Fossil Lake II: The Refossiling Read online

  “Dustin Cameron,” I said.

  “Oh, right. We have an appointment,” he answered, shuffling through the pile of folders on his desk. “Let me see… Here it is.” He pulled a folder from the stack, inspected the contents, glanced at me, and cleared his throat before addressing me with unexpected formality, “Mr. Cameron.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Some of your teachers are a little concerned about your writing.”

  “Yeah. I know it’s dark and gothic and…”

  “Not that. It’s…just not good.”

  “What?”

  “How can I put this delicately? I know you want to be a writer, but…um, have you considered something more suited to your…uh…abilities?”

  “What? What do you mean?” I tried to keep my eyes from watering. Was this some kind of joke?

  “Maybe some light vocational training. Home economics, custodial engineering something along those lines.”

  I couldn’t speak.

  “I don’t want to crush your dreams” he continued,” but you need to consider how you intend to make a living. The writing market’s a tough one.”

  I’d never wanted so much to kill somebody. If I weren’t such a retarded pussy, I would have stabbed him with my rainbow eraser topped pencil or pushed that fat bastard out the window.

  “It’s just that students interested in a writing career tend to enroll in a university writing program…and your grades are less than…stellar.”

  “So I should apply —”

  “Let me stop you right there. I think it’s great that someone like you has goals, but you need to be realistic. You are enrolled in…special education classes. College curriculum is going to be a little too advanced for you.”

  I looked down, holding my backpack with my Stephen King novel and H.P. Lovecraft books inside. I just had to get through this. One day I’d look back and laugh. I finally managed an “okay,” and he handed me some brochures on crockpot cooking and toilet cleaning as I was on my way out the door.

  As soon as I stepped out his door into the hallway I ran into a strange guy I’d never seen before. The stench of him almost knocked me off my feet, and I had to step back to recover from it. That pause gave me a chance to look up to see the man. He seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t quite place him. He was a fat guy with long, greasy black hair. He was far too old to be in school.

  He looked me in the eye and said, “Don’t give up, Dustin. You’ll be a great writer.” Then he walked past me and into Mr. Porras’s office. That was the last I saw of either of them. I dropped out of school that day.

  For the next twenty years I didn’t give much thought to Mr. Porras and the smelly guy. Then, a few days ago I watched an episode of Saved by the Bell in which Screech got shoved into a locker. That got me thinking about school and what ever happened to those chomos who used to beat up on me every day. It wasn’t too much to hope that at least a few of them had died horribly gruesome deaths.

  I didn’t have any trouble finding most of them on Facebook and Twitter, but I had more trouble locating Mr. Porras. Looking through some old newspapers, I managed to find an old article dating to the day after I’d last seen him.

  He’d been slaughtered right there in his office in the middle of the day. A couple students had seen a pool of blood coming out from under his closed office door. He’d been cut to pieces, with bits of his intestines scattered all over the room. His eyes had been plucked out of their sockets and were neatly impaled on a couple of pencils which were sticking out of his mouth. Oddly enough, they had the rainbow eraser toppers I used to use.

  The suspect was a smelly man with long black hair. A little more research revealed that the killer had never been found.

  God, I couldn’t believe I was there just a few minutes before he was killed!

  I tried to convince myself it couldn’t have been the same man I’d seen in the hallway. But it must have been. Scrolling down the page, I came in for another shock. A security camera had captured a photo of him.

  It was me.

  It was the thirty-six-year-old version of me, but it was definitely me.

  I still don’t know how it could be possible. Honestly, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

  You must think I’m out of my mind, but, if you look closely at the picture, you’ll see he’s wearing the same jacket I’m wearing right now, and he’s carrying a copy of one of my books—a novel I published last year!

  LADY GHOST

  Edward Martin III

  Jacob drank the entire pint in one pull. Impressive – I know how bitter that beer is.

  “She’s real,” he said. “And I’m going to find her.”

