SUNDAY STORYTIME - 03.03.24

A New Occasional FICTION Feature From Distant Perspective

[Hello faithful reader! I have a special treat for you today. As you know, Distant Perspective publishes fact-based commentaries about politics and modern life three times a week, and occassionally more often when events dictate. This NEW FEATURE is a total departure. SUNDAY STORYTIME is completely rooted in fiction. Fiction, you see, is my new playground. Since retiring from being a journalist in Washington, D.C., I have written five books. (Yes, they are on Amazon.) Four of them are fictional crime stories based on real events, and one is the true story of going ex-pat during Covid.

I have also started a writer’s group in my adopted Costa Rican town and an amazing collection of writers has crawled out of the woodwork to join me. We are having a blast! Among the things we do is pick a topic (based on a random photo or word or, well, anything we want), and write a story. Some of these quick writes turn out quite good. I am going to share a few of these writings with you in this space I‘m calling Sunday Storytime. Not all of the stories I share will be written by me. Other members of the group will appear in this space as guest writers and I can’t wait to share their work with you.

This first piece is mine. It comes from a writing exercise in a Stephen King book titled “On Writing”. He outlines a backstory about a man released from prison who returns to a house that’s not his and violently confronts his wife. (Of course, King’s backstory is far more complex and detailed, but that’s the gist of it.) Then, Mr. King says to turn the story inside out by making the wife the antagonist. The prime goal, he instructs, is not to write the story, but to let the characters write it for you. In doing so, I had no idea how this story would unfold as I began typing. I must say that the entire tale just happened before my eyes and it was fun to be its first reader.]

Dick Comes Home

by Gary Westphalen

The key sticks at the halfway point. Not quite open. Not quite locked. His key has always done this. It’s a copy of Jane’s key and the kid at the hardware store didn’t do a very good job of cutting it. At this point, he has to jiggle the door to make the key slip over the little levers inside the lock. When the rattling of the door convinces them to fall in line, the lock opens all the way.

It’s not just the lock that rattles. The caulking around the single pane glass panels in the old half-rotted door has long-since dried up and fallen away. The panes clatter like crashing cymbals. The hinges squeak. Even the ancient joints where the wood panels of the door are glued together add a dull clunking rhythm to the ensemble. The whole door sounds like an orchestra from hell.

Dick hates this house. He always has. It was once a stately farm house with a wrap-around porch and a tall, complex roofline. But the farm was sold many years ago, and the house is now surrounded by nothing but cornfields as far as the eye can see. That beautiful porch succumbed to the ravages of time, replaced by simple concrete steps that don’t even have a handrail. That’s why, seven years ago, when Jane insisted they move into her mother’s old house so she could take care of the aging bitty, Dick nearly divorced her. But they worked it out, settling on an uneasy truce, and Dick set about looking for a job in this shitty little town. Having been a city rat all his life, there was nothing to do here that interested him. Eventually, he ended up selling cars at the local dealership. His slick city way of talking was an advantage and he quickly worked his way up to sales manager.

So, on this Wednesday afternoon, when business at the dealership is slow and Dick has a headache left over from last night’s impromptu staff gathering at the Cozy Bar, he grabs the keys for the new pickup truck that he has chosen as his “demo” vehicle (a very nice perk) and heads for the house. His plan is to take a few aspirin and catch a quick nap before heading back to the dealership around five. They are open on Wednesday evenings to accommodate the shift workers at the foundry on the edge of town. Dick often splits his work shift on Wednesday’s, which explains why Tuesday is a party night for him. This is quite a normal Wednesday for Dick.

Today, though, as he opens the door to the decrepit old house, something that is not normal flirts through his senses. A scent? A sound? A sight? He can’t place it, but whatever it is, he can feel it in his nerves. That prickly sensation of ants crawling up and down his spine is telling him something isn’t right.

The smell of the old lady still permeates the house, even though she has been gone for three months now. It’s not like Jane is here, either. Dick is alone. He is quite certain of that. Still, it doesn’t seem that way. Something is triggering his fears, and he can’t shake it. Dick walks through the house, checking every room. He looks in the closets. He even looks under the beds. There is nothing under them. The old lady’s hospital bed is still tilted halfway up, just the way she liked it. Of course, every time she ate while lying in that position, she would dribble soup and bits of food all over herself. Jane would clean it up and the two women would argue about it endlessly. Maybe it is the echoes of that contentious relationship that Dick is still sensing, even today.

