The Recipes

Did you ever buy a used cookbook at a yard sale and then later find a treasure trove of little handwritten recipes on scraps of faded paper secreted between its pages? Well, something like that happened to me.


I had bought a job lot of mostly antiquated books at a flea market from a scraggly, tall dude who told me he cleans out old houses to make money on the side. He was younger and admitted he doesn’t enjoy reading, that he prefers video games, and that he doesn’t really even look at books when he finds them. He just boxes them up and tries to unload them as quickly as possible. I figured I would flip them, sell the best of them online for a markup. I bought several boxes. Because the prices he gave me really were a steal, true flea market prices.


When I finally got a chance to examine the books, little recipes began falling out of one of the mustier volumes. I bent to retrieve the faded little, irregular scraps of scissors-cut paper from the floor and put on my glasses to scrutinize them. They were yellowed and stained recipes written in cursive ink. As I was reading the first recipe, my eyes darted over to the book from which the scraps of paper had escaped. I hadn’t realized until that very moment that the book from which they had tumbled was titled Secret Recipes of Fiji. It was a book on cannibalism and the descriptions of “food preparation,” which I scanned only briefly, had my stomach doing gyrations in no time.


I slammed the book shut and looked at the small sheaf of recipes which had fallen out. The most disturbing thing wasn’t the fact that each recipe included a mystery ingredient which was not named. For example, one read “2 pounds X meat” and another “macerated liver of X.” The worst part is that a different name appeared in cursive ink at the bottom of each recipe. I Googled these names. The common names turned up nothing. But the first uncommon name which I looked up online turned out to be a young man of twenty-three who had gone missing in 1938 and had never been found. Ditto the girl of seventeen who vanished in 1942.


But it went on and on. I really hate to tell you that the book held nearly two dozen recipes. Twenty-three, to be specific. All of the disappearances had occurred in the greater Philadelphia area with the exception of two disappearances from New Jersey in the late forties. The appropriate authorities now have the book, but the chances that this will result in any arrest are slim to none.


I looked for the seller again at the flea market I frequent, but he never returned. I even asked other sellers if they knew him from the circuit, but it appears he was a one-off visitor. Nobody knew him. I still wonder if he will ever be located, and if so, if he will remember the house where he found that particular grim book. The odds are looking slimmer and slimmer.


America’s top cannibal chef is almost certainly dead and probably buried somewhere in New Jersey. I would like to say that I believe that this was a prank pulled by some dark-souled individual. That somebody jotted down the names of missing people on recipes that were pure fiction. But my heart knows how dark this world is in places. So I think the “prank scenario” is just wishful thinking. Justice was not served. But I suspect dinner was. And I sincerely hope (but seriously doubt) that he (or could it be she?) always dined alone.









(If you enjoy creepy pasta type fiction, I am on Medium.com under my name, William Keckler.)

Library Amnesty Day

One rainy spring afternoon in Baltimore, a man walked into one of the city’s smaller libraries. He drew a little attention to himself since he was wearing a burnouse. It was Library Amnesty Day, which meant that patrons could return overdue library books and have the fines for those books waived. He explained that he wanted to take advantage of this amnesty. The librarian asked him for his library card but he said, “I have none.” The librarian tried to get more information, but he fled. He was in and out of the library in under five minutes, but he did leave a plastic tube on the counter of the librarian’s station. This tube was discovered to contain an ancient papyrus. Obviously, this had not been borrowed from the small library in Baltimore. It was forwarded to one university and thence onward to several others. Eventually, it was determined that the origin of the papyrus scroll was the Library at Alexandria, burned when Caesar himself strategically set fire to his own ships during the siege of that city. The fire spread from the ships to the docks and then reached the vaunted library and consumed much of it, Plutarch informs us. Other historians insist the fire (or multiple fires) happened earlier or later. But all agree that the library and its precious volumes perished by fire. Had the Library at Alexandria ever collected such penalties, the overdue fee the mystery man was seeking to have discharged would have been astronomical. Even a modern robber baron would have difficulty paying such a fine. The scroll the mysterious man dropped off contained text in ancient Greek and hieroglyphics. The title of the work, when translated, was revealed to be How to Live Forever.

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.

The Creatures on the Roof

When our mother died in that terrible spring, the one with the record level flooding, my sister Rosalie and I inherited our crazy aunt Esther from her.

