Category: Short Stories

It starts off innocently enough with a knock on the wall precisely at that very moment where the conscious mind is about to tip over into the unconscious world of dreams. The dull thud on the wall somewhere in the century old house startles you somewhat but not enough to make you leap out of bed. You strain your ears for a moment to listen for another knock or something else that could have made the sound, such as a mouse scurrying behind the wall but all is silent. There is no one else to ask if they heard the same thing because you are alone, in the dark, on the second floor of the bedroom with the two windows that face the street. The only light that keeps the room from being shrouded in complete darkness is the street light on the opposite corner across from the house. It has only been a week since you moved into your new place so you justify that what you are hearing is due to the fact that you are still being acclimated to all of the new noises that come with moving into a new home. However much you may believe this, you still can’t forget that eerie feeling you had when you came to see the house for the first time with the landlord a few weeks prior.

As he walked you through the house, something immediately came over you as if a cold damp blanket had been draped over your spirit and the house felt close, like the feeling you get when the clouds are low and the air so moist that your lungs feel heavy with too much condensation. Despite the large windows in the living room and dining room, which provided an adequate amount of sunlight that afternoon, you remember how the rooms still felt gloomy. Perhaps it was the dark greenish blue carpet that covered the floors in the main living area that left you with such a bleak impression. Your feet felt like they were walking across an old bony graveyard where the grass is always cut much to short. Going up the stairs to the second floor, you distinctly remember the ominous looking shadow being cast on the wall of the stairwell as though it were being thrown by someone standing in the living room with their back to the window. It was only you and the landlord, there was no one else there but something was watching you and you could feel its presence as its cold stare followed you up the stairs.

On the second floor, the ceilings were slanted in each of the the rooms and the length of the slope of the ceiling in the master bedroom made it look like a small chapel with it’s two double hung windows peering out into the pasty blue sky. It didn’t occur to you then but at night the room would transform into something quite different. The ceiling would slope just inches above the headboard of where the bed would be, making it feel similar to the mere inches from the inside lid of a coffin to the tip of the nose of the occupant buried inside of it. No, you didn’t think of that then. But it was the rope tied to the inside door handle on one end and knotted around the head of a nail tacked into the outside wall on the other end, that brought back memories of a similar old brass door handle from many years ago. It was this type of brass door handle that locked you into a room once before. It spun around and around and would not unlatch the door no matter which way you turned it. There was someone there that time to let you out but up here in that room alone, there would be no one to let you out. You subconsciously knew the reason why that door was being held open by a rope.

The last item you were shown on your tour was the trap door in the kitchen that led down to the cellar below. The landlord wanted to show you where the furnace was in the event that something ever went wrong with the heating. A gentle cool draft blew across your face as he opened the trap door and gingerly made his way down the steep steps to the dirt floor below. You followed him only out of politeness and watched from the bottom step as he proceeded to walk over to the furnace, hunched over to avoid hitting his head on a floor joist. You smiled and thanked him and knew that if you ever did end up renting the house, there was no way you were ever going down there alone because you were certain the trap door would slam shut just you as you reached the bottom step.

Despite all of the odd feelings you experienced during your visit to the house that day, you did end up renting the house because you were desperate and the rent was reasonable for a house of this size.

The days and weeks go by and as fall turns into winter, you begin to get used to the nuances of the old house. Some of the strange sounds it makes during the middle of the night no longer wake you up. Even the dull knock that you hear on the wall from time to time doesn’t rattle you as much anymore. It’s the two or three knocks in a row on the wall that are the ones that rattle you now. Every time you hear them, it always makes you wonder if someone is just knocking on the back door outside but you know in your heart of hearts that it isn’t and that the dread that fills your paralyzed mind every time it happens, always confirms that it is what you think it is. Your mysterious reality is filled with other anomalies such as the lights that randomly flicker and dim at night while you are relaxing on the living room couch or the lamp you leave switched on while you are away for the evening, is switched off when you return home. While these may just be some strange coincidences, what is not so easily passed off as a mere coincidence is the cutlery drawer in the kitchen cabinet opening and closing under its own force while you are upstairs lying in bed getting ready to turn in for the night. It is this heart pounding moment that leaves you utterly spooked, far beyond everything else you have experienced so far and you know, without question, that there is something living with you. You have suspected it all along.

Who then is the unwelcome stranger in the creepy old house? It surely can’t be you but there is nobody else.

