For Mature Readers Only

# 4
October, '07

Strange Tales Presents

THE HAUNT OF HORROR
featuring Ghost Rider

Ghost Rider '57
Part 4 of 6

Written by Mike McGee

Beverly Ackerman knew how women were supposed to drink. She didn't drink that way. The fruity drinks with the funny names and the bubbles that gave you the giggles; drinks meant for young girls out courting and needing an excuse to wake up alongside of a young man the next day, or for adult ladies who wanted to feel like those young girls, but never would again. Not ever.

That was how women drank, and Beverly didn't drink like them. She liked her bourbon straight, and she liked it room temperature. She loved that fifth of Jack Daniel's like a child – albeit a child she had to replace once every two to three days – and if it didn't give her any comfort...not much did...it did at least give her whatever it was she needed to make it through the day. There would come every now and again a cycle of days, sometimes weeks, when everything in the universe seemed especially like shit; and in that time, Beverly found her daily alcohol consumption going up in volume and getting started earlier and earlier. Even under the best circumstances, Beverly usually took her first drink at dawn, or as close to dawn as she was likely to wake, but that was just to stave off the ever-looming threat of hangover. When things were as good as they got, she would stop there...at least for a few hours. But now, at seven AM the morning of Sunday, October 5 th , 1957, she was stumbling around in her kitchen in a bra and a worn-through pair of panties, jug in hand, already tanked.

And why not? And why the fuck not? A woman's place was in the home, after all, and here she was: At home. Who could find fault with that? Beverly struck a wooden match and lit one of the front burners on the stove, crashed a black iron skillet down on top of it, cracked a couple of eggs open on its lip and let the contents ooze, sizzling, into the pan, and thought: See? Here I am, the good woman, doing all the things I'm meant to.

She splashed three ounces of Jack Daniel's into the skillet and started to stir the whole blackened, crackling mess together with a fork.

It didn't matter what she did. Her mother had always told her that all a woman needed in this life was a man to get by, and that a good woman never had any trouble keeping one. A fucking lie, that's what that was...or, worse, it was the truth. And Beverly was just not good enough.

She'd thought she couldn't ever be good enough when she met Ben back in the spring of '34. She didn't dream there was a woman alive who was the equal of that man, and if there were, she certainly wasn't a simple little sixteen-year-old girl like Beverly McCormick. Already she had left school to slave away in a cannery; the drudgery left her drained and hollow-eyed and muscled like a boy, and not much richer than she'd been. The only escape she had was reading, and even that cost her, as in those days the library did not loan books, but rented them. It was at the library that she met Ben, and she knew even as she fell how hopeless it all had to be – he was so kind and handsome and strong, working here and going to college all at the same time and shouldering the burden without the slightest indication of strain. Not to mention he was four years her senior. And in talking to him, Beverly divined that his family was moneyed...or what that meant to her then, in those grim Depression days. Of all the young ladies who longed for his attentions...and there were many...Beverly McCormick was surely the one least likely. What he had seen in her Beverly would never know. Perhaps, she sometimes thought, if she did know, she might not feel this way now, without him. But whatever it was, it drew Ben to her. And by the summer of 1935, with Ben fresh out of school, they were wed.

Within a month of their marriage, Ben had secured a job that took them here, to Sunset Falls. The only home Beverly had ever known was the bleak industrial city of Cleveland, and to her the languid little town was like something from a fairy tale. Yet there was darkness in what Ben did: He'd come to replace the man who'd served as the sheriff's deputy. Beverly had relations who'd been cops back home – “best job an Irishman can get,” her father often observed; that and, “at least when they call you a fucking mick and shoot at you, you're allowed to shoot back” – and she had been at once proud and horrified at the prospect of her new husband joining their ranks. But the man whose shoes he'd come to Sunset Falls to fill hadn't been killed in the line of duty. He'd died a few days after suffering a stroke, died in a bed surrounded by his friends and family, at the age of sixty-four.

Ben settled into his new role nicely. It didn't seem as if anything bad – or, truthfully, much of anything at all – ever happened in Sunset Falls. Soon, the only worry Beverly had stemmed from the looks she saw every unattached woman in town (and not a few of the marrieds) turn Ben's way when he made his foot patrol. She trusted him, but she knew that he just didn't have it in him to be rude to anyone, not even a hussy who was all but throwing herself at him; the most such a woman would ever get was a polite rebuttal that she would take as permission to try over and over again, and no, of course Ben would never stray, but he was just a man, and he might think about it, think about one of them when he was there with her, and sometimes when they were doing it Beverly just couldn't help herself, she looked into his squeezed-shut eyes and wondered if there were some other lady grinding under him in his mind, and the idea just drove her crazy.

But then someone came along to change all of that. And Beverly knew she need never worry about her husband going anywhere.

John was the apple of Ben's eye straight away...the apple of both their eyes. She had never seen so beautiful a baby, and that wasn't just her matronly bias talking: There was something about that boy that filled the hardest hearts with light, just at the sight of him. As much love as Beverly had seen in her husband to that point it was nothing compared to what came pouring out of him in the presence of that child. And for some long time there, Beverly dared to dream that her life was complete, her happiness absolute.

The souring came when Fred Hopkins got sick with the scarlet fever and had to step down as sheriff. This was 1940, and Ben – a half-decade veteran of the Sunset Falls beat – more or less had to take the job. It meant marginally better pay but much longer hours. The only upshot was that the job kept Ben out of the draft when World War II got rolling, but Hitler still took his toll on Beverly Ackerman's happiness: The war department would allow a sleepy town like Sunset Falls its sheriff, but saw no need to keep a deputy around to haul kittens out of trees when he could be on the other side of the planet fighting the Axis. Between 1942 and 1945, Beverly and her husband were both awake and in the same place maybe ten hours out of every week.

