FICTION BY DENISE J. BRYSON

Denise J. Bryson resides in Detroit, Michigan. She grew up reading Stephen King, Dean Koontz and John Saul, so is it any wonder that she is all about supernatural and horror? Her mom Gwen was a huge horror fan and she gave this love to Denise. Horror comes in many forms but none is more frightening than the horror that enters your mind.

Denise is Catholic and has found a way to incorporate her faith in her writing. She started her writing career at an early age but fell off until she was about twenty when she began to pen in earnest.

Her first book was published under Artistic Words Publishing, which is no longer in operation. Before the company ended, she finished Through the Eyes of a Killer which is the sequel to her novel In the Footsteps of a Killer.

She is a fierce Redwings Hockey fan and you may find her in attendance when there is a home game.

A NIGHT IN THE GRAVEYARD
by Denise J. Bryson

The graveyard had been particularly busy this week, what with at least five new arrivals, two of which already needed his immediate attention. Tommy never liked it much when the yard was this busy. It didn’t give him much time to get to know the new inductees.

He looked at his list and made his way to the first job. With damp, canvas gym-shoed feet that sank into wet squishy ground, he made his way to his first new grave. It always rains before, during, or after the main event, he mused.

“Well, who we got here?” he said, reading the instructions from his clipboard into the silence of the night. He stood for a moment or two, shaking his head. People had no respect. Who would do such a thing? he thought. Someone had written “most likely to get ahead,” in red paint on muddy earth.

“So disrespectful,” he said out loud. On the other hand, if there were no vandalism, he’d be out of a job. He was the janitor of the yard, and there was always work for him to do.

He turned his head and pulled up a great big, slimy green-and-yellow mucus-filled spit glob. He hacked it to the ground near where the dead man’s feet lay. He stood, considering about this person’s untimely death.

This newbie to the yard had died in a six-car collision. Having just been planted early this morning, the freshly dug grave was nothing but mud. As he walked closer to begin the cleanup, his feet slipped, causing him to slide and fall almost headfirst into dirt. This grave was so new that it hadn’t even received a headstone yet. The vandal had merely spray-painted red words over the muddy back-fill.

He sat down on the wet bed of grass next to the pile of wet earth and pulled out a bottle of Vodka from his cleaning bucket. Smiling, he raised the fresh bottle in salute to the man buried there who had been decapitated in the crash. He figured the authorities had probably found his head on the highway and buried it with the rest of the body. But vandals were morbid.

Bringing the white lightning liquid up to his lips, he took a long hard swig, then closed his eyes. He sighed with a smile on his face as the liquor slid down his gullet.

Tommy’s job had its perks. He never had a boss looking over his shoulder; he never shared a space or desk, and he didn’t have any chatty co-workers going on about grandkids. Most importantly, besides the booze money he earned, he worked on his own time and that was just fine with him.

He whistled a little ditty and got busy with the work at hand. He pulled his bucket over and took out some cleaner and began to clean up the red paint.

“So, Buddy—did they really find your head?” he asked. “Or is your neck just a stump, as the rumors are saying?”

The wind blew up through the trees and he could hear a low moan.

“Hmm…you can’t scare me. You’re just the wind and he’s dead. Besides, if he ain’t got his head, he ain’t got no ears. He can’t hear you blow,” Tommy said, looking up at the trees swaying in the breeze.

He turned his gaze to the new grave. “All right. Talk to me.”

In his mind’s eye, he settled in to watch the scene that began to form behind his closed eyelids.

*****

A red Corvette roared down the highway at breakneck speed, the Oregon Police close on his heels. He was not about to pull over. Not now, not ever. The corvette veered dangerously in and out of traffic as it swerved, causing brakes to be squealed and horns to be blown. In the front seat, behind the reckless wheel, was a handsome dark-haired man with sunglasses on, covering his blue and bloodshot eyes, even though it was the dusk of the evening.

“I don’t give a shit what Bart thinks. This is my baby. I saw this coming a mile away and I’m not about to drop it now,” he yelled into his phone as the Corvette roared.

He raised the bottle of expensive brown liquor up to his lips until it was empty. Looking at the drained bottle, he frowned, then threw it out of the car. He sneered as it went crashing to the road.

He was Edwin “Iron Man” Steele, a man to be feared. A true modern-time gangster, he was sure he’d shake the stupid cops. Nothing and no one was safe from him. Faster and faster…the little red death machine’s speedometer needle was shaking, hitting 115 mph and the sun was almost down.

