Night of the Living Dead

Night of the Living Dead : a novel by G. L. Payne. Based on the film, “Night of the Living Dead” , screenplay by George A. Romero and John Russo . In Public Domain

Excerpt part one:

https://vocal.media/horror/night-of-the-living-dead-u25rb60hgx

Excerpt part two:

https://vocal.media/fiction/night-of-the-living-dead-t7203n0m61

3

~THREE DAYS AGO:

Milton Euston was going home. He didn’t know it yet, but all the same, he was going home.

Oh, he knew all about the cancer. Any number of consults with specialists and oncologists had given him more information about the subject than he could ever begin to process. The gist he’d grasped from it—and it was an important gist; perhaps the most important gist— was that the tumor was small. It was treatable. Milton should have had every reason to expect he would have many years of life ahead of him.

Of course, things didn’t always go according to plan.

The nodule lurking in the bottom lobe of his left lung had been found early. It had clean margins. The mass was confined to one discrete area. Milton had experienced no symptoms and he’d had zero reason to suspect anything amiss. The discovery of the malignancy was pure luck; an incidental finding on a routine screening (Screening Saves Lives, the poster on the wall of his Oncologist’s office said. Damn right it does, Milton thought on every subsequent visit). If you had to have a cancerous lung tumor, Milton’s was the pick of the litter. The doctors considered his prognosis ‘excellent’. To a white coat, every one of the Docs working his case had assured him he’d likely have a full recovery. They’d done a stand-up job instilling confidence in him and he was surprisingly unconcerned about the impending procedure. He hardly felt worried at all.

What he felt more than anything else was hungry. In fact, he was starving.

Dressed in his hospital gown, standing barefoot on the cold tile floor of his room on the ninth floor of Philadelphia General, he stared out the window. His room was dark and the lights of Philly beyond the heavy glass pane glittered against the black velvet tapestry of the night like gemstones flashing in the noon-day sun. The city, his home for the last 28 of his 46 years, had a glorious night-time skyline, he thought. He had no reason at all to suspect the view he was admiring was one of the last sights he’d ever see.

At least, it was one of the last sights he’d ever see while he was alive.

A knife of hunger sliced through his abdomen. It was nearly 11:30 p.m. and he should have been asleep. The procedure to remove the little cluster of demon cells was scheduled for 6:15 a.m. and his surgeon wanted him well-rested for the ordeal and the aftermath. Well-fed was apparently another matter entirely. Milt understood the need for an empty stomach going into an invasive surgery. His angry stomach did not.

He was surprised at just how shitty not eating had him feeling—at least he thought it was from not eating. To be honest, he’d felt rough off and on most of the day. He hadn’t said anything about it because he was already here in the hospital, prepped for the procedure and he didn’t want to risk some medical over-reaction to his sense of being vaguely out of sorts that might end up delaying things. Get the shit over already, he figured, though he’d felt increasingly fatigued and had a gathering aura of slight disorientation as the day rolled on. It’ll pass, he told himself.

Evening arrived along with a fierce headache that came knocking on the walls of his skull, rattling like a jackhammer in his brain. The waves of nausea he had brewing in the pit of his stomach—enough to keep him from eating even if they had been willing to feed him—weren’t helping matters much either so, after two hours tossing around restlessly in his hospital bed, he’d finally given up on sleep. Feeling trapped in the cold and darkness of the nearly empty hospital room (there was another bed but, thankfully, not another patient) and unable to bear watching whatever vapid shit was on TV, he’d decided to cross over to the window. Crawling from the bed, he was shocked when his vision blurred and he’d swooned hard enough that he had to grab for the bed rail to keep from dropping to the floor.

What the hell? he wondered. His coordination was off and he felt almost drunk. Briefly, he considered hitting the call button to summon someone but he really didn’t want to risk his surgery being postponed. More, as ridiculous as it was, he was sick of people getting his goddamned name wrong. Sick to death of it, in fact—which in this case would prove to be more than just an expression.

