Uncollected Blood (6 page)

When the floor grows cold it is a sign. Winter has come to Richmond. If the rain should choose to fall, it will not stink of sewage, but of the matted leaves. If the children are lucky the rain will freeze and when it turns to snowfall, it may just stick.

For a day a blanket of beauty can shroud the city streets. The appearance of a virgin bride is just a tradition these days. It is just another white dress on a harlot just for a day, just for tradition. But she will be beautiful.

Most of the children in Regina Johnson’s third grade class have heard the story of the Chimborazo Ghost Janitor. The young artist signed his name larger than the image itself. Proud that he might gross out his teacher. He must’ve just heard the story and thought he’d have a laugh drawing red everywhere. But it didn’t disturb her it just made her sad.

To think one man would be doomed to walk these halls for the rest of his life thinking they weren’t clean enough. Scaring little children in the bathroom who dared to make a mess. Sadly that kind of propaganda had failed to promote cleanliness but luckily the faculty bathroom users practiced some kind of honor to the superstition. As far as Regina knew the story had never been true to begin with it was as much a fabrication of word mouth as the Richmond Vampire himself, W.W. Poole.

Regina decided to not make a fuss of the drawing and was about to shove it under the more pleasant drawings when her classroom door opened and the drawing dropped right back on top of the stack.

“Pretty spooky out there right now.” The stubby white man complete with dated mustache and brown suit said. The superintendent was almost in his sixties and had known Regina for years. “I guess you can’t hear it in here, but the wind is really blowing out there.”

Regina smiled letting John Cahill know it was alright to join her. She looked outside to see if she could notice the wind he was talking about. But it was too dark outside.

The night comes too quick in December.  The sky falls to a light gray blue every object across the school parking lot is little more than a blurring silhouette. From her classroom she can see the abandoned basketball court where a man was gunned down back in May. She knew it wasn’t occupied now only because it was so cold. Too cold for cigarettes to warm the children.

“Sounds haunted out there.” He said and then paused seeing the drawing of the bloody janitor on the desk.

“You’re not telling ghost stories are you Miss Johnson?” It was Mrs. but Regina didn’t correct him.

“No.” She laughed at him.

“Jesus, the violence these kids are exposed to.” He shook his head and let the moment of seriousness pass by him. “Well I don’t want to keep you if you have work to do, just thought I’d stop in. The building felt empty. I think everyone has snuck home.”

Now Regina could hear the howling of the wind. It was high pitched and tinny like an old black and white movie.

“Told you.” He said with a wink. It surprised Regina when he sat down on top her desk. Wasn’t he about to leave? He stared out on her students’ desk and sighed.

“Do you believe in ghosts?”

She shrugged even though he wasn’t looking at her. He continued nevertheless.

“I don’t know. As a kid I really wanted there to be ghosts. I thought one of them could be my friend, scare away all the bullies. Oh, I was teased. But it seems like nothing nowadays. I would think kids wouldn’t kill me. But I couldn’t
expect
kids to kill me. You know?”

He cleared his throat. He was famous for being longwinded and Regina now realized she was trapped. He was going to talk her ear off. She shuffled the drawing of the janitor under the more pleasant one like she had intended. She settled back into her chair. It gave a creak that flicked John Cahill’s eyes back at her.

“I was absolutely obsessed with catching a ghost. We were raised Catholic so we didn’t go messing with Ouija boards. We knew better. Invented our own little game, basically the same thing. We called it Ghost in the Glass and we had this really nice Crystal vase of my mother’s that we’d turn upside and pretend we’d trapped a ghost inside and it would tell us what we wanted to know. “

He laughed, “We were all very dramatic. It was me, my sister and my neighbor and his sister. Since we were all close in age and living next door in Chester it meant we had to be friends. So we had to find ways to entertain each other and pretending we were getting haunted was exactly the kind of entertainment we were into, except my neighbor Matt.  Years later he told me how much he would hate playing Ghost in the Glass.  I guess I kind of remember him getting upset. But he was one of those kids that was always getting angry cause we weren’t doing things the way he wanted.

