50 Famous Horror Legends (Part 1)

Introduction

I’ve seen a ghost. Matter of fact, I’ve seen a number of them, although, strictly speaking, some of them would perhaps better be classified as “supernatural beings” than the souls of the human departed. Once, while working at a college campus computer lab late in the evening, I went to take a restroom break. Down the hall, in the middle of the night, all the classroom doors were solidly locked.

There was one long hall with exits on opposite sides. Keep that in mind.

I went into the Mens’ Room, and, standing there, curiously, was a strange, tall man, with a chili bowl haircut, black, and a large black moustache. I remember he had on a plaid shirt, and what I believe were brown corduroy pants. He had a strange, Shemp Howard kind of haircut, and strange little round glasses with heavy wire plastic frames. I took him to be a custodian or maintenance man; maybe he was, at one time.

It struck me as a little odd, of course, that he didn’t seem to be doing anything in the Mens’ Room except standing by the toilet with his arms folded. I used the urinal. I walked over to wash my hands. In the mirror, I could see him standing behind me, looking at me in the mirror, a very confused expression on his face. His arms were folded across his chest. He looked as if he couldn’t understand what I was doing there…maybe he couldn’t.

Then, he turned to walk out the door, and I followed him. I was directly behind him when the door swung shut, and I swung it immediately back open…and he was gone.

The hallway in front of the computer lab stretched right and left, to east and west exits. He was not walking down the hall; he couldn’t have walked outside in the time it took for me to come out of the restroom without seeing him. He had not gone into any other room, because they were all locked, and, even if he had had a key, the doors were really LOUD when opening and closing, and I would have heard him.

He was not in the computer lab. I checked, my brain still trying to put together the weirdness of what I had just experienced.

The mysterious man had vanished, it seemed, almost right before my eyes.

However, that’s ancient history, and not, primarily, what I’m here to talk about. What I'm here to talk about is...fear.

What sorts of things make YOU afraid? Or, at the very least, give you the creeps? Ghosts? Vampires? Dead people? Spiders? What about rats?

Fear is the most universal of all human emotions; it runs second fiddle to love. (Saying that will make me umpopular, but, examine the way animals survive in the jungle, or humans maintain civilization in the urban jungle. Obedience is usually born of fear: fear of punishment, fear of retribution, fear that I'M NOT GOING TO SURVIVE.)

Humans dwell on their fears, transform them, and create stories and scenarios meant to help us deal with them. That's what the present book is all about.

Many of our best fear stories come down to us as urban legends, or even timeless legends, and the sories in this book are no exception: each of them is based on a popular piece of folklore, both ancient and modern, and each of them has that haunting, timeless quality that make our best fear fables seem all too frighteningly real. \

So sit back, relax; crack open a cold one. We're going to take a little terror trainride through fifty-odd states of shocking good fun. It's getting late, and the sun is setting out behind the hedges in the weed-choked yard.

Turn off the TV. Settle in.

In the words of the great Edward Van Sloan, "I think it will thrill you. It may...shock you. It might even HORRIFY you."

And he finished that off by telling the audience for the original Frankenstein:

"Well, we warned you!"

The Three Ghosts

I was visiting with my aunt after my granpa died, many years ago. She was married to a doctor, and they lived in a nice, two-story Victorian house near the hospital district. I haven’t been over there in a lot of years, but I can well remember sitting around after the funeral was over, and everyone’s nerves were a bit drained, and talking far into the night.

“This story--Papa use to love to tell these old Kentucky ghost stories--this story is about a man named Jameson, who was driving his wagon across a lonely old field one day, when he met up with three ghosts

“Now, Jameson was just a-riding along, minding his own business, when he sees three dark shadows standing right in the middle of the road. He suddenly senses trouble, and he reigns his horse in. The shadows approach, and old Jameson gets the shock of his life.

“One of them comes with his shirt all bloody in front, as if he had just been shot. Still another has a sharp poker sticking out of the top of his noggin. The one in the middle, the one that Jameson thinks surely must be the leader, trails a long rope behind him, the noose still around his neck. His head hangs at an odd angle, and Jameson realizes the man’s neck is broken. The faces of the three are ghastly white, and Jameson realizes all of a sudden he’s in the presence of the walking dead!

The leader, the one with the noose around his neck says, “We come for you Jameson! It’s your time.”

Well, Jameson was aghast, but he kept his cool, saying, “Why, I ain’t above forty-five years old yet! Whatever can you mean? How could it be my ‘time’?”

The three ghosts looked at each other warily, before the leader said, “You’re gonna be involved in a little accident on this road. Horse is spooked; wheel falls off your wagon. You go plum smack dab into a ditch and hit your head on a tree. Brained like a suckling pig at Christmas time!”

Jameson felt his heart grow cold, knew that the possibility of what the ghost had just said was very great. But to die today, on such a beautiful, crisp, clear day as this? It somehow didn’t seem right. He shook his head; he was having none of it.

“Well, look here, how do I know what you say is true? I mean, for all I know, you’re just trying to convince me to come with you so’s as you can slip away from the Devil, undetected. Right? I am right, aren’t I?”

The three ghoulish figures looked at each other with a look of growing uneasiness. The broken-necked leader suddenly piped up, “Well, I suppose if we did bring you back, the Boss might take you a fair trade…But, say, you aren’t a sinner like we were! Maybe the Devil wouldn’t even have you! Me, I shot a man in Memphis just to watch him die…”

“And I killed my wife and chopped my mother-in-law up into little pieces. Buried her in the garden,” said the bloody-shirted one.

The last one confessed, “Me, I was just a regular old bank robber! Banks and stage coaches! Nothing fancy, until that slick lawman done jumped up and shot me down with a double-barreled dose of thirty-ought six!”

Jameson listened to it all with astonishment, but kept a steely gaze. He then stood up, and raising his arms above his head, said, “Well! That’s a mighty impressive roster of felonies and misdemeanors boys! I guess you’ve all pretty much earned your time in Hell, sure enough! But, to claim that I’m no sinner? Pshaw! Why, I’ll have you know, I’m the worst sinner has ever been! Why, I’m the worst sinner’s ever walked the face of the goldurned earth. Matter of fact, I ran over an innocent puppy on the way out here! I shortchanged the grocer at the General Store, cut a fart downwind from the Widow Jenkins, and pilfer the collection plate ever Sunday, whether I need it or not.

“I once shot a man for snoring! I once wrestled an angel, hogtied a passel of nuns, and raped a hyena! So if there’s any doubt in any of your burnt-out little pea brains that I’m one bad, bad man, you can just clear that horse puckey out of your flyblown craniums now! Comprende?”

At that, the leader of the bunch looked sullen and embarrassed. The other two ghosts began to shift slowly in the dirt. Jameson smiled, put his fists on his hips, pulled at his long grey beard, and said, “Now, I know that your boss doesn’t fill you in on what’s a-goin’ on very well, but I reckon one of you had some idea of who it was you was a-goin’ after before they turned you loose. I reckon that fellow had some designs on trading me in for a little freedom, of maybe getting himself a furlough or even a reprieve! Now, which one of you was it?”