People calling Milt by the wrong name had been a peeve all his life. He should have been used to it by this particular twist in his mortal coil—he mostly was— but since checking into the hospital, he’d suffered a veritable avalanche of people getting it wrong. EUSTON was his name, goddamn it—not “Houston”. But the whole time he’d been here all he’d heard had been, “How are you feeling, Mr. Houston?” or “Mr. Houston, it’s time for your meds”. Even Dr. Logan, his for-christ-sake oncologist, had gotten it wrong a couple of times. Milton flat out didn’t want to deal with any of that right now. Hell, about the only person who hadn’t called him by the wrong name was the guy who drove the floor-polishing Zamboni down the hallway outside his room.

“How ya doin’, Chief?” the custodian gabbed at him cheerfully when he’d seen Milton idling in the doorway of his room earlier in the evening. Then he was off, polishing his way down the corridor, driving the humming machine in gentle swirls. Obviously “Chief” wasn’t Milton’s proper name but the maintenance guy had gone to a totally different place. Despite feeling like shit, that had put a smile on Milt’s face.

Milton had rolled into Philly out of the sticks of western PA as a young man, coming in for college and, like so many townie-folk who got their first taste of the big city bouncing in from the country for school, he found it intoxicating. Over time he’d developed a taste for the urban life and it was hard for him to feature the idea of ever going back to the slow-paced amblings of his roots. That seemed a world frozen in time compared to the metropolitan hustle and bustle of his life now. Of course, he hadn’t totally left his rural roots behind. He still visited his old stomping grounds of Zelienople, Evans City and the surrounding boroughs every now and again. It would always be ‘home’, after all—though he’d been back far less often since his folks had passed.

Despite that years at a time passed between visits, he remembered the area well enough and it had changed so little that he easily could have shown Johnny and Barbara where their path had gone wrong and set them right toward their destination in a flash. Evans City Cemetery was where his folks were buried: his father for seventeen years and his mother the last eleven. Milton had no family to finagle with over his final arrangements—his wife had divorced him 3 years earlier and there were no kids to consider— so when his time came he planned on being buried there himself, next to his folks in the family plot.

Well, he’d planned on that being his place of final rest when his time eventually came. Unfortunately for Milton, while he’d never actually make it into the ground, he was destined to arrive at the cemetery much sooner than he ever expected. Milton Euston (not ‘Houston’) was blissfully unaware standing there in his hospital gown looking out over the beauty of his adopted hometown, that the moments remaining in his life could be measured by the merest handful.

The death certificate (they’d still be writing those at this early stage of the game) would list the cause of Milton’s passing as a “Cerebral Vascular Accident”. CVA for short. It was a fancy way of saying that a bulging vessel in his head blew out like a threadbare tire and the subsequent flood of blood filling his brain dropped him stone-dead in a matter of seconds.

In the end, the nasty little bug of a lung tumor had not a damn thing to do with his passing other than placing him in the hospital, which was the best place Milton could have been for any chance at all to pull through. Except for a couple of drat-the-luck happenstances, he might have survived long enough to see the sun rise another day. For instance, if he’d mentioned the throbbing behind his eyes to any one of his caregivers they doubtless would have checked him thoroughly to make certain all was well ahead of his surgery. If he’d summoned attention when he’d first felt the monster storm in his brain coming on, when the faulty vessel was just bulging and before it ruptured, an urgent-care team might have gotten the hypertensive episode and his spiking BP under control to save him long enough to get a chance to observe some of the madness destined to descend over the world in coming days instead being an oblivious, early participant in it all.

But he didn’t say anything to anyone. While Milt had a care about not wanting his procedure to get set back, his real concern was with the risk of being called “Houston” rather than ‘Euston’. So he stayed by the window, waiting for the dizziness and thunder in his head to pass. Instead, it was Milton himself that passed, gone so quickly he never had a chance to even realize he was dead. He’d arrive at the Evans City Cemetery roughly two days and several very odd hours hence—just in time to be there when the whole world fell apart.

—just in time to be there when Johnny and Barbara finally found their way off the winding backroads and got there themselves . . .

