50 Famous Horror Legends (Part 4)

Cry-Woman's Bridge

It was a rainy, foggy night in Dublin, just east of Indianapolis, many, many years ago.

The roads were wet and slick; visibility was poor. For some reason, the mysterious woman was speeding along, trying, desperately it seemed, to make it to some destination, perhaps before it was too late.

(Searchers later found the swaddling clothes and pacifier of an unidentified infant, presumably her baby, in the back of the car. In the days before child car seats, this was permissible; the baby itself was never found.)

The woman skidded into the side of the bridge. Perhaps she had been drinking; perhaps it was simply one of those odd, tragic quirks of fate that sometimes wait, creeping in the brush like a deadly snake, waiting to strike out at the worst of times. Whatever the case, the car plunged through the old wooden guard rail, into the churning river below. The woman was killed, perhaps sitting unconscious in the driver's seat, water filling her lungs as she died, unknowingly, in the dark recesses of her stunned brain.

Even more horribly, perhaps she awakened in time to know her terrible fate and was trapped in the car as it slowly, inexorably began to fill with water, encasing her in a heavy metal death chamber as hope floated away in the churning damp.

Whatever the case, the car, and the woman were later hauled from the river. Her identity, if it was ever discovered, is lost to the retelling of this tale. Most tragically, the rescue workers discovered the aforementioned baby blanket and pacifier in the back--but no baby. What, they wondered, could have happened to the tot?

Many years passed, but the ill-starred woman refused to fade into the obscurity of legend. Travelers through that unhappy stretch of the countryside began reporting the image of a mysterious young woman, pacing back and forth across the bridge, looking, for all the world, as lonely and forlorn and lost as fate and local folklore would suggest.

Witnesses claimed they could her weeping.

"Oh, where is my baby? Oh, where can my baby be? Oh, won't you help me find my baby?"

(Or, something along those lines, at any rate.)

We can conjecture, based on the experiences reported by one young couple, exactly what a weird encounter with this particular phantom was like:

Brad pulled the car over to the side of the road. Janet was oh, so pretty tonight! And, what a gorgeous night it was, too! The river looked so calm and peaceful, and the sky was clear and studded with little twinkling diamonds. Brad turned up the radio to a little lounge music and put his arm around his best girl's shoulder.

She looked over at him with her large, milky blue eyes, and said, "Oh Brad, you're so strong and handsome! Why any girl would have to be out of her gourd not to want to go steady with you!"

Brad smiled. He was the captain of the football team, and he was, indeed, tall, rugged, athletic, oh-so-handsome, and popular. He leaned over, feeling his big heart go pitter-patter in his chest. She leaned over as well, and he knew they were going to kiss...

"Oh, where is my baby? Oh, can't you help me find my baby!"

"W-what was that?" Janet drew back, nervously.

Perturbed, Brad leaned in again, saying, "It's just the wind, that's all. C'mon."

"But," Janet replied, "there isn't any wind! Hey, look!"

She suddenly pointed over to the edge of the bridge. There, standing lonely and solitary, was the tall, strange figure of a young woman. She seemed to be curiously dressed as if she were twenty years behind the times. Also, she seemed to be disoriented or distraught and was pacing back and forth, worriedly.

Suddenly, Janet said, "Oh my! You don't suppose that could be?"

Brad said, "No. There is no such thing as ghosts, Jan." He sounded a little miffed. Suddenly, the woman walked back down the length of the bridge, disappearing into the darkness.

"Where'd she go?" Janet seemed like she was getting panicky. Brad thrust his key in the ignition, sighed, and said, "You want to go look for her?"

But before he could start the car, Janet cried out--

"What in the world!"

There was a low, eerie metal scraping coming from the trunk of the car. Brad and Janet turned around, surprised and frightened out of their wits now.

There was a strange black silhouette standing back there! It moved forward over the trunk of the car, wailing, scraping its long, weird fingers over the lid. This caused a horrible sound to emerge, a sound that could set a person's teeth on edge.

"Brad! Let's get out of here!"

But he was already starting the car, gunning the engine, pulling away from the road and across the bridge in a squeal of burning rubber.

The car sped across the bridge, bouncing a little over the old wooden boards. Behind them, the lonely figure faded into darkness.

"W-who in the world was that!" asked Janet, after she had calmed down a bit.

Brad didn't answer at first, but then said, "I don't think it was a 'who' so much as a 'what'!"

They parked in front of Janet's house. Brad could see her mother part the curtain worriedly and look out. He got out of his car, walked around the back, stopped, went to the passenger side door, opened it, and said, "Get out. There's, ah, there's something I need you to see."

Janet gets out of the car. Curiously, she clack-clacks down the paved driveway to the rear of the car. She stands there, aghast.

It is as if someone has raked razor-sharp claws down the lid of the trunk.

One for the Road

Dee was a little drunk, but the party was, really, a lot of fun.

It was 1985, and Dee was 21 that year. She was what the guys called bodacious; a totally hard body with short blond hair, a face like a fashion model, and lips to die for. She was always well dressed, if rather conservative in her long green skirts and sweater tops. She worked as a youth counselor, but, deep inside, she dreamed of one day going to Los Angeles and becoming a television actress.

But she promised herself she would finish college first. Besides, she was having the time of her life.

She had had a little too much to drink tonight though and was stumbling around, bumping into young couples. The song “Lady in Red” was blasting on the stereo. It was 11:45.

Gotta be home by midnight, or I turn into a pumpkin, she thought and started cracking up. She wasn’t quite sure why the thought had struck her as so funny, but she was suddenly hanging off a young couple, drunkenly singing the song on the stereo, when another party of people arrived.

It was two former roommates and an old boyfriend, an exchange student from India who was very conservative, and whom she knew didn’t drink. He looked at her as he entered, realized she was almost blotto, and a vague look of sad unease crossed his face. He folded his arms over his chest, and one of the girls he was with (a girl that always liked to stir stuff up), said, “So, we have the third member of the love triangle, right.”

