Jack the Ripper

She looked down as the blade penetrated her dress.


“Oh God, please, No!” she shrieked.


“There’s no two ways about it, Missy, this is how it’s got to be done. Now be a luv and do shut your painted mouth, whore, and let old Jack do his work.”


She giggled and spun around to look at all the other dresses in the tailor’s shop. She loved Jack’s dirty mouth, loved bantering with him in this slutty way. And he did good work. When a working girl had been prospering and gaining a little weight from all those meals paid for by all those slimy clients, Jack was the one to let her dresses out, make them suitable apparel again. And he worked so quickly. His hands moved like a dream as he cut and basted and sewed. He was so good he could do it without even looking down, could tailor while carrying on a conversation and meeting your gaze.


“I suppose we shouldn’t joke,” he said. “It’s truly a dire situation with this lunatic butcher on the loose. I do hope you’re being careful, Catherine.”


“Oh, I know who to approach, love, and who to flee like the plague. Trust me, I’m not letting some complete stranger corner me in a dark alley. Not this bird! I’d sooner eat pigeon pie with a leper’s spoon.”


They chatted a few more minutes, settled the bill (with the customary discount Jack gave to the ladies in that line of work) and then the shop door chimed and she was gone into the night.


Jack loved talking to the girls. They told him everything about their lives because they knew he was discreet and non-judgmental. He knew their schedules, knew where to find them and at what hours. He knew their “dead hours” when they would be alone and hungry for business. He even knew where they lived. And, most importantly, they knew him. So should they encounter him on a foggy street at 3 a.m., they were never alarmed. It was just the dressmaker, the confidant. And should he suddenly prove himself to be thoroughly human, in need of a little attention himself, well, what a surprise, but not really. Men are men, aren’t they? And here was a chance to reciprocate that discount he offered all of them on their tailoring. A true gentleman. One deserving of a little pleasure. And so they would turn into the dark alley with him, that place they would never go with any mere stranger.


Jack walked into the back of his shop and laid the bolt of fabric back on its shelf. He looked down at a small pottery jar. He smiled as he removed the lid. He dumped the contents of it into his palm. Some liquid spilled between his fingers, then percolated down between the wooden floor boards below. Not blood but a preservative.


It was so beautiful to him. He loved holding it. Who knew a kidney could be one of the most sensual parts of a woman, almost as pleasing to feel as a beautiful mouth whose lips formed a Cupid’s bow.


He returned the souvenir to its receptacle, replaced the lid, and turned down the gaslight before leaving the storeroom. He turned down the light in his work room that fronted that busy London street, stared from darkness into darkness for a few moments, then stepped outside, locked his shop door, and disappeared into the fog.


He felt more alive as he became less visible in the fog. He never felt so charged as he did when he felt invisible. The London night was moist. It was moist with pleasure and promise. Jack passed a public clock and smiled at its glowing face. It was a countdown to ecstasy tonight. He had his tools on him. Time for some drinking and fantasizing, to whet his appetite. He couldn’t wait to see her familiar face on some desolate street corner, couldn’t wait to hear her voice chime, “Fancy running into you here!” It was just like tailoring, this night work. It took patience and the human touch. You just had to understand how all the parts fit together. If you wanted the pleasure of ripping it all to pieces later.

Night Suntan

There is a place back behind the old Lochiel Hotel where some disused railroad tracks have been rusting away for over a century in an overgrowth of wild trees and scrub.

If you stand there for an hour or so in the middle of the night, even the darkest night, in the morning you will find you have a suntan.

Or rather, you will find in the morning that you have what looks like a suntan. It may be a slight reddishness, but it will be noticeable.

It doesn’t matter what clothes you wear. It doesn’t matter whether or not the moon is shining, whether it is summer or winter.

You just have to stand back there, behind the Lochiel Hotel, in the right place. The place where it happened.

You see, that is where two trains collided in the middle of the night, over a century ago. One train was filled with sleeping passengers. And the other was filled with freight. When they collided, one train poured its steam into the other one, the sleeper train, and roasted alive the people in there. The victims of the train wreck looked like hot dogs which had been boiled.

If you bring an old radio back there and listen through the static on the A.M. side, you can sometimes hear voices from the accident. There is one man’s frantic voice which keeps crying out, “Tell Alice! Tell Alice!”