Mother had warned us that the responsibility for Aunt Esther’s care would devolve upon my sister and me. She let us know that her older sister certainly had her “peculiarities.” She had wanted us to be familiarized with Aunt Esther’s crotchets before we began helping the octogenarian in the ways mother had outlined for us before she lost her bravely-fought battle with cancer.

Of course, we knew Aunt Esther. We had known her all our lives. It’s just that we rarely saw her, except at the occasional family gathering. So we didn’t really know her all that well, notwithstanding the blood relation. Truth be told, Esther had always been a bit of a recluse.

She lived in the house she had inherited from our maternal grandparents. All her life. Since she had had no children, she had no heirs, mother explained, so we would inherit the house upon Esther’s death. We didn’t have to do much by way of actual personal care. Mother had arranged for two neighborhood girls, Meg and Aurora, to act as personal care assistants (and also perform light housekeeping functions) in morning and evening shifts. We simply had to make sure the house bills and the girls were getting paid. We had to make sure the little bit of yard work (lawn mowing in summer, shoveling in winter) got done. This we could either do ourselves or delegate. And we had to be there for Aunt Esther when she called, which initially was not often.

Mother had made us promise not to send Esther to a nursing home unless it became “absolutely necessary.” She had told us that many people had insisted our aunt was suffering from dementia. But mother insisted that Esther always did just fine with a little bit of help. It couldn’t be real dementia, she promised. It was just the fogginess of age. We had nodded our acquiescence to this wish, just before mother died. So it was a sacred vow. We felt duty-bound to honor it. Rosalie and I would come to regret this. By the next summer, we become convinced that our mother could not possibly have had a real conception of how poor Esther’s mental faculties had become.

Both my sister and I began receiving barrages of phone calls from our frantic aunt, at all hours of the night. She would rant about “the creatures on the roof.” She insisted there were some unidentifiable little beasties scrambling over her roof at night. It had been going on for quite some time, years in fact, but she hadn’t trusted us enough to tell us. At first.

As soon as caregiver Megan went home, it would begin. The creatures would seek her roof then. And then she would make those terrified phone calls to us. Rosalie told her that it must be squirrels. Or some larger species of bird. Turkey vultures were known to perch on roofs in our area.

“They have huge claws to match their ridiculous wingspans,” Rosalie explained to her.

“No, no, no!” Esther would shout at us through her old landline (she didn’t even know what a cell phone was). “These are different things altogether! I’ve seen them more than once. In darkness, yes, but I saw their forms. They were little creatures, like little men, like children…but not quite that. Their faces are unformed. They can draw their faces with their fingers. I saw one of them do that once. Just drew itself a human face while I stared at it through a window. It gave itself a child’s face. A little girl’s face.”

We had gone through the mythological catalog together, Rosalie and I, to get a little humor out of the situation. Gremlins? Trolls? Elves? Evil sprites? What magical beings could crazy Aunt Esther be entertaining on her roof? Should we show her an encyclopedia of magical beings and ask her to select the critters that most resembled her nocturnal visitors? (We would never actually be so cruel.)

But Aunt Esther’s phone calls really began to get under my skin. I hate to confess that I went and talked to someone on my own. Without even consulting Rosalie. I sat down with a social worker and we had a serious discussion. It was decided that an evaluation should be done on our aunt. Her mental faculties should be checked and we could decide where to go from there.

Rosalie was angry at me for going behind her back on this, but I also sensed a bit of a relief. We knew something had to give. We were getting phone calls all night long from Aunt Esther. Almost every night. She had begged both of us to leave our homes and families and come over in the middle of the night. She wanted us to bring guns. To shoot the creatures off the roof! Imagine. Save that story up for the competency hearing, I thought.

“You don’t understand,” her frail voice would explain through the wires. “They come and steal your memory. When you sleep! Once I woke up and there were wires going into my head! Into my brain! Do you understand? They steal your memories. That’s why I am the way I am now. That’s why I forget things. If you would just kill them, I’d get better. They did the same thing to Norma across the street. She saw them on her roof too. And then she just lost her mind altogether. She’s in a home now. I told father when I was a child I heard them on the roof and he admitted to me he knew they existed.”

“Wait? Are you saying Grandpa Lutz saw these creatures, Esther?”

