Old Bones: A Collection of Short Stories Read online

  Old Bones

  A Collection of Short Stories

  Copyright 2013 Steven L. Campbell

  Published by Steven L. Campbell at Smashwords

  Cover design by S.L.Campbell Graphics and Books

  Originally titled Ridgewood Sparks, this book is a collection of stories centered on the fictional town, Ridgewood, based on the author’s hometown in Pennsylvania.

  All characters, organizations, places, and events portrayed in this book either are products of the author’s imagination or are fictitiously used. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead, locales, organizations, or events is purely coincidental.

  Smashwords Edition License Notes

  Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book is a licensed copyrighted property of the author. However, you are welcome to copy and share it for non-commercial purposes, provided the book remains in its complete original form. If you enjoyed this book, please return to your favorite ebook retailer to discover other works by this author. Thank you for your support and respecting the hard work of this author.

  To Jennie and our children and their children

  Always.

  Table of Contents

  Tales for Young Adults

  Are We There Yet?

  The Thing in the Mirror

  Something Special

  A Fantasy Trip

  Night of the Hell Hounds

  Bottom of the Seventh

  The Trespasser

  Oddities

  Dead Rabbits Don’t Run

  In the Wake of Annihilating Kings

  A Child’s Tale of Learning

  Tales for Adults

  Dragon Slayer

  A Matter of Time

  A Buzzing of Bees

  A Sinister Blast from the Past

  Ghost Lights

  A Haunting

  Into the Void

  Different Perspectives

  Behavior Unkind

  Afterword

  About the Author

  Connect with Steven L. Campbell

  Tales for Young Adults

  Are We There Yet?

  With all its blemishes, I wrote the strange and creepy “Are We There Yet?” in 1999 and published it at my old no-longer-in-service website. Since then, I have recycled parts of it for an upcoming novel, Margga’s Curse.

  *

  ON A PARTICULAR August day, not far from Ridgewood, Pennsylvania, a black Grand Cherokee wound its way over a hilly countryside. The closer the Coleman family got to Ridgewood, the harder the rain fell. Fifteen-year-old Douglas Coleman pulled at his sweaty T-shirt and wished that the air conditioner in his parents’ Grand Cherokee worked. The “grand” had left the vehicle several years ago. Same with their lives. Their fortune had been yanked away over the summer by a cruel twist of fate, right before the dog days of August had hit.

  He didn’t care if they ever got there, but he asked anyway: “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost,” his mother said. “Another half-hour is all.” She looked unhappy, as though she had done something wrong. Douglas sighed and crossed his arms. It wasn’t she who had made a mess of things.

  Next to him in the back seat, Douglas’s eleven-year-old sister, Keera, snored. Drool leaked from the corner of her open mouth and formed a puddle along the front of her pink T-shirt. Douglas wondered how she could sleep when it was so hot and their lives had been ruined—thanks to him, of course, though his mother and Dr. Jarvis insisted that it wasn’t his fault.

  He clenched his jaw and deepened his frown, if that were possible. No matter how many times his mother said that things were going to get better, he knew they would never be as good as when they had lived in Minneapolis.

  Keera took a breath and snored louder. Douglas jabbed her shoulder until she turned her head and quieted. Then he tilted his own head and let the warm spray from his open window douse his sweaty face.

  The landscape of woods and occasional farm and cornfield looked like home. But it wasn’t. Minneapolis and everything that had been theirs were a long ways behind them now. There would be no going back until he turned eighteen. Then he could go to college at Minnesota State where many of his friends planned to go, and be far away from a place where the state depended on a captive groundhog to predict their springs.

  We have no other choice, Dougie! His mother’s words still resounded in his ears from the days they had spent packing. They were SFC: strapped for cash, a term his father had started using after lightning had struck him three months ago. It was a term that Douglas hated hearing. It ranked up there with SOL, which was how he felt most of the time.

  In the front seat of the old truck, Adriana Coleman banged an open palm against the dashboard. The engine was overheating again.

  “We there yet?” Douglas’s father asked as he awoke from his nap.

  “Almost,” Adriana said. She pointed to a giant, white billboard sign ahead of them that read WELCOME TO RIDGEWOOD in large, blue letters.

  Maurice Coleman rubbed his right temple as he turned in his seat to look at Douglas. “We’re muh-moving, son,” he said. “Nuh-new home, new town, new people. New, new, new.”

  Douglas’s face soured. “I don’t want to make new friends,” he said. “It’s taken me all my life to make the best of the ones I’ve left behind.”

  Adriana said, “When we get settled, you can e-mail your old friends, or call a couple next weekend. I know they would love to hear from you.”

  Douglas sighed. “Like they’re gonna care about my new life. I saw their looks. They were glad it wasn’t any of them heading to a new a place.” He sputtered as a realization clawed at his mind. “I’ll be the new kid at school. The one everybody’ll pick on.”

  “It’s tenth grade. You won’t get picked on.”

  Before Douglas could argue, Adriana said, “I know you’re going to like your new bedroom. You’ll have plenty of space for your easel and desk and all your paints and canvas and—”

  “Whatever. I’m not painting anymore.”

