DOWN THE PSYCHO PATH
A collection of horror by Dan Dillard
Don’t steal this work. It isn’t yours.
Copyright © 2016 Dan Dillard
ISBN: 9781311503947
Dedicated to anyone who wakes up in the morning and wonders if they are okay...really okay.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS AND AUTHOR’S NOTES:
I’d like to thank the usual suspects for helping me find the story within my stories. My dad and brother, who are always encouraging. My wife who tells me like it is even when I don’t want to hear it. My sister who doesn’t like the icky stuff, but occasionally reads my books anyway...My friend Terry out in San Francisco who wants to make a movie as bad as I do and tells me to keep going even though the odds are stacked so high. To all the people I meet. You might not think you make an impact on the world, but you do...and if you look hard enough, you’ll find yourself in these words somewhere. To Full Sail University for teaching me how to be a better storyteller and also how to put those stories on film.
As usual, if I have forgotten anyone in these acknowledgments, yell at me and I’ll fix it.
Because I don’t like to pick favorites, they are presented alphabetically:
Anderson Wake
Anniversary
Black Rock
Cleanliness is Next To...
Dracula Knocks
Filthy
Frozen
I Fear Nothing
Meliae
Midwatch
My Name Was John
Not Safe For Work
Owls
Routine Procedure
Seventeen
Sparrows
Suicide Solution
The Beach
The Courting Ritual
The Passing of Grady Starnes
The Perfect Man
Unnatural
What Fresh Hell
Worse Than Me
Now that the formalities are done--and they must be done--take a stroll with me won’t you?
A stroll down the psycho path.
ANDERSON WAKE
Nothing was quite the same after that day I saw momma walking back from those woods. I was eleven at the time. Her smile was solid as always, but it lacked something. That fundamental thing that an eleven-year-old child sees in his mother’s face was gone, the recognition, the sweetness. Her hands were shaking that day and her attention was somewhere else. She clung to her rosary with white knuckles, rubbing the beads between her fingers. I sprinted those fifty yards to meet her as she walked.
Ruth Anderson Wake was her name, my mother and my namesake. I'm Anderson Wake, no middle name. Filling out forms, I always got a chuckle from writing NMN on the middle name line. I put down the word “None” once, but it backfired and to this day, I get the occasional piece of junk mail addressed to None Wake. She said it made me sound like one of the roguish adventurers in the cheap novels she always read before bed. She said it was the kind of name that would make me become somebody important one day. If only.
“You okay, momma?” I asked.
She smiled, a tired thing on her face, and gave me a silent nod, still rolling and squeezing those beads like berries that might pop. Her hand gripped my shoulder as she led me back into the house. Those hands were caked with dried mud and her clothes were filthy. She never looked back at the woods during our walk home, but I looked back the whole way until she caught me and jerked my little body around to face her.
“Don’t you never go in there, hear me?” she said, a vice grip on my young face with one hand, pointing with the other. Her mostly-gray hair hung ragged, and with her eyes wide, moist and red-rimmed, she looked like a crazy woman, a scared woman.
“Yes ma’am,” I said, startled and scared because she was.
We ate leftovers in silence. She stared at her plate, picking at its contents. I watched her as I mindlessly shoveled food into the bottomless pit that was a growing boy. Afterward, I offered to help her clean the dishes but she shooed me away, her hands still shaking. I went to my room, and I went to bed without so much as a good night, Andy. I didn’t see her again until morning, but I heard her go to her room and lock the door about 9:00. Then there were the soft murmurs of my mother praying, and then it was quiet in the old house.
I lay in my bed and stared out at the dark woods. My eyes would focus on the tiny squares of metal screen, then back on the trees beyond. The moon was bright, giving them life where there was normally none at that time. Lightning bugs flashed for whatever reason they have to do so, and I listened to the crickets sing through my open window.
A year or so prior to that night, she had told me that something lived in those woods, deep in the thickest part where no person needed to be. Any folks who had gone there accidentally or willingly, were eaten up by it or worse, they were scarred forever, driven insane and locked away as babbling fools in the nuthouse over in Gainesville, something she called the laughing academy. I wondered right then if maybe momma had seen that thing in the woods, whatever it was.
It never bothered me before that night. I’d always figured whatever it was must’ve liked it out there in those woods, and I was safe from its hunger. But if it had gotten to momma, maybe she’d brought a little piece home with her and what if it came looking for that piece?
I lay awake well past the witching hour and let the darkness take hold of my thoughts. When my eyes were shut, I saw things that were hollow coming out of those woods. Things that absorbed light and ate everything in their path. Things that came rushing toward me intending to drag me back and eat me. When I opened my eyes and looked out the window, they were still there, crawling up and down those swaying trees. I kept my blanket pulled up around my ears and eventually, slept from exhaustion.
The next morning, momma was less nervous, but not quite normal. I never saw normal again.
“Good morning, momma,” I said.
She sat at the table, looking at the woods through the kitchen window.
“Anderson, eat your food,” she said, never looking up at me.
