Land of Bones Read online

  First Digital Edition: February 2018

  Alien Agenda Publishing

  LAND OF BONES

  Copyright © 2018 by Glenn Rolfe

  Edited by Erin Sweet Al-Mehairi

  Hook of a Book Media

  www.hookofabook.wordpress.com

  Cover Art by Jason Lynch

  http://jlynchgraphics.com/

  The following selections, some in different form, were previously published:

  “Simon” in Dark Moon Digest #15 Edited by Lori Michelle, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing (2014)

  “Charley Sings the World Away” in Vignettes from the End of the World Edited by Jacob Haddon, Apokrupha Publishing (2014)

  “Welcome to Paradise” first appeared on the blog, The Gal in the Blue Mask (2016)

  “Death Lights” in Northern Frights Edited by David Price, Grinning Skull Press (2017)

  “Not Kansas Anymore” in VS. Edited by Dawn Cano, Shadow Work Publishing (2016)

  “Little Bunny” in Easter Eggs and Bunny Boilers Edited by Matt Shaw, Matt Shaw Publications (2016)

  “The Rooster” in Bleed Edited by Lori Michelle, Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing (2013)

  All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be used work reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  Praise for the author:

  "A vital part of this next generation." – Brian Keene, author of The Complex, and The Rising

  “We're in the presence of a rising star in the genre.” – Ronald Malfi, author of The Night Parade, and Floating Staircase

  "A wonderful throwback to the fun and bloody days of paperback horror glory!” – Richard Chizmar, Editor-in-Chief at Cemetery Dance, co-author of Gwendy’s Button Box

  Praise for Blood and Rain

  "A major new talent rises from the Maine woods...Rolfe is the real deal, and Blood and Rain is a classic monster novel, full of blood and teeth and the kind of razor sharp writing that makes the pages sing. Small town horror is back, with a vengeance!" – Nate Kenyon, award-winning author of Sparrow Rock, Diablo: Storm of Light and Day One

  "Many authors nowadays get lauded for writing 'throwback' horror fiction, but none of them quite goes the distance like Rolfe does in Blood and Rain. Werewolves, silver samurai swords, and small New England towns: it all makes you wish this was twenty years ago so you can take the paperback off a supermarket spinner-rack and huff the yellowed pages." – Adam Cesare, author of Zero Lives Remaining and The Summer Job

  "Brutal, tension-fueled and captivating...Blood and Rain is the best werewolf novel I've read since Jeff Strand's Wolf Hunt." – Horror After Dark

  "Blood and Rain is a monumental piece of horror fiction."- Horror Underground

  "It's Silver Bullet on speed! A mix of early Stephen King and Bentley Little..." - Aaron J. French, author of The Dream Beings

  "Wow! Easily one of the best werewolf books I've ever read."- Hunter Shea, author of We Are Always Watching and The Montauk Monster

  Thanks to Erin for her time and energy. Thanks to my family for putting up with me. Thanks to Jason for the wonderful Goonies-inspired cover (Goonies never say die!). Thanks to Curtis Freeman for the early review. Thanks to Max Booth III and Tom Deady for making time for me, as well. Thanks to all my readers—you guys make it so much fun. Thank you! Thanks to all my writer buds: “We’re a Happy Family” Hunter Shea, Russell James, Tim Waggoner, Patrick Lacey, Matt Hayward, Somer Canon, David Bernstein, Michelle “wolfsister” Garza, Melissa Lason, Michael Patrick Hicks, Jack Bantry, Kit Power, Dawn Cano, Duncan Ralston, Russell Coy, Jonathan Moore, Brian “champ” Kirk, Mercedes M. Yardley, John Palisano, Ronald Malfi, Brian Moreland, Richard Chizmar, Brett J. Talley, Bryan “GnFnR” Smith, Jonathan Janz, Adam Cesare, Jeremy Hepler, April Hawks, Peter Dudar, Morgan Sylvia, Todd “TK” Keisling, Pete “bloodshot” Kahle, Matt Shaw, Graeme Reynolds, Joe Mynhardt, Tim Meyer, Joe Hempel, Armand Rosamilia, and anyone else I forgot. Thank you!