Hard as this was on her, it was even worse for Johnny. The boy was developing a willful streak that terrified his mother and wounded his father, at least when he was actually around to see it. One day in 1943, when Johnny was seven, he called her a bitch right from out of a clear blue sky. Beverly struck him then, something she could never have imagined herself doing... and Johnny hit her back. Hard enough she had to get one of her teeth fixed. She told Ben she'd slipped on some ice on the porch steps, but not to protect their son. It was to protect Ben, whose heart would break in two.

Some nights she would press her face to Ben's chest and weep and beg him to quit. Ben would stroke her hair and shush her like a little girl until she finally cried herself to sleep. And when she woke, he would be gone.

But at the War's conclusion, it looked at last as if she would have her husband back. Ben was able to take on a deputy, a man named Howard Jourgensen who was only too pleased to serve the people of Sunset Falls after serving Uncle Sam over in Okinawa. Howard was dour and portly where Ben was lean and amiable (more amiable now that he had another fella on hand to lighten his workload), and if the two contrasted each other, that didn't get in the way of their becoming fast friends. Beverly didn't think much of Howard, thought he still acted like he was at war here in the middle of the most tranquil place she had ever known, but he was good for Ben; and the reverse was true as well. Howard looked up to the sheriff, admired his good judgment and peace of mind, and strove to emulate him...and, for a few years there, it even worked.

Then it was 1949, and everything went to hell.

She should have known better than to take Howard in. Even now, she couldn't say that she loved him. But he was so obviously in love with her, and they needed each other. There was the same hole in their lives, caused by the passage of the same man, and she figured there wasn't anybody who could better understand her sense of loss than Howard. And he was very comforting...very consoling...at first. But there was a fury that surfaced. A fury, and a self-hatred that made you start to hate yourself, too, if you were around him too long. Because if Howard was worthless, then you must be worthless as well to want to spend time with him. Sometimes he would just stew in it, like there was a cloud of stink that settled onto him and couldn't be expunged and all he could do was loathe it, and there wasn't a point to doing anything else. And then, when he got tired of being stinking and sad, he would get angry.

It was Johnny who caught the brunt of that. Beverly would make concessions to Howard's moods, but Johnny – who felt he alone had the right to be miserable – looked on them, and on Howard Jourgensen himself, with unconcealed disgust. Beverly couldn't even think back on their confrontations without experiencing a vertiginous lapse in her memories. She could recall shouting, and shrieks of torment sometimes, and she could hear things breaking, doors slamming, and heavy weights being shoved against walls. Nothing else.

Sometimes memory...even the memory of Beverly Ackerman, whose recollections were darker than most...can be merciful.

She never did find out where that motorbike came from. It was expensive, she could tell that, and it was hard to guess how Johnny's odd jobs could have paid for it. Howard had his suspicions as to the motorcycle's origins, but the day the sheriff went to the shed where Johnny did work on the bike to confront the seventeen-year-old with them proved to one Howard Jourgensen would rue. Beverly didn't know what exactly had happened: All she knew was that it all ended with Johnny bleeding out one ear from a rabbit punch to the side of his head and Howard bleeding out his nose from where Johnny had broken it with a socket wrench.

Johnny lived in the shed after that.

For about two months. Come dinner time, Beverly would walk a plate of food out to him. He would look up from whatever he was doing to the motorcycle, and sometimes he would motion for her to set the plate down, and other times he would brush her away. Then one morning she brought him a cake. Or would have, if he had been there.

He wasn't.

Neither was the bike.

It was the morning of November 10, 1954.

Johnny's eighteenth birthday.

What was burning and smoking in the pan more closely resembled a bubbling mass of sticky molasses than the two eggs she'd started out with. Beverly poked the mess, stirred it around a little with the fork, slamming back shots from the bottle all the while. She opened the refrigerator and found half a stick of congealed butter still wound up in its wax paper wrapping. She peeled the paper off and tossed the butter in. The pan spit hot grease back out at her, burning oil droplets that seared tiny pits into the flesh of her hand and forearm.

“Shit!” Beverly pulled her hand back, startled, and dropped the fork into the pan. It sank into the morass of charred eggs and booze and butter and was quickly subsumed.

“You...you....”

Her eyes welled with stinging tears; her vision doubled. Only the very tips of the fork's tines protruded from the tarry slop. Gingerly, Beverly reached for them, hoping to grab hold and snatch the fork out of the skillet before she could be burned. But as her fingers got within an inch of the skillet's contents, a flash of grease fire flared up out of the pan to singe her. Beverly screamed again, yanked her hand away –

“You...you....”

A hand she tried to shake the pain out of, but that pain would not subside. There she was just trying to cook, something any person, any normal person, had to do every day, she didn't want to do anything that people all over the world didn't do on a routine basis without incident, but this thing, this simple thing, even this –

“You motherfucker!” Her hand landed on the handle of the skillet with a hiss of searing flesh. She closed her fist tight around the handle of the frying pan, sucking all that agony up, and spun to her side to whip the skillet into the shelves over the sink. There was a cataclysmic explosion of glass as a dozen plates and an equal number of tea cups and saucers and jelly jars all shattered to rain a thousand gleaming shards into the stagnant moat of dishwater. The skillet splashed down into the sink a moment later. A tsunami of soapy water swimming with sharp, gleaming splinters of glass washed over the kitchen. Then there was calm, and dark steam rose out of the washbasin.

And, from somewhere nearby, she heard a weighty thud.

Beverly straightened at the sound of it. For an instant, everything was back to normal. It was a sound she had grown accustomed to long ago, one she'd once heard at this time every Sunday morning...until Ben died, and stopped paying the bill.

