Where We Live and Die (5 page)

Creating a literary estate took money, something that neither Jesus nor I had much of. I’d gotten a sample draft from a link Neil Gaiman had posted, and was weighing the possibilities of finding something similar on LegalZoom.com or another website. I wondered if such a document would still be considered legal. This was important to me. I didn’t want to die and have the rights to my work fall into the hands of one of my publishers. The money, what little there was, should go to my sons.

This was what I was thinking about when Sam started growling. I glanced down at him. He was staring at the top of the driveway. His ears were flattened and his haunches were raised. His tail was between his legs and he stood stiff as a board. When I reached for him, he growled again. His eyes never left the spot at the top of the hill.

I looked around, thinking he’d seen an animal, but the driveway was deserted. Annoyed, I picked up Max, sat him down and then took Sam inside. When I came back out, Max had run off to the garage and was standing outside the door, meowing to be let in. Although he is an outdoor cat, Max sleeps in the garage at night. It provides him safety from the cold in the winter and protection from nocturnal predators like coyotes and foxes and owls in the warmer months. I opened the door and let him in. Then I closed it behind me and returned to my cigar.

As I sat down again, the porch glider began to move. The rocking was slow, but noticeable. Back and forth. Back and forth. The aluminum struts squeaked. Max began howling inside the garage. In the house, I heard Sam start growling again. He barked once, loud and powerful. Then Cassi hollered at him to shut up. Her voice was muted, almost lost beneath the forcefulness of his bark. Through it all, the glider kept rocking. There was no wind. I glanced up at the treetops to confirm this. No wind, not even a slight breeze. Sometimes, when a dump truck or tractor trailer goes barreling down the road, they’ll vibrate our deck, but the road was clear. There were no vibrations, no disturbance.

And yet the glider was moving.

I said, “What the fuck?”

The glider’s rails squeaked in response as it continued rocking. Cigar clenched between my teeth, I walked over to it. It stopped moving when I was halfway across the deck.

If this was fiction, this would be the part of the story where the protagonist starts to put two and two together—
the dream of the girl on the glider (so eerily similar in setting to what was now occurring in real life), the glider moving on its own while the protagonist watches. But this isn’t fiction, and I didn’t put those two events together. Not then.

That came after my son started saying “Hi” to something I couldn’t see.

ENTRY 11:

Been a few days since I worked on this. Real life intruded. To paraphrase Bob Segar, deadlines and commitments, what to leave in and what to leave out. I finished the extra material for
Darkness on the Edge of Town
tonight. It’s a little after 3am and I’m sitting here wondering how “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” by Vaughan Mason & Crew ended up in my iTunes library. I’ve got about ten-thousand songs on iTunes, the culmination of a lifelong music collection, and when I write, I put them on random shuffle. It makes for eclectic and inspiring background music. I never know what will pop up next. Jerry Reed and then Anthrax, followed by The Alan Parsons Project and then Marvin Gaye and then Public Enemy and then Johnny Cash or Guns N’ Roses or Neil Diamond or Iron Maiden or Alice In Chains or Dr. Dre. But I don’t remember ever owning this disco tune, and here it is, blasting from my computer’s speakers and subwoofer.

I don’t have a lot in life. Material wealth has not accompanied my success, and these days, I seem to have more hangers-on and acquaintances than I do real friends, but the one thing I’ve got going for me is a kick-ass collection of tunes. And an awesome fucking library. This is what I leave behind for my sons—a metric fuck-ton of books, comics and music.

Anyway, I went back through this tonight, reading what I wrote, and I noticed something. Even in this, my secret diary, I avoid mentioning the baby’s name. When he was born, Cassi and I made a decision to guard his privacy as much as possible. We’ve never posted a picture of him online. Indeed, when I do talk about him in public, I refer to him as ‘Turtle,’ rather than his real name. Maybe we’re just being paranoid, but I don’t care. I’ve got enough crazies out there, and have gotten enough death threats that I’m not taking any chances. Like I said at the beginning, I genuinely half-expect to get done in by some crazed ‘fan’ one of these days. What’s to stop Nicky, the guy who said he wanted to, (quote) “shoot me in the head with a crossbow because I psychically stole his story ideas” (end quote) from hopping on a Greyhound and coming to York County and tracking down my kid at school? These are the thoughts that keep a horror writer awake at night. So we guard his identity, and I did it even here, in this Word document, and I wasn’t even aware I was doing it until now.

