Chapter 3 – Things You Hear In A Diner

You might be wondering, with all of the strange happenings in this town, why I would deny that what I’d seen had been abnormal, or even paranormal? Consider someone who lives in an urban landscape. The population is dense, so it stands to reason there’s a higher percentage of muggers living in that city, too. People hear about attacks and robberies all of the time, but it never happens to them. They go on with their lives as if the criminals don’t really exist.

That is, until the day they get mugged, and they don’t want to believe that it happened to them. Still, they patch themselves up, and they replace their wallet or purse. They keep living in the city because that’s their home. Maybe they won’t get mugged again, because now they carry mace. Things are Blackwoods Bend’s brand of mugger, except that you can’t mace a Thing.

The next morning I stared at myself in the mirror for a long time contemplating what I’d seen the night before, as I tried to convince myself that it was just bad beer. It’s as if I thought that my mirror-self would speak to me, telling me that everything was fine, and what had happened to Robert was just a tragedy. Instead, my reflection stared back at me unaltered, giving no explanation. All of my features were where they should be. My eyes were still the same shade of brown, and my hair was still blond. My nose, mouth, and ears were all still proportionate, and arranged correctly on my head. I don’t know why I expected my features to look distorted or ballooned, but I supposed that you never could know what’d happen around Blackwoods Bend. I wouldn’t have been surprised if I’d sprouted horns.

“I just imagined that shadow last night,” I said to myself out loud. “What I saw was just the mental projection of a long day. Maybe weird hops—that’s all.” I got a shower, got dressed, and went to check whatever messages I might have on my social media accounts, and on my phone. I’d slept in a little later than usual, and I was sure that I had a few notifications from friends, or maybe people wondering what I was up to that day. I’d never been an incredibly popular person, but I was the one person in our friend group that was usually free.

When I was a kid I’d wanted to be a rock star. I wanted to tour, singing my songs to massive crowds of adoring fans. That hadn’t played out the way I’d imagined, and I became a songwriter—selling my music to record labels, and artists who recorded them. It paid well enough that I could keep the utilities and the mortgage covered, with a little extra for spending on whatever I might want to, and it also gave me a lot of free time. I expected, on any given day, that one of my small friend group would want to get together to hang out. Maybe even get out of Blackwoods Bend for a few glorious hours of pretending that we weren’t from the edge of Hell.

What I was not expecting were the fifteen instant messages from James. I checked my cell phone, and I had six missed calls, and twelve text messages. My mind instantly went into overdrive. Had it been that important he reached me? After the night before, I’d expected that he’d sleep well into the day. What had gone wrong this time? What event had I missed? Who was dead?

I read all of the things he’d sent me, and the general, frantic message was that James wanted me to meet him, Amy, Will, and Keith at the old high school football stadium at three PM. He gave specific instructions not to go to his house, but he didn’t say why. I checked the time, finding that it was nearly the time he wanted us to meet. Lucky for me, the stadium was only a few minutes away from my house.

I grabbed my keys, hurrying out the door to my car, then I raced to the stadium. When I pulled into the parking lot everyone else was already there, waiting. James looked frazzled, like he hadn’t slept at all the night before. He was still wearing the clothes he had worn, albeit more crumpled, and lived-in looking. His short black hair was sticking up in all directions, and his eyes looked bloodshot. Even his beard looked like it was standing up oddly from his face. If you could describe a person as lopsided, James was the portrait of what a lopsided person should look like.

As soon as I stepped out of the car he began talking in a rush. “I don’t know what to do. I heard it. Dammit, I heard it! It was there, but it wasn’t there, and then it was. I looked! I looked everywhere, but it wasn’t!” We were all watching him intently, trying to catch hold of what he was saying, but none of us proved capable of doing so, sharing looks of concerned confusion. James chattered on, his hands trembling, stopping every now and then to stare wide eyed into space, as if he was having epiphany after epiphany—each more terrifying than the last.

He paced, moving his hands and arms as if he was explaining something in depth, but he wasn’t saying anything that we could comprehend. Finally, Keith spoke up, grabbing James’ shoulders to stop him in mid over-gesture. “James! We cannot understand you, man. You are speakin’ squirrel. In English, please?”