Dee drowned; she’d like to wipe the smirk off that bimbo’s face if she could. Instead, she frowned, and said, “No. He knows that I love him. I told him a long time ago.”

The three looked puzzled, and Dee wandered away. She made her way to the couch, and flopped down next to two geeky guys who were discussing…well, she wasn’t quite sure just what they were discussing.

The fat one with the worried, limp Woody Allen hairdo and the pocket protector (and thick, plastic glasses) was leaning over, trying to compete with the music, yelling at his buddy, who finally moved his skinny butt from the battered easy chair and plopped beside the three of them on the spacious sofa.

“Hey man, you ever hear the legend about James Dean's car, man?”

His friend (a skinny kid with a Shemp Howard haircut, dressed similarly to his buddy), said, “No. I have seen his grave, though. He’s buried in Fairmount.”

“Yeah, but he’s from Marion. But, anyway, they say that Porsche speedster, the ‘Lil’ Bastard’…they say that car is cursed.”

“It still exists?”

His friend seemed surprised.

“Of course it does, you idiot! Do you think they’d just melt down an important piece of history like that? But, the thing is, is: they don’t know what to do with it. You see, anyone who gets close to it, something bad happens to them. Like, once they put the car up on a truck to transport it somewhere--some millionaire bought it. Well, it slipped off the flatbed or something and broke both the mechanic’s legs. Pretty fricking weird, huh?”

The friend got an awed look on his face. He said, “Far out…” slowly like his voice was playing at half-speed.

“Yeah,” but the geeky storyteller continued, “it gets even weirder. Parts from that car were put in two OTHER race cars. And do you know what? Those cars both crashed, killing…”

She got up. She didn’t want to hear anymore. As she walked away, though, she heard the boy start in on the story of the “Death Car.”

“…So this guy buys this real expensive car, right? And he thinks he’s gotten this great deal, right? But there is something wrong. Like, there’s this smell, man, and no matter what he does, no matter how much air freshener he uses, he just can’t get it out. And it’s the worst frickin’ smell he’d ever smelled. So he goes back to the used car salesman, and he asks him about the smell, and the dude gets a puzzled look on his face, and says, ‘Look, man, I really thought we cleaned that smell out of the car, but now you say you can smell it. You see, the former owner of that car, well, he committed suicide in that car. Yeah. Attached a hose from the exhaust and ran it in through the window. Anyway, it smelled like a rose when you drove it out of here, right? The damn car must be haunted, is all I can figure.”

The other guy said, “Man, I never knew cars could be so creepy.”

Dee wandered around, looking for her date. Well, they were practically boyfriend and girlfriend at this point. He was such a fox! They had been together nearly every night for the past two weeks!

But now he seemed to have disappeared. She sort of drunkenly asked about him, but finally, she just went down the hall opening doors--which she realized was just a little rude.

After she opened a closet and a (thankfully!) empty bathroom, she tried a third door and--Bingo!

There he was.

However, he wasn’t alone: he was making passionate love to another girl.

Dee did a double take.

Then--

“You, you bastard! How could you? How could you embarrass me like this?”

The young cad’s head hot around, and the girl he was with suddenly looked a little frightened. He said, “Dee, wait, it’s not what you think!”

But she had already turned and stomped out with a huffy shout. He followed, shirtless, through the crowd and to the walk outside. He caught up with her outside and grabbed her shoulder, but she shook him away violently, yelling “I don’t want to hear any of your BS excuses! I never want to see you again.”

He let her go, staring as she walked off down the street, yelling after her, “Dee, you can’t just walk home alone!”

He grew quiet as he watched her disappear into the distance.

“It isn’t safe,” he said to no one but himself.

***

She clack-clacked angrily on the gravel at the side of the road, hearing the sounds of the campus partying fade into the distance, as she went deeper and deeper into the desolate neighborhood. She suddenly felt very foolish: her apartment was, at least, a forty-minute walk from here. And it was chilly out here.

And creepy.

She went down the deserted street, the old, decrepit houses seeming to stare blackly at her as she went. Wasn’t there any life on this street? Wasn’t anyone up and moving about, yelling at the kid to turn off the TV and go to bed? She saw a few dim lights behind drawn shades…but the whole neighborhood seemed curiously…dead.

She crossed the desolate intersection. Ahead, a low cement wall topped by a wrought iron fence enclosed a cemetery.

Great, she thought, Just the place I wanted to pass tonight, as I walk home alone.

Suddenly, the combined effect of alcohol, fatigue, and creeping depression all overwhelmed her, and she had to stop and sit down on the curb. Which, she knew, was quite possibly the most foolish thing she could have done under the circumstances.

She held her head in her hands and began to weep.

Hey, there’s no need for that, my dear.

Huh? Who in the world said that? she wondered, her head suddenly shooting up as she peered around in apprehension.

Aw, c’mon, honey. Do you need a lift home? Let’s go for a spin!

She looked down the street. Parked at the corner was an old black station wagon.

She suddenly felt afraid. She stumbled to her feet, turned, and began to walk clumsily past the graveyard. She glanced back over her shoulder.

It was gone.

Great. Now I’m hallucinating, she thought. She turned and began to walk back the way she had come, when, suddenly, she heard the vroom of a revving engine. She whirled around, almost losing her balance in the wet grass at the side of the curb.

The black station wagon was now on the opposite side of the street. Almost as if it disappeared and reappeared…but that was ridiculous.

Dee felt her pulse quicken, and an electric charge began to swirl in the air. She could feel static electricity set her hair on end, and her skin began to tingle as she began to approach the passenger side window of the car, almost as if she was no longer in control.

What am I doing? she thought. I should turn around and run back to the party.

She bent down to the window, and it rolled slowly down. A blast of cold air, as if the air conditioning unit came straight from the county morgue, hit her square in the face. Along with a most curious smell, like decayed flowers.

Also, a few dozen flies seemed to be buzzing about.