On the plus side, he’d never have to hear anyone call him ‘Houston’ ever again.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

4

The hairpin turn came up almost before Johnny saw it. Unlike the intersection he’d blown through earlier when he wasn’t paying attention, he’d been watching for the last 20 minutes or so to catch this one. Still, the turn was a genuine blink-and-you’ll-miss-it opportunity and he almost did exactly that. At the last second, he managed to tap the brakes and make a looping about-face to start the car up the graveled rise that led into the cemetery. It was a sloppy maneuver but Barbara didn’t notice. Whatever else her mind was on at this point, it wasn’t his driving.

Johnny had been distracted by the sky, wondering whether the overcast was rain on the way or if the gathering darkness was the impending arrival of night. He’d nearly missed the yellow, diamond-shaped road sign announcing Cemetery Entrance. When he finally spotted it, he had no doubt they were in the right place, recognizing not only the sign but also the pepper-shot spray of pellet holes in the bottom corner of the diamond where some fool decades before had fired a shotgun at it. As a child, he’d been fascinated by the wound on the sign, noticing it the first time he’d been to the cemetery at six years old, there with his family to lay his father to rest. The fact that someone had shot the sign had been unfathomable to little Johnny. Why, he had wondered, would anyone SHOOT a sign? It was an enigma that would remain forever unresolved. Eventually, when adulthood encroached and his attentions focused on fewer of the odd little wonders in life, he forgot to think about it anymore.

Though they’d never addressed it between them, the scar on the sign also cued Barbara that they had finally arrived at their destination.

“Oh, we’re here,” she cooed with satisfaction. “Look, Johnny. There’s the sign.”

Barbara was never more on point than when she was dancing cheek-to-cheek with the bleeding obvious. Johnny pursed his lips, reaching for patience, and wondered what kind of hair-brained scenario his sister might have been running in her head where he wouldn’t have seen the sign and yet managed somehow to make the sharp turn off the highway into the cemetery.

“Yeah, we made it,” he replied, swallowing back a spicy rejoinder.

“It only took forever,” she tacked on, determined to keep the boat rocking.

Johnny bit his lower lip.

The winding avenue—if the gravel road could be called an “avenue”—carried them through a cluster of pines to the top of a long grade. The trees here formed a sheltering screen that set the grounds apart from the surrounding hills, farms and fields in the area, the timber thinning out in a central open vista that was the cemetery proper. The plain was expansive. For such a sparsely populated borough, the graveyard was huge. Of course, it had been an active cemetery almost since colonial times.

The car rolled off the gravel path leading into the main grounds of the cemetery and onto a winding ribbon of blacktop. The noisy pop-crunch of the tires on the unfinished surface went quiet. For the first time in hours, there was total silence in the vehicle.

Johnny was grateful for the respite as he split his attention between the road and taking in the scenery. Tombstones, grave markers, family crypts and mausoleums of all manner dotted the grounds, interspersed with small groves of shade trees and well-tended hedges that brought a finely cultivated, respectful dignity to the environment. Even in twilight’s gathering haze, the beauty of the place gave Johnny a sense of calm that had him feeling better than he’d felt all day. As much as he resented having to be here, he had to concede it was a beautiful place to spend eternity.

Barbara stared out her window. To the west, a sliver of blue sky was just visible, slipping in under a low-hanging wall of overcast gray that didn’t quite touch the horizon. It heralded a red-streaked sunset peeking over the hills and trees in the distance that broke up the light in patterns, scattering what was left of the day into bright shafts and streaming pillars of dying sun. Barbara’s face was unreadable as her eyes scanned the scenery, taking in both the view as well as seeking a point of reference as the car moved through the field of graves.

It was easy to get turned around in the monotonous terrain and the flat white granite marker identifying their father’s grave was impossible to spot from any distance. Fortunately, there was a handy reference. The plot was about 60 yards off the road from a small stone chapel that stood under a canopy of old-growth red maples. The deepening evening shadows were making it a challenge, though, to find the little building among the shapes of bushes, tombstones and mausoleums that twilight was blurring into smudges of gray.

