Hole: A Ghost Story

  Copyright 2011 by Rod Redux

  This book is a work of fiction. Any similarities to

  persons living or dead is entirely coincidental

  First Edition E-book Version

  Published by Cobra E-books

  Metropolis, IL

  ALSO BY ROD REDUX

  The Oldest Living Vampire Tells All

  Menace of Club Mephistopheles

  Mort

  The Oldest Living Vampire on the Prowl

  Well I've opened up my veins too many times

  And the poison's in my heart and in my mind

  Poison's in my bloodstream, poison's in my pride

  I'm after rebellion, I'll settle for lies

  --BLUE OYSTER CULT,

  “Flaming Telepaths”

  Part 1

  Sex and Death

  1.

  This was Mary Klegg’s bedtime prayer when she was ten years old: “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be Your name. Your kingdom come. Your work be done. In heaven, and down here on Earth, too. Please, God, bless Mommy and Daddy, and bless Stevie, and Yorkie… and bless Dean, too, God, but please make him not come in my room tonight and touch me down there. And make him not want me to touch him--or Suck It, either-- ‘cause I know it’s a Bad Thing, and I don’t want to go to heck if I die. Oh, and please bless Aunt Jean and Uncle Norman, and everybody else I love, even if I forgot to mention them. In Jesus’s name… Amen.”

  She prayed silently because her mother said people weren’t supposed to pray out loud, but that was a good thing because she didn’t want anybody to hear some of the stuff she needed to bring up with the Lord. It was embarrassing.

  Plus, Dean said she must never, ever tell. Not anybody. Not a soul.

  Well, God wasn’t just anybody, although she guessed, technically, he was a soul. Dean couldn’t keep her from talking to God, though. Nobody could. That was something else her mother said.

  “When you can’t take it to anyone else, you take it to God,” her mother said. Mom told her that when her classmates were all teasing her about her clothes, which her mother bought at the Goodwill.

  Her mother’s words were always good advice, and Mary clung desperately to them.

  “Nobody can keep you from taking it up with the Lord,” her mother had intoned, her eyes fierce with conviction. Her eyes always got bright when she talked about the Lord, birdlike, as if she had a fever. Sometimes it could look scary, her eyes, but it was also heartening. How could she be wrong, if she was so sure about it?

  When she finished praying—on her knees by the side of her bed—Mary hopped to her feet and slid beneath her covers, waiting for her father to come tuck her in and shut off her bedroom light.

  She could hear the water running in the bathroom down the hall—Stevie brushing his teeth—and beyond that, drifting from the living room, the chatter and canned laughter of the television.

  Mom and Dad were watching Three’s Company. Mom hated the show because she said it was dirty, but Dad liked it, and he was home now, so that’s what they were watching. Dad thought Three’s Company was real funny. He watched it every week, despite Mother’s sniffing disapproval.

  He paid no attention to the way her lips pinched together real thin or how she made loud sighing sounds every few minutes or so. He was the man of the house, after all.

  Mary liked the show, too, though she didn’t get to stay up late enough to watch it most times. She liked the character Chrissy Snow, who was silly and whose first name was actually Christmas, which Mary thought would be a neat first name to have.

  Mary laid beneath her Strawberry Shortcake bedsheets for a moment, listening to the muted babble of the television, then shouted, “Da-aaaad…! I’m re-eeeaaaady!”

  “I’ll be right there, hon!” her father called from down the hall.

  Mary waited, a little girl with long wavy brown hair, round freckled cheeks, and large, curiously dark eyes. She was small for her age and pretty, a good girl, a sweet girl. There were no outwards signs she was being abused except for a gradual decline in her school marks. That, and the burgeoning look of wariness in her chocolate brown eyes, hardly noticeable most days.

  Mary waited, her eyes shifting suspiciously to the left when something thumped hard against the wall her bedroom shared with the adjacent room.

  That was Dean’s bedroom.

  The thump made her jump a little, and the muscles in her shoulders and arms went tense, her hands curling into fists. After a moment there was a heavy scraping sound as her big brother’s dresser went sliding across the floor. Then silence for a while. Finally, she heard, muffled through the plasterboard, the yammer of music: Dean, playing one of his records.

