Long Holler Road - A Dark Southern Thriller (2 page)

  “You must remain calm, dear,” she said, her face showing gentleness like he’d never seen before. Richard suddenly began to calm down some. He was still frightened out of his mind, but somehow her angelic face and soothing voice made him feel as if he were under some kind of spell.

  “The doctor will be here any minute and we can begin,” she said.

  Despite her alluring eyes and the calmness of her voice, Richard suddenly snapped out of his trance. “What do you mean we can begin? I..I haven’t even been prepped. And what about anesthesia?”

  “That’s for the doctor to decide, sweetie,” she said as she turned and walked away beyond his line of vision.

  Richard all of a sudden felt like he was breathing through a damp wash cloth. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t get a deep breath. Then, he realized he was hyperventilating. He’d done it once before when he was a child and had awakened from a terrifying nightmare. A nightmare that reoccurred several times, even after he was a grown man in college. Maybe, hopefully, this was what was happening now. Maybe he would wake up any minute and find himself laying beside his wife, safe in his own bed. But he knew this was no nightmare. What was happening was real. His face and all his extremities were beginning to feel numb. He was getting light headed. He felt like if he could break the leather restraints, he could run five miles without stopping.

  “Can you please give me some kind of sedative,…. please?” he begged.

  “I’m not allowed to administer any medication without orders from the doctor, dear,” the nurse answered in a casual tone, as she were talking about some matter-of-fact, benign subject.

  Another set of footsteps could now be heard. Heavier footsteps. Then more sounds of metallic objects being rattled around. A husky, male voice spoke;

   “Is the patient ready, nurse?”

  “As ready as he will ever be,” she replied. Richard thought he could detect excitement in her voice. Maybe even a child-like giggle.

  “Ready? What do you mean, am I ready? Are you about to put me to sleep?”

  “Afraid not,” the male voice responded in a robotic tone. “This particular procedure doesn’t achieve positive results with anesthesia.”

  “Wh…what are you about to do?” Richard felt like he would die if he didn’t get a deep breath soon. His skin was crawling and his entire body suddenly felt like one giant, open wound.

  The doctor, or rather madman, didn’t utter a response. Richard had still not even seen a glimpse of him. He felt a hand gently rubbing across the toes of his left foot. The gentle caress suddenly became a firm grip on his big toe. It happened so quickly, it took Richard’s brain a few seconds to process it. The razor sharp scalpel took off his toe like cutting through butter. The nurse came back into view holding a small, stainless steel tray that prominently displayed the bloody toe as if it were a trophy. Richard screamed to the top of his lungs, which until now had felt like they had been deprived of oxygen. The nurse had the same sweet, innocent smile on her face.

  “Sometimes it’s just better to go ahead and get it done quickly,” she said coolly. “The patient doesn’t have time to dread it that way. Now that that’s over with, and your mind is prepared for pain, we can proceed. I promise I’ll keep you informed as to the rest of the procedure.”

  Richard didn’t respond. He couldn’t respond. His body was so racked with pain and anxiety, he couldn’t utter an intelligible word. All he could do was moan. He’d never heard anything like the sounds that were coming out of his mouth. He sounded like some kind of pre-historic beast that was being slowly devoured by something higher up the food chain.

  “The doctor is now going to begin stripping the damaged muscles from your calf. This requires a long incision, so just hang in there sweetie. You must maintain consciousness at all costs. You want us to succeed, don’t you?”

  Richard was beyond giving any kind of response, other than the guttural, inhuman sounds he couldn’t control. The cutting began just above his Achilles tendon. It felt as though his entire leg had been placed inside a vice and some medieval tormentor was tightening it with all his strength. It was nothing like the quick, clean amputation of his toe. This felt more like someone was digging with a spoon or some other cold and blunt object. Waves of nausea overcame him and the contents of his stomach came rushing to his throat.
I’m going to die strangling on my own vomit!,
his panicked inner monologue was shouting. He tried turning his head to spit it out. He was choking to death! No matter how hard he strained, there was nothing he could do. He looked at the woman with terrified, pleading eyes. She just smiled, her countenance unchanged from the first time he laid eyes on her. The cutting and digging continued. But that didn’t matter anymore. Richard’s oxygen supply had been cut off from the foul tasting contents that was restricting his windpipe He felt a split second of total peace before his brain finally told his body to take him away.