Dick doesn’t extend his search into the attic. The spider webs and the stuffy heat up there make it hard to breathe. He doesn’t go into the basement. The crumbling stone foundation and dirt floor down there give it a musty, dank stink that makes him gag. There’s nothing living in either of those spaces, anyway. They can’t be the source of his odd quiver.

Dismissing his feelings as nothing more than fallout from the way everything in his life has come apart, Dick heads for the bathroom and the relief the aspirin in the medicine cabinet will provide. He opens the old mirrored door, with its silvering flaking off around the edges, and shakes three pills out of the bottle. If two is good, three must be better, right? He places the bottle back in the cabinet, and as he closes the mirror it flashes past the doorway to the hall. In that brief moment of the reflected moving image of the doorway, he sees something. A shadow? A person? There is something there. Dick quickly spins around to see for himself. His heart leaps against his rib cage. His aching brain thumps against his skull. His muscles tense.

There is nothing there. There is no sound. But, does he detect a faint scent? Is that? Could it be? It’s gone now, having only been available for a single whiff. But that hint sure smelled like the shampoo Jane used to use on the old lady. It was the odd fragrance of a shampoo specifically for grey hair.

The scent is gone now, and no sounds can be heard, save for the usual creaks and moans of a crumbling house. He downs the chalky white pills with a beer, the second last one in the fridge, and lays down on the bed, closing his eyes to catch a few winks.

A floorboard creaks.

A scratching sound from a foraging mouse in the wall near his head.

A fly buzzes against the window alongside the bed.

An acorn drops off the tree outside, rattling its way down the old cedar shingle roof and dropping into the tin eave with a plunk.

“This god damn house won’t let me sleep,” Dick grouses to no one but himself. But his words are heard by another.

The harder Dick tries to get to sleep, the less it will come. Finally, he decides to give up and just watch the tube for a while. As Dick walks by the attic doorway, he hears a floorboard creak. But he knows there is no one up there to make that sound. It is just the arthritis of an old house.

Downstairs, as he walks to the kitchen for that last beer, Dick passes the basement door. There it is again! That odd shampoo smell seems to be coming from behind that door. He grabs the door knob and pulls it open with a rush. The knob comes off in his hand, the little screw that holds it in place having given its strength to the ravages of corrosion and time. The door swings open, slamming against the wall and launching the knob from the other side across the kitchen floor. It rattles to a stop against the refrigerator.

“Who’s there?” Dick demands as he looks down the stairs to the black hole below.

His query is met with nothing more than silence and the moist stink of old, damp dirt. There is no shampoo smell coming from down those old wooden stairs. He sticks the parts of the doorknob back together without replacing the rusted screw. He’ll never open that door again, anyway.

Dick grabs the beer from the fridge and plops himself down in front of the television. Changing channels with the remote in one hand and popping the top of the beer can with the other, Dick fumbles the can and foam sprays all over. He drops the remote to commit both hands to the main task, and the TV flips to a local newscast.

“A security guard at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston was killed today in an escape that involved three patients,” the local newsman is saying. Dick forgets all about the beer as his attention is drawn to the newscast coming from the Morgantown TV station. “Two of the patients were found dead in the brush along the West Fork river just outside the facility, about an hour and a half after the death of the guard. The third man is still on the loose. The Lewis County Sheriff’s Department has identified the missing man as Richard Vernon. He is considered armed, dangerous and criminally insane. If you spot this man, do not approach him. Notify authorities immediately.” As the young newscaster is saying these words, Dick recognizes his own face in the mug shot being shown on the TV.

The beer no longer interests Dick, and he throws it at the television. The TV falls to the floor, but keeps talking to him.

“Vernon had been a sales manager at Weston Ford prior to being held in the asylum since the unexplained disappearances of his wife Jane, and her mother, several months ago.”

Dick stomps on the television with all his might, and the blasted thing finally shuts up.

As the television speaks its last words, Dick hears the creaking of the cellar door hinges. He spins around to see the door knob drop to the floor with a loud bang. A foot, really just the toes, appear from around the edge of the door. They are rotted. The skin is the darkest of greys and falling off. The smell of old lady shampoo fills the air as a hand, as rotted as the foot, slides around the edge of the door, gripping it with fingers that are more bone than flesh.

