Bad Stacks Story Collection Box Set Page 7

  Reynolds smiled to himself. David had spoken possessively. The deal was all but sealed.

  If only she would stay away long enough to get David back up the stairs.

  “Uh, David? Don't you have a plane to catch?”

  “Uh?”

  “Your wife. You said you were picking her up at the airport.”

  “Oh, yeah. Guess I've seen enough, anyhow.” David headed for the stairs.

  Reynolds' heart flipped for joy. He didn't even mind that David had left him in darkness. He hurried after David.

  That's when it came out, built itself from the bricks and mortar of nightmare. Nailed itself together with the claw hammer of insanity. Staple-gunned its mockery of flesh into form.

  It was her.

  She looked him in the face, her eyes deeply bright and strange, her mouth curled into a smile. “You're real,” she whispered, no fear in her voice.

  Reynolds drew in a sharp breath, then swallowed the scream that filled his lungs. The basement air tasted of fiberglass and tomb dust. David paused on the stairs, then whipped the light around.

  “What was that?” David asked.

  “Nothing,” Reynolds said. “Nothing but a bunch of nothing.”

  David thundered down the steps, splashed the light around in the corners of the room. “I know I saw it.”

  Reynolds adjusted the necktie that seemed to be choking him. “Listen, David my man, you've seen all there is to see.”

  “Except the breather.”

  “The breather?” Reynolds shrugged innocently. The last three prospective buyers had said nothing, only shivered and hurried up the stairs. None of them had returned Reynolds' follow-up phone calls. But David seemed to be immune to the skin-crawling sensation caused by the basement's tangible tenant.

  “I know there's a breather here,” David said, sounding like all the other pompous out-of-staters who thought money gave them the right to bully around mountain people.

  “No breathers,” Reynolds said. “Breathers don't exist.”

  “Most of the summer houses in the Appalachian Mountains are supposed to be empty. I'll be damned if I'm going to own a house that has a restless spirit banging around. Where's the peace in that?”

  The woman stepped into the flashlight's beam. Reynolds stumbled backward, bumping into the bottom step and nearly losing his balance.

  “I see you,” she said, reaching out her hand as if to touch an expensive fabric. “I knew this place was haunted.”

  David splashed his beam of light on the breather. Her satisfied grin absorbed the light, sucked it into the netherwhere of her chest. The dim basement grew even darker, became the pit of a hell so bleak that even fire could not draw air. The only luminescence came from the strange glowing eyes of the human, floating like the lost moons of insane planets.

  Reynolds fell to his knees, his only comfort the hard, cold concrete. He hated this next part. The only thing worse than losing a sale was watching a fellow ghost have his very foundations rocked. The prospects either went insane or found a religion that worked, but either way Reynolds remained stuck with this damned piece of overpriced unreal estate.

  The woman flipped on the overhead lights and punched at her cellular phone, her breath as sharp as a winter wind in her excitement. “Meryl?” she said into the phone. “You know that house I just bought? It's haunted! Oh, this is just so terribly delightful.”

  David backed up the stairs slowly, disgust and horror etched on his face.

  “Jackie's going to simply die with jealousy,” the breather prattled into her phone. “We'll get together for a séance soon, I promise. Right here in the basement, that's the cold spot. Of course, I'll have to redecorate first.”

  Reynolds drifted after David, who had already reached the top of the stairs. “David. It's not what you think. I can slash it to three-and-a-quarter, David. But the offer's not going to be on the table long.”

  David was pale, shocked, too recently dead to comprehend all the workings of the immaterial world.

  “Excuse me, I...I have a plane crash to catch,” David said, looking down at his hands as if expecting to see an owner's manual for his amorphous flesh. Then he shimmered and whisked across the room.

  “Call me?” Reynolds said weakly, but David was already through the wall.

  Reynolds succumbed to the sideways gravity and the interdimensional currents dragged him to the basement stairs. He sat on the hard wood, mingling with the dust that the breather had stirred with her industrious cleaning. Her words echoed off the concrete walls, frightening and shrill.

