| Uncle Tim's Story Time |
| Story #2 NIGHT CALLER (originally published in House of Pain 12/2001) |
When the night closed in around him, came whispering down with a breathing silence that was absolute, Dan was
sitting in the broadcast booth at WKXY, thinking about Marsha and how he felt about her and how it was going to
tear him up now that she was gone.
You did enough of it, you got real good at things like that. He was thinking that come morning, when his shift
ground to a halt, he was going to have to go back home. Go back to the place they’d shared for four years. Place
that was going to be as empty as a drum, full of echoes and memories and a hurtful, blanketing stillness. She was
gone now, but he would feel her, smell her, hear her. Her perfume, her laughter, and ultimately, her tears. They
would be there waiting, like phantoms hungry to torment, demons slipped from some dark and moldering box.
Dan took a pull off his cigarette, thinking: I’m going to the bar. I’m going to get good and pissed. I’m not going
back there to sit around, listen for her footsteps that’ll never arrive. I won’t do that.
He decided that’s how he would handle it. Pickle himself up like a jar of beets and maybe, just maybe, when he
opened his eyes and the breath came back into his lungs, he would have forgotten. But, goddammit, he wouldn’t
wait and then wait some more like he did when he was a kid and his mother ran off. Every night, hoping,
dreaming, torturing himself.
He wished somebody would call in a request. The midnight show was all hard rock, alternative, metal. But
somebody wanted to call, wanted to talk to him, hey, he’d even play Journey and fuck the sponsors. What there
were of ‘em. Damn. Alone. Dan wasn’t good at being alone. If there was one thing he’d dragged from his childhood
it was this.
He closed his eyes and drummed his fingers.
Why wasn’t anyone calling in?
He started up a Rob Zombie cut and began paging through a magazine.
The light on the phone began to flash.
A live one. He could barely contain his excitement. Of course, it could’ve been Marsha trying to get in a few last
licks over the corpse of their relationship. And, damn, he would’ve heard her out, sucked it all in and down, ate
humble pie with whipped cream, any goddamn thing to get her back. Just so he wouldn’t have to be alone, alone--
“WKXY. The Thunder of the Great Lakes. You’re talking to Danny C. I’m very desperate and I’ll play just about
anything,” he said. “Go ahead and ask me.”
“Are you the radio guy?” a voice inquired, that of a girl. A young girl, just a kid by the sound of it, but the
headbangers came younger every year.
“That’s me. What do you want to hear?”
There was silence for a moment, then: “I’m alone and I’m afraid.”
A crank? No, no way. The voice was genuine, he could sense its urgency, feel the dread underlying each word.
“Wait a second now,” Dan said. “What’s your name?”
“Kaley,” she admitted softly, almost as if she were afraid to.
“Now, Kaley, tell me what’s wrong.”
“There’s no one here. I’m alone.”
Oh boy, you and me both, kid. You called the right number tonight.
“Where are your mom and dad?” he asked her
“He got em.” Her voice was even, but strained. Dan could just imagine all the strength it took.
“Who did?” A cold chill had settled into him now.
“Him. Old Blood and Bones.”
Dan just sat there, forgetting what he was about to say. Old Blood and Bones? Jesus, they’d been kicking that
story around when he was a kid. The older kids tormented the younger ones with it. A local boogeyman. He could
remember it all too well.
“Honey, listen to me now. Old Blood and Bones…that’s just a dumb story.”
“No, it isn’t,” she said with perfect conviction. “He lives in our basement. He’s been trying to get me to go down
there, he keeps calling me from the bottom of the steps. He says he’s starving. I told my mom…her and dad went
down there.” She swallowed. “They never came back.”
Dan didn’t say anything, not right away. His breath was locked-up in his lungs. “Listen, Kaley. Do you have big
brother or sister or an aunt or uncle? Anyone you can call?”
“No...there’s no one,” she said bleakly. “That’s why I called you. I heard your number on the radio. My dad left it
playing in the living room. I’m scared. I’m really scared.”