Edwin reached up for his Panthère de Cartier diamond-framed sunglasses to take them off of his face, but they spun out of his hands and twirled in the air until they landed neatly down between his feet.

“Damn!” he said, and angrily lowered his gaze to find them.

Not finding them, he looked up just in time to see that the trailer bed of a semi stopped was just up ahead of him. Edwin’s speed had not slowed, his brakes were not touched, and his cell phone flew up into the air as his hands clasped down on the steering wheel in white-knuckled style. His feet finally found the brakes, grinding down hard but not in time by any stretch of luck or hope.

He crashed, and crashed hard.

He felt no pain as his head went soaring high up into the air. His eyes were wide open, mouth frozen with “oh fuck” as his head spun aimlessly through the air. It hit the road, rolling some, then disappeared forever down a hole that Hell opened just for him.

*****

“Aw man, shit,” Tommy said as the vision faded from his mind.

So the rumors were true: Edwin had been buried without a head. Must have been a closed casket, Tommy thought.

He finished his task of removing the red paint, and then pushed himself up off of the ground and onto his knees. Ignoring the wet muddy ground saturating his pants—his backside already muddy and dank—he rose and took a step back from the grave.

As he staggered away, he moved on to his next assignment. Tommy may have been the town’s idiot but he knew his job and he did it well. He didn’t think that he was an idiot, hell, he may very well have been, but he enjoyed his job. And that didn’t give them the right to call him an idiot.

He didn’t have many expenses; he didn’t have a mortgage or a car note. Night maintenance was the way to go. And thanks to his little gift and the midnight conversations with his departed friends, he knew a great number of secrets about many of the people in town.

Moving on to his next assignment, he came to the grave of a young woman. This one had been here a week, so it had a headstone. “2000 to 2024. Young as hell. Too bad.” Tommy said shaking his head.

The dirt around this grave needed to be raked and packed down into a presentable mound because the graveyard was planning to place a roll of grass over it. He stood, looking at it. This time he flipped over his metal bucket and sat down on the top of it. Another sip of Vodka.

“Okay, little girl, lay it out. Speak to me.” Sitting down on his upside-down bucket, he took a drag from his bottle and closed his eyes.

*****

Twenty-four-year-old Kelly sat in the back of the bus, on her way home from work. Not much on her mind, just to get home and eat dinner, then go to bed. The bus ride wasn’t a long one, only 45 minutes long. Not much could go wrong in 45 minutes.

With her nose deep inside a book, she did not notice the man who sat down next to her, even though there were plenty of other seats available.

The man cleared his throat and said, “Hey.”

“I’m sorry. Are you speaking to me?” she asked as she looked to see the guy practically connected to her at the hip. She scooted over as much as she could.

“Yeah, I’m gonna take over this bus. You wanna do it with me?”

She immediately stood, pulled the cord and rang the bell. She walked up the bus to the front and stopped at the driver. “You’ve got a weirdo in the back. He’s talking about taking over the bus.”

The driver looked up into his mirror. “Thanks, lady.”

As the driver stopped the bus she stepped off.  At the same instant, the weirdo from the back rushed to the front of the bus. Now standing at the corner waiting to cross, Kelly had her head down fumbling around in her purse for her house keys, and never saw the runaway bus moving toward her.

She never saw the driver fighting, struggling and losing to the weirdo. Nor did she see a few of the people on the bus trying to stop the weirdo. With the wheel jerking back and forth, the bus burst forward at breakneck speed.

Kelly looked up with only the time to say. “Oh, dear God!”

The bus hit her with a vengeance and then rolled over her. Large, black heavy tires—meant for potholes and wretched, unrepaired roads—tore the young woman in half. Pain was never felt. Her upper half lay on the curb as the bus was finally stopped. Her lower half lay under the rear tires.

*****

Tommy’s eyes slowly opened and had a tear in the corner of one.

“Dang little lady, that’s awful. Nobody should die like that.”

He shook his head sadly and began to stand up, swaying just a bit then standing upright. He moved the dirt with his tools to an acceptable appearance then finished up by smoothing the mound of dirt.

As he grabbed his bottle for another swig, he swayed. He had no idea why the recently dead chose to talk to him, but they always did.

“Wonder what makes me hear you all? Why don’t you talk to somebody who can do something about what happened? Why me?”

But even though the dead always talked to him, they never answered that question.

Next was the grave of a guy he knew, only marked by a number. This grave was way in the back, by the fence at the end of the yard. This grave held a big bad bully and Tommy had been his lifetime victim, from school days until adulthood. He wasn’t sad to see this son of a bitch go. In fact, from the moment the bully was planted, he became Tommy’s special mission; especially since no one but he knew who was under this little patch of ground.