Five of the victims from the wreck were never identified and are buried in a cemetery nearby. It is believed that the “Alice” voice people hear on A.M. radio is the voice of one of the men buried there, a young man who never made it home, still trying to find a way to explain to his wife or girlfriend what happened to him over a century ago.

I Had an Evil Doll Once

I had an evil doll once. It strangled my best friend’s dog. It was with Katie when she disappeared on the hiking trail. They haven’t found her bones yet, but soon the heavy snows will melt away from the woods. It’s almost spring. She should come up fresh as wintergreen.

My parents started to get suspicious after Katie. So I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when the doll killed them. I was surprised anyway. He made the fire look like an accident. He woke me where I had just enough time to escape, but where I could do nothing to save my parents. Or my little brother. I opened my bedroom door and the house was just a total conflagration. I had no choice but to escape out my window.

The doll’s, I mean the killer’s, name is Vlad. This horrible homunculus was given to me by my creepy Russian grandfather, just before he choked to death on a bunch of sardines. Go figure. Of course, the doll was there when he died. We found it sitting on his chest. I can still hear my mom screaming when she found them that way.

The doll looks like a little well-dressed banker. He looks like a little guilty man pretending to be innocent. I was so happy when he disappeared. I didn’t care if the police had him or even if he had gone and thrown himself into the river or even burnt himself up. Good riddance! I was so happy. Past tense.

Because just Tuesday I saw him again. I saw him in the park. I don’t think he noticed that I spied him. He was hiding in some shrubs. But I saw what he was doing.

I know exactly what he was doing, what he is planning. He’s watching my new family. Anybody that likes me, he’ll come for them. Sooner or later.

My one uncle is really starting to get on my nerves. He keeps calling me and bugging me with questions about my parents’ deaths.

I think he’s gone senile. Because whenever I mention Vlad or my Russian grandfather, he gets upset. He keeps insisting there never was any doll in our house and that I don’t even have a Russian grandfather.

I wish someone would help that poor guy get his head checked.

The Atonement Room

My colleague from overseas was explaining the origin of the atonement room and its place in posthumous spirituality.


In his country of origin, people would construct a miniature house or sometimes a single room next to the grave of a man or woman who had died in a torturous way. This could be the grave of a murder victim or it could be the grave of a tortured soul who had been a murderer in life.


The idea was that the soul which crossed over through such a terrible absence of grace might be blinded, stunted, trapped down there in its grave, trying to work out the sum of its terrible end on earth, asking itself over and over why its life had been so horrible that it existed on even now as this echo of discontent. We are talking about those souls in a kind of purgatory or bardo hell.


The houses would be charming little creations, miniatures for sure, so small that not even a four year old could enter one. There might be cheerful, tiny curtains set in a little kitchen window through which one could spy a cup of tea waiting on a lovely table with a brilliant centerpiece of red and green and purple. This might be tea laid for the soul of a savage man who killed seven teenage prostitutes. But the idea was that here his soul would reflect, in this sweet house of eternal domesticity. The idea was that he might be liberated, his soul somehow repaired and fit once more to face God. What kind people these peasants must have been who could practice such generous, spiritual rites.


My colleague friend went on to explain that sometimes you would even see several little houses in a row next to the grave, each consecutively larger, for the soul to adjust its residency here on earth in careful increments, like the stages of pupa, chrysalis and imago in the insect.


These I thought of as serial nunneries, insect dollhouses, boxes preparing the post-mortal soul to slowly take on its true dimensions of sky.


Our experiment was set to coincide with his country’s traditional Atonement Day, when many citizens set aside a special room in their home for the welcoming of a troubled spirit who could seek atonement over the course of one night, star-rise to star-fall.


My colleague led our version of this experiment and set up a separate room at our university with some dummy controls. You darken a room, he explained, and you gather the members of the seance. You target the individual you wish to help spiritually advance on this night where we were to be (lore maintains) assisted by angels.


Our group had selected the soul of Mary Ulweather, the “Hatchet Widow of Elmo,” as our star sinner for the night. Elmo was a small town near our university that boasted several centuries of paranormally-tinged history. Mary went through four husbands in her lifetime. Three went missing, as did the fourth, but since he was recovered with a hatchet in the back of his head, she was sentenced as a four-time murderer and hung on the outskirts of the only town she had ever known.