Beverly set her bottle down on the stovetop, grabbed her bathrobe from the spot where it hung off the can opener mounted on the wall, and went to the door.

And when she opened it, there it was, tied up in a rubber band at her feet: That thick bundle of newsprint they called the Sunset Falls Times-Herald.

And when she looked up....

Ben looked back at her.

But no. No, it wasn't Ben, though it damn well might have been. Ben had been thirty-five at the hour of his death, and this was a boy – as much a pretty boy as Ben was the day he'd married her, but Ben would never have been caught dead in a get-up like this one. The leather jacket, the sunglasses, the black boots, the chain tied around his waist...good God, the boy was a hood.

Their boy. And if she had any doubts about it, all she had to do was take one look at the motorcycle he walked beside, pushing it along like a kid with a bicycle who's too tired to pedal it anymore. Their boy.

Johnny.

“Hope you appreciate that,” Johnny told her. “I had to walk it up here because I figured your old man would hear a bike engine and come out all guns blazing.”

Beverly stood, holding the bundled newspaper before her like some ancient, holy relic. “Johnny,” she said. “What...?”

“Checking, Ma,” Johnny said. “Just checking, is all. You read that, now. There's a review from the New York Times on that new Hemingway, sounds like something you might like. Make that man do something nice for you and go pick it up for you. You hear me?”

Beverly could only stare. “Yes,” she said. “I do.”

“Good,” Johnny said. “And you read that whole paper, too. Fifteen cents I won't never see again in life. There's a lot of things going on in the world, things a worldly lady ought to know about. A lot of things.”

“I...okay. Okay.”

“All right,” Johnny said. “I'll see you.”

And with that, Johnny hopped on the motorcycle, started the engine, and cruised away to disappear down at the end of Willow Lane.

“Hell was that,” Howard said behind her.

Beverly didn't turn to look at him. She just kept looking down Willow Lane. Johnny wasn't coming back, and she knew it...not today. But maybe one day. She knew that was possible now, and it was something she hadn't known for a long, long while.

“My son,” she said.

The Black Shadow eased down the little path that led through the cemetery. The cobblestones underneath its wheels were still slick from the storm the night before, and the air was heavy with a haze and a dampness that diffused the early morning sunlight that spilled through the long, spindly-fingered branches of the trees that surrounded the grounds. Dead, multi-colored autumn leaves fluttered, crackling, in the Shadow's slipstream.

Johnny Ackerman looked in the direction of the modest headstone that marked the spot of his father's burial. He was looking for something else, too...someone.

He saw her, pulled the bike over to the shoulder of the path, turned off the engine, and walked over.

“I didn't expect to see you again so soon,” Christina told him.

Johnny used the sleeve of his leather jacket to wipe the moisture off the flat top of a smooth marble headstone, then turned his back to it and hoisted himself up a couple feet to take a seat on it. He faced the ethereal blonde who sat on the moist grass with her back to a stone next to his father's. Christina wore the same white taffeta dress as the night before, though it seemed no dirtier, even for its contact with the rain-wet earth.

“Yeah,” Johnny said. “Well, you know, I wouldn't make too much of it. Where'd your book go?”

“I lost it last night, in the rain. It got wet. The pages were coming apart in my hands, and I couldn't read it anymore.”

“Oh.” Christina seemed genuinely saddened by this, but resigned to it in a way that made it even stranger to him. He wanted to point out that most people don't sit outside and continue to read once it's started to pour, but stopped himself. “Well, here.” He reached into a pocket of his jacket and pulled from it a slim paperback.

Christina looked at it and gasped -- then smiled, blushing. “Oh, Johnny,” she said, “I couldn't....”

“Sure you can,” Johnny said. “I wouldn't have known to pick it up without your recommendation, so you are kinda entitled to it. I know you've read all these stories in here already, but....”

“No, that's wonderful,” she said, and took the offered copy of The Golden Apples of the Sun from him. “I love them so much, you don't even know. But it was already so late when you left here the other night...you must have gone straight to the bookstore for this!”

Johnny sighed. “Well, no. I picked that and another up at the gift shop in the hospital in Clover bright and early this morning.”

“The hospital? Were you hurt? You didn't fall off that bike of yours, did you?”

“No, ma'am. A friend of mine, he had an emergency with his heart....”

“Oh, no. Is he all right?”

“I hope he will be,” Johnny said. “He's a tough son...he's a real strong man. But...listen. I have something I have to tell you, Christina. This might...you know, this may upset you, I don't know, it could not affect you at all, but....”

“It's Gladys,” Christina said sadly.

Johnny nodded. “You knew?”

“I know she died,” Christina said. “She used to come and look at me sometimes. Most people never even notice I'm here...you came here for a long time before you ever noticed I was here. She was such a sad little girl. She never said a word to me, and I...I just didn't know what I could've ever said to her. But I think it made her happy to come here. I hope that things are better for her now, wherever she is.”

“Me, too,” Johnny said.

Christina began to study the illustration on the cover of her book. “That wasn't the only reason why you came,” she said.

“That reason alone made it hard enough for me to come,” Johnny said. “But you're right. Gladys didn't just die. Some folks...this isn't easy to say, and you may know it, but she was murdered. By some crazy folks who just did it for no reason at all. A few of them are still out there, and....”

“I'm not in any danger from them,” Christina said. “I don't bother people, and no one bothers me. I'm safe here.”

“That's real brave of you to say, but the fact is you might not be. If these fellas were to come across a pretty girl all alone, I hate to think of what could happen after. Now you...you don't have anywhere to go, do you?”

She studied the book cover in silence.

