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Ochanlele,
Maybe you can help me with this one. It's a complete story, it's what I intended to write, but somehow, I don't know, it just misses. Can you give fix it? Does anyone have any ideas?
Keith
The Club
By
Keith Rodgers
The cabbie let Marty Robinson out at the corner of Second and Thirty-fifth. He walked halfway down the block to the club. He bent over against the whistling wind, holding his hat on his head with one gloved hand. In almost no time at all the life-force seemed to have been driven deep into his body. A flickering blue flame about the size of the pilot-light in a gas oven.
Snow as dry as sand beat into his face. It seemed darker, colder, more threatening. The brownstones all looked somehow secret, as if hiding mysteries best not investigated. Their windows looked like eyes. He was glad to see the four steps leading up to the door of 249b had been sanded. The door was of thick oak, and as stout as the door of the castle keep. His boss, Mr. Witherspoon, was waiting for him at the foot of the steps with Stevens. Stevens held the door open and Mr. Witherspoon waived him in.
“Come in, Marty, come in.” Said Mr. Witherspoon grabbing him by the arm and ushering him through the door. Mr. Witherspoon was huge, slope-shouldered, and choleric. He had a vast ginger-colored beard splayed over his chest. He had on dark brown slacks and a tweed Martyet. “This is Stevens, he’ll take your coat and hat.” Stevens was a cadaverous man, possessed of a narrow blade-like nose, and made even more ghostly by his white mess Martyet.
“A nasty night, Sir.” Stevens said as he helped Mr. Witherspoon’s guest with his hat and coat.
“Stevens tends bar as well. He makes a fine drink.”
“It’s a small but vital skill.” Stevens humbly added as he closed the closet door. “What can I get you gentlemen?”
“The usual for me, Stevens; scotch - neat.” Stevens knows the base alchemy of old age, ... er, not lead into gold, but bones into glass.
“And for you Mr. Robinson?” Stevens inclined his nose to his new guest.
“Oh, I’m not usually much of a drinking man, but on a ‘nasty night’ like this I think a brandy would be good, don’t you?” Marty stood eye-to-eye with Stephens, yet both men were a full head shorter than Mr. Witherspoon.
“Most excellent choice, Sir.” Stevens nodded.
“We’ll take that by the fireplace if you don’t mind Stevens.” Mr. Witherspoon gestured for his guest to come with him down the hall. Come, let me introduce you around.”
The hallway was lined in mahogany, through double doors standing three-quarters of the way open on recessed tracks, and into the library. They were greeted by the steady snap of hickory logs in a huge fireplace. The heat radiated across the room - surely there is no welcome for a man that can equal a fire on the hearth. The fireplace at 249B East thirty-fifth was a huge thing, big enough to broil an ox whole. There was no mantel; instead a brawny stone arch curved over it. This arch was broken in the center by a keystone that jutted out slightly. It was just on the level of Mr. Witherspoon’s eyes.
Seat across the room where two men engrossed in a game of chess. “Marty, let me introduce you to these two distinguished gentlemen. Marty Robinson, I’d like you to meet two of our finest members; Dr. Aderly – whom we affectionately call Spoony, and his worthy opponent; Councilman Roger Worthington, AKA The Dodger.”
Dr. Aderly was a very distinguished looking gentleman with a baldpate and graying hair around the ears the flowed into a well groom beard and mustache. His adversary for the evening was of a smaller stature but made up for it in an intelligent and robust personality. He had all his hair even though his hairline was receding and graying at the temples. Both men were beginning to show a pronounced middle aged paunch beneath their finely tailored attire. All of a sudden he felt underdressed in his off the rack blue blazer, discount khakis and the same loafers he wore for work and church.
“Dr. Aderly - .”
“Please, call me Bob.” The Doctor said cutting Marty off amid sentence as they shook hands. “I’ve been Dr. Aderly all day, it’s time to give it a rest.”
“The same for me.” Said the Councilman shaking his hand firmly. “It’s Dodger, or it’s nothing.”
“Here, Marty.” Mr. Witherspoon offered a high backed, claw footed leather chair to his guest. “Pull up one of these by the fireplace.”
Stevens produced a snifter of brandy that was more than just good. He handed it to the guest and then handed Mr. Witherspoon his ‘usual’, scotch - neat.
Stevens spoke from the double doorway that communicated with the hallway. His voice was low and pleasant, but carrying:
“Who will bring us a tale, then?”
The others started to draw chairs up around the heart in a semi-circle.
With a practiced hand Stevens gave a nod and a wink to Llewelyn McCarron who promptly drew up a seat in front of the fire with an unmarked packet, about the size of a seed envelope, in one hand. He tossed it into the flames without opening it, and a moment later the fire began to dance with every color of the spectrum - and some, I would have sworn, from outside it - before turning yellow again. He raised a toast - the toast, one might almost say: “Long live the tale.”
“Here, here.” Everyone cheered and raised their glasses in salute.
They drank to that.