She had been known to manifest for centuries, virtually non-stop since her death, in various parts of the town. Her spirit had been blamed for more than one suicide, more than one murder.


Mary hadn’t been penitent at the time of her hanging, but we all hoped that four centuries of unrest had perhaps brought her soul closer in tune with the idea that confession and redemption could set her soul free.


We sat down and began the seance and it did not take long at all for Mary to manifest vocally and even visually. Several members of the parties received nasty cuts on their legs and forearms. But these were like paper cuts, only discovered after the seance. It hadn't felt like much of anything at the time, just some cloth brushing us. We figured it was the confusion of emergence for Mary. It must be a strange feeling to be pulled between worlds like that.


Following our colleague's instructions, we did not interrogate Mary. As soon as she manifested, we fled the room and sealed it shut. It was a windowless room. We left the candle burning. We knew we could not film the goings-on are we would all be at spiritual risk. But we could listen at the door as the long night passed.


We were all very pleased to hear Mary crying in the room at various times throughout the night. She would suddenly weep and wail. The walls would shake as presumably she pounded them. It was as though she were beseeching heaven for something. Surely it must be grace.


We waited until we heard the call of a crow (actually brought to the university expressly for this experiment!) and then we knew it was safe to open the door. We rushed in, hoping to find testimony. It was said that tortured saved spirits often left notes of gratitude in the atonement room to angels, their Maker, even the souls who had helped them achieve atonement. Would we get a Thank You note from Mary?


What we saw on the table in the center of the dark room, the site of our last night’s seance, was the paper we had left. There were bloody fingerprints all over the pages and words in an almost indecipherable red scrawl.


“Can anyone read what she’s written?”


“I know the witch’s handwriting,” said Julie, with a dark expression.


“She wrote, ‘OH DAMN YE, LORD AND HIS COMPANY, ANGELS THAT TAUNT ME ALL NIGHT, A POOR OLD WOMAN, BELDAM,

WHY OH WHY I CAN NOT HAVE

JUST ONE MORE HUSBAND, HOUSE-BOUND?

I MISS THE SENSE OF THEIR BONES BROKEN ON THE RACK, I MISS THEIR

HANDSOME MONEYSACKS. LORD, SATAN, SHOW MERCY….I STARVE

AND YOU MOCK ME AND FEED ME NOT THE HANDSOME PREY

WHO COME TO MY DARK HAIR, MY FLASHING EYES…CURSE

THAT MORNING COMES I FEEL…RELEA….


So we counted our experiment half a success. We had managed to acquire a subject for the trail run of the atonement room.


We had failed, however, in finding a soul desiring atonement.


But we figured there was always next year.

Her Boyfriend Went MIssing

Her boyfriend had gone missing. Lovable, nerdy Adam. She had gotten a dog right afterwards. She’d take him with her everywhere. Even in the car. Really, can you blame a girl for wanting to feel safe? But here’s the weird thing. You’d only see her walking the dog or taking him out to the car with her at night. I guess night is the scariest time. But we all wondered: wasn’t she afraid to be out at night like that after her boyfriend had just vanished?

Many people thought it had been a drug hit or the work of the mafia. You know how people always talk that crap. It’s natural to want to blame the victim. He must have been doing something wrong. It gives one a smug feeling of safety to say that and try to believe it.

You must have seen the MISSING posters put up all over this apartment complex and half of the city by Adam’s parents, siblings, friends and coworkers. It was like the dude had just walked off the planet. At twenty-eight. And most of his friends kept saying they were sure he was dead. Because he wasn’t the type to just thoughtlessly vanish like that. Grace didn’t seem to care, wouldn’t participate in the searches for him. She told the police and the media he had just up and left her. She wished him all the best. But she didn’t really care anymore where he was. It was no longer her business. That’s all she’d say to people when they asked. She seemed to believe he was fine.and just living a new life somewhere else. A few gullible people bought this explanation. Most didn’t.

