The Girl on the Glider Page 2

  I know of four fatalities that have occurred in the time we’ve lived here. I personally witnessed one of them. A couple on a motorcycle rear-ended a pickup truck that was making a left turn. Both riders were ejected from the bike. The woman’s head cracked like an egg inside her helmet. There wasn’t much the truck driver, my neighbor, or myself could do for her. She was dead before the paramedics arrived. I never found out what happened to the guy that was on the bike with her, but I remember that his chest looked like raw hamburger.

  One of the other fatalities happened about a mile from our house. A machine operator from the Harley Davidson plant was coming home after second shift and hit a tree. The tree won. Speculation is that the driver fell asleep at the wheel. The third fatal accident happened fifty yards from our driveway. A lone driver ran down an embankment at three in the morning. The accident was quiet enough that both my neighbors and myself slept through it. We didn’t know anything was amiss until we heard the sirens outside. By then it was too late, although, judging by the condition of the car and the body, it would have been too late long before they arrived.

  The fourth fatality occurred at the top of our driveway.

  And that was how I met the girl on the glider. And that is where our story really begins.

  ENTRY 5

  I wasn’t home when it happened. It was mid-January, and I was a Guest of Honor at a convention in Missouri called VisionCon. After Saturday’s book signing and Q&A were over with, I spent the evening hanging out in the hotel bar with Mike Oliveri, Cullen Bunn, Val Botchlet (who used to moderate my old message board forum), my friend Richard Christy’s cousin Adam, playwright Roy C. Booth, and the guys from Skullvines Press. I was pleased to note that the hotel bar, upon learning that I would be back in town that weekend, had Basil Hayden’s and Knob Creek on hand (the year before, they’d only had Jack Daniels and Jim Beam available, which are like the Coors and Budweiser of bourbon). Needless to say, we had a good time, and I didn’t get to bed until after 3 a.m.

  When I woke up the next morning, I called home to talk to Cassi. She sounded tired and I soon found out why. She hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. She told me there had been another accident. Four kids, all of them between the ages of eighteen and twenty, had wrecked their car right at the top of our driveway. Three walked away from the accident. One did not. The accident happened just after midnight. Emergency vehicles, firemen and paramedics had been on hand until well after dawn. Had Cassi experienced some kind of crisis, and had to leave our home, she would have been unable to get out of our driveway. The emergency crews had it blocked off, along with the road. I asked her if she knew the details and found out that she didn’t. All she knew was what one of the paramedics had told her-the wreck, the number and ages of the people in the car, and that one of them had died. I asked her if Coop had been on the scene, since he works as an EMT and our road is along his ambulance route. It turned out he hadn’t. While all of this was going on, Coop and the rest of his ambulance crew had been down at the river, fishing a suicide out of the half-frozen water near the Columbia-Marietta Bridge.

  My flight home from Missouri was delayed until Monday night due to inclement weather. I didn’t land in Baltimore until nearly midnight, and didn’t get home until after 2 a.m. Tuesday morning. I didn’t bother to look for damage from the accident or markings on the road. It was dark and foggy outside, and I was focused solely on giving my wife, my son and my dog all a big hug. I didn’t see anything that night, supernatural or otherwise.

  I wonder now, looking back, if I might have seen something then had I been looking for it-and if I had seen something, would I have known what it was?

  The next morning, after I woke up and unpacked and told my wife about my trip, I remembered the accident and decided to walk up to the top of the driveway and survey the damage. Yes, I’m one of those people who slow down to gawk at accidents on the highway. I’ll stand and watch a burning building. I’m fascinated by such things. To be fair, though, I’d like to think that I’m also the type of person who will stop along that highway and offer assistance, or run inside that burning building and pull people out until the firemen arrive. This is what I tell myself, at least.