“Okay, take it easy, Kaley,” Dan said, trying to remain calm, trying to be the voice of adult reason and security she
needed so much right now. And, yes, trying to force those childhood images of his own loneliness out of his head.
“Is there someone’s house you could go to? A friends’ or neighbors’?”
“No, everyone lives far away. We live on Whitlock Road.”
Christ, that figured. There were only a half a dozen houses out there, as much as a mile in-between most of them.
A few weren’t even occupied. “All right. That’s okay. Do you have a room you could lock yourself into?”
“My bedroom upstairs, but my dad said I’m not supposed to—”
“Do it anyway. Don’t open it for anyone. Okay? Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” she sobbed, “I won’t.”
“Good girl. Now tell me your address.”
“306 Whitlock. It’s way out by the end. By the river.”
“Okay, I’ll—”
“Are you coming? Are you coming right now?”
There was desperation in her voice like nothing he’d ever heard before, he felt it way down deep like a knife in his
belly. But he wasn’t allowed to leave the station while he was on duty. And he didn’t have his car with him. But the
company truck was in the lot around the side…
“Yes, I’m coming right now. Just lock yourself in and wait for me. You hear me? I’m coming to help you.”
“Hurry. I think I hear him moving around…”
“Get to your room and lock the door. Now.”
He heard her drop the phone and scamper away. Time was precious, but he couldn’t help himself: Kaley hadn’t
hung up the phone, so he listened to see if he could hear anything. He couldn’t. Just a few tinny strains of
“Demonoid Phenomena” from his own broadcast. He killed the connection and dialed the Sheriff’s Department.
They handled anything outside the city limits. It took only a few moments to explain the situation to the night guy.
He took everything down and said he’d get a car right out there.
Dan loaded the player with CDs, programmed them in sequence. Enough music and commercial spots to last
three hours. Plenty of time to do what he had to do.
He dashed down the hall into the manager’s office and looted through the drawers of a desk until he found the
keys. He also found a letter opener that seemed better suited to opening stomachs than mail. He took it along and
ran downstairs and out into the lot. The company truck was a red Dodge Durango with the station’s logo lettered
on the doors.
Just hang on, kid, he thought.
He hoped against hope he wasn’t too late.
Old Blood and Bones. Damn, how long was that one going to be handed down? Dan remembered being terrified
of it as a kid. Remembered screaming in the dead of night, his dad rushing into his room, telling him it was okay,
okay, wasn’t anything in the closet but shadows. And when Dan calmed down enough to tell him, his father had
laughed. Laughed because they’d told stories of Old Blood and Bones when they were kids, too.
Driving, Dan remembered it all. If his old man knew of them as a kid, it meant Old Blood and Bones had been
creeping the dark side of childhood imagination back in the 1930’s and was still at it when Dan was a kid in the
‘60s. And, apparently, the old haunter hadn’t given up the ghost even yet, had been recycled for yet another
generation.
Dan let that go, refused to let Old Blood and Bones escape from that moldering box he’d nailed him shut in so
many years ago now. Instead he thought of what it must’ve been like for that kid, for Kaley. Alone in that empty
house on a cold April night out in the middle of nowhere. And, God, he could remember what that was like. His old
man had been a pipefitter, worked at a paper mill three to eleven shift. Dan was left alone to fend for himself.
Unheard of these days, but not unusual back in the late sixties. It was great being in command, eating what he
wanted, watching what he wanted on TV…that was, until it got dark. And then the shadows crept up around the
house, swallowed the yard and the lonely country road out beyond. The forest grew darker and thicker and
somehow malignant, breathing, hungry.
And Dan would wait and wait, entertaining fantasies that his mother would finally come home. But reality was cold
and grim and eternal, for it was just him and the night and that big house in the woods that had grown bigger and
shadows that had grown longer, taken shape, clustered around windows in a thousand black, sightless forms that
whispered and scratched and hissed. And, sometimes, unable to stand even one more minute of it, Dan would run
out into that stygian underbelly of tenebrous possibility, run through snow, slipping on ice, collapsing finally in a
snowbank while the wind knitted him with frost and he would cry, shriek his mother’s name until his throat was
hoarse and there was nothing left to do but sob and pray that headlights would cut the blackness of the road and
those headlights would be from his father’s truck.