  “You’re a nutter,” I said. “And I’m going to buy you another beer, because God loves us more when we buy beer for nutters.”

  He approached the next beer – which was his sixth , by the way – with a little more caution. I imagine the first one was finally having some effect. Plus, I think he premedicated before coming to the tavern.

  “She’s real,” he repeated. “I saw her.”

  “You saw her?” I asked. “You saw the Lady Ghost.”

  He stared into his beer and was silent a moment. “Well, Old Bill saw her, and I know he was telling the truth.”

  “Jacob, Old Bill moved back down to the Lower 48 ten years ago. Why are you bringing this up now?”

  Jacob polished off the last of the pint, and slammed the glass onto the table. “Because it’s time. It’s time, dammit, and I’m going to show you he was right all these years. I’m going out there tonight to see her, and then you’ll know.” He leaned forward. “I know she’s real.”

  Abruptly, he stood up.

  “I’ll see you when I get back,” he said, and he spun on his heel and marched out the tavern door.

  Shawn leaned over and took the empties away. “What was that all about?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “Jacob’s off his rocker,” I told her. She smiled. I’m sure to her, we were all off our rockers. She came up only two years ago from Portland. No matter how crazy it might seem in Portland, by the time you passed through Kotzebue, the entire rest of the world must seem saner than sane. “He’s off to play footsie with the Lady Ghost.”

  “Who’s she?” she asked.

  “Oh, that’s right,” I said. “You don’t know about her. Well, it’s not complicated — the Lady Ghost is a lady ghost. She walks out on the Bay, looking for a mortal man who can love her, so she can move on into the afterlife. Yadda, yadda, yadda. It’s a local thing.”

  Shawn nodded. “Okay, that makes sense. Yeah, we had Bigfoot down where I grew up.”

  I nodded, too. “Everybody’s got legends. If there’s a swamp nearby, it’s a swamp devil, or if there’s a forest nearby, it’s probably something to do with a goatman. When I lived in Phoenix, it was the Lost Dutchman, who apparently mislaid his treasure trove somewhere on the mountain. The world’s full of weird-ass legends.”

  I drank more.

  “So Jacob’s going out to find this one, the Ghost Lady?”

  “Lady Ghost,” I corrected. “Yep, he’s gonna wander around out there all night in the fog looking for her, and if we’re lucky, he’ll pass out near a dead seal and swear it was her, because that would make a terrific story.”

  She pointed. “Is that his coat?”

  It was. I sighed. “Shit. I don’t want the old bastard freezing to death on my watch.”

  Fifteen minutes later, I was dragging Jacob’s big coat with me, and tramping down the path toward the bay.

  I didn’t expect him to go far. Normally, six beers was barely enough to wake him up, but as I said, I was pretty sure he had premedicated earlier that evening.

  “Jacob, where the hell are you?” I muttered. I wasn’t going to start calling out his name – not yet. I’d probably just scare him to death. Safest move would be to find him, give him his coat, and let him make the call.

  I reached the beach in ten minutes.
It was pretty cold out.

  The water was still like a mirror, and a thin fog was everywhere. I could see trees and the beach, of course, but if I had to guess, I’d say visibility was maybe forty or fifty feet.

  I stopped to catch my breath.

  Damn, it was beautiful. There was a half moon up in the sky, and everything was cast in shades of silver. The water made tiny laps at the pebbled beach, and the wind was only the tiniest gust. I took a deep breath, and the air was so crisp and fresh I could almost feel the insides of my lungs burning. As much as I hated the lack of conveniences, this place kicked Phoenix’s ass nine ways from Sunday.

  I raised my voice a little more: “Jacob!” I called. “Where are you?”

  No answer.

  Damn, he had already passed out. Now I’d have to actually hunt him down in the fog. Annoying.

  I tripped and my feet tangled in something soft. Something that wasn’t just pebbles or a branch. It was a cloth something.