  I walked up the driveway and was out of breath by the time I reached the top. This happens a lot-more and more these last few years. When I was a kid, I could ride my BMX Mongoose all over York County, pedaling down to Spring Grove to buy comic books at the newsstand, and not get winded. In the Navy, I could swim a mile and not be out of breath. I used to run cross country in high school (the only organized sport I ever played, and I did it just to make my old man happy). But now, at forty-one? Forget about it. I gasp for breath after walking a mile through the woods and vigorous sex sometimes leaves me winded and on the verge of passing out. There are times when I lay there on the bed, wheezing and panting and waiting for the room to stop spinning. I told Cassi she should consider my breathlessness a compliment, but she doesn’t see it that way. It concerned Cassi enough that she made me go to the doctor. I hate doctors. I could cut my arm off in a horrific threshing machine accident and I still wouldn’t go to the doctor. But I went for her. The doc said there wasn’t anything wrong with me. No heart trouble (at least, not yet). No lung trouble. In plain terms, I was out of fucking shape. I asked him how this could be. He asked me what I did for a living. I told him I sat around in my underwear and made up scary stories all day long. He frowned, as if to say, “Well, there’s your answer.”

  I was never the athletic type. Sure, I can hold my own in a fight (and I am mean enough to win), but I’m not much for playing sports or exercising or things like that. Under orders to get in shape, I went to the one person whose advice I trust in such a situation-Wrath James White, former World Champion kick-boxer, UFC trainer and fighter, horror novelist, and one of my best friends. He told me to run every day. He said I should start out running, and when I felt like I couldn’t go on, that instead of stopping, I should walk. Then, after a little bit of walking, I should start running again. Wrath told me to do this every day, and I’d be in shape in no time. I did it once and it almost killed me.

  I’m certain this was Wrath’s idea of a practical joke.

  Anyway, I stood at the top of the driveway and looked around while I caught my breath. It was easy to tell what had happened. The car had been coming north and heading southwest when, for whatever reason, the driver lost control. It had swerved up the embankment on the far side of the road, missing our mailbox by inches. Then it had flipped over onto its roof, slid back across the road, and slammed into the guardrail next to our driveway. There was debris and markings everywhere. The tires had gouged huge trenches in the embankment, and a piece of the muffler had come off on a chunk of granite sticking up out of the dirt. The pavement was scratched and scuffed, and covered with fragments of windshield glass and shards of plastic from the headlights, taillights and elsewhere. There were a bunch of other tiny parts. I don’t know shit about cars, but I bet Coop could have identified them easily enough. (Coop once took it upon himself to teach me how to fix a car. Within an hour, he’d grown annoyed enough to tell me that the timing belt ran the digital clock on my dashboard. I believed him. It was my wife who eventually set me straight.)

  Some of the junk was lying in our driveway. I’d probably driven right over it the night before. I wondered why the cops hadn’t done a better job of cleaning up after the accident. Maybe it was because there were just so many crashes on this road, and they knew they’d have to do it all over again soon enough. There was more debris scattered around the crumpled guardrail, along with bent and broken saplings and vegetation.

  There were black and brown stains on the road. The heaviest concentration of them seemed to be about ten feet away from the guardrail. The black stuff was oil. The brown stains were blood. Around these, the State Police investigators had spray-painted arrows, circles and numbers. Number one corresponded with the embankment. Number four corresponded with the largest of th
e bloodstains. These modern day hieroglyphics told me a story. Someone had been ejected from the car when it flipped over onto its roof. That person was thrown farther down the road while the car and the other three occupants slid toward the guardrail. I wondered who came to a stop first. I was pretty sure, judging by the visual evidence, that the person who’d been ejected was the one who had died.

  I walked back down to the house, went out into the garage, and got a broom and a snow shovel. Then I trekked back up to the top of the hill and swept the debris out of our driveway. When I was finished, I went out to my office and settled in to do some work. Nothing relaxes me more than sitting in my office after I’ve been out on the road, and this was my first chance to enjoy it since coming home from VisionCon. I started writing, and didn’t think about the accident again until the next day, when the cross showed up.

