Trick or Treat

Mother died in late August. I was still cleaning up her house in October. Sometimes I wonder how different my life might be today if I had just hired someone to clean out the mess and pack up that house for me.

It’s sober work for the only child of an only child to clear out a house, memories lifting from objects like choking dust. All the physical traces of bad memories in that house needed to be boxed and carted away. Or trashed. It felt so good throwing away things from my unhappy childhood. I wondered how mother had lived alone all those years after my father fled. I had only been four at the time. I never saw him again.

Mother never remarried. She taught elementary school when she was well.
I had spent more than half of the years of my childhood and adolescence bouncing around between the homes of various distant relations. These are the years I remember as years of thunder and lighting, years in which my mother crashed frequently and was hospitalized for her fragile mental state. I knew my second cousins better than I knew my own mother. If I speak the homely truth. When I fill out resumes, I joke that that I need an extra sheet of paper to list all the schools I attended. Somehow I managed to overcome my feelings of inadequacy, the feeling I was just some“waif girl,” and made a few goods friends wherever I went. I try to fight against this feeling of reticence that I know is my natural disposition, this tendency to withdraw. I hate to admit that I hold my mother in my mind as a counterexample. She was largely a hermit. I don’t want to end up like her.

Some family members try to blame mother’s mental illness on the “Trick or Treater.” Every year, on Trick or Treat night, a man would knock at the front door of our house, long after the candy-gathering had ended. He’d knock and sometimes ring the doorbell and then vanish into the night. Some people would say that she was hallucinating, that there was no such creep, but I knew he was real. I saw him. I’d only ever catch a glimpse of him. By the time I hit the porch light, he’d be out in the shadows of the hedgerow in our front yard or standing in the middle of the street, staring at the house. I would beg mother to call the police, but she always refused. It was harrowing. I rarely slept on that night each year. As I got older, on Trick or Treat night I would fall asleep clutching a butcher’s knife. Perhaps poor mother did the same.

I found mother’s diary under her pillow. I hadn’t known she had kept one. Then I found other diaries in a drawer with her lingerie. She hadn’t kept one every year but there were at least a dozen of them. I found myself going to the entries written around Halloween. They were deeply disturbing.

“Trick or Treat last night. Gave him her school photograph again this year,” mother had written in her severe penmanship. I saw the year on the entry and calculated that I had been twelve at the time. “Seemed to satisfy him,” she went on. “He lingered about twenty minutes in the yard.”

I felt the chill of violation. Had this woman given the creep that haunted our house a photograph of….me? My own mother. Feeding a predator who lurked around the house where I was sleeping?!

I looked at the other diary entries and every year she talked about giving “him” various tokens, usually my school photograph, but also mementos like drawings I had done or poems I had written. It was unbelievable. I had hated my mother at various times in my life, but not like I hated her now. I began to think it was a miracle that I had never been abducted by this man. And I began to wonder if I had ever really had a clue about how sick my mother actually was.

As I was reading these diaries, I heard the laughter of children in the street. I realized with a goddamn it must be Trick or Treat night in the borough. I made my way to the front door to make sure the porch light was off. I had no candy and I was in no mood. Then I wondered if he might actually still be alive. The old creep. I hadn’t checked the last diary. The one under the pillow. I took it in my hands and paged through to the entry that began “Trick or Treat.” This was just last year.

“What will he do next year, when I am gone?” she wrote in a scrawl. Her teacher’s penmanship had degenerated to chicken scratch. “This is the last time. I’m glad it’s over. Finally. I’m sorry. But what good is that word to anyone?”

I closed the front door of my mother’s house after one last glance at the dark street where jack-o’-lanterns glowed here and there before happy little houses. Where little monsters and superheroes, princesses and witches, robots and frog-faces, went giggling from one skeleton-decorated door to the next. I locked the door and pulled all the curtains in the living room. Then I lay down on the couch and drifted off to sleep. It just came over me, a depression. The diaries had taken me right down. I needed a reset. It was okay to lie down on the couch and just vanish. Nobody was expecting me anywhere. Nobody in the world.

The horrible knocking woke me. I had no idea what time it was, but knew it must be late night. I reached for my bag on the carpet next to the couch. I curled my fingers around the little SIG Sauer that I hated having to carry on me. I had the concealed carry permit. After living alone for a few years, I had one bad experience with a stalker and that was enough. That was when I acquired this pistol and went through the training to be sure I knew exactly how to use it.