But they never seemed to come.
Just Dan and Old Blood and Bones.
And maybe much of it was simple childhood imagination run wild, nightmare shapes and sounds created from the
whole cloth of youthful terror. But not all of it. Even to this day, Dan could not completely convince himself that the
darkness was not cognizant, was not somehow imbued with a morose and pernicious intelligence that was
nameless. Not simply the absence of light, but a discarnate entity named Old Blood and Bones that shunned the
same. For nothing could erase that horrible night when, certain something was stalking him from the shadows, he
had run into the house and the phone rang. Hoping for a friendly voice, he answered it. Only to hear a buzzing
sibilance and a voice, mournful and disembodied, say: “The last one, you’re the last one.”
Dan finally snapped himself out of it by thinking of Marsha.
That bitch. Abandoning him like his mother had, leaving him alone to suffer and brood and despair. Oh, she knew
what she was doing, all right. And, God, dear God, how he’d trusted her. Given everything to her, unzipped
himself and let her handle his soul only to have her dirty it, drag it through filth and mud. Yeah, Dan wasn’t good
with relationships. He was in his forties and that bit with Marsha had been the first real one he’d ever had. The
rest were physical, drunken interludes. He’d never dared open up before Marsha, always terrified that his heart’s
desire would fade away, abandon him, evaporate like morning dew in the bright validity of the sun’s rays.
Dan grimaced, thought: That poor kid. That goddamn poor kid. I find her parents, I find ‘em, God help those
selfish bastards. Because I know what it’s like when you’re alone and the night comes slinking in…
In about five minutes he’d fought free of the city like a snake shedding its skin. Ten more and he was out on
Whitlock, the city and its dead streets behind him. Whitlock was deserted, so he opened the truck up to about
seventy. It didn’t take long to get there at that speed. He saw a mailbox emerge out of the gloom, 306 stenciled on
it. He pulled into the drive and saw no patrol cars about, only a minivan and an old pick-up around the side. The
house was hard to make out in the dark. Lights burned both up- and downstairs. And that house, lonesome
sentinel out here in the ravening gloom, looked like a skull to him. Deserted, stripped, sardonic.
Old Blood and Bones like places like this. Lonely, sullen, dark places.
Stop it for chrissake!
Dan stepped out. The night air was cool and damp, the drive inundated with water and slush from the winter run-
off that was quickly freezing as the Celsius dipped below zero. A cigarette hung from his lips and there was fear in
his belly like a huge, sucking hole.
Where the hell was that patrol car?
Dan felt utterly useless with the letter-opener. He kept thinking of what the girl had said. Didn’t really believe
it…but didn’t discount it either. To her, it was the truth. And that was good enough.
If there was something terribly wrong here, it was too late. He was in too deep. The safety of the broadcast booth
was light years away and he was going in. There was a kid in there. Alone. Frightened. Hopefully alive.
Damn, but he could feel it. The night around him. He could feel its immensity. It was huge and waiting and
stealthy, some blank and wanting void rising up, gathering itself, breathing out, breathing in, closer, closer. He
hadn’t felt it like that since before Marsha, but even then he’d refused to acknowledge it. On those hot summer
nights when the air was a trembling gelatin and he lay in his bed, window open, shade up. Outside, empty lanes
and crickets singing and dogs barking in the distance. And the night, alive, aware, moving through the streets, a
sentient and morbid entity, older than the town, the world, the stars themselves. He’d hear a phone ringing
somewhere and wonder, wonder as gooseflesh threaded him, who could be calling so late and what did they want
and why, why did nobody answer? And then there would be the desperation, the busy need in his legs to rise, to
get up and run outside into that stagnant, seeping air. To wander those nocturnal streets withering with nameless
secrets as bats winged overhead and the town slept, shadows oozing like oil from alley and vacant lot, cellar and
sewer. To find that phone, to enter the tomblike silence of some dead, sleeping house and answer that goddamn
phone. The last man on earth. Answer it, but afraid of what the voice would tell him.