Barbara was looking across the expanse of the field when Johnny unexpectedly brought the car to a stop. She glanced over, startled to see the small stone chapel on the opposite side of the road from where she’d expected it but pleased that, even as late as it was, enough day was going to be left to locate the grave before dark. In fact, if they hurried even a little, Barbara thought they could be back on the road before full-on nightfall. A light breeze came in through her open window and brushed her face and she realized the evening was still even comfortably warm.

“They ought to make the day the time changes the first day of summer,” she offered, out of nowhere.

Johnny blinked a time or two, flummoxed by the apparently random comment. He looked up, slight consternation on his face.

“What?” he asked, his voice cracking with surprise. He sharply exhaled a cloud of smoke as he spoke, stubbing out his last cigarette in the car’s ashtray.

“Well, it’s 8 o’clock and it’s still daylight.”

Barbara’s leap-frogging logic suddenly made a tiny bit of sense. But Johnny’s mouth became a tight, unhappy line as he began peeling off his motoring gloves.

“A lot of good the extra daylight does us,” he grumped. “We’ve still got a three-hour drive back. We’re not going to be home until after midnight.”

Purely out of habit, Barbara pulled a small compact from her purse and gave her appearance a quick check in the mirror.

“Well, if it really bugged you, Johnny, you wouldn’t do it,” she said.

He issued a growl in the back of his throat that landed somewhere between a groan and a chuckle, waving a hand to indicate the desolation around them.

“You think I want to blow Sunday on a scene like this?”

It was a pretty place but it was still a graveyard. Fed up with the routine of the expedition their mother compelled them to undertake every year or so and seized with a sudden inspiration how to put a final end to it, he added, “You know, I figure we’re gonna have to move Mother out here or move the grave in to Pittsburgh.”

Barbara snapped the compact closed and tucked it back into her bag, satisfied with her reflection. Registering Johnny’s ill-conceived suggestion—which he appeared to think was quite reasonable—she threw him an incredulous look. “She can’t make a trip like this.”

“Oh, you don’t know that she can’t,” he half-heartedly returned, not exactly making a strong prosecution for his argument.

Barbara didn’t bother to address the even more ridiculous idea of moving the grave. Nineteen years their father had been resting here. He wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon and Barbara knew Johnny’s stupid idea was just another angle to allow him to continue his bitching.

He twisted in his seat, digging for something in the back of the car.

“Is there any of that candy left?” he asked.

Barbara had eaten the last of it more than an hour earlier but she made a show of checking anyway.

“No,” she said, trying to sound convincingly disappointed.

“Look at this thing,” Johnny muttered, his voice tinged with irritation. He turned toward the front of the car with a small Styrofoam grave decoration in his hand that had been riding in the backseat since Pittsburgh. The soft green foam cross with a gentle spray of plastic white and red flowers and a hint of Baby’s Breath—also plastic—was a cheap but clearly sincere offering to honor a lost loved one. Pinned in the middle of the cross was a red ribbon with a few gold-glitter words embossed on it in a sweeping cursive script.

“We Still Remember.” Johnny read. His tone vacillated between amusement and disdain but when he looked up at Barbara the sad expression in his eyes glinted with hurt and anger.

“I DON’T,” he proclaimed. “You know, I don’t even remember what the man looked like.”

Barbara knew damn well he was lying. The car crash that had killed their father had happened when Johnny was a solid six years old. Barbara was barely three at the time and she still had a scattering of disconnected but relatively clear memories of their father, so Johnny’s recollections had to be better. Could be it was resentment rising from an irrational sense of abandonment or perhaps it was a simple misread of his grief manifesting as bitterness but whenever the topic of their father arose, Johnny always became sullen and moody. Whatever it was that tormented him about it, on the heels of the torturous ride to get here and his bullshit antics along the way, Barbara was of no mind to coddle him.

“Johnny, it takes you five minutes . . .” she scolded.

“Yeah,” he huffed. “Five minutes to put the wreath on the grave and six hours to drive back and forth.” He gave the cross a look like he’d have been just as happy to snap it in half and toss it out the car window. “MOTHER wants to remember so we trot two hundred miles into the country and she stays at home.”

