I walked back down to the house, went out into the garage, and got a broom and a snow shovel. Then I trekked back up to the top of the hill and swept the debris out of our driveway. When I was finished, I went out to my office and settled in to do some work. Nothing relaxes me more than sitting in my office after I’ve been out on the road, and this was my first chance to enjoy it since coming home from VisionCon. I started writing, and didn’t think about the accident again until the next day, when the cross showed up.
ENTRY 6
The only newspaper I read is
USA Today
, and the only time I read it is when I’m traveling. I’ve tried twice to subscribe to it, but each time I was told that we lived too far out in the country for them to deliver it. We don’t subscribe to either of the local papers. It’s nothing personal. I have good friends at both the
York Daily Record
and the
York Dispatch
. Indeed, before I went full-time as a novelist, I used to supplement my income as a freelance writer for the
York Dispatch/York Sunday News
. Both papers have given me reasonably fair coverage over the years (other than the time they mistakenly reported that I was quitting horror to write a Civil War novel). I have nothing against either publication, but I don’t subscribe to either. I read the news online when I wake up in the morning. By the time the local paper would arrive, I’d already be working, so it doesn’t make sense for me to subscribe.
Both papers had, in fact, reported on the accident, but I missed the coverage.
I also don’t watch the local news. Unlike the local newspapers, our two local television stations-WGAL 8 and WPMT Fox 43-are both run by monkeys. At least, that’s the way it seems to me. Channel 8 spends fifty-five minutes of every news hour extolling the benefits of their Super Doppler Weather Radar. The remaining five minutes are usually devoted to a special feature regarding whichever advertiser paid them the most money that week. I’m not kidding about this. Fox 43 isn’t much better. To their credit, they do attempt to report the news, but their idea of reporting involves sending pretty female news anchors out to the local dairy farm or Cub Scout meeting for some ‘slice of life’ events. If Iran does eventually build a nuclear bomb, you won’t hear about it on either station, because Channel 8 will have local weatherman Doug Allen jerking off over the goddamn Super Doppler Radar and Fox 43 will be reporting live from some craft fair in fucking Hanover.
I don’t know if either of them reported on the accident. I somehow doubt it, but if they did, I missed the report.
And don’t even get me started on the sorry state of our local radio stations…
In truth, even though it was only twenty-four hours since I’d swept up the debris, I’d already forgotten all about the crash. After all, it had happened while I was gone, and none of the victims were anyone that I knew, and our property hadn’t been damaged, and the wreckage was gone, so it didn’t really impact me that much. It was something that had happened, a momentary distraction, but there were other things to focus on, important things like writing and trying to figure out if it was possible to add yet another novel to my list of deadlines in order to pay for the baby’s daycare.
Perhaps that sounds callous. Someone had lost their life. Perhaps I should have been a little more concerned. Caring. Sympathetic. But I wasn’t. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I think it just makes me what I am-a flawed human, just like everybody else.
Around noon, I walked up to the top of the driveway to get the mail, and I noticed a rustic, white picket cross and a beautiful floral arrangement mounted on the smashed guardrail. I’ve driven by these crosses countless times. You see them dotting our roads and interstates. Sometimes, they seem almost as abundant as McDonalds, Exxon and other highway staples. I’d never actually seen one up close, though. Up until that moment, I’d only experienced them as a passing glance through the windshield, there but for the blink of an eye and then gone as the next mile marker rolled past.
Curious, I quickly pulled the mail out of our mailbox and then hurried over to the cross for a closer look. The flowers were fresh and professionally arranged. There was no tag or any indication of which local florist had put them together. Nor was there a name on the cross. Not even the old standard ‘R.I.P.’ It was just plain white-two thin slats nailed together in the middle.