The last one, you’re the last one.
Dan shook it out of his head and told himself the night was just the night and summer was a long way away and
early spring had its own cryptic tales to tell.
He could wait no longer.
He trudged up the steps and stopped before the door. There was a shovel and an ice-axe leaning against the
frame.
The door was open.
Dan stepped inside. It was warm in there. He could smell faint aromas of burning logs and spices. This was
somebody’s home. The kitchen was neat, though cluttered in a comfortable fashion with cookbooks and cutlery
and appliances fighting for space on the counters. There were crayon drawings clipped to the refrigerator--horses,
dogs, trees, and one of a bearded gent that could have been Jesus--all signed by Kaley. Two steaks were set out
in a broiler pan and a bottle of wine was chilling in a bucket of ice. Somebody had been planning a little party after
the kid had gone to bed. Above a rack with copper pans hanging on hooks, a wood carving read, GOD BLESS
OUR HOME.
Dan’s throat was dry as cinders.
The telephone was still off the hook. He replaced it.
The living room was crowded with furniture and bookshelves and potted plants. The TV was on, as was the
stereo. Dan could hear his show playing away. Rob Zombie singing “Living Dead Girl”. An afghan was thrown
over the back of the sofa and the walls were decorated with cross-stitch and needlepoint hangings. A basket of
yarn was set before a recliner, waiting to be taken up.
Where the fuck was that patrol car?
This can’t be a joke, but if it is, Dan thought, if this is some prank played on yours truly and I waltz into somebody’s
home with a goddamn letter opener in my hand...
But it was no joke.
Dan knew that much. He could feel a cold and cruel truth buzzing in the stillborn air.
The kid.
He found the stairway and started up it. There was a door next to the landing. It might’ve been another room or the
entrance to the cellar. He didn’t really want to know which. At the top of the steps, he found himself in a short
hallway. There were three doorways and a fourth at the end that was probably a linen closet. Two of the doors
were wide open, the third was ajar. There was a light on in there.
Dan swallowed down hard. It felt like there was cotton in his throat.
The door was pink. A little girl’s room.
The knob was soiled with something that glistened like snot.
Dan eased it open with his boot.
The room was empty, a bitter, frosty breeze blowing through it from an open window. He went to it. The carpet
squished beneath his step, rank water rushing from its fibers at the intrusion of his weight. There was no ladder or
other visible means of escape leading down. The backyard was white and frozen and lonesome below.
“Jesus,” he said under his breath.
The carpet…what was that stuff gushing from it?
He gave the closet the once over and decided he’d better get going. He stopped at the door. The inside knob was
clean of that wet material. He tried it and found it broken. It wouldn’t catch at all. The lock had been engaged, but
someone had applied enough force to the outer knob to snap the internal mechanism.
Someone very powerful.
He didn’t hesitate any longer.
He went downstairs quickly, ready to slash at anything that got in his way. That door at the bottom. Probably to
the basement. He told himself to go outside, wait for the cops, it was their job to stick their noses into crap like
this. But he knew he couldn’t wait. He kept thinking of the girl and knowing somehow, that he was too late, just too
late.
He touched the door.
It felt warm as if it was made of living flesh, not wood.
Here I come, Old Blood and Bones.
Dan pushed it open. He could see the steps twisting down into the darkness. They were wet, slimy with something
that glistened and sparkled with stolen light. His fingers sought and found the light switch. Hazy illumination. Step
by careful step he descended, knowing the law would be here soon. At the bottom he could smell something that
stirred childhood paranoia—a musty, damp smell, the fetid odor of things breeding in dark, wet places.
The cellar was typical.
Rough sandstone walls festooned with ancient cobwebs. A single naked bulb hung from a cord. Boxes of clothes
and toys, old furniture and dented appliances. The debris of modern life. A washer and dryer, stationary tub.
