Year's End: 14 Tales of Holiday Horror (8 page)

The man curled up, forehead to knees, then drove a punch to his own right temple. A cry of pain mangled out through gritted teeth. Ray stood stunned in the booth’s doorway. Ed made no move either. The man swung again, harder; Ray panicked, almost expecting to see eyes pop from their sockets. Against half his will Ray ran to him, sneakers squeaking on snow. His mind blank, he pulled the man’s arms down and pinned them at the knee.

Once again Ray could attend to the world. “Joshua, Joshua!” wailed a woman many paces away.
I know that voice; I know that voice. Oh, right.
Celia, redhead, pretty, walks her beagles down the street. She mentioned once she’d lost a son, didn’t seem too broken by it
. “Breathe, Honey, breathe!” she begged the empty air. “You’re not going to die in front of me!”

“It’s just a dream!” Ray screamed, stuck in place but hoping his voice could reach her, “I think.”
How else do you explain this?
He felt his father’s presence on him, unforgiving, but managed to shake it off.

He kept his grip on the resistant arms of the man beneath him. Yells and cries surrounded them, and it felt like forever until the man lifted his head. “Keith?” Ray recognized the college student home on break. He couldn’t hide his surprise. “What happened?”

“You don’t know,” Keith shook his head. “Put those pills in front of me, and I’m powerless. I’ve destroyed my life. Let me go.” His eyes, the right bloodshot, begged. “Or at least,” he said, “Let me rest in the woods. It’s quiet there. I don’t know why. People yell going in, and then they’re silent.”

Ray scanned the field and realized Keith was right. Half the adults had run away, all towards the dark trees. The remaining ones cried, but with less passion, or hugged their children like ships tied to anchors.

“Please?” asked Keith. “I need some relief.” He tried to force his arms upward against Ray’s grip.

Ray was stronger and had the advantage of standing.
This kid is not going to hit himself again if I can help it. It sounds crazy, but could the woods give him some peace?

“Okay,” Ray said, “But you promise, no stupid shit like before?” He tried to sound tougher than he felt. “You’re a good kid.” He failed.

Keith nodded. “I’ll hold on, if the woods will make a change. Or will let me. I don’t know. I’ve fucked up.”

“All right.” Ray released Keith’s arms. “I’ll walk there with you.”
Makes a good excuse. What are those people doing in the woods anyway?

The two of them found a makeshift trail, one of the many where boots and shoes had scattered the snow. Ray glanced at the field as they made their way across. Countless children huddled on blankets near the dim light of a dying lamppost. A few lone adult figures too, rocking back and forth as though to calm themselves, yelping out occasionally.
Why have they been spared? Maybe their lives don’t hold enough trauma to cause them to run.

Keith and Ray reached the edge where grass gave way to thick pines. The wind picked up a distinct Christmas-tree scent. Ray looked to Keith for a final decision. Even in the near-darkness, the young man’s pain was unmistakable. “I’ve got to go,” he said. “I’ll curse myself all the way, though. Being alone and thinking about my past…” he shook his head. “I hope I can find some peace.”

Ray peered into the trees as Keith stepped forward. He could follow the boy further, try to comfort him, but the border of this silent forest made him catch his breath and stop. As promised, Keith resumed his loud self-recrimination: “God, what kind of imbecile are you, can’t even control yourself…” But in seconds—too soon—his yells faded to eerie quiet. Ray couldn’t hear so much as the crunch of snow under Keith’s boots. The drops of sweat on his back flash-froze to an icy web.

Ray’s watch beeped: almost time for the midnight fireworks. He wouldn’t set them off this year. Soon a new day would dawn. Would it be safe then to enter the strange woods, search for the people who’d walked in but not out?
I pushed the button and started this whole thing. I have to try to fix it.

The new year came with a sudden silence. Ray hadn’t realized how loud the screaming from the field had been until it ended. He turned to look. The dark figures on blankets stopped in place. Soon they began moving again, but in slow motion, rising to stand, hugging their children, talking again.

Relief swept into Ray’s lungs. The weight of his father’s rage lifted from his shoulders.
They’ll be okay.

The people in the woods, though… All still dark and quiet. He gulped.

One careful step into the forest. Ray looked down. More footprints, no surprise. On and on, dodging tree trunks. A few minutes in, he stopped. Bent to touch one icy shoe print. S
maller than the ones before? Three-quarters the size.

A hundred more footsteps.
At least there’s moonlight.
The snow reflected everything the sky gave.

He scanned the ground, then knelt closer. Shoe prints, less than half the size of his own. His breath stalled.
No children came in.