Keith let James’ shoulders go, and immediately James slumped down against the hood of his car, as if all his bones had turned to jelly. “Well,” he half-moaned, scratching his head as he absently stared at his shoes. “I think I’m gonna die”

“What in the hell are you talking about, James?” Amy asked, standing up a little straighter. “If this is all you called us to meet you here for, I’m gonna be so pissed at you. I’ve got so much stuff to do today, Bub. Important stuff.”

“Well, jeez, Amy. Make a guy feel better,” James half-whined. He sucked in a deep breath of air then let out a hacking cough; likely from smoking too many cigarettes the night before, and today. “I’m a dead man walkin’, I just know.”

I spoke up then, simply because the suspense was killing me. “Okay, I’ll bite, James. What is this about?”

He looked at me with a blank expression. “The thing that killed Robert is in my house now.”

“What do you mean there’s something in your house?” Will whispered, his voice thick.

What if it was James that I had seen last night in Robert’s house? What if James is losing it? What if he went in there, and something had followed him home? I wondered to myself, feeling my pulse race. That was impossible, though, wasn’t it? James would have had to leave his house before me, and there was no way that happened. Was there?

James cleared his throat, interrupting my thoughts. “I mean there’s a thing in my house and it’s*…*It’s somethin’. I don’t know what it is. I couldn’t see it,” James looked embarrassed, and I felt bad for him, but what he was saying was so bizarre.

“Well, then how do you know there was anything at all?” Amy was looking a little more blanched by the second, and I knew how she felt. This wasn’t supposed to happen to us—not to our friends. We were all exempt, or at least we had believed that we were.

“I know it was there,” James insisted. “I could hear it. I could hear it breathin’.”

Amy slowly placed her hand on the hood of her car, lowering herself carefully to sit on the ground. Will glanced down at her for a second in concern, then he looked back up at James like he’d suddenly become a giant, pink elephant. James simply stared at his shoes, as if they were showing him something really interesting, but horribly tragic.

The feeling hanging in the air between all of us was similar to when someone would start to tell a ghost story around a campfire. We were all uneasy, anxious, yet morbidly fascinated. James heaved another big sigh, followed by another rough cough that ended in a gag. In spite of this, he pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, pulling one from the pack, then lighting it. I had half a mind to tell him not to smoke anymore, but in his state I think he’d have just started crying if we tried to take away the one vice that seemed to be grounding him.

I still couldn’t wrap my head around what he’d said. What do you say when someone tells you something like that? I felt my stomach lurch forward without me, but I managed to keep down the breakfast I hadn’t had time to have yet. I put a hand to my forehead, and lowered myself to sit next to Amy on the pavement. “James,” I said, my voice weaker than I intended. “I realize that this is probably impossible, but did you go to Robert’s house last night? I swear, every light was on in the house, and I saw a shadow moving in the living room.”

James’ head snapped up, bewilderment across his features. “No. I tried to go to bed, but I kept hearing shufflin’ noises, and that fuckin’ breathin’ sound.” He blew out a deep breath before continuing. “There was some other sound, too. Somethin’ like static on a radio? I don’t know.”

“Static?” My head felt like it was filled with air for just a moment. James had heard a sound like the one that I’d thought I had imagined when I saw the shadow in Robert’s house. It was sixty-eight degrees outside, but I broke into a sweat, like the Devil himself was sitting next to me.

James appeared to take our varied uncomfortable reactions as proof that we didn’t believe him. “Look, I know how this sounds, but you all know as well as I do that sometimes this kind of stuff happens here, for whatever reason. I didn’t know what else to do but to call y’all. I’m really afraid to go home. What if it does to me what it did to Robby?”

The hair was slowly standing to attention along the back of my neck and down my arms. I tried to take solace in counting the pebbles around my right foot. There were six, but I wished there were more just to keep me occupied. All the blood in my body felt like it was rushing to my feet, then zooming back up again.

I felt Amy’s shoulder bump mine, and I looked over to her. “Shudder. Sorry,” she said curtly.

