End of the Road Read online

  “Jimmy could not have strung up William,” said Jerald. “William was a big guy and Jimmy was just a skinny kid.”

  “What does William’s ghost do?” asked Reeta.

  “Nothing,” said Jerald.

  “He knocked the top of the steeple off the church,” said Bert.

  “No he didn’t, it just fell,” said Jerald.

  “Chuck says lots of people feel bad vibes around the church. They all think it is William’s ghost,” said Bert.

  “The church is right down there near the end of the road. Do you see it?” Jerald asked Reeta.

  “Yes. We’re almost there. Where should I park?”

  “Drive past just a little bit and pull off the side of the road.”

  Reeta pulled over off the side of the road where it was dark. You couldn’t see the car unless you were right on it. The boys got out leaving Reeta to wait for them to return with the weed. They snuck back to the parsonage. There were no lights on inside so it seemed that no one was home or they had all gone to bed early. Jerald had a flashlight he borrowed from Scott’s house. The batteries must have been old because the light from the flashlight was weak. They crept up to the oil tank. Jerald shone the light from the flashlight between the oil tank and the parsonage. There was no plastic bag of weed.

  “Damn. Someone took it,” said Jerald.

  “Give me the flashlight. Maybe it just fell down,” said Bert.

  Bert got down on his knees and pointed the flashlight under the oil tank. He squeezed in closer and illuminated the dark space.

  “Wow. This must leak real bad into the basement when it rains.”

  “What?” asked Jerald.

  “There’s a hole into the basement. I’ll bet our weed went in there.”

  “Let me see.”

  They exchanged places and Jerald squeezed in under the oil tank with the flashlight. After he examined the hole he pulled back out.

  “We have to go in there and see if our weed is in the basement.”

  Bert just looked at Jerald.

  “What?” asked Jerald again.

  “Let’s go get the gold cross,” said Bert.

  “I’m not so sure it is gold,” said Jerald.

  “Chuck said the candlesticks are fake but the cross is real gold. He said you can tell by the weight,” said Bert.

  “We don’t have the key to the church. Chuck was supposed to get it,” said Jerald.

  “He gave it to me so his Dad wouldn’t catch him with it.”

  Bert held up the key.

  “Shit!” said Jerald. “Still, Chuck was part of the plan.”

  “He still is part of the plan. He’s the one knows the guy who’ll pay us for it,” said Bert.

  “OK. We’ll get the cross then come back here and break into the basement to find our weed.”

  The boys snuck around the parsonage and looked down at the parking lot. It was illuminated with some tall lights but no cars were in the parking lot. The church was dark. The boys had to sneak all the way around to the front of the church. When they got there they hid in some bushes near the front door.

  “Damn. The outside light is on. Someone will see us,” said Bert.

  Jerald felt the ground under the bush and pulled up a medium sized rock. He took aim and threw the rock at the light. The light broke but the bulb didn’t go out. He grabbed up a second stone and threw it at the bulb. Darkness resulted. The boys quickly ran up to the door, unlocked it and closed it behind them. They were inside. The sanctuary was empty but lit from the moonlight streaming in the stained glass windows. They moved rapidly up the central aisle and stopped at the altar. There was a large wooden cross on the wall up above them. Bert was staring at the wooden cross. Jerald grabbed the gold cross.

  “Man this is really heavy,” said Jerald.

  Bert dragged his eyes away from the wooden cross.

  “Let’s go get our weed,” said Bert.

  They peeked out the clear glass windows at the front door. There was a neighbor walking his dog.

  “Shit. Hide,” said Jerald. “Make sure he doesn’t see us through the windows.”

  Bert sat down against the wall to wait for Jerald to give the ‘all clear’. Jerald stooped down facing the window and he kept peeking up and out the window to see if the neighbor had gone home. As soon as he took his dog and walked down the street away from the church, Jerald punched Bert in the shoulder.

  “Let’s go.”

  Jerald opened the door a crack and the boys left carrying their prize. They closed and locked the door. Then they snuck back to the parsonage.

  “Hurry up,” said Bert.

  “I’m coming. This cross is damn heavy,” said Jerald.

