had eyes that didn’t seem human, more feral cat than man, the kind of burning eyes that looked right through him. “Never had anybody look at me like that before or since,” he’d said.

Just a little boy himself at the time, my grandfather would shudder the moment he heard the horse approaching, and by the time The Ragman’s song began, he’d take off running down the block and hide inside until the old wagon slowly disappeared around the corner at the end of the street, the sounds of the rusty bell and The Ragman’s cries trailing behind it in the foggy haze of dusk.

By the time I was born, in the early 1960s, The Ragman, and those like him in cities and towns across the country, were long gone, relegated to history and folktales. But my grandfather’s stories of him were so vivid (and often frightening) that I never forgot them. I can remember my mother and grandmother scolding him for talking about The Ragman, because for an impressionable child like me, those tales often led to nightmares and histrionics after dark.

And so, he began to tell me tales of The Ragman only when we were alone together, or when he was drunk (which sadly, was most of the time). He’d often disappear for weeks at a time with no explanation then return looking like he’d been off on a bender (which he probably had been). But in those moments when he was at home and somewhat lucid, he’d tell me the Ragman had followed him from his youth to adulthood, that he’d seen him in his dreams and nightmares and even now in waking moments, in plain daylight, watching from just around a corner, across the street or even standing in his backyard, slowly ringing his bell and peering at the house.

“What does he want, Grandpa?” I’d asked.

“He’s hungry,” the old man told me, staring off into space, years of torment and fear etched across his already weathered face. “He needs to eat, and he never stops until he gets his fill.”

“What does The Ragman eat?”

“Souls,” he’d answered, running a shaking hand across his brow.

When I asked my mother about it she patiently and lovingly explained that Grandpa was ill, and that I needed to understand that when he told me such things. I was just a kid and didn’t understand what senility or alcoholism was, but in the years that followed, as both diseases continued to ravage my grandfather’s mind, his look of fear and regret soon became a blank stare, and whenever he spoke of anything it was dismissed as the ramblings of a crazy old man.

Until the day he died my grandfather swore The Ragman was more than the scary old man from his youth, something not quite human that had stalked him nearly his entire life. “There’s more hidden than seen in this life,” he once told me.

And he was right.

Over the years, I periodically thought about The Ragman, and replayed my grandfather’s tales of him again and again in my mind. In time, they became more than frightening stories from an old man’s distant past, they became my memories as well. Although he remained a mystery to me, the older I got the more I thought of him as a human being rather than a ghoul, and I began to wonder who he’d really been. He’d been just a boy once too, with a life before he’d climbed onto that decrepit wagon and skulked about neighborhoods buying rags and frightening children, he’d had dreams and fantasies, fear and joy, experienced wonder and love like the rest of us. Hadn’t he? What had happened to him then? What led him to that wagon, to the filth, the trash, to that role in life? Though honest work, surely those realities had never been his dreams.

What
had
he dreamed then? What were the dreams of The Ragman?

When I was a teenager, just months after my grandfather died, murder came to the otherwise peaceful town I’d grown up in, and I thought I might just have my answer.

Nestled along the southern coast of Massachusetts, my small hometown became the scene of two brutal killings. The first victim was a middle-aged man I knew as Mr. Patterson. He ran a feed store at the end of Main Street. A few days after his body was found in his store, a young woman was killed. A teacher’s assistant who had just moved to town and begun work at the local junior high school a few months prior, she’d been murdered in her bed in a small apartment downtown. In both cases, the victims were horribly slashed, stabbed and hacked with what coroners believed was a large cleaver, the bodies eviscerated and desecrated with such violence the media dubbed the murders “rage killings.”

The crimes were never solved, the killer was never caught, but almost a year to the day later, it happened again. This time the victims were a middle-aged man who lived alone and a housewife who was killed just moments after seeing her children off to school at the bus stop across the street from their home.

And once again, the murderer vanished without a trace.