  Her mind flashed on a memory of Dean, sneaking into her bedroom after everyone was asleep, the way his eyes seemed to gleam in the dark, the shadow- patterns of her curtains gliding across his bare torso as he approached her bed…

  Mary pushed the image away quickly. For a moment, her eyes were hollow and haunted. She shivered under her Strawberry Shortcake blanket, waiting for her dad to come tuck her in, eyeing the wall of Dean’s bedroom with a drawn, too-adult expression on her cherubic face.

  Not tonight, she thought. Please, not tonight!

  A few minutes later, commercials started, and she heard a creak and clunk as her dad flipped down the footrest of his La-Z-Boy chair and rose to tuck her in for the night. Mary listened to her father’s footfalls as the TV extolled the virtues of Alpo dog food.

  “Are you in bed, Gumdrop?” her father called as he ambled down the hallway.

  Mary’s brother Stevie dashed from the bathroom in his pajamas, making her father stumble as the boy cut across his path. Stevie dodged around his father and vanished into his bedroom, slamming the door.

  “You better get your butt in that bed, Roscoe!” her father yelled at Stevie. For some reason, her dad always called Stevie “Roscoe”. She didn’t know why Dad called him Roscoe, but Mary thought it was a funny nickname.

  Mary watched the light under Stevie’s door wink out, the squeak of the boy’s mattress springs as he dived into his bed.

  Outside her bedroom window, it was still light out. The window was open to let in a breeze, and she could hear crickets chirping in the back yard. Dark always came slower in the summer months. In winter, it was pitch black outside when Mary’s eight o’clock bedtime rolled around. It didn’t bother her to go to bed when it was still light out, though. She was always grateful for the postponement of dark.

  She hated the dark.

  The dark, and the things that skulked around in the dark.

  From Dean’s bedroom: the bass and brassy electric guitar of a rock-and-roll album. The rock band KISS, singing “Doctor Love”. Mother might dislike Three’s Company, but she loathed KISS. She’d thrown out all his rock-and-roll albums once, but he’d simply repurchased them. The only reason she let Mary’s older brother listen to that stuff was because Dean was her favorite. Dean was a lot older than Mary, and got to stay up until 10:30, too.

  Mary’s father rapped on Dean’s bedroom door and growled, “Turn that racket down, son! The little one’s are going to bed!”

  Dean didn’t reply, but the volume of the music did inch a tiny bit lower.

  Then her daddy was walking through her doorway, tall and handsome and smiling, and she couldn’t help but smile back at him, sitting up as he crossed to her bed. He was a short, fit man, with close-cropped gray hair and a face creased by a father’s mysterious concerns. He used to be an Army sergeant, but he was retired now, disabled. Dean said their dad killed gooks in the war, but Mary couldn’t believe that was true. Her dad never even yelled at them, except when he was goofing around. He didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Her mother, t
hough… Mary could imagine her mom killing some gooks, whatever that word meant exactly.

  Her dad eased down on the edge of her bed. He was dressed in white boxer shorts and a strap tee-shirt and socks. Overtop his tee-shirt was the slightly yellowed truss of his back support, a girdle-like compression garment that had lots of straps and ties and a metal bar running up the back. Her father had a big nose, and big square teeth the color of old ivory, but Mary thought he was the most handsome man in the world.

  “Did you brush your teeth?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Yep.”

  “I don’t believe you. Let me see.”

  She bared her teeth.

  “Okay. Did you use shampoo when you took your shower?”

  “Yep.”

  “Are you sure? Let me smell.”

  Mary leaned her head forward and her father lifted a tassel of her curly brown hair, still moist, and sniffed it. “Mmm, smells good,” he said, and Mary laughed. “Did you go to the bathroom before you hopped in bed?” he asked.

  “Yep.”

  “And did you wipe your butt?”

  “DA-ADDDDD!” Mary cried, aghast. Ten years old, Mary was horrified by the thought that other people might know she pooped and wiped her butt.