I waited and listened. Sitting bolt upright. I knew the door was locked. I found my cell phone with my other hand and dialed 911, but did not touch the phone icon and actually make the call. But I wanted it ready to connect. I heard my breathing. The old terror was back. It was like I was sixteen again, clutching that butcher knife. Only this pistol was much better than any knife.

What happened next might not make sense, if I don’t confess to you that I had been drinking. I don’t usually overindulge. But as I read mother’s diaries, I had sought out her liquor cabinet and had been drinking a somewhat rancid vodka, cranberry juice, club soda mix. The cranberry juice was probably months old, but mother had frozen it. And I figured the wicked alcohol content would just sterilize everything. I had sampled some of her other liqueurs too. I had needed something to counteract those diaries, to soften the blow.

So maybe this is why I went to the door, gun in hand, and opened it.

Maybe that. And the hatred of years for the fear this creature had inflicted upon me and my mother. A woman and a girl alone. What sort of lowlife does that? I opened the door and there he stood. His mask was a simulation of decaying flesh. His clothes were the clothes of the grave.

“How dare you?!” I screamed quietly.

He stared at me. He said nothing.

There was only the outer screen door between us. Mother had died before the change from summer to autumn, when glass would replace that simple mesh. That was all that was between us. That outer door had been locked when I first entered the house. It hardly felt like safety. I made sure he saw the gun trained on him. There was only one light on in my mother’s living room but it was enough for him to see what was in my hand. Yet he did not flee. He was tall. He stared at me from his black eyes. Why did he seem so sad suddenly? I felt waves of sadness coming from him.

“What do you want?” I rasped.

I looked at my phone. Something stopped me from completing the call to 911.

“She’s dead, you know, right? The house is being sold. The next owners might just kill you the first time you show up. You might want to think about that.”

Nothing.

“You must be an old man under that mask. Your wife and kids must be very proud of you. Do they know you stalk old women and young girls?”

Nothing.

He tried the front door then. He tried to open the outer door. I felt a hot rush of adrenaline. I don’t want to think I unlocked the door because I wanted to use that pistol. But once he stepped across that threshold, I would have the legal right to discharge that weapon. Perfect legal right. I can’t tell you why I opened it. But I did, to my own horror. And he stepped into my mother’s living room. He moved like an old man. An ancient man. But the mask had a few patches of dark hair up top, not white hair. My finger tightened on the trigger. I backed away as he advanced into the house. I kept at least ten feet between us at all times.

“What the hell do you want?” came out from between my gritted teeth.

He walked to a photograph hanging on the living room wall. It was a photograph of my father and mother in their youth. I was a baby in the photo. My father held me in it. He stared at it, his back to me. I didn’t lower the gun or my guard for a second.

He reached out and stroked the photograph.

Then he turned suddenly and walked toward the kitchen. I ran halfway up the stairs to the second floor to get out of his way. He passed by me without a word and entered the kitchen. I ran back down the stairs and backed away from the kitchen’s entrance way. I watched as he went to the open basement door and presumably descended the rickety wooden stairs, down into the darkness of that unfinished room. But I couldn’t see from where I stood. I never heard the steps creak as they always do. So I wondered if it was a ruse and if he was waiting on the top step.

That’s when I realized I didn’t have it in me to shoot the man, no matter how much he might have deserved it. That’s when I dialed 911.

The borough police were there in five minutes.

They searched the house and there was no one. I saw the one female officer examining the alcohol by the couch. They asked about my mother’s recent death. I began to see a conclusion, a totally wrong conclusion, forming in her eyes. She whispered to her young male compadre and they suggested I might want to vacate the house. At least for tonight. They asked if I had someone who could pick me up. They suggested that I not drive.

I thought about telling them the history of the Trick or Treat Man, but I realized there was no police record. I would sound even crazier. So I said nothing.

I started entering info into an app to arrange a ride out of there, figuring I would retrieve my car the next day. The younger cop said he wanted to do one last basement check, just to be sure. I told him there was definitely no means of entry or exit from down there. Only the kitchen door at the top of the stairs. He asked twice. I told him twice. Surely he could see that for himself? I asked them where the hell the guy could have gone and was met with two blank stares.  I told him I hadn’t been down there but one time since my mother had died, for the most cursory of inspections. My mother told me she only threw unwanted junk down there. She hated the basement and always warned me about what she called “the mold hazard.”  So I avoided that potentially toxic room. I heard the officer descend those treacherous stairs again. About five minutes later, he came running back up the stairs, breathing heavily.