  “And black velvet drapes,” she said into the phone. “No, there are no windows down here, but drapes are called for all the same. One can't have a séance room without black velvet drapes. I'll have some crates of candles shipped in for the occasion. Oh, this is going to be simply divine.”

  Reynolds rubbed at his weary eyes and looked up at the beam where he had draped the noose. The wood was slightly splintered from the friction caused by his body weight. Eighty grand in the hole hadn't been worth killing himself over. Not to get trapped in a hell like this one, where he had to close a final deal before being allowed to rest in peace.

  “Oh, I'm certain he'll be back,” the woman said. “He had that look. You know, the one your second husband had? Yes, the 'doomed puppy dog' look.” Her laughter hurt Reynolds' ears.

  Reynolds stood and brushed the cobwebs from his sleeves. No use hanging around here. He'd be summoned back soon enough. In the meantime, self-pity wasn't going to get this house moved. He'd learned that in salesman school. The only way to unload property was to circulate, press the flesh, talk fast and smile faster.

  Maybe the breather would take a vacation, fly down to Florida, go on a tour of America's haunted houses or something. A window of opportunity would open, another mark would want to be shown around. All Reynolds had to do was keep the old confidence, comb the hair over his bald spot, and act like a generous uncle who wanted to make someone's American dream come true, and maybe soon this house would be somebody else's problem.

  She'd said he looked a doomed puppy dog. What an insult. The living had absolutely no sensitivity. Well, at least he didn't lurk in dark basements hoping to catch a glimpse of the other side.

  Reynolds tried on a glib smile. His “closer face.” A good salesman didn't stay down for long. He whistled as he drifted through the wall and under the moonlight in search of buyers.

  A sucker was born every minute, he reminded himself. And just as many suckers died.

  THE END

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  ###

  THE THREE-DOLLAR CORPSE

  The morning sky was red-orange, the colors of hell and Georgia August. Ragsdale squinted into the brightness and marveled at how rapidly the scant dew had evaporated. Another fifty men would die today, but that was today. At the moment, the only dead that Ragsdale cared about were yesterday's.

  The corpses were in a line, laid out like sacks of grain. Some had been stripped of their rotted clothing, leaving pale skin stretched taut over bones, flesh exposed to the unblinking eye of dawn. Others, treated more mercifully, had scraps of blankets covering their rigid faces. Those lucky souls were tended by friends. The rest were accompanied by traders like Ragsdale.

  Ragsdale could see Tibbets' corpse, down at the end of the row where the freshest ones were. He mourned the waste of a good body. As a tent mate of Tibbets, Ragsdale had a right to be the one who bore the corpse to the dead-house. But a corpse at the end of the line was nearly worthless, and brought only fifty cents for the privilege of carrying it out. So he'd sold the privilege and bought the three-dollar corpse at the front of the line.

  Those near the front of the line had first chances with the smugglers waiting in the woods beyond the stockade walls. A good day of trading kept one's belly full and made a handful of dollars besides. The war would end someday, and Ragsdale planned on having a sm
all fortune tucked away inside his boots the day he walked out of the camp for good.

  Some of the soldiers freely distributed their smuggled goods to keep others alive. Ragsdale didn't believe in camaraderie. Only each man to himself, each man to live or die as his wits allowed, each man abandoned and alone, even though 40,000 of them were cramped into a place barely 25 acres across. And each death was welcomed, if not by the poor sufferer himself, then certainly by the huckster tradesmen like Ragsdale.

  He held his kerchief over his face to block out the wave of corrupted air, but the kerchief smelled as bad as the bodies. He had once used the kerchief to filter the water from the sluggish stream that served as both drinking supply and sewage for the prisoners in the Andersonville camp. Even after several strainings, the water still looked like tea in the bottom of his dented tin cup. But all he could do was grimace and swallow, the fetid particles imparting a sweetly foul aftertaste. Ever since he'd become a huckster, though, he had all the fresh water he could drink.