Barbara rolled up the passenger window, trying to focus her attention on pretty much anything but continuing the conversation with her brother.

“Well, we’re here, John, alright?” she said. She quickly exited the car before he could complain any further and slammed the passenger door just a little too hard.

Johnny cast another dour glance at the grave decoration, then, rolling up his window, was surprised to hear a crackle of static and popping burst from the car radio. He’d forgotten he’d even turned it on and had assumed it was silent all this time because it was malfunctioning. Now, a voice came through the speakers, almost lost amid a thick soup of hisses and warbling, whistling tones.

“. . . test . . . back on? Oh.” The broadcast was weak like the signal was coming from some distance barely in range but the voice grew stronger as the speaker continued.

“Uh . . . Ladies and gentlemen, we’re coming back on the air after an interruption due to technical prob—”

Johnny snapped off the radio in disgust. Where the hell was the goddamned thing when they could have used some tunes to fill the dead air during the interminable drive down here, he thought. He took the key from the ignition and got out of the car, slipping the keyring into his jacket pocket.

Barbara was already some distance down the road and by the time he reached her, he’d changed his thoughts about the radio. At least they’d have some music for the drive back. Something to make some kind of noise other than them fighting.

“There’s nothing wrong with the radio,” he reported with some real cheer. “It must have been the station.”

Barbara didn’t comment on the news. She looked pensive, drawing her light coat around her as though chilled in spite of the comfortably warm evening. She pulled her collar up and drew her head down, trying to disappear into the coat.

The black suit-coat Johnny wore actually had him feeling almost too toasty but his dress shirt and black slacks were thin material and he would have been too chilly without the jacket. Now the piss-yellow tie spattered with a random pattern of blue daisies that he wore loosely over an unbuttoned collar, that was a whole other matter entirely. It was there purely for the spectacle. Loud and obnoxious as all hell, Johnny felt it brought a touch of the absurd to his otherwise generic office-boy ensemble. The fact that Barbara absolutely hated it was really just icing on the cake.

Johnny wadded up his motoring gloves and stuffed them in his jacket pocket, glancing over at his sister. His gaze seemed to make her uncomfortable and she fixed her eyes distantly, staring out across the cemetery.

“Which row is it in?” she asked. She sounded as though her mind was a million miles away, on some other matter entirely. Not waiting for him to respond, she left Johnny behind on the road as she waded out among the graves.

They ambled among the headstones for a bit. Barbara took point and Johnny was content to allow it. He didn’t have any better idea than she did exactly where to find the grave and letting her lead put the responsibility for locating it on her shoulders. She picked a wandering path through the graveyard, careful to not step on a single grave. Johnny wasn’t nearly as respectful, following after her in a loping gait, tromping indiscriminately wherever his feet carried him without regard to the dead. He carried the cross tucked in the crook of his elbow with the same reverence he might afford a sack lunch.

Finally, Barbara spotted a small grove of shrubs set in a semi-circle to create a suggestion of a natural meditation garden. She was certain then the grave was nearby and paused to get her bearings. Johnny hovered behind her, gawking at the empty graveyard. He didn’t even pretend to look for their objective.

“Boy, there’s no one around,” he said.

“Well, it’s late,” Barbara complained. “If you’d gotten up earlier . . .”

She drew a deep breath and pulled the collar of her coat closer around her neck, her shoulders bunching with tension. The desolation and gathering night were making her more uncomfortable than she cared to admit and certainly more than she wanted Johnny to see.

Her brother gritted his teeth at the mention of his oversleeping.

“Aw, look,” he moaned. “I already lost an hour’s sleep on the time change.”

“I think you complain just to hear yourself talk,” Barbara snapped. Even though Johnny was once again tap-dancing on her nerves, she moved closer to him, drawing comfort from his company. Then she spotted the familiar shape of the headstone marking their father’s grave and felt an instant of relief.

“There it is.” She made a beeline for her target.