I would do anything for my sons. I would murder others to keep them safe. My oldest son, David, is now an adult and can fend for himself. He’s as big of a genre geek as I am, and he likes telling goth girls who his dad is, in hopes of getting laid. And it works, too. He gets more game at sci-fi and horror conventions than Coop and I ever did back in the day. I don’t have to worry about him as much anymore. He’s a smart kid…hell, he’s not even a kid. He’s a man, now. But I still have to worry about my youngest son. The world is a scary place and he has no fear. When
he attempts to climb out of his crib, he isn’t aware that he might fall. When he clambers up onto the couch and rolls around, he doesn’t realize that he could tumble off. He is not afraid of the electrical outlets or the neighbor’s dog or the swift, deep and powerful stream running through our property. He has no fear of strangers. He greets everyone he meets by waving his little hand in the air, smiling broadly until his dimples overshadow the rest of his face, and then shouting “Hi.”

Which is what he did the morning after I saw the glider moving by itself.

My mother was watching him for the day, and I had just brought him out of the house to take him over to her place. I was walking across the deck, juggling the baby and the diaper bag and a travel mug full of coffee and my car keys, when the baby suddenly whipped his head around, waved at the glider and shouted an enthusiastic greeting.

“Hi!”

Little hand waving back and forth just as fast as it could go. Big smile showing off those baby teeth. Eyes sparkling. My kid is a charmer, but there was nobody there to charm—at least that I could see.

“Hi,” he said again, as if he was speaking to someone he knew. When I turned toward the glider, I saw that it was moving. It stopped as I gave it my full attention, as if it had been rocking back and forth unnoticed, and the person doing it had gotten up when I focused my attention on it. That was when I started to get creeped the fuck out.

I carried the baby down to the car, and as I opened the back door and bent over to strap him into his car seat, he looked over my shoulder, waved again and shouted “Hi” a third time. He was staring at the top of the driveway.

Inside the house, Sam howled.

My hands and fingers felt numb. I fumbled with the straps on the car seat. Once the baby was safely inside, I started the car. Howard Stern came on, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I was too busy putting it all together in my head. The car wreck. The leaf cyclone at the top of the driveway. Cassi getting spooked out on our deck. The weird dream I’d had. The porch glider moving on its own. And now this.

I drove slowly to the top of the driveway. I stopped, looking both ways for oncoming traffic before pulling out. The makeshift monument was still there. The flowers were dead and gone, but the cross remained—a lone reminder of what had occurred there. I bit my lip, waiting for the baby to wave at the cross and say hi, but he didn’t. He was busy playing with a pacifier. In hindsight, I’m glad he didn’t.

If he had, I think I might have screamed.

* * *

I dropped him off at my mom’s, and then stopped in to see Bill Wahl and Ned Senft (some old friends of mine who are the proprietors of Comix Connection, a Central-Pennsylvanian chain of comic book stores). It turned out that Bill and Ned weren’t in that day. Manager Jared Wolf was working the counter. He was his usual friendly, gregarious self, but I found it hard to talk. My mind wasn’t on comic books. It was on what had just happened. It must have been obvious because before I left the store, Jared asked me if I was feeling okay.

When I got home, I considered ripping that stupid cross out of the ground and tossing it over the bridge and into the creek. I imagined it floating along on the current until it ended up in the Susquehanna River, and then bobbed along until ultimately landing in the chemical stew that is the Chesapeake Bay, and from there into the Atlantic Ocean. Or maybe taking it down and smashing it in the road. Or driving over it. Or setting it on fire. Or using it for target practice.