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The Junkers were a special kind of family. Not in a way that they were a rich and highly esteemed family, no quite the opposite. They were what some would call white trash. More specifically, white trailer park trash. Was it their fault some would ask? Did they just get dealt a crappy hand and were born into this life with no hope in hell of ever getting out of it. Probably. Some would argue that their predicament was of their own making because nothing ever good comes from an attitude of not giving a shit about anything. Still others would not be so polite in their observations and just call these sorts of people out for what they were, leaches on society who took every free government handout that they could get their hands on. It was understandable that some people would be so harsh about where their hard earned tax dollars were being spent but to the Junkers, it made no difference what people thought of them at all, so long as they got their welfare check at the end of the month.

The Junker family consisted of Jimmy Junker, his wife Janice, though not technically his wife and their two children Jared and Julie. Despite being a high school drop out, Jimmy Junker was good with his hands in various ways but mainly with cars and in 1980, at the age of eighteen, Jimmy got a job as an apprentice working in a garage as a mechanic. This job would be the one and only ray of hope that was ever to shine through the dismal clouds of the life he was born in to. That job lasted right up until his boss, old man Parsons, caught him slinging hashish out the back door of the shop. Jimmy quickly found out that moving brick was far easier than rotating tires, doing oil changes and the odd brake job which old man Parsons would let him do from time to time as part of his apprenticeship. He also learned that dealing dope was far more lucrative than the measly five dollars an hour he was making. Hell, he made more money over lunch break than he did the entire day. Had he been smarter and more careful, two attributes which were not too potent in the Junker family gene pool, he could have made a killing. Sure, he would have had to slug it out in the garage listening to old man Parsons bitching and complaining but all those delivery guys dropping off parts all day was like a gold mine. If his entire three month stint working at old man Parsons garage taught Jimmy anything at all, it was this, working for a living was for suckers.

A couple of years later, when Jimmy was thick into building his small town drug dealing empire, he met Janice Tanner at the annual town carnival. They knew of each other from high school but not much more than a quick glance in the hallway or while in line at the school cafeteria. Janice was a couple of grades below Jimmy and back then, the thought of even having a girlfriend to Jimmy was far less attractive than skipping class and rolling joints under the football bleachers with his friends. It would be an exaggeration to say that on that summer night of July 1982, it was love at first sight when in all truth, it was more like convenience at first sight. A quickie behind the hot dog concession stand was the beginning of their dysfunctional relationship. They would eventually produce two rug rats which Jimmy would sneer at almost every morning after they woke him up from running up and down the hallway of their mobile home. Most days, the wake up call also included a hang over from the night before.

As far as the children were concerned, they were always pale with a runny, snotty nose and were hyper as all hell. They could be seen at the grocery store not listening an iota to their mother as they ran up and down the isles grabbing whatever they liked off of the shelf and sticking it in their cart. All of these items of course were junk food and one shouldn’t have expected anything less from two eight and ten year old kids. In the childrens’ defense, their mother would be much too busy yakking it up with everyone she met at the store, to even notice what the children were putting in the cart. There was the occasional scolding of them by her but for the most part the juicy gossip with the neighbors was more important. After the grocery carts were brimming with low nutritional value items, it was all packed into boxes to be delivered to the trailer free of charge. Then it was off to the tobacco and lottery ticket counter to get six cartons of cigarettes, a bundle of scratch and win cards and most importantly, the weekly lottery tickets. Fifteen dollars was spent every week on the same numbers that had been used for the past ten years. One of these days the Junker’s ship would come in. One of these days.

Every Friday night was card night at the Junker trailer and it was the highlight of the week for everyone in the park, whether they were thrilled about it or not. The poker games were mostly a nickel and dime affair since not many folks in the trailer park had any serious money to part with. There was the usual copious amounts of liquor to be had, everyone brought their own handle to the party and the trailer would be smokier than a seedy poker lounge off of the Los Vegas strip. The evenings were usually loud and boisterous, as would be expected, with the usual arguments about who was dealing the deck and handing out such horrible cards. From time to time, as the night rolled past midnight and into the wee hours of the morning, two drunk guys would decide that it would be a good idea to take it outside and kick each others ass out on the front lawn. It was always a real crowd pleaser and quite the spectacle seeing two men barely able to stand, throwing punches while desperately trying to maintain their balance. From time to time, one of those heavy weights for the title of trailer park champ was none other than Jimmy Junker himself. These drunken bouts never usually amounted to much and often ended up in a wrestling match on the ground with every profane word known to the English dictionary being slurred out by both men at the top of their lungs.