  Dedicated to those that know the pain of loss….

  LAND OF BONES

  Glenn Rolfe

  “Table of Contents”

  Foreword

  The Land of Bones

  Ghosts of Spears Corner

  Simon

  Not Kansas Anymore

  Fire

  Wish

  Avenging Kitten

  Charley Sings the World Away

  The Fixer

  The Rooster

  Too Much of a Dead Thing

  Little Bunny

  Death Lights

  Author Notes

  About the Author

  Foreword

  The Land of Bones. You’ve knocked on the door after the cover invited you. You’re probably anticipating what you’ll find within these pages. Well, come in, hear the wind chimes of femurs and ribs as they call you. Just beware of what you’ll find in the song.

  Glenn first asked me to work on this collection with him last year, and he sent me a pile of stories to consider. After reading the first few, I knew that this would be a body of work dealing primarily with different forms of loss. I knew Glenn would be the most vulnerable he’s ever been as a writer, and I would push him to be and support him in those efforts, till he collided past the boundaries of walls built to constrict feelings.

  Inch by inch, over the last few years, he’s been shedding this skin, but something, whether even he knew it or not, was telling me this would be the one where he’d wear his heart a bit more toward the end of his sleeve. I think he’s not alone in his confusion of life, of loss, or in his various fears. I think we can feel the pain and hurt over loss, the same frightening realizations of life, and I think we can all connect with these stories, and even more so, his characters. These stories entertain in the usual style that uniquely screams Rolfe, yes, but they also make us think and feel on a level in which we all need to go, whether it makes us as readers uncomfortable or not.

  Our very lives are a myriad of connecting trails left by the marks of bones hollowing tunnels behind us and before us, below us and above us, surrounding us with nightmares, fear, longing, and often, defeat. And yet, they bring us hope also. When our own bones grow brittle with age and are chilled to exhaustion, we pull our strength from those who impacted our lives and those we hope we’ve impacted.

  Our deep, dark fears are always present in our marrow, strangling us with the prospect of losing a child, suffocating us with the death of people so dear to us it’s like dying with them, or even being given the inhumane task of choosing someone’s death. It makes our very bones ache to be haunted by the questions and the memories, but we must endure it, for this is living.

  After you read “Little Bunny,” I’m certain it will stay with you forever and you’ll never look at a garden gate again, it’s been several years for me, and I haven’t. When you read “Rooster,” you’ll see the horrors of real life and I’ve got Kleenex ready. When you read “Too Much of a Dead Thing,” you’ll realize how messed up the world is and wonder why we try so hard sometimes to survive.

  Of course, not all the stories are heavy. Some of the stories are a bit more fun, like “Ghosts of Spears Corner,” when an ancient corpse descends from floorboards, flesh flaying off bones, and wreaks havoc. Some won’t reveal bones literally or figuratively either, like “Welcome to Paradise,” but rather, is just an exercise in escapism.

  This collection is some of Glenn’s best work to date. You’ll see a side of him he doesn’t often show. He probably won’t even know he bared his soul as much, peeling back layers of his writing potential, but you and I will know. As readers, we’ll bandage the pain with our healing eyes.

  Over the course of the collection, as you wander
through the crevices of Glenn’s graveyard of souls, you’ll find connective ties to themes of fear, distraction, loneliness, loss, and death. A scattering of bones. A Land of Bones. Be careful where you step.

  Erin Sweet Al-Mehairi

  Editor, February 2018

  The Land of Bones

  A howling wind lifted dead leaves over graves. The dearly departed took no notice. All things laid to rest, October’s cold settling around them, the dead were ready for the nights. When the life faded from the Earth, everything green shriveled and crumbled to dust. The seasons of wither and decay take hold, unrelenting until spring.

  Only mischievous youth and devoted family brave the grounds during these nights. Most never noticed their presence, but prickled neck hairs and raised gooseflesh serve bodily notice.

  The veil thinned, the gathering begins, and spirits return.