Walking faster. Smaller, smaller, smaller prints. Then tiny hands and feet like a baby had crawled. Then gone. Not a single print but his own.

Where are those people?
Had they left, risen up?
No, that’s silly
.
I don’t believe in those crazy things.
But the snow here was so fresh, untainted. Maybe they’d given up their bodies and memories to start over. He paused.
Would I have done the same?

He felt in his jacket pocket for his house key.
It’s time to go home
. He turned to follow his path back. Then stopped fast. Smooth, untouched snow reached from his shoes, as far as he could see.

The Story of Myrtle Roady

George Seaton

Myrtle Roady took a toy

Drank some rum

And ate a boy

Myrtle Roady stole a curl

Drank some rum

Then ate the girl

On December 31, 1882, Hiram Clop, a fair-haired boy of seven who’d already broken one leg of the hand-fashioned wooden horse his daddy had given him for Christmas, carried the cherished albeit lamed steed he’d named Fury to the tent that covered the odiferous hole fifty yards from the pine-framed and canvas-walled and roofed structure he knew as his home. His mamma and daddy had told him to hurry-up his business, as the New Year’s Eve celebration would soon commence in the large communal tent down the road, and “You still gotta change your clothes, Hi.” He pulled the flap open, smelled the odor that always aroused his druthers to just step off into what was now, at almost eight o’clock in the evening, the blackly-hued scrub either side of the path where he could just squat, do what he needed to do and then run back to the warmth of the single-burner iron stove that centered their unfinished house. He’d been admonished to be civilized, though, by his mamma who’d caught him more than once, “…actin’ like a savage,” and that “…decent white men use the privy.” And he did, stepping under the flap, keeping hold of Fury in his right hand and pulling his drawers down with his left. He quickly finished his white man’s duty to decency, wiped with a handful of feather grass, pulled his pants up and stepped back out of the awful place. He saw the glow of his house, heard the voices of those already gathered in the Crawford town center, smiled with the remembrance of last New Year’s Eve when the townspeople had sat down to a fine supper after the blessing from Pastor Gumm had ended. He took one step into the run he knew would get him to it all a little faster, felt something clamp against his mouth as Fury was ripped from his hand and his whole body rose as he was tightly embraced by an arm around his middle. He tried to scream, and he couldn’t. Kicked his legs and flailed his arms. Knew he was being carried away from the proximity of his home, and even further from the happy sounds of those anxious to bring in the new year with good food, a warm fire, a little cider and declarations that the Good Lord would bring them a better year ahead. He felt no pain when the hand upon his mouth quickly snapped his head backward to an unnatural and mortally conclusive life-ending droop. Hiram Clop was dead, and Fury found a new home amongst other childish things—ragged baby dolls and ribbons, curled locks of hair, six-shooters of wood and wood blocks painted gaily in reds and greens.

*

Myrtle Roady left life on January 1, 1889, in a town of 150 souls called Crawford in southwestern Colorado; a place where scrub oak, cacti, sagebrush and saltbush are plentiful upon the land, and where the mountains and canyons beyond provide stingy embracement of Pinyon Pine, juniper, yucca and Mountain Mahogany; where cottonwoods suck sustenance from washes here and there, and sunrises come late against the rise of the West Elk Range of the Colorado Rockies to the east.

Story is that Captain George A. Crawford passed through the area at the end of December in 1882, mentioned to a Baptist preacher/resident, Henry Gumm, that this would be a fine place for a town and the preacher and his flock heartily agreed as they watched Captain Crawford disappear into the sunset. They then and there named the place where they’d settled Crawford and set up a post office for good measure. Didn’t occur to the folks who now had a name for the place upon which their ragtag assemblage had squatted, that Captain Crawford—who didn’t even find it necessary to dismount as he smiled down at Pastor Gum and gave voice to those encouraging words—that patronization was a convenient way to just get on with more pressing business that, in Captain Crawford’s case, eventually included the founding of more hefty burgs like Grand Junction and Delta.