  The woman looked at him for a minute, then felt for a pulse. It was still there, but just barely.

  She looked at the man and shrugged her shoulders. “I was hoping this one had a little more tolerance,” she said in an almost juvenile voice.

  The man stopped his cutting and placed the scalpel on the instrument table. “We could still revive him if you want to take it farther.”

  She stood there for a minute, as if in deep thought. Then she shook her head. “No. No let’s just get the plastic spread out in the van. I believe I’ve become bored with this one.”

CHAPTER TWO

 
Me and Glenn had been told to stay out of that cemetery at night no less than a thousand times. But what else were two fourteen year old boys who lived out in the country gonna do on a Saturday night? We were too young to drive, even if we had a car, and all the girls within walking distance were kin to at least one of us. There are always jokes being told about us folks in Alabama marrying our cousins. That’s mostly untrue. Anyway, even if there had been girls walking around as thick as fleas on a dog we would have been scared to death of them. Oh, we talked a big game when it came to the girls at school and what we would do if we ever got one of them alone, but up until this point talk is all it had amounted to. I could have made some stuff up, but I’m a horrible liar. Now Cob, Glenn’s brother, was an inveterate liar. He was four years older than us and had mastered the art not long after he learned his first words. But that had caused problems. He became like the little boy who cried wolf, and it got to the point that nobody knew if what he was saying was the truth or some fantastic yarn he’d spun.

  But we were in the cemetery once again, along with Tom Jenkins, telling ghost stories and passing around the two Pabst Blue Ribbon beers Glenn had managed to steal from his daddy once he’d gotten too drunk to notice. Glenn’s momma even encouraged our stealing a couple of beers from old Roscoe on Saturday evenings. That meant there would be two less for him to drink. He still got falling down drunk anyway, but it was a nice gesture.
                        

  We all had pretty good imaginations and ghost story telling was in our DNA. I had two aunts that were afraid of everything that moved, except their husbands, but could tell the scariest stories you ever heard. A lot of nights I’d leave one of their houses after they had been telling those morbid tales and almost break my neck running home. Do you know how hard it is to run over a mile with your eyes shut every step of the way?

  Anyway, back to the cemetery. The only reason our folks didn’t want us to hang out there at night was because of Old Man Turner, the de facto caretaker. He lived next to the place and was about eighty years old. He was still in good shape for his age, but his hearing wasn’t what it used to be and he was always afraid somebody was gonna steal some of his chickens or pigs or whatever else he had that was worth a continental shit. I believe the old man
did
have money, though. People said he was so stingy he wouldn’t give a nickel to see a piss-ant eat a bushel of corn and he probably still had ninety-cents of the first dollar he ever made.

   But he was as nervous as a cut coon and suspicious of everybody and it only got worse as he got older. He kept an old double-barrel shotgun loaded with rock salt, and though rock salt is not lethal, if you were shot with it at fairly close range, it could make you wish you were dead. Momma was afraid we’d cause him to have a stroke or heart attack, or worse, shoot one of us. But when you’re young and full of piss and vinegar you will almost always do the opposite of what your folks tell you to do, so there we were.

  We had just drained the last sixteen ounce can of beer, so naturally we had to pee. We jumped off the tables we were sitting on that the church had set up for their occasional dinners on the ground and walked to the little copse of woods behind the cemetery. The cemetery was on a hill and at the top of that hill, where the patch of woods were, the ground dropped almost straight down into a big, flat field. On the far side of the field, maybe two-hundred yards or so, we saw a light and the shadows of what looked to be two men, though at that distance it was hard to tell, even with the nearly full moon. They appeared to be just at the edge of the field where the woods began.