  Whispers and echoes travel on radio waves unheard by the living. Secrets kept, promises held tight to ribs, where maggots could devour but never access what each soul took with them. Somewhere beyond what is seen and what is conjured, what is lost to the fire and what is forgotten above, a new tribe congregates and moves below, here in the land of bones.

  Ghosts of Spears Corner

  Sixty years ago, things in these parts were different. Elvis was everything. Cars were artistic badges of honor and something to strut around town in that spoke of toughness and oozed cool. Movies were on the real big screen. Horror movies consisted of weird Hitchcock films and UFO invasion tales, not these crappy slasher offerings the kids are mad for today. The innocence of America was still fully intact; no Nam, no readily available “pill” to keep you baby-free, no War on Drugs.

  Here in Maine, we got the newest films and the latest Elvis tracks a few weeks later than the rest of the country. We still had some Klan activity, but the Blacks tended to steer clear of the frozen tundra of trees and lobster boats. In ’55, my best friend, Ted McKenzie’s uncle Jed, got caught beating the lone Negro boy in our neighborhood. The boy’s family moved away, and Uncle Jed spent three days in Sheriff Olson’s dingy, little cell.

  We weren’t perfect, but I’d say we managed to be relatively normal. All that changed, at least for me, the last week of summer vacation in ’57.

  I was twelve and going into junior high, the big kids school where boys smoked in the bathroom and made out with girls after school. And I was ready. My best friend, Ted, on the other hand, was nervous as hell. He was sweating from his pits a flood of onion-smelling stains and when he got two zits at the start of August, he nearly choked to death when I told him he should ask Missy Berry out.

  Ted was a jumbled bundle of nerves; I was ready to be James Dean. And then we found the thing under the rotting floorboards of the Spears house.

  Spears Corner, about twenty miles inland from the beach, was small. We weren’t the “big city,” like Portland, but we weren’t backwoods, either. We had JT’s Gas, Jenner’s Grocery, McKenzie’s Hardware, a drive-in, and the A1 Diner.

  Joseph Spears and his descendants had founded, and ruled over, the town since the mid-seventeen hundreds. Spear’s Corner had two cemeteries with their fallen kin alone. The church, on the corner of Spears Road and Highland Avenue, was the heart of the community. Pastor Thomas Spears made certain he saw our faces no less than three times a month, or he’d give you the greatest look of disappointment you ever saw. That devastating look was comparable to the one my mother had given me when Sheriff Olson brought me home for stealing penny candy from Jenner’s last summer.

  Joseph Spears’s house, referred to as the Spears House, remained unoccupied. Instead, it was treated like a shrine in his name, even with plenty of kin still in town to warm its cooling and slowly decaying walls. The two-story home sat abandoned and called to Ted and I, as it had many kids before us, to come and see the ghosts of yesterday.

  That last Sunday of summer vacation, Ted found some balls. Maybe it was all the prodding over Missy, or maybe my confidence had become contagious, but he showed up at my door that morning (with his new Big Hairies) and demanded we enter the empty house to prove we were ready to be among the big boys. To prove we were prepared to walk the halls with our chins high, and ready to smoke in the bathrooms, make out with the likes of Missy Berry and her friends, and maybe even ditch a day to drink some of my father’s beer. We left Pastor Spears’s service, and met up at the end of Highland Avenue.

  “We have to do this,” Ted said. It was somewhere between a question and a declaration.

  “Yep, I reckon,” I said.

  Neither of us spoke another word until we reached the dirt drive that wound around a row of Pines, leading to the waiting home. I don’t know why I thought of the house as waiting, but now, I know it was. There were ghost stories attached to the house, of course, but those were just stories. The real aspect of entering the house that filled the kids of Spears Corner with fear and anxiety was the Spears family itself. Pastor Spears, and his many eyes, would surely lay judgment upon any juvenile who dare trespass the family’s sacred temple.

  It was the thought of Pastor Spears and his damned look of disappointment that weighed my steps that day with cement. Ghosts were in monster magazines; Pastor Spears was Spears Corner.