  “Anyway,” Adriana said and sighed, “it’s a beautiful home in the country, just down the road from Uncle Jason’s farm.”

  “Great. I love the smell of cow manure.”

  Adriana set her mouth firm. Her expression was one of iron now. Douglas returned to gazing out at the lousy rain. The move was his fault, after all. If he had put away the lawn mower before going to Kenny’s house, then his father wouldn’t have been struck by lightning while putting the mower into the shed. But he had been in a hurry to see Kenny’s new computer, and so the storm came and knocked Maurice Coleman from his shoes with a lightning bolt that left him with impaired short-term memory.

  Blame and guilt weighed Douglas’s shoulders. If not for his carelessness, his father would still be employed as a lawyer. And not just any lawyer. Maurice Coleman, the man about Minneapolis, had been successful as a private practice lawyer, earning as much as six figures last year. But now, he wasn’t well enough to be an ambulance chaser.

  “Nobody’s fault,” Maurice said from the front seat.

  Douglas clenched his jaw, turned away from his father, and glared out his window at downtown Ridgewood. The streets appeared barren and so did the stores—a steady conglomeration of brick and cement shops that shoved against each other. Their windows looked dark and lifeless, though all were open for business. Even the tiny McDonalds and Burger King—cramped between more brick buildings—looked dingy and deserted. At a street corner, Douglas looked at a discolored tavern on the left, its only visible window sporting a black sign with white letters that announced fifty-cent wings on Friday nights. Below it, neon signs advertised a selection of be
er inside. On the uneven sidewalk in front, three young girls around the ages of ten or eleven came around the corner and passed by on Rollerblades, each of them teasing each other with obscenities. An old, sickly looking man in a tattered Army jacket stepped out of the tavern, turned up his collar to the rain, and then looked at Douglas and grinned. Douglas shuddered at the rotting teeth he saw and looked away. Icy pain sliced through his stomach.

  “I spy … muh-my right eye,” Maurice Coleman said, “suh-something blue.” His stutter caused Douglas to clench his jaw tighter as another icy feeling jolted through his stomach.

  “C’mon Duh-Douglas,” Maurice said cheerily, “play along.”

  Douglas crossed his arms and held in his anger. “Later, Dad. Okay?”

  The light changed and Adriana drove them deeper into an increasing murkiness of more constricted stores that looked empty of any life. They crossed over a cement bridge and a wide gray fording called Myers Creek. On the other side, a gothic stone church called St. John’s Cathedral sat large and tall. Its tower bell was in mid-procession of peeling four o’clock.

  Past the church, St. John’s Cemetery rolled wide and far with many tombstones marking the dead there. Keera awoke and screamed.

  Douglas jumped and nearly screamed as well. Alarmed, Adriana turned to Keera, and then returned her attention to her driving when a car horn sounded at the stop sign she almost ran. Maurice made hushing sounds, but Keera sobbed louder.

  “The cemetery … it scares me,” she said. “I saw myself buried beneath the ground.”

  “It’s okay,” Adriana said. “It was just a dream.”

  Keera turned to Douglas. Her tears dropped to her chin. “I saw you in a coffin,” she said between sobs. “I saw Mommy and Daddy, too.”

  Pain knifed through Douglas’s stomach. He shuddered.

  “Bad dream,” Maurice said. “Bad dream tap-tap-tapping.”

  Douglas’s stomach lurched. “Mom,” he cried and hiccupped. “I don’t feel good.”

  “We’re almost there. Just two more miles.”

  Maurice made more hushing sounds as he turned and looked out his rain-covered window. “Almost home,” he said. “No more tap-tap-tapping.”

  Douglas pressed his hands against his stomach as his mother drove south and into the murky countryside, past woods and occasional clearings of soggy cornfields and pastures with waterlogged fences and muddy cows, and farms with rusted trailers and car skeletons in the yards.

  They stopped at an intersection and Adrianna waited for a semi decorated in yellow running lights to speed by before she eased the steaming, chugging vehicle into the intersection.

  Douglas saw the other semi come at them from the corner of an eye.

  Instantly, a thousand screams filled his head. His world exploded, which deafened the screams. Then all sound and sight went dark. He flew in darkness a long time before he awoke.

  He stared out his window. The closer he and his family got to Ridgewood, Pennsylvania, the harder the rain fell.

  The move was his fault. He pulled at his sweaty T-shirt and asked, “Are we there yet?”

  “Almost,” his mother said. “Another half-hour is all.”

  She looked unhappy, as though she had done something wrong.

  #

  The Thing in the Mirror

  INSIDE A SINGLE yellow eye of a two-story brick house, fifteen-year-old Randy White sits at his bedroom desk and stares into a rectangular wall-type mirror propped in front of him. He draws a few lines to his portrait, trying to capture a convincing likeness of himself to show Mr. Evans, his art teacher, on Monday.

  A crowd roars from outside his bedroom window; he wonders for a moment if the Fighting Eagles have scored. A half-block away, Ridgewood High School’s football team is battling a well-matched contest with their tough-to-beat rivals, New Cambridge. His parents and sisters are there amidst the fervor.

