Walking At Night

Walking At Night

a collection of short horror

Brian J. Jarrett

Copyright © 1996-2011 Brian J. Jarrett

Elegy Publishing, LLC

All rights reserved by the author. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted by any means without the written consent of the author.

This book is a work of fiction. Any names, people, locales, or events are purely a product of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to any person (either living or dead), to any event, or to any locale is coincidental or used fictitiously.

2011.WAN.1.6

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OLD MAN MILLER'S DOG

I’VE LIVED WITH a fear that has haunted me almost all my life.

I’ve lived with the fear that it might all catch up to me one day, and that nothing is really ever over. I can sometimes push it to the back of my mind, but even after all these years it still comes back.

It always comes back.

During the day it subsides. Surrounded by wife, baby, siblings, coworkers and others it seems like a bad dream. A surreal out-of-body experience had while sleeping fitfully as a child. The fear is always there, but it gets...muffled.

At night, however, when everyone is asleep, when the world quiets and lets its guard down, when unexplainable things lurk in the darkened recesses of our minds, that’s when it strikes. Waking up from nightmares covered in sweat, consoled by my goodhearted though thankfully ignorant companion is only a respite. The fear is my constant companion, an uninvited house guest who never leaves.

What is it I’m afraid of? I’m afraid of the things I saw as a child. Maybe what’s more important is that I’m afraid that something like that can even exist at all. I was a kid then, and perhaps only the mental flexibility of youth has allowed me to continue living to adulthood without going completely mad.

I’m sitting in my office as I write this. It’s late and I should be in bed now, but whatever this thing is it won’t leave me alone. It sits in the bottom drawer of my desk, a violent and hateful red, lined with polished silver spikes like piercing daggers. It disgusts me, yet I feel a frightening sense of excitement as my eyes rest upon it.

That scares the hell out of me.

Teddy and I are the only ones left of our childhood group of friends. There were five of us then, before my life was changed forever. We were innocent though mildly precocious boys living in a rural community an hour outside of a city which itself barely registered on any maps. A tucked-away slice of wholesome Americana on the surface, but seething with unspeakable evil beneath.

Teddy and I don’t talk much anymore. I wish we did, but we just fell out of touch. We share a bond like that of war buddies, but maybe our falling out of touch was because we both reminded each other of that awful shared memory. He’s got beautiful kids, and if you would have ever known him as a child you’d find that almost impossible to believe.

I called him a couple of months ago, shortly after I heard that Old Man Miller had died. Teddy lives an hour or so away, but he came right over. Neither of us spoke of Miller; it was like an eight hundred pound gorilla in the room that everyone was afraid to acknowledge. A hulking, wild-eyed gorilla that, once provoked, would tear everyone in the room to pieces.

We ended up having too many beers on the back deck that night, passing out until morning. I woke up to an uncomfortable goodbye with Teddy and a very pissed off wife. Something in my eyes, however, caused her to stop cold in mid-sentence. She just stared at me, like I was some kind of freak show oddity to be both pitied and reviled. She saw something there that frightened her. She didn’t ask, and I didn’t tell.

Maybe it’s better that way.

I called Teddy on a whim last month, or at least I told myself it was a whim. It was more like unspoken desperation. He sounded scared when I called. I was glad; at least it wasn’t just me. We talked; he told me I was crazy for what I had done. Maybe I am crazy; it’s hard to tell anymore.

I just called him again. He’s on his way over now.

I just hope he gets here soon enough.

* * *

When I was twelve years old I ran with four other kids around my age. Chris Zain, Mike Kessel, Pete Staats, and Teddy Spellman. Pete was thirteen, but barely. In his head he was an adult. The rest of us were kids, still clinging to the last vestiges of childhood, where Mom put Band-Aids on scraped knees and Dad threw the ball around in the backyard. Before moms got breast cancer and dads had heart attacks. Back when the apple pie tasted even better than it looked.

Pete’s dad was a piece of shit drunk; his mother a spineless coward. If Pete ever had a chance at a childhood it was ripped away by his horrible parents. Everybody got a good whacking from mom and dad back then, but Teddy’s house was different. Teddy got punched when he happened to draw the ire of his hateful father, and it was impossible to know exactly what those ire-drawing things could be.