“Look, you don't have to be ashamed of it,” Johnny said. “I just ask because I could put you up in the garage, or I could make arrangements for you somewhere else if you'd rather that. But the important thing is...it's just best that you don't be out in the open like this.”

“Then I won't be,” Christina said. She didn't look at him. “I'll be gone. Think no more of it.”

“Okay,” Johnny said, “but that doesn't really solve where....”

“I won't be here.” She looked at him now, and her eyes were hard as nails. “That's where. All right?”

Johnny shrank back a little. “Ma'am...Christina...I want to make it clear so you understand, I'm not trying to tell you what to do, and I'm sure not trying to chase you out of a place where you feel comfortable. It's just these guys are dangerous, and....”

“They always are,” Christina said. She opened the book and turned her angry eyes to its table of contents. “I'll do what you say. Thanks for the book. You can go now.”

“Johnny... Johnny!”

Johnny's eyes snapped open, and it wasn't until he had to lift his head that he realized his face was resting in his lap. The issue of Life he'd been perusing had tumbled to the antiseptic white floor at his feet. He sat up straight in the padded seat of the wooden chair and moaned: His spine felt like it was broken in six different places. He reached behind him and rubbed his knuckles over the vertebrae at the small of his back.

“Shit.” The word was a gasp of sharp pain, agony in his lower back that was only fueled by his own ministrations. “How long have I been out?”

“Four o'clock now,” Coyote Bob said. The old man would have been a comical sight, all his wartime tattoos and thick black thatches of extraneous body hair sticking out of the crisp white hospital gown that looked like it belonged on a kid acting the part of the Angel of the Lord in a sixth-grade nativity play, if it weren't for all the business-like tubes and wires that stuck out of him, feeding him life and measuring his proximity to death. The various components of the disassembled Sunday paper were scattered at his bedside, and the book Johnny had bought him at the gift shop downstairs – Mickey Spillaine's I, the Jury – was tented open on his chest. “So I figure somewhere in the neighborhood of seven and a half hours.”

“Oh, man,” Johnny said. “You been awake all this time?”

“Most of it,” Coyote Bob told him. “Been reading about this Mike Hammer here...now this is one bad news sonofabitch. Can't put it down, I might have to send you to get me another before you go home.”

“You been awake all this time, and you let me sleep?”

“They got any cowboy stories down there?”

“You let me sleep for seven hours in this torture chair?”

“You know what's good for that is to just stand up, it'll straighten you right out.”

“Thanks.”

“Anyway, I figured that you could use the rest. It's a Sunday anyhow. You feel like you need to be at the shop?”

“Shop's closed,” Johnny told him. “Indefinitely, on account of the proprietor's sad and untimely demise.”

“I didn't demise.”

“They don't gotta know that.”

Bob chuckled. “God loves an industrious fella like yourself.”

“Somebody ought to.”

“I expect somebody does,” Coyote Bob said. “Anyhow, someone was mighty damned upset when they told me you was dead.”

Johnny blinked. “What?”

“Last thing I remember,” Coyote Bob said, “I mean before I woke up this morning, is I'd called Betty's to add something to our dinner order. The girl answered the phone there, she wasn't in a good way. Distraught. Crying, y'know. She said somebody killed you. Shot you in the face is what she said. And then the telephone line cut off on me.”

“Mallory,” Johnny said to himself.

“I expected you'd know who I meant,” Bob said. “And I expected it had to be her, because when Howard was here earlier he told me she was the only one worked there who walked out of the place alive.”

“Howard was here?”

“Yep,” Coyote Bob said. “You had to have been sleeping like a rock not to have heard his fat ass stomping around. I suppose you missed it in all the commotion with me last night, but evidently it wasn't long after they brought me in that them others, the shooters they had in custody, came after. Three of them, they said. They're all alive, but won't none of them ever be worth a damn again, not that they was worth a damn before. One's all burned up, the other's cut up from being put through a window and getting his back broke, and the last one seems okay physically, but he's crazier than a shithouse rat on a hot 32 nd of December.”

“That's pretty crazy.”

“It is. The broken-back one ain't doing much better. He says he got his ass whipped by a demon with a skull head.”

“Sounds to me like he took in those shows the Rialto booked for Halloween and got confused.”

“Your Mallory must've been a little mixed up, too.”

“I figure,” Johnny said. “Something like this must always be at least a little confusing, when a whole lot of folks get killed. I was already headed back with the take-out when this all got going, thank the Lord.”

“And you know I'm just a stupid old man so I believe you.”

“You used to be pretty sharp, but your faculties, they ain't what they used to be.”

“You ever gonna tell me what happened? I got a feeling somehow the demon with the skull head don't play a real big role in the way you remember things.”

“Maybe sometime when you haven't just had a heart attack.”

“All right, then,” Bob said. He sighed. “So who all was it. Howard wouldn't tell me that.”

Johnny ran his fingers through his hair. “Matt, the Navy fella. Kevin, the fella washed dishes. And Gladys...well, you know Gladys. That retarded girl.”

“That girl wasn't retarded,” Coyote Bob said. The old man's features had taken on a grim cast.

“Bob, I feel you with not wanting to speak ill of the dead, but Gladys was definitely retarded.”

“Nah,” Coyote Bob said. “That girl, when she and her momma moved here back in...hell, it had to be ten years ago, right after the War, so maybe '45 or '46...back then, she was as normal as you or me. Maybe not a genius, but certainly not no pumpkin head.”

“So what happened? Was she in some kinda accident?”

“Don't know,” Coyote Bob said. “Near as I can tell, she got shell-shocked when her momma ran off and left her. It was a strange thing. Her mother...she was a real pretty girl, young, probably twenty, twenty-one years old. Gladys was...well, you know, you and her are about the same age, so you do the math. She was a little younger, though, maybe six when they came to Sunset Falls. Her momma had a Chevy that was forever coming to pieces, so I saw a lot of both of them. Louise didn't like that any, I can tell you.”