  Her father chuckled and ruffled her hair. He kissed her on the cheek, saying, “All right… all right…” He rose and tucked her sheets under her sides good and tight, just the way she liked them, then told her good night and started from the room. “Have sweet dreams, Gumdrop,” he said from the doorway, his hand hovering over the light switch. “You want me to shut your window?”

  “No, I like it open.”

  “Okay, then. Good night. Love you.”

  “Love you, too.”

  “Pleasant dreams.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t let the bed bugs bite.”

  “Da-aaad…!”

  He chuckled and flipped off her light.

  As he started back down the hallway—commercials were over and Three’s Company was back on—he noisily broke wind, and she covered her mouth and nose with her hands and giggled, lying tucked in her bed.

  But then there was another thump behind the plasterboard, and her laughter dried up. Her eyes twitched to the wall she shared with her big brother Dean, and it seemed like all the happiness drained out of the world again.

  The curtains of her bedroom billowed, stirred by a cool summer breeze that smelled like mown grass and sunshine. She watched the curtains balloon and then roll languidly aside, deflating. Outside, crickets chirped, a dog barked down the street, faint and echoic with distance. A bit of heat lightning throbbed in the darkening sky, very high up, where lumpy clouds were piling in the heavens. She watched the light play across the contours of those unseen cumulous. A strobe here. A dim flash. Then a silent, pulsating flourish.

  Another thump in the wall. It made Mary twitch.

  She slid down in her sheets, pulling them up to her nose, and lay watching her bedroom wall with a wary expression, forgetting all about the fresh smelling breeze and the crickets and the silent fireworks playing across the sky.

  Dean’s music went silent. She heard him move around his room. There was a click, the pop of a needle dropping down on vinyl, then the other side of the record began to play.

  After a few minutes, Mary heard the heavy scraping sound again. Dean sliding something across the floor. It sounded like, whatever he was pushing, it was creeping closer and closer to her wall.

  Mary broke out in goose bumps, her eyes wide in the dark.

  He’s doing the Bad Thing, she thought. He knows he’s not supposed to be doing that. Mom will call Pastor Sonny. They’ll make Dean exercise again!

  She lay in her bed, staring at the wall. She could feel him doing the Bad Thing.

  She remembered when Mom caught Dean doing the Bad Thing, the thing he called “the Trick”, and how frightened she’d been. She’d called Pastor Sonny over that very night. Pastor Sonny was the preacher at the church Mom went to. She went every Wednesday night and all day Sunday.

  Pastor Sonny’s church was way out in the country, at the end of a long gravel road, only it wasn’t a regular church with white clapboard siding, a high pointy steeple and rows of long wooden pews inside. Pastor Sonny’s church was in an old mobile home that stood up on cinderblocks. All the interior walls had been removed and the seats inside were brown metal folding chairs. There were no pictures of Jesus on the walls, like at the church Daddy sometimes attended, just a big wooden cross behind the pulpit, wrapped in a purple linen scarf.

  Pastor Sonny was frightful and thin with a half-melted face. Mom said his face was that way because his mother threw hot grease on him when he was a baby. When he preached, he spoke in a singsong voice and sometimes shouted out nonsensical phrases and kicked his legs.

  When Dad found out Mom took Mary there when he was in the hospital for another back surgery, he got madder than Mary had ever seen him get, and since then Mom had gone to the strange church in the woods all by herself.

  Mary’s stomach tied itself in knots, thinking of the Pastor, and how his body had trembled and his eyes rolled back in their sockets. She remembered how the Pastor and his congregation had made a circle around Dean and cast the Devil out of him, the way the room shook and the pictures went flying off the walls.

  No! Stop thinking about that! It’s bad! Mother said we must forget all about that night! We can’t tell anyone about the Pastor and what those people did to Dean, especially not Dad!

  She was so nervous and scared she thought she’d never fall asleep, but sleep did eventually come. Her eyelids drooped and her body relaxed. She began to snore while a breeze stirred her bedroom curtains and heat lightning strobed in the sky. It was a little girl’s snore: soft, purring.