  We crept down the driveway as if we would be spotted any second by the Warden (Pastor Spears) or his guards (the town), but no one saw us. The Spears House had no neighbors, at least none that could see the property. The front fence was a wall of towering pines. The surrounding forest blocked out all views of the home.

  “Where do we get in?” I said.

  “Front door?”

  The chain and padlock turned us away, as did the plywood planted over each first-floor window.

  “How about that way?” Ted said, pointing to a clear window above the back-porch roof.

  “Gonna have to scale the porch, I can probab–”

  “I can do it,” Ted said, and before I could argue, he was on his way up. The kid fumbled all over himself with people, but physical challenges were his domain. He looked like a monkey working his way up the railing, then the roof.

  “It’s open!”

  I joined him, with less fluidity in my climb, and squatted at his side before the open window. The smell wafting out was our warning. We acknowledged its pungent potency, and pushed it aside, prepared to be men.

  The window opened to a barren room that was drastically cooler than I imagined it could be, with cobwebs and dust the only occupants. The furniture had probably been relocated to one family member or another. Ted stepped in through the window. I followed. The floorboards groaned at our presence. Dust stirred to life as we made our way across the room. Ted took the lead and opened the door to the tomb beyond. My nose crinkled at the buried scent. It wasn’t an outright stench, but more of a hint of one. I remember thinking, for the briefest of seconds, as Ted pulled the door ajar, that the smell was death. Maybe it was my need to prove I was no wimp, maybe it was ignorance, maybe it was the house, but I shook the grave thought from my head and pinned the old house’s fragrance on mold and dry rot.

  Stepping from the room, sunlight from the large hallway window lit the corridor. Despite the light, the warmth of the day was not permitted. The walls were naked, and the floorboards moaning, grunting, and creaking with each step we took. We found the stairwell and moved to the main floor.

  The ground floor waited in darkness, save for the few cracks of sunlight that managed to squeeze through the boarded windows.

  “I can’t see anything in here,” I said.

  “Just give your eyes a second to get used to it,” Ted said.

  He was right. Doorways, hidden amongst the shadows, appeared as if from a blanket of fog. I followed Ted past the bottom of the staircase and into the darkened rooms.

  All my life I imagined the inside of the Spears House would be filled with glamorous treasures and vintage hallmarks of the great Spears family home. I was not prepared for the hollow shell we wandered through. It clenched my
spine with icy claws and made me ill to my stomach. I stumbled back against the wall, but kept my mouth shut. Ted hadn’t said more than “hmm.” There was no way I was admitting my yellow streak before he confessed his. So, I clammed up, and continued behind him as we passed an empty kitchen and matching living room on our way to the first-floor hallway. A tunnel of black stared back.

  The urge to leave crawled over my shoulders and pulled so hard at what remained of my good sense I was certain I would fall over. Ted’s sense seemed to have been crushed under his newly found cajoles, as he stepped into the hall (I remember imagining him simply vanishing in the absence of light). I made myself follow.

  “Whoa, what do you think’s in there?” Ted said, stopping before the first piece of furniture we’d seen in the house.

  Blocking off the last door at the end of the dark hall was a large, wooden burrow.

  “All right, Ted. We made it in, and walked through, let’s just get goin’, huh?” I said, no longer caring whether I looked like a wimp. I just wanted to get back to a place where the sun felt like it was supposed to in the summer.

  If he heard me, I couldn’t tell. He pulled at the knobs on the drawers.

  “Help me pull this,” he said.

  “Pull what?”

  “The handles. These drawers are heavy, or jammed, or something.”

  I grabbed hold of the little knob and heaved. Slowly, the drawer began to pull out.

  “Stones?” Ted said.

  The drawer was filled with stone slabs. We tried the one above, the one below–-more slabs. Someone had decided to make things difficult for anyone to access the room behind the burrow. The whimpering middle schooler I thought I was leaving behind next week tugged at my soul to get out, but the rebel without a clue persisted, spurred on at the intrigue of the obvious roadblock. What was in there? What were they trying to keep people from? The treasures from my daydreams danced across my thoughts like a parade of mysterious gifts unearthed.