“There wasn't no man around?” Johnny asked.

“Oh, there were plenty of men around, but if you mean the little girl's daddy, no. The mother came from Chicago, and it seemed she'd lived a pretty wild life. Back before you made me listen to that damn rock n' roll station all the time, I used to play mine and Louise's old jazz records in the shop, and Gladys' mom knew damn near every cut. I took that to mean she'd swung in those circles, and the jazz scene gets pretty racy down there even now. So it's not too hard to imagine that this sweet little thing maybe takes a toke off a reefer and coochie-wrestles with some hornblower and nine months later out pops Gladys.”

“You got any reason to think this other than it puts the lead in your pencil?”

“Some,” Coyote Bob said. “Her wild streak didn't let up just because she had a baby, and it didn't even let up after she left Chicago behind for some nothing town in Ohio. Mind you, this was a smart girl. A strange one: She had subscriptions to all the pulp magazines, the Weird Tales, Amazing Stories, all of that. But she was smart, so you don't think she was just some trashy whore. Thing was, she went after that bohemian lifestyle. She would go out all night, leave that little girl with all manner of people for days at a time...she was always losing jobs, and the only thing that kept getting her hired to new ones was on account of how good she looked. Then one night, eight or nine years ago, she went out and she didn't never come back.”

“She died?”

“I guess she just got tired of being a momma,” Bob said. “Did something terrible to that little girl. Something in Gladys' mind broke, and since they couldn't find her father, she became the ward of the state.”

“Jesus,” Johnny said. “Do you know...is there any way she could have known my dad?”

Coyote Bob's brow furrowed. “You wanna clue me in?”

“Just something she said to me this one time. She thought that I was him. She wanted me to help her...she wanted Dad to help her.”

“She probably just recalled Ben from when he was the sheriff. I expect Gladys felt like she needed help most of the time, John.”

Johnny stood, and as expected, pain flared up in all the nerves in his spine. He hardly felt it.

“Well,” he said. “Thank you for depressing the hell out of me. Places to go, people to see. You want a book before I beat feet?”

“Don't worry about it,” Coyote Bob said. “All this talking's got me wore out, and I still got a couple more chapters of Mike beating the shit out of people. I could use it, too, after what I seen in the paper.”

“What's that?”

“It's this goddamned Sputnik. Every American oughtta be outraged them Russians beat us into space, and now here I see some goddamn astrologer talking about how great it is we got clear skies tonight and a big full moon, because if we're lucky we oughtta be able to see the damn thing through a telescope. Only sound reason for that I can determine is so we can shoot it down. I'll tell you, kid, people just don't realize the danger.”

A bleak face stared through the black wire mesh of the screen door that looked out on the back porch of the Coscarelli house. Gabriel Coscarelli was darker-skinned than his sister, and he was as tall and stocky as she was slight; he wore motorcycle boots and black jeans not unlike Johnny's, but also had on a black t-shirt with the sleeves cut away to reveal a pair of powerfully-muscled arms that might have been sculpted by Michelangelo. But Johnny didn't have it in him to admire Gabriel's biceps as living works of art. He was too busy thinking about how Gabriel could use those arms to twist his head around like the cap on a bottle of soda pop.

The cold, nearly-black eyes that looked through Johnny more than they looked at him let Johnny know that Gabriel was thinking about the same thing.

“Mal,” Gabriel said. “Everything all right out here?”

Mallory glared over her shoulder. “Get lost.”

Gabriel laughed once without humor, turned and walked away. Johnny heard low mumblings that receded with his footsteps.

“Guess it's a good thing I don't know Spanish,” Johnny said. “I'd hate to have to go stand up for myself and get my ass kicked.”

The two of them were sitting out on the back steps, drinking from green glass bottles of Coke and watching the sun go down. Johnny had imagined himself in similar settings with Mallory many a time. It figured it would take a massacre to make his visions reality.

“Gabe tries to play tough,” Mallory said. “Anyway, I thought you were a little bit beyond worrying about getting beaten up by my big brother. Or anyone.”

“That's the Ghost Rider you're talking about. Not me.”

She looked at him. “The what?”

“That's what I call it,” Johnny said. “I imagine it's got some, you know, demon name of its own, but it doesn't share too much.”

“But I mean...you and it...Jesus, Johnny, I'm Catholic, are you sure it's really a demon?”

“Came from Hell.”

Mallory tilted her head back and blew her hair out of her eyes. “Did you really sell your soul to the devil?”

“I don't know. I guess so.”

“You don't know? How can you not know?”

“I guess I got kinda caught up in the moment. It seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Mallory chewed at her lower lip. Neither of them said anything for a moment. Then:

“Can it get killed? The Ghost Rider?”

“You planning on killing it?”

“If it isn't human,” Mallory said, “then maybe it can't die. And if it can't die, then...maybe you're immortal. And if you're immortal....”

“Then I'd never go to Hell, so that would make the bargain for my soul pretty stupid on the part of Satan.”

“Yeah,” Mallory said, defeated. “Yeah, so I guess you aren't immortal.”

“It might be,” Johnny said. “Or at least it might be very hard to kill. It sure didn't seem too scared of those guns them fellas were waving around. But I'm still just flesh and blood. And so are you.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“I want you to get outta here,” Johnny said. “For a while. A day or two. However long it takes to sort this out. You used to be pretty good friends with that Billie Sue Mailer who started to Oberlin last year. That's close by, but far enough away that if you went and hung around her dorm till, say, Wednesday...well...I'd just feel a lot better about that, Mallory.”

“I have work tomorrow.”