“Uh, we’re going to need to call this in,” he said, grimly.

“Call what in?” the other cop grimaced.

“There’s a note down there.” He looked at me with the strangest expression on his face. “Was your mother named Angeline?”

I nodded.

Over the next few days, my mother’s house was heavily trafficked. The borough police were soon joined by state police. And then the forensic specialists and excavators came. And God only knows who else.

And that’s how I learned my father never ran away at all.

The Tour Bus

I don’t expect you to believe me. I totally expect you to call bullshit, to call a thousand times bullshit. Or say, “You must have been on some good drugs back in those days, son!” Go right ahead. I would do the same thing. If I hadn’t lived it. But I did live it. And I want you to hear it.

I was young then. Nineteen. I lived in the boonies and I worked an odd graveyard shift in a warehouse as an order picker. That company moved out of state long ago, but in those days they built computer towers to order for businesses. It was just a temp job to me, one that could help me finally get some replacement wheels, since the transmission on my first P.O.S car had gone out in the spring, and I was forced to walk to work and back on the nights I couldn’t bum a ride with somebody. That job was a no-brainer, because the warehouse was within walking distance.

I used to get out of there at odd hours, three or four in the morning. I had a shortcut I took through some fields which had a rough sort of path running through them, and then I would walk down this lonely stretch of road that only had this one old house on it. Long abandoned, it had been some some sort of office space for railroad officials back in the day. It did look rather like a regular house, but old school, with a mansard roof like you see on those old houses in Edward Hopper paintings. It had these spooky dormer windows where I always hoped I wouldn’t see anyone staring out at me. The railroad tracks were only a few hundred yards from the building, but they were just two parallel strips of rust. That stretch of tracks was no longer used.

I used to get spooked walking by the house at four or five in the morning. It was always dark, of course, and I never had the impression that anyone was actually in there. Well, until the whole thing began that summer.

Even today, that road doesn’t get any traffic. And I would have been the only foot traffic that road saw back then, apart from kids playing down there, throwing rocks to knock out the few jagged teeth of glass left in the window frames of the old house. But that would have been in the daytime. There wouldn’t have been anyone around at night but me on that walk home.

One night, cutting through the fields with half a moon above, I saw the strangest thing going on at that house. There was a freakin’ tour bus there. Running. But with its lights off. Parked right next to that falling down house. I saw a bunch of people standing around the bus. They were only silhouettes to me. I had a weird feeling about the whole thing, so I made sure nobody saw me. I stayed in the fields, a good distance behind the house. I got on the road further down that night.

I figured that was a total fluke. Something that would just never be explained in life. Life is full of things like that. But then the next night the tour bus was parked there again. At four in the morning. I hid a little while longer that night and watched people coming out of the house and getting on the dark bus with its motor running. The house was entirely dark the whole time this was going on. Eventually, the bus filled up, I guess. Because it took off down the road, finally turning on its headlights when it started moving in earnest. Soon it was gone. A few hours before dawn. The house was quiet again. I wasn’t going anywhere near it though.

I hadn’t told anyone about what I had seen. I was pretty much a loner then. I only had my mom and I didn’t even talk to her much.

The third night as I crossed the field, I heard the bus motor again. Total disbelief. My curiosity was really starting to gnaw at me. I was hidden, crouched down behind some tall grass, watching silhouette people come out of the dark house and climb aboard the bus, when I heard a crunch on the ground behind me. Instinctively, I grabbed a decent-sized rock lying near me and whirled around to find myself facing a tall man. He was smiling. He wore the uniform of a bus driver. He had the blue cap and jacket. And the tie.

“Would you like to take a closer look?” the stranger asked.

“I don’t want any trouble. I won’t tell or…”

“You have nothing to fear, son,” the silver-haired man promised.

And I believed him. It’s hard to explain this, but he smelled so good. I’ve never smelled any cologne or perfume or anything that’s come close to the way this guy smelled. How can I explain it? He just smelled….good. Not like just sweet-smelling, but also kind and trustworthy. “How can that be a smell?’ you’ll probably scoff. But I’m just telling you how it was.