  “You see Tibbets go over?” It was McCloskey, a young tough who had the corpse next to Ragsdale's. McCloskey had been working his way up the line over the last few weeks, a sign of affluence. Ragsdale didn't like the competition. McCloskey was starting to get some of the better trade goods, things like cigars and real bread and even an occasional pint of whiskey. Damned Irish, Ragsdale thought. But he kept his face as stolid as those of the dead.

  “Yeah,” Ragsdale said, quietly, so that the guards assembled by the gate didn't snarl at him. “I wish I coulda got that fresh one instead of this here sorry sack of maggots.” Ragsdale nudged the corpse with his boots.

  “You got the first one,” McCloskey said. “Every first one is beautiful.”

  “Maybe. Damn shame about Tibbets, though.” What Ragsdale meant was that if Tibbets had any consideration, he'd have died early in the day so that Ragsdale could have made more profit from his corpse.

  Tibbets was from the 82nd Regiment New York Volunteers, the same as Ragsdale. Tibbets was the religious sort, always chattering in his sleep about the divine hand of God that would deliver him from suffering. He never bothered to make any money, and never asked Ragsdale for extra portions, though the smell of smuggled food must have been overpowering in that small tent. Maybe he knew Ragsdale would have denied him.

  So Tibbets wasted away on camp rations and prayer, until the previous evening. He had eaten his palmful of raw corn meal, not even bothering to pick the larger pieces of dry cob from the ration. Soon the food was gone, leaving only a few white specks in Tibbet's beard, his lips being too dry for the meal to stick. But the fool had not stopped there. He continued gnawing at the toughened skin of his fingers, perhaps imagining them to be fine Illinois sausages.

  Ragsdale had slapped Tibbets' hand away, but the man's jaws continued to gnash together. Those teeth rattled like sabers, a percussive counterpoint to the low somber dirge made by the groans of ten thousand sick, wounded, and dying. Tibbets' eyes went bright and wide, looking past the high stockade walls and the coarse Southern clouds to that high place where He was trampling out the vintages. Before Ragsdale could stop Tibbets, if he had even thought to stop him, the man had vaulted to his feet and dashed through the rows of ragged tents.

  The stricken man was all bony limbs and rags, jerking like a windy scarecrow on a wire. The nearby prisoners paused in the eating of their rations to watch him run. Shouts arose, half of the voices pleading for him to stop, the other half urging him onward. They all, Ragsdale included, watched as Tibbets neared the slim gray railing that marked the dead line.

  The dead line was a single wooden rail laid about twenty feet inside the walls and circumscribing the perimeter of the camp. Any prisoner who crossed the rail was assumed to be attempting escape, and was instantly shot. It was the only activity that kept the Rebel guards alert, for they had been denied the glory of battle by their ignominious posts. A Union prisoner might be their only quarry of the war, so they competed among themselves to be the one who fired a successful shot.

  Three rifles rang out as Tibbets vaulted the fence. Tibbets stumbled, fell to one knee, then rose and continued staggering toward the stockade wall. Maybe his fevered brain thought that reaching the wooden wall itself was some kind of victory, as if a door might open and usher him to Elysian fields. In any case, Tibbets fell dead when a fourth shot pierced his skull.

  But he'd died in the evening, and a whole day's dispatch of dead were already waiting to be carried outside before him. So Tibbets lay stiff and nearly worthless near the end of the line, attended by some amateur hucksters who were no competition to the likes of Ragsdale and McCloskey.

  “What got yours?” McCloskey said, biting off a small plug of chewing tobacco. Ragsdale watched him with disguised envy, then looked down at the corpse at his feet. The flesh around the sunken eyes was as black as the inside of coalstove pipe.

  “Dysentery, diarrhea, the Tennessee trots, take your pick.”

  “At least the lice is off him, eh?” McCloskey cackled juicily around his chaw.

  “Every dark cloud,” Ragsdale said, tired of talking. But McCloskey was right. If you happened to be near a man at the moment the heat started fading from his dead body, all the fleas and lice and invisible parasites hopped and jumped onto the closest host. Ragsdale scratched his beard, remembering the things crawling there.