To the real world above the ground, this person was a John Doe. But not to Tommy, who liked to taunt Jason before he left the yard for the night. Somehow, it just seemed like the right thing to do. 

Looking disdainfully down at the grass-covered grave, Tommy stopped and stood for a few minutes. He leaned and almost fell over but held onto his delicate balance.

He reached for his zipper and smiled. He sprayed a plentiful amount of warm piss all over Jason’s grave. For a year now, this was Tommy’s ritualistic stop, and pissing on Jason’s grave was an extra bonus to his job.

Jason had always been a mean son of a bitch. A rotten kid and a most unpleasant, ugly adult. Most of Tommy’s young life had been spent running from the jerk. Tommy thought, Funny, in a small-town, people see things, but they also don’t see things. No one paid any attention to Tommy when he cried about Jason.

But one day, he had found out that Jason could not swim, so he waited for just the right time, because Jason liked to fish. Tommy watched one night as Jason sat, legs swinging off of the edge of the pier, bucket of night crawlers, fishing line in the water, his bottle of white lightning sitting next to the bucket. So content was he that he never heard Tommy creeping up from behind him.

With a sudden, hate-filled shove, Tommy pushed Jason just as hard as he could into the deep murky water.

Jason bobbed up and down in the seaweed-thick water, and on one of his up-bobs, he saw Tommy standing and smiling, showing off that missing front tooth—the one Jason had knocked out when they were teens. Tommy watched as Jason’s head bobbed up and down in the water, a smile the size of Texas on his face.

“Tommy!” the bully had cried as he struggled to stay afloat. “Help me!”
“Help you? When did you ever help me when you was beating my ass? Yeah, well, you’ll have to bully me from hell now.”

And Tommy watched Jason go under. When he didn’t emerge again, Tommy laughed.

*****

Tommy put away his Johnson and zipped up his pants. He had never reported Jason’s death. By the time the authorities had found the water-decomposed body, it was unrecognizable. No one had reported Jason missing, because no one cared. Tommy was not the only one Jason had been mean to.

He staggered off, found a tree, and sat down on the wet grass again. He drank from the last of the Vodka and some of it dribbled some down his brown and gray three-inch-long beard.

He reflected that originally, he didn’t want this job but took it because he would be able to work alone. He thought he would be alone with the silence…but after starting the job, not a damn one of them was ever silent.

He dozed, and when he woke, it was still dark. He sniffed the air and could smell the dawn on the horizon. He almost panicked, realizing he still had one more task to finish.

This newest occupant was planted in the Potter’s Field right next to Jason, at the farthest end of the graveyard where all the Jane and John Does were. Even in a town as small as Cannon Beach, was there were still some of those, just like Jason.

Tommy rolled over and got himself to his knees. Once on his knees, he pushed up. He stood and swayed, almost falling back down. He pulled at his shirt and attempted to tuck it inside his pants.

He leaned over the fresh new mound of wet dirt. “Hello number G-486730. How are you today?”

He got his tools and began to tend to the ground. He wasn’t even trying to hear this one, he was really trying to just hurry up so he can get back to the maintenance building and lie down. His buzz was wearing off and his stomach was starting to grumble. His nearest bottle was back in the shed.

“Damn I am gonna have to start stashing me some bottles around the yard so I don’t run out.”

A voice spoke. “You always were a lush.”

Tommy froze. Even he didn’t know who this particular Jane Doe was. It was a Jane because the voice was female.

“What?”

“You don’t recognize my voice? Well, I guess not, you never listened to me before so why would you listen now?”

Tommy stood still. His heart was beating like a drum in a college football team’s half time show. Droplets of vodka-tasting sweat rolled down as he licked his lips.

He hadn’t been with a woman in years. He had been married once but she left him decades ago, never even bothering with a divorce.

He spoke to himself out loud. “This can’t be. I only see and hear them when they died. They never even know I’m here.”

Tommy sat down next to the brand new grave and closed his eyes. He saw a woman. It wasn’t his ex.

*****

At a roadside diner, he saw himself sit at a counter. It was a little jarring to see himself in his vision back when he had a legitimate truck driving job, but there he was. He tried to remember this moment of his life but the years of drowning his sorrow, blanketing his pain and just not fucking caring had made his brain a hot mass of mush.

“Another coffee, Tommy?” She was smiling at him like he had a Kit Kat bar to snap and share.