Myrtle Roady was amongst the group who watched Captain Crawford ride away that day, and finding the silly hurly-burly of the gathered Baptists distasteful, she spit an epithet barely heard by the rowdy group, walked north past the outskirts of the wee settlement, climbed one hill, stepped down the other side, then trudged up another topped by her one-room roughly-hewn pine abode, entered it and farted mightily. Charley, a raccoon of mild temperament who had half-buried himself under the three deer hides spread upon Myrtle’s floor-bound sleeping corner, raised himself from his loll, studied Myrtle’s entrance, cocked his head with her malodorous release and stood up on two feet—wide-eyed and bushy tailed, as they say. Myrtle nodded, said, “Go back to bed, Charley,” and Charley did, once again digging into the bedclothes as a badger to a hole. “Goddamned Bible-thumping sonsabitches,” she said, not knowing it would be thirty or more years before her pejorative would gain prominence. Didn’t care about such things, as her priorities tended to focus on the here and now. And here and now she figured it was time to once again hone the edges of her cutlery, including the two axes she favored for endeavors past and those certainly ahead. Yes, she had done it before, without knowing the why or wherefore of her passion for such a thing, but believed by simply doing it was in itself reason enough to do it again. She tossed two thigh-long and as doubly thick pine logs into the river rock fireplace where orange embers still sizzled. She grabbed her cutting tools, placed them upon her all-purpose table, sat down on the broad-based two-foot tall log chair and began filing the edges with a hand-crafted rasp, working rhythmically as she sang, “Oh, dem golden slippers! Oh, dem golden slippers!” She stopped her scraping, held the axe up, licked her finger and slid it against the business end of the implement. Shook her head, grinned large and got back to work. “So it’s good-bye, chillun. You will have to go. Oh, dem golden slippers! Oh, dem golden slippers!” She’d long since forgotten all the lyrics and, besides Dixie, it was the only other song she knew, and she’d not really intentionally changed the words but had found they’d somehow changed themselves once she’d satisfied her passions for the first time. “So it’s good-bye, chillun,” she now hollered, spitting out the words to the four walls and Charley, who didn’t stir from his slumber after having long since concluded Myrtle’s quirkiness was a benign thing for him, and perhaps other small critters as well. But those other larger critters Myrtle fancied more dead than alive? Well, that was another thing altogether; something that manifested itself to Charley as exotic but filling tidbits she’d toss his way after… He wasn’t exactly sure what had come before the after, but in his quiet, calculating, nocturnal scrounging way, he understood night feeding as well as any like-minded critter and knew Myrtle surely did know how to bring home the bacon…so to speak.

*

In June of 1880, Pastor Henry Gumm had not really seen the worth of settling upon the spot that would become Crawford, but had understood that, after leading his flock of thirty-five from Ash Flat, Arkansas—an apt name for a dreary place even the most robust of Baptists could no longer countenance—across the even more dismal flatlands of the Indian Territory that would become Oklahoma, then up to the northern New Mexico Territory and into what he had identified as the Promised Land of Colorado, his and his congregation’s fervor for travel had hit rock bottom. He knew Colorado offered more ideal places to settle, but the road had been long and the collective enthusiasm for continuing their exodus had turned sour as sun-baked milk. So tents were raised, plentiful water was found, deer were shot, timber was felled and cut for the coming winter. They’d found their Promised Land; surely not an Eden, but it’d have to do.

Myrtle Roady, certainly not partial to religious folks, especially Baptists, Catholics to a lesser extent, had tagged along on the journey when Pastor Gumm et al had reached the Panhandle of the Indian Territory where, more as a matter of expedience rather than any notion life might be rosier in Colorado, she joined the group. Seems Myrtle had outstayed whatever welcome she’d found there at the Cimarron cutoff for the old Santa Fe Trail, where more than a few travelers from points east rested for a day or two before resuming their westward trek ala the mantra of Manifest Destiny.

Myrtle, preferring pants to skirts, knee-length boots of soft hide, a silk top hat ragged with wear and a wool coat two sizes too large, had tarried at that offshoot of the Santa Fe Trail for two weeks, where she gained some little respect for her cutting and carving skills upon newly-slain game. Elk and deer mostly, and one domestic hog toward the middle of the second week that had apparently gone mad from ingesting nettles, kept Myrtle busy and valued by the fairly steady flow of folks upon the trail. She was glad to do what she could, and certainly had the equipment with which to do it. Folks took notice, though, that Myrtle didn’t like children; seemed she’d determined that children were “…no good for nuthin’ and oughtin’ ta be on the road screamin’ and smellin’ like vermin.” ’Course, Myrtle hadn’t smelled herself for some time, given that she’d long-since become immune to her own odor, and the most displeasing odors she did smell always seemed to wrinkle the impressive lump of her nose upon the passage of one child or another within her sniffing distance. Folks began to wonder, though, about Myrtle Roady who’d take to her cutting and carving with the same song upon her lips, “Oh, dem golden slippers,” with the chopping part of her butchery always punctuated with a heightened tone, and blaring vociferousness when the words to the song declared, “So it’s good-bye, chillun!” Seemed her axe always managed to separate the head from the body with those words: “So it’s good-bye, chillun! You will have to go!”