“And years later we went and saw the Exorcist in theaters. I forced him to go with some girls and me. He cowered the entire time right along with the girls. I remember hating that movie, being so irritated by it, not sacred and so when we left I teased and teased and teased Matt. But he was obviously pretty shaken up. Went on this whole tirade about how horror movies are stupid and people who watch them are stupid.  I loved horror. Still love it.

“But he didn’t want to stay at his parent’s house. They’d been fighting pretty rough lately as far as I had understood and so I didn’t think anything of it until much later when I realized how much the movie had scared him.  And the next day we stopped into his house to grab some food and I decided to tease him in front of his mother. Man, did she correct me. She said in all seriousness.

“’Oh no, poor Matt, he’s seen a ghost.’ Then she continued on about how Matt used to have an imaginary friend that was a little girl. And how even she had heard the girl talking and playing with Matt. I could see Matt was getting uncomfortable as his mother told the story but he wasn’t denying it.

“One day she had heard them jumping on the bed, carrying on, laughing and talking and so she came up the stairs and when she went into Matt’s room he stopped jumping and said:

“Hey where’d she go?”

“Where’d who go?’ She asked.

“The little girl I was playing with.’ He told her. But that wasn’t the first time spooky things had happened in the house. She told me about how they would spot an old woman at the bottom of the stairs. And how their dog, Mister Mustard, would growl and bark like crazy at a rocking chair in their living room. To the point where they got rid of the chair and then the dog started to bark at a different chair in a different corner of the room.  I didn’t really believe it, liked to, but I could tell his mom really did. But she was a dramatic woman much like her daughter. She was convinced they were haunted. That maybe some little girl had gone missing during the Civil War and maybe the old woman was looking for her.

“She’d had this whole story worked up. But the house and our house were brand new. The land had been farmland during the Civil War and for a brief time there were Confederate soldiers camped there, but no battle. But it was the kind of story I liked hearing. The kind of story that gives you goose bumps of awe. Ah the wonder of the unseen world.”

John Cahill shared his smile with Regina.

“Matt’s parents went through a rough divorce soon after. He and I rented an apartment down in the Fan and I remember my shock when he was taking his father’s side. His father had always been that kind of father that when he got home, we’d all stop playing. We’d get quiet and then my sister and I would say we probably needed to get home for dinner. He was reportedly abusive and so again, I was just shocked that Matt had turned his back on his mother.”

Regina watched as John Cahill shook his head in disgust and thought for a moment before she realized she had missed her chance to excuse herself. His story started up again.

“It was because she cheated on their father. Good for her, life is too short not to do what makes you happy. Remember that, Regina. Too short.

“So I urged him to talk to his mother again, meet the guy, give her a chance. And eventually he did. He told me he was going off to meet them and I remember being at the apartment when he returned. God he looked exhausted. So much so I had to ask, which I normally wouldn’t do. Guys don’t talk about things, you know?

“How did it go?’ ‘Oh fine, fine. The guy was actually not bad’

“But Matt still looked like something had happened. So I asked again. Matt’s voice was distant as if he was making sense of something when he said, “He had a daughter that was dead.’

“You know I’m still at the age where I can’t respond to that better than, ‘oh, I’m sorry.’ So that’s what I said then, too.

“Matt just looked at me and asked me if I remembered that Ghost in the Glass game. He said he heard a voice and that’s why he refused to play. The voice was of a little girl and she told him, ‘I’ll be your sister one day.’

“I was somehow mature enough not to laugh and start teasing him when he added, ‘he showed me a picture of her. I remember playing with her.’

“Matt got weird after that and eventually we went our own ways and I knew he thought maybe the little girl had caused his parents’ divorce. But he saw his mother was happy now.”

John Cahill laughed, “That’s the kind of ghost story I like. The kind that says there are ghosts who stick around to make life better for people.” With that he swung off Regina’s desk without another word and left her classroom.