  ENTRY 6

  The only newspaper I read is USA Today, and the only time I read it is when I’m traveling. I’ve tried twice to subscribe to it, but each time I was told that we lived too far out in the country for them to deliver it. We don’t subscribe to either of the local papers. It’s nothing personal. I have good friends at both the York Daily Record and the York Dispatch. Indeed, before I went full-time as a novelist, I used to supplement my income as a freelance writer for the York Dispatch/York Sunday News. Both papers have given me reasonably fair coverage over the years (other than the time they mistakenly reported that I was quitting horror to write a Civil War novel). I have nothing against either publication, but I don’t subscribe to either. I read the news online when I wake up in the morning. By the time the local paper would arrive, I’d already be working, so it doesn’t make sense for me to subscribe.

  Both papers had, in fact, reported on the accident, but I missed the coverage.

  I also don’t watch the local news. Unlike the local newspapers, our two local television stations-WGAL 8 and WPMT Fox 43-are both run by monkeys. At least, that’s the way it seems to me. Channel 8 spends fifty-five minutes of every news hour extolling the benefits of their Super Doppler Weather Radar. The remaining five minutes are usually devoted to a special feature regarding whichever advertiser paid them the most money that week. I’m not kidding about this. Fox 43 isn’t much better. To their credit, they do attempt to report the news, but their idea of reporting involves sending pretty female news anchors out to the local dairy farm or Cub Scout meeting for some ‘slice of life’ events. If Iran does eventually build a nuclear bomb, you won’t hear about it on either station, because Channel 8 will have local weatherman Doug Allen jerking off over the goddamn Super Doppler Radar and Fox 43 will be reporting live from some craft fair in fucking Hanover.

  I don’t know if either of them reported on the accident. I somehow doubt it, but if they did, I missed the report.

  And don’t even get me started on the sorry state of our local radio stations…

  In truth, even though it was only twenty-four hours since I’d swept up the debris, I’d already forgotten all about the crash. After all, it had happened while I was gone, and none of the victims were anyone that I knew, and our property hadn’t been damaged, and the wreckage was gone, so it didn’t really impact me that much. It was something that had happened, a momentary distraction, but there were other things to focus on, important things like writing and trying to figure out if it was possible to add yet another novel to my list of deadlines in order to pay for the baby’s daycare.

  Perhaps that sounds callous. Someone had lost their life. Perhaps I should have been a little more concerned. Caring. Sympathetic. But I wasn’t. I don’t think that makes me a bad person. I think it just makes me what I am-a flawed human, just like everybody else.

  Around noon, I walked up to the top of the driveway to get the mail, and I noticed a rustic, white picket cross and a beautiful floral arrangement mounted on the smashed guardrail. I’ve driven by these crosses countless times. You see them dotting our roads and interstates. Sometimes, they seem almost as abundant as McDonalds, Exxon and other highway staples. I’d never actually seen one up close, though. Up until that moment, I’d only experienced them as a passing glance through the windshield, there but for the blink of an eye and then gone as the next mile marker rolled past.

  Curious, I quickly pulled the mail out of our mailbox and then hurried over to the cross for a closer look. The flowers were fresh and professionally arranged. There was no tag or any indication of which local florist had put them together. Nor was there a name on the cross. Not even the old standard ‘R.I.P.’ It was just plain white-two thin slats nailed together in the middle.

  I turned away and started back downhill. The mailman had brought no royalty or advance checks. Instead, there were only bills, catalogs, and my monthly issues of National Geographic, Soldier of Fortune and The Fortean Times (all of which, for some inexplicable reason, seem to arrive on the same day each month). I was flipping through the bills, wondering how the hell we were going to stay caught up on them, when the wind began to blow. I heard a rustling sound behind me.

  Figuring it was my pet cat, Max (who lives outdoors and was the source of inspiration for Hannibal from my short story, “Halves”), I turned around and then stopped.