  ***

  She snapped awake sometime in the middle of the night, her room dark and colorless. Light, like hope, had fled. There were just the shadow-patterns of her curtains, undulating on the wall in the rectangular glow of the street light.

  She woke because someone had shut her door. She heard a metallic click: the sound of the lock in her doorknob being depressed.

  No no no no no…!

  Dean glided through the dark toward her bed, only his eyes and the Cheshire gleam of his teeth visible in the gloom.

  No no no please no…!

  She peeked out through the dark fan of her eyelashes, trying to see him while still pretending she was asleep, hoping, praying, he would go away and leave her alone.

  Dean swam out of the shadows, naked from the waist up. He was dressed in white underwear, the kind her brothers called “tighty whities”. His bare flesh looked purple in the dim glow of the streetlight, like an all-over bruise

  He loomed over her bed. He smiled down at her. He had dark eyes like her, almost black. Finally, he whispered her name.

  “Mary… Mary, wake up.”

  He already had his thing hanging out the front of his underpants.

  She started to plead with him, tell him she didn’t want to do the Dirty Thing, not tonight -- Not ever! — and that’s when she felt the invisible fingers seize her wrists and ankles. That’s when the invisible palm clamped down over her mouth. That’s when her Strawberry Shortcake blanket slid slowly down her body, untouched by human hands, and she squeezed her eyes shut in despair.

  2.

  “Eat them,” Dean snarled. “Put them in your fucking mouth.”

  The woman he’d met in the bar of the Icon Luxury Hotel stared at him in disbelief, her body trembling. She was sitting beside him on the bed, dressed in just a pair of skimpy pink panties. He watched her skin break out in goosebumps, her flesh pebbling up and down her arms and shoulders, her bare nipples tightening. Even her teeth were chattering. A nice guy would have pulled some covers over her bare shoulders or told her to put some clothes on, but Dean Klegg just scowled at her.

  He couldn’t remember her name. She’d told him earlier, when they were flirting over drinks, b
ut it had slipped his mind since. Debra? Donna? D-something... It didn’t matter. Twenty minutes ago she’d been lying beneath him, her legs wrapped around his thighs, screaming out her gratitude for the magnificent fucking she was getting. An hour before that, he’d never laid eyes on her.

  In less time than that, she was going to be dead.

  She was a lovely woman in a fragile, hapless kind of way. Mid-thirties and married, she had long stringy blonde hair and big blue eyes. She was dressed in a conservative tan dress and matching vest when they met downstairs, a little bit of jewelry, light makeup, but most of her clothes were scattered across his hotel room now, and tears had made a dripping raccoon’s mask of her mascara. For some reason, it made her all the more attractive to him.

  A small pile of blue pills sat in the palm of her hand. Ecstasy, she’d called them. Both of them had taken one earlier. Each of the pills had a butterfly shape stamped into the side. She had about a dozen left.

  “Please…” she begged, looking from the pills to his face. “I don’t want to.”

  “Do it!” Dean hissed.

  On the hotel suite’s television set, the raw footage he’d filmed at G2G earlier that afternoon continued to play. They’d given him a copy so he could put together a presentation for his own congregation. This Jezebel he’d brought up to his room had found it while he was showering, had put it in the VCR.

  In the video, Dean Klegg was sitting with Robert and Mallory Rise on the set of Morning Glory, one of the more popular programs on the Glory to God Network -- or, as the young hipsters at the studio liked to call it, the G2G.

  “God has a plan for all of us,” Dean’s twin on the television screen was saying, his voice smooth and sure. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe in Him, because He believes in you!”

  “Yes!” Mallory Rise cried, shaking her head and waving her right hand in the air. “Thank you, Jesus!” The co-host of Morning Glory was rocking a beehive hairstyle that was twenty years past its prime. She had dressed for the taping in a bright green pantsuit that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the H. R. Pufnstuf show from the seventies, big flowers embroidered into collar and down the side seams. She swayed back and forth in her seat like she was in the throes of religious passion… or needed to pee really badly.