“Well,” Keith said a little too loudly, making both James and Amy jump, “you can stay at my house tonight, but you know you’ll have to go home eventually, James. It’s probably nothing. Probably the air vent making funny sounds, or something. We’ll check it out tomorrow after you’ve had a day to calm down, and a night of sleep.” James nodded his agreement to Keith’s suggestion.

Will shook his head back and forth quickly. “Welp, I need a beer.”

“It’s three-thirty in the afternoon, Will,” Keith chuckled, humorlessly.

“I honestly don’t give two shits,” he said. We watched silently as Will leaned down to kiss Amy quickly, then he got into his car without so much as a glance backwards. He drove a block to the gas station, walked out with a twelve pack, then sped off in the direction of his apartment.

“You know, maybe he is onto an idea,” Keith said, taking off his ball cap to scratch his head. James piled into Keith’s car, and they pulled away, stopping at the gas station, themselves.

I finally stood up on shaky legs. “You all right, Ames?” I asked, holding a hand out towards her.

Amy took my hand, climbing to her feet. “What’s happening, Danny?”

“I don’t know. I mean…I know something’s wrong, but I don’t know what that is,” I said, letting out a breath.

“I need to go,” Amy said, shaking her head. “I just…need to go.”

“Bye, Amy,” I said as she climbed into her car, then I walked towards mine. I tossed myself down in the driver’s seat, fishing a pack of cigarettes from the cup holder. I pulled one out, putting the filter to my lips as I lit it, blowing the smoke out in a big puff. Amy was sitting in her car, her thumbs typing furiously on her phone. My eyes wandered to my rear view mirror, to what I presumed was my empty back seat. I could feel my imagination creeping into dark corners, wondering if any of us were ever truly alone. Were there things that we couldn’t see, lurking just beyond our peripheral vision?

I took another pull off of the cigarette, turning to look over at Amy. She was sitting in her car with the windows down, and I saw her now, talking on her cell. Talking to her mother, I thought as parts of her conversation drifted to where I sat. That was Amy. She and her mother were incredibly close, and it made sense that she would call her mom with this situation that she couldn’t wrap her mind or emotions around. I imagined that her mother would tell her that there isn’t any way that something like that could be real. I could almost hear her voice as she told her daughter that mental instability is a genetic issue, and that it’s most likely that Robert’s death triggered James’ own mental issues. That was all there was to the story. Mother always knows best.

That will be how Amy gets through the day, but not me. I couldn’t call my mother about this, because she was gone. She and my father had been amazing people. I recall so vividly how hard they worked to keep me safe, fed, and happy. Then, somewhere around the time I turned sixteen, my memory of them ceases. My Aunt Sela said that it’s a result of the concussion I sustained, but something never felt quite right about that explanation.

My aunt had always been the most logical person I’d ever met, besides my mom, but I never felt like I could question her about what she told me. There was just a sense that she’d erected a wall around the accident, and I knew only what I absolutely needed to. I didn’t feel like I could call her about this. These kinds of things never really bothered her, and she seemed to just roll with strange events like everyone else. It’s as if she was desensitized to it, or expectant of it, and when I brought up strange things in the past she reacted as though I might as well have been telling her about having a hangnail. She’d tell me that, if James says it’s real, then I should listen to him, but that I shouldn’t ‘build a house on sand like it’s solid ground’.

That thought reminded me of the little information Aunt Sela had told me. She said time and again that Mom had told plenty of strange stories about the house we’d lived in around the time of the accident, and that there seemed to be ghosts that dwelt there with us. Sela always waved her hand dismissively. “That’s just what your mother thought,” she’d say. I always felt there was more to the story—more that I don’t remember.

Aunt Sela would say that teenagers never pay attention to the obvious, and with the concussion on top of that, I just forgot it all. It was true, I couldn’t remember what my room looked like, or anything about the house we’d once lived in. I’d asked Aunt Sela to tell me more, but she always changed the subject when I tried to pry too far. Eventually I just stopped asking.