I kept thinking I was going to get murdered that night. For sure. Even though I trusted him. But I let him lead me to the house. I walked there beside him.

“What you’re going to see is something difficult to see. But I think you should see it anyway.”

“Okay?” I croaked in my nervousness.

I could have just taken off running. Zinged off. But I’d be lying if I didn’t say that the curiosity was burning a hole in the bottom of my soul.

We must have been a few dozen yards from the house when I smelled it. A whiff of the nastiest charred meat you’d never want to eat. It smelled ancient. An aroma like cruelty baking terror.

“What the hell is that awful smell?”

The bus driver guided me by the shoulders towards the house. We went in the back door through what looked to be a wrecked dining hall the railroad guys must have used. There was still old train company stuff hanging on the walls, mostly askew. Old calendars and timetables and stuff. But none of that really had my attention. Because from there I would see a glow of fire from the next room.

“The house is on fire!” I yelled, and started turning to run back out the way we had come in. But the man shook his head no, and continued guiding me forward, his hands steering my shoulders.

We stepped into the next room and I could not believe my eyes. There was a giant collapsed area in the floor of that high-ceilinged room. Inside that hole, I saw burning coal and ash, a slope of it that led downward into the earth. I could see flickering orange light from flames down below. And people were climbing up this burning slope of hot ash. On their hands and knees. Men and women of all ages. They were all naked. Crying out. Weeping and wailing. Many of these refugees from below were badly burned. I saw when one of them turned, a young woman, that her back was covered in long scars and fresh bloody wounds. Then an old man with similar markings on both his front and his back sides made it up and out. Some of those climbing up had mangled limbs that appeared to have been stretched on some medieval rack. It was all too much. I started to tear up and told the driver I wanted to leave. The fumes from the hole and the sight of the tortured bodies had nauseated me and sickened my soul.

He led me outside and I was able to breath a little better, even though I could still smell the stench of the pit. I watched in amazement as several other men in company livery handed clothing to the naked people emerging from the ramshackle house before helping them onto the bus with its motor still running. These clothes didn’t always fit, but the people sure didn’t mind. They seemed in shock, but were also so eager to board the bus. I heard so many different languages being spoken. Those speaking English were uttering words of gratitude. Some were speaking in strange dialects where I could not really understand all their words. But it did sound like a sort of English. Perhaps a very old kind of English.

I looked at the large logo on the side of the bus. “GREAT ESCAPES,” it read. The words were contoured around an image of a white dove in flight.

The bus driver noticed me reading the side of his vehicle.

“Sometimes a hole opens up. A way out. Sometimes it happens naturally, and other times a group of them manages to figure a way to force an opening. Poor buggers. We don’t have long. Maybe a few days if we’re lucky. We have to be discreet. Each night we have to fit a temporary seal in place. To let them know we’re full up on the bus for the night. They can’t break through it. It’s terrible to have to do that to them, but there are rules to what we can do on a rescue mission. Rules from on high. We want to rescue as many as we can, so we work fast, but He finds out eventually. And usually sooner rather than later. Then it’s all over. On to the next assignment. I was in China last week and Venezuela the week before that.”

“ ‘He’, you said? Who is ‘He?’ ”

“He,” the driver repeated, with a heavy underscore of darkness in his voice.

“Oh,” I said. And I knew for sure then.

“I’m not at liberty to talk in anything more than general terms. I can’t admit anything, really. But sometimes I think it’s important that someone on your side of things sees the truth.”

I didn’t know how to reply to that. So I just told him, “I’m going home now.”

The bus driver nodded and went to help some of those burned, excoriated people with the haunted eyes onto the air conditioned tour bus.

I thought of eyes looking like that for centuries, for thousands of years.

As I was walking away, I turned and shouted back, “I hope you get a lot more out! I hope they all make it out!” And I meant it.

“Thanks,” he yelled back, but he was occupied now in his real work.

The next night I had to stay at work past my usual, odd quitting time. I didn’t get out of the warehouse until nearly six a.m.. I walked home in the light instead of the dark. So I wasn’t surprised the tour bus was not parked next to the empty house. I figured it had just picked up its load of refugees and had taken them wherever it is they go.

I walked up to the back of the house and peered in. That’s when I realized the acrid smell was gone. I should have smelled it by then. I decided to step inside just a few paces, to see if I could pick up the horrible whiff. But no, nothing.