Regina sighed and listened as his footsteps disappeared down the hallway. She noticed red and blue lights flashing outside her classroom window and her soul sunk. She could only imagine what horror had beset Church Hill again. At least, she thought, with cops on the scene she wouldn’t have to clutch her mace on the way to her car.

She packed up her things, turned off the lights and looked back at her classroom, now only illuminated by the flashing lights. She hadn’t heard the sirens when they had arrived. Perhaps the police felt it was unnecessary, wasn’t like it wasn’t a tune that was overplayed in that area.

She walked towards her car and kept eyeballing the scene of a body bag being raised up on the gurney and shoved into the back of an ambulance. She saw her principal wave to her with a look of sadness in her eyes.

Not one of the students, Regina begged and walked quickly over to her principal, eyebrows raised and asking her to break it to her gently. The wind whipped against her and she almost lost her balance before she reached the principal.

“They found him stabbed.” The principal said. “Mr. Cahill.”

“Mr. Cahill found who?”

The principal shook her head. It was Superintended John Cahill who had been stabbed. It was his body shoved into the back of the ambulance.

“But I was just talking to him.”

THE END.

-A tale of the Hatchback Woman-

She buried it.

Jeff Simms stood and watched from his window. He couldn’t help it. A pretty woman stepped out of a beat up red car and started bending over. Jeff was an old man but he wasn’t dead yet.

He was so old, a young woman like her would know there was nothing he could do but stare. Might even appreciate that her beauty transcends generations. Maybe she would think of him as a creepy old man or get down on herself for only being attractive to senile old men, but Jeff didn’t think that she should feel either. Hers was a classic beauty.

Her blonde hair bounced from shoulder to shoulder as she looked around. Whatever was in the small bag she buried wasn’t something she wanted people to find. Jeff wondered if she suffered from incontinence as he did.  He imagined her on the move, long trip from somewhere and not being able to stop. So she fishes out a bag, does her business and keeps on moving. Only then it starts to smell. She gets off the interstate and lucks into asphalt-less ground just off of 295.

No, that wasn’t it. Jeff could tell there was something a little more to be concerned about, whatever was in that bag seemed important.  She seemed to get her bearings as if trying to remember the exact spot she buried it. Then she took off with the subtly of the Apollo missions.

Jeff considered another episode of
Law and Order
but his hand had already removed the chain on his door and he was hobbling across the street.

He could still smell the exhaust from the woman’s battered red hatchback. What was left of the cartilage in his knees ached as he braved the short incline off the street into the ditch. Level ground was welcoming though slippery. He felt his shoes slide a little on the muddy grass beneath and then he saw where she had dug.  There had been no effort to conceal it. The woman must not have thought anyone would venture off the street in this area.

Jeff hadn’t owned a shovel in fifteen years but he wanted one now as his arthritis reminded him he was no young pup. His digging days were over.  He kicked at the loose dirt instead, working his way until he felt something unearthly beneath the clumps of grass and mud. His body popped. A moan forced out of his stomach as he knelt and pulled the object out of the ground.

The bag was purple and an imitation of velvet, like the kind liquor pretending to be fancy came in. It had a drawstring that was pulled as tight as could be and then knotted to where Jeff Simms’ years of experience knew to get a pair of scissors rather than trying to pick it open.

As he foraged through his kitchen cabinetry he imagined what could be in the bag. He hoped it wasn’t shit. Jeff knew all about incontinence. He still couldn’t bring himself to wear the adult diapers his children kept sending him to ‘help out.’

People had so many medical problems these days. Jeff couldn’t assume a woman of her youth would not be forced to make an embarrassing roadside stop. And if that was the case then Jeff was the jerk for digging it up. But the bag hadn’t felt mushy aside from the obvious mud clinging to it. Instead there were hard forms within.

Jeff remembered not to run with the scissors once he found them in his junk drawer, however his trembling hands were hazardous enough. He dropped the scissors as soon as he clipped the knot. The bag immediately pursed open and with a soft shake Jeff watched the contents roll out onto his kitchen table.

