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Excerpts

Seen through the heavy rain pouring across the windshield, the old shop swayed back and forth as if alive. As if in anguish, bewailing its abandoned state, pleading for someone -- anyone -- to flick on the lights and fire up its boiler, to begin the dirty chore of wiping away a decade of grime from its front window.

The rivulets of rain parted and the shop's pitted sign became momentarily distinct:

LUTHIER LORENZO

Beneath that, another sign:

FOR SALE

The man at the wheel stared, face blank, as memories played to the sound of the idling engine. He saw himself standing on the step in rubber boots, a shovel over his shoulder, grinning as he inhaled the sweet scents of autumnal decay. He heard the sound of his father gently hammering a fret in place with a mallet. Above he saw his mother, a ghost in the window, waving him off to work.

Then the vision disappeared, and all that remained was the filthy, dilapidated shop. He clenched his teeth. How he now hated the place and its cramped little second-floor apartment. It needed to be put out of its misery.

The car growled impatiently -- a low, throaty noise befitting the huge engine that surely lurked under such an enormous hood. The man put the black car into drive and made a U-turn. The thick tires hissed on the slick road and the chromed grill shone like a bared set of teeth. He headed a short way back the way he had come, pulling onto the muddy patch in front of the cemetery gates.

The car stopped growling. The man got out, sheltered from the rain under a wide black umbrella. The galoshes protecting his shiny shoes sank in the mud as he entered.

This time, he needed no fleeting visions of yesteryear. Everything was just as it always was, the same old ghosts rising up almost visibly from their graves. In their familiar company he recalled all the wasted hours, blistering his hands and breaking his back within these long stone walls. Tending and fussing over the horror of a place like it was some sort of royal garden. Living without ambition, up to his waist in muck and digging himself in deeper. How foolish he'd been.

But no longer, he told himself. Today he strode the avenues of the dead in a suit and tie.

He recalled his conversation with the grave-digger down in Darlington -- a kid really, with a pierced eyebrow, busy scooping enormous clods of earth with a backhoe. He gave the grave-digger a good story, that he was a nephew wanting to pay his respects to his beloved Uncle Ludwig, except his crazy old aunt wouldn't tell him where her husband was buried. Any chance he knew where to find him?

"Yeah, but the dude -- your uncle, I mean -- went in up the hill in that creepy old graveyard," he had answered. "Man, I even had to dig the hole with a shovel 'cuz I couldn't get this stupid thing in," he added, slapping a hand loudly against the frame of the backhoe. "Anyway, he's buried pretty much right in the middle, by some big stone angel swinging a sword. You can't miss it, dude," the grave-digger said finally, before popping his blaring headphones back on.

"Thanks, dude," the man said, smirking as the backhoe roared to life.

Now, standing in the graveyard, he looked up at the statue -- the Avenging Angel -- drenched and dark, its cheeks streaming with tears as it wound up to smite him with its heavy sword.

The man looked away. To the left, he spotted a small polished granite stone standing out of place among the ancient markers. There it was, the name he sought, chiseled simply.

LUDWIG ZWEIG

He wrote it carefully in a little leather notebook, the streaming umbrella resting unsteadily on his head.

CHERISHED HUSBAND, it said underneath.

The old woman, he remembered.

He felt a flash of anger. He had had enough of this game playing. Well, one down, he thought, one to go. He turned to leave.

Another headstone caught his attention.

VERONIQUE PHIPPS

Here she was, finally, alone for eternity. He gasped.

"Your father," she'd cried down the phone. "He's gone, Octavio, and this time it's for good!"

He stood there, watching raindrops bounce off the headstone, ashamed of himself. A failure, that's what he was, a failure of a son. He couldn't have saved her from being alone in the grave, but maybe he could have made her a little less lonely at the end of her poor life.

His father, however, no one could have saved. Not from his cursed blood.

The same blood that coursed through his own veins, he knew. At the thought, he felt a tingling feeling in his fingertips. He raised one hand in front of his face and stared hard. It looked solid enough, he thought. Probably just numbness from gripping the umbrella too tightly.

But he had to get out of there -- the place wasn't good for his nerves. He weaved without sympathy through the gray markers of other long-lost loved ones until he arrived back at the cemetery gates.

The black car started up angrily and then spun out toward the road. There was a sudden blast of a horn, terrifyingly close. The tires screeched as he hit the brakes.

His head slammed against the steering wheel, hard enough to honk back at the bright yellow blur roaring by. It was a school bus, full of children, their round faces pressed up against the windows above him. He swore, rubbing the swelling egg above his eyebrow, as the bus careened down toward Darlington.

How he hated this hill, he raged to himself as he drove off.

