Scary Guest Post for Halloween by Vivian Rinaldo

IT WAS A DARK AND STORMY NIGHT


There was thunder but no lightning; the air crackled with electricity, making Carolina's hair frizz out around her head. The power had gone out more than an hour ago, and she couldn't find her emergency candles; more than that, she was royally pissed because she was missing "House". Sitting in the dark, she reflected for the millionth time on the fact that she was woefully unprepared for any kind of catastrophe. No weather radio, no flashlight, no candles (not to mention no matches to light them with – and now she remembered why she should have a gas stove instead of electric) no lanterns, no batteries, and about enough food in the fridge and cupboards to last, possibly, until morning, if she was very frugal.

The wind moaned, but she wasn't intimidated; she didn't believe in ghosts. She considered getting in her car and driving around to see how Nashville looked in the dark, but she doubted she could find her keys, either. Besides, all the traffic lights would be out, and she had a nervous feeling that there was a semi out there in the dark somewhere with her name on its grill. A fireplace would have been nice and cozy, maybe would have even given off enough light to read by. She didn't have one of those, either. "Damn," she murmured softly, then laughed at her reluctance to make a loud human sound. "HA, HA!" she shouted….strange how that echoed. She'd have bet the house was more solid than that.

She reached for the telephone, and then scolded herself. "You idiot, the phones will be out, too." Suddenly, she remembered the cell phone, and began groping around in the living room for her purse. A loose safety pin – conveniently open, of course - impaled her just as her fingers closed on the pink Sprint flip phone, and she opened it eagerly. At least she could call someone and talk. The backlight came on, then a beep, the message "Low Battery", and the phone powered down. Dead. "Jeez, what else could go wrong tonight?" she growled.

A touch against her leg, and she jumped several inches backward. Frankie, her enormously fat tiger tabby, rubbed static sparks against her bare calf. "Ow, Frankie! Cut it out! Stupid cat!"

She felt him sit down on her left foot, and she knew he was nonchalantly grooming himself. The urge to boot him across the room welled up in her, but she tamped it down. "You're lucky you are the only friend I have, or you'd be violin strings about now," she muttered, shoving him over and making her way back to the couch. Even with the blinds up and the curtains parted, the room was cave dark. How lucky, she thought, that there's NO moon tonight. That might have made the whole thing bearable, and we can't have that, can we?

Carolina pulled a knitted afghan off the back of the couch and covered her legs; she didn't feel especially cold, but there was something extremely shiverish tonight about being in the dark in the silent house. Finally, she could stand the creaky stillness no longer, and she got up, groped around for her sneakers, and headed toward the front door. Her purse gave up a very small pen light; she tucked a key to the house into her pocket, locked the door behind her, and headed down the sidewalk toward the National Cemetery.

"May as well visit the dead," she muttered to herself. She loved the Cemetery, with its more than 16,000 Union soldiers' headstones, the sad, forgotten graves of the 'unknowns', and the lonesome wail of the L & N as it bisected the grounds. She reveled in the shocked responses of her faraway relatives to whom she revealed that most areas of Tennessee actually stood for the Union Army during the Civil War. For many it was the first time they'd ever thought about Tennessee as anything other than backward, bib-over-alled, cousin-marrying, gun-toting, tobacco-spitting hicks. Very satisfying.

She got to the gates, visible only because the heavy cloud cover parted briefly, and found them closed and locked. "Damn!" In the dimness, she could see but not read a sign that probably explained why. Carolina turned to head back toward home, hesitated, looked around, and then realized that the stone wall surrounding the Cemetery was only about four feet high. She couldn't help giggling to herself over the fact that the gates were wrought iron topped with vicious-looking spikes, but the wall that held them up on either side was so low she could easily jump – well, at least step – over it. "Maybe it's not to keep me out, but to keep them in!" she said softly, then burst into brays of laughter caused at least as much that idea as by the eerie shadows of the willow branches along one side of the wall that swayed gently in the humid breeze.

Carolina tucked the pen light into her pocket, threw one leg up over the rock wall, hoisted herself up and over and landed with a jolt in a sizable hole on the other side. For just a moment, she entertained the horrific thought that she had climbed deliberately but unknowingly into an open grave. "Come on, now, get a grip," she scolded herself. "It is highly unlikely that anyone would dig a grave this close to the outer perimeter of the graveyard." Pulling the pen light back out of her pocket, she pressed the button and looked around her. "Oh, my God, are you a big pansy," she grumbled. "It's just where they dug up an old tree stump. The roots were probably growing under the wall and cracking the stones. Jeez!" Hoisting herself up out of the hole, she brushed off the dirt and leaves that clung to her jeans and headed deeper into the Cemetery.

Humming along with the music the DJ in her head played, she moved slowly between headstones, touching one here, brushing grass off another there, and carefully not stepping directly on the graves themselves. She paused for a moment, considering why. Certainly the dead don't care, and horror movies to the contrary, corpses hardly ever rise up and grasp the legs of the unwitting. She giggled again. "Oh, my girl," she encouraged herself, "you really need to get out more. You're bringing talking to yourself to a whole new level."