  “How are we going to get into the basement?” asked Bert.

  “Maybe there is a window on the side that we can get open.”

  There were flower beds around the base of most of the walls of the parsonage. The boys found one window into the basement behind a bush. Jerald put the cross down, the gold gleaming in the moonlight. Jerald got down under the bush and tried to push the window open. It didn’t appear to be locked but the metal handle holding it shut was rusted into position and Jerald could not get it to move. Bert was sitting as a lookout while Jerald was under the bush. Jerald crawled back out from under the bush. Bert glanced at him. Jerald dragged the gold cross under the bush with him. He used it to bash the metal handle loose. He dropped the cross though the window and slid down into the basement after it.

  “Come on Bert. Bring the flashlight,” said Jerald.

  He pulled the flashlight out of his jacket and slid down into the dark basement with Jerald. Jerald helped Bert reach the floor in the basement and took the flashlight from him. Jerald shone the now flickering flashlight beam around the floor. It was empty. Jerald lifted the light and shone it on the walls. They were two by fours and insulation but no wallboard. It was an empty unfinished room. The boys moved toward the door. As Jerald reached for the knob a floorboard creaked above them both. Jerald and Bert paused and glanced up. The footsteps moved off. Jerald opened the door.

  The rest of the basement was also dark. Bert followed Jerald into the open area of the basement. On the far side the flashlight barely illuminated a washer and dryer. There was a stairway going up to the upper level of the house. Jerald walked toward the side of the basement where the furnace was located.

  “Hey! There it is,” Bert ran in front of Jerald and picked the bag of weed up off of the floor.

  A cool breeze wafted past the boys. Jerald shivered. There was a sound like a muffled voice.

  “What was that?” asked Bert.

  “I don’t know. There seems to be another window open. It’s cold down here.”

  There were more sounds.

  “Where is that coming from?” asked Bert.

  “Over by that bookcase,” said Jerald. He waved the flashlight in the direction of a bookcase standing up against the wall. To the left of the bookcase was the laundry room set back about six feet from the rest of the wall. The wall was covered with the old floor to ceiling bookcase and some paintings. There was a small area with a rug on the floor and some comfortable chairs arranged in front of a fireplace.

  “There isn’t anyone here,” said Bert.

  “Where was it that William hung himself, do you know?”

  “Chuck said it was right by the steps. He climbed the stairs and tied the rope then he jumped off the steps.”

  Bert was looking up at the ceiling near the steps still holding the bag of weed. They heard more sounds. It seemed to be a voice and some banging coming from behind the bookcase.

  “We should leave,” said Jerald.

  They turned to return to the room with the window to escape. They didn’t make it. They heard a screeching noise behind them as the bookcase slid open. They turned and in the dim beam of the flashlight saw the figure of a young man standing in front of the open darkness.

  “Ahhhhh! It’s William’s ghost,” Bert scre
amed and tried to run.

  The ghost ran past Jerald knocking him to the ground and sending the flashlight spinning across the floor. Jerald was flat out on the floor but he heard the sound of something crushing Bert’s skull then he saw William’s ghost dragging his friend Bert back to the darkness. Jerald was terrified. His legs were weak and it was so dark. He got up and felt his way back to the room where he left the cross. Holding it by the crossed part and intending to use the heavy base as a weapon he returned and approached the dark hole behind the open bookcase where the ghost had taken his friend.

  “Bert?” Jerald said in a quavering voice. “Are you in there?”

  The ghost popped out from the darkness and grabbed Jerald by his shirt and threw him further into the room. Jerald dropped the cross and hit a cold damp stone wall and slid to the floor. He heard the bookcase close. An overhead light came on and there stood William.

  “Please William don’t kill us,” said Jerald.

  “I’m Jack. William was my brother.”

  “What kind of place is this?” asked Jerald.

  Bert lay crumpled on the floor.

  “It was an old coal bin,” said Jack.

  Jerald glanced around. There was a small table with three dolls in really old clothes seated in chairs around the table.

  “What are those?” Jerald pointed to the old dolls.

  “My sisters play with those,” said Jack.