We all felt for Pete, but what could a group of kids do? Pete dealt how he could, and we never said anything. We saw the bruises; we saw the bite marks and even the cigarette burns, but nobody said anything. How I wish I could turn back the clock; I would have done things differently.

I would have done a lot of things differently.

Teddy was the ’fat kid’. I don’t just mean he was simply fat. He was fat, no doubt, but he embodied the stereotypical ’fat kid’ persona. Greasy hair, pimples, thick glasses, and high-water pants rounded out his ensemble. He was the kind of kid who would never get a girlfriend, not looking like that at least. It took nine more years of transmogrification before he became the Teddy who could attract members of the opposite sex. He got contacts, his skin cleared, the weight fell off, and he started buying pants of proper length.

It couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy. Even when things were at their worst, even when everyone else had turned tail to save their own skins Teddy stood his ground. The fat kid exterior couldn’t hide his outstanding character. I will admit though that I was glad to see his exterior change to match his interior. If anybody deserved it, he did.

Chris and Mike were tight, probably the closest of the group. They were gangly and goofy, both overconfident and fiercely competitive. They spent an exorbitant amount of time debating silly notions for the right to claim title as victor, an activity the rest of us dismissed as wholly unnecessary and pointless. It seemed they gravitated toward each other for this reason.

So it seemed morbidly appropriate when they died together in a horrific crash along the Interstate less than two years out of high school. I was shocked, saddened even by the news. There was a little part of me, however, a nagging little voice in the back of my mind that reminded me that on the day Pete died they ran.

They ran to save themselves, and Teddy didn’t.

Neither did I.

Spindly little Brad Fraley; that was me. Good family, good grades in school, ornery little kid brother, and a guaranteed ticket to college for a bright future. Nerdy enough for the nerds, not too nerdy for the girls. There are worse fates than that, I suppose.

We were country kids, living out dirt roads that stretched and connected to paved roadways like capillaries connecting to arteries. Kids with mailboxes instead of post office boxes, kids who built forts in the woods instead of playing video games inside. We explored our world physically, without boundaries.

Except for one boundary: Old Man Miller’s junkyard.

Miller’s junkyard had been a fixture of our rural community for longer than I could remember. Even my parents couldn’t remember a time when it wasn’t there. It was almost as if it had always been there, like a dark, brown stain in a pair of white underwear. It sat in the valley between two small mountains, as if the Earth had shat it out upon the surface from its murky bowels.

The junkyard was surrounded by a tall chain link fence that looked as old as the mountains that nestled it. It bowed and sagged in areas, covered with patches of brown rust throughout. In some areas trees grew into the fabric of the fence itself, as if trapped in a large spider web. The fence wrapped and coiled its way around a jagged dozen acres of defiled land, on which sat the contents of the junkyard itself.

The sign at the entrance read MILLER’S SALVAGE YARD, but there was nothing salvaged in this filthy collection of rusting heaps. This was junk; the discarded remnants of times gone by. Or maybe it was like a form of Hell for things no one wanted anymore. Rusted-out washing machines along with faded refrigerators with doors still attached, perfectly poised for suffocating young children. Gray, torn shingles, broken glass, and sun-bleached, busted furniture littered the grounds.

Mattresses with rusted springs exposed to the elements lay on top of piles of unwanted muck, the springs bursting forth like the ribs of a rotting animal carcass. Old toy trucks, naked baby dolls, bicycles no child would ever ride again and baby carriages that would never hold another baby lay in piles like mass graves. Cars that would never again know the sound and feel of the open road lay abandoned and forgotten in their eternal prison. It was a depressing and dismal patch of ground; a place where humanity’s history came to rot away.

Large, wide paths crisscrossed across the grounds, twisting between the decomposing mounds like a serpent. When the rains came the paths became sloppy trails of stinking muck, stained with the oozing, rusty runoff from dozens upon dozens of piles of junk. Large ruts from the old man’s truck became small streams, holding water for weeks, allowing it to stagnate and breed mosquitoes in the summer.