I turned away and started back downhill. The mailman had brought no royalty or advance checks. Instead, there were only bills, catalogs, and my monthly issues of
National Geographic
,
Soldier of Fortune
and
The Fortean Times
(all of which, for some inexplicable reason, seem to arrive on the same day each month). I was flipping through the bills, wondering how the hell we were going to stay caught up on them, when the wind began to blow. I heard a rustling sound behind me.
Figuring it was my pet cat, Max (who lives outdoors and was the source of inspiration for Hannibal from my short story, “Halves”), I turned around and then stopped.
Ever see the wind pick up a bunch of leaves and spin them in a mini-cyclone? It’s common, of course. That’s what was happening. The leaves around the cross were spinning fast, reaching a height of about five and a half feet off the ground. Then, as quickly as it had started, the breeze died off and the leaves floated back down to the ground.
That was the first thing that happened. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and even now, I’m almost willing to chalk it up to nothing more than a natural occurrence-except for everything that’s happened since then.
In hindsight, there was nothing about it that was natural…
ENTRY 7
The second thing that happened is also somewhat dubious, but when considered in the greater context, it makes me wonder, especially given her recent expressed desire to move.
Cassi is a smoker. Ever since the baby came along, she only smokes outside, and then, only after he’s gone to bed. There’s an ashtray out on the deck, along with a table, four chairs and the glider. Oh yes, we can’t forget about the porch glider. It’s the central part of our story.
The glider is a family heirloom. It belonged to Cassi’s grandmother and was given to us after she passed away. Cassi has fond memories of sitting on it when she was a little girl. It’s very comfortable, but the cushions are a garish, green floral print and when it rains, they soak up the moisture. Sit on them after a storm and your ass will get wet.
Within two days of the accident, Cassi stopped smoking out on the deck. Instead, she began smoking in our bathroom with the door closed and the exhaust fan running full blast. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Keep in mind, it was winter. I just assumed that it was too cold outside to smoke. But as months passed and the nights grew warmer, she still avoided smoking out on the deck. When I asked her why, she said she got spooked out there at night. Neither our flashlight nor the big dusk-to-dawn light that’s installed on the side of the garage helped. She said it was still too dark out there, and sometimes, she felt like someone was watching her. Despite those lights, the top of our driveway remains pitch black at night. If you shine the flashlight up the hill, the beam gets lost in the darkness, almost as if the shadows were swallowing it. The only thing that dispels the darkness are the headlights of approaching cars, and then, only for an instant.
I asked her when she’d started feeling this way, and she said it was after the accident.
My wife is not given to flights of fancy. She’s firmly grounded in reality. She’s the Agent Scully to my Agent Mulder, to put it in terms of
The X-Files
. The only spiritual or supernatural activity she even remotely engages in is occasionally attending Catholic or Episcopalian church services. She doesn’t believe in aliens or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or ghosts. Despite this, being out on our deck and staring up at the driveway at night has made her uncomfortable enough to start smoking inside. As I write this, many months later, that is still her practice. Let’s call that occurrence number two, and catalogue it accordingly.
ENTRY 8
If this were a horror novel, I’d plot it like one, but it’s not a horror novel. It’s simply a diary, notating a random collection of occurrences, all of which have happened since the accident. I’m jumping around here. One minute, I’m in the present. The next, I’m back to the beginning again. There is no linear narrative. There is no slow build of suspense and dread. There is only me, trying to make sense of it all.
I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a great quote regarding
The Amityville Horror
,
Poltergeist
, and similar haunted house stories. The quote (and I’m paraphrasing here) goes something like this: ‘If this stuff really happened, if the house was really haunted, then why did the people stay? Why didn’t they move the fuck out as soon as they heard the voices/saw the ghost/the dog started levitating? Because that’s what would happen in real life.’
Except that’s not true. I know, because this is real life. This is real fucking life and we can’t move. We can’t move because we can’t afford to move. We can’t afford to buy another house. Cassi’s been talking about it again-talking about finding a place with sidewalks and fenced-in backyards where the baby can play. A year ago, she was fine with him growing up playing in our big backyard with its trees and trout stream and wild outdoors. Now she’s craving suburbia, and I think I know why. I don’t think it has anything to do with sidewalks. It has to do with some of the things that have happened here.