Everyone said they had had a really weird relationship. What people whispered on the grapevine was that she was a crazy domme. They said that was extremely dominant to the point where Adam’s friends believed he had been swallowed up by her. They were sure it was an unhealthy relationship. They even felt he might be in danger. But Adam always told those friends to let him live his life. He said he could handle it. We’d see him with black eyes. His left arm was in a cast for a while. The BDSM lifestyle is one thing. This was another thing altogether. But Adam always told his friends he was getting what he wanted from Grace. He didn’t mind, he said, if people thought he was a freak for enjoying the abuse she inflicted on him.

Yeah, she was a beauty. Grace was. No denying that. Amy Winehouse goddesss hair. Those ridiculously long legs of hers were usually in the sexiest boots. I’d see her smoking a cigarette at night while she walked that dog in one of her short little skirts. I live in that complex too. The one where Adam used to live with her. Some people say she killed him. Or that one of her lovers did. That they’ll find his body in the bay, if they ever find him at all. She always did look like trouble to me. I won’t deny that.

But last night I learned that she’s much worse than that. And he’s not dead at al.. Killing him would have been much kinder.

I was getting back to my apartment from a night jog. She was walking her dog, that big muscular beast we all thought she had bought for protection. I had always wondered what breed it was. I glanced their way to see, since Grace and the animal reached the streetlight at the corner nearest our apartment building at the same time as me. She hadn’t seen me coming up the shadowy side street. She gasped and pulled on the dog’s chain to hurry him away from me. It was one of those long, retractable leashes. I realized then what had happened to her boyfriend. I knew what had happened to Adam.

Wow.

Talk about the ultimate sub. I wondered how many surgeries it had taken to make him look like that. And what sort of doctor could bring himself to do something like that to a human being? How did they get the fur to grow all over his body like that? He even had a tail. God only knows where that tail flesh came from. Or how those paws had been constructed from what had been Adam’s hands and knees. Now I knew why Grace only took the dog out at night. All I know is that when she whistled, he went running after her, tongue hanging out.

Tongue hanging out.

I really hate to admit this. But he looked like a very happy dog.

Our Lives Cast in Photonegative Look Creepy

Antique Halloween Glass Plate Negatives Rare Find assorted lot 8
Several of these glass negatives give me the creeps. It might be ordinary goings-on, and you have to remember that darkness is actually light in these, but still. 

In one, a figure (real? sculptural?) appears to be lodged way up on a building in a very dangerous way. The one with the graffiti on the wall feels weirdly anachronistic, modern. And what is the child standing before in the front yard? Is that a makeshift stage or is she hiding? It's another weird touch. Maybe if you print these, they will all be perfectly normal scenes. But in photonegative they suggest all sorts of dark tales.

Warm

Jim was hunting with his two older brothers on what the locals called Jawdrop Mountain. Though he was only sixteen, he had convinced his brothers to let him go it alone, at least for a few hours at a stretch. The guys had gotten a late start that day, so it was around one o’clock when the three brothers set out hunting in different directions. This was to have been a separation of two hours before a final rendezvous at a marker tree on the path which the three young men had used to ascend the mountain. And then the brothers would head back down, deer or no deer.

It was a severely overcast day in midwinter. Several inches of snow lay on the ground from recent storms. No significant snowfall had been predicted for that day. But the weatherman had been wrong and a surprise storm brewed up on the mountain. It began as a squall, near white-out conditions. Jim panicked and stumbled around until he realized he could walk right off a precipice. This thought scared him so badly he froze in place under a sheltering stand of trees until the squall degenerated into a normal snowfall.

Then the boy realized he was lost. He had sprinted and walked much further than he had realized in his panic.

He looked at his cell phone, but without hope. He knew there would be no reception. Ridiculous even to look. He cursed himself for having wandered so far in his initial panic. He had lost all his “mental markers” in the landscape. He was calling out to his brothers, to anyone really, at the top of his voice. But no one replied. And the terrain already looked totally unfamiliar. All the trees looked the same in any direction. The snow continued to fall.

Just as it was getting dark, the boy saw a form in the woods which gave him hope. There was a cabin in its own little clearing deep in these woods of the tallest trees. He raced to it, realizing it was his salvation.

As soon as he arrived at the front door and knocked, he knew it was empty. It just felt that way. He looked in the windows, which were actually very dusty, and knew then that the cabin had probably been empty for a long time. He did a cursory inspection walking around the small structure, and saw it was intact. This was a secure place to hole up until help arrived. Though he had his rifle, he did not want to be out in the night. He realized it was hypothermia he should fear, but a primal part of him feared the other things too.