The driver was a dark silhouette in a slouching fedora. She noticed he had a bandana around his neck. Suddenly, he leaned over, his features exposed in the sickly yellow glow of the crime light.

She was silent with shock for a moment.

Then she opened her mouth to scream, but no sound would come out.

For the face, she now looked into was nothing less than the clean white skull of a living skeleton, dressed as if someone had taken him from his moldy grave, dressed him in a coat and hat, and set him behind the wheel. The eyes were deep pits of black; the mouth parted in a hideous death’s head grin.

“Hey lady! You want to take a ride?”

The Mexican Pet

The crazy old lady had never been to Mexico before, but she was going there now. As a tourist, she could afford first-class accommodations; her husband was LOADED, after all.

Predictably, he elected to stay behind. With his secretary. To catch up on important "paperwork." well, she might be a little crazy, but she wasn't stupid. She would be filing for divorce as soon as she got back Stateside. Divorce, and a decent amount of alimony to keep her in the lifestyle to which she had become accustomed.

The resort in Acapulco was beautiful, giving her plenty of room to lie out on the beach and tan, walk along the coastline and pick up shells and odd bits of this and that, and feel the gentle salt surf upon her face. Ah! It almost DID seem like paradise, in a way. And the food and drink were simply to DIE FOR.

And went she went into town, there were so many interesting little shops, so many strange little vendors selling pictures of Elvis and Jesus, knockoff toys, statues of saints and Indian and folk art; colorful blankets and rugs. Why she hardly knew where to start!

One day, while making her way through the dusty streets, she spied the ugliest little brown dog she had ever spied, looking lost and forlorn at the filthy, trash-littered curb. It was starving for something good to eat.

She approached it cautiously but found that, if she simply fed it peanuts out of her hand, it was gentle and pleasant and obedient enough. She instantly fell in love with the ugly little thing, and, scooping it up, took it back to her hotel room.

It was only a few days before she had adopted the little furball, and paid an exorbitant fee to have it smuggled back stateside. The crazy old lady cared for the ugly little dog as if it were the most precious, beautiful little pet money could buy.

She let it snuggle up to her in bed, let it caress her with its long, weird, thin tongue--that felt more like a cat's scratchy tongue. Of course, there were drawbacks; the thing sometimes scratched her viciously, even bit her with its sharp, weird, curving little teeth. But what did she care? She was head-over-heels in love with the thing and willing to tolerate a lot from it.

And it would eat most anything. Which didn't mean she skimped on the dog food, either. She had the money, and she preferred to buy the most expensive brands.

Her daughter hated the little thing.

"Oh, Mom!" she would say, grabbing handfuls of her hair, "can't you just gag every time you look at that little thing! It's so gross, and it smells...weird! It acts weird and looks weird...I'm-I'm afraid to pet it! It bites!"

She would shush her, but feeling more like yelling "Hey! It's my damn dog, and if you don't like it, GET OUT." Instead, she would say, "Why, you're just being silly, dear! Why, little Snoozer here is a perfectly kind, gentle, and playful little pooch! Aren't you my little snooky-wookums?" And then she would get quite close to the dog's weird, elongated snout, and let it lick her with its weird, raspy, long tongue.

Well, things went on like this for a while, until, one fine day, the woman took the pooch out for a walk to her favorite outdoor cafe. Once seated, though, the dog began to act as if it were sick (and, frankly, its mistress wasn't feeling much better these days, herself), and began to drool, burble, and retch as if it were going to hurl up its doggie food all over the cafe floor.

"Oh, oh dear..." The woman began to drag the dog away, but, like so many other times when they were out on their walks, the little critter wouldn't budge. So, she scooped it up in her arms and went right away to the vet.

It was in the waiting room that she began to feel woozy. Suddenly, a disturbed-looking receptionist came out and said, "Mrs. Ratcliffe, the doctor would like to have a word with you in private."

Well, not knowing exactly what could be wrong, but not feeling all that well, the crazy old woman went back into the examining room, where she found the veterinarian as white as a sheet, looking as if he'd seen a ghost. He suddenly snapped at her, "Lady, where did you get that dog?"

She looked at him blankly for a moment, and then finally, sweating bullets and feeling very faint, she said, "Why, I found him when I was on vacation in Puerto Vallarta. Why? Is something wrong with him?"

The doctor rolled his eyes and moaned. He said, "Lady, we've got to get you to a hospital right away! You've got to be put through a battery of tests! Who knows what sort of disease you might have contracted from that thing!"

She laughed. She said, "Why, why that's ridiculous! I feel just fine!" But she DID NOT feel just fine. Pretty far from it.

"Lady," the veterinarian began again. "I want you to listen to me, and I want you to listen to me good. That little 'dog' you brought back from Mexico? Lady, that's no dog. IT'S A GIANT MEXICAN SEWER RAT. And, I can't be sure, but I think it's got RABIES."

This One'll Kill Ya!

Okay, I got this story but nobody gonna believe it, dig? I heard it firsthand from a friend of my neighbor's wife. There was this funeral home--yeah, you know, that one on the corner down by Madison? That may be the one, I can't remember. Well, anyway, turns out the funeral director had this little son. Well, maybe he wasn't so little, maybe he was thirteen or fourteen.

Anyway, he gets this gag where he likes hiding in the showroom coffins in his pop's funeral parlor, and maybe he covered his face in corpse paint, and when he'd invite his little school chums over, he pops out of a casket. Scares the you-know-what outta 'em.

Anyway, so the little troll gets himself a casket fixation, all the time messing around in the showroom with his pop's showroom models. Well, one day, this casket comes in, and it's a special model from some foreign...some sort of export. Real high-end, and expensive.

So Pops tells his son, "Don't you go messing around with that coffin! That one I can't afford to have anyone touch. Man, that sucker costs a pretty penny, junior!"

And so the kid says, "Solid, Pop!" And maybe Pops shows him the price tag or catalog or whatever.

