New Yesterdays by Jim L Wright - HTML preview

Chapter 1

“That is one scary house!” declared the red-haired boy for at least the thousandth time. Every time he played there, he felt a thrill of excitement race up his spine. It was the same giddy sensation he got from watching the gothic soap opera, Dark Shadows on the television or seeing the latest horror movie at the Allison Theatre in Piedmont when he could wrangle fifteen cents from his mother. He adored reading Edgar Allan Poe’s horror stories, especially The Gold Bug and The Black Cat. He must’ve read each of them a dozen times and every time they thrilled him more. Knowing the outcome of the story somehow made the build-up even more titillating.

Worthy of any Poe story, the abandoned, once elegant hundred-year-old Victorian house was the twin of a second abandoned place, nearer Jim’s house. Both were festooned with turrets and gables. The lacy gingerbread decorations were silvery grey, broken and decaying. With its ancient green paint faded and peeled almost into nonexistence, the house stood dark and sinister like a silent sentry nestled amongst tall, slender pines, majestic oaks and pear trees gone wild. Most of the dozens of window panes were broken, leaving only gaping, baleful black holes staring out onto the road. The front door stood open, having fallen away from the top hinge, as if beckoning inquisitive young boys into its dark and dangerous entrails. The shrubs were overgrown and tangled like the webs of a tribe of maniacal spiders. The once lush, grassy lawns were now just a matted carpet of dead and dying weeds. Everything about the place was in advanced stages of decay. In contrast to the other house, the entire property was surrounded by an ornate rusty iron fence with pikes that had been sharpened to a razor-like edge by the passage of time and eroding rains. Two paneless gas lamps guarded the gate as though no one had remembered to tell them the family they once lighted the way for were long since gone.

The boy and his two brothers never tired of prowling around “The Old House”, sure that one fine day they would discover the treasure that just

had to be hidden in one of the old turrets or in a dark attic corner. Or, maybe it was buried in the gardens somewhere. One thing the boy was certain of was that a spooky old house like this just had to be hiding some kind of secret! Two summers before they had found a mantle board that had pulled away from its moorings during the winter. When they extracted the remainder of the desiccated wood from its place, they found several old coins that had fallen behind it. There was a silver dollar, a quarter, four dimes, a buffalo nickel and nine pennies. Seventy-nine cents! It was a small fortune! The boys were ecstatic over their find and it only whetted their appetite for the “real treasure” they knew they would find one day.

The boys’ mother had warned them time and again to stay away from the house. “It’s dangerous” she’d say.

Hell, she said that about everything that was fun or interesting, so they didn’t give much attention to her warnings. After all, they lived five miles out of town with no neighbor closer than two miles. Finding entertaining ways to spend the long summer days wasn’t that easy. She wanted them outside playing and out of her hair, but she didn’t want them to get too far away just in case she should suddenly invent a chore for one or all of them to do. As “The Old House” was almost a mile away from home, her calls for them to “Come here, now!” couldn’t reach them. Yessir, that suited them just fine. Away from Mother and on a treasure hunt to boot! What could be better?

Jim and his brothers were cranky on this day. Mother was in a foul temper and it apparently was contagious. It was just “too blessed early in the morning for so much noise” from them. They would jolly well eat what she offered them for breakfast or do without. The litany of their sins and transgressions went on and on. Their escape to the outside wasn’t quite in time to avoid having their moods spoilt as well. It seemed that every word or action gave rise to an argument or fight.

Tony claimed that Jim and Michael weren’t playing their “cowboy” game according to the parameters they’d long ago established. They, in

turn accused Tony of being too rigid. They both thought the game should evolve according to circumstance. It was eventually decided that they’d forego cowboys and go play on their own. It wasn’t an unusual development and normally they’d be playing together again within an hour or so. When his brothers went their separate ways, Jim decided to go explore the Old House.

When he arrived at the now familiar place he hesitated for a bare second. He knew this place. He knew it like the back of his hand. But something was off kilter today. The boy couldn’t quite put his finger on it, but dammit, there was something that just didn’t seem quite right. It was as if everything had been moved, maybe. Not moved much, mind you, but moved and put back just a smidge out of place. It sent a shiver right up his spine.

