Shades: Eight Tales of Terror (11 page)

And it didn’t matter
anyway. Pete had already left for some plumber’s school in Houston, Luther Cole’s body now rested in the small county cemetery that bore his own surname, and Deerhunter Hill lay submerged under twenty feet of water. It was over and the threat had passed. Telling the truth now would serve no purpose other than to move up his retirement by four years.

Nope, things worked out pretty much the best way they could.

“Well, Les, sometimes art is truth.” Carl smiled out at the new lake. “Especially when it needs to be.”

A Memory of Me

“I am so sorry.” Will whispered into the night.

He gazed out from his place on the bluff, across the moon washed river bottom, to the tree line that marked the Brazos itself. He could hear the sounds of the river from here. The song of frogs reached up from the shadowed banks, just as they had from time immemorial. Somewhere
down there, steamboats had dropped off supplies and picked up bales of cotton from the long vanished town that once topped the ridge where he now stood.

It must have been a grand time when the steamboats arrived. Imagining the celebration and bustle of those long ago arrivals filled him with nostalgia for a time he never knew. It also helped him ignore the travesty his friends were committing in the graveyard behind him. 

Port Sullivan had boasted more than fifteen hundred people, a sawmill, a college, and numerous stores and motels. All of that vanished long ago when the railroads bypassed the town, and river travel became obsolete. Now only a brush choked graveyard, which few of today’s locals knew about, remained hidden in a thicket of trees along the top of the bluff. Most people in nearby Hearne or Bryan had never even heard of the city which once represented the important northern edge of river travel on the Brazos.

Will stumbled onto its existence while researching a term paper for his history class at Texas A&M. The idea that such a large town once existed nearby without leaving a trace surprised him, and he felt compelled to investigate for himself. Of course it never occurred to him to go on this excursion without letting Jack and Rowley in on it, and now he had the smell of the burning grave marker to remind him of that error.

“Hey, Will! C’mon back and stop being a stranger.” Jacks cheerful voice called from the darkness behind him. “I’ll toast you a snack.”

Will choked on his own anger.

He knew full well he wasn’t going to say anything. It wouldn’t do any good. So he consoled himself with the thought that making a big deal out of it would only cause Jack to do something more outrageous.

Turning his back on the moonlit vista below, he clicked on his little flashlight and made his way back into the darkness of the trees. Laughter came from the yellow glow ahead, just visible through the hanging vines. He picked his way forward, careful not to catch his foot on a briar or an overgrown tombstone, while shining his light around to avoid spider webs and hanging sticker vines.

Tromping out into the clearing, Will spotted his companions in a small section of the graveyard surrounded by a decrepit wrought iron fence. Their faces illuminated by the small fire, Rowley leaned against the fence while Jack lounged on a low stone sarcophagus. 

“The lone wolf returns
.” Jack grinned broadly across the clearing. “Pull up a grave and join the party.”

“That’s history you’re burning,” Will sighed, “Not to mention, what might be the last evidence of a real person who once walked this earth.”

“Exactly! And that’s the whole point!” Jack pulled back the stick he had been holding over the burning marker and extended it toward Will. “Marshmallow?”

“No thanks.” H
e averted his face from the offering, “What
is
the whole point?”

“Historical clutter.” Jack gestured at the burning grave marker, its rounded top carved to look like the stone versions that more affluent people could afford back then.

“What?” He couldn’t help the shock in his voice. Even after knowing him for two years, Jack’s views on life still had the power to surprise him.

“What do Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Attila the Hun have in common?”

“I…uh…I give up. What?”

“None of them have tombstones.”

“So?” Will tried to grasp the connection. He was far from slow, but Jack’s thought processes often left him floundering to catch up.

“They didn’t have tombstones. Hell, they were buried in secret. But everybody knows who they were. They matter
ed. This on the other hand…” he waved dismissively at the source of their illumination, “…is a vanity. It’s a pitiable cry for something undeserved.”