The front of the yard was exposed for public scrutiny, surrounded by farmers’ fields and visible from the main road. A narrow graveled road led from the paved road to the entrance, but the bulk of the junkyard was surround by forest. Most people said that was the only reason Miller was able to hold on to it for as long as he did; the mountains and the trees surrounded and covered it up like a dirty secret. Out of sight, out of mind.

Old Man Miller lived on the grounds of the junkyard itself, near the back, in a ramshackle, pieced-together wreck that looked as if it had been built with the very junk it sat within. Siding of various colors and materials was hung haphazardly across the surface, giving it the appearance of a tossed-away patchwork quilt. The windows, where not boarded up, were filled with discarded replacement windows of varying sizes. A tattered back porch hung off the place, even more jury-rigged than the house. The whole place looked as if a strong wind could sweep it right into one of the junk mounds it was nestled between. Unfortunately that never happened.

None of us ever saw anyone dump anything there. We passed it often, both the front and the back of the place, but we never saw anybody else there. The contents of the piles seemed frozen in time, as if the old man had stopped collecting well before any of us were born. All the things in that place looked like they had been made before the Second World War. Maybe an item or two from as late as the sixties could be found, but it was rare. It wasn’t until later in life that I wondered how he survived with no obvious income.

Miller rarely left the junkyard, but he did leave. I saw him only on a few occasions, and when I did I felt as though I were looking at the devil. His hair was snow-white, reaching out into scraggly curls beneath a filthy baseball cap. His skin was reddish-brown, aged and lined with wrinkles as though it were the skin from the knee of an elephant. His teeth were yellow and blackened with decay around the roots. His face bore a stubbly beard, just as white as the hair that hung limply from his head. A thick waddle of loose flesh covered his throat, giving him the appearance of a large turkey. He wore faded bib-overalls with a stained white shirt beneath and tan work boots covered his feet.

He drove a faded orange Ford pickup truck when he did venture out, the side peppered with jagged, brown rust spots. In the back window hung a gun rack, though I never saw any guns stowed away in it. Old Man Miller probably never needed guns to do his dirty work.

Several years before the day Pete died and my life changed forever, I had a chilling encounter with Old Man Miller. My mother had taken me to the local IGA for her weekly grocery trip. It was a good day, at least it started out that way; blue skies and mild temperatures, along with the promise of a candy bar if I behaved. I remember watching the trees blow in the breeze as I sat in the back seat of the family car, trying in vain to decide between a Snickers bar and a Kit Kat.

We arrived at the store; there my mother got me out of the seat and on the parking lot. She closed the door and immediately my good mood turned to revulsion. Then it turned to fear.

Standing there in the parking lot, directly behind our car door, was Old Man Miller.

He was dressed the same as usual; bibs, white shirt, tan boots, filthy baseball cap, but there was something different about him that day. He stood there, blocking our way, and just stared at me. His teeth clamped down upon a brown pipe like a bear trap. His white, bushy eyebrows perched above his eyes like large, wooly caterpillars. I couldn’t swear to it, but I was almost sure that I saw blood on his shirt.

Then he smiled. I panicked, my eyes grew wide, my breathing grew rapid and my heart rate increased. I felt hot, nervous, almost sick. I tried to hide it; I didn’t want him to see my fear. I don’t think I was doing a very good job of it though.

My mother must have noticed something was very wrong; I look back now and I see no way she couldn’t have seen that the man standing in front of her was the physical embodiment of pure evil. A polite woman until the end, she stammered and stuttered to find something cordial to say to the man. She opened her mouth to speak, but nothing more than a few staccato sounds came forth. She dropped her keys as she fumbled to put them in her purse. As she bent down I noticed that she never took her eyes off him. That frightened me as much or more than Old Man Miller himself, that an adult, my own mother even, was just as afraid as I was.

The old man just kept smiling at us. It wasn’t that department store Santa smile that children know and love. No, it was like the frozen grin of a corpse as the skin desiccates and stretches away from the mouth. I could almost hear his leathery skin stretching as he grinned, revealing more of those horrible, yellow teeth. They almost seemed like fangs.

Suddenly my