But, as soon as Pops is down in the prep room, embalming the bodies or whatever, junior takes it into his head that he's gonna give that new casket a whirl, see? So he climbs in and lays down, and it's got that satin lining and is comfortable, and he starts feeling a little sleepy, so, in a short amount of time, he's nodded off in this damn casket!

So an hour later a couple of workmen come in, and neither one of them is ever going to get elected a member of Mensa if you know what I mean, and they take one look at the boy in the casket, and what do you think they do?

Slam the lid of that sucker shut, that's what!

And one of them says, "Does this heap go to Morningside or Gardens of Memory?"

And the other one says, "Nah, this ain't no burial, ya mook! It's a CREMATION."

Ha! See I told ya this one'll kill ya!

The Murder Kit

The woman was headed to her class reunion. She was dolled up prettily, and not looking any the worse for wear despite the twenty-five years that had elapsed. “Besides,” she reminded herself, “half of the people who show up are going to be old, fat, and fifty. On the whole, I think I’ve made out okay. Whaddya say, toots?”

She smiled at herself in the rearview. She, indeed, was not too bad a looker for her age. Still had all of her teeth, a full head of lustrous, black hair, and not many lines or wrinkles around the eyes. Yet.

“It’s because I use an exfoliating gel scrub,” she reminded herself. She turned into the filling station and decided he needed a quick jolt of something for the drive ahead.

“Just go for a Diet Coke. That’s the ticket,” she said to herself, parking at the double glass doors, rummaging through her purse, and preparing to exit her vehicle. It was just then that she realized there was a rather handsome young man holding a briefcase and standing just a few feet from her car.

He had an infectious grin and was well-dressed. Otherwise, she thought he might be some young drifter.

Neither of them spoke, then, each started to speak at the same time. The boy laughed. She thought, My! He is quite good-looking!

“Hi, my name is Chris. I’m, well, my car is in the shop, and I need to get to an…appointment. Mind if I?”

At first, she didn’t know how to respond or even realize what he was asking her. Then she said, “Well, I’m on my way to a class reunion, but…”

He suddenly burst into a radiant, relieved grin. He threw up his arms, and exclaimed, “Wow! You know, so am I! Wow, what are the odds we’d both be headed to the same place? Wow. Say, mind If I catch a ride with you while my car is being repaired?”

She put her hands to her lips uncertainly. But she was not one of those people who could easily say no. And he was so young and charming!

“Well, I suppose…” she began, perplexed as to how to respond.

“Great!” he exclaimed. Here, just let me go an straighten things out with the mechanic–”

And he opened up her car door, putting his briefcase in the backseat. He then said, “My, it is a stroke of good luck, me finding you, and both of us going to the same class reunion! What are the odds?”

And, smiling, he turned and walked back to ward the garage, gesturing over his shoulder that he would be back in just a minute.

Anxious and a little excited, she got back behind the wheel. And waited. And waited. But, the young man must have been tied up on some minor business detail with the mechanic. At any rate, she started thinking to herself that the whole thing seemed fishy. He was much too young to be going to her class reunion, she surmised. And, well, you could always be charmed by a snake…

She started up the car, put her foot on the gas, and headed on her way.

Later, after the affair was over; after dinner and drinks and dancing, and reminiscing with old friends that were now married, fat, bald, and well past their prime, she was headed out to the parking lot to get on the road home (she had soberly stuck to non-alcoholic punch all night), and, getting in her car, she spied the young man’s briefcase.

Oh my! she said to herself. “I’ve run off with it. And I don’t even know his name!”

She reached into the back and retrieved the briefcase. She was vaguely aware, in the back of her mind, of some small chatter that had gone on during the reunion, something about an escaped inmate…but she had been having too much fun to pay any real attention to it.

She got the briefcase out, put it on the hood of her car, and snapped it open.

Inside, she found a roll of duct tape.

A length of rope.

A mask.

A few rags that looked as if they might be used as gags.

A bloody knife, some locks of hair…

Rats!

The woman was walking down the street, greedily slurping up an orange sherbet in the hot summer sun, when, darn the luck! The thing fell off the end of the paper cone and splattered on the sidewalk.

Even worse, she had orange sherbet on her knuckles now, all over her wedding ring. She threw the paper cone into the gutter, never mind the laws against littering, and took off the ring. She reached into her purse with one groping hand, looking for a Kleenex. That was when the unthinkable happened!

The ring somehow plopped from her gooey fingers, and, rolling like a dime, fell unceremoniously into a sewer grate with a tinkling, metallic echo!

No, thought the woman madly, getting down on her hands and knees and looking through the rusted grate at the little sliver of the polished gold band sitting in the filthy muck and darkness below.

It was just then that a horrifying sight, a huge, hairy SEWER RAT, came forward. She put he hand to her mouth in horror as the filthy brute gobbed down her ring as if it were a piece of solid gold candy!

The woman was heartbroken. She raced home to her husband, threw herself into his arms, and said "My wing! I rost my wing!" (She had an unfortunate speech impediment, and had difficulty pronouncing her rs and l's.)

"Rats!' said her husband. "Rats! Rats! Rats!"

***

It was only later, while she was yet again eating junk food, that she was seated in an uncomfortable plastic seat at a fried chicken joint. She was eating a chicken sandwich when she thought it tasted sort of funny.

Hm.

The chicken was shaped a little oddly, too. Should chicken have a tail? she suddenly began to gag, dropped the sandwich, and before she knew it, she had thrown up all over the little plastic table!

The other diners let out groans and shrieks; but, as she stood there, with puke dripping from her chin, she realized the full horror of what she had been eating.

No. The chicken didn't have a tail.

And they didn't have little ears, either!

In the puddle of vomit on her table, she saw a mysterious golden circle gleaming. Bending over, she picked it up.

It was the miracle of miracles, a ring.

It was her wedding ring.

(Later, she successfully sued the chicken chain for millions...)