The sight registered in an instant but Jeff did not gasp or sigh. He just stared, wondering if he was really that senile. He tried to imagine the story behind the woman in the car and the reason she stopped here just outside his home and buried such a thing.

He tried to remember life wasn’t like television, that there often times wasn’t any justice, and perhaps this woman had done the wrong thing to the right person and this was the last bit of evidence to link her to an unfair case in court system which would not listen to the reasons.

No
, Jeff knew he was senile. These were not human bones. He was sure of that, for all he knew they were chicken bones that had stunk on the woman’s drive and she just finally had to get rid of them.
But then why did she put them in a bag and bury them. She could’ve tossed them anywhere. Every gas station has a trashcan.

Occult sacrifice.

No, pet. Just a pet.

Jeff liked the simple idealism of his final thought. It was a dead pet that another pet kept digging up in the yard so this woman took what she could get and drove it miles and miles away and just picked a spot she knew her dog would not sniff out and dig up again.

Jeff started to shovel the bones back into the bag when his knee popped.

He shrieked as his arm swatted at the table for support. The bones scattered about the room and with a whine Jeff rolled on the floor. The pain was too much to bear. He hated taking the drugs the doctor’s gave him. It made his mind all fuzzy and just like that another day of his last days would whimper away without producing so much as a memory of what he had for breakfast.

Jeff refused to go down that easy. He cursed the linoleum and used the counter to pull himself back to up to his feet, they felt numb and offered no support so he twisted himself into a chair at the table. His eyes fell on the table and spotted one of the few bones that had not been flung across the room. He reached for it.

><><

Jeff stared back at the kitchen table. He was on the floor again holding a different bone than the one he swore he had just picked up on the table. Only Jeff could see clear as day the bone he had grabbed remained on the table.  He tried to search his memory for a sign that he only imagined sitting down in the chair.

But his memory was angry that he no longer trusted it.

Dammit, I just sat down. I know it.

Jeff dropped the bone in his hand and reached for a nearby doorknob to aid him. He stood up for less than a second before his knees buckled again and he landed face down on the linoleum floors. The smell of antiseptics still fresh from when he last cleaned it. He couldn’t remember that either.

His mind felt like it had slipped a gear. How could he be in the wrong place? He knew he wasn’t on this side of the kitchen a second ago. He clutched the bone he had dropped and his mind flipped again. He felt nauseous as suddenly he stared from the opposite side the kitchen, and he was sure this time that he was holding a different bone and the one he had picked up by the door was still lying on the floor.

><><

Jeff laughed.

He tried to toss one of the bones as far as he could but it landed in the middle of the street, like some prepubescent girl had thrown it. He was grateful all of his fellow Little Leaguers were not present or at least too dead to have commented on his throw.

Then Jeff walked back into his house, grabbed another bone and continued his laugh out in the middle of the street.

He’d read of this kind of thing in his science fiction magazines as a kid. It was called teleportation. And some how the six bones could transfer Jeff from one to the next like playing connect-the-dots. And he knew their path worked like that of whatever structure the bones once formed. As he collected them he found as long as he had all of them he wouldn’t jump to the next and so soon he was laying them out on the table and from his frail memory he knew they had once formed a human finger.

In all his years Jeff didn’t remember believing more in magic than he did just then.
Figures, that beautiful woman was a witch.

But here he was with the answer to so many of his problems. He started small and taped one of the bones to the mailbox just outside his door. He practiced a few times and thought he might scare the postman one day just for a laugh. The next of the bones he took to just outside the grocery store and placed it where he figured it wouldn’t be spotted in some badly hedged boxwood.  He was delighted to find that he would no longer need the bus. And that he could carry his grocery bags directly into his kitchen in the speed of a snapped finger.

Convenient.

He then addressed an envelope to his grandchild and mailed him a bone.

><><

“I got your letter grandpa,” His grandson, Will said over the phone.

“Do you have the bone?”

“Yeah, that’s cool is it like a dog bone?”