And Jameson bent over, peering at the three ghosts with a suspicious eye. He looked a little like a stern schoolmaster addressing three guilty little boys. The three ghosts bgan to mutter and grumble nervously. Suddenly, Bloody Shirt said, “Him! I’d swear it was him all along!”

“Hmph!” replied the other in his defence. “That’s stuff and nonsense! Why, I think it was you, and you’re just tryin’ to pin the blame where it don’t rightfully belong!”

The third one said, “Well, I didn’t know anything at all about any of this before we set out! I think you fellows are both in on it!”

“Why, that’s the dumbet thing I’ve ever heard!”

Suddenly, the three ghosts began to pull each other’s hair! They poked each other in the eyes, pounded eachother on the chin, slapped and kicked each other! They must have looked a little like some ghoulish version of Larry, Curley, and Moe!

“Well, those three phantoms got so busy fighting each other, each just certain the other was using them to bring Jameson back to Hell and trade him for a free pass back to the world of the living, that they never even noticed the living man drive past them as fast as he could go.

“He raced home, raced inside, bolted his door, and spent an uneasy night looking out the window. Of course, the way these things are supposed to end, he lived ‘happily ever after.’ Whether he did so or not, Daddy never said. But that was the story he told us.

“I like to think Jameson outsmarted the Devil’s henchmen, but you never know.”

She leaned forward with a strange gleam in her eye. I suddenly remembered that the house we were sitting in, an old Victorian that my Aunt and her husband had lived in for time out of mind, was supposed to be haunted

The clock ticked loudly as silence, reared its muffled brow. The room was dimly lit by soft lamps; the night seemed long and interminable after an exhausting day.

“Of course,” she finally said, leaning forward, her hands clasped in her lap, “I might have elaborated on the details here and there.”

The Treasure in the Wall

My grandpa, Lord rest his soul, hailed from Kentucky, where they use to spin yarns just like this one here, while sitting around an old cook stove and passing a bottle of moonshine.

Grandpa remembered this one from when he was a boy. He told it to me, and now I’m passing it on to you.

Otis Smutzer’s uncle Bib up and died, and Otis was mighty grieved because of it. Bib and Otis use to hunt rabbit and quail together, and Otis was just about as close to Bib’s heart as any boy could be.

“Otis,” he’d say, “I promised your Pa I’d look after you if anything ever happened to him, and I intend to keep my promise.”

Otis didn’t quite know how Bib intended to do this, but, all the same, he was glad that he did. When Bib took sick and died, suddenly, it hurt Otis in the deepest and most profound way. The boy, just a little thing of twenty-seven, like to grieve himself to death; all day long he’d be out on the chicken run, feeding kernels of corn to the birds, sobbing in his bib overalls. Sometimes you could find him wallowing around with the pigs (boy was, as they say, kind of “special”).

Otis never did smell too good, nor look too good, but when he got the word to come on down to the courthouse for a reading of the Last Will and Testament of Bib Smutzer, he got gussied up in his best suit (which didn’t fit him none too well, him being a might large in the middle), and, making sure he gussied up and put on enough rosewater to draw a cloud of blue bottle flies, he headed to town with his hat in his hand and hope in his heart.

The executor of Bib’s estate (some fat cat lawyer) sat very solemnly at a desk with the will in front of him, and twitched his fuzzy nose first this way, then that. He looked at Bib as if he wasn’t exactly sure just what sort of strange, uncouth breed of animal he was dealing with, but remained polite and professional nonetheless.

“Otis, if I may be so bold--It says here your uncle left everything he had, which, truth be told, wasn’t much, to the Veterans of Foreign Wars. Except for the deed to the house, which includes all the adjoining property and livestock. Now, that all belongs to you now, Otis, to dispose of as you see fit. Now, there is something in here about…”

And the lawyer fellow peered closely at the sheet of paper, and then said, “Ah yes! Bib left instructions that, should you be able to locate his secet treasure, it indisputably belongs to you.”

The man put the paper down, rolled his eyes as if in exasperation, and then took the little granny glasses perched on the end of his fuzzy nose off, wiping them carefully with a handkerchief.

He seemed like he was already weary of the weird ways of hillbilly folk. Otis felt mighty confused.

“Treasure? He never said nothing to me 'bout no treasure.”

The man smiled, but looked as if he could just barely tolerate Otis’s obvious lack of native intelligence.

“Otis, if I may be so bold?”

“You may.”

“Oh, right, Well, Otis, your Uncle Bib was known to be a real prankster, a guy that loved a practical joke. No, I don’t think there is any actual treasure. Still, I guess a man might spend the rest of his life looking, if he thought there was any truth in it”

The lawyer fellow smiled a big, wicked grin, and put the paper down. His words continued ringing in Otis’s mind:

“I guess a man might spend the rest of his life looking, if he thought there ws any truth in it.”

On the way back out to his truck, Otis was deep in thought. Man, had Uncle Bib gone and left some kind of actual fortune behind, or something? Something he had hid, so as to keep it safe? Why would he up and die and not leave a clue as to where it was hidden? Otis couldn’t say for sure, but as he lay his greasy scalp down on his old pillow, he found it harder and harder to get to sleep.

It started flitting through his mind just what he could do with all that money, assuming it really existed, and how he could use it to fix the old place up, and buy him some snazzy new clothes. Maybe even take Hildegard Harrison to the ice cream social this Spring (it never occurred to him Hildegard might not want to accompany him to an ice cream social). He felt himself grow excited, and he tossed and turned in the dark.

Kerash!

Otis bolted wide awake, sitting up in bed and pulling the covers about him tightly. What in the world was that? Sounded like broken glass!

He had heard of ghosts, pesky dead people, who made similar sounds, but he always told himself he didn’t believe a bunch of stuffin’ nonsense. Right now, though, he was not so sure.

Just then, he heard what sounded like screeching tires, and the loud vroom of an engine, and he found himself blinded by what he soon realized were twin headlights.

He raised his arm to shield his eyes, and was astounded to see, at the foot of his bed, what looked to be the outline of an old pickup truck! It vroomed, and revved its engine like a hungry beast, seeming almost to bob in the air as if it were floating above the floor!

Otis was too astounded to even yell out (who would have heard him, anyway?), but through the fear and terror, he could clearly see that he was, most likely, just having a nightmare, so he forced himself to lie back down, and pulled the cover up to his chin (although the smoke and exhaust were making it difficult to breathe).

Suddenly his eyes popped open. He recognized the dark silhouette sitting behind the wheel of the phantom pickup! Surre enough, it was Uncle Bib, alright, and he was just sitting there behind that big old steering wheel, leaning over intensely, revving that engine and belching out clouds of diesel exhaust (which Otis could swear was coming out his nostrils, too).

Also--and Otis wasn’t sure how he knew this, but he did--Uncle Bib had blood dripping down from his teeth.

