Roadside Ghosts: A Collection of Horror and Dark Fantasy (Stories to SERIOUSLY Creep You Out Book 3) by Vernon Steve

Author:Vernon, Steve [Vernon, Steve]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Stark Raven Press
Published: 2014-10-21T04:00:00+00:00

There always ought to be a story or two in any collection that has not been printed elsewhere – which is where this next story comes into play. I wrote it with a Virginia ghost story collection in mind and it has been sitting in the bottom of my filing cabinet. Yes folks, I am about to peddle a trunk story in your direction. Treat it kindly. I am certain it feels neglected.

Memory Stains

My wife always said I was crazy. She said she loved me just the same but she was certain sure that I was stark raving mad. I had fallen in love with a memory ghost, she swore, that I loved even more than her.

She’d seen it come over me like a fog rolling in from the grey Atlantic, one of my moods coming on. Like an alcoholic yearning for the bottle I’d catch a feeling and I’d walk out the door and stand in the backyard.

Are you out here Granddaddy?

I’d catch a whiff of a memory or a dream. Something on the breeze like the taste of gunpowder or the penny scent of hard spilled blood. The evening sun is a cannonade of recollection and more than a little regret. I can hear my wife in the house behind me, singing softly on the evening breeze, her voice lulled and low and coming in from a long way off.

Let me tell you a ghost story.

I know, most folks nowadays just don’t believe in ghosts.

That’s all right by me. I know better. There isn’t a man or woman walking the face of this earth who doesn’t drag the shackle of a ghost behind him. You’ll feel it tailing out abaft of you, a little like the breeze of autumn catching at the last shadowed coattails of August.

I’m talking about regret, of course. The should-have’s and the would-have’s that we carry through our lives. You can try to grin over it and sing out through it but nothing will hide that stain of guilt in the lonesome hour when the moon climbs up high enough to talk to the maker of all good things worth remembering.

Wall paper won’t cover it.

Paint won’t hide it.

Further back than I can recollect God and the government carved out a little notch in the northeast corner of West Virginia, right where she bumps noses with the pretty little state of Maryland. I live about a stone’s throw and a strong throwing arm away from that notch, just northeast of the town of Petersburg in the little town of Moorefield.

We don’t do much around here except grow crops and grow old but every now and then somebody will strike up a conversation and as sure as squirrel shooting somebody will start talking about the old Frist House.

There are a lot of stories get passed back and forth about that there old house and some of them are true and some of them aren’t. Most of what is remembered is just what folks have talked about since long ago.

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