The February Special Guest Story is by Scott Nicholson

Please feel free to visit Scott at: http://www.hauntedcomputer.com/

HOMECOMING

by Scott Nicholson

The wind cut through the valley like a frozen razor. Black clouds raced from the west, shrouding the setting sun. Leaves skittered over the brown grass. The air smelled of electricity and rust and dried chestnut and things long dead.

No ghosts flickered among the sagging fence posts outside, no spirits swept over the hay-strewn barnyard. Only earthly shadows moved in the twilight, nothing but swaying trees and nightbirds and loose gates. Charlie Roniger turned from the dark glass of the window.

"It's gonna come a storm," he said, drawing the dusty curtains. His wife, Sara, sat in her ragged easy chair and said nothing. She looked deeply into the flames crackling in the fireplace. Her wrinkled hands were folded over the quilt in her lap, hands that had once snapped green beans and wrung out wet sheets and caressed the soft down on a baby's head.

Charlie studied her face. It was fallen, as if the framework behind it was busted up like an old hatbox. He never thought she'd end up broken. Not the way she'd always been able to show her feelings, to hold the family together, to love the only two men in her life.

She was too much like that old spring up on the hill, just kept on slow and steady until you came to expect it to run on forever. Then when it dried up, you got mad, even though you had no promise that it would keep running. Even when you knew you had no real right to it. It was a blessing, and blessings weren't made to last. Otherwise, the bad things that God sent along wouldn't get their proper due.

Charlie reached into the front pocket of his denim overalls and pulled out a plug of tobacco. He twisted off a chaw with his three good teeth. His gums mashed the tobacco until it was moist and pliable. Then, with his tongue, he pushed the wad into the hollow of his jaw.

He walked to the door, unconsciously checking the lock. On a peg beside his overcoat hung the baseball glove he'd given Johnny for his tenth birthday. The leather had shrunk and cracked from all the years Johnny had lobbed dewy walnuts on the tin roof of the barn, pretending he was catching fly balls off Yankee bats. Johnny had been a southpaw. He'd gotten that from Sara's side of the family.

Charlie wished he'd had more time to play catch with his son. But the fields always needed his plow, the hay had to be pressed into yellow squares, the hogs squealed for slop, the corn cried for water. The forest gave its trees but demanded in trade hours of stretched muscles and stinging sweat. Even the soil begged for his flesh, whispering to him to lie down and rot and feed the new roots.

So time went away, the sun rose and fell like a rib cage drawing in deep breaths. And chores and meals and church on Sundays stole the years. Charlie wondered if all you were left with at the end was the memory of all the things you should have said but never could. Things like "I love you."

He touched the glove that was as rough and parched as his own skin. He always thought it would be the other way around, with him fading out slow and gaspy and full of pain, while Johnny stood over the bed and tried to get up the nerve to hug him. And Charlie thought he might have been able to say it then, when they were both scared and had nothing to lose. Back when death looked like a one-way road.

Charlie stooped, his spine popping as he reached into the firebox and grabbed a couple of oak logs with his arthritic fingers. He carried the wood into the living room and tossed them onto the fire, sending a shower of sparks up the chimney. The reflection of the fire danced in his wife's glassy eyes, red-orange pinpricks on bald onyx. She didn't blink.

"Fire feels good, don't it, honey?" he said gently, squirting a stream of brown juice into the flames. The liquid hissed and evaporated as he waited for an answer, knowing it wouldn't come. Language had left her alone, even if the dead folks hadn't.

Outside, the wind picked up. The old two-story house creaked and leaned against the coming gale. A few loose shingles flapped, and the upstairs windows rattled. Blasts of cold air swirled under the front door and the first raindrops spattered the porch.

He gingerly led Sara up the squeaky stairs to bed and tucked her under the thick blankets. Charlie checked the weather once more, but all he could see was black and his own reflection. He tossed on a back log, spit out his chaw, and locked the door. He went upstairs to wait for them.

He fell asleep with his arm around Sara, nuzzling into the hard edges of her bones. The howling wind came into his dreams and turned into a familiar moan. He awoke in a sweat and blinked into the blackness around him. Faint blue-white shapes hovered above the bed. He reached for his wife, but felt only the cool sheets in the little hollow of the bed where she should have been.