Spying the object of their quest, Johnny finally took some initiative and quick-stepped past his sister, getting to the grave ahead of her. By the time she caught him, he was down on his knees, planting the spikes for the small cross into the ground.

“I wonder what happened to the one from last year,” he muttered. The decoration wasn’t cooperating, refusing to stand properly so he messed with the spikes, trying to get it at least halfway adjusted.

“Each year we spend good money on these things,” he carped, “and we come out here and the one from last year’s gone.”

“Well, the flowers die and the caretaker or . . . somebody takes them away,” Barbara said, with childlike reflection.

Johnny hadn’t really been looking for an answer and he laughed softly, deciding not to point out that the plastic flowers on the decoration couldn’t die if they had never been alive in the first place. It crossed his mind to wonder then if she hadn’t noticed the flowers were artificial. She’d sounded so utterly earnest in her reasoning that he decided not to spoil the illusion.

“Ah, a little spit and polish, you can clean this up and sell it next year.”

Finally, he got the ground spikes to hold so they supported the cross standing upright. Glad to be done with the task and feeling mildly proud of himself, he stood, wiping the dirt from his hands as he walked from the grave.

“I wonder how many times we’ve bought the same one,” he cackled.

He stepped back to admire his work, relieved to finally fulfill the objective they’d spent all day trying to achieve. It was just in time, too. A flash of lightning streaked across the sky, followed by a roll of thunder. By a razor-thin margin, they were going to make it out ahead of the rain.

Unless they weren’t.

Johnny had turned away for just a second to look at the sky, Eager to get back on the road, he was digging in his pocket for his motoring gloves. In that split second of distraction, Barbara had managed to get down on her knees and was now kneeling in prayer before their father’s gravestone.

Johnny sighed heavily, pulling on his gloves. He took a few respectful steps away and stood silently, trying to be patient as thunder continued to rumble in the distance.

The breeze went from a whispered breath to a whipping wind. A chill hit Johnny as the cold front on the leading edge of the storm arrived. It rattled the branches of the nearby trees, the restless leaves issuing a hissing chatter that made a sound like a sudden downpour had erupted though not a drop of rain fell.

“Hey, come on, Barb,” Johnny grumbled. “Church was this morning, huh?”

But Barbara continued her prayer or meditation or whatever the hell it was she was doing without paying him any mind.

They were both startled by a flash of lightning that arced across the sky, followed by a loud crash of thunder that rolled a timpani through the surrounding hills. In the fraction of mid-day brightness, Johnny spotted some errant movement in the distance. It didn’t match the rhythmic sway of the branches of the trees and bushes in the gusting breeze and he thought he discerned the shape of a human figure wandering among the tombstones some yards away.

So, he and Barbara weren’t totally alone in the graveyard after all. At least one other person was present. A cascade of lightning—flickering like a child playing with a light switch and absent any thunder this time—created a strobing effect that captured the scene in a series of rapid-fire freeze-frame images. Then solid twilight took over again and Johnny quickly lost sight of the figure amid the shadows. He looked around to see if there was anyone else he might have missed but it appeared the population of the graveyard was stable at three.

Three people who were still above ground, at any rate.

Trying to defuse nervous energy and impatient to get back on the road now that their job here was done, he picked at the cuffs of his motoring gloves, wondering what kind of fool would be wandering the graveyard so close to night-fall—with a storm brewing to boot. He didn’t miss the irony of the fact he and Barbara were doing the same thing and that made him all the more anxious to get a move on. Barbara, though, now seemed determined to stall their departure. He knew damn well she was doing it just to irritate him. And after her all-day bitch-fest blaming him for their late start, her little stunt of dragging her feet now was supremely aggravating.

“Hey,” he griped. “I mean prayin’s for church, huh? Come on.” He was tempted to grab her by the arm, drag her to her feet and haul her bodily back to the car. If he had done that, things would have undoubtedly turned out much different for both of them. Maybe not better, but certainly different.

Barbara made no effort to move. She wanted to turn the screws just a bit more so she remained on her knees, her hands tented in seraphic prayer like she was one of the Lord’s sweetest little angels asking for grace. A churlish smirk tickled the corners of her mouth as she chirped, oh-so-innocently, “I haven’t seen you in church lately.”