  He looked off toward the center of the camp, at the stretch of swamp that served as the camp's sewer. A few men were in the thick of the morass, relieving themselves. A new prisoner stood at the edge, his face curdled in horror at what the others had accepted as routine. The surface of the swamp churned with the breeding of maggots. Ragsdale looked away as the new prisoner squatted at the edge of the soiled water.

  The front gate opened, and a half-dozen Rebels slouched in, their guns lazily angled toward the ground. They were near-corpses themselves, gray-faced and war-weary and noses wrinkled against the constant fecal rot of the camp. A captain accompanied them, head high, wearing leather leggings and his brass polished and gleaming in the dawn. Ragsdale cursed under his breath.

  This was the man whose pockets were filled by the mass misery. But Ragsdale knew he was no more honorable himself. He only begrudged the captain skimming off the profits, and avoided all reflections on morality. Now, with the guard coming, he thought of nothing but the tradesmen waiting outside, the smugglers and dealers waiting along the route to the dead-house and the grave ditch.

  And he had first opportunity. Sure, it cost him a good thirty percent of his take, but he was making a killing inside the stockade. He was fat, which was a prisoner's true sign of wealth. He had clean water and cotton blankets and molasses and pipe tobacco. He had a pillow. And no one would touch him, because to cross Ragsdale meant getting no smuggled goods, subsisting on the meager camp rations, and likely a slow death.

  The Rebel captain gave the command for the detail to move out. Ragsdale lifted his corpse with ease. The fellow was hardly more than a skeleton. That was another advantage of a disease victim. With fresh ones like Tibbets, two men had to carry the corpse on a makeshift stretcher, which split the profits.

  Ragsdale dragged the corpse past the open dead line toward the gates. The guards watched, hollow-eyed, not even joyful about the goods that the hucksters would slip them upon the return trip. They were as much prisoners of war as the Union troops. All were bound to this boiling swamp of disease and death, and sometimes Ragsdale could imagine the war never ending, their ghost-like daily struggles extending into an afterlife of misery.

  He never imagined anything for long, though. In the camp, dreams were dangerous. If you dreamed, you were apt to lose your reason. That was one of the few differences between the living and the dead: only the dead could afford to dream.

  So he shook his head and damned himself for dreaming. All one had to do was look back toward the camp, at the pathetic shebangs made of old coats and tent scraps and dry tree limbs, with not even enough of a breeze to flutter a stray
thread. And in front of the makeshift tents, or dying inside them, were men. Men who had letters from home folded carefully in their pockets, men with children waiting, men with hearts swollen by religious faith and patriotism and all false hopes.

  Ragsdale smiled to himself. He wouldn't cling to bravery. He would survive. He pulled the corpse through the gates.

  The captain nodded as Ragsdale passed.

  “Morning, Johnny,” Ragsdale said, using the only term of address that the prisoners were allowed.

  “Going to be a dandy one, Yank. Don't ya'll forget me on the way back in.”

  “No, suh,” Ragsdale said, imitating a Southern accent. He kept his grin plastered on, and wondered if that was how the Negroes felt, smiling and smiling as the lash came down across their backs. He didn't know, because he'd never met one.

  The haul to the dead-house was about a hundred yards. The corpse-bearers passed the cookhouse on the way, and a charred smell drowned out the rot of corpses. A gaunt civilian came from the cookhouse and dumped a thick greasy liquid into the stream. Ragsdale watched the gray slick make its way down the creek towards the stockade.

  When Ragsdale reached the dead-house, which was an open covered area, he laid the corpse down and went into the shade of the high Georgia pines. The other hucksters laid out their corpses as well. In the dead-house, Confederate officials tried to determine the names and units of the dead and keep careful records. But as the death tolls mounted over the summer, the effort had become hurried and careless.

  But, brief though the respite was, there was time enough for Ragsdale to do business.

  “Hi, Johnny,” Ragsdale said to the Rebel guard who was slouched against a tree. The guard might have been a civilian from the manner of dress, but Ragsdale took no chances.

  “Howdy.” The guard scarcely looked up. “Don't you go and try to run, or I got to put a bullet in your back.”

  “Wouldn't dream of it, Johnny.” And he wouldn't. He was making too much money. “What's good today?”