  Ever see the wind pick up a bunch of leaves and spin them in a mini-cyclone? It’s common, of course. That’s what was happening. The leaves around the cross were spinning fast, reaching a height of about five and a half feet off the ground. Then, as quickly as it had started, the breeze died off and the leaves floated back down to the ground.

  That was the first thing that happened. I didn’t think much about it at the time, and even now, I’m almost willing to chalk it up to nothing more than a natural occurrence-except for everything that’s happened since then.

  In hindsight, there was nothing about it that was natural…

  ENTRY 7

  The second thing that happened is also somewhat dubious, but when considered in the greater context, it makes me wonder, especially given her recent expressed desire to move.

  Cassi is a smoker. Ever since the baby came along, she only smokes outside, and then, only after he’s gone to bed. There’s an ashtray out on the deck, along with a table, four chairs and the glider. Oh yes, we can’t forget about the porch glider. It’s the central part of our story.

  The glider is a family heirloom. It belonged to Cassi’s grandmother and was given to us after she passed away. Cassi has fond memories of sitting on it when she was a little girl. It’s very comfortable, but the cushions are a garish, green floral print and when it rains, they soak up the moisture. Sit on them after a storm and your ass will get wet.

  Within two days of the accident, Cassi stopped smoking out on the deck. Instead, she began smoking in our bathroom with the door closed and the exhaust fan running full blast. At first, I didn’t think anything of it. Keep in mind, it was winter. I just assumed that it was too cold outside to smoke. But as months passed and the nights grew warmer, she still avoided smoking out on the deck. When I asked her why, she said she got spooked out there at night. Neither our flashlight nor the big dusk-to-dawn light that’s installed on the side of the garage helped. She said it was still too dark out there, and sometimes, she felt like someone was watching her. Despite those lights, the top of our driveway remains pitch black at night. If you shine the flashlight up the hill, the beam gets lost in the darkness, almost as if the shadows were swallowing it. The only thing that dispels the darkness are the headlights of approaching cars, and then, only for an instant.

  I asked her when she’d started feeling this way, and she said it was after the accident.

  My wife is not given to flights of fancy. She’s firmly grounded in reality. She’s the Agent Scully to my Agent Mulder, to put it in terms of The X-Files. The only spiritual or supernatural activity she even remotely engages in is occasionally attending Catholic or Episcopalian church services. She doesn’t believe in aliens or Bigfoot or the Loch Ness Monster or ghosts. Despite this, being out on our dec
k and staring up at the driveway at night has made her uncomfortable enough to start smoking inside. As I write this, many months later, that is still her practice. Let’s call that occurrence number two, and catalogue it accordingly.

  ENTRY 8

  If this were a horror novel, I’d plot it like one, but it’s not a horror novel. It’s simply a diary, notating a random collection of occurrences, all of which have happened since the accident. I’m jumping around here. One minute, I’m in the present. The next, I’m back to the beginning again. There is no linear narrative. There is no slow build of suspense and dread. There is only me, trying to make sense of it all.

  I can’t remember who said it, but there’s a great quote regarding The Amityville Horror, Poltergeist, and similar haunted house stories. The quote (and I’m paraphrasing here) goes something like this: ‘If this stuff really happened, if the house was really haunted, then why did the people stay? Why didn’t they move the fuck out as soon as they heard the voices/saw the ghost/the dog started levitating? Because that’s what would happen in real life.’

  Except that’s not true. I know, because this is real life. This is real fucking life and we can’t move. We can’t move because we can’t afford to move. We can’t afford to buy another house. Cassi’s been talking about it again-talking about finding a place with sidewalks and fenced-in backyards where the baby can play. A year ago, she was fine with him growing up playing in our big backyard with its trees and trout stream and wild outdoors. Now she’s craving suburbia, and I think I know why. I don’t think it has anything to do with sidewalks. It has to do with some of the things that have happened here.