Otis boltedup instantlyly in bed, yelled out, and fainted dead away. When he awoke the next morning, it was with a splitting headache and the knowledge that something strange had transpired in the night--but he wasn’t sure just what. Took him dang near forever to remember the particulars of his weird dream.

All day long Otis moped about with a worried frown and a furrowed brow. He slopped the hogs, fed the chicks, watered the garden--but he just couldn’t get his mind off of things. Was Uncle Bib trying to tell him something? Or was it something else? He wasn’t sure, and he didn’t like to be so unsure.

Aunt Millie was coming to look after him in a day or so. Supposedly, Aunt Millie was a medium, or could speak to the dead, or had visions or some such thing. Otis wondered what Aunt Millie might have to say about all of this when she arrived.

That night, Otis tossed and turned, listening to the hoot owl in the barn. The room seemed as still and quiet as an old country lake, and, as stifling as the air proved to be, Otis still felt a weird sense of coldness creeping over him. He settled down into a fitful sleep, plagued by disturbing dreams.

He was standing at the door when someone knocked. He reached out to grasp the door knob.

Ewwww!

He suddenly pulled his hand back; it was dripping slime! He looked down at the door handle, and realized it had turned into a giant yellow slug-like creature.

He reared back in disgust, then noticed the weird angles of the walls and doorway.

The doorway blew open with a howling crash, and, illuminated in the moonlight, he could see the weird, lonely figure of Aunt Millie standing just beyond the threshold with her arm raised imperiously. She crept forward toward him, almost as if she were floating just above the creaking floorboards, and said, “Otis! I’ve come a long way Otis! But my friend her, he’s come a whole lot farther.”

And behind her loomed a great shadow, filling up the doorway, and blotting out the drifting moonlight. A shadow in a great Stetson hat.

***

His eyes blinked open, and his breathing was labored. He was scared to sit up and look around, because he knew, just knew, there was someone moving about in the room with him.

His eyes adjusted to the weird, spectral light shifting round the bedroom. He sat up, his heart hammering in his chest. He could not quite believe what he was seeing as the weird light seemed to configure itself into a shrouded human shape, flowing in a shimmering, pale gown. His breath caught in his throat as a scream died on his lips; if Otis had had any hair, it almost certainly would have been standing on end.

The figure approached the foot of his bed slowly, making no noise. Otis was frozen in wonder and terror. The figure then stopped, stretched out one impossibly long arm, pointed one skinny, long finger capped by a long, long fingernail, and croaked out, in a graveyard whisper, the single word “there.”

Otis followed with his eyes, realized the phantom was pointing at the far wall, and then looked back at his ghostly visitor. To his surprise, the phantom had already vanished.

Otis hurriedly pinched himself to make certain he hadn’t been simply dreaming. He then stumbled out of bed, went to the far wall where the ghost had pointed, and began to feel along it.

Just a plain dirty old wall, he thought to himself. But still, it seemed as if there was something there. He began to thump along it with his fist. He noted that it made a right solid thump until he came to a certain spot, then…

“Bingo!” he yelled out loud.

He knocked again harder, just to make sure he wasn’t imaging things. No! He was certain he wasn’t! There was some kind of secret hiding pace behind the wall!

With mounting excitement, Otis suddenly went and got his claw hammer. He ran back to the room just as the dawn was breaking and the light in the room was transforming to a dishwater grey.

He stopped suddenly in front of the wall, pulled the hammer back, closed his eyes, and stuck the wall as hard as he could, sending plaster dust flying everywhere.

He turned the hammer over, used the claw side to tear away more of the wall. It was just as he suspected.

His heart hammering in his chest, he reached his ham-hock arm down inside the hole, and felt around. At first, he almost feared he wouldn’t find anything until his fingers seized upon what seemed to be a rusted metal box. His eyes bulged in excitement as he pulled the thing out.

He blew dust off of the top, choked, shut his eyes in pain, and then sat down on the bed, holding the thing out in front of him.

It was small and obviously very old. He quickly broke the rusted lock with his powerful fingers. He put his hand in, pulled out a fistful of money, jewels, gold coins, precious stones…it was Uncle Bib’s “treasure”! He was rich!

At last, he pulled out a note. It was in Uncle Bib’s unmistakable tiny chicken-scratch handwriting. It read:

Many years ago, I was involved in a poker game with a number of other fellows. The pot was pretty sweet when sauntered over to our table a chap no one had ever seen before. He was drunk and mean and arrogant, but had a sack full of more money and jewels than any of us had ever before seen. Well, he demanded to be let in on the game and we, having seen the amount of loot he was carrying, did not object.

That fellow must have been from the Devil himself, as he won hand after hand until we put everything we had in, and were down to our skivvies, as they say. Well, darned if he didn’t win everything we owned! He then stood up, smiled, thanked us, tipped his hat, and grinning like the Devil himself, wished us all a good night. Then he strode right out of the saloon, and left us feeling as if we’d just been horns waggled.

We figured him for a card cheat or magician or something, so we followed him out on the lonely old road, sneaking beside him as he went, hidden in the bushes and trees. He just kept right om walking into all that blackness, whistling as if he didn't have a care in the world. Which, truth be told, feller probably didn't. Not least, till we run up on him.

Well, we had seen about all we came to see, so, donning some balaclavas, we then jumped out of the brush, me and Eddie Sims and Frank Barnett and Old Gus, whose last name I don't rightly recollect. They're all dead now, so I don't guess it matters none.

Wasn't none of us outlaws, but we had already decided to make out like we were the James gang or something. I drew out an old stick of wood and wrapped it in my coat, like I'd seen in the movies, making like it was a real gun. Why, I'm not sure, except it seemed the proper thing to do. The others just stood there like dummies, their faces covered; we all figured we could strong arm him if he didn't believe we were armed.

He took one look at us all, and before we knew it, he had dropped to the ground! Fainted dead away! My, what a coward. So we grabbed his loot, and turned to hightail it out of there when Gus or somebody said, "We can't just leave him here. What if he gets eaten by a bear or something?"

We didn't want to be responsible for someone becoming food for hungry animals, so we elected me to go over and gently nudge him awake. Which I did. Which I will regret until the day I die. (Which, if you're reading this, has already happened I assume.)

He suddenly flew up like a vengeful demon! He was punching and kicking and spitting and clawing and biting, and I like to never have gotten away from him, except Frank Barnett stepped in suddenly and grabbed him around the waist, and Gus began pounding on top of his head while still holding his cap, and Eddie Sims seemed too panicked to even move.

Finally, we managed to beat the rascal down to the dirt, and were satisfied we'd finally laid him out, when, upon turning to leave, he jumped back onto his feet, and came cahrging at us again!

This time I picked up a large branch, started swinging it to and fro, knocked him in the head with it until blood poured out his skull. All the while he was swinging like an angry bear, cursing us and calling out, "I swear before the Almighty, I'll get every damn one of you! If it takes me from now until judgement, do ya hear me? Every damn one..." He yelled out this and other things I won't even repeat (mostly stuff about the virtue, or lack thereof, of our respective mothers). Finally, we beat him and beat him until Eddie Sims reminded us that we sure didn't aim to kill him, so we all turned around to scram, when, suddenly...