She was with them, dancing and waving her frail arms, as she had every night since Johnny had been buried. The translucent wisps flowed over her, caressing her skin and weaving around her worn flannel nightgown. She floated two feet off the ground, embraced by the spirits. They were all locked together in a hoe-down of resurrection.

As Charlie's eyes adjusted, he could make out the feathery shapes taking form. It was the regulars, the happy hour crowd of the dead set. The ghosts filled the room like joyful clouds. They cavorted like they had time to kill and forever to do it in.

Familiar faces coalesced among the mists. There was Doris, the school teacher, who had passed on in the winter of '73, now as withered as a forgotten houseplant. Freddie, Charlie's old fishing buddy, was moaning and hooting like an eviscerated owl. He had drowned several years ago and his skin was stretched and pale like a bleached water balloon. Freddie had lost his hat, and Charlie noticed for the first time how large his ears were.

Colonel Hadley was hovering like a shroud on a coat hanger, wearing his military dress blues even though his ramrod days were over. The town gossip held that Fanny Coffey had run off with a traveling Bible salesman, but she couldn't have made it far on those amputated legs. The Bible salesman had answered a newfound calling to be a sex murderer, an about-face career change that caught Fanny by surprise. Consumptive old Pete Henries fumbled at his chest, aimlessly searching for another of the cigarettes that had nailed his coffin lid shut. The Waters bunch looked on, father and mother and child, still as ashen as they had been on the morning they were found in their garage with the Buick engine running.

Rhetta Mae Harper was among them, Rhetta Mae who had tried to seduce Charlie when Sara had been so knotted up with pregnancy that she couldn't bear her husband's touch. Sara's womb had taken his seed in late middle age, and the fetus that would be Johnny kept her in constant discomfort. Charlie had tasted Rhetta Mae's temptation and had nearly swallowed, but in the end his love for Sara kept him true. Rhetta Mae had been shot during some drunken, jealous frenzy, her voluptuous figure shredded by number eight buckshot pellets. Charlie found her charms much easier to resist now.

He kicked off the blankets and rolled out of the old cast-iron bed, the mattress springs and his bones creaking in harmony. The cold pine floorboards chilled his feet as he walked over to his wife. The ghosts crowded Charlie's face, but he brushed them aside like cobwebs. He put his hand on Sara's arm. She tried feebly to fight him off. She wanted to play with her see-through friends.

"Johnny isn't here," Charlie said to Sara. "They won't take you to Johnny."

She tried to answer but could only gurgle like an infant. She was finding ecstasy in those icy arms.

"Now get the hell outta here, you bunch of deadbeats," Charlie shouted at the ghosts, trembling with chill and outrage. For some reason he didn't understand, they always obeyed him, as if they hadn't a will of their own and took their masters where they found them.

The ghosts turned to him, blank faces drooping, like children who had been scolded for taking baby chicks out of a nest. They gently lowered Sara and she stood on the wobbly sticks of her legs. The figures flitted into shadows and disappeared.

The storm had blown over now and a sliver of moonlight spilled across the bedroom. Charlie laid his wife down and tugged the blankets over her. He got in beside her and watched the corners of the room. Johnny's photograph was on the dresser, the portrait grinning in the weak moonlight. Smooth skin and a proud shy smile, those eyes that Sara said were so much like his father's. Damn shame about that boy, he thought, as his rage faded like the ghosts had. Sorrow rose from a shallow grave in his heart to take its place.

They said Johnny had slipped down at the sawmill, his flannel sleeve yanked by the hungry blade that didn't discriminate between limbs of poplar, jack pine, or flesh. The lumber company sent a check and paid for his funeral. It rained the day they lowered Johnny's purple casket into the ground. Rivulets of red streaked the clay as the gravediggers shoveled. Charlie thought it was funny how they threw in that coffin and all that dirt, and the hole still wasn't full. He and Sara watched the rain drill down into the man-sized puddle long after the minister had fled for the shelter of his powder-blue Cadillac.

The ghosts had paid their first visit that night. Sara's mind, already splintered by grief, took a final wrong turn down the dirt road of madness. Charlie had been disbelieving at first, but now the midnight stops were another part of the day, as fixed in the rhythm of his life as milking the cows and gathering the eggs. Just another hardship to be endured.