Breakfast was on the butcher-block table, scrambled eggs and toast with a glass of orange juice. On weekends, ever since Daddy left, I had always helped her cook. We would sing and make pancakes and act silly. That morning, there was no joy. I ate and watched her look out the window. Then I rinsed my plate before walking over to give her a hug. She let me, but didn’t reciprocate.
Over the next few weeks, things got a little better. She spoke more and was less distant, but never happy. Then, in the fall, it started all over again. I came home from school one afternoon to find momma crying on the couch.
“Momma, what happened?” I said.
“Leave me, boy! Let me be,” she shouted and waved me away.
I tried to hug her but she shoved me without so much as an apology. Over the next several years, she cycled in and out of depression. Fits of rage were spaced between weeks, sometimes months of melancholy. I didn’t hear her speak a thousand words in those seven years and our relationship never healed.
***
When I was seventeen, she signed the papers for me to join the military. I did it just so I could move away. I didn’t have many friends to leave, and no girl to speak of. Momma’s withdrawal took all of my energy. Her anger became my anger and I had no idea why I was mad, except that my mother had stopped loving me. My temper haunted me during my years in the army, and it crept into my first real relationship and turned it into a failed marriage.
I was almost thirty when I pulled myself together and finished school. I got a real job with a desk and a tie and made some real money. I went to church. I met a woman named Georgia who was joyous and loving and beautiful. We had a son. Life was good for the firs
t time since I had been eleven years old, before that day when momma came out of those woods.
Ruth Wake had grown ill and unable to live on her own. The woman I knew as a boy would never have agreed to assisted living. It would’ve taken the state to declare her unfit, and I’d bet two, maybe three men with weapons to remove her from that house. Apparently she kept that part of her spirit as I received updates occasionally from her few neighbors asking me to come and check on her. Call me a terrible son, but I no longer cared about her. When she died, it was the church that contacted me.
The phone call was simple. “We’re sorry for your loss. Your mother was a good woman,” the minister said. I expressed something like gratitude for the phone call, but I didn’t feel anything. I had spent too many years feeling sad or angry. Her death was meaningless.
She had nothing but that house and though I paid for her to have a nice service and a proper burial, I didn’t go. There was no debt to speak of, so the house was mine, free and clear. I would have let it rot. I would have left her house to auction and whatever came out of it would’ve been the end of that shitty part of my life. I might have even made a few dollars when it was all said and done, but I wanted no part of her. It was only at Georgia’s urging that I went back home at all.
“You’ll always regret not going to spend time with her, Andy. I can’t believe you missed her funeral” she said. “Your own mother’s funeral.”
“I don’t regret as much as you think. You don’t know what she became, Georgia. I do regret that, but it wasn’t my fault. I was an eleven-year-old kid. It took me years to accept that it was nothing I had done, to learn that I couldn’t fix her. And when I finally did, I couldn’t see her. I just couldn’t have her in my life.”
Georgia put a hand on my cheek. He eyes pleaded, dark and moist. Beautiful. Her voice was frustrated, not understanding. Not able to understand.
“Andy.”
“Did I tell you that when I was thirteen, she told me I was a mistake? I hadn’t even misbehaved. She wasn’t mad. It was just part of our dinner conversation. She told me of an older sister I never knew I had. Her name was June and she died when she was only a year old.”
Georgia’s eyes finally spilled over, and I continued.
“She told me of other babies, three miscarriages in all. Then she told me that I was born when she was thirty-eight. That I was an unwelcome thing and that she wished I hadn’t happened.”
Georgia hugged me. I felt her chest heaving with sobs. One of her hands found my neck, and she grabbed a handful of the hair on the back of my head in a loving embrace.
“I don’t know what happened that day when I was eleven, but it changed her. I don’t think those feelings were new, something she just dreamed up. She’d always felt that way about me. So I don’t think she missed me these last twenty years.”
My wife cleared her throat, wiped her cheeks dry and put on a serious expression.
“Go home, Andy. Put all this to rest and put your mother to rest. She was kind to you when you were a boy. The rest was some kind of … illness. No woman regrets her own children unless she is sick,” she said.
“It’ll go up for auction and that will be the end of it.”
“Is that all she’s worth to you? Given everything, is that still all she’s worth?”
Georgia’s eyes hurt me. The amount of emotion packed in them was why I loved her in the first place. I had missed so much of that passion throughout my life. I couldn’t say no. It took a moment to find the courage, to find my voice, but I did. I interrupted her continued pleading with, “I’ll go.”
She smiled. A kind, warm thing that reminded me of a younger Ruth Wake, the one who said my name sounded like a roguish adventurer. The Ruth Wake who loved me.
“You won’t regret it. Do you want us to go with you?”
“No,” I said. “I think I need to do this myself. I’d rather do this myself. It’s not part of my life you or the boy need to be concerned with. When I get back, we’ll move on.”
More tears. More hugs. More love.