Yeah, you guesed it: he charged back up from the ground where he lay, a bleeding, broken wreck; he was more full of murderous hatred now, though, than any man alive, I reckon.

I won't say who finally produced the knife, but, at this point, it was an act of sheer desperation. The feller got stabbed...and stabbed...and stabbed some more...The feller doing the stabbing was rolling around in the dark with the crazy devil, and, well, I suppose you could make an argument about self-defence either way.

But the end result was: we'd just killed a man. Now we had a corpse on our hands. Sort of killed the whole mood of the evening. Man alive! I once read a story about the killing of Rasputin, and the killing of this fellow sure reminded me a whole heck of a lot of that. The way he wandered around after the stabbing, bleeding like a stuck pig, cursing us and vowing to haunt us forevermore. Well, we didn't pay him much mind, but, soon as he up and died, we had ourselves a little confab out there under the lonely, watchful eye of the moon, and we decided that we weren't going to let on that anything had ever happened. Heck, we would have all hanged for sure, and for what? For killing a no-good card shark what cheated us out of our hard-earned nickel? No.

So we got us a passel of rocks, and used some old rope to tie the stones to the body, and filled the pockets full of stones, and then sank that grisly old corpse in the river. Heh, sort of like Rasputin after all.

Of course, we took all of his money, just like in the old ballad about whiskey in the jar. Funny thing, though, the other fellows seemed particularly unenthused about the prospect of divvying it up; said that it just felt wrong, somehow; sort of like taking blood money. I had no such compunctions, but the rest of them (particularly the fellow what done the stabbing), decided they'd just as soon have back the money that was theirs to begin with...and nothing else. Which left me holding the bloody bag, a richer man, but somewhat unnerved.

It was then that I decided to secure the loot in a safe place, behind the walls of my own bedchamber. I can't say as if that fellow just up and died without ever fulfilling those curses he uttered--many a night, I thought I'd heard sinister footsteps, and faint moaning, heavy breathing. Of course, things sometimes get moved around here without me knowing who done the moving. But, if that fellow was a vengeful ghost, he sure could have fooled me, as it's been pretty peaceful around these parts (no one ever having discovered what we done) all these long, long years.

And that's all she wrote, my friend.

***

Otis put the letter down in mute wonder. So, he had found the hidden loot and learned the awful secret. Now what?

He counted out the money. It looked to be a bundle of bills, some gold coins, jewelry. Must be thousands and thousands there, easily. Heck, even an idiot like him could see that easily enough.

His mind suddenly began to race with thoughts of what he was going to do with all that money.

"Buy a new truck, that's the ticket!" said Otis to himself. Then he whispered, "It somehow doesn't seem right, though, taking this money. Like maybe it's cursed after all."

Suddenly, he heard:

"It is."

As if in answer to his thoughts, a low, murmuring voice moaned out in the silence of the empty room.

Heads on the Mantle

The two yokels sat at the bar, getting soused. On the jukebox, Johnny Cash sang about how he walked the line.

“I tell you what, any man fool enough to spend a night in that place, he deserves whatever he gets.”

His buddy spit tobacco juice into an old spittoon, took a swig of beer, and said “Pshaw! Ain’t nothing to it, I tell you what! Just a bunch of old wives’ tales to scare the little ones before they tuck in for bed. Ain’t a real, true, honest-to-goodness MAN alive couldn’t sleep forty winks in the place. Why, I’ll wager I could get a better nights' sleep there than laid up in bed with that cantankerous old shrew I been married to for thirty years.”

His buddy took his John Deere cap off his head, scratched a few greasy curls, and said, “You looking to make a wager, old hoss?”

His friend ran his fingers through his itchy red beard. He looked a little like Grizzly Adams; at least, that’s what everyone always told him. His friends all called him “Griz” at any rate.

“What are the terms?”

The man leaned back on his stool, tossed a peanut into his mouth idly, and reflected.

“Well, let’s say, you spend an entire night in that place, I’ll owe you a quick fifty dollars. If you chicken out though, or happen to meet with any, uh, unfortunate circumstances as a result of your…well, then you’ll owe me fifty dollars.”

Griz frowned, scratched his beard, said, “How you planning on collecting the dough if I meet with any ‘unfortunate circumstances’?”

He hadn’t thought of that. He looked a little puzzled, but eventually, the two dunderheads made it out to the pickup truck, and started out on their little adventure.

“I’ll spend the night in the truck,” said the man who had thought up the wager to begin with, “and if you need any help, or run out screaming with your tail between your legs, I’ll know about it and we can hightail it out of there.”

They drove down to the old farmhouse in Butcher Hollow, a lonely, desolate place where the fields had all long ago been abandoned to be choked by weeds and brush. No one wanted to come within ten miles of the place; not after what had happened.

(Long ago, so local memory recalled, a man had taken his family, a wife and two children, out there, buying the place even though it had a reputation of being cursed, or haunted by the ghosts of the Indians buried nearby…

The man laughed off what he considered to be the superstitious folklore of uneducated yokels; he was a college teacher, and quite an erudite fellow, who never believed in ghosts or ghouls or things that go bump in the night.

Well, everyone shook their heads at his foolhardiness, but, since it was none of their business, they just let it be.

It wasn’t long, however, before the situation out there became strange, and began to arouse suspicion. The first thing was the iron bars the man had put on the doors and windows. Whenever he came into town (which was less and less frequent), he looked disheveled and worried, preoccupied with keeping “something out”, and away from his family. He mumbled to the storekeepers, never seemed to make much sense. But he paid cold, hard cash, and that was good enough for most.

Finally, he stopped coming to town altogether, and sent his wife instead, who was a mousy little woman that looked even more worried and pale than her husband. She usually had her two boys in tow, two young lads that seemed sullen and shy; a little glum. Well, tongues wagged, and stories went this way and that, but, despite some colorful whisperings, no one could quite put their finger on it. Something seemed to be amiss out at that old place, and, before you know it, some folks had a notion to go out there and make sure everything was still okay.

A few weeks went by, and most everyone in town was chattering, in hushed, worried tones, about the fact that the strange man and his wife had not been seen for long. Folks began to suspect that something bad had happened out at the old place, and, finally, the Sherriff decided he needed to go out and have a look. Taking his most trusted deputy with him, he set out for the place on one cold, blustery November day.

They parked the patrol car at the end of the old dirt road, got out, began to walk slowly up to the porch.

They spied something strange stuck up on a pole in the yard. At first, they thought one of the children might have put a doll’s head on top of an old wooden spike.

Then the two men stopped dead in their track. The blood froze in their vein. The deputy suddenly screamed, but the Sherriff stood there in simple wonder.

Dolls’ heads don’t bleed…

With mounting horror, the two peace officers approached the grisly handiwork. Ahead, the front door stood open, leaning crazily at an angle, seemingly having been pulled off the hinges. The two men went in now as if in a daze. The Sherriff drew his pistol, held it out in front of him in a slightly trembling hand.

