Story

The Goat roared down the dusty country road, shattering the silence of the late October twilight. The Goat was a 1969 Pontiac GTO “Judge”, Ram Air and a Rock Crusher transmission. Jay had painted it a glowing, canary “arrest me” yellow, and he had mounted a goat skull on the dash. “You wanna see Methenes Chapel?” Jay shouted at me over  the roar. “Sure,” I said. 

We were college roommates, both nineteen, weird, into heavy metal, goth, industrial, and false occultism. We both knew our inverted pentagrams were fake, but it surely offended the normals in those small, rural Alabama farming communities. One of our favorite activities was ghost-hunting, which to us meant driving to supposedly haunted locations and acting out our own developmentally-challenged “Beavis and Butthead” episodes. 

“Whose mug is this?” Becky asked. 

“No idea,” I replied. “What are you talking about?”

“This mug right here,” she said. I leaned back in my chair and craned my neck to see. 

“I’m trying to watch this show,” I said. “What’s the big deal about a mug?”

“I’ve never seen it before,” Becky said, getting that tone in her voice like I was about to be in trouble.

“So what? You collect cups and mugs like most people … er, don’t,” I said. If I was going to be in trouble, I might as well go for broke.

Sometimes things do not go as planned. The heist certainly did not. I meant it to be a simple job — masks, a few guns, fast horses, a big score at the end. 

The big dumb deputy got Jim in the back, about a minute in. By then there was smoke in the air, screaming, lots of noise. I always knew Jim would die of a bullet, most likely in the back. I think he knew the same. I should have known that the sheriff would post a deputy at the bank. It made no sense. We had spent the previous night torching the Canaveras Ranch, shot old man Canaveras, shot his ranch hands, shot the wife and children. Let one run to town with a hole in her arm, in her bloody nightgown, so as to attract attention back to the ranch. Then we rode hard around the Gap to town, and waited until the kid rode up, nearly dead, screaming and hollering about murder. 

Can a house be evil? Is it possible for a structure of wood and stone and plaster and glass to become more than the sum of its parts, in the negative sense? It certainly happens in the positive sense. Fill a house with light and love and family and that sense of comfort and well-being seems to permeate the very walls of the place. But … is it possible to architect a bad place, however inadvertently, through the unwitting intersection of board and beam?

“Your honor, I’ve seen shit that would turn you white!” — Winston, Ghostbusters.

There’s not a lot of work out there for a twenty-ish ex-security guard with a bad case of PTSD. And if that dumb kid was hideously scarred by a ‘serial killer’ that had carved a swathe of victims across three states and disappeared without a trace? That kid can barely get a hamburger at McDonald’s, much less gainful employment.

The Stairs and The Doorway
I don’t feel like I’m a nosy person. No more nosy than the next guy. I just have what my Ma would call an unhealthy amount of curiosity. I was the kid who climbed to the top of the big oak in the back yard, just to see what was in the crows’ nest. I was the kid who dug a hole in the back yard so deep that I hit groundwater because I was convinced there was a cave under our house, and I wanted to see it. To see.