Every day, the children of Spooking rode the bus past the cemetery, down the hill to school in Darlington. And every day, they received the same rousing welcome.

"THE GHOULS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND, ROUND AND ROUND, ROUND AND ROUND. THE GHOULS ON THE BUS GO ROUND AND ROUND, ALL OVER TOWN!"

It was a tradition Joy had endured since her first day at Winsome Elementary. Six years later, it showed no signs of abating. With an evil hiss the bus would come to a stop, pitching the kids of Spooking forward in their seats as pudgy fists pounded the windows and fat faces bobbed up screaming. The door would then fold open violently.

"OFF!"

Burdened by school bags and lunch boxes, the Spookys would then march straight through the wall of taunts and abuse into school. There, hopelessly outnumbered, they did their best not to draw any more attention to themselves than necessary.

And so it had gone that morning as Joy sat down at her desk -- an old wooden one, carved and chipped over countless semesters, with a little round hole at the top right where a bottle of ink used to go. A desk that was riddled with secrets, Joy decided, as she spent long afternoons deciphering the puzzle of scribbles on its surface. For instance, did Edith really love Ezra? Or was it just some cruel torment? Perhaps the answer lay in that illegible blob of smudged marker....

The others' desks in the class were new, each with steel legs and a Formica top that had an almost supernatural ability to destroy the tip of any pen foolish enough to mark on it. Exactly how her old desk had ended up there among them was a mystery. But she was fond of it, even grateful that it had been forced on her the first day of school by the sharp elbows of the other children.

Joy yawned -- the teacher was late. She looked up at the familiar poster of an old, crazy-haired man with his tongue sticking out. "Imagination is more important than knowledge," it said underneath. The man was Albert Einstein, Joy knew, the big genius, who even Mrs. Wells reluctantly acknowledged was smarter than your average logical positivist.

The teacher came in, laying her coat on her desk. "Sorry I'm late! Children, how are we today?"

"GREAT, MISS KEENER!" answered the class in a single exuberant voice.

Except for Joy, that is, who pretended to cough, like she did every morning. Coughed, or sneezed, or fetched a pencil that just happened to roll onto the floor....

"Terrific! Is everyone excited to continue with the book reports today?"

"YEAH!" shouted the class.

"Wow! You sound like you all had a great breakfast!" she remarked, laughing.

Miss Keener had a thing about breakfasts. If you didn't eat a proper one, not only were you unable to concentrate in class but you were also much more likely to end up in prison later, possibly on death row. An unbalanced lunch, meanwhile, foreshadowed not only brittle-bone syndrome but a career in the toilet-cleaning trade, Joy had been informed.

"Okay, let me pull a name...." Miss Keener picked up a large top hat and stirred the contents. "I do hope Mr. Fluffs didn't get in and eat any of them!"

Mr. Fluffs was the class rabbit. Using the hat, Miss Keener was able to make him vanish into thin air. It was a good trick but hardly the equal of Mr. Fluffs's own magic act, wherein he disappeared into the shredded newspaper of his cage for an entire week before reappearing with yet another disgusting eye infection.

"Abracadabra! Abracadoo! Who's going next? Who is it? Who?"

Please don't pick my name, thought Joy. Please.

Joy knew such a pathetic attempt to alter the course of fate was pointless -- her name was in there somewhere, and Miss Keener wouldn't stop fishing for it until the hat was empty of everything save a few crusty flakes from Mr. Fluff's eye. But she couldn't help herself.

Miss Keener read from a small piece of paper. "Tyler!" A couple of chimpanzee-like whoops came from the back of class.

"I'm ready, Miss," said Tyler, swaggering up to the blackboard, where he cleared his throat theatrically. "For this report, I decided to choose a really famous story that most everybody knows."

"Great," purred Miss Keener. "Let's hear about it."

"It's based on the TV show Ultradroids." Upon hearing the title, a few boys started humming something that Joy guessed was the Ultradroids theme song. "Take out the trash, Ultradroid captains€Š!€Š" yelled Tyler, striking an action pose. The class erupted into laughter.

"Now settle down, everyone," said Miss Keener mildly. "Okay, Ultradroids -- cool," she said, snapping her fingers and bobbing her head to show she was down with it. Joy cringed. "Go on, Tyler."

"Yeah, so it's a wicked show as everybody who lives on this planet knows. And this is the book version." Tyler held a copy up. The cover featured a gigantic robot bristling with missiles in a similar pose to the one Tyler had struck moments before. "Well, actually, there's like twenty-eight books or something. But this one is Number 7: The Destruction of Homeworld."

Tyler looked at his sheet. "There's no author listed, so I left that part blank. What's next? Oh yeah, the story.

"So the Ultradroids are returning from fighting the Legion of the Overlord again, but instead of their home planet, they see this cloud of broken-up rocks...."