“Remembrance?”

“Beyond her own circle, yes.” Jack took a bite of the marshmallow. “And a pointless gesture on the part of whoever put it there. They didn’t need it to remember her, and she has no use for it herself. Hell, it’s cleaner to finish the job of sending the poor wretch off to oblivion”

“So you just erase her?
” Will felt a bit queasy at the thought. The smell of the marshmallow hung fetid in the night graveyard air.

“There is no ‘her’ to erase. There is at most a spongy collection of bones about five to six feet beneath us. There is no such thing as a dead person. There is a person, and then there isn’t. People get hung up on residues, and confuse constructs of their own imaginations and memories with the present. They give life and feeling to a delusion created from their own recollections. You have to cut through those illusions, and that’s what I’m doing.”

“By burning somebody’s grave marker?”

“Yes!” Jack stood up and pointed at the charring stump. “Don’t you see? Working it out through intellect isn’t good enough. Even knowing that there is no ‘dead person,’ you still refer to th
at piece of wood as ‘somebody’s’ marker. There is no ‘somebody’. And by burning that piece of wood, I’m cutting my own Gordian knot here. I’m overcoming the illusion of death. You can’t accomplish that by reason alone.”

“Oh.”

It seemed an underwhelming response on his part, but he could think of nothing else to say. One got used to being underwhelming in Jack’s presence. Standing a powerful six foot two inches tall, with Teutonic good looks and a ferocious 140 IQ, Jack Strauss embodied the word “impressive.” He possessed a cheerful assertiveness that dominated the atmosphere around him. Sometimes Will wondered if Nietzsche had somebody like Jack in mind when he posited his
ubermensch
.

And since Will was not in the mood to argue Jack’s “overcoming of Death,” he felt it would be more productive to just try and not provoke any further damage to
the site.

“And that’s why you want to spend the night out here too. As an act of defeating death?”

“Well yeah,” Jack laughed, “and how many people have actually ever camped in a graveyard? Seriously, name one. At least when you’re old, you can tell your grandkids you really did it.” He stretched out on top of the concrete sarcophagus, hands behind his head.

“You are unbelievable.” Will groaned.

“Yeah, but you gotta admit he’s pretty cool.” Rowley chipped in.

Shaking his head, Will turned
toward the sleeping bag he had earlier laid out right outside the rusting wrought iron fence. He patted his hands down the length of it, making one last check for hard lumps that might be stones or roots. Finding nothing, he unzipped the top two feet of the bag in preparation to crawl in.

“My grandkids are going to think I’m a complete dumbass,” he grumbled to himself. Taking off his shoes, he slid into his bed for the evening and turned his back to the fire.

“Good night, you guys.”

“Good night, John Boy.”

With a sigh, Will shifted and tried to get comfortable on the still knobby ground. Failing that, he gave up, closed his eyes, and tried to dream of steamboats.

***

The dream that came had nothing to do with steamboats.

Will found himself standing by his sleeping body, and looking over the slumbering forms of his companions.

He saw that Jack had fallen asleep on the concrete sarcophagus. He lay in the exact same pose Will had last seen him. Hands behind his head, Jack snored in the deep untroubled sleep of a man completely at home with wherever he was. Dappled moonlight, filtering down through the trees, made him look like a carved bas relief on the lid of the sarcophagus. Rowley huddled in his sleeping bag at the foot of the tomb, tossing and fidgeting in more fitful slumber.

And as Will looked down on them, he realized they weren’t alone.

People stared at them from all corners of the graveyard. Silent people. People in old style clothing who stood motionless, waist deep in the ground, each at their own gravesite. Men, women, young and old, all staring in frozen wordless reproach at the trio sleeping near the charred gravemarker. Many were barely visible due to the brush. Some others were just presences he could feel watching from their overgrown graves in the black thickets of the trees.