In that instant a door bangs open upstairs, and Dick hears the footfalls of someone coming down the attic steps. There are eight steps, and he hears every one of them issue its signature creak. Seconds later, the foot of another corpse appears at the top of the stairway to the second floor. This one is different, though. Where the appendages from the basement are rotting, the foot - feet, now - coming down the stairs are dried up like a mummy. Leathery skin wrapping tightly around bone.

Dick looks back to the kitchen to see the old lady staring at him with black, rot-filled eye sockets. Her skin hangs from bones like shreds of torn cloth. Maggots, and liquefied human drip from her torso.

The footfalls on the stairs sound like sandpaper scratching across wood. The sound breaks his gaze on the corpse in the kitchen, and he looks to his right, where Jane - well, what’s left of her - takes the final step down to the living room. Her lips, once full and luscious - they were what attracted him to her in the first place - are tightly drawn back from her yellow teeth. Her body, once luscious and curvy, is now desiccated skin drawn tightly around the bones of a skeleton. Her blue eyes have become shrunken marbles and her full head of beautiful blonde hair is a mere mop of colorless thread.

“Welcome home, Dick,” Jane says. He heard it. But her mouth never moved. He knows he heard her say it. Maybe he just thought he heard it. Still,…

“We’ve been waiting for you.” Dick flashes his attention toward the corpse standing in the kitchen. It was clearly the voice of the old lady. But that…thing…in the kitchen could not possibly speak.

“Oh, Dick,” sound once again coming from the mummy standing at the bottom of the stairs. Only she is closer to him now. He didn’t see her move, but she must have. “Don’t be scared. I’m your wife. You know, the one you shot and stuffed in the attic months ago.”

“And I’m her mother,” the putrid collection of body parts in the kitchen says. Only, she is no longer in the kitchen. Dick blinks and rubs his eyes. When he re-opens them, both corpses are within arms reach. He stares at the kitchen skeleton and the old lady says, “You remember me. You threw me down those basement steps and left me to die there. We’ve missed you, and now it’s time for you to join us.”

Now Jane’s mummy has her arm around his shoulder. Her breath tastes of dust as she says, “It is time for you to join us.” A bony hand covered in thin, brown leather wraps around his crotch. “We have some catching up to do.”

“You’re dead!” Dick screams at Jane. “I shot you four times and rolled you in that old carpet in the attic! You’re not real!” He grabs her hand and pulls it away from him. As he does, the arm comes off at the elbow and falls to the floor.

“And you! You’re dead, too!” Dick says to the basement corpse.

A loud CRACK emanates from somewhere above them and the floor sinks oddly in one corner as plaster from the ceiling separates and falls atop the silenced TV. Dick looks up at the damaged ceiling and realizes that a roof beam has cracked above them.

“Don’t you get it, Dick?” Jane says. “It is time for you to join us in our world.”

There is still no movement of the once-beautiful face, now horribly disfigured from months of drying out in that hot attic. But the words are coming from somewhere. From the corpse? From a hidden speaker? Is this is a trick? Maybe from inside my own mind. Am I crazy?

That broken front door explodes open and folds in half as the entire front wall of the house crumbles to the ground.

“You can’t kill me!” Dick screams. “You’re already dead!”

The kitchen floor crumbles away, dropping into a pit as old and deep as time.

“No, but we don’t have to” says the old lady. The floor beneath her gives way and she disappears into that bottomless pit below.

“But the house can,” the Jane mummy says as she wraps her remaining arm around him, snugging him tightly against her furrowed skin.

The house lets out a final groan of death and collapses into the pit as the sides of the chasm draw together. The corn field stretches over the top, completely concealing all traces of the house and its occupants.

“Good evening,” the newsman says on television the next night. “Richard Vernon, the escaped mental patient who killed a guard and two other patients at the Trans-Allegheny Lunatic Asylum in Weston two days ago has been found. Two spelunkers exploring a newly discovered cave near the West Fork river found his body amid a pile of debris, deep inside the cave. Authorities say they have no idea how the man’s body, or for that matter, the debris, ended up in that cave. Vernon’s wife and her mother have never been found. The Weston Sheriff’s Department says it considers the matter to be closed.”