The Phone Call

She had been planning this move for a month and had all her belongings packed in cardboard cartons and an old trunk. One more night here, and she’d be gone. She was glad. The place had bad pipes, and an awful reek often wafted up from the bathroom. Incense and air freshener only partly masked the problem.

It was half past three when the phone rang. It was something she hadn’t been expecting, as she thought the service had been turned off.

(It was 1987, a fabled year before the invention of modern cellular phones.)

Tentatively, she approached the cluttered end table, picked up the receiver, said a shaky little hello into the mouthpiece,

“H-hello? Who is this?”

There was silence on the other end. Discernible breathing.

(A pervert, she thought.)

Then:

Hello. My name…my name is not important. I’m calling because…because I have something I need to tell you. Something I need to say to you. Something I need to warn you about.

The voice was that of a woman, maybe 40-ish. She said, “Is–is this some sort of a joke.”

The voice said:

No. No, this is not a joke, Right now, you’re in very, very great danger. You have to leave. You have to get out of there as soon as you can. You see, HE’S headed up the block, just down the street, and he’s headed to YOUR house. You…you’re to be his next victim. You see, he’s done this before. Yeah, many, many times. He can’t be stopped, not by any law or authority of man. Maybe not by anything on this side of the grave. He murders them, and mutilates them; they’re left a gory, sickening mess splattered on the walls.

She began to breathe heavily. Whatever sort of game this woman was playing, she didn’t find it funny. Not at all.

“Look bitch, if you call here again, I’m calling the cops, okay?”

The voice at the other end suddenly cut in,

The cops? They know all about this. They’ve viewed his handiwork many, many times. They keep the killings secret, because–because of the rumors. The rumors that he’s NOT EVEN HUMAN. It’s a legend among the homeless, among prostitutes and winos and the outcasts all over this country–that the killer can’t be stopped. That he’s some sort of demon. That he can walk through walls. That he has razor-sharp fingers. That to look at him is to go mad. Do you hear that? That sound of footsteps out on the walk. Go outside and look!

Indeed, as she held the receiver away from her head, she fancied she could hear the chomp of hard-soled shoes, perhaps boots, coming up the sidewalk. Maybe she could hear someone speaking. No, sounded like…singing?

“I hear people outside. That’s not unusual for this time of day.”

She suddenly realized she was taking this particular noxious prank seriously. Her heart was pounding rather furiously now.

It’s him. There’s no one else about it. It’s as if he brings some sort of time warp with him. Call it the “Oz Factor,” call it whatever you will. He’s dirty, he’s dressed in black rags. His face is a mass of dirt and scars. And he kills. This is how he operates. This is how he survives. This is what he does, all he does.

Suddenly, amid her mounting apprehension, the woman asked, “How–how on earth did you get my number? I mean, why me? How did you know?–”

The voice said:

You’d never believe me. I knew you wouldn’t believe this. I think, once a victim has been chosen, that person is probably doomed, no matter what. But I had to try. Right now–and believe me, where I’m at, I can see all of this clearly–he’s opening the downstairs door to the street, getting ready to climb the stairs. Hear that? That’s him coming up your steps to the street.

She suddenly heard what sounded like a heavy tread on the bottom steps. Her breathing became heavy with panic and fear. She fancied she could hear the macabre singing, a song whose single refrain seemed to be the words “broken blossoms” endlessly repeated, was suddenly floating up from the darkness below. She felt the icy grip of shock freeze her in place. She started to speak into the mouthpiece again, and found she had lost her voice–

I’m sorry. I’ve done all I can do. I tried. Soon, he’ll knock. You’ll answer the door; they always do. I don’t know why. It doesn’t matter. He’d come in, anyway. And then, the screaming will start. The death will be slow, and painful; he draws out every torturous cut for maximum shock and pain. Finally, all that will be left of you will be a butchered rag. Then, he’ll disappear again, and fade back into the fog. Until he resurfaces for another kill.

“No, no… Please…help me…”

She choked on tears, her voice coming in between terrified gasps. She felt the floor spin beneath her feet.

I can’t. I’m sorry. I tried. In a moment, he’ll be inside. Then, it’ll all be over. Just try to remember, for a moment, the good times. Well, you’ll be joining me soon, where I’m at. Goodbye!

And with that, the phone became a dead object in her hand, as lifeless as any piece of plastic and wire she had ever held. She suddenly realized the service HAD been shut off when the call “came through.”

A slow, rapping knock at the door alerted her to the reality of the moment. She suddenly felt strangely calm. Putting down the dead receiver, she hesitated a moment. The knock came again, harder this time, more insistent.

Calmly, she straightened out her skirt and breathed in. Breathed out. The knock came again. She went to answer the door.

Rawhead and Bloody Bones

Once, long ago, in the wilds of Mississippi, lived an old conjure woman named Betty. Betty was a weird old woman with wild, woolly hair and a witchy, wicked wit, and she lived in a shack in the deep recesses of the woods, alone.

The nearby villagers tolerated Betty because she could help, with the aid of her nostrums and potions, with any number of peculiar ailments and states. She could even, it was said, make a man or woman fall madly in love with you if you so desired...and most folks reckoned she could stir up a mess 'o hate in folks, too.

No one was allowed in Betty's shack, but folks that came to receive her special nostrums sometimes peered through the boarded-over windows. Inside, in the dark, Betty often sat talking with her prized razorback hog, her only friend in the world, which she christened "Rawhead," because the darned animal was so infernally ugly. Some folks swore that Rawhead sometimes reared up on its little piggy hindquarters and walked across the floor like a man. Some folks even swore it sat, from time to time, in a wooden chair.

Be that as it may, Rawhead was fairly popular with the local butcher, who was always careful to feed the animal delectable scraps and precious vittles whenever Betty came to town for supplies. So, it was with some surprise that the man saw Betty enter his store one fine summer evening...but no Rawhead!