Stevens moved back into the shadows, and for a moment there was a silence so perfect that they could hear the faint whistle of boiling sap escaping from the burning logs on the hearth. Llewelyn McCarron was looking into the fire and they all followed his gaze. The flames seemed particularly wild that night. They were all fairly hypnotized by the sight of the fire as the cavemen once were as the wind walked and talked outside their caves.
At last, still looking into the fire, bent slightly forward so that his forearms rested on his thighs and his clasped hands hung in a knot between his knees, McCarron lit his pipe and sat back. He exhaled a great cloud of aromatic smoke that billowed like a canvas for him to paint on, and then he began to speak.
The Haunted Man
By
Dr. Lewllyn McCarron
“Do you believe in ghost?” He asked no one in particular and yet everyone. “I do.” He said in a low speaking voice that was deep and grave, like that of a haunted man. “I always did I suppose, in the way children believe in the Tooth fairy or Santa Clause, but I didn’t ‘really’ believe. That is until I saw one, right here in this very room.” The fire hissed and the sap popped.
“I was sitting right here many years ago, pretty much as I am now, on a night much like this one. It was cold and dry and bit to the bone, when a member came running in. If I called his name you’d know him. As a matter of fact, his name was Scroggins.” One of the older members in the back gasped. It had been a fact that Scroggins had died in the club, but no one knew the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. It had been rumored that the details had been covered up to protect the Club. “He was very distraught. ‘Are you all right, man?’ I remember asking him because he still had his overcoat on. He twirled in circles, not knowing which way to turn. You should have seen him then; his face devoid of color, his brown eyes, once bright with intelligence and sharp, stretched wide in fear. His usually neat hair all disheveled. ‘Sit, sit here.’ I said to him and sat him here at this very hearth.” The fires danced as the wind rushed up the chimney.
“I called for Stevens to bring him a brandy. Which Stevens did promptly. His hands were shaking so badly I pretty much had to hold it to his mouth as a mother would a baby nursing from the teat. ‘Get a grip on yourself, man,’ I ordered him, ‘and tell me what’s the matter?’
After a couple of good pulls from the snifter he settled down enough to hold his own glass, not steady mind you, but well enough to keep from sloshing it about. He looked me in the eye and steeled himself to tell me his woes, I braced myself for what I was sure of was the news that the world was coming to an end.
“I saw her.” He said, like it explained everything.
“Saw whom?” I asked.
“Her!” The her he was referring to was the one great love of my life, Constance Pettifore. Well, at least she was when I new her, she also happened to be his late wife.
“You see, we had both been rival suitors for her hand. She picked him based upon his family’s social standing and wealth. A smart pick all-in-all. After all there was no guarantee that I was going to amount to a hill of beans. I loved her dearly, but I was just finishing my residency and not yet come into a practice of my own. I barely had enough to feed myself, let alone a lady of society as obviously she was.
“He, on the other hand, turned out to be something of a disappointment; squandered most of his inheritance and embarrassed her right out of the social circle that she wanted most to be in by living the sporting life. Not only that, but he turned out to be something for a cad! He beat her until she was no longer beautiful and then he started in on their children. Finally, when she was just a shell of the woman I had loved and the children in rags, he left her alone and destitute.
“She, not being able to face life anymore, killed herself and her two small children, a son and a daughter. She left the gas on and hung herself, the children, Charles and Diana, died of affixation.
“He, on the other hand, through family connections landed in the lap of luxury and began building a real estate empire. He began by being a slumlord and eventually buying the very building in which she died. It was on the inspection of this very building in which he first saw her, he told me.
“He found her body swinging from a light fixture, her once beautiful swan like neck horribly twisted and mangled. The eyes that had once dazzled us all now stared blankly at him. The body of his two small children huddled beneath her sleeping peacefully for all eternity.
“He could never forget her eyes he told me. First they were just in his dreams, and he sought refuge in a glass. Then they were in his glass, then his mirror, the windows. Eventually every reflective surface seemed to be looking at him, judging him, haunting him.
“Then it became more than just her eyes. It was ‘their’ eyes as well, the eyes of the children. The eyes of the children he had abandoned to a life of squalor in the gutters. It was almost more than he could bear. The comfort of a glass was no longer enough, he needed the comfort of the whole bottle.
“He told me he would awaken from drunken binges in a start. He could feel their blank eyes burning a whole in his soul, and he started to feel their cold, dead hands pulling him down into the brimstone fires of unimaginable hells that would burn his soul, yet their touch would freeze him to the bone.
“He had awoken from just such a binge I imagine from the smell of him before coming here. He said this time was different. He said that this time she spoke to him.
“What did she say you might ask? What would a ghost have to say to the living? What would an apparition have to say to someone of living flesh and blood? I wondered that myself. So, I asked him; what did she say?
“He said that she said just one word. One word in a ghostly nether worldly voice that gurgled up through a mangled neck and washed over her crushed windpipe to mix with a ruined life and dashed dreams: Why?