The frosty snark of the comment caught Johnny in a way that made him laugh out loud. His lack of religion was one of his least vulnerable spots and Barbara knew that. She’d phrased the shade like a champion though and from her satisfied tone, she clearly thought she’d scored a major hit with the remark. He appreciated her styling and decided to roll with the theme.

“Well,” he drawled out, wryly. “There’s not much sense in my going to church.”

Johnny set his hands on his hips. Staring into space, he chewed his lower lip, surprised at the intense emotion the moment had just triggered in him.

“Do you remember one time when we were small, we were out here?” he asked. “It was from right over there.” He pointed at the thick trunk of a nearby red maple. “I jumped out at you from behind that tree and Grandpa got all excited and he shook his fist at me and he said ‘Boy, ya be damned to hell’.” Johnny spoke the words in a creaking, ancient voice that sounded nothing like their grandfather so much as some grizzled old cartoon prospector freshly down from ‘six months a’ minin’ up in .them thar hills’.

“Remember that?” He chuckled, not recognizing at all that the warm fuzzy he was getting from the reminiscence was the memory of his own grandfather condemning him to eternal damnation. “It was right over there,” he recalled, smirking.

Barbara got to her feet, throwing him a foul look. She remembered the incident quite well—thank you—though she’d hardly been more than a toddler at the time.

The episode had occurred on the day of their father’s funeral. Johnny, impatient and fidgety throughout the entire service had for some bizarre reason, decided to disrupt the event and chose the Moment of Silence following the final prayer as his crucially ill-timed opportunity to clown around. The blood-curdling shriek he’d issued leaping from behind the tree scared Barbara so badly she screamed herself and jumped. Only a quick grab from the minister officiating the service saved her from tumbling headlong into her father’s open grave. The back-to-back cries from the children startled the hell out of everyone present and some minutes elapsed before the commotion settled. Even then, Barbara wasn’t able to contain herself and sobbed intermittently throughout the remainder of the visitation, causing it to break up early. She was pretty sure these many years later several of the mourners still had not forgiven either of them for spoiling the memorial.

Johnny forcing her to revisit the trauma now, funny as it was to him, made her feel sick in the pit of her stomach and her anger over his inconsiderate buffoonery throughout the day was subsumed by a gnawing, primitive fear. That childish prank long ago had left her with nightmares throughout her childhood and, to this day, she found it difficult to even enter a cemetery without her nervous system going into overdrive. Johnny’s comment brought the moment screaming back and she stalked past him, desperate to get back to the car before she succumbed to a full-blown panic. About the last thing she wanted was for him to see how frightened she was.

“Boy, you used to really be scared here,” Johnny said, with playful malice, not realizing how spot on he’d hit the mark.

“Johnny—” Barbara froze in her tracks, wanting to push back at him and make him stop his nonsense. Her trembling voice betrayed her fear though.

Her brother caught the tremor and saw the deer-in-the-headlights fright well up in her eyes. The effect was like waving a red cloak in front of a bull. A malignant joy came over him at an intensity he simply could not resist.

“Hey, you’re still afraid,” he realized, sparking with no small amount of delight. Suddenly he was that malevolent six-year-old kid again, grinning from ear to ear.

Barbara tried to mask her fear as anger but she was flashing back to being that vulnerable toddler he’d terrorized all those years ago. She all but stamped her foot as she demanded, “Stop it now. I mean it.” If she’d added, “Or I’m going to tell Mom!” it wouldn’t have sounded out of place. Blinking rapidly to hold back tears, she fixed her gaze on the ground and stormed away from him in the direction of the car. This time, she paid no attention where she walked and tread across the graves without a thought.

Johnny allowed his head to loll to one side, eyes rolling back behind his glasses until only the whites showed. His shoulders dropped and suddenly he was a human-sized rag doll, arms like loose noodles dangling at his sides. His lanky legs, all bandy and out of kilter, barely supported his body as he feigned a madman’s empty stare. But he couldn’t keep the twisted grin off his face.