This particular Friday night though, was different. A new guy came to the party at Jimmy Junker’s trailer with Cyril Chambers. Cyril lived a few trailers down the road and Cyril just showed up that night with this new guy, unannounced. As he was making a thirty five cent bet, Jimmy called out from the kitchen table asking Cyril who the hell this guy was. Cyril and the stranger had already taken a seat in the living room on the baby blue velvet couch, which was littered with cigarette burn marks and Cyril hollered back that it was just his cousin Bill who was passing through town. While Jimmy trusted Cyril, having known him for over fifteen years, Jimmy still felt that there was something a little off with this new guy whom he didn’t fully catch the name of. For one, the new guy hadn’t made eye contact with Jimmy when he came in the door and two, he acted like he didn’t give two shits whose place he was at or who his host was. Not that Jimmy was one for manners per se but a look in the eye and a nod of the head was the least someone should do when entering another mans house. Jimmy got neither.

As the night wore on, Jimmy had forgotten about Cyril’s cousin. He was having a good time as usual, yelling and cheering as the nickel and dime poker pot grew bigger. While he was having fun winning at his own poker game, Jimmy was still a little miffed with Cyril for not giving him the heads up about his unexpected guest, especially since Cyril knew what Jimmy did for a living.

At some time a little after midnight, Jimmy staggered down the hall to take a leak. As was typical, being this many rye and coke’s into the night, he kept missing the toilet bowl and instead ended up peeing on the seat of the toilet and floor beside it. While he was zipping up his pants and latching his belt, he thought he heard a thump coming from the bedroom next door. It couldn’t have been Janice or either one of the kids because Janice was busy in the kitchen whipping up a campfire Jiffy Pop popcorn on the stove and the two kids were asleep in the other room. He knew something was up and he was damn well sure that unless it was two people trying to “get it on” in his bedroom, then some sneaky prick was up to something and if that was the case, there was going to be some hell to pay.

Sure enough as Jimmy quietly opened the door to the bedroom to take a peak, there was Cyril’s cousin Bill down on the floor on his knees looking under the bed. Jimmy casually walked in, closed the door, locking it behind him and reached for the bat he kept behind the door. Bill looked up over his shoulder as Jimmy flicked the light off. He had been caught red handed snooping around and he knew what was coming next. In all his years of dope dealing, Jimmy never had to resort to violence, even when people didn’t pay up on time but a guy in his bedroom trying to rob him, well that was a different story altogether. Jimmy knew what Bill was after, he was trying to see where Jimmy kept his stash of money and dope but Jimmy wasn’t stupid enough to keep it in the house to begin with, it was out in the shed in the old rusty toolbox on the top shelf behind all the other grimy tools. The only thing that could be done was to teach Bill some manners and introduce him to an Old Hickory baseball bat. As he moved towards Bill, cocking the bat over his left shoulder, Bill quickly rolled onto his back and fired three shots into Jimmy’s chest. Jimmy fell to his knees and did a face plant beside the bed in a pool of blood.

Whose to say if things would have turned out differently had Jimmy Junker taken the straight and narrow path and stuck it out with old man Parsons. Whose to say that this was likely going to be the way it ended for Jimmy Junker anyway, given the risky business he was in. But the bigger question that comes to mind is this, was it nature or nurture that sealed Jimmy Junker’s fate in the end? Some would argue that it was nature because of the messy gene pool he inherited and others would argue that is was nurture because of the environment he was brought up in. In either case and for whatever reason, that was how the end came for Jimmy Junker on that Friday night of November 6 1992.

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Something flickered out of the corner of my eye that caught my attention as I was walking by. I knew every nook and cranny of this hiking trail. Every rotting tree that had fallen off to the either side, every ridge, every path that wandered off into the woods, some of which I had cut myself. I knew where every cluster of tree was and what type of tree they were, every fissure in the rock face and even the small caves where an animal could sleep for the night. Having been hiking this trail for the past twenty years, this was something very unusual. It wasn’t a colorful bird like a cardinal darting from the branch of a tree or a squirrel leaping quickly across the forest floor. I had experienced that many times before on my hikes. No, this was a glint off to my left that happened in a split second. It came from just beyond the old rotting birch stump with the green moss growing on top of its once smooth, paper thin bark. It was strange because the chances of a ray of sun breaching through the green, dense summer leaves and flickering off an object as I walked past, was one in a million. Whatever the chances were, I made my way over in the direction of the old tree stump.