***

The three brothers were the oldest siblings in a family of five children; four boys and a girl. The youngest boy, Dwayne was three years Michael’s junior and somewhat sickly. At least that’s what their mother constantly told them. The boys didn’t like him very much. They couldn’t play with him the way they wanted to because of his alleged delicate constitution. So, they generally just ignored him and concentrated on the little girl, Bonita. She was two years younger than Dwayne, with feisty high spirits. She was just about ready to start school in the coming fall and loved to tag along with her three older brothers. She wasn’t delicate at all, like you’d expect a girl to be. No, she was up for anything her brothers wanted to do. No dolls or tea sets for Bonita, she’d rather have a BB gun or help her brothers make slingshots as they traipsed through the woods and fields in search of the adventures Jim spun yarns about as they went along. He had a vivid imagination and told tales to his siblings about kidnappers or wild Indians who lurked just out of sight, waiting patiently to get their cruel hands on them so they could extort carloads of gold from their parents. Despite coming from a family of very modest means it never occurred to them to wonder just where their parents were going to come up with all that gold for ransom.

Occasionally, Mother would get her nose out of joint over some infraction, real or imagined, and order up a ‘hickory’ for Sister. This was the time for the boys to become heroes. A hickory is a long, slender branch from a young tree. Stripped of its leaves, it makes a fine instrument for punishment. Just the high, keen 'whisssh' sound it made as she swung it through the air was enough to strike terror into the boys’ hearts. When the expertly wielded stick made contact with naked skin, the pain was exquisite and she generally put in a good two or three minutes of the punishment for each one of them, just to make sure it 'took'. It was bad enough to go first, but watching the other brothers receive theirs only heightened the dread and made it seem even worse. Each of the boys always tried to lag a bit in hopes that Mother would tire out a bit before getting to him, but she seemed tireless, and entirely too generous when it came to doling out the “whuppin’s.

When Mother’s ire was directed at Bonita, they swooped in and grabbed the little girl and whisked her off to the woods to hide out until the temper storm blew over. They had experienced the dreaded hickory too many times to even consider allowing their sister to undergo its punishing welts. Mother was usually so exasperated by their actions she ended up whipping them and forgetting that she had originally intended to punish Sister. That suited the three brothers just fine. They were accustomed to it; they didn’t want their sister to become accustomed to it as well.

The boys had discovered the house during the previous summer. They had gone past it hundreds of times in the car when they accompanied their mother to Piedmont for shopping. Nearly every time they passed it, they peppered Mother with questions about it.

“How come nobody lives in that old house?”;

“Whose house is it?”,

and dozens more.

Jim’s appetite for reading had given him an actively creative imagination. He had furtively whispered to his brothers, Tony and Michael, that the old house was haunted. He told them stories about the woman who had lived there and was murdered by her husband because he found out she had been practicing witchcraft. After stabbing her in the heart and sawing her head off, he filled her coffin with salt. He built a smaller box for her head and also filled it with salt and then buried them in the front yard. Afterwards, he told everyone she had been murdered by Indians and spent the rest of his life pretending to mourn her death.

He told the story to them so many times that slowly he came to almost believe it himself. More than once, as they had driven past the Old House, he fancied he could see the woman’s ghost standing in the front doorway. It scared the bejabbers out of him. No matter how often he told himself that he had made up the stories, he knew his eyes were not lying to him. She had been standing there, alright. Standing there as if she was waiting for him to come to her. And oh, didn’t she have some nasty plans for that little red-headed boy for telling tall tales about her!

The first time the three brothers ventured up to the Old House they were nervous about going inside. Truth to tell, Jim had come to believe his own stories so completely he was at least as terrified as the other two. Neither of the boys dared to show his fear to the others though, so they stood at the edge of the unkempt yard and dared each other to be the first to run up on the porch and get back. After a few minutes of this, it became apparent that none of them would accept such a dare and they agreed to go together. On the count of three, they all ran toward the house, clearing the three steps with a single leap onto the porch. Each one touched the rusted, ragged screen door and dashed back out to the edge of the yard. They fell into the weeds laughing and hugging each other, relieved to have lived through the experience! After three more rushed trips to the porch and back outside, the luster was beginning to wear off.