“They’re coming to GET you, Barbara,” he intoned in a hauntingly dulcet, faux-British accent that was slippery as silk. It was a decent impression of the voice of Boris Karloff during his stint as a late-night TV show host in his latter years. Reaching out his arms, Johnny lurched toward his sister in a staggering, somnambulistic gait.

Barbara hesitated, turning back long enough to shout, “STOP IT! You’re ignorant.”

But there was no stopping him. Johnny had gone from being a bull with a red cape in front of him to a shark smelling blood in the water. He hunched over like a silent-movie fiend on a killing spree and did a hob-goblin hop, bounding toward her. He was so into his character that he stumbled and had to grapple with an upright tombstone to keep from falling.

Barbara spun around and sped away from him, no longer paying the slightest attention to the direction she was going.

“They’re coming for you, Barbara,” he keened in his Karloff voice. He lumbered around the tombstone after her, determined to terrorize her into breaking into a full run.

She changed direction again, zigzagging to keep the headstones between them to slow Johnny’s pursuit. She looked back over her shoulder to see him clambering up behind her and broke into a light trot.

“Stop it,” she whimpered. “You’re acting like a child.”

“They’re coming for you,” he taunted.

A short distance away, Johnny once more spotted the figure he’d seen minutes earlier. It was an older man dressed in a suit. He was still idling along between the graves. Barbara hadn’t noticed him but her erratic changes in direction now had her pedaling right at him.

Johnny knew a lucky prop when he saw one.

“LOOK,” he shrieked. He jabbed a finger fearfully in the direction of the figure. “There comes one of them now.”

Barbara was startled to see the man and froze in her steps when she realized they weren’t alone in the graveyard. Her childish fear was kicked to the curb by a sudden very adult sense of embarrassment.

“Stop it,” she demanded again. “He’ll hear you.”

It was already too late. The figure reacted to Johnny’s cry and turned to look their way. He altered his path in their direction and Barbara was even more humiliated to realize Johnny’s bullshit had attracted his attention enough that he was coming to investigate the commotion. He couldn’t have been too alarmed about what was happening though as he approached at the same ambling pace he’d been walking all along. Barbara hoped that if they hadn’t created too much of a scene already, simply explaining that her brother was an idiot would be enough to smooth things over.

But Johnny wasn’t done yet. He leaped up next to Barbara, grabbing her by the arms, catching her in a fearful embrace.

“Here he comes, now!” he wailed. The man was on an intercept course for them and was near enough there was no way he could fail to hear Johnny’s nonsense at this point.

“I’m getting out of here,” Johnny gasped, so close to laughing he was barely able to stay in character. He shoved Barbara to the side and jogged away a few yards before he stopped and turned back to see how his sister was going to handle his handiwork.

“Johnny—” she shouted after him, furious that he’d put her in such a humiliating position.

Mortified with embarrassment, she put her head down, unable to look the stranger in the face. Desperate to find an excuse for her brother but with no suitable explanation coming to mind, she decided to take the easy way out and just ignore the man unless he spoke to her first.

She changed direction to avoid their paths crossing, certain she was going to escape encountering him when she caught a flash of movement from the corner of her eye and cold hands closed tightly around her throat.

For a crazy second, she thought it had to be her brother again, still trying to scare her. But, no, she saw Johnny standing where he’d run to, absolute shock on his face. He obviously wasn’t acting anymore.

Barbara’s gaze ran to the face of the figure holding her. She saw glassy, lifeless eyes, an ashen pallor and a slack-jawed expression devoid of almost any emotion. His mouth gaped open, a black hole in the bottom of his face, and his breath rasped like sandpaper running slowly up and down rough wood as he leaned toward her. Barbara realized in a panic that he was trying to BITE her face. She recoiled and the man, the thing, the creature—whatever it was that had a hold of her—twisted and pulled her hard, trying to wrestle her to the ground.

“JOOOHHHNNNYYY—” Barbara shrieked in blind terror.

“Oh, HELP ME, Johnny! HELP ME!”

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