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 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.)

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.

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.

The Lovely, Post-Well Samara

Apparently, this is a rare doll now.

It is bendable and poseable.

Three and a half feet tall and weights seven or eight pounds.

The hook is for suspension of the lovely and well-meaning child.

Diapers for onlookers not included. (Well, she scares me shitless.)

I'd keep her in the closet and bring her out when my cats were misbehaving.