  “Why doesn’t the pastor get them some new dolls?” Jerald was nervous and confused so he just kept talking.

  “Our Dad doesn’t know about this place,” said Jack. “No one does.”

  “How did you get the dolls and the table in here?” continued Jerald.

  “I got the toy table and chairs at one of the church’s yard sales. They must have crawled in here by themselves. You’ve heard the stories about the three little girls that disappeared sixty years ago? When I found out how to open the bookcase they were already here. They must have crawled through the coal chute and died when no one found them.”

  Jack walked over to where he had dragged Bert. He stepped over his lifeless body and pressed on the stone wall. Part of the wall slowly slid open.

  “Over here is the root cellar,” said Jack.

  He turned around and dragged Bert by the ankles into the new darkness. Jerald watched Bert’s body slowly disappear through the passageway. As Jack dragged Bert’s lifeless body Bert’s arms extended above his head as if he was giving Jerald one last chance to save him. Jerald shook his head back and forth saying softly, “No. no. no.” The cross still lay on the floor beside him. He got up from the floor and grabbed the cross by the top part again. He entered the root cellar that was dimly lit from the light in the coal bin and swung the cross high up and crashed it down on Jack’s head. He stepped back and tripped over a fourth mummified body. Jimmy’s skeletal arms reached for Jerald as he screamed and backed away. He heard the bookcase open. He looked up just in time to see Jack’s two sisters standing there. One of them pressed the stone that closed the root cellar passageway trapping Jerald alive inside with the two fresh corpses.

  As the pastor was jogging around the community the next morning, he saw a car pulled over near the parsonage. He tapped on Reeta’s car window. Reeta woke up blinking from the sunlight. She put in the key and turned it far enough to hit the button lowering the car window.

  “Are you alright young lady?”

  “Uh, yeah. I’m sorry I must have fallen asleep.”

  Reeta had no idea where the boys were but she was already late for work. She started the car and drove home.

  Back to Top

  The End

  Chapter 25

  Once We Were Children

  By Chris Ward

  Makayoshi died in the spring, just as the cherry blossoms began to fall. The eighty-fourth time his eyes had looked upon the pink sakura trees of Nakajima Park was his last. Takahiro didn’t mourn his younger brother’s death. He walked to Nakajima Park, sat on a bench among the dying cherry blossoms and toasted Makayoshi with a glass of sake made from their own home-grown rice. His brother would have approved.

  He didn’t want to cry. He didn’t like crying, it made him feel weak, and for as long as he could remember he had been the cornerstone of his family, the dependable one.

  He wrote a letter to Ayana in Okayama, asking if she would come back for her great uncle’s funeral, and perhaps bring the children?

  She didn’t reply in time.

  Makayoshi was cremated on May 14th. On the 15th, Takahiro, together with his brother’s neighbor, Kobayashi, interred the remains into the family shrine on the little hill outside Matsumoto.

  Ayana’s reply arrived on the 17th:

  Sorry, Grandad, I was away on business. Sorry to hear about Uncle and sorry I couldn’t make it. I’ll try to visit during Obon. Love, Ayana.

  It was a postcard, not even a sealed letter. He knew she resented his failure to convert to the electronic generation, but he would be following Makayoshi sooner rather than later and didn’t see the point of stressing himself out on something he would never understand.

  He hadn’t wanted to cry. But he had.

  #

  ‘Dad, look. Oh, look. It’s a girl. A beautiful girl.’

  His eyes filled with tears as Kentaro held out the tiny bundle of life, pink and clammy in a hospital blanket. They had thought Hiroko couldn’t conceive, had tried everything. When she fell pregnant after some experimental IVF treatment, the family still hadn’t dared to believe. But here was the wonderful result, a beautiful little girl.

  ‘She has her grandfather’s eyes, I think.’

  Takahiro smiled. Maybe she did.