  I bent down and picked it up. It was an old work shirt, worn through in spots, torn in spots, and filled with humanity. More distressing, it was the shirt Jacob was wearing when he left.

  I tucked it under my arm – the absolute very last thing that I wanted to find is Old Jacob lying somewhere sleeping it off with only his long-handled underwear on. I would not be able unsee that. Better to be able to cover him. Once I found him.

  “Jacob!” I called a little louder.

  Then I saw her.

  At first, I thought she was just a reflection, some trick of the light my glasses played on me, but nope, there she was.

  I have to admit, the Lady Ghost was, in fact, stunningly beautiful.

  She was exactly what I expected to see – a thin beautiful woman with long flowing hair. She walked softly, ethereally, across the bay, right on top of the water, in a place where I knew it was at least twenty feet deep, if not deeper.

  Did I say beautiful? She practically glowed.

  She wasn’t wearing much, and what she wore left little to the imagination. It was a sort of a slip. She was barefoot. Where her feet touched the surface of the water, the most delicate ripples spread.

  I looked around, thinking maybe someone was fooling me, maybe Jacob was in on it, but there was no one there, no one except me and this beautiful slender vision of a woman.

  She turned and started her gliding walk toward the shore.

  I stepped closer, and rubbed my eyes. I didn’t expect that to actually solve anything, but I’ve seen people do it in movies. She was still there, and still softly and slowly walking closer to the shore.

  Closer to me.

  My god, she was beautiful! Her eyes were clear and perfect, her skin like some kind of cross between the smoothest alabaster and something magical.

  I stepped closer, and stopped at the water’s edge, watching her.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  In response, she glided closer.

  I was stunned. Absolutely stunned. When I returned to town with her, everybody was going to completely freak.

  “Are you okay?” I asked. “You look cold.” It seemed like a pretty stupid thing to say, but I was pretty much saying whatever came out of my mouth.

  I reached out to her, and she reached toward me.

  In a man’s life, there are few times when he knows without a shadow of a doubt what love really is, and in that exact moment, as I reached toward her and she reached toward me, my heart and mind sang with this exact feeling, with the sense of absolutely pure and passionate love.

  Her embrace was brilliant. It was everything a man could ever want in life, in love, and for the rest of his days.

  Then I felt her arms tighten like steel bands, and I was lifted from the beach, high into the air.

  The water heaved upward, and erupted in chaos, revealing Something Horrible. Something Horrible looked like some kind of frog or fish, but fifty, maybe sixty feet wide, with a body that trailed fatly down into the depths of the bay. Something Horrible’s head had a thick tendril protruding from it, for nearly thirty feet, and ending at my beloved Lady Ghost. I looked into her face, but it wasn’t quite a face anymore, and the arms tightened and tilted me upside down.

  I dropped Jacob’s shirt and watched it fall upward back onto the beach.

  A blast of warm moisture struck me and I looked back at Something Horrible.

  Something Horrible’s mouth opened up, and there were rows of teeth, wet and still red, probably from Jacob. Something Horrible swung me over its mouth.

  Then, Something Horrible let go, and my last thoughts were of how beautiful the Lady Ghost had been.

  How very, very beautiful.

  INNOCENT PASSAGE

  Randy Attwood

  The skies were cloudy all day.

  Since morning, Fred and I had been peering out of the tiny windshield of his car as the overhanging sky loomed above us and met the horizon: flat and far ahead. The black metal skull of his even-then ancient 1935 Ford, with its sets of human eyes, prowled the sand roads across the prairie.

  It was late afternoon. I was driving. We were both irritable.

  As far as we could see, there were no houses. The few acres of wheat that had been sown, cut, and the stubble plowed under bespoke infrequent human contact to the land. The rest was poor pasture—brown from lack of rain through July and now into a mid-August Kansas hell—where no cattle grazed.

  “Hit a left,” Fred said.

  “Why?”

  “Just hit a left up here. Looks like a promising road.”