“Okay, Okay, hear this!” It was Tony talking. “She doesn’t give a damn about us. Let’s just go inside and see what it looks like!”

All laughter stopped as they looked at each other and then at the house. Running up and touching the front door was one thing, but actually going inside was something else altogether. What if the ghost woman was just pretending she didn’t care, waiting for them to come inside so she could practice her witchcraft on them? Jim told the boys that witches can be pretty damned tricky. What would she do to them if they went inside? Would she kill them? Torture them? What could she do? Jim allowed that since she was a witch and a ghost too, she could do pretty much anything she wanted to do. Maybe she would turn them into zombies and they’d have to spend the rest of their miserable lives mindlessly wandering in the swamps and forests. When her husband murdered her and she went to the grave, her powers grew to make her the strongest witch in all of Alabama!

“Well, we ain’t gonna hurt anything” was Tony’s opinion, “So she ain’t gonna hurt us. Hell, I bet she’d like to have some company!”

After a moment or two of consideration, the logic of Tony’s argument made perfect sense to them so they started walking slowly toward the front door. The warped and rotting floorboards on the porch shrieked ominously in protest as they crept toward the door. A loose, warped floorboard held the screen door permanently half open. The inner door hung precariously from the jamb, barely holding itself somewhat upright by the bottom hinge. They stopped and peered through the door into the front room. It smelled of dust and bird shit and the boys could feel waves of heat emanating from inside. But, there was no movement. No ghost lurking in the shadows, at least none they could see. After examining the room for a full minute, Michael gave Jim a shove into the room.

“What the hell…?”

Before he could protest further, his eyes fell on an ancient, rusted child’s toy in the corner. He walked over and picked it up and turned to face his brothers who had come in behind him.

“Lookit what I found!” It was a tin horse, gaily painted with red, blue and green dots. A great deal of the paint had come off and much of the horse’s body was rusted, but his eyes barely registered that fact. It didn’t matter. This was a treasure! They hadn’t been inside the house more than fifteen seconds and already they’d found a treasure! There must be lots more!

****

The Old House wasn’t much to look at but it was a paradise to the three brothers. They spent every spare moment exploring it and playing games in it. The house itself consisted of four rooms. The front room and kitchen were separated only by a door. A double fireplace opened into both rooms. In the corner opposite the fireplace stood an old cast iron cook stove gone a dull red, covered with rust, and a sink hung on the wall next to it. The back door opened onto a porch that was surrounded on the two open sides by half walls that were lined with shelves for storing preserved fruits and vegetables. The upper part had been screened in long ago. Now the screens hung in rusted tatters that fluttered in the slightest breeze. Four steps led to the back yard and a well with a hand pump. Back inside, off the living room were two bedrooms. Other than the wood stove in the kitchen, there were no furnishings at all. After being inside the house a couple of times Jim realized that except for the fancy decorations and turrets the house was laid out very much like the other old house that abutted Granddaddy’s farm. They had spent a great deal of time exploring it, too.

There was some kind of tiny room off the front porch. Jim’s imagination was sparked when they entered it.

“Before the old man killed his wife, this is where he held her prisoner. He kept her here for months, feeding her only bread and water, reading the Bible to her, trying to force her to give up her witchcraft. When he finally figured out that she would never give it up, he killed her in here.

“See that dark stain on the floor? That’s where he sawed off her head.”

The three boys stood rooted to their places staring at the dark stain and trying hard to imagine what kind of man could cut his wife’s head off with a saw.

School was nearly finished for the summer and the days stretched out ahead of Jim, filled with promise. It was the same every summer, but somehow this summer promised to be different. Days would be spent swimming, when they could get Mother to drop them off at the creek near Knighten’s Crossroads, or exploring the mountains around the house. Now there was the Old House that wanted exploration. The excitement of exploring a real, true, genuine haunted house was almost more than Jim could bear. He was antsy to get back up there to see what he could find. Old houses were treasure troves of junk left behind by previous owners.

****