He couldn’t believe his luck in finding an unlocked window in the rear of the cabin and squeezed his svelte body through. He actually ended up falling to the floor and that was the scariest moment, when he felt most vulnerable. Lying there on the floor in the dark cabin. He froze and waited for whatever horror lay hidden in the cabin to fall upon him. He breathed a sigh of relief, right there on the floor, when he realized it was silent throughout the rooms. He could actually hear the sound of the snow falling outside through the still open window. But he wouldn’t close his exit behind him. Not before he really saw the whole cabin and knew he was safe.

“Hello?” he called out. “If you can hear me, I’m not an intruder. I’m a hunter. I’ve gotten separated from my brothers and I’m lost. Don’t be afraid.”

No fearing soul answered him or came forward to greet him.

Jim ran to the front door and undid the locks. He threw open the door and this let in a little more light. It was the wan light of snowfall which was cast into the living room of the cabin. Jim discovered that there were two other bedrooms and a small bathroom. These bedrooms were the scariest rooms to enter, since they were the darkest rooms, windowless. His eyes adjusted, but he could not be sure that he was seeing everything in those rooms. He saw enough to realize no one could be in those rooms. Not unless they were hiding under one of the beds. This was just a little too much of a risk to check right now. He could smell the dust in the cabin. Jim took it on faith that he was the only occupant of the cabin. It had surely been empty a few years, at least.

He ran out the front door and couldn’t believe his luck in finding a woodpile under an old, wind-torn blue tarp. He loaded up the fireplace and had never been so happy to be a smoker in his life. His Bic served him nicely. He prayed the chimney wasn’t blocked or sooted up beyond use. But the fire roared up and he slammed the front door shut and locked it again.

He felt terribly guilty when he thought that his brothers might be risking their own lives looking for him. He worried about them. But he figured they would descend the mountain and return with a search party. They sure would be pissed though. What more could he do but sit and wait until the morning. At dawn, he would try to find his way back to the path and maybe even be able to meet any searchers on their way up the mountain.

He decided to keep the window by which he had entered cracked open just a little bit, in case he could hear his brothers’ voices. He wondered if he should listen for search helicopters flying overhead. Or was that unrealistic? If only he could tell everybody he was alright, sitting now in front of a toasty fire as the sun died off the mountain.

Jim made a bed on the floor in front of the crackling fire. He had taken the pillows and blankets off the rather ramshackle couch that occupied the center of the room. In no time, the exhausted boy had fallen deeply asleep, grateful for the fire and the roof over his head.

When he was suddenly awakened, he had no idea at first where he was, what time of day or night it was, or what the sound that had awakened him had actually been. He thought it had been a knocking. A hard, insistent, series of fast knocks. Had he been dreaming?

Then he remembered his circumstances and he called out his brothers’s names, each one in turn. Had they miraculously found him? He sprang up and ran to the front door. But something in him told him not to open it. Not just yet.

“Hello? Who’s there?” he asked hopefully.

No answer. Only the sound of the wind. The storm had grown emboldened after night fell. He could hear its shrieking on the other side of the door.

“Okay, no one then,” Jim laughed to himself. “Of course, it’s no one. I was dreaming.”

Jim turned to return to his bed. This was just as more knocks sounded on the door: three times more. But this time, they were loud beyond belief. They sounded like the worst type of threat. It couldn’t have been a fist that had done that. It had to be some sort of board or log or….

Jim looked at the open window at the rear of the dwelling. It was still cracked open a few inches. The boy ran to it and slammed it shut. He was grateful there was a swivel lock on the sash. He shot it clockwise tight. He let the thick curtains close on the window, hiding it. But he knew that was only a thin pane of glass separating him from whoever or whatever was out there in the night. And there were two other windows in the cabin.

Panicked, he searched for a weapon. He was so grateful to realize the fireplace’s poker was there. He approached the front door again, weapon in hand, and listened.

His mind began to play tricks on him. What if that was one of his brothers, half-frozen to death, on the other side of that door, unable to speak, trying to let Jim know that he was a human icicle. It seemed improbable. But it was not impossible. He had to know.