“Naw, Clare, I’m good. But look, I don’t have to drop this load off until tomorrow morning. Ya wanna have a drink later?” Hey, nothing like asking, he thought. She was young and almost pretty, but she was trash just like himself.

“Yeah, sure. I get off at seven. Is that too late?” she said as she continued to smile.

“I can go get some beers and be back to get you then. You don’t mind drinking in my truck, do you?”

“No that’s cool; my dad was a trucker. I used to sit on his lap while he drove. Against the law now I guess, but sure.”

Tommy went off and back to the cheap dive hotel room he was staying in. He washed up a bit—well, he washed his face and trimmed his beard—then sprayed on some cologne. It was actually air freshener but it made him smell better.

It would be the start of a good two-month relationship. That is until it wasn’t and then it ended badly.

This particular evening, he was back at the diner to pick the young lady up. She hopped in the passenger side of his cab with an ease that said she’d done it a time or two before and probably not just her dad’s truck. He drove off and per her directions he found a secluded place. There they parked, talked and drank. Both were pretty well drunk when it happened.

“Hey. Are you all right?” he asked.

“No…something’s wrong. Oh my god, my chest hurts!”

Panic didn’t set in; it never occurred to him that something bad would happen.

She continued, “I…gotta…go to…the hospital.”

“Oh come on, you’re too young to have a heart attack. Just grin and bear it and it will go away. Stop being a hypochondriac or whatever they call it.”

“You’ll…be responsible for my death…if you don’t take me right now.”

He had been getting tired of her for a couple of weeks now, so it was as good a time as any to dump this drama queen. “I’m only responsible for me. You ain’t included.”

He jumped down from the cab of his truck and went around to her side. He opened the door and pulled her out with no concern for being gentlemanly or kind.

Pushing her to the ground, he ran back to the truck and pulled off with her screaming after him.

She’ll be fine and hitchhike home, he thought. I don’t deal with problem bitches.

*****

The vision faded, leaving Tommy confused. “When I left, you were alive.”

The voice told him, “I had a heart attack. A couple of kids found me and got me to the hospital.”

“See now, you made it anyway.” But he was aware that his stomach had a new feeling and it was about to make him puke.

The dead woman continued, “Yes, I survived but I was damaged. I spent the rest of my life partially paralyzed. I was eventually able to walk some, drag some; shamble my way around. One day as I was hobbling my way down the street, I stumbled onto a stray car. Probably the friend of a neighbor or something. No one was around and it had the keys in it. As I drove it off a cliff, I prayed to Satan to let me find you and now here you are.”

Tommy’s stomach erupted with liquid: some green, some brown, some blood; all vile tasting. He felt fear for the first time in this graveyard because the fresh dirt was parting; clods of earth falling as something arose from the grave.

A finger that once held flesh, now white bone, moved the dirt. Teasingly, one at a time, a hand emerged, pushing and pulling at the fresh mound of muck and mud. The hand was followed by the wrist then the arm. Some flesh still enveloped the limb as its owner had only been dead a short time.

Now the dirt was a hole and another arm made its way through it. Both arms moved to the side of the grave and seemed to be searching for something to grip.

“No! This can’t be happening! No way could you find your way out of your casket. That’s not possible. You’re fucking dead! I’ve had too much to drink. You’re not real.”

But in his drunken haze, she looked real. She was a perversion, a corruption; but she somehow existed. This was reality, and Tommy knew it.

Discolored, open and popping blisters seeped with ooze as wet shrouds of clothing hung loosely on deteriorating skin. Her once beautiful, long blond hair now hung like spider webs. The stench of rotted meat, embalming fluid and the putrid byproducts of bacterial growth floated through the air like a fog.

Bone peeked out of the skin on her head. Tommy didn’t want to see but couldn’t stop himself from peeking out through his hands that he had placed over his face. Fully out of the grave now, the dead woman knelt on her knees and glared at him.

His own smell of urine was added to stench of death in the air. He began to whimper as he watched the dead woman come to her feet. He could hear the sickening sound of wet suction as she slowly stood. His eyes focused on a piece of her flesh as it peeled away from her body and drifted to the ground.

She was decomposing right before his eyes.

She raised her hand and pointed a bone of a finger at him, and he clutched his chest. He felt a prickling like glass shattering on a ceramic tile floor, and a thousand, invisible tiny knives moved into his chest like they were in the hands of a skilled tattoo artist.

Tommy felt a shaking all over and he was aware that he defecated himself. He heard the sickening sound of a balloon popping as his heart stopped cold in his chest. He fell forward on the gravyard ground.

It started raining. It always rains before, during, or after the main event and for Clare, this revenge was complete.