“Yes, they came for his sister back in those days. Don’t you remember? She lost her memory before she was forty. Don’t you remember what happened to your great aunt Melissa? They steal your memories to help them pass. They pretend they’re children. People even adopt them. I’m not the only one in this family who knows the secrets. I was taught as a child. They follow our family for some strange reason. For heaven’s sake, I’ve thought of burning the house down. I told Father he built the house too close to those woods. When Reuben was alive, he would keep a gun trained on the woods at night. He even killed a few of them. But they’d pick up their dead and run with them. You have no idea how fast they are. You don’t know these family stories. You see how close the woods are to the house. They come out of there at night. They live in the trees. They travel from the trees right onto the roof. They just sail right over…”

I had to hang up. It was making me nauseous to hear what an insane hell the poor woman lived in. Medication could help her. It could calm her down, even if it couldn’t restore her grip on reality. It was time to move on a new plan. Rosalie agreed. We had honored our promise to our mother. It was now “absolutely necessary” that Esther live in a structured, safe environment.

It was a little difficult legally, and emotionally difficult as well, but we did get Aunt Esther into a very nice nursing home. She had tried to fight us a little, at first, but ultimately she capitulated. She said she wanted to get away from the creatures. “Maybe I will get my mind back now,” she said, pitifully, as they took her away.

Rosalie and I were going through my Aunt’s things, preparing the house for an autumn sale, when we came upon something surprising. We hadn’t expected our Luddite aunt to own a digital camera, but there was a small one resting on the writing desk in her bedroom. Rosalie turned it on and showed me the photos our aunt had taken of the flowers in her garden. We both got a little teary-eyed at that. She had always loved her garden. It was still beautiful. I looked at this year’s sunflowers from her bedroom window. It could be a Monet postcard, that garden.

Rosalie made a strange sound then. A sort of raspy, choking sound that made me swivel around, fast.

“My God, please tell me what this is?” she whispered throatily.

When I looked at the sequence of photos which Rosalie had just thumbed through, I wondered briefly if we had been pranked for the strangest reality t.v. show ever. But I knew it really wasn’t so.

The photos which had caused Rosalie to choke were of Aunt Esther’s roof, clearly taken from the backyard of the house at night. The flash didn’t illuminate all that well, but one could see pale forms, pale bodies turning away, fleeing across the roof. These were bidpedal….things. The worst photo was the one where you could see the blurry outline of one of those things silhouetted against the window, inside the house.

Aunt Esther later made a miraculous recovery. She did not have dementia. She had suffered some memory loss, but her cognitive function overall was very good. We managed to get her upgraded to a very nice retirement community with the sale of her house. We found her demeanor changed with time, much better, although she still wanted to talk of her experience with the creatures. She told us that a few days before she had been forcibly removed from her home she had finally killed one of them (with a bronze bookend!) and had managed to hide it quickly under her bed before the others saw it and had a chance to collect its body on their retreat. She had buried it in her garden. She paid a neighbor boy five dollars to dig a hole. She told him it was for a dead pet. He never saw what she buried. She said it had “no face at all.”

We asked her why she didn’t tell us that. Why didn’t she call us over to show us the proof that she had been telling the truth all the time. Esther said she had become resigned to leaving the family home, that she was exhausted, and she hoped the things would just leave her in peace, not follow her.

“Anyway,” she explained, “the corpse began to shrivel up immediately after death. By morning the thing had flattened out like an old balloon and looked more like a miniature scarecrow made of rags than any real creature. It looked nothing like it did when it was alive. Most people who would have looked at what I pulled out from under my bed the next morning would think it was just a pile of dirty old rags sewed together by a crazy old woman. So I just buried it.”

Rosalie and I still dare each other (three years later) to go over there and dig it up. Maybe science should have it. Wouldn’t DNA testing tell us much? If the thing even has DNA in it, that is. But the house has a new owner now. Should we have made full horrid “disclosure” before finalizing the sale?. Anyway, it would be awfully hard to explain to that family what we were doing in their backyard with a shovel.

Rosalie and I often wonder if she was right about how they move among us later, after they have absorbed enough faux human memories to pass as human children. And we often wonder what “lucky parents” are adopting these children who grew up in the cold, night trees?

Most of all, we wonder if Esther was right about these things having formed an attachment to our family. We wonder whether we will ever wake in the night to hear the sounds of those things coming for our memories. And neither one of us lives next to the woods. Nor will we ever. I promise you that.

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.