Charlie turned his eyes from the photograph and reached for the tobacco. Since he was awake, he might as well have a chaw. He rested his wiry neck back on the pillow and worked the sticky sweet leaf with his gums. Something rustled by the dresser.

"You're a little late, the show's over," Charlie said. The noise continued.

Charlie raised his head and saw a faint apparition trying to form by the closet. Damned if it ain't a new one, he thought. Threads of milky air spun themselves into a human shape. Charlie blinked and looked at the photograph.

"Can't be," he muttered. Then he realized it was the one he'd been waiting for, night after long night. "Johnny? Is that you, boy?"

A voice like December answered, "Yeah, Dad."

Charlie sat up in bed, his heart pounding. He glanced sideways at his wife. Her eyes were closed, and the blankets rose and fell with her even breathing.

"How's it going, son?"

"Not too bad. I've been a little confused here lately."

"Didn't I tell you to keep an eye out for that damned sawblade? Just look what you've gone and done to yourself."

Johnny materialized more fully and stepped forward into the moonlight. Flesh hung in ropes from his ruined cheeks. His nose was missing, and chunks of his hair had been torn from his savaged scalp. His Adam's apple bobbed uncontrollably, dangling by a tendon from the gash in his neck.

Charlie gulped, feeling the tobacco sting his throat. "You're looking real good, son."

"How's Mom?"

"She's fine," Charlie said. "We better let her sleep, though. Her spring's dried up."

Johnny nodded as if that made sense. The Adam's apple quivered and made a wet sound.

"They took your pitching arm, son. That was supposed to win you a college scholarship."

Johnny contemplated his missing left hand as if he could still see it. "It happened so fast, Dad. Hurt for a second, like when you get rope burns or something, but then it was over. Seems like only yesterday, but seems like it never happened, too. Lots of things are funny that way anymore."

Charlie looked into Johnny's eyes that were deep as graves. He suddenly remembered teaching his son how to tie a slip-knot on a fishing line. They had stood in the shade of a sycamore, where the branches were highest, so the hooks wouldn't snag. Johnny's stubby fingers had fumbled with the line as his face clenched in determination, but now the fingers of his remaining hand were ragged and moldy, with dirt packed under the nails.

Charlie felt the blankets slip from his shoulders, and a coldness flooded his chest, as if his heart had frozen. "You feel like talking about it, son?"

"Well, I'm supposed to be looking for something. I thought I ought to come here," Johnny said, the bone of his head slowly swiveling.

"Home is where you go when you got trouble," Charlie said. "I told you I'd always be here to help you."

"Dad, it ain't the hurt, 'cause I don't feel nothing. But I'm lost, like. Can't seem to find my way."

Charlie gummed his chaw quickly and nervously before answering. "You know you'd be welcome here, but I don't think that's right. There's others that are your kind now."

"I reckon so," Johnny said softly, looking at and through his own torso as if finally understanding. Then his hollow voice lifted. "You remember when those Corcoran boys were picking on me, and you stared down their whole damned brood? Walked right up on their front porch, standing on them old boards ready to fight 'em one at a time or all at once. That sure took the steam out of their britches."

"Nobody messes with my boy." Charlie looked into the shadows that passed for Johnny's eyes.

"Say, Dad, whatever happened to Darlene?"

Charlie didn't want Johnny to rest any less easily than he already did. He couldn't say that Darlene had married Jack Corcoran when Johnny was barely six weeks in the ground, before the grass even had time to take root over his grave. Fond memories might give the dead comfort, for all Charlie knew. So he lied.

"She pined and pined, boy. Broke her poor little heart. But eventually she got on with her life, the way a body does. That would have made one fine wedding, you and her."

"I only wanted to make her happy. And you, too, Dad. I guess I'll never get the chance now."

The dark maw in the center of Johnny's face gaped like an endless wet cave.

"We all got our own row to hoe, Johnny. I taught you that we take care of our own. But I also told you that you gotta make hard choices along the way. And it looks like this is one path that you better walk alone."

Johnny shuffled his shredded feet. "Yeah, I reckon so. But I ain't scared. I guess it's what ought to be."

Charlie felt a stirring in the blankets beside him.

"Them other ones been here lookin' for you. Been here ever damn night, bugging hell out of your mom," Charlie said quickly.