  Randy glances at the radio on the stand by the side of his bed and considers turning on the game. Then, annoyed, he realizes the noise of the game has become a distraction; the skinny boy stamps to his window to close it.

  Football season has ascended upon Ridgewood’s Friday nights and tonight the air is heavy in the third quarter, the game tied. Randy knows that sweat and adrenaline and coffee and soft drinks are flowing fast. He had been part of that life once.

  Before he closes the window, a loud cheer follows the spinning ball kicked over the heads of the visiting blue and white team. The ball passes between white jutting poles rising toward the night sky, and then falls and bounces into a wire backstop, rattling the fence where on the other side, a few bees buzz atop the uncut field of brush and scrub in the waning September twilight.

  Behind the school and beyond the field lights, portions of Myers Ridge jut like jagged canine teeth trying to bite into the remaining bands of sunset above it. The clouds are turning dark, but not because of the failing sunlight.

  Randy notices a sphere of white light blinking along the cliffs of Myers Ridge and wonders what it is. The light moves back and forth and up and down, then zips away for a few seconds before it returns and repeats the pattern.

  Randy thinks of UFOs, so he hurries back with a digital camera. He zooms and snaps a picture. The orb blinks off and on. Randy takes another picture. The crowd roars. The orb stops blinking.

  He waits for the strange light to blink on again, but the ridge remains dark.

  Bands of lightning spread out across the northern sky, streaking and skipping over the pink and purple clouds. Randy reaches to close the window when white light flashes in front of the window and sends him falling backwards. Partially blinded, he scrambles from the floor to the window and closes it. Then he ducks and waits; he wonders if little gray beings will enter his room and want to abduct him.

  After several minutes, he peeks outside. Then he pulls his curtains over the window and hurries to his desk. He watches his window in the mirror for several minutes. The football crowd is muffled on the other side; there is no other disturbance out there.

  No UFOs. No aliens. All is safe. Right?

  Right.

  And the light?

  He ponders the light for several minutes. Perhaps, he decides, the flash of light wasn’t as close as he thought.

  He returns to his portrait and draws. His hand, eyes and mind become synchronous and he discovers he really likes what he is doing. He understands the rules of composition and positive and negative space now. He has become an artist and he knows it. Drawing what he sees is easy to do.

  He looks at his face and studies the forms made clear by the light from the lamp on his desk. Then behind his mop of brown hair where thick green curtains should cover the window he closed not long ago, he sees a closed door instead.

  What? This can’t be.

  He slowly puts down his pencil, rubs his eyes, and looks again at the mirror. The door is there! A plain slab of dark oak with a glass doorknob on it, all in the exact spot where his window should be. He quickly turns from the mirror and looks at his window covered by green curtain. In the mirror, he sees the door.

  Fascinated and a little frightened, he repeats the procedure until he is certain the mirror is not lying to him.

  He looks at his window. “Hello. Aliens?”

  No answer.

  He lifts the mirror from its propped up position and crosses his room. Facing the curtain, he holds the mirror by its wired back with his left hand and sees clearly in the mirror the door now next to him. He reaches out to where he knows there is curtain. He watches it happen in the mirror as he touches cold wood instead.

  He yanks his hand away and blows on his fingers as though the wood had been ice.

  He hears the muffled noise from the football field where his parents and two young sisters are watching the game. But he barely thinks of them now.

  He lifts his hand to the curtain and watches his hand in the mirror grasp the faceted doorknob. It is solid and cold and he shivers and takes a deep breath to calm h
is excitement. Then he turns the knob.

  The door in the mirror swings out and he feels its weight against his right shoulder as the door comes to rest against him. He moves forward and watches the door open all the way in the mirror.

  Beyond the door is a hallway with a wood floor as dark as the door and just as polished. Across the hall is a plain, off-white wall where a large painting of a seascape hangs from an ornate gold frame.

  He reaches back toward his window and sees his arm enter the hallway. He turns and looks at his hand pressing against the curtain and the window behind it. He does not feel the curtain or window, even when he leans his shoulder against the curtain.

  When he looks again at the hallway in the mirror, he tumbles through the doorway.

  In his bedroom, the boy holding the mirror falls into the curtain and window, evaporating through green fabric and window glass and wood frame and wall. His reflection continues to tumble likewise into the hall, sprawling onto the cold, hard wood.

  In Randy’s room, the mirror falls to the bedroom floor and bursts into shards and slivers.

  At the window, Randy White has vanished.

  At the window, glass begins to chatter on the other side with the sound of rain. Two-hundred yards away the football game has ended. Several minutes pass before the front door at Randy’s house opens. His father calls upstairs to remind him of their ritual of going out for ice cream after a home game. Wear a jacket, Randy’s father says, it’s raining.

  Minutes pass. The youngest girl impatiently stomps upstairs calling for Randy to hurry. Inside his bedroom, the girl sees on his desk his drawing pad and a self-portrait looking back in wonderment. Past the desk, Randy’s camera lies near a broken mirror below his window. She crosses the room, picks up the camera and turns it on. She looks at the pictures that Randy took of the flashing orb. The images are blank.