“Why what?” I asked. Do you know what he said? He said ‘why is such a small word, yet it can mean so much.’ Why did I do this to her? Why didn’t I love her? Why did I leave her? That one word could mean a million things, and I wouldn’t have an answer to any of them.
“By this time the brandy had begun to take effect and his nerves had begun to settle down a bit. He slumped in a chair across from me next to the warmth of the fire.
“Be a good fellow and sit with me for a moment won’t you, Lewellyn?” He begged me. “Watch over me while I get some rest. I’m so dreadfully tired. I haven’t had a moments rest since I first saw her. I can hardly close my eyes without her haunting my dreams.”
“I took one looked at his haggard face and could feel nothing but deep pity for his tortured soul. I agreed to sit with him and watch over him as he slept. He pulled his overcoat up over himself like a blanket and turned into the deep recesses of the wing of the chair and slipped off into a restful slumber just that fast. I, true to my word, watched over him. It wasn’t long before Stevens’ brandy took effect on me as well and I drifted off into a light slumber of my own.
“I didn’t really think he was being haunted by a ghost. I thought it was merely his conscience finally catching up to him. I thought, like you probably do right now, that his guilt-ridden conscience had dredge up all these horrors to get even with him for all the evil he had done to the innocent. Certainly he was deserving of that and probably more.
“Imagine my surprise when I awoke to what I thought was him whimpering in his sleep. At first I thought it merely tendrils of smoke from the fire that had wafted this way, but it seemed only to be near his chair. It hovered over him, then around him, all the while growing ever larger and darker. A faint light emerged from somewhere that coalesced into a pair of eyes, and a form emerge, a woman’s form. A familiar woman’s form. It was ‘her’ in darkness, dressed in her burial garb with a black, smoky veil. She was beautiful again, and the children beside her. She reached out with a charcoal colored hand in a gentle fashion to caress his face. The closer her hand came to him the more her features became twisted. Her neck bent at an odd angle, the beauty of her face melted to a corpse. Her gentle caress became a clawed talon that sunk deep into his flesh. He awoke with a start to a three-headed floating apparition that he knew as his family. He screamed in mortal fear of his soul. That’s when I heard her utter the word in that soul wrenching voice that sent a chill to my bones: ‘Why?’
“Scroggins was right. ‘Why’ is a small word, and it can mean a million things. In this instance it meant only one thing: ‘why didn’t I kill you instead?’
Her eyes burned with hatred as she bent over him. Her neck twisted in remembrance of her demise as she covered his lips with hers, smothering his scream with her deathly cold kiss.
I watched the surreal scene unfold before me somewhere between a dream state and muted horror as his hair turned white in the instant her lips touched his. His legs flailed helplessly, his knuckles turned white as his hands dug into the chair’s armrest. His whole body seemed to age before my eyes; his skin dried up and withered away into leather as he gagged for breath.
Moments seemed an eternity before his body went limp and collapsed. I knew he was dead. The ghostly remains of Constance Scroggins turned towards me, her beauty restored and blew me a kiss. I recoiled in horror so violently that I kicked myself and the high wing-backed chair over, landing on my head. In my recklessness I managed to render myself quite unconscious. I awoke to find myself sprawled on the floor with Stevens hovering over me like a mother hen. I had a bit of a headache but I seemed to be no worse for wear.
I remember Stevens asking me what had happened. I was telling him about Scroggins’; the story he had relayed to me, and about how he had asked me to watch over him as he slept, and that what I had apparently dreamed caused me to kick myself over in a nightmare.
“Is he, Scroggins, still here” I asked Stevens, I thought for surely he must have left by now.
“Yes, sir.” Stevens told me. “He seems to be still sleep in the chair.”
“You mean with all the commotion of me falling over and you coming in didn’t wake him? The poor fellow must have been dead tired.” After Stevens helped me to my feet he went to check on Scroggins who was sitting next to the fire with his coat pulled over him. That’s when Stevens made such a sound that I never heard a human make before.
“What’s wrong, man?” I asked Stevens.
“Look for yourself, sir.” He said, pulling off Scroggins’ coat. There sat Scroggins, or what used to be him, just as I had dreamed: his hair was gray, his eye sockets had been hollowed out, his cheeks sunken in, and his skin had been stretched tight as a sheet. Needless to say he was as stiff as any mummy could ever be. It appeared that though someone had sucked, or kissed, the life out of him.
“Gentlemen, it was at exact moment that I believed in ghosts.”
“The authorities where called and we persuaded the coroner to list it as death by natural causes to protect The Club’s reputation and privacy. We wouldn’t want to many officials snooping around now would we Mr. Stevens?”
“Rightly so, Sir.” Answered Stevens from the back of the room.
“So, gentlemen, as you make your way home this evening remember to kiss your loved ones and treat them tenderly, with gentleness and respect because you never know what might haunt you.”
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Riding The Witch II: Dancing With The Devil
