Candy and Other Nightmares by Rod Senter

Author:Rod Senter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror, ghost stories, short stories, fiction
ISBN: 9781780929439
Publisher: Andrews UK Limited 2016
Published: 2016-04-07T00:00:00+00:00

Relatively Dead

“There were hollow sockets where her eyes had been, and her lips were long-gone, so all her teeth were showing. I could see she’d had blond hair, but a lot of it was lying in clumps on the pillow, having fallen out of her shriveled scalp who-knows-how many years ago...”

“Sick... sick! Oh, this is sick! ” Mom had screamed hysterically, then ran down the hall and threw up. Dad later sent me to a psychiatrist.

Then we moved.

As graveyards went, old wasn’t the word.

The most recent tombstone was from my grandfather’s day, and so far as I could tell, none had been visited for years. I mean, how could they be? The only way you could get there by car was on Rural Route 30, a county highway that was closed in 1960 (or thereabouts) when the six-lane interstate was completed. That was four lanes more than it needed, by the way. But I didn’t write this to talk about expressways.

Anyway, I doubted it had been visited by anyone but me for a good twenty years even before the road was closed. And when the county road did close, the county workers stopped maintaining the graveyard. I mean, how were they gonna get there - swing through the trees like George of the friggin’ Jungle?

The same went for visitors, assuming there were any left who weren’t dead themselves: they would have had to park on the shoulder of the interstate, then trek through a mile or so of woods - most of it accessible only through the properties of folks who wouldn’t have taken kindly to wreath-toting strangers trouncing through their alfalfa gardens. Man, I’d have to love somebody one hell of a lot to dance with all that, just to visit a fifty-year-old rock with their name on it.

So you know what that means, right? It means that by the time I’d found the place, during the summer break before my eighth grade year, not one human being had set foot there in at least twelve years - maybe longer. A lot longer.

In the spring of ‘Seventy-two, me, my parents and my brother had moved to Indian Creek, Ohio after an incident involving our cat. The psychiatrist had said that a change in scenery would be good for me. Unknown to us at the time, we became one of the folks whose property bordered the woods that camouflaged the graveyard so well.

But camouflage or no, I and was bound to find it because I had always been the exploring kind. And I especially loved the woods. Any woods. I mean, show me a patch of real estate that wasn’t yet raped by some pot-gutted mall developer, and I was there, believe me. The truth was, my real appreciation for unspoiled land was probably the last healthy thought that would visit me for any length of time. At least, that’s what the guys in lab coats would later say between shock treatments, isolation rooms, and daily injections of God-knows-what.

Uh oh. I jumped ahead quite a bit, didn’t I? Yes, I’m afraid I did.

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