  #

  It was always planting time that Takahiro liked best. Knee deep in mud, a bright sun shining overhead, the hum of conversation all around him. Things always worked in order of seniority, so Takahiro and Makayoshi would plant the seedlings, while Kentaro, together with Makayoshi’s boy, Seima, would wade along in front of them carrying the trays. Takahiro’s wife, Yumiko, and Makayoshi’s wife, Tomoko, would prepare the picnic of rice balls, sushi, boiled eggs and fried chicken. Hiroko and Makayoshi’s daughter, Hiromi, got the bum job, cleaning out the old trays in the small canal that ran between their rice field and that of Mr. Tanaka next door.

  As a baby, Ayana was as well behaved as a child could be, sitting in her pushchair while the others worked, only crying when she was hungry or needed changing. While they chatted over their picnic she would be passed from lap to lap, and Takahiro would always want to hold on to her the longest, look down at her tiny puckered face as it broke into a grin aimed only at him.

  ‘I’ll bring my sister next year, promise,’ Hiroko teased Seima, who was thirty-one that first year after Ayana was born. ‘She’s looking for a husband.’

  ‘Who says I want a wife?’ Seima replied with a wide grin designed to mask the insecurities they all knew he felt inside. ‘Maybe I’m happy as I am.’

  Kentaro punched his shoulder. ‘Come on, cousin. She’ll love you. You’ve got a great car!’

  Even Ayana seemed to giggle in Takahiro’s arms.

  ‘Stop teasing him and eat your boiled egg,’ Tomoko scolded.

  Above them a warm June sun beat down from a cloudless sky. A sparrow chirped from a tree back near the road. Takahiro wiped a sheen of sweat from his brow and smiled. Good times, good times.

  #

  Takahiro was seventy-nine and Makayoshi seventy-five the last year they planted the rice field. Of course it was all done with a machine by then, but even so, riding what looked like a tractor crossed with a spider under the hot sun was too much for either of them. This would be the last year, they both decided when it was finally done.

  And another book was closed.

  #

  Ayana had been gainfully scrubbing seed trays for five years when the phone rang one evening in May.

  ‘Hiroko has cancer,’ Kentaro said. ‘We’re going to stay in Osaka for a whil
e so she can have treatment.’

  Takahiro didn’t cry after he put down the phone, but he frowned for a long, long time.

  #

  ‘Another boiled egg?’ Tomoko said.

  Takahiro took it, as was expected of him. The women had made eight, the usual number, but there were three spare. No one wanted to say anything, so Takahiro, Makayoshi and Seima had an extra one each.

  Hiroko had died. Her family was from Osaka so Kentaro had stayed down there for the funeral. He had transferred his job too, because he couldn’t bear to take Ayana away from Hiroko’s grieving parents. We’ll visit often, he said.

  #

  Kentaro was true to his word, at least in part. Ayana was sent up for a visit every spring. In the little canals around the rice fields they caught tiny fish and eels and kept them in a tank in the house. Once they found a rhinoceros beetle hanging from a tree branch and put it into a plastic case because Ayana said she wanted to give it to a boy she liked at school. Takahiro had wondered about taking it on the shinkansen, but they forgot to close the case properly and in the night it got out and flew off somewhere. For years afterwards Takahiro expected to find the shell of its armoured body down behind a bookcase or under a pile of old magazines, but he never did.

  The fish, little dojo, which became harder to find as the years passed, lived. They bred. Every few months Takahiro or Yumiko would scoop out a handful of babies that were little more than swimming eyes and let them back into the little canals where they would drift away towards the river beyond the rice fields. Even though there were always too many for the tank, Takahiro hated to see them go.

  #

  Often, sitting on the bench in Nakajima Park, with a hot sun beating down, Takahiro would let his head loll back, allow his eyes to close, and he would dream of those days.

  Ayana had found a frog once, a really huge one, more like a toad, and popped it under Seima’s sweater as they sat eating their lunch one year. Seima and Kentaro were sharing a couple of beers and a joke. Seima leaned back, reaching for a rice ball, not looking. The toad bounced under his hand. Seima shrieked and rolled backwards. One leg slipped into the muddy water of the rice paddy, and only Kentaro’s quick hand stopped the rest of Seima from following it in. For a moment he looked shocked, then Ayana laughed, quickly followed by the others. The toad bounced across Seima’s chest, into the water and away.