“I think you don't, probably.”

“I have class tomorrow.”

“You're smart, you can miss a day.”

“They're burying Kevin tomorrow, Johnny. Gladys and Matt the day after that.”

Johnny exhaled through clenched teeth. “Well.”

She placed her hand over his own.

“It's okay. Gabe will protect me. From all threats, real and imagined.”

“Does Gabe have a gun?”

“So you're forewarned,” Mallory said, “yes.”

“Sonofabitch,” Johnny said.

Dark had fallen. But it wasn't too dark to see what was waiting for him out front of the garage.

Howard's '51 Lincoln. And Howard standing in front of it. He was holding something...a bag, it looked like. A white paper bag.

When he knew Johnny was close enough to see it clearly, Howard held the bag up to show him the bloodstains on it.

Johnny brought the motorcycle to a halt a few feet short of running the sheriff over.

“Let me guess,” Johnny said. “You'd worked up a bit of an appetite doing nothing all day so you thought you'd come and raid my home in search of day-old take-out.”

“This bag says on it it came from Betty's Grill,” Howard said. “That's some pretty conclusive evidence you were there the other night, son.”

“Obtained illegally, i.e., when you broke the fuck into my place of residence.”

“Your word against mine,” Howard said. He tossed the Betty's bag into a nearby trash can. “Which I tell you strictly as a matter of GP. I know you didn't have anything to do with those assholes shot up Betty's the other night, boy. Because I know those assholes wouldn't have nothing to do with you.”

“That is a crying shame, too,” Johnny said. “They were such a genial, easy-going group of gents, and I feel I could have made a valuable contribution to their fine motorcycle club.”

“Ain't what I meant,” Howard said. “I think you know what I meant.”

“I do. They told me they wanted me, and you, and my Ma all dead. You got any idea why that is?”

“Turn off that bike and get in the car. You and me are taking a drive.”

“You sure you're still the sheriff? I see the blue bedspread, but that don't look like the cruiser so much as that rusted-up piece of shit you drive around in to pick up groceries.”

“Turn off that bike and get in the car.”

Whistling to himself, Johnny twisted the key in the ignition and pulled it out. The engine ceased to rumble. In no hurry, he climbed off, walked over to the Lincoln and, under Howard's watchful eye, opened the door on the passenger's side and got in. Howard followed. As he settled into the driver's seat, there was a lurch of hydraulics, and the car sank to the left. Howard slammed the door behind him and said, “Shut up.” He started the car.

The radio crackled to life with the engine.

“Oh, sweet!” Johnny said. “I bet you like this one a lot, don't you, tough guy?” Imitating Johnny Cash's smoky monotone, Johnny sang along: “When I was just a baby/My momma told me, son/Always be a good boy,/Don't ever play with guns/But I shot a man in Reno/Just to watch him die....”

Howard snapped off the radio. “Enough of your bullshit.” He drove out of the dirt lot, headed east. “This is important business, case that hasn't dawned on you yet.”

“It's dawned on me.” He reached into his jacket for his Luckies and lit one up. “Where's my mother?”

“At the station house,” Howard said. “She's there with Bill Brunner, my deputy. I can't be in touch because this goddamn car ain't got no squawk box in it, but I trust she's safe.”

“Yeah, from everybody except Bill Brunner.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Well, hell, if she'll pick up with you, she'll pick up with damn near anybody, now won't she?”

Howard's eyes narrowed; his grip tightened around the steering wheel. “I tried to do right by your mother,” Howard said. “I've been trying for years. To do right by yourself as well.”

“You can't help it you're a fuckup.”

“I said enough, and I meant it. I can't be your daddy, John. Believe me, if I ever doubted that, I don't now. But I am trying to be a man nonetheless. Now do you wanna know what in the hell is going on here or not?”

Meditatively, Johnny closed his eyes, breathed out smoke.

“Tell me,” he said.

“You know some of what happened,” Howard said. “The end part. What you don't know is the stuff your daddy shielded you from.

“Beginning in late '48, there was a rash of violent crimes here in Sunset Falls, and in some of the other towns around us. Rapes, murder, robberies, for the largest part all at the same time. In a place like this one, you sometimes get an incident. But nothing like this. The paper here and in them other towns kept these things quiet...what makes folks move here from the city is the notion that life is different here. And Oberlin, of course, didn't nobody there want us talking about this stuff. The university lives off kids moving there for college. I figure they might have thought different if any of these crimes had happened in Oberlin. Anyhow.

“Me and Ben didn't know where to turn for the longest. Whoever was doing this didn't typically leave no survivors. They mostly struck homes that were off the beaten path, which was why it took us a while to find what we needed: Motorcycle tracks. A lot of motorcycles. We would never have known it except this one time they rode up on the family's lawn, and come daylight those tracks stood out like stars in the sky. We figured a bike gang was something one or the other of us would have remembered seeing, so we knew they had to split up when they weren't out raising hell.

“It turns out that a lot of people ride motorbikes. We stopped them at random. Most of them were city folk who were just out having a good time, and they didn't take too kindly to the intrusion. Ben got especially dispirited after a few weeks of this, and while we were out making fools of ourselves, the murders kept on coming. But then we got lucky.

“One night, we pulled up behind this hog and motioned for the boy to pull over. He took one look at us and took off. Me and Ben thought we knew what that must mean, and we were right. That bike was a lot quicker than us, and mind you this was a vehicle we got Coyote Bob to select for us when we knew we'd have to prowl the highway until this was resolved. That boy could have kept headed north till he hit Canada and there would have nothing much we could have done to stop him. But then he all of a sudden doubled back, and we saw he had a sawed-off shotgun underneath his vest.