When asked about this unusual situation, Betty snorted and glanced, with her beady, misshapen, wrongly-colored eyes, "Hm. I ain't seed hide nor hair of that varmint all day, and I'm gettin' a might worried. If he comes in here, send him home right away! I sure do miss him!"

And the butcher (who could have in no way expected the hog would come into his store without his mistress) said that, indeed, were Rawhead to put in an appearance, he would most certainly tell him to march his little piggy trotters straight home to his mistress.

Well, at this very time, the hunter, who lived not far from Betty, began to covet the flesh of a fat hog, and so he sought high and low and finally saw Rawhead rooting among the brushes. He quickly aimed his rifle at the ugly beast and fired, felling the critter and sending up a bright splash of pigs blood to cover the trees.

He then took the carcass, cut off its head, and tossed it on top of a pile of other critters he had laid bleeding and dead in the back of his wagon.

He stripped what flesh he could from the bones, and then went to grease up his frying pan.

Well, Betty waited and waited, and became more and more worried about her razorback hog, so she looked deep into a cloudy pan of murky liquid, which she could use to see over long distances many things dark and secret. What she saw drove her to fiery anger.

Rawhead was dead! Killed, she knew, by the greedy hunter, who lived nearby. Her poor razorback hog, her only companion, was lying in a bloody heap on the ground, his ugly head rotting on top of a pile of other trophies. Betty howled and screeched, and, going to her tottering bookshelf, took out the secret tome of black magic rituals she reserved just for occasions such as these.

Invoking the darkest spirits that she knew, she sent a lightning bolt of fury to the shack in the hollow where the Hunter lived.

Instantly, the severed head of Rawhead rolled from off the top of the wagon heap. It fell to the ground, rolled over to where its bloody bones lay in a pile--and reattached itself to the neck! Then, with scraps and bits of raw, mutilated flesh hanging off its limbs, it stood upright and growled. Like a man!

Unsuspecting, the Hunter came out of his wretched shack and saw the giant figure of the monstrous Rawhead standing in the shadowy, moonlit gloom!

"Man alive!" said the Hunter. "They sure are some silly-looking eyes you got there, feller!"

And so Rawhead answered, "All the better to see you in the darkness!"

And, as he was quite drunk, the hunter continued foolishly. "Well, they sure are some funny-looking claws you got there, feller!"

And Rawhead answered, "All the better to grasp you and feel you before you can run away from me!"

And the hunter, still too drunk to see, unbelievably, that he was in mortal danger, said, "Well, they sure are some strange, ugly teeth you got there, feller!"

And so Rawhead finally replied, "All the better to eat you the way you wanted to eat me!"

And the monster fell upon the hunter, and tore out his throat, and gouged out his eyes, and ate his flesh, and drank his blood. Then (we can only assume) Rawhead went home to Betty.

Forever after, people spoke in hushed, fearful whispers about the ghost of the old witch, and the monstrous, rotting skeleton with the head of a hungry razorback. They told tales until the tales became mere legends and bedtime stories, and people stopped believing in them altogether.

(Surely YOU don't believe them, do you?)

"Boots"

Bub Rattleborough stood out on his porch one fine Spring day, aimed his six-shooter, and blew the head off of a poisonous snake that had crawled out from behind an old log in the yard.

He stepped off the porch eagerly to inspect his kill, patting himself on the back that he was still such a fantastic shot he could blow the head off of a snake at twenty paces. The day was bright and hot. The year, we're tempted to say was 1865.

He approached the bloody mess of a serpent carefully, mindful that, perhaps, the shot hadn't entirely done it in. Sure enough, as he approached it, he could see there was still some wiggle left in it.

In a panic, he brought down the hell of his boot upon its head, crushing its brain once and for all in a gooey splat, and backing up again to view the resultant carcass. Hooey, he thought to himself. He then went to fetch a shovel with which to pick up the body of the lethal varmint (which he had already identified as a deadly diamondback, due to its peculiar coloration).

It was not long after that Bub while working out on a perfectly pleasant day, clearing the brush from the front yard of his property, suddenly turned a mysterious shade of blue. Keeling over, he gave up the ghost, as his befuddled young boy raced forward to see what in the world could have been the matter with Pa. Tragically, by the time the boy reached his side, he found that Pa had already died.

The funeral was held, as was customary in those days, in the parlor of the old farmhouse. Bub's best friend Titus had taken care of all the arrangements for the grieving widow Rattleborough, making sure to have Bub laid out in his Sunday best. He was careful, though, to hold back the expensive leather boots with the fancy embroidery that made Bub look as if he were walking about with flowers growing out of his ankles. He didn't think Bub would want to be buried in those, but, instead, would want to have them passed on as an heirloom for his boy to wear when he was big enough to fit into them.

Of course, Titus oiled and polished the cracked leather--Bub had worn those boots everywhere, had, been wearing them when he pitched over dead. Curious.

Well, the years passed, and Bub Rattleborough Jr. finally attained manhood and a fairly impressive size, so it was determined, on his eighteenth birthday, that it might conceivably be the proper time to hand the boots his father so highly prized over to his surviving son.

"Bub Junior, you know how much your father, God rest his soul, loved these here old boots. He died in 'em. I'm sure you remember him wearing them everywhere, all the time. Well, he would have wanted you to have them. Here--"

And Ma, wiping a tear from her seamed old cheek, handed the pair of boots over to Bub Junior, who just as eagerly put them on.

"Whooee!" he exclaimed. "Ma, they sure as shootin' is a perfect fit!"

Ma beamed. The sun went behind a cloud. The minutes turned to hours, days, weeks, months...on and on.

It was not long after that the somewhat irresolute Bub Junior while playing pinochle in one of his favorite drinking establishments, suddenly turned a mysterious shade of blue. His compatriot, who found themselves befuddled by this sudden turn of events, began to pound him on the back, thinking he had swallowed a particularly pesky olive.

"Aw come on, Bub, the found in this joint aint that bad!"