As soon as their eyes adjusted to the gloom, they faced a further scene of horror:

On the mantle over the fireplace, the head of the second child had been placed, where it had dripped blood and gore that had dried, in a little pool, on the floor below. What was more, it seemed as if someone had used the blood to scrawl strange messages and signs on the wall. Most of them looked like symbols from old books on the occult, but there were stranger things, phrases that made no logical sense. For example:

…this is not the sea auntie he say.

Was one of the phrases that always stuck with the Sherriff, who looked in vain for some meaning behind it.

They found the adults upstairs, the wife having been decapitated with the same axe used to slaughter the children. The husband had then scrawled the strange messages on the walls, had come back to his bedroom, had put the barrel of an old shotgun in his mouth, and had pulled the trigger. The body fell in a pool of blood and brains, beside the slowly cooling corpse of the wife. Guesome, huh?)

Hours went by. Griz had been in there awhile now, and the man in the truck suddenly realized he could no longer make out the light from the man’s flashlight. He didn’t believe in ghosts at all; still he was a little wary. He leaned back in his seat, turned on his old Philco radio, twisted the dials.

He couldn’t get a clear reception out here for some reason. He switched the radio off, sat and stared at the dark, broken windows that looked out on the lonely, moon swept yard like black, murderous eyes. He felt himself grow curiously excited at the prospect of going in the place himself, bet or no bet.

Strangely, he found himself getting out of the cab of his truck, moving almost as if he were having a dream. He closed the door, and stood looking at the old house, his skin breaking out into gooseflesh. But he was darn curious, all the same. Was it really as scary inside as some old house from a horror flick? He felt himself move forward on rubbery legs; he was afraid, of course, but curiosity seemed to be compelling him forward.

He climbed the rickety teps up to the sunken porch, his boots chomping hard on the creaking old wood. He cautiously grabbed the screen door, which was hanging by a hinge, and pulled it open. Then, he tested the doorknob of the front door.

It swung open with a bone chilling creak, His eyes fought to adjust to the darkness. Then, he saw a dim light that seemed to glow, brighter and brighter, as he stepped across the threshold.

He looked about in astonishment.

There were streaks of blood on the walls. Strange writings and symbols. It looked as if someone had slaughtered a pig in the living room.

But that was not all. There were dozens of tall candles set about, illuminating the strange display on the mantle over the fireplace. He at first thought someone had cut the heads off a bunch of mannequins. It looked like an entire family: Mom, Dad, and two little ones.

Then one of the mouths popped open.

He heard a low, guttural groan.

A string of gooey intestines slopped from the open mouth of one of the heads. It writhed about on the floor, like a snake.

It whipsawed around, reached for him, began to coil itself around his ankle.

In a blind panic he shook it free. He bolted out the door, across the sunken porch and down the rickety steps, running toward the cab of his truck.

He opened the door furiously, hopped inside, jammed the key in the ignition…

“No! No, no, no…”

He felt tears of panic and frustration course down his cheeks. The truck wouldn’t start! The engine chugged and sputtered, as if it were mocking him.

Then, out of the corner of his eyes, he could see a tall, dark figure approaching him slowly in the moonlight. He felt his blood race in his veins, and then…

It was moments later when he felt powerful hands shaking him awake.

“Whew! Lucky I had them smelling salts!”

He looked up in groggy confusion. Above him, the Sherriff smiled down, his flashlight held out in one hand, And behind him was the grinning figure of ol’ Griz.

“Wha-wha?”

“Your buddy here got kind of worried when he came out and found you lying in your truck, fainted away. He came out to the road and flagged me down. We been trying to bring you around for at least fifteen minutes."

Then, the man remembered why it was he had run out into the truck. Desperately, he grabbed at the steering wheel, his eyes bulging out of their sockets.

"Man, don't go in there, whatever you do! You won't believe what I saw in there. Heads, severed at the neck, stacked up side by side over the fireplace! Blood dripping everywhere, all over the walls!"

He turned as white as a sheet of paper, and his hands shook on the steering wheel. Griz and the Sherriff looked at eachother with peculair expressions. Griz said, "Hoo boy, now that is some story, old timer. But I tell you what, I sincerely think you must have imagined it. You see, when I went in there, I was so plum scared myself that I just plain chickened out and went out the back door. I guess I could have spent the night in the yard and won the bet, but I got so darn cold, and it was just as spooky out in that desolate, weed-choked old yard...well, I just plum decided to give up, I guess. So I came back out to the truck, and found you like I found you! But, man alive, I didn't see no candles or severed heads or blood on the walls, or none of that!"

The sheriff said, "Fella, you want to follow me?" He didn't seem as if he were really asking, either, so, reluctantly, the cowering man behind the wheel did as he was told.

It was with wobbling knees that he was lead back onto the creaking porch, as the sherrif shined his light in through the dusty, broken panes of glass, and said, "Take a good look in there, old timer. You see any severed heads or blood or what-have-yous?"

The man looked incredulously at the dusty, ruined living room. It was obviously deserted, dirty, but there was not a hint of anything he had seen (or thought he had seen) that had so badly frightened him before. Just ratty old furniture covered with grey shrouds, and yellowed pictures hanging at odd angles on the wall.

The sheriff said, a little smugly, "Satisfied?"

He wasn't. Long after that, whenever he sat drinking away his sorrows at the local tavern, he recounted his frightening experience to anyone would listen to him. Most thought him a silly old drunk; others thought he might be trying to get one over on them.

But a few thought he had really seen an honest-to-goodness ghost. Or, at the very least, had experienced something supernatural.

But they kept it to themselves, for the most part.

The Gravedigger

He pulled his cloak about him against the cold, gathered his pick and shovel, and started out before dusk. The sky overhead was a dirty grey, and the cold wind blew threatening droplets of rain. His walk, though, was not far.

He went slowly, sorely, down the wooded lane, glancing up only occasionally at the barren branches that curled, like the gnarled bones of decayed fingers, across the sky. The gloom was something real, so real a body could almost touch or taste it. He felt nothing inside, though; neither sadness nor loneliness ever touched him. He walked the world with his withered, white face an inscrutable mask, his black cloak wrapped around his lean form, an enigma to everyone.

Soon, he turned off the dusty lane, coming to an old wrought-iron gate set deep in a decayed stone wall. Above, he could see the name of the place set into the gate: Eternity Fields.

It was a cemetery, old and abandoned, the rolling ground, dips and hills, overgrown and choked with clumps of weed and rotting vegetation. The monuments themselves were weathered, broken; leaning at strange angles, as if the restless spirits buried beneath them were in a painfully slow revolt, trying to push their way, inch by dusty inch, back to the surface of the earth. He put his hand out to the gate, pulling the rusted, squealing thing open, and walked through.

His boots crunched in the gravel, and he quickly made his way past cracked, moldering cherubs and tottering marble angels to the back of the place, where the strange, soft soil seemed to yield beneath his feet; yield, as if the casual visitor might be in danger of sinking in.