I screwed up my courage and creeped into the next room. There I saw a sight even more horrible than the burned, lacerated and mangled bodies I had seen crawling up that ash slope.

I saw that the hole through the floor, what had been a gaping maw in the earth the previous night, had been sealed shut. I knew this was not the temporary seal the bus driver had talked about. The hole had been filled and covered up with a huge mound of pitch which had hardened.

And on top of this black mass, someone with a devilish sense of humor had placed a ROAD CLOSED sign.

The Older Girl

She woke and the first thought was the joyful thought. It was her birthday! She ran barefoot down the hallway and then sprinted down the stairs, barely touching the railing, her knees turned shock absorbers to the punishing jolts. When she reached the destination of her mad flight, the dining room, she was both pleased and confused.

Here was a birthday cake set upon the table. Here was the pink icing in arabesques and lovely green leaves. Here was her name, spelled out in sweet sugars she couldn’t wait to taste. And here were the candles placed so carefully in the cake. She counted them. Sixteen candles.

Silly mom. What sort of a joke was this?

Sarah looked up into the heavy mirror suspended by chains on the wall, grandma’s gift, the mirror from Sicily, the strange one. She saw her mother’s back reflected there as she walked out the front door. Before she could call out to her, the door had closed on the sunshine of a beautiful day.

Why was she leaving? Didn’t she want to make her guess where her presents were hidden, their usual fun ritual? Didn’t she want to play the “Warmer and Colder” game?

Then she wondered why the dining room was dark. Why had her mother not lit the room? She felt a vague worry. Maybe something was wrong with Grandma! That could explain everything. Maybe that’s why she had to leave.

Sarah drew closer to the mirror. She looked into it. “Nine years old,” she thought. “It’s my birthday and I’m nine years old today.”

Then she glanced down at the credenza below the mirror. Resting on one of its corners was a sheaf of papers thick as a telephone book. She stared at the top page. There was her school photograph beneath the large word MISSING.

And next to the photograph of her, the one she recognized, the face she saw when she looked in grandma’s mirror, was a picture of another girl, one she almost recognized.

She read the words above the photograph of the older girl, the one she felt, somehow, she should know: “Age Progressed From Age 8 to 16.”

And then everything began to feel terribly wrong. She knew if she tried really hard to remember, everything would make sense. But something told her not to remember.

“I’m Sarah and I’m nine years old today,” she told herself.

But a voice in her head whispered, “Cold.”

“I’ll just wait for mother to get back and she’ll explain everything to me.”

“Colder,” the voice in her head whispered.

Sarah realized it was her own voice she was hearing, correcting her. Playing the birthday game.

“Everything is going to be fine!” she promised herself.

“Colder,” said other-Sarah in her head.

“I’m feeling a chill now. I’m so cold. Nobody should feel this way on their birthday. I feel like I’ll never be warm ever again!”

“Warmer,” said the other voice in her head.

25 Two Sentence Scares for Halloween

Author’s note: The two sentence horror genre would probably not deny that it is a very low art form. It’s often Guignol, often in bad taste and pure internet. I confess a soft spot for this awful genre that wears its lack of literariness on its sleeve. Some of these micro-stories are childish and pointless as a firecracker, but some are memorable for reasons you can’t quite place your rational finger on. So maybe not so pointless after all. There’s sometimes an overlap with the urban legend. Maybe, like the urban legend, the well-written two liner works on the subconscious and its unresolved issues. How much can you say in only two sentences? Sometimes, surprisingly much. It’s a populist thing and probably powered by the young. I wanted to take a spin in this goofy bumper car for a day, so in honor of October, spook month, here are my original contributions to this light, dark genre.

I was horrified that two people had the bad taste to dress up and do their makeup to look like my dead parents and stand on my front porch, ringing my doorbell over and over, many hours after Trick or Treat ended. And then through the rotting clothes, I noticed the secret tattoo my mother never told anyone about.

*

After popping an Ambien, which always messes me up, I dreamed that I was carving a pumpkin into a jack-o’-lantern. Twenty-three facial plastic surgeries later, I’m almost back to normal.

*

Our children have begged my husband and me for years to tell them the story of how we met. Hubby and I tease them that we’ll tell them someday, when they’re old enough, but how can we tell them that we were using the same dumping ground for our victims.