Bub Junior, in way of a reply, pitched forward on the table, upsetting the cards, spilling the beer, overturning the plates, and creating all manner of havoc. He never raised his head pinochle-playing head again.

There followed the inquest ("Death due to undetermined causes," was the final, befuddled finding), the funeral, the weeping widow going about in her mourning attire, veiled in black...someone thought to keep those famous leather boots that two-generation of Ratlleborough men had died in for the sake of Bub Junior's infant son. Although, at this point, they might have wondered at the efficacy of handing down such a seemingly unlucky heirloom to yet another up-and-coming young Rattleborough.

The year was, we recollect, 1890 or 91. Bub Rattelborough the Third was a stout young whippersnapper who liked to range across the width and breadth of his acres of inherited property, pulling weeds and kicking dust and rocks, and digging up bugs and whatnot. But he was a good hard worker. And he chose to do his work in those same damn boots.

Well, one day, he and some cowpokes were out on the arroyo, rounding up them doggies, when, all of a sudden and sure enough, Bub the Third turns as black as a moonless night, and keels over in the dust, stone-dead.

The other cowpokes tried as best they could to revive him, but it was to no avail. Finally, they threw him over the back of a horse and carried his body home, not anxious to break the news to his brand-new widow.

Well, the woman was disconsolate, as can be expected. So was Bub the Third's Ma, but, she is used to grief in a big way at this point, and kept her head about her. Curious, she saw that the left heel of the boots her dead son was wearing seemed loose or crooked. Damn things were so old they were cracking apart at the seams, she surmised, and before she knew what she was doing, she had reached up and pulled it off.

Something fell out of the heel of that boot then, something that rattled against the floor. One of the cowpokes, recognizing what it was immediately, yelled out, "Don't touch it! It's full of deadly venom!"

When the object had been carefully picked up and examined with tweezers, it was found to be, in point of fact, one poisonous snake tooth. Which had, they finally decided, been lodged in the fatal boot for over twenty years.

"And undoubtedly, that's what killed three generations of Rattleboroughs, each of which wore those boots. And I reckon, as Old Man Rattleborough told the story, it must have been that snake whose head he smashed beneath his foot...so this, in a strange way, was the 'Serpent's Revenge'! My what a strange, horrible coincidence!"

No one ever wore those boots again.

The Body in the Trunk

The trunk contained the curled-up, mummified (or rather desiccated would perhaps be a more apt description) body of a young woman. The coroner later identified her as maybe twenty-one, twenty-two. The cops had blanched when they opened the thing. One had politely excused himself to go outside and puke.

“The story seems to be that she disappeared, oh, ten, twelve years ago. Do you remember? Everyone thought she was a runaway. Jilted her husband at the wedding reception, and left with cold feet. Assumed a new identity, or got involved with prostitution, and drugs. Kidnapped, maybe. But, this? It’s almost too much.”

The detective tilted back his hat and chewed on his bottom lip. His partner took careful notes. This was in the old days, and the scene could have been ripped straight from the pages of a bad mystery thriller. Or maybe it could have been the opening scene of a long-canceled cop show.

“What I can’t figure is how she thought she was ever going to get out of that thing if she got herself stuck. She must have known how dangerous it was.” He aimed his steadily-scratching pen at the open lid of the old trunk. The smell in the room was still somewhat indescribable.

“These kids, who knows? Maybe it was an accident, a stupid, stupid, tragic mistake. Maybe she just didn’t think.”

The partner stopped writing, and said, “Or maybe she had a secret death wish?”

***

The girl had always been trouble.

She had been a good little girl before hitting the age of fifteen or sixteen. Then she began to run with a bad crowd. She started skipping class, cutting up; dabbling in alcohol and marijuana. She flunked classes, got in trouble with the cops, and was on probation for shoplifting.

Her teenage years followed the same predictable course. She was in trouble more often than she was out of it. She finally decided high school wasn’t for her. She quit, told her parents she was going to get her GED, then failed to do that.

Her doting, long-suffering father (everyone considered her a “daddy’s girl”) dealt with her with the same, weak, kid-gloves approach that had caused her to come out so spoiled, to begin with (at least, in her mother’s opinion), and bought her clothes, a car, bailed her out of jail, ad infinitum.

“He was a real enabler,” the mother later told the reporter for the Star Tribune. “He would have done anything for that kid.”

Regardless, she continued to lose in life.

It was not until she met her future, short-lived husband, Brad, that she began to somewhat ameliorate the damage she had done over the past years. Brad was tall, square-jawed, and good-looking; he was a high school athlete, and his parents were loaded.

His trust fund bought them the house. They lived there until the wedding.

Needless to say, Missus’s residency there was rather short-lived.

It was the night of the wedding, the wild drunken occasion. She was careening around the room, holding a beer in her hand, making an ass out of herself.

Brad looked embarrassed and uncomfortable. He looked as if he had made the biggest mistake of his life. He looked like, after the “wedded bliss” of the day, he had suddenly realized that his new wife was the biggest whore in town.

She announced, in her own demanding “I’m-The-One-In-Charge-Here” voice, that the assembled revelers were to play a game.

“Hide and go seek,” she said, slurring the words a little. “C’mon. It’ll be fun. Just like when we were kids!”

And because no one had any real objections, or wanted to offend the blushing, undeniably-inebriated bride, they did as they were asked.

The lights were extinguished. One by one, everyone hid. Soon, the assembled partygoers found each other out. Everyone met back in the dining room, a little wearier than they had previously been.

Everyone, that is, except for the lady of the house.

She never reappeared from her own game.

A search was commenced, a search that became increasingly panicked as it became apparent that the lady had, indeed, vanished. At first, it was assumed she was simply still playing a game of “hide-and-go-seek.”

Search as they might, though, it was all in vain. The young lady was never seen again.

It was five long years later, after the husband who assumed his new bride had simply, in her chaotic way decided to abandon her new married life and flee, that the house had fallen into disrepair. The husband had abandoned his property in grief, had struck out for a foreign land, and had left the property in the hands of caretakers.