It wasn’t until the FBI put together the pieces and realized that similar murders had been happening along a specific route up and down the Eastern Seaboard and as far away as Florida that they theorized the killer might be using trains, hopping them and riding them from state to state, jumping off for hours at a clip, murdering, then escaping on the same trains he’d ridden in on. Gone before anyone knew what he’d done, over the course of three years the killer claimed thirteen victims in six states.

He’d been spotted only twice, and both reports described him as a homeless man dressed in rags, so of course I dubbed him The Ragman. While he wasn’t exactly what my grandfather had described, a deranged hobo riding the rails and murdering unsuspecting townsfolk seemed close enough.

The Ragman—or whoever he was—was never caught. The killings stopped right after his mode of transportation was discovered, almost as if someone had tipped him off. Or perhaps there was a lot more to this Ragman than anyone realized, just like my grandfather always claimed.

Back in those days, my best friend Caleb and I were fascinated by the killings. I’d shared my grandfather’s stories with Caleb and he’d been as enthralled with them as a teenager as I’d been at seven or eight. Neither of us had any trouble weaving the two together and toying with the possibility that my grandfather had been right all along, and while the rest of the town was gripped with the stranglehold of hysteria, Caleb and I became obsessed with finding the truth behind the murders. We were frightened too, of course, but instead of locking ourselves indoors as many residents did, we’d often wander along the train tracks that crossed through town and the surrounding forest, searching for clues, hoping to solve the mystery of the hobo killer or perhaps even catch a glimpse of him riding the rails, a bloody clever in hand and those horrible eyes glaring back at us from the very precipice of Hell.

Careful what you wish for.

We were just two bored teenagers, I suppose, and whenever I remembered those days I forced myself to see them as tame at best, a tapestry of fantasy, dreams and harsh reality all woven together into a frightening jumble that continued to haunt me but no longer seemed quite relevant.

Until thirty years later, when I realized the killings had started again.

TWO

All those years later, I was still living in the same little town I’d grown up in. I’d never felt a strong connection to the area personally, but I married a local girl who did, so that’s where we made our lives together.

When our marriage started to falter, we were both forty-six, twenty-two years in and at a point where I figured we were home free. Jill and I had separated two months prior, and although I’d considered leaving town and starting over somewhere else, such a move seemed too final and premature. So I took our cat Louie, moved out and rented a little cottage in town, still hopeful Jill and I could eventually work things out.

It had been a particularly tough couple days. Work had been even more draining than usual, and then the reports had hit the local television news regarding two horrific and as yet unsolved murders that had taken place about an hour away in a small decaying resort area on the New Hampshire coast. Even half asleep and in a drunken haze, slouched in my recliner with Louie, the details hit me like a tire iron to the side of the head. Two victims, both slaughtered with sharp instruments the origins of which were not yet known. No clues, no suspects, a total mystery in an area that had had plenty of problems with crime in recent years, but rarely murders and never murders like that. I scrambled out of the recliner, jumped on my laptop and checked train routes. Those same old tracks ran all the way up into New Hampshire and beyond. I didn’t want to know, didn’t want it to be real, but immediately realized what was happening. All the memories and nightmares came flooding back.

I knew then I’d go there, and that Caleb would too. I hadn’t seen him in nearly five years, but he’d called me periodically, usually drunk or stoned in the middle of the night. They were brief, mostly bitter exchanges that rarely ended well, but it’s all we had. He’d moved to New York City a long while ago, and through the years we’d learned to talk about things without truly discussing them, to be friends and enemies both, loving and hating each other all the while, and all at once.

I spent the next couple hours pacing and trying to think. Louie wanted to go out, and although he wasn’t allowed out of the house after dark, it was still dusk, and the prospect of having to empty his litter box was less than appealing, so I let him go.

I had another drink, tried to settle my nerves.

Some time later, when I noticed Louie at the sliders waiting to come in, I saw he’d brought me a present. There, on the mat, was a dead baby bunny.

“Goddamn it, Lou!” I pushed him into the house with my foot. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

He sauntered in, gazing up at me like I was a mental defective he needed to exercise patience with. I knew he was just being a cat, but it always amazed me how such a wonderfully loving and gentle animal could also be so ruthless and cruel. Much as I loved him, I wanted to strangle the little bastard for what he’d done.