“As it happened, firing it was about the stupidest fucking thing that man could have done. Ben saw it coming and pushed my head down, and him down on top of me. The shot blew out our window and we got some glass in our hair, but that was about it. Meanwhile, the recoil knocked him off the back of his bike. The bike just kept on going until it wandered into the other lane and got cracked up under a rig. And we got our man....”

“Reptile,” Johnny said. The biker hadn't used his name in Johnny's presence, but it had come to him in the moment that the Ghost Rider had torn the man's soul apart.

“Yeah,” Howard said. If he wondered how Johnny could have known it, he didn't ask. “He was loyal to his pals. It took some work, but we got what we needed out of him. That isn't the kind of man me or your daddy were, but it was a desperate time. What we did to that boy was ugly...but we got what we needed.

“With the one in jail, there was six more to bring down. Over the next week, we got four of them. How they all managed to come in alive I won't never know. How it was me and Ben didn't get killed I really won't ever know. But then, just when we was starting to feel good about it all, something worse started happening.

“There were more murders, more rapes, and just like before, all tied up into one. But there was nothing stolen, and there was...other reasons not to think it was the two fellas we still hadn't caught. They were some savage, evil motherfuckers, make no mistake – but whatever was to blame for this...it was something else. This seemed almost more like a dog done it. Or maybe a bear. Something big and mean...something feral. The only reason we knew for sure it wasn't an animal was the rape part of it.

“The problems we'd had with the bikers stopped with the majority of them locked up, but that didn't seem to matter anymore. Three girls who shared an apartment in Oberlin all got tore up the same way one night, and that's when the shit really hit the fan. We were well into '49 by now, and the lid had been held down on all this for so long it was bound to blow any minute. These new murders went on three nights in a row, and by the third night we had six dead, two of them here in Sunset Falls, and we knew that whatever had to be done, it had to be now that it happened.

“Morning after the third night, Ben drove over to Barrett. You know, where all them coloreds live. None of the killings had taken place there, but that wasn't why he went visiting. There was a woman there he'd heard tell of. One of them. A voodoo lady. Ben had it in his mind that all this, it couldn't have been natural. I wasn't sure, but I didn't disagree. And the voodoo woman said he was right. What she did, I don't know, but I know that Ben had brought her some items from the crime scenes, and she some kinda way used them for a magic spell. When she was done, she told Ben what thing had done this. And where to find him, and what to do when he got there.”

Howard hanged his head.

“She told Ben a lot of things.

“We went out that night, back to the highway. It was one of the bikers after all, you see. The voodoo woman said that he'd been with a dark lady one night at the roadhouse, not long before all these new killings began, and the things she did to him changed him. But if we got him tonight, and did just what she said had to be done, then we could kill him. He'd be more a man, less a...less a thing.

“And maybe that was true. But I'll tell you, Johnny, the man we cornered that night...that was no human man even so.

“Ben didn't waste no time. He sideswiped that sonofabitch the minute he saw him, took him right down off his bike, and while I was still stunned by what he'd done, your daddy got out of the cruiser and had his pistol out and shot that man just as easy as you please. The bullet caught that biker in his throat, Johnny.

“And he stood up.

“Him and Ben raised their guns at the same time. Ben was the faster shot. Your daddy shot him through the heart. He screamed, and there was blood pouring out his mouth, but he wasn't dead. So Ben fired again...and that thing he was trying to kill...he fired, too.

“The biker got shot in the face. There wasn't nothing left of the front of his skull but a crater, and black smoke rising out of it. That smoke came streaming out of his head for a good fifteen minutes. I could see shapes in it. It hurt to look at them for too long.

“Your daddy got the bullet right in his forehead. I watched as it spun him around, and then the next thing I knew he was down on the blacktop. And then there wasn't nothing left for me to do but call an ambulance that I knew couldn't get there in time, because my friend...only friend I ever had...he was already gone.”

Johnny ground his cigarette out in the ashtray and immediately sparked up another one. It was his third since he'd gotten into the Lincoln.

“You can guess the rest of it,” Howard said. “That last one, the seventh biker, him I never could catch. With the one dead, all the murders and whatnot were over. I assumed he'd moved on, and he probably had. Then a few months ago, I hear that them others have escaped. Whoever did it got into the impound lot, too, got the motorcycles. It had to be the missing one, I figured...but now I'm not so sure. Because one of these fellas who shot up Betty's sounds to me like the one your daddy killed.”

“The leader,” Johnny said.

“Yes.”

Johnny had been so caught up in the story that he hadn't paid any mind to where they were going. When Howard brought the Lincoln to a stop, Johnny had no idea where they were.

“Come on,” Howard said, and got out.

Johnny followed him into the darkness, and into the cemetery.

He didn't question it. There was way too much on his mind for him to question anything...and somehow it did not feel wrong that they should be here. The sensation Johnny experienced walking the grounds was not a pleasant one. But it all felt correct. Destined. Undeniable. Inevitable.

They reached Ben Ackerman's headstone. Christina, as she had promised, was not here. Johnny almost wished that she were.

Howard had carried an old manila envelope out of the vehicle with him. There was a large bulge in its bottom left hand corner, and even in the dark of night Johnny could discern the age of the creases in the envelope, could tell whatever it contained had been there for a very long time.

“Take it,” Howard said.

Johnny did. It was heavier than he would have thought. “What is it?”

“Reach in there. It won't bite you.”

Johnny did so, and his fingertips flinched respectfully away from the touch of cold metal. He'd been a sheriff's son once...and, in a sense, once and again. He knew damn well what was in that envelope.

He pulled out a chrome-plated .38 and a small box of shells. The motion of popping out the cylinder to load the gun was automatic. He opened the box....

Six bullets. Made of pure sterling silver.

