The Ghost Breaker
John Bass was the first character I ever wrote more than one story about. Inspired by Manly Wade Wellman, among others, I wanted to create a character that I could use to explore a world of my own creation – namely, Jackapo County. I haven’t written much about him of late – I have other characters and other worlds to explore – but I hope to return to him someday, if only for one more story.
Either way, here’s a little something I wrote about him. See what you think.
John Bass is a name known from one end of the county to t’other. Sometimes folks curse it, oft-times they give it a bit of a blessing, but under the tongue, y’understand. All except for Mr. Chicken, who tends his grave because there’s no one else to do so.
John Bass was born in the county and he died here too, which is probably a metaphor for something but I’m not sure what. Either way Bass didn’t hold with metaphors. School neither, but that was his only bias.
Bass left the county as a boy and went to Cuba with Mr. Roosevelt and them, fighting the Spanish. Damn near as soon as he came home, he was gone again, fighting the Germans, though he didn’t hold either group in any particular ill-regard. He was a good soldier as things went but there were stories about him even then. The soldiers under him said Bass had a little bag with a bullet in it and it was the bullet with his name on it so he could never die by violence. They said he’d spit in the Devil’s eye one dark night in a French chapel and that he’d gotten the scars on his hands, big, white looping things, from where he’d fought a dead thing that came slam-bang out of a trench wall one bad day, beating it back into the earth with barb-wire wrapped fists.
They said he’d taken up with a French lady with a monkey on her shoulder and murder in her heart, but that he brought a different lady home-a pretty farmgirl with a shrapnel scar on her face that ran from hair to jawline. They had married and come home to Jackapo County and that’s where the stories got wilder and darker. His wife died of the influenza and his land went sour, a curse they said, on account of the Devil and the spitting and such, and then came that bad black day when he was called up to Jack-Town and he went into that dark house and did what had to be done because there was no fool else to do it.
That’s how John Bass became the Ghost-Breaker. And he broke a hundred of them, if he broke one. He settled Raggedy Fale back in his grave, they said, and saved them babies’ souls. He threw bad, dead Heath Bradley back down into his well and he even went to the Screaming Place and lived, though he was never the same afterwards. But who would be?
And then he died. There’s a story about that too. About how and where he died and what was found around him the next morning. And how he took back the invitation to Tenebre and trapped the Devil there for all that it cost him everything, in the end. But nobody tells the story. No one want to think about Tenebre, y’see.
It was his heart, they said. It just gave out on account of things. But most folks know that’s foolish and they know why he was buried at the crossroads to Tenebre, alongside his foreign wife. And how if you don’t take fright and you go there, to that crossroads at midnight, you can hear the Ghost-Breaker’s heart still thumping and smell the hint of his wife’s French perfume.
And you can know you’re safe there, if anywhere.