He quickly found the gravesite he was looking for. He bent low, straining his eyes at the inscription on the front, but the stone was too weathered for him to make out even the name. No matter; he stood, cast down his burden, heaved a gusty sigh, and began.

The job grew progressively worse the deeper in he dug. He cast shovels full of earth to the side, breathing in the stench of freshly turned soil, feeling droplets of sweat chill upon his brow as the grey sky spat dribbles of cold rain. It was very dark now, and he needed to be done soon.

He became aware of a rustling behind him, the sound of footsteps in the tall grasses. He fancied he could hear the heavy swish of a dress. He glanced behind him.

She stood, her flesh the color of old soap, clutching a bundle to her breast. He already knew that, inside the bundle, lay an infant. The young woman was quite beautiful in her ruffled white gown, but her eyes belied the fear and confusion that seemed to be controlling her. For a moment, both of them were too surprised to say anything. Then, with eyes wide and chin quivering, the strange young woman warbled, “Please, please help me! I’m lost, and there’s…there’s something wrong with my baby! Oh, I’ve come so far, and you’re the first human face I’ve seen in so, so long.”

He sighed inwardly; he was already incredibly tired, and this was only slowing down his progress. He ignored her, turning back to his work with a grunt.

She became frantic.

“Sir, I implore you! You must help me! You must find for me a doctor. My baby! Can’t you see my baby is very sick?”

He turned back. He was silent for a moment. Then:

“Miss, your baby is not sick, nor is it sleeping. Your baby is dead.”

She looked at him as if truck by the bolt of Jupiter. Then she grew indignant.

“No! You liar! You’re only trying to trick me! Why, I was wrong about you! You’re not a good man at all; why, you’re a horrible fiend, trying to convince a young girl that her baby has died in her arms! You--”

And with that, she advanced forward as if to strike him, but seemed suddenly to recoil.

There was, of course a peculiar odor about him now.

“Oh my, what a foul stench!”

She thrust her pale hand across her mouth and nose, backing away. He moved closer to her, letting his cloak fall open just enough to reveal…

He thrust out his hands, siezed her bundle, and she drew back with a strange, savage, frightened hiss. There was a loud report, as of a rifle shot, and she was gone, quicker than a frightened fox, running off into the surrounding wood.

He felt his chest heave back and forth in surprise. Then looking down, he spied the faded flannel bundle the woman had dropped. He used the toe of his boot to kick it over.

A pitiful pile of decayed bones fell out, a grinning skull rolling over and staring up at him with blackened eyeholes.

It was now almost completely dark. Eternity Fields was oddly, eerily silent; one could hear no chirp of crickets, rustling of nearby animals, or even the howling of a lonely stray dog.

He continued his work, unabated, finally revealing the coffin buried in the shallow grave beneath the rocky, reeking earth. He went down in the hole, ran his finger over the rough pine lid.

He went back up to retrieve his crowbar.

He carefully lit his lantern, setting it close by. Eerie shadows grew long by the flickering flame, as, filthy and reeking of sweat, he used his last bit of strength to pry the creaking lid away, not liking at all the squealing of the coffin nails and splintering of the decayed wood.

Before him, a bed of darkness. He picked up his lantern, shined it inside.

Lying there, as fresh as the day she was planted, was the young woman with whom he had just been speaking, not long ago.

She must have, judging by the condition of the box, been down here a long time. Yet, on her pale visage there was not a sign of decay! She looked as if she could sit up, and walk out of her own unearthed grave.

What was more, she seemed to have grown repulsive and fat; she looked, a little, like a swollen, white worm.

He suddenly felt the fear tremble in his bones, bringing him awake once more. It was an unholy task, but it had to be done. Quickly, he drew from beneath his cloak his sword.

Cutting the head off was the work of a moment. A torrent of fresh blood gushed from the severed neck, and he supposed some of it must have splattered on him. He would have to wash in the creek.

Finally, heaving and puffing in exhaustion, he reached around his neck and removed the strange, stinking necklace he had been wearing: fresh cloves of garlic. He carefully bent over, pried the jaws of the severed head open, filled the mouth with the cloves. Then he bundled up his tools, tossed them over the edge of the pit, and began to carefully ascend. Before he even managed to climb out, though, he remembered the pitiful bundle of baby bones that lie scattered in their shroud, nearby.

He picked up his lantern, walked over to the bundle, and with filthy, bloody finger, began to carefully collect the bones, wrapping the rotted grey bundle up in the tiny shroud.

He walked back over to the grave, climbed down, and placed the remains of the infant in the cold, dead grasp of the mother. Then he replaced the boards of the lid as carefully as possible, nailing it all down as best he could.

Lastly, he filled in the hole in the earth, tamping it down.

***

He was weary deep down in his bones. Above, a cold grey dawn was breaking in the east. Somewhere, a lonely cock crowed. The wind blew through his hair. He was tired and filthy, but unafraid.

There were some things a man just had to do; didn’t mean he had to like them.

He left the cemetery as the world awoke around him. He would sleep like…well, like the dead, he reflected with grim amusement. He had solved their mutual problem, put a great evil to rest, finally. Whoever that woman was, however she had become what she became, the townspeople could rest assured she would trouble their lives no longer.

He’s Right Outside the Door!

She shivered on the couch, the bowl of popcorn resting across her crossed legs.

"We interrupt this program to bring you a special bulletin: a maniac has escaped from the Cravenshurst Hospital for the Criminally Insane. The man, who is described as extremely dangerous, has been locked down since the Sixties, when he was found unfit to stand trial for the murder of his mother, a priest, and a trio of Eagle Scouts. He is described as being large, burly, and having a menacing hook for a right hand..."

She smiled to herself. This movie was so stupid, so low budget, it seemed more like a comedy than anything else. Some masked maniac skulking around a lonely, Midwestern neighborhood; she'd seen it all a thousand cheap movies ago. She got up to get herself a Coke.

She was babysitting ("babysquatting," her mother always called it) on Halloween night. Well, it showed just what sort of social life she had, didn't it? No parties for her; she was plump and homely and looked a lot like Amy Farah Fowler on that show "The Big Bang Theory." Well, at least she was making money.

What was that? She thought she heard rustling in the bushes outside. Probably just some kids playing spooky games on Halloween night, but maybe she should go investigate. Maybe.

No, probably not a good idea. The kids were asleep upstairs. She needed to go check on them in a minute. Their parents would probably not be home for another hour, hour-and-a-half.

She sat back down on the couch. The sound was down on the television (one of those newfangled flatscreen jobbies her own parents could not afford), but the movie looked as if it were just about to get good. The masked killer was skulking through the bushes, breathing heavily, holding his hooked hand out in front of him. The camera shot was such that it made the audience share the killer's point of view. Ahead of him, a spooky house glowed with a single light in the bedroom upstairs.

"That's where the stupid teens are," she giggled to herself. "Screwing their brains out! Boy, are they going to be in for a surprise."

She yawned just as the phone (a suspicious landline) began to ring. She hopped off the couch, went over to the end table, and picked it up on the third ring.