He looked up at Howard. “What the fuck, man.”

“Ain't you guessed what that motherfucker is yet?” Howard placed his hand upon the gravestone of Ben Ackerman. “Your daddy killed him right, just the way the voodoo lady said. She said silver is all you need, you take them out just like a normal man with a lead bullet. So how he can be up and walking around now, I don't know. But what I do know is that your mother is a woman, which means you and me are the ones gotta fight this thing. So you lay your hand down on this man's grave and you swear that you will fight beside me till we see it die.”

Johnny said, “Do you swear?”

“I do,” Howard said. “I swear to God and before Ben Ackerman that I will send this fucker back to Hell where it belongs.”

Johnny set his hand down next to the sheriff's.

“So do I,” Johnny said.

“Well, good fucking luck,” a voice called from the other side of the graveyard.

Something flew out of the shadows and had its arm locked around Johnny's throat before he could think to breathe. Hot, rancid breath sprayed mist on his cheek. Johnny looked out of the corner of his eye to see his assailant and came face-to-face with the repulsive, earless, pasty-faced ghoul: Russell. The knife that had cut Mallory Coscarelli's blouse to ribbons was pressed to Johnny's jugular vein. Russell's free hand reached over to slap the gun and the bullets out of Johnny's grasp. The shining silver shells tumbled out of reach.

Yards ahead, Redbeard stood from a crouching position to tower over the gravestones all around him. The brilliant, luminous white of the full moon shone at his broad back.

As the huge biker approached, Johnny tried to twist his way out of the headlock Russell had on him, but the other man was far stronger. Johnny looked to Howard, but Howard was just looking at Redbeard; the sheriff's jowly face went utterly pallid. “Oh, my God,” he said.

“If it isn't fuckin' every body,” Redbeard said. “Or, if not everybody, close enough for right now. The lady of the house I can fuck to death at my leisure. Howard...you are looking positively delectable tonight, I gotta tell ya. And Johnny! I see you got your face back. Good for you. I think this time....”

Redbeard's lips pulled back in a grin.

“...I'm gonna have to chew it off.”

A grin wide with a hundred fangs...all gleaming in the moonlight.

END OF PART FOUR

For Mature Readers Only

# 4
October '07

Strange Tales Presents

THE HAUNT OF HORROR

"Peek-A-Boo"

Written by Josh Reynolds

When he'd first seen it, he could've sworn it was looking at him.

Like it was saying, peek-a-boo. I see you.

That was silly of course.

It wasn't looking at anything, the condition it was in.

Felton stared at the collapsed section of wall, ripped lengths of wallpaper hanging down around the hole like curtains on a window. Debris covered the floor of the flat and water stains climbed the walls and spread over the ceiling.

Storm damage. The storm had hit Brighton like God's fist. The buildings closest to the shore had flooded and suffered water damage. That was the reason he was here. The reason he was standing here, in this place with a dusty sledge hammer with a neon yellow plastic handle in his gloved hands. The reason he was here staring at it.

He coughed harshly, the dust stirred up by the renovations going on in the building cutting into his throat and causing his eyes to water. Feeling phlegm and bile in his mouth he spat a wad of something to the floor.

The mummified thing he'd found in the wall minutes ago gave no sign that it noticed. Something for which Felton was grateful. Thin and stick limbed it slouched against a support beam, arms crossed over a sunken, cobwebbed chest. It was naked and its dried skin was the color of ash. Its bottom jaw gaped and its eyes were closed.

It looked like it was sleeping.

Felton shuddered.

Should he call his supervisor? What was the procedure for finding a body behind the wall of a flat in which repairs were under way? He stared at it.

Had its eyes just fluttered?

Peek-a-boo.

No. That was daft. He shook his head. Don't be a mentalist Felton. Downstairs he could hear the rest of the crew at work. Tearing out the water damaged walls and reinforcing the supports. He was the only one on the top floor. In the top flat.

Just him and the dead thing.

It moved. Felton stopped breathing. No. No, it hadn't moved. Just the support beam vibrating from the work downstairs causing it to look like it was shivering. Dead things don't move.

It was dead.

Dead.

Felton felt a sudden impulse to smash its head in with the sledge hammer he still held in his gloved hands. Just smash that leering expression right off its withered face. He blinked. It was frowning. It hadn't been frowning before had it?

Of course it had.

Yeah.

He wanted to call his supervisor but he couldn't look away. Couldn't stop staring at those milky, blind eyes.

Weren't they closed before? Felton stared at thing's face, trying to remember how it had looked minutes ago but the image wouldn't come. It was staring at him, head cocked, frowning.

He couldn't breath. Felton swallowed and felt a chill despite the heat.

It was looking at him. He knew it was looking at him. Could feel it.

No. No that was foolish. Stupid.

He lifted the sledge hammer hesitantly. He'd just smash it. That was what he would do. Just smash it to dust and pretend he'd never seen it. That was what he had to do.

A harsh scream sent a bolt of electricity up his spine and paralyzed him for a second. The sledge hammer slipped out of his hands and landed with a thunk on the floor, shocking him back to awareness. Breathing hard, cold sweat running in rivulets down his face he looked towards the bay window that dominated the far wall, looking out over the street below.

A seagull crouched there, shaking its wings, glittering eye pressed to the window.

Just a bird. Just a stupid bird.

It watched him for a moment before it took flight and disappeared into the sky. He fought to get his heart rate back under control, his eyes sliding back towards the hole. Back towards the thing that lay there.

Only it wasn't there.

Not anymore, oh no.

Where was-?

Behind him, a floorboard creaked. He spun around.

He'd been partly right.

It was looking at him. But it wasn't frowning.

It was smiling.

Peek-a-boo.

THE END