The air hung heavy and still, as if weighted by the combined gaze of the graveyard
’s inhabitants. The song of crickets lent the lone sign of life to the tableau. From his position at the foot of his own sleeping bag, Will found his gaze drawn to the figure beside the charred grave marker that had furnished Jack’s fire.

Unlike the others, she stood completely out of her grave.

He could definitely make out a woman’s figure, with long dark hair. She wore an old turn of the century style dress with a hat or bonnet of some type. She stood with her back to him, due to the fact she gazed down on Jack and Rowley from her grave’s position by the low stone sarcophagus.

Up until seeing her, Will’s feelings about being und
er the scrutiny of the cemetery’s occupants amounted to a certain sense of shame. He knew that he and his friends had committed the intrusion here. He struggled to speak, for he felt the overwhelming urge to apologize to these people whose peace he had disturbed.  Paralyzed in the grip of the dream, just the faintest of sounds managed to escape his throat.

Apparently that sufficed.

Some sixth sense told him that he had caught the woman’s attention. As if moving in slow motion, she started to turn toward Will. At that same instant, his instincts screamed of danger for the first time. This ghost felt different from the others. Instead of the sense of reproach he felt from the other specters, this shade emanated menace.

As she continued her slow turn, Will struggled to move. He lacked even the power to close his eyes, which at the moment he desperately wanted to do. All it would take wo
uld be the movement of just one finger, the twitch of one muscle, then the spell would be broken and he could wake up. Even getting control of his breathing would be enough. Straining to the very last fiber of his being, the realization that he wasn’t going to make it sunk in as her motion started to cause the thick mane of hair to fall away from her face.

“Hey Sleeping Beauty! Rise and shine!”

Will almost exploded out of his sleeping bag, gasping for breath. A frantic look around revealed the sun to be up and Jack grinning at him from over the fence. He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder toward Rowley’s van.

“C’mon! It’s already nine o’clock and Rowley is in a hurry to get back to town and start working on his term papers. I’ll drive, since it looks like neither of you wieners slept worth a damn last night.”

***

The knock on his apartment door came as an unwelcome distraction.

With a groan, Will put down the cup of coffee he had been inhaling and pushed himself away from the book laden table. Rubbing his knuckles into his eyes, he shuffled over to the door. He reeked of coffee and stale cigarette smoke, or as he liked to think of it, “the scent of study.” At this time of the semester, sleep existed as a luxury earned between hard bouts of cramming for exams.

“Coming!” he mumbled aloud as the knock repeated.

Pulling open the door, he grunted in surprise. Rowley stood outside alone and looked even more haggard than he himself felt. He stuck his head out and took a quick look up and down the walkway in front of his apartment, then stared in mild wonder at his guest.

“Where’s Jack?”

“I don’t know, probably studying.”

Will doubted that. Jack had a phenomenal memory, and seldom bothered to study. Hitting the books was for lesser mortals in Jack’s worldview. On the other hand, the fact that Rowley was neither studying nor tagging along behind Jack was something he would have also found hard to believe a moment ago.

“Can I come in for a moment?”

“Oh…uh…
sure!” He regrouped. “Don’t mind the mess.”

Rowley shambled in, ignoring the piles of paper and soda cans, and flopped down on the old vinyl chair in the corner. He looked even worse than Will. The sockets of his eyes were dark from lack of sleep behind his glasses.

“Coke or coffee?” Will asked, still bemused by this unexpected visit.

“Coke in a can, if you got it.  I know you’re busy so I won’t be staying long.”

“No problem,” he called over his shoulder while moving to the refrigerator, “So what’s up?”

“I had a question for you…um…
just something that’s been bugging me.”

“What’s that?” Will returned with the Coke and set it down on the scruffy coffee table beside his guest.

“Do you remember last week, when we were in that little diner in Hearne on our way back from the graveyard”

“Yeah, Jack was lecturing me over confusing sentimentality with morality. I remember.”