*

I used to worry about the snakes that kept coming into my house from the crawlspace. Now I worry about the thing they’re fleeing, the thing I saw eating them in the crawlspace the first time I shined my flashlight under there.

*

After receiving that crazy note in my mailbox, “THEY WILL KILL YOU AT EXACTLY MIDNIGHT,” I stayed up until 2 a.m. and then drifted off to sleep, laughing at the stupid prank and my fear. When I woke later in the dark, my digital clock was flashing 12:00 in bright red, over and over, and I realized the power must have gone out and the clock reset itself, at the same time I realized two large figures were in the dark of my bedroom with me.

*

I was friends with a kid named Robbie whose family always spent the winter in Europe, and one year I broke into their empty house to retrieve a game system I accidentally left there. I found these white things in each of their bedrooms, glued to the walls, that looked like the butterfly chrysalis we learned about in science class, but large as a human being, and when I looked closely at the one in Robbie’s room I thought I saw his face under the white fibers, then something screamed in another room, and I ran away, and the house was sold in the spring and I never saw any of them ever again.

*

I was told not to skate on that pond at night, because a kid skating there had fallen through the ice, gotten trapped and drowned many years ago, and they say he looks up at you through the ice and screams. To tell the truth, I think I would prefer the scream to the dark smile he gives me.

*

“The Fingerpaint Killer,” who painted surreal images with the victims’ blood (always smudging so fingerprints could not be captured) on walls, turned out to be a psychotic fourteen-year-old girl. Her mother had told her that no one on earth would ever talk about her paintings, and she had proven her mother wrong, and become one of the most talked-about young artists in America.

*

I feel really creeped out by the stranger in the elevator who always smiles at me for virtually the entire ride. You see, the living aren’t supposed to be able to see us.

*

Roses are red, violets are blue.

Where you are, both feed on you.

*
In the eighteenth century, Farmer LeDoux accused his widow neighbor of witchcraft. She won her case in court and shortly after that his sheep gave birth to calves, his cows gave birth to sheep and his wife delivered a stillborn piglet.

*
I’m happy to see two Mormon missionaries in white, pressed shirts and black trousers standing on my front porch and can’t wait to invite them inside. Sometimes the conversation can get a little stale among the six I already have chained in my basement, but I think all they really need is a little more young blood to liven up the atmosphere down there.

*

I begged mom to let us move out of this small house next to the toxic waste dump, but years later here we still are, and now I even have a little baby brother to babysit. I hate it when he keeps climbing out of his aquarium, and
I have to rush to put him back, because otherwise his gills start to dry up.

*

I used to bang on the walls when the neighbors next door made that disgusting noise when they were having sex, when you could hear both of them groaning and moaning. Then one day I met the single neighbor who lives over there, a Buddhist practitioner of daily meditation actually, who assured me she’s as quiet as a church mouse, and that’s when I realized the sounds were coming from within the walls.

*

Being a geneticist who specializes in recombinant DNA, I think it would have been wrong of me not to use my special expertise to give my children every extra advantage in life and to enhance their ability to protect themselves. However, the school feels somewhat differently, since this is the third my son has stung another student, and this time the venom was nearly fatal.

*

When I began out of nowhere to have perfect, eidetic-memory recall of days from my earliest childhood, I thought it was interesting and I watched these little films play out in my head, and it was like I was living twice. And then the memories started to come from before my birth and the worst memory of all was my conception, in which I watched and felt a billion of my brothers and sisters die in a single night, just sink into an oblivion of darkness like all the stars in a galaxy going out at once.

*

Mom and Dad gave little Dexter a Ouija board for Christmas, because they thought he might be able to contact Grandma. Instead, he contacted Charles Manson and now little Dexter is an orphan who has founded a cult.

*

We swam in the creek and joked about the water monsters waiting just under the surface to kill us, grabbing at each other’s legs underwater and scaring each other. And when we went home that night, one of us was carrying the real monster in his nose, and this brain-eating amoeba took first his senses of smell and taste, and shortly after that his sense of sense itself, and lastly his young life.

*
After dark, the boys and I lie in our beds and tell each other stories to see who can get the best reaction, the biggest scare jumps, out of the others. We miss Charlie, because he had a real way with words, and our Death Row family just isn’t going to be the same without him.