Sara sat up, her eyes moist with sleep. She gasped as she saw the scraps of her son. Charlie put a hand on her shoulder to keep her from getting out of bed.

A thin strand of drool ran down her chin as she tried to speak. "Juhhhnn..."

Johnny drifted forward. "Mom?"

Charlie pressed Sara's head down onto her pillow. "You'd best be getting on, son. No need to stir up trouble here."

Johnny moved closer, though not one of his limbs moved. He was beside the bed now, and Charlie felt the stale cold draft of his son's deathwind. Johnny reached out with a hand that was the color of a trout belly.

Sara squirmed under Charlie's arm, but Charlie pinned her and pulled the quilt over her face. When he looked back at Johnny, the vacant expression had been replaced by a look that Charlie had seen one other time. A possum had crawled under the henhouse wire, and Charlie went after it with a pitchfork when the animal refused to give up its newfound territory. Charlie must have jabbed the possum fifty or sixty times, with it hissing and snarling every breath right up until it finally died.

Charlie wondered what kind of pitchfork you used on a ghost.

The mottled hand came closer, and Charlie clenched his teeth. "Ain't proper for a grown man to be making his mother cry."

Johnny paused for a moment, and his eyes looked like they were filled with muddy water.

"That's right," Charlie said. "Your spring’s drying up. You got other rivers to run to, now."

Sara kicked Charlie's leg, but he wasn't about to turn her loose.

Johnny reached out and touched Charlie's cheek. His son's fingers were like icicles. The hand trailed along the line of Charlie's stubble, as if remembering the scratchiness he'd felt against his infant skin. It was the first time they had touched in nearly twenty years.

"I'd best go with them. Seems only right," Johnny whispered in his lost voice. Affection and a strange pride fluttered in Charlie's chest. This was his only son standing before him. Did it matter that his decaying guts were straining against the cotton of his burial shirt? As a father, it was his duty to teach his son one more of life's harsh little lessons.

"A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do." Charlie pointed to the far corner of the room. "They went that-a-ways."

Johnny turned his mutilated face, a face that only a mother could love. Then he looked back. He leaned over Charlie and spread his arms wide. The raw meat of his throat jogged as he spoke. "I love you, Dad."

Without thinking, Charlie reached up, his hands passing through the moist silk of Johnny's flesh. But how could you hug a dried-up spring? How could you hug a memory?

Charlie loved the son who had walked this earth. The small boy who had sat between Charlie's legs on the tractor, pretending to steer while making engine noises with his mouth. The son he had taken to see the Royals play, who had built an awkward birdhouse in eighth-grade shop for his mother, who had slept in the hayloft in the summer because he liked the smell. The son who had buried his old hound himself because he didn't want anyone to see him cry. Johnny did those things, not this blasphemy hovering over him.

Johnny had been the flesh of Charlie's flesh, but this thing was beyond flesh. Resting in peace was a comfort for the living, not the dead.

He almost said the words anyway. But he found he'd rather take his regrets to the grave. Second chances be damned.

"It's good to see you, son." Like hell.

"Tell Mom that I miss her." Johnny's maw opened and closed raggedly. Sara was sobbing under the blankets, her fragile bones trembling.

"I will. You take care, now." Like he was sending Johnny off to summer Bible camp.

Johnny shimmered and faded, the dutiful son to the last. His stump of a left arm raised as if to wave good-bye. The essence that had been Charlie's only son fluttered and vanished just as the first rays of dawn broke through the room. The ghosts wouldn't be back. They had what they had been looking for.

Charlie relaxed and pulled the blankets off his wife's face. She turned her back to him, her gray hair matted against the pillowcase. He touched her shoulder but she shrugged him away. Something rattled in her chest.

He rose from the bed and dressed, working the tightness out of his stringy muscles. He rubbed his hands together to drive away the lingering chill of his son's touch. His heart felt like a charred ember in the ash of a dead fire. His eyes burned, but they had always been miserly when it came to making tears.

He knew you couldn't expect it to keep running forever. When the spring dries up, you had to remember that you had no promise that it would keep on. The water's for everybody or even nobody at all. You had no real right to it in the first place.

Scott Nicholson is the author of ten novels, 70 short stories, six screenplays, three comics series, and numerous articles. His Web site is www.hauntedcomputer.com, where digital and paper copies of his books are available.

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