“No, it’s a wish bone! Go ahead and wish that I was there?”

Before the six-year old could finish hesitating, Jeff was standing next to him.

“How did you? Grandpa you’re being silly you were hiding in the closet,” Will said.

“Was I now? Did you check that closet?”

“No.”

“But you’re glad to see me?”

“Yeah. Want to push me on the swings?”

Jeff smiled and wondered if he could mail a bone to China so he could finally see The Great Wall.

><><

Jeff had every intention of becoming a globetrotter. But he never lost his priority of being a grandfather.  He visited little Will every chance he got. 

They had become the best of friends and Jeff’s daughter appreciated the time his watchful eye gave her to rest. Jeff felt like a million-bucks, or better yet, Grandpa-of-the-Decade!

Then one day much to his surprise he did not arrive in Will’s bedroom.

He arrived in a dark and dank and terrible place. Soda and beer cans and black trash bags swallowed his footing and he collapsed into a heap of trash. The smell barreled him over until he wretched up his morning cereal. He fought to stand again and knew exactly where he had ended up.

This can’t be happening!

Only it was, Jeff was stuck in a garbage truck.

His daughter must’ve found the bone in Will’s room and thrown it out thinking it was simple garbage that the boy had collected.  Jeff was so angry he didn’t notice right away that he had lost the bone. It was somewhere in the trash heap.

He fought through wet newspapers and packing materials and all kinds of slime.

Then the air compressor hissed.

“No!” Jeff cried as he could hear the gears starting to churn. He would be crushed alive.

“Help I’m trapped in here!” he screamed. “Somebody help! I’m in here!”

He dove through the garbage hoping in the darkness his hands might stumble upon the bone. He tore apart bag after bag, unleashing the foulest of stenches.

“Stop! Please!” he hoped the garbage men could hear him, but the truck was already growling forward and Jeff was tossed into the compacting mess. He could feel his pressure of the trash as it snapped the bones in his ankles, and his brittle old shins soon followed.

Please God help me, please!

He screamed and dug. He begged that it be a quick death if he couldn’t find that stupid bone. He could feel his heart sputtering. It wasn’t made for this. He was going to die, he just needed to accept that, but he couldn’t. He dug until the familiar shape appeared in his hand. It was too dark to know for sure, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He squeezed as hard as he could.

><><

Will jumped over a headstone.

“Did you see that, Mommy?”

“Will, be respectful this is a cemetery.”

Will didn’t know what that had to do with anything. He jumped another one and this time his mother yanked him by the arm back off the grass.  She almost lost the bouquet of flowers she was carrying.

“Don’t do that, you will make people mad!”

“But nobody sees me. Nobody here is alive anymore. And I know these places aren’t haunted. I’m not six anymore. I’m seven, duh.”

“Oh really?”

Will nodded with pride. He wasn’t afraid of anything.

“Do not jump on people’s graves.”

Will nodded and his mother tugged him back towards another grave.

“Hi, Grandpa!” Will screamed.

“Please,” his mother corrected him, “show some respect.”

“Ah mom, but dead people can’t hear. They’re so old they can’t hear. You’ve got to yell way louder than I did.”

“He’s right,” Jeff said looking at his daughter and grandson.

“How’d you beat us? I thought you hadn’t left your house yet?”

Jeff smiled and rolled forward in his wheelchair. He’d never shared his secret with his daughter, even after the incident with the trash compactor. No, from now on Jeff decided it was best to keep the bones out of places where other people might move them.

“How are you doing?” his daughter asked.

“Well the wheelchair is different, but I’m getting around.”

His daughter bent down and kissed his forehead. “You aren’t a young man. You can’t go jumping around anymore. Mom would’ve chewed your ear off if she could.” She set the flowers in a vase in front of her mother’s grave.

“Oh really?” Jeff smirked, “well I’ve got a bone to pick with you!”

His daughter looked him completely dumfounded and then he laughed.

“Forget about it, all’s well that ends well.”

THE END.