That should make me happy, because if it’s true, then it means that I’m not crazy. If she’s experiencing things too-enough that she suddenly wants to move-then that’s proof right there that I’m not losing my mind. Right? If so, then I should be ecstatic. But I’m not. I’m not because this is my family we’re talking about, and we probably should move and I can’t afford to do it. I’m supposed to take care of them and provide for them and protect them, and in this case, the best way to do those things is to buy another house and get the hell away from here.
I wish sometimes that I still had a real job, a job where I operated a machine or moved boxes around, and got a paycheck every week for my efforts. A job with health insurance and a 401K would be nice, too. It would be awesome to have a job where people didn’t email me at the end of the day, after I busted my ass for eight hours, and said, “Your last book sucked. When are you gonna write another zombie novel?” But I’d even put up with that, as long as the job gave me a steady enough income that I could buy us a new home.
Earlier this week, I tried to get a job like that. I went back to two of my former employers-the foundry and the loading docks. Neither one of them was hiring, on account of the economy. The Human Resources Director at the foundry said, “You must be a millionaire from all those books. Why would you want to come back to work here?”
Life is nothing more than a series of lyric snippets from Bruce Springsteen songs.
This is good whiskey. Woodford Reserve. Big fucking bottle. I believe I will have some more. I believe, in fact, that I will drink this bottle dry tonight.
The people in those stories don’t move out because they can’t. They’re trapped.
So am I.
ENTRY 9
The third bit of strangeness occurred around the end of March. In truth, I’d again forgotten all about the accident. Oh, sure, I thought of it for a second when I went up to get the mail or pulled in or out of my driveway. The cross was kind of hard to miss. The floral arrangements had since withered and died, but the marker was still there. So while I did occasionally think of the accident, such thoughts were fleeting. They weren’t even fully-formed thoughts. If anything, they were just echoes.
I’d even forgotten about the mini-cyclone the leaves had formed. Cassi had taken to smoking inside, but as I said earlier, I hadn’t put two and two together at that point, and didn’t know why she’d changed her routine. I thought it was because of the cold weather.
The third occurrence was an incredibly vivid and detailed dream. I know that I dream all night. I’ve been told by Cassi, ex-girlfriends, my ex-wife, one-night stands, cellmates, my old Navy buddies and anyone else who has ever slept beside me that I’m restless at night. I kick and twitch and talk in my sleep. Not mumbling. Not whispering. No, I have loud, boisterous and elaborate dream conversations. Sadly, I never remember them. It’s rare that I remember any of my dreams. But I remembered this one. It happened in March. Here we are, months later, and I still remember every detail.
In the dream, I was sitting out on our deck after dark, smoking a cigar and looking up at the stars twinkling down through the tree limbs. I do this quite a bit in the waking world, so the dream was pleasant enough. Max was sprawled in my lap, and I was petting him with one hand and holding my cigar in the other. My dog, Sam (who was the inspiration for Big Steve in my novel
Dark Hollow
, as well as many other things), was sprawled at my feet. There was a glass of bourbon on the table in front of me. Crickets and spring peepers were chirping over in the swamp, and in the distance, I could hear the soft, muted roar of the trout stream. Eventually, I became aware that Max and I weren’t alone. I heard the glider rails squeak, as if someone was slowly rocking back and forth. I turned around and there was a girl sitting on the glider. As soon as I saw her, Max jumped down off my lap and ran away, hissing.
The girl was young, maybe eighteen or nineteen years old. She had long, shoulder length blond hair, combed straight. She was thin but not skinny. Pretty. She wore denim jeans, sneakers and a white t-shirt. She clutched a black cell phone in one hand, and held it at her side, as if waiting for it to ring. When she raised her head and looked at me, her expression was one of profound sadness.