Jim counted to three, but silently, in his mind. And then he threw open the door.

No one.

Only the snow innocently falling.

But looking down, Jim saw there was a line of tracks in the snow leading to the front door! Bipedal tracks. The snow had gotten rather deep and the wind was blowing, so there was no way to tell what sort of boots or shoes the visitor was wearing. Yet the weirdest thing was that these tracks stopped right there at the door. Jim looked left, right. No one. The snow was its own light source, so it was easy to see into the night. But there was no one, nothing there to be seen.

“Where in the hell did you go?” Jim whispered under his breath.

And that’s when he heard the sounds above him. Someone was walking on the goddamn roof!

This freaked the boy out. His thoughts ran madly. How did the visitor climb up there. Was it his brother, after all, hallucinating while freezing to death?

Jim couldn’t take the wondering anymore and stepped through the open door, ran out into the deepening snow. He looked up onto the roof, but there was no one. There was a tall pine tree, however, that grew close by the roof. It dangled branches down over it. He saw little miniature avalanches of glittery snow come sparkling down from the tall tree’s branches. Because something was stirring in those branches. He couldn’t see it in the darkness of the tree, but he could see it was climbing. Then the tree grew still.

“Who in the hell are you?” Jim screamed up at the tree.

He waited in a terror he felt was skinning his heart.

Now there was only the sound of the snow, the gusts of the wind picking up and then dying off.

Just as he was ready to run back into the house, feeling all his danger sensors shrilling alarms, he heard a voice come from the darkness of the tree.

“Waaaarm,” the voice hissed out at him. The boy was shocked at how well this loud whisper (for it was a sort of creepy whisper) carried.

“You want to get warm?” Jim asked.

“Waaaarm…..” the voice sighed again ten seconds later.

Before Jim could respond, a black form flew out of the tree, and it was larger than any man, whatever it was, and came sailing down right over Jim’s head, and something touched him there, on the top of his head, as the boy screamed.

But the thing had sailed past and up into another tall tree behind Jim.

So Jim bolted inside the cabin and locked the door in triplicate.

Mere seconds later another knock came on the door. This one sounded much more polite. It sounded almost like a human knocking. Almost. But it was a dragging sort of knock.

“What are you?” Jim couldn’t stop himself asking.

“Waaaarm?” the voice hissed beseechingly.

“What do you want?”

“Waaaarm!”

“You want to be warm?” Jim asked, shaking now.

“Waaaarm meeeeal,” the voice whispered loudly.

“Listen. To. Me. Now. I have a poker and I’m going to beat your brains in if you don’t go away. I’m going to beat your brains in, and then I’m going to eat you. I don’t care what you are. I’m going to skin you and eat you and cook you in this fire. Then tomorrow I’ll shit you out and flush you down a toilet. So consider that before you ask for anything again.”

There came the sound of claws scratching on the other side of the door. This was a very angry sound.

Then Jim was sure he heard wings flapping, flapping away.

He returned to his makeshift bed and he stared at all parts of the cabin over and over, all night long. He paid particular attention to the windows.

Morning came. Morning finally came after that endless night of snow and winds and the unspeakable. Jim looked out the dusty windows. He saw a beautiful sunny morning.

He stared out several of the windows for another hour and then he finally decided it was time to head back out and find the path home.

He held the poker tight in his fist and his breath tight in his chest as he opened the front door.

Four raw scratch marks had gouged the wood. There was a claw stuck in the fourth raking. It was no claw or talon that Jim could recognize. It looked like the sort of claw you saw on dinosaurs in the museum reproductions of those creatures.

Three hours later, Jim heard a member of the search party calling his name. He was reunited with his brothers an hour after that.

He couldn’t say why he never showed the claw to anyone, not even his brothers. Maybe the shame of having gotten lost, of causing so much worry for everyone, was enough embarrassment to shoulder. The story he had to tell would have made it even worse.

But he kept the claw in a drawer in his bedroom for many years, right next to a pistol that he always kept with him anytime he found himself having to enter the woods, whether it was hunting season or not.

Stop Me, Oh Oh Oh Stop Me, Stop Me If You Think That You've Heard This One Before

Gary was driving home from a Friday night poker game with old friends which beer and b.s., mostly b.s. of the sports variety, had prolonged into the wee small hours.