*

“If I have to explain the joke, then I guess it isn’t a very funny joke,” I said from behind the wolf mask in a dismayed tone to the stranger whose home I had just invaded. Then I started up the chainsaw as the punchline.

*

You know that horrible sensation where just as you’re drifting off to sleep, you suddenly feel like you’re falling off a cliff and then suddenly jerk awake? Well, I get that twenty-four hours a day now, even wide awake, but I just can’t tell anybody because, you see, I’m an airline pilot.

*

Vladimir spoke in a tone Donald had never heard before, telling him, “I’m sorry, but in light of recent events and your failure to heed my ‘advice,’ the Trump Kompromat will be global news in exactly one hour.” The first ICBMS were screaming towards Russia within forty minutes.

*
Civilization is a glass floor we all walk upon, and it is composed of very thin glass that barely supports our weight. If you look down through the transparent glass you are walking upon today, you can see people of all ages being loaded onto trains for Auschwitz, a mere Augenblick ago, historically speaking.

*
For a moment, every animal on earth that could look to the skies did so, as the alien craft beamed an energy into the core of their being, raising their intelligence exponentially, making them aware of how they existed only as “product” to one species which had monopolized the planet. The War began in that hour, the war for justice, and perhaps not surprisingly it was the insects which struck the first and most decisive blow, making it clear that humanity’s cruel hegemony was over, and that the eaters were now to be the eaten.

*

The meteor which would have struck the earth with such force as we think only gods can muster was delayed thirty seconds, missed the planet entirely, and continued on into infinite darkness. In Washington, D.C., in 2018, small upright hominids averaging four feet, who only recently developed language, are scattering, their primitive conversations interrupted by the occasional T-Rex chase or a pterosaur swooping down for takeout dinner and finding it, lifting one of their family members into the sky and delivering the screaming man-thing to a waiting nest of hungry kids.

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.)

These Photos of a Kirkbride Plan Insane Asylum (Warren, Pennsylvania) Give Me Chills

Maybe it's the cold, perfect emptiness of these photos (and knowing the human hell that would fill it). It wasn't exactly an enlightened time. I hate to think of the abuse and the curtailment of liberty. Just so sad.

I just learned that this building still exists and is still being used for mental health treatment. Pennsylvania has two extant Kirkbride plan buildings: this and one in Danville. Two (or possibly three) other Pennsylvanian Kirkbride asylums were demolished. Another exists in Pennsylvania but is used by a private company for "non-psychiatric purposes." One could wager a guess that there might be hauntings in all of these extant Kirkbride buildings.

There's this touching bit about the Warren hospital, too, from 2010: 

"The 954 grave cemetery at Warren State Hospital has been the subject of a restoration. Like many state hospital cemeteries, this one was overgrown and neglected until a restoration committee formed at the hospital in 2006. Employees and volunteers are just about finished with the painstaking task of identifying the deceased patients and giving each one a headstone with their name on it."

You can read more about how the Kirkbride Plan dictated a general architectural layout for insane aslyums of the nineteenth century here.  Kirkbride appears to have had good intentions and a progressive mindset. However, worse treatments would follow and the next century would see atrocities committed against the mentally ill.

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania had a Kirkbride plan asylum (Dorothea Dix was responsible for its creation) but it's on the list of demolished buildings. It was one of the earliest Kirkbride plan asylums.It was torn down in phases and replaced with the Harrisburg State Hospital, which was in use as a mental health facility until 2006. Now its buildings are occupied by several government agencies. 

Most of the information in this post came from the site to which I linked above, kirkbridebuildings.com. There's a wealth of information there about these fascinating structures.

Details on the photographs:

"Period images of Kirkbride Plan architecture, six boudoir cabinet photos (5.25 x 8.5”) signed Bairstow. Gifted from William E.M. Corson (one of three state hospital commissioners) to Cameron Corson (an engineer and likely son) dated November 19th, 1886. Small sketch on one reverse noted John Smithson inmate (perhaps by Corson) of four folky ducks. 

"Beautiful condition with occasional foxing and wear to gilt edges. Letter from a state report magazine about the overflow and patient cost included."

Oh Wow! This Old Painting Suggests Such a Dark Tale!

"Gnarled gypsies climb under an anthropomorphic moon! From an early Somerset Pennsylvania estate, likely last quarter nineteenth century. As found condition, complete with a hundred years of dirt and spots of loss. Oil on board measures 9 x 11.5 inches."