  “Now just what makes it look so promising?” I asked, but slowed the sputtering car and depressed the clutch to downshift.

  “You forget I’m the one who spotted the last four houses?” he reminded me, his eyes scanning the horizon. No houses had been seen all day.

  Haunted house hunting, we called it. The legal term was breaking and entering. The county sheriff had warned us that he knew we were responsible for the summer rash, but couldn’t prove it. If he caught us, he’d “throw your asses in jail,” as he so quaintly put it.

  We hunted anyway.

  What we found was a treasure-trove left by those whom the land had defeated. There was a vast, though spotty, salvage yard of farm houses abandoned by failed farmers; retired farmers who had moved to town; dead farmers whose city offspring didn’t bother to come back and claim what was considered trash in their modern lives.

  Our hunting had started harmlessly that summer in 1964, the summer before our senior year in high school. We happened upon the first haunted house among a stand of trees at the edge of town. The high weeds scraping against the bottom of the car as we pulled into the driveway told of long disuse. The roof of the two-room shack was caved-in at spots. A porch beam listed. Early summer insects rose up from the waist-high weeds as we walked to the open door. Inside, litter was covered with years of dust. Fred’s foot kicked something, and he reached down to uncover a wooden crank-type telephone. In a corner was another.

  We took this find to Fred’s family farm, cleaned off the telephones, followed the schematics inside the casing, hooked them together, attached a battery, and turned the crank on one. The bells rang on the other. I picked up the receiver to say hello, and heard Fred’s voice. “Hey, it works!”

  I often stayed the night at Fred’s father’s farm. We slept on air mattresses on top of a wooden platform he had built among an opening in a hedge row of trees. We would stare up at the stars hoping to see meteors while we talked late into the night of different girls and what it would be like to screw them; or what it would be like just to screw. How exactly did it feel?

  Invariably, it was I who would fall asleep first and be told when I awoke in the morning, “You missed a really gigantic falling star.”

  The night after finding the telephones, we talked about how many abandoned farm houses there must be across the prairie; what they might contain.

  “Tables, chairs, lamps and beds, who knows what. Why, I bet we’d need a house to ke
ep it all,” Fred said, and we turned to each other.

  “A house.”

  We could hide it right here in the hedge row, build it with wide screen wall panels and a veranda porch. We would furnish it with the free booty we would find, booty that had been left to the wind and dust, and us. We would entice girls to join us there. We would score. His old Ford certainly wasn’t working for us when we dragged Main.

  But now summer was almost gone—school a scant two weeks away. Our house had yet to get off its foundation, but we had our finds hidden in the stand of trees protected under a tarp.

  We had become experts on the nooks and crannies of our and surrounding counties. We scoured over larger areas, probing deeper into the prairie: north to the slabs of limestone used as fence posts on the treeless high prairie; east along the Big Arkansas to find abandoned efforts at orchards and flood damaged homes; south along the rich wheat fields and clusters of small dying towns that came alive only at harvest time; and west across the ever flattening empty reaches.

  We would camp out in old cemeteries where we found tombstones containing the names of Russian, German, Swedish and English immigrants who had come to Kansas in hopes of a future: a future that became a present of digging through blizzards to the barn; fixing broken machinery; the endless buttoning, and unbuttoning, of children’s clothes; the watching those same children die of fevers; prayers for a decent crop to pay off the loans from the bank; and hail storms ruining those same crops.

  We hunted for what remained of their efforts.

  The first sign would be a roof without a television antenna, at which the cry of “haunted house” would be raised and make our hearts pound as fiercely as those of whalers who had spotted the spray of whale. But our screams were followed by stealth.

  First we’d find the road that led to the house, then slowly approach, looking at our prospect as it came closer. Dirty windows, padlocked doors, driveways with high weeds were signs of life to us, and time for greater quiet.

  We were, after all, opening a tomb. We were about to enter a place once full of human life and pain and hope and fear. The people would be gone, but the house still contained the spirit of their lives.