A momentary break in the clouds allowed her to see a concrete bench near one of the beautiful old willows, and she headed for it. It pleased her just to sit and think sometimes among people who could neither praise nor criticize. She pulled a much-used tissue out of her pocket and brushed away the crusty remains of pigeon gifts before sitting down. The DJ in her head was now playing some nearly forgotten tune by WHAM!, and it was driving her crazy. She couldn't remember the name of the song, and the same phrase repeated itself in her mind – "I don't want your freedom…" What the hell, she thought, and tried a trick her mother had taught her when she complained about the mental music. Out loud, she sang with great gusto but less than perfect pitch, "Mare-zee doats and dozee doats and liddle lambs eedivee. A kid'll eedivee too, wouldn't you?" Taking a deep breath, she repeated the refrain, and then moved on to the chorus. "If the words sound queer, and funny to your ear, a liddle bit jumbled and jive-ee, sing Mares eat oats, and does eat oats, and little lambs eat ivy. Oh…" She broke off suddenly, aware of another sound that was certainly NOT coming from her. It was a strangely familiar sound, sort of like a train whistle or the lonely cry of a wolf separated from its pack, but she couldn't quite tell what it was. She closed her eyes and focused her attention, listening so hard her ears began to ring with the silence that now fell.

"Humph," she grunted. "Must've imagined it. Must be time to head home; I'm starting to hear things." Looking around her, she doffed an imaginary hat to those she was leaving, and turning to go, she sang out, "WOULDN'T YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU?" And then, there it was again, just a trace of a sound underneath her own caterwauling. She shut up abruptly, but at the same moment, the other sound stopped, too. "Okay this is just stupid," she groused. "I'm imagining things, it's creepy here, the wind is blowing, it's too dark to see, and I'm in the middle of a graveyard…" There! There it was again.

She turned slowly and headed back toward the gates, using the pen light sparingly – its faint flicker told her the battery was nearly exhausted – to avoid running over the head stones that now loomed like a grisly obstacle course in front of her. And now she longed for the DJ in her head to play something happy – loud, too – but he obstinately refused to accommodate her. There was a deep quiet inside her, a quiet that rang with intensity. Her feet felt suddenly heavy, and a tiny squirm of panic began to grow. Where the hell was the wall? Where were the gates? How had she gotten so turned around? All she could see as she pivoted slowly on her heels was a vast ocean of stones. "Oh, for God's sake, get a grip on yourself, Carolina Parmenter. You know the way out of here; you've been here before and there is nothing – abso-freaking-lutely nothing scary about a field full of dead people. It's just a weird crop that Farmer God planted over the last hundred and forty-three or so years. Just dust and hair and a gold filling or two to show for His work." She shrugged the tension out of her shoulders and tried to get her bearings. "If the moon would peek out just for a second until I could figure out where I got turned around!"

It was the sound again. Low, but there. It drove her crazy that she couldn't identify it; she was certain she'd heard it before…but where…how…when. She just couldn't place it. Carolina pressed the button of the pen light again, but the beam was now so weak that it didn't even illuminate her own feet beneath her. She shoved it back in her pocket, and a trembling laugh seeped out of her mouth as she imagined herself back at home, putting the pen light in the junk drawer that also held dead batteries, pens that had run out of ink, scotch tape rolls that were stuck to themselves, and pencils with no erasers. What a treasure trove, she thought. I should bring all that crap here and bury it along with all the useless junk in this place.

The wind kicked up a bit, the clouds parted briefly, and she could see the gates no more than 150 yards to her left. Baffled, she started toward them, but the wind died down again, the clouds massed together, and she had a frightening feeling of being disoriented in space. The distance between her feet and her head was so vast that she could no longer tell she was moving. For just a second, she considered the idea that she might be having a seizure, experiencing a psychotic break, or maybe suffering a mini-stroke.

She stopped where she was, squatted down, wrapped her arms around her bent legs, and rested her chin on her knees, closing her eyes. Rocking gently back and forth, she murmured, "It's okay now. It's going to be okay now. It's okay. Just calm down. Nothing's wrong, nobody's hurt, you're not lost, the world isn't coming to an end." The wind stopped blowing suddenly, and she could hear a train off in the distance, faint but clearly recognizable – and in no way the same sound as what she had heard before in the graveyard. She knew that, not sure how she knew, but certain she was right. The ground beneath her seemed to ripple slightly, and she tumbled over, releasing her knees and thrusting her hands beneath her to catch herself. It was a slow-motion collapse, but once she was down, she realized how horribly tired she really was. At once frightened and exhausted, she opened her eyes and, on hands and knees, began to crawl toward the gates. She could still see them, but she didn't seem to be getting any nearer. It was like walking on a treadmill – she could feel the earth beneath her moving under her hands and knees, but she was getting nowhere.

Carolina was frightened, truly frightened, and now she began to weep softly; the dj in her head began to mock her – no longer satisfied to play music that would drive her mad, he had become at once her judge and her tormenter, her critic and her disappointed parent. His words were barbs, rusty but still sharp, piercing her heart and forcing her breath out in sobs.

* * * * *

"And the incredible irony of it all is this: she loved cemeteries; she talked about how sweetly romantic the headstones could be, how grim, how hopeful the epitaphs. She died right here, folks, scared literally to death." Voices murmured in shivery delight, and leaves crackled beneath the feet of the Ghostly Tour participants.