  “You don’t reckon that’s Old Man Turner down there, do you?” Tom asked.

  I was concentrating on keeping my aim on the tree I was peeing on and thinking about it.

  “Nah, he wouldn’t be out in the middle of the night like this, would he?”

  “He goes to bed with the chickens,” Glenn said. “It’s gotta be somebody else. Besides, there’s two of them. Looks like one’s got a shovel or somethin’.”

  “Maybe they’re buryin’ a cow or somethin’ like that,” Tom said, zipping his pants.

  “Well, if they are, they’re buryin’ it on Old Man Turner’s property. He’ll raise all manner of hell if he finds out.”

  “Maybe that’s why they’re buryin’ it in the middle of the night,” was Glenn’s deduction.

  Old Man Turner didn’t like anybody trespassing on his property for any reason, other than maybe stepping off the road for a car to get by. He was an irascible old cuss when he wanted to be and didn’t suffer fools or children. He tolerated us boys once we were big enough to help him get in his hay. We hired out in the summer to everyone in the community to help them get in hay and Old Man Turner always paid the lowest wages. But we helped him just the same. Momma said it was our Christian duty to help everyone in need. I thought us boys were in just as much need of money as he was help. Where was the quid-pro-quo?

  We watched whoever it was doing whatever it was they were doing for about five minutes and finally got bored. We couldn’t tell what they were up to anyway, and were too big of cowards to walk down where they were. It could be anybody doing anything.
                           

  We eventually walked back up to the tables, had a seat, and continued our conversation, changing the topic from ghosts to girls. We knew a lot more about ghosts and weren’t nearly as afraid of them, but felt like we had to at least address the subject. Sooner or later we were going to have to stop being so spineless and actually start asking girls out on dates. We all three loved girls and fantasized about them constantly. Why was it we weren’t afraid of Daddy’s old mean bull, or afraid to dive off the high rock at Big Wills Creek, didn’t let rattlesnakes bother us much, but were terrified of a skinny little giggling girl? I couldn’t come up with an answer.

  We hung around until about eleven o’clock and decided we had better head home. Me and Tom had to be at Sunday School in the morning. Glenn didn’t go to church much, despite the threats of fire and brimstone me and Tom always hurled at him like we were pounding him with rocks.

  Just as we were nearing the end of the road that led out of the cemetery, an old screech owl let out a blood curdling scream that pierced the still night air like a bolt of lightning. It sounded just like a woman screaming and we all took off like we had been shot out of a cannon. After we had run far enough to be what we perceived out of danger, we stopped to catch our breaths.

  “That wasn’t nuthin’ but an old owl.” Tom was bent over with his hands on his knees, breathing hard.

  “Well I wasn’t gonna stick around to find out,” Glenn said. “It sounded like a woman to me. I’ve told y’all about old Jenny, the crazy woman that lives in that old house on the Dobb’s place. It could have been her. They say she comes to the graveyard at night sometimes and mourns them two girls, wailin’ away like there ain’t no tomorrow.”

  Anytime we heard anything that even remotely sounded like someone screaming, Glenn always played the old crazy Jenny card.

  There was this widow woman who lived in a house she rented from the Dobb’s family. The story was that she lost her marbles when her daughter died. The girl got hit by a car late one night when she was carrying water up Long Hollow Road from the spring below their house. One of the Bullard boys was driving the car and some said he ran over her on purpose. All those Bullards were mean as striped snakes, but most people didn’t believe that even
they
would run over a young girl that had never done anybody any harm. Personally, I thought the trouble making bastards were capable of  anything. Anyway, it was ruled an accident and the poor girl was buried in a pine box. I was at the funeral and saw it. The woman was real poor and that was all she could afford. Folks in the Long Hollow community would have made up and given her enough money to have bought a decent casket, but she was too proud to ask.