He wasn’t drunk, but he was tired and tapped out and saw by his dash that it was after 2 a.m. This was just as he was driving along the seemingly endless expanse of the large Elysian Fields cemetery.

As he looked away from the digital clock and back to the road, a young woman in white came rushing out of the darkness of the cemetery and ran right in front of his car. Barefoot, no less. And in a long gown. Gary swerved and hollered the expletive-laced name of a messiah at her.

His car braked to a stop less than fifteen feet from the woman, whom he could see now was more of a girl. She was standing stock-still, facing directly away from Gary’s Hyundai. He thought about blowing his horn, but he figured something was wrong with the girl. Seriously wrong. Maybe something horrible had just happened to her. Maybe she was the victim of an assault or worse. She certainly appeared to be in an altered state. She was holding a small bouquet of flowers upside down in her right hand. He watched as she tossed it off towards the cemetery bushes without even looking that direction.

“Are you alright? I’m sorry, but you just came out of nowhere. You know?”

He was talking loudly out the driver’s side window, hoping she could hear him.

The night was very still, so she had.

“I know,” the girl said. She still wouldn’t turn to face him. It unnerved him.

“Listen, I would normally offer to make a call for you, if you need a ride. You’re probably not going to believe this, but I don’t have my phone on me. I can offer you a ride if you need one, but I understand if that’s not something you’d be comfortable with. I mean with a stranger out here in the middle of nowhere…”

But before he could finish his sentence, she shocked him by turning and walking directly to his driver’s side window. She leaned her arm there, her slender white arm, and smiled with little trace of fear. A big smile on a small, pretty face.

“How about this? You move over and let me drive. I’d be much less afraid that way.”

“I’m not so sure about that. You seem to be missing your shoes. Where did you come from, anyway? Is that a prom dress? It seems an odd time of year for….”

“Do we have a deal?” She was still smiling.

Gary reluctantly slid over and she opened the door and took the wheel.

“I’ve never driven one like this. All these new-fangled doodads!”

But already she had them in motion, headlights picking out their way down that long street otherwise deserted. Everyone in the small town had found their beds already.

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I have to ask: you haven’t been drinking, I hope?” Gary realized it was a slightly ironic question to pose.

“No, Buzz and Joey were the ones drinking. Drinking like hogs. I told them to slow down. That punch bowl stunk to high heaven. But they don’t listen to anyone but each other. Egging each other on like idiots!”

“Where exactly are we going?”

“Why, of course, I’m going home.”

“It isn’t far?”

“No, not far at all. You’re very kind to help me out.”

By now, she had already taken some dozen turns and they were in a part of town with no streetlights. Gary was not familiar with these rural areas at all. He began to wonder if this might not be a set-up. Was there some guy waiting with a gun out in the countryside to roll him where no one would even hear his cries for help? And the one time he didn’t bring his phone. He slipped his wallet under his seat surreptitiously. She didn’t seem to notice.

“I’m gonna need to use my g.p.s. to get back out of here. I don’t know all these backroads. I can see we’re getting higher. Could you do me a favor and keep a few feet more to the right of that barrier? That looks like a hell of a drop off.”

“What the heck is g.p.s.?” she laughed. “You know, it was just terrible what happened to Joey and Buzz. Some say they deserved it. But did the others?”

“What happened to them?”

“They went off the cliff on River View Road. They were picking up pieces of them in the ravine for days. Them and all their passengers. That car was just crammed with kids who had come from the dance.”

She shook her head, crying then.

“I’m so sorry,” he commiserated. “Listen, you seem pretty upset. Why don’t you pull over and we can switch seats.”

She began to accelerate then. It really scared Gary.

“No point,” she said. “We’re almost home.”

“What do you mean we’re almost home?” Gary asked. “And you’ve gotta slow down, this road is getting narrower and narrower. Where the hell are we, anyway?”

And then the headlights picked out an old street sign that read “River View Road.”

The car was going about seventy at that point and he began to scream at her to stop the car, hit the brakes, this isn’t funny at all.

But she was laughing now through her tears.

As the car left the road and Gary felt his stomach, his ass, everything, try to float, the girl turned to him and said, “This is the part where you hope, but it doesn’t come true.”