When he suddenly died, possession of the house reverted to the township, and the place was put up for sale. It was acquired by a young couple who had nothing but bright hopes for the future. They busily set about refurbishing the place, a job they did mostly by themselves, as the wife was an interior decorator who fancied she had “superior” taste.

One day, covered in dust and grime, the husband began poking around far back in a disused closet. It was then that he came across what seemed to be an old steamer trunk, of a variety probably not manufactured for many, many years.

Curious, he began to pry and pull at the rusted padlock. He thought he could probably get the thing open with a good stout crowbar, and he called his wife to come and assist him. Together, they worked at the lock, finally breaking the thing open with a heave and a ho.

A ghastly odor erupted, forcing both of them back. The wife started coughing and gagging. The husband felt as if he were going to faint. He pointed his flashlight into the dark space at their feet.

A gasp.

A scream.

The wife fled from the closet, from the room. The husband continued to stand there in disbelief, his jaw quivering in shocked outrage.

Below, curled in the massive trunk…

“The desiccated remains of one incorrigible young woman. Tragic. But, do we know, conclusively, it wasn’t suicide?”

The detective tipped his hat back and scratched his forehead.

“Nah. This was just a silly prank, went wrong is all. If she wanted to kill herself, why go out by trapping yourself in an old trunk? Suicides don’t usually pick convenient, fool-proof methods…unless they’re just crying for help.”

He paced a little around the empty room, moving far back out of the glare coming in from the gritty, filthy windows.

“No, she meant to be found out, to be discovered. She chose that stifling, suffocating enclosure in which to play out her game…let herself be discovered. Unfortunately for her, no one could have known where she was hiding. She played too well. And she paid the price of the game with her life.”

His partner chewed reflectively on his bottom lip. The place was quiet, and eerie, the scene of broken dreams and lost lives. Could a place attract evil like a magnet? Like a house from a Stephen King thriller? He didn’t know what to say so he opted for, “Something poetic in that, Bill. Let’s go get a burger.”

Skinned Tom

Legend has it that a masked maniac--yeah they say he might not even be fully HUMAN--but, anyway, that masked maniac haunts Lover's Tryst. He's looking for bad little boys and girls to slice and dice--they as has not been "pure" and "upright."

The story is that, of I dunno, back in the Sixties maybe, he was seeing this dame. A real looker she was, or, at least, that's what everyone thought. At any rate, she didn't know that he didn't know that her HUSBAND didn't know that she was...unhappily married. But hubby was a long-distance trucker with a bad temper, and he was fuming over the open road and sizzling hit highways most of the time.

So he says to her one day, he says, "Hey honey, let's do just like all them young whippersnappers, and go park out on lover's lane, and make mad, passionate whoopee! Huh, whaddya say?"

And so she says, "That sounds solid, daddio! But, we have to be careful..."

He looked at her curiously, and asked, "Why?"

And to this all she replied was, "Well, we just have to be careful, is all."

So they go out to Lover's Tryst, and they have their clothes off, and they are into some heavy petting...but what they don't know is that, from a distance, the husband is watching his wife through some binoculars, and he's getting more and more steamed.

And he's blowing smoke out his ears and fire out his nose.

And how he found out, I'll never know, but he did. So, after watching his no-good, cheating wife get made love to by this clueless idiot, he strides up to the driver's side door, rips it open with one bare hand, and Ol' Tom looks up at him, with her bra in his teeth and lipstick all over his face, and says, "Oh, hiya pal! So, uh, what can I do for ya?"

"Oh, I'll tell you just what you can do for me!" says the husband, grabbing him with one ham hock fist and dragging him out of the cab.

"Bruce no! Don't hurt him, please! HE DIDN'T KNOW!" screams the wife, but Bruce just lays her out cold with one brutal thrust of his fist. Tom, drags him to a secluded spot.

"Okay, creep! I'm gonna teach you what happens to guys what muscle in on my turf!"

And Bruce ties him to the tree. He gags him so that his creams are muffled, and then...he takes out his buck knife.

"She's a real beaut, huh? Cost me a pretty penny. Ordered her from an advertisement in Guns and Ammo. Now, hold still!"

"Mmff! Mmff! Mmff!" cried Tom.

And Bruce started cutting. He cut off the skin from Tom's eyes. And He cut off the skin from Tom's nose. And he cut off the whole skin of the face. And then he went to work on the, uh, lower extremities if you know what I mean...

Soon, Tom was completely skinned, from head to toe. Man, he must have looked like something from the Grey's Anatomy book, or something. Or maybe one of those Hellraiser movies.

Well, by this time, the wife had woken up and had driven frantically back to town. She called the cops asap, and the fuzz hurried out to Lover's Tryst, searching carefully the surrounding woods.

"Oh, Mac, will ya take a look at this!" said one of the cops, when they found the tree, the ropes, the...skin of Skinned Tom.

"Urf! That's...that's! Oh, man, I'm gonna be sick!"

And, you know what, his partner went into the bushes and puked, and puked up lunch.

They found everything they needed for evidence: rope, blood, one complete human skin...but, as for the man that skin had, formerly, BELONGED to--there was no trace!

Bruce was quickly arrested. But, you know what? Without the body, it was darn hard to convict him, and they finally let him go on a technicality! He laughed about that, and the local press had a field day, photographing his ugly, bulldog face as it contorted into a series of menacing grins and guffaws on his way out of the courthouse, a free man.

As for "Skinned Tom," they say he lurks Lover's Tryst to this very day, with horrible skinned features hidden by a clinging shadow of night. He may or may not have a hook for a hand. He may or may not "disappear" certain teenage lovemakers who have parked at Lover's Tryst in hope of a grope...he may or may not have hung one with a rope (that story has the girlfriend spending a terrifying night locked in the car, only to find out that her boyfriend has been dangling by a tree branch overhead, all night).

These things may or may not be true. I heard it from a friend of a friend. You know, as the old song goes.