I could tell by the broken branches of the young saplings that someone or something had been this way quite recently, forming a small trail in the underbrush. The old birch stump was about fifty feet from of edge of the trail and just below a ridge of rock that rose up sharply about ten feet or so. From the base of the stump I cast my eyes along the ridge thinking the glint must have come from there but did not see anything which would reflect the sun in such a way. There must be something shiny like a shard of glass or a piece of metal lying on the ground close by. As I was making my way carefully through a thick patch of ferns, staring intently at the ground, my lungs choked up suddenly as I came across a body lying face down in the underbrush.

The body was splayed out on the ground with both arms outstretched above the head and the legs were lying straight out and flat with each foot propped up by the toes of the boots. On the left wrist was a watch with a silver plated wrist band. I realized that this must have been what the sun had reflected off of as I was walking by.

Based on the the build of the body, it wasn’t hard to tell that this was the body of a man. His skin was white and he looked to be between twenty to forty years of age but it was hard to tell for certain since I could not see his face. He was not clean shaven and had dark stubble running down the side of his face to the edge of his throat. He had reddish brown hair, not too short, enough to run a comb through and it was cut square at the back about half an inch above the top of the shirt collar. He had a black jean jacket on and was wearing a pair of faded blue jeans. His hiking boots were light brown and I could tell from one of the raised pant legs, that he was wearing a pair of white socks. How did he die, was the first question that came to mind and the second was, how long had he been lying here face down in the dried up leaves and pine needles.

I was completely perplexed on what to do next. Did I hike the two miles back to the car where there was a clear enough cell signal to call the police or did I roll the body over to see if I knew him and try to figure out how he died, whether I knew him or not. Tampering with a body at a potential crime scene though, no matter far out into the woods you may be, was still illegal and considered a crime but my curiosity was overwhelming me.

Sitting down with my back against the old tree stump, I pulled out my bottle of water from my back pack and took a few mouthfuls. My mind was racing with so many questions. How did he end up face down, two miles down a trail and fifty feet from it? Was he murdered and brought up here to become one of those missing persons you read about that never return? Here is an opportunity to experience a real murder mystery case like the books I enjoy reading so much. I could be like the detective at the scene of the crime cracking the case. Surely I know how to go about doing an investigation, how hard could it be. Just think of all the help it would provide the authorities when I called it in. I might even be rewarded for my efforts. Besides, what if I left and some wild animal came along and dragged the body off somewhere. The opportunity to do the right thing would be lost.

Looking at my watch, it was coming on noon. It’s a good forty five minute hike to get back to the car. After I make the call to the police, it will take them at least forty five minutes or maybe even closer to an hour to find me because I‘m off of the main road about a mile in, where the trail begins. By that time, it will be almost two o’clock and then add on the time it will take to hike back to the location of the body, it’s easily going to be closing in on three o’clock. This means that the best of the afternoons sunlight will be on its way out, so how good of an investigation are they going to be able to do under a canopy of leaves that are starting to cast shadows. Not to mention that it’s going to be an all night affair once the investigation starts. I’ll be giving them a good head start and saving them a lot of trouble. Screw it!

I picked up a large branch that was lying near the tree stump to push the body over onto its back. As soon as I rolled it over, a rush of anxiety ripped through my stomach and my heart leaped into my mouth. Indeed this man had been here a few days at least and I did not recognize him. The maggots and worms had already started eating out his eyeballs which were staring out cold and empty into the pale blue sky. He had a black t-shirt on with the word, Metallica, written across the top. His stomach had been sliced open and his guts had spilled out. They were also being consumed by every vile creature that slithers in the ground. The sight made my stomach heave and puke.

Taking a moment to collect myself, I wiped my mouth off with the sleeve of my jacket, took out my cell phone and started to take pictures of the body and the crime scene. The ground under the body was not wet in a pool blood which could only mean that it had been a few days that the body had been lying there, like I suspected. The weather had been quite hot the past week, with little rain, so the blood must have seeped into the ground and dried up. I didn’t want to touch the ground to examine it. Contaminating the crime scene with my fingerprints would be a bad move and not something any good detective would do who was worth his salt.

With my pictures taken and a short video documenting my findings, it was time to hike back to the car. As I turned to make my way back to the trail, I was immediately seized with fear, a cold sweat ran across my forehead and a chill ran down my spine. There he was standing about eight feet in front of me carrying a gas container in his hand. I knew that I was staring into the eyes of the cold blooded killer who had murdered this man, lying not more than two feet away from me. The killers face was harsh and his teeth were clenched as he snarled at me in disgust.

He had seen my car parked alongside the trail. I knew instinctively that he had already made plans on how he would deal with the person who owned that car, if they had discovered the body. I put my arms out it front of me and started to back up slowly as he dropped the gas container and pulled a hunting knife from the sheath under his jacket.

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