Early the next morning, I started the ten hour drive to the old house. Georgia stayed behind and watched our son, Andy Jr. or AJ as we most often called him. He was starting school. I was glad for some distance. I didn’t want any part of Momma’s illness or whatever it was to taint my family, at least any more than it already had. I also didn’t know what shape the house was in, if it was safe, or how long it would take to wrap things up so I could go back to them.
AJ watched me leave that morning, hugging his momma’s leg. He had tears in his eyes, but played tough, just like I’d taught him. No doubt there would be crying when I was out of sight, but I could hardly hold that against a six-year-old. He had Georgia’s heart. It reminded me of me when I was small and new, before the world had got its claws into me. I hoped as I drove throughout that day, that he would never lose that heart. I had plenty of time to think while I was on the road, and when I pulled into the old drive that evening, I had a little cry of my own.
***
The place hadn’t changed much. The grass had grown up because I stopped paying the lawn service and the siding and trim needed scraping and painting, but it was the same old house. I stood outside and stared up at my bedroom window for a long time before using the key. The lock was stiff, but tumbled with some patience and I opened the door, letting the afternoon light spill in for the first time in years. The inside was a cliché of sheet covered furniture and cobwebs. It smelled of mildew and naphthalene. Dust covered every horizontal surface and floated in the beams from the evening sun.
Memories lurked around every corner of the old house. Walking through the living room onto the yellow linoleum kitchen floor felt as natural as if I’d never stopped doing it. I pulled back one wooden kitchen chair and sat down at the table. It was the same spot where I always sat. Anywhere else would’ve felt strange. I looked at the kitchen from a man’s point of view instead of the teenager who had last sat there with contempt in his heart, although the contempt was still there. It was such a simple room to be filled with so many complicated emotions. I stood up to shake off the feeling.
In the sink I found a single dish, rinsed a month ago, I guessed. Left from the last dinner she’d eaten there. Dried, brown flowers drooped from a vase that sat on the window sill overlooking the woods.
I walked up the narrow staircase to my old bedroom, taking note of every creak and pop of the wooden planks. Some had familiar voices, others were new.
My room was unchanged since the day I’d left for basic training. The quilt on my bed had discolored from the sun that streamed in my window, but my old clothes were still in the closet. My desk still had the same books on it. The view was still of the same woods.
The woods.
Even after all those years, they looked inside me and froze my heart.
***
I woke the next morning to a ringing cell phone.
“Daddy?” AJ said.
“Well, hey there,” I replied.
“You coming home?”
“Soon.”
“I love you.”
“Love you too, buddy. Your momma there?” I asked.
He dropped the phone on the table. I listened to it roll around and then heard scraping sounds as my wife picked it up. In the background, Georgia was telling him to go brush his teeth for school.
“You making any progress?” she asked.
I looked around at several piles of pictures and papers. There were three bags full of garbage, old magazines, Christmas cards and dry-rotted linens ready for the dump. I’d looked through every room in the house except one.
Mother’s room can wait until I can process it.
“No, not really,” I said.
She made a noise that told me she understood. “Think you’ll be home by the weekend?”
I thought about it.
“Don’t see why not. I think I can talk to the attorney today, get the auction set up and let it
run itself. I’m not looking for any money out of this place. Momma never had anything valuable anyway.”
“Except for you,” she said.
It made me smile. “That’s right,” I said.
“You hurry home, Mr. Wake,” she said, tears staining her words.
“I will, baby. Love you.”
“You do and you’d better,” she said.
I loaded the trash bags in my car and went back for the last room in the house. Her bedroom was at the opposite end of the upstairs hallway from mine. The door was closed, the way I remembered it, but back then, there were sobs coming from the other side. The silence I heard that day might have been worse. Momma had found peace, but Georgia’s prophecy was already eating at me a little.
I opened the door to find the room dark. Heavy drapes of dark fabric hung in front of the windows. I pulled the curtains aside to let in the morning sun and coughed in the cloud of dust. Opening the window made it worse for a moment, but it let in some fresh air and cleared the stale odor.
I looked under the bed, finding nothing, so I sat on the mattress and scanned the rest of the small room. The springs creaked in response. There were three things to go through: a large oak dresser, a cedar chest, and her closet. The dresser held clothes which I piled on the bed. Under the clothes, I found a bible. It was leather bound in white with gold lettering and it was still virtually new in its box. It was the type of bible folks put birthdays and pictures of their newborn children in. There was nothing but scripture in that one. It looked as if it had never been touched.
Her chest held sweaters and blankets and nothing else. In her closet, I found more clothes and shoes, some in boxes and others lying about, eight or ten pairs in all. I pulled all of it out and tossed it on the bed. The last shoebox was much heavier than the rest. I sat back on the bed and placed it on my lap to open it.
Inside I found a small sketchbook, a journal, and the rosary she used to hold, twirling the beads between her fingers. It was worn from her constant worry. I was surprised those beads didn’t get buried with her.
The sketchbook held chalk and pencil drawings of trees and animals, all quite detailed with a practiced artist’s skill and I remembered how she used to draw on occasion, the rare occasions when the work was done and she wasn’t exhausted. The memory was faint, but it was there. I must have been very young at the time.