I grabbed a shovel, a flashlight and a small plastic grocery bag. Darkness had fallen by then, so with the flashlight pinned under my arm, a shovel in one hand and the plastic bag in the other, I loaded the bunny carcass into the bag then went as far out on the property as possible and dug a hole.

After I’d tied the bag off and placed it in the grave, I stood there thinking a while. This little guy had been born into the world and survived until this night for what exactly? So my cat could slaughter him for sport?

I wanted to believe there was a point, that there had to be. I wanted—needed—it to have meaning. But there was none. The bunny had been a living, breathing being just moments before. Now he was dead. And that’s all he was, a dead
thing
beneath the ground. Nobody was listening. Nobody cared. Nobody saved him.

When I closed my eyes I could almost hear Caleb mutter, “Just like us.”

Next morning I called in sick to work, packed an overnight bag and made plans to leave for New Hampshire that evening.

* * * *

I left the cemetery in my rearview, drove across town and stopped at a convenience store to grab a cup of coffee. The cashier, a tired-looking blonde in her early thirties with acne scars and a rather contagious smile, asked me how I was doing. I lied and assured her I was just fine. As she made change and mentioned something about the weather, it occurred to me that she was just a baby when the murders took place in town, and probably now had children of her own older than she’d been then.

As a social worker, I saw sorrow and heartbreak every day on the job, and over the years I’d begun to believe life was essentially arbitrary, infuriatingly pointless and cruel. If there really was something supernatural orchestrating all this, it could hardly be described as benevolent. A sadistic butcher might be a more accurate description. I wanted desperately to see love behind and deep within all the mayhem, some saving grace or tidbit of spiritual sense, but it just wasn’t there.

Five minutes from the convenience store, I pulled into the parking lot of the insurance agency where Jill worked. Rather than go inside unannounced, I flipped open my cell and called her desk phone instead. “I’m outside,” I told her when she answered. “I need to talk to you.”

“Derrick—”

“It’ll only take a minute.”

She hung up without answering, so I assumed that meant she’d be right out. These days I couldn’t be sure, so I stayed in the car until I saw her stride through the door, a jacket thrown over her shoulders as she made her way across the lot. I was surprised to see her decked out in a tight black dress and high-heels. She’d also had her hair done. A new style, shorter and sexier than the pulled-back-into-a-ponytail look she’d gone with for so long.

I stepped out of the car and tossed out a fairly lame, “Hi.”

She came to an abrupt stop a few feet from me, just out of reach. “What’s up?”

I shuffled my feet, maybe from the chill in the air, maybe because I was tired of having to pretend there was anything normal or all right with any of this. “I need a favor and was hoping you could help me out.”

“Is something wrong?”

I bit my lip and started counting. It was a trick I’d learn in my anger management classes, and as simplistic as it was, it usually worked. Of course something was wrong. We were apart and it was killing me. “I have to go out of town for the weekend and was hoping you could feed Lou and change his litter box, maybe hang out with him a while.”

“There’s no one else you can ask?”

Jill knew damn well I had no family left here and only a few pseudo friends from work, people I might go out and grab a drink with now and then, but no one close. “Don’t you miss Louie either?”

She ignored the question. “Where are you going?”

“It’s Caleb, I—”

“But of course.” She’d never cared for Caleb, so I readied myself for the usual onslaught of criticisms that usually spewed forth whenever his name was mentioned. Fortunately they never came. “What kind of trouble is he in now?”

“Not sure, but he’s in New Hampshire and—”

“What’s he doing there? He left New York?”

“Apparently. I just want to get up there and make sure he’s OK. I assumed you missed Louie, so—”

“I do miss him,” she said softly.

“He misses you, too.”

“OK,” she sighed, “I’ll watch him.”

“Thanks. This opens the front door.” I held out a key.

As she took it, she asked, “When will you be back?”

“Hopefully by Monday. If it ends up being longer, I’ll call you.”

“All right then.” She turned and started back.

I returned to my car. “Yeah,” I muttered under my breath, “good to see you, too.”

“Derrick?”