"Hello? This is the Johnson residence. May I ask who's calling?"

Nothing on the other end.

Then, what sounded like some pervert heavy breathing...

Oh man, she thought to herself. Not this kind of creep again!

But, after all she reflected, it was Halloween night. What else did she expect?

She angrily slammed the phone down, got up, went into the kitchen for another cup of tea. Just as she was about to open the refrigerator door...

Bleep! Bleep! Bleep!

The damn phone was ringing again. She thought about just letting the machine get it, then thought that that would be silly. What if it was the Johnsons calling, worried about the kids? How would it look if she let the machine pick it up? (The reader will be forgiven for thinking the girl a little dense. After all, she was still a young teenager who had never held a real job.)

She went back out into the living room, picked up the phone, angrily said, "Hello? Hello? Who is this?"

After a moment of silence, she was surprised when a voice on the other end said, "Wait! Don't hang up. I know you've heard that old story..."

Pause.

"Who is this?"

"Who I am is not important. Or, maybe it is the most important thing in the world right now, at least to you. Anyway, that's not the question that I asked you. I asked you if you've ever heard the old story. The one about the babysitter."

She started to breathe heavily, her eyes going wide. She was getting really scared now.

"N-no..."

"Well," continued the voice, which was curiously flat and robot-like (at first she found herself wondering if it was a male), "it goes a little something like this. Once upon a time, a friend of a friend's cousin's girlfriend was babysitting some brats. The rich parents were out living it up, and the hardworking young girl was glued to old horror movies on the old-fashioned boob tube. It was Halloween.

"She suddenly gets a call. Heavy breather. She figures it's a Halloween prank, hangs up in anger. Heavy Breather calls back, and this time, she really starts freaking out. She hangs up; the third time he calls, she gets really freaked out, and then calls the police. The police trace the call...and find that the maniac is calling from the phone in the bedroom upstairs! The cops tell her to get the heck out of there quick, but, like a hero I guess, she goes to try and rescue the kids. Maybe he throws them down the stairs at the end, I don't know. However, I know you know this story. Heard it in the hallways at school, right? From a friend of a friend, right?"

She had no idea what to say. The blood seemed to turn cold in her veins, and her hands were trembling. The voice on the other end seemed to grow more excited, less monotone.

"What you don't know Missy, is that the story is TRUE! He's out there, waiting; lurking. It happens every Halloween night, somewhere. The cops don't like to talk about it. Society and the media, they cover it up. But there it is. I can't tell you how I know these things, I just do."

"You, you're lying." she said, her voice quivering as tears sprang to her eyes. "This is all some sort of a joke!"

"No," the voice shot back. "No joke! I can see it all right now, as I'm sitting here in my room, waiting. Right now, the maniac is lurking on the sidewalk just outside your house, waiting in the darkness. Fantasizing. Watching YOU!"

She gasped, her head swiveling around to look at the curtained living room window. Could she see someone lurking out on the sidewalk? No. She could not. She tried to reassure herself that this whole thing was ridiculous.

"This whole thing is ridiculous! I'm hanging up now!" she spat angrily at the receiver.

"No!" exclaimed the voice on the other end. "Don't you dare do that! I may be the only hope you have of survival, because I can see his every move. Now, he's snuck in back of the house, is examining the rose trellis. It looks as if he's going to climb the rose trellis and sneak in through the window...that window opens up into the childrens' bedroom, does it not? WELL, DOES IT NOT?"

She sniffled, fighting back tears, "Y-yes..."

"Okay, well, I suggest you get up there immediately and rescue the little brats before that maniac has time to slip in and slit their..."

She suddenly felt her courage well up, fight against her growing panic.

"Oh, this is stupid! Maggie," she told herself, "you're just being a big baby. This is just a Halloween prank, and there's nothing to be afraid of. Nothing up there that can hurt me. Nothing up there, nothing up there..."

The voice on the other end grew still.

She was reminded of the scene, suddenly, at the end of the movie The Believer. The teacher at the Yeshiva had told a dead Danny Balint the same thing

(Nothing up there...nothing up there...)

as he trudged fruitlessly up one flight of stairs, caught in an endless loop. Of course, it was the end of the movie, and Danny was in some sort of private Hell...she pushed the thought out of her mind, went boldly up the staircase to the childrens' bedroom.

She paused before she got to the door; She still had the phone in her hand. She suddenly raised it to her ear, was surprised to catch the voice speaking in mid-sentence.

"...through the window. The little ones are all snuggled up in their wittle beds, visions of sugraplums and such. He's standing over them, creeping slowly, stealthily around in the dark. Oh! He just tripped on something, sent it crashing over, a toy maybe..."

Indeed, she thought that she could hear something rattle around beyond the door. Maybe the girl was sleepwalking again. She didn't know. She suddenly realized the phone was still in her hand. She thrust it angrily up to her ear.

"Look creep," she said definatly, "I don't know what sort of sick, twisted game you're trying to play, but it hasn't worked! Epic FAIL! Now, I'm going in there to make sure everyhting is okay with those kids, and, you know what? I KNOW it will be, because this is just a Halloween prank, and you're just some sick, lonely creep who gets his joillies calling teenage girls on the phone and trying to freak them out! Now, I'm going to go do my duty because I' m the BABYSITTER, and that's just how we roll!"

And with that, she swung open the door with a warrior's cry.

She blinked for a moment, her eyes adjusting to the gloom.

The kids were snuggled up in their beds. The television was turned to old monster movies.The girl, Veronica, shot around, her mouth full of chocolates. The boy, Billy, barely turned his head at all.

"Oh, oh thank God," she said, breathlessly. "I actually thought, for a moment, that this creep on the other end of the line was telling the truth. I thought you guys might be in trouble."

Suddenly, a voice behind her said:

"They...I mean, YOU are."

She turned.

The lights went out.

And then someone, somewhere heard a scream.

Hellfire on Horseback

The wind blew across the prairie with a tired, howling moan.

Ma and Pa were snuggled deep in their beds. Pa had had a rough week: he had had a dispute with a local farmer over boundary rights, and the man had gotten rough with him. Pa had gotten rough right back, and had threatened to call in the sheriff. This had settled the man’s hash for the time being, but Pa was sure that it didn’t mean the end of the trouble. Not at all.

Now, in those days, Pa had an old black horse named Nightshade, and she was maybe the envy of all the neighbors. Of course, she wasn’t much more than a broken-down old dray horse, but she had a kind of quiet dignity about her, and was the apple of Pa’s eye. Why, he even claimed that that horse had saved his life once.

He claimed that that old nag had pulled him free by letting him hang onto her tail when he was sinking in a pool of quicksand…but I never did believe that particular tall tale; I just didn’t see how that could be.

At any rate, Pa loved that old horse, and did all he could to pamper and keep her well groomed. Not that she was ever going to win any prize competitions, but in Pa’s rather rattled head, she must have been the most valuable piece of hossflesh in the whole dern county.