I left the parking lot of the old stadium with my stomach growling loudly, so I went to the Flat Cat to get myself a sandwich, and a much needed cup of dark, resuscitating caffeine. I placed my order at the counter, was handed a number, then I went to sit at the nearest clear table. I tried to collect my thoughts, and calm myself down while I waited on my food, listening to the hum of voices around me, chatting to each other, buzzing over whatever life had handed them recently.

I always found it funny how little diners like this hummed with chatter, and yet fancier establishments were silent, as though more money bought less human connection. Maybe it’s because places like this were more comfortable, and they felt lived-in. People felt like they could be themselves, and talk about anything. At that thought my ear tuned in on the woman sitting directly behind me.

She’d been the quietest person in the restaurant, besides me, until her phone rang, and she picked it up. “Mom! I don’t know what to do,” the woman said. She seemed as though she was trying to keep the hysteria in her voice to a whisper, but I could hear it plainly. “I just left her there, Mama. There is somethin’ wrong in that house, and I had to get out.” I could hear the woman’s mother on the other end of the phone squawking angrily at her daughter, but I couldn’t make out what she was saying.

The woman began to cry, but then she spoke again. Her voice cracked, broken by nearly silent sobs, and she told her mother what had taken place. “I was doin’ laundry. I was puttin’ it away in the drawer. Rylee sat in my recliner, like she always does, playin’ with her doll, dancin’ it across her lap. I turned away, for just a second, to put the clothes away, and I heard this…poppin’, creakin’ sound. It was like somebody steppin’ on a loose floorboard. I turned around to see what Ry was doing, and—”

The woman paused on a sob, and I listened intently. What came next? I realized that I was literally scooted to the edge of the seat, turned around backwards, and that I was also staring at the back of her head. She hadn’t noticed me though, distraught as she was, so I turned myself back around, embarrassed at my own rubber-necking, keeping my eyes fixed on the table. The woman finally caught her breath. “There was some creature there in that chair, instead of my child. It was a creature, Mother. It had her hair, and her skin tone, and it was wearing her clothes, dancin’ the doll on its lap. Whatever that thing was, it was not my baby,” then she lost control of the volume of her voice and everyone in the diner looked at her with alarmed expressions.

“It had hardly any face shape, really—just a giant nose that came straight down from its forehead, and connected to the top lip…No, I guess it was the top lip! There was no bottom jaw to speak of, hardly, and the eyes? Little black, beady, opossum eyes, just starin’ straight forward into space! The rest of her body was stretched like Silly Putty, all lanky and thin. It was like she’d been run through a taffy-pulling machine. Even with all that, the worst part was the weird, one note, hum it was makin’… Mama, I want to die! I just left her…it there! She’s only three.” She began to bawl hysterically, her chair making a harsh noise against the floor as she scooted it backwards.

Everyone was still staring at her, and I watched as people lowered their sandwiches and forks to their table, one person got up and ran to the bathroom, covering her mouth. Others just stared in disgust, while still others just up and left. I stood, walking over to the counter to cancel my order. I had lost my appetite for anything edible, and I suddenly didn’t need the coffee. I was wide awake.

Screw this, I thought to myself as I walked to my car. This town is going to Hell in a hand-basket, and I have a front row seat. At least I don’t have it as bad as that poor woman. Against my earlier judgments, I got into my car and drove to my aunt’s apartment. When I got there I told her about James and the lady at the diner. As I had suspected, she didn’t seem very surprised.

“People over-exaggerate,” Aunt Sela said, shuddering slightly before shrugging a shoulder. “You know that, Daniel.”

I looked at her with an eyebrow arched, tilting my head in my curiosity. “You think that lady with the possum-bird-baby is over-exaggerating?”

Aunt Sela reached over to pat me on the forearm. “I’ll make us some hot tea. That sound good?” she asked, rising from her seat to head into the kitchen without waiting for my response. I frowned as I watched her walk over to grab the kettle off of the stove. “Strange things happen all the time, all over the world, Danny. You just have to accept it.”

“Right,” I said, more to myself than to Aunt Sela. Just like always, there were no answers coming from a member of the older generation of this town, and we were just supposed to act normal. Let the horror slide, and never talk about it. Aunt Sela was wrong. Nowhere could be as horrifying as Blackwoods Bend.