Tyler began outlining the major plot points. They involved his crawling around on all fours while firing barrage after barrage of imaginary missiles from his hands, feet, back, and even his eyes in one dramatic instance. The resulting explosions left a fine mist of saliva swirling in front of the class, making Joy once again thankful that she sat near the back.

"So their planet wasn't really destroyed," Tyler concluded, wiping his chin. "It was all a dream Commander Slate had when he was unconscious after his Ultradroid was hit by a pulse rocket." He let loose a final, incredible explosion of spittle. "But everything was actually okay the whole time! So if you read it yourself, don't worry, because everything works out in the end. Thank you."

There was loud applause as Tyler took a bow. Joy marveled at how Tyler's spoiling the ending made The Destruction of Homeworld an even less likely read.

"Thank you, Tyler," said Miss Keener. "I can see you really enjoyed reading that book! Wouldn't you say that reading about Ultradroids was a better experience than just watching Ultradroids on television?"

Tyler shrugged. "Not really, Miss Keener. It took me a week to read the book, but I can watch a whole episode in just a half hour. Television is a much more efficient way to enjoy Ultradroids, I think."

"Well, that's certainly a valid point, Tyler," said Miss Keener. "Thank you -- you may take your seat. Now allakazam, allakazoo. Who's going next, who, who?" Miss Keener drew another name. "Cassandra!"

Joy decided to tune out Cassandra's book report, which not surprisingly involved a pale young lady with a secret, a troublesome pony, and a handsome farmhand. She began thinking about last night, and how she'd woken to more scratching sounds outside. This time, however, there was no wind and she could see from her bed that the trees weren't moving. So she'd crept to the window to scan the shadows of the front lawn -- just in time to get a glimpse of something bolting away.

Unfortunately, in the morning she discovered that a particularly deep sleep had left her memory a bit fuzzy, and she was now unsure exactly what she'd seen. So, as Cassandra droned on in the background, Joy began clearing her mind of all thoughts until the image became clear again. The results she excitedly sketched in the margin of her notebook.

But it just didn't look right. Somehow it looked less like some monster and more like an overweight cat.

"Joy," said Miss Keener.

Joy dropped her pencil. She looked up, startled, and saw Miss Keener with the magic hat on her lap, holding up a slip of paper.

"Are you ready to do your book report, Joy?" asked Miss Keener.

Joy nodded. Just get it over with, she thought. She quickly collected her folder of papers and rushed up to the blackboard.

"For my report," she began, trembling slightly as she addressed the class, "I chose a story called 'The Bawl of the Bog Fiend.'"

There were a couple of snickers.

"That's 'bawl,' with a w -- it's another word for 'cry,'" she explained. "Anyway, the story was written by Ethan Alvin Peugeot, who lived over a hundred years ago. E. A. Peugeot wrote many stories, poems, and essays, and is considered one of the greatest contributors to suspense and horror literature of all time. 'The Bawl of the Bog Fiend' is the first story where we meet Peugeot's best-known character, paranormal investigator Dr. Lyndon Ingram."

Joy opened the stapled booklet from the EAP Society, which now had several paragraphs delicately underlined in pencil.

"Interestingly, Mr. Peugeot is believed to have lived somewhere in this area -- near Darlington," she added spontaneously, "although of course it didn't exist back then. Exactly where he lived has always been a cause for much speculation," she said, referring to the EAP Society biography.

"You see, Mr. Peugeot was a very mysterious person. He lived under false names and wore disguises. And there were all sorts of crazy rumors about him." Joy read out: "€‰'There are even people to this day who believe that his supernatural stories were in some or all part true accounts of his extraordinary life.'

"He ultimately vanished from the face of the earth, never to be seen again."

Joy glanced up. The class was listening intently.

"This is perhaps the greatest mystery of all," she continued, "As the story goes, Mr. Peugeot only appeared at his publisher's offices once a year, around October, when he would drop off new manuscripts and get paid before disappearing again.

"Then one year he did not show up. The publisher finally hired a private detective to go look for him. A month later, the detective sent a telegram to the publisher's office.

"It said: found out what happened to eap stop getting train back tonight stop," she read out dramatically. "But the detective never returned -- he, too, vanished without a trace.

"The only clue was this final telegram. But no one was even sure where it was sent from, as the receiving office noted it with only four letters: SPKG."

"SPKG?" repeated Miss Keener.

"It was shorthand," explained Joy. "For the place where the telegram was sent."

The class was dead silent.

"Well?" asked Miss Keener. "Did anyone ever figure it out?"

"No," replied Joy. "I mean, not until I did." Her voice rose in triumph. "It was short for Spooking!"

Copyright © 2008 by P. J. Bracegirdle