But I did none of these things. I put it out of my mind. There was weirdness afoot, and it seemed to me that the best thing to do was to ignore it. I told myself these were nothing more than a string of coincidences, and the only reason I suspected something more sinister was because of what I did for a living.

I got out of the car and went to work. At the end of the day, I drove back to my mother’s house and picked up the baby. When we got home, and I got him out of the car, he glanced at the top of the driveway, now half-hidden in the encroaching evening gloom, and said, “Hi.” When he waved, I peered into the shadows, wondering if something was waving back at him.

* * *

He’s done that ever since—every single day. Every time we bring him outside, he waves at the top of the driveway and says, “Hi.” One night, when he woke at 3am and absolutely refused to go back to sleep, I took him out to the car. Sometimes, driving him around will make him sleep when nothing else will. It was pitch black outside. There was no moon. No stars. No light of any kind. We literally couldn’t see five feet in front of us, let alone the top of the driveway. That was the only time he didn’t do it.

Cassi says he’s talking to the passing trucks, or our neighbor’s goat, or a variety of other things, none of which are supernatural. I’ve never told her who I suspect the baby is saying hi to.

ENTRY 12:

Things went on like that for a while. There were no more leaf cyclones and the glider didn’t move, but the baby still waved and said hello every morning, and I still had weird dreams some nights. They were always the same—the girl sitting on the glider, staring at her cell phone with a sad expression.

I didn’t do anything about it. I mean, stop and think about it for a minute. What could I do? Call an exorcist? That shit only works in the movies. In real life, I wouldn’t know where to start. I couldn’t very well call up the Vatican and say, “Hi, this is mid-list horror novelist Brian Keene. I’d like to hire an exorcist to come chase a ghost away from my house.” And although I know some occultists and ghost hunters, I couldn’t ask them for advice either. Mason Winfield and Bob Freeman would have probably been happy to come check it out, but Mason is near Buffalo and Bob lives out in Indiana, and I couldn’t afford their travel and lodging expenses. It would have been embarrassing to ask them for help and then tell them it would have to be on their own dime. Vince Harper, former head of Bereshith Publishing and Shadowlands Press, was closer, and as far as I knew he was still involved in the OTO, but I had no idea how to get in touch with him. He’d sort of fallen off the grid after leaving his publishing gig in the horror genre. I still miss him. Vince was a good guy, and these days, good guys are in short supply in this business.

The main reason I didn’t act, however, was because I just didn’t believe it. It’s one thing to write fictional stories about ghosts. It’s something very different to actually believe those things are occurring to you in real life. That’s the appeal of horror fiction. In real life, the monsters are the ones abducting and killing children or flying hijacked airplanes into skyscrapers or looting our treasury and sending our kids off to fight a bullshit war just so they can line their own pockets and the pockets of their corporate buddies or eradicating our Bill of Rights in the name of national security. Those are the real monsters. Watch an hour of that shit on CNN or MSNBC or FOX and you’re more than ready to curl up with a fictional monster. Zombies, werewolves, vampires and ghosts are an escape from the real world because they don’t exist in the real world.

Except that I was apparently being confronted with proof of a ghost’s existence, and since that was impossible, the only other option was to question my sanity—which was no option at all. No way could I be going crazy. I had too many fucking books to finish. Insanity is not conducive to meeting deadlines, nor does it provide for one’s family.

So I forced myself to ignore all of it. The dreams were just that—dreams. And Cassi was right. The baby was just saying hi to the neighbor’s goat and the trucks racing by. These are the things I told myself, and they worked, for the most part…

…until I heard the cell phone.

It was a Wednesday night. The baby was asleep. Cassi and I were curled up on the couch, watching the final season of
The Shield
. I’d seen all of the episodes already, but she could never stay awake late enough to watch them on their original air-dates, so I’d bought the whole season on DVD when it came out. I love
The Shield
. I genuinely believe that it, along with
The Sopranos
and
The Wire
, is the best series ever on television. Vic Mackey is a perfect example of how to write a sympathetic character. He’s an absolutely loathsome individual, and yet we, the viewers, root for him every week. That is great writing.