Rough-hewn beams in the rafters, a snaking network of ancient plumbing. Yes, all very typical. Then another
room. Dim and shadow-clustered, the floor of dirt now. That decayed smell was stronger, palpable, it seemed, with
a vaporous evil. It leeched the breath from Dan’s lungs, made something twist in his belly. Gooseflesh pebbled his
arms, crept up his back…
Oh, God, oh God.
The hulking shapes of the water heater, furnace. More boxes, a few old nail kegs, a bed-frame, rows of coats
hanging from wires above, swaying and dancing now as he brushed into them. Animate with hidden, secret life. A
stink in the air—raw, savage. A metallic odor. Through the coats he went, seeking, seeking.
And something cold and fleshy brushed his cheek.
Jesus.
Dan fell back, making a choking, gasping sound as terror washed over him like the frigid waters of some black and
haunted sea. In the field of shuddering, waving coats, yes, three of them hanging. Father, mother, daughter.
Impaled on hooks and moving with a slow, terrible motion. Dead, white as spilled floor, eyes stark and sightless,
but staring, staring. Shrunken, wizened things that had been dead for some time.
Mouth wide and frozen in a silent rictus of horror, Dan fought and stumbled through the coats, fell over boxes,
letter-opener still in his hand, slashing madly at shapes that were not shapes but dark bits of imagination given
breath, lunatic ghosts. The opener struck the light cord and it swung back and forth, back and forth. Hideous,
lurching shadows rising and falling, sweeping and crawling.
Dan, half out his mind, his brain filled with a wild, shrieking noise as a voice somewhere, somewhere in the phobic
depths of his soul said: Kaley…the little girl is Kaley…and cold, so very cold, dead for hours and hours if not
days and if she is dead...then who called you out here?
The light dimmed.
Went out with a pop.
Dan let out a maddening scream, fell over a stack of boxes. The basement was silent and filled with a living,
hateful blackness. The cellar door above slammed shut and he felt something in him go with a warm, wet sound
and he was eight years old again as he clambered up the steps on hands and knees, feeling the darkness brush
him with moldered, fleshless fingers. Rustlings. Wet sounds. Dripping noises. The turgid, slithering motion of
something that lurked in pits and sub-cellars and drainage ditches, peered with flat, yellow eyes from ruined
houses and open graves, hungry for little boys afraid of the dark…
No, Dan, he thought crazily, don’t say it’s name, don’t even let it know you’re thinking about it.
He found the door and it opened and he fell onto the carpet, trembling and making high, garbled sounds in his
throat. He felt activity around him, things seen but unseen. Grotesque, shifting forms out of the corners of his
eyes. But there was light and warmth here, yes, and maybe sanity.
Jesus Christ in Heaven, where was the sheriff?
The phone on table shrilled. It rang and then rang again and he wondered for one impossible moment if it was
only in his head, in some fevered dream. He ran for it, needing both hands to lift and steady it. His voice, whining
and childish: “Hello? Hello? Hello?”
And on the other end, a voice like wind howling around ancient eaves, through midnight wells and blighted fields,
lonely, empty spaces: “The last one, you’re the last one.”
The lights went out then, all of them.
And Dan knew the sheriff was never coming.
Old Blood and Bones, yes, he was coming instead.
Dan felt the darkness press in with a dry rustling of Autumn leaves, the gurgling sound of something belching up
from a drain. It was wet and jellied and dry and coarse and stinking like a dead mouse in a shoebox. It hands were
claws, were spades, were hooks. Its breath was hot and mildewed and rancid.
It was lonely, so very lonely.
And it had been waiting a long time for Dan.
*
Sometime later, Dan picked up the phone and called Marsha. Told her how he needed her and she said she
would come and get him, but this was the last time, the very last time. And when she arrived, she found him
hanging downstairs with the others, long dead, bled dry as a peach pit.
Then something called her by name, something lonesome.
Something from a child’s closet…
| ENTIRE CONTENT COPYRIGHT 2009 BY TIM CURRAN tim@corpseking.com |