But, unbeknownst to Pa and Ma, that night, as they slept, dark figures lurked around their property, trespassers in hoods. One of them carried an old lantern. Suddenly, there was a smash of glass, a shout, and fierce laughter as two horses bounded away into the darkness.

Amazingly, though this was quite close by, and the wind was up, this did nothing to wake Ma and Pa, who were plum tuckered after a hard day working the farm, cleaning house, taking care of the children, and whatnot. They slept until Ma got the faintest whiff of the smoke wafting in through the open bedroom window, and rolled over, listening.

She could hear the crackle of the flames. She turned to Pa, who was sound asleep.

“Bob! Bob! Wake up, I think the barn’s on fire!”

The old man was finally roused. He stared at her a moment as if he might, still, be dreaming, then, bounding out of bed, he raced to the window and looked out in the pasture.

His eyes bulged out of his head and spit (and foul language) flew from his mouth as he turned, throwing on his breeches and boots, and bounding down the staircase, yelling and knocking on the walls as he went.

“Fire! Fire! Up, damn it! We have to put it out before it destroys--”

He raced out to the yard. Bub, the oldest son, was right at his heels, yelling “I’ll go and fetch a bucket.”

This proved an absurd suggestion, though, for, as they both stood out on the yard, and as Ma and the rest of the brood came to join them, it was already apparent that no amount of water was going to rescue the barn or livestock.

It was a raging inferno now, hideous squeals and shrieks of dying animals pierced the crackling roar of the flames, Pa looked as if he had just been struck by a thunderbolt from God Himself.

“No! No! It can’t be! Beelzebub! Oh, Beelzebull!”

Beelzebull was the name of Pa’s precious black horse. Suddenly, as if siezed by a madness, Pa bolted forward, racing toward the burning barn, yelling “It’s her! Can’t you hear her? She’s dying in there! I’ve got to save her!”

Ma cried after him. “Bob no! You’ll be killed!”

But he was beyond reason. He raced into the burning barn, and Ma, in her desperation and panic, raced after him. The children stood in shock and terror right where they were. The littlest ones were screaming and crying, of course.

Ma said later that, as she went through the door of the burning barn, she saw, for a moment, Pa standing there, his clothes singed and his hair smoking, leading Beelzebub out of the place. It was just then that some flaming timber collapsed from the ceiling.

Ma covered her face with her arms, recoiling. When she regained her balance, she saw Pa lying under flaming boards. Beelzebull, his precious horse, was rearing back, her skin aflame, her shrieking cries piercing the night.

Ma never said how she did it; perhaps even she didn’t know, but it must have been God who gave her the strength, because she managed to drag Pa free and outside, right before the entire ceiling of the barn collapsed in a hellish ruin.

Ma collapsed, but was soon revived, as the nearest neighbors had seen the fire and had come racing to offer assistance. She was taken into the house and carefully laid in bed, while the neighbor folk collected buckets of water to douse what remained of the barn.

As for Pa, he was hurt beyond helping. He lingered, delirious, for three days, rousing himself every once in awhile to yell out, “We’ll get you, Jed Aikens! We know’d it was you who done it! Me and Beelzebull will get you! We’ll get you and drag you to hell if it’s the last thing we ever do!”

Everyone gathered around him to pray, because Dr. Blakely said there weren’t no hope for him; and so we were all keeping a death watch.

At near midnight, three days later, Pa indeed did die of his injuries. Or smoke inhalation. Or maybe of a broken heart.

Well, Ma about grieved herself to death. Bub was the man of the house now, and worked the farm as best he could, but he never could make much of a go of it (truth be told, he was something of a lunkhead).

Me? I left the farm shortly after, not even fourteen years old, and riding the rails like a genuine bindlestiff. I finally got a job in a carnival, and didn’t return home for a few years. When I got back, though, I got quite an earful.

Ma was older and more tired; Bub was a quiet, grave man, looking older than his twenty-six years. We all sat down to a rough dinner, and Ma told me the local gossip.

Bub buttered his bread, said grace, looked up from his plate to my ornery face, and said, “Where you been all these years, Skippy? We got to missin’ you.”

He always called me Skippy. To this day, I don’t know why.

“Aw, Bub,” I said, “You know I’d of just been a burden to Ma and the rest of the family if I’d a stuck around. I was just another mouth to feed.”

He ate a mouthful of his bread, chewed reflectively, and I could see the wheels turning in his greasy, brown brow. He turned to Ma, said, “You hear that Ma? Skippy done left so’s not to be a burden on the rest of us. Why, I figure a feller puts that much care and thought into the welfare of his family, well, he right deserves a decent homecoming. Just like the Prodigal Son the Lord spoke of.”

I wasn’t rightly sure if I was being chastised or welcomed back in the fold with open arms, but I said nothing. Instead, I gently turned the topic of conversation back on the fate of the presumed burners of our barn--and killer of our Pops--so many years prior.

“Well,” said Bub, “Some said it went this-a-way, and some said it went that-a-way, but this here is how I know’d it to happen. You see, that yeller-bellied sumbitch and his hired goon was standing outside chawing terbacky one evening, when, suddenly…”

Seems the Jed Aiken to which Pa kept referring in his delirium was standing outside with his hired man one evening right around dusk, when suddenly, his wife, who was in the kitchen doing chores, heard what sounded to her like the approaching hoof beats of a horse.

In fact, she claimed there was a whinnying cry, screams, and what sounded like the roaring of a mighty flame. In terror, she rushed outside, just in time to see a cloud of smoke and what looked like a fiery black steed racing away into the sunset. When the smoke cleared, she couldn’t believe her eyes.

There were two pairs of charred leather boots, standing in a pile of grey ash…and nothing else! Well, the old lady screamed and fell to her knees and fainted, and the children went to get the sheriff.

He found peculiar, smoking little craters all around, like the hoof prints of a burning animal! But they scratched their heads at that, as everyone knew such a thing was impossible.

Finally, they called in some professor from the college, who wandered around with a pipe hanging out of his jaws, scratching his head and taking samples, and finally declaring the thing was, most likely, caused by something he called “spontaneous human combustion.”

And everyone knows THAT is impossible, too.

What was left of Jed Aiken was swept up and put in an urn on the mantle; I don’t know if they kept his boots or not, but maybe they buried them. His hired man probably got much the same treatment.

As for the rest of the neighborhood, a sort of local legend began to brew. Some whispered faint and worrisome things about the death of Jed Aiken and his hired man, about revenge from beyond the grave, and about the immortal soul of my Pa and his beloved old mare. A dark and sinister folktale began to take shape.

For they say that, riding through the country lanes and down long and dusty roads on certain moonlight nights, a dark horseman and a black steed can be seen, smoke and tongues of flame flying from their weird, ghostly forms, as they go racing by. They say you hear the thunderous hoof beats, and the weird shrieking cry of the demon horse, and, before you realize what is occurring, they have raced by, leaving whoever sees them rigid with fear.

Some say they seek the souls of the wicked and the lost, to burn them alive and drag those souls to Hell.

Some say these things, and some may actually believe them.