Long black coffin, p.1
Long Black Coffin, page 1
LONG BLACK COFFIN
By Tim Curran
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Digital Edition Copyright © 2018 Tim Curran
Original publication by DarkFuse
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Tim Curran is the author of the novels Skin Medicine, Hive, Dead Sea, Resurrection, Hag Night, Skull Moon, The Devil Next Door, Doll Face, Afterburn, House of Skin, and Biohazard. His short stories have been collected in Bone Marrow Stew and Zombie Pulp. His novellas include The Underdwelling, The Corpse King, Puppet Graveyard, Worm, and Blackout. His short stories have appeared in such magazines as City Slab, Flesh&Blood, Book of Dark Wisdom, and Inhuman, as well as anthologies such as Shadows Over Main Street, Eulogies III, and October Dreams II. His fiction has been translated into German, Japanese, Spanish, and Italian. Find him on Facebook at: https://www.facebook.com/tim.curran.77
Bibliography
Novels
Afterburn
Biohazard
Cannibal Corpse
Dead Sea
Doll Face
Graveworm
Grim Riders
Grimweave
Hag Night
Hive
Hive 2: The Spawning
House of Skin
Long Black Coffin
Monstrosity
Nightcrawlers
Resurrection
Skin Medicine
Skull Moon
Terror Cell
The Devil Next Door
Novellas
Blackout
Corpse Rider
Deadlock
Fear Me
Headhunter
Leviathan
Puppet Graveyard
Sow
Tenebris
The Corpse King
The Underdwelling
Toxic Shadows
Worm
Collections
Bone Marrow Stew
Here There be Monsters
Zombie Pulp
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“Who is this who is coming?”
—M.R. James
LONG BLACK COFFIN
Table of Contents
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Epilogue
Other books by Tim Curran
1
Every town has a history, and every closet has its skeleton. In the case of Lynnstown, its history was dark and its closet held a monster. This particular monster did not sleep in a coffin or howl beneath the full moon, it did not hide yellow-eyed and leering in closets or wait fanged and ravenous beneath cellar stairs to prey on the unwary. It was a different sort of monster, and being that its victims were children, in many ways it was worse.
Daniella May Addams was the first. Just after sunset, she was sent exactly two blocks to a neighborhood store called McKandy’s to pick up a loaf of bread for her father’s supper. She was seen by two people on the way there, one of whom was her fifth-grade teacher who was out walking her dog. Daniella purchased the bread, stepped out of the jingling door of McKandy’s and became a statistic. The second victim was Louise “Missy” Schreiber, aged nine. Three months after the Addams girl became a common sight on MISSING flyers and billboards, Missy returned from an afternoon softball game and dropped out of sight. Like the Addams girl, she was less than two blocks from home. The final victim was a boy this time, Charles Warden. He was twelve-years-old. Five weeks after Missy Schreiber’s ill-fated softball game, Charles was watching TV with his younger sister. His parents were across the street playing cards. There was a knock on the door, according to the sister. Charles answered it, chatting with someone the sister did not see in the dark. Charles said he’d be right back, stepped out onto the porch and was never seen again.
At this point, the monster’s reign of terror ended. By the standards set by other such creatures, it wasn’t exactly prolific. It came out of nowhere, did its dark deeds, and then vanished into the woodwork of Lynnstown. The bodies of the three children were never found. As time passed, it was relegated to a cautionary tale told by adults and a ghost story told by children themselves. It became part of the town’s lore and a particular ugly skeleton in its closet.
People did not forget, but as the years piled up and new tragedies came and went, they moved on and the monster was relegated to disused dusty shelves in the memory of the town where it yellowed like an old photograph.
What was done could not be undone and one day, it was suspected, a hunter or hiker would stumble across a set of small moldered bones after the winter snowmelt and there would be closure, if not answers, for one of the families and the town itself.
Lynnstown put the monster out of its collective mind.
Then, fifteen years later, it returned.
2
In retrospect, maybe I should have seen it coming because it was there even then, unfolding its dark wings and casting its night-black shadow over my life. But it hadn’t yet taken definitive shape; it was formless, elemental, just waiting to become something. And when it did, it would gut a lot of lives, leaving a lot of souls barren and burnt in its wake.
But I knew nothing of that, of course.
It was Friday night, and I wanted to have a good time. So, after I finished my shift over at the lumberyard—the absolute shining pinnacle of McJobs—I brushed off the sawdust, cleaned up, and went over to see Kurt Tamerlyn. Kurt had been kicked out of college for like the third time. He’d told me why probably half a dozen times, but I couldn’t seem to remember the reason. Something to do with pissing. Pissing in class? Pissing in the wind, pissing himself? It didn’t much matter. Kurt was out of control and he had been for years. Like myself, he was drifting and not much of anything seemed to matter but having a good time.
When I got over there, pulling into the driveway, the music was cranking and Stella, Kurt’s mom, was yelling above the din. Like most things in her existence, her son brought her pain and I could see that pain simmering in her dark eyes when I opened the door. She stood there, not inviting me in, just staring me down like she was waiting for something, an explanation maybe as to why her son had no common sense and why I seemed to encourage this.
“Hello, Kurt’s mom,” I said to her like always.
“Don’t try that with me,” she said. “You two are up to something. Where is it you think you’re going?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t got there yet.”
“You’re going out drinking again, aren’t you?”
“Us?”
“Yes.”
“You wanna know if we’re going out drinking?”
“I’m not in the mood for this, Johnny.”
“In the mood for what, ma’am?”
Poor Stella.
Upstairs, Kurt killed Acid Witch and yelled down the stairs, “Is that Johnny Bree? That my Rock-and-Roll Johnny? Yeah, that’s the boy! You met Johnny Bree before, my dear mother, my sweet sage of parental suffering? Why, it’s said he carries his guitar in a gunny sack{MISSING SYMBOL}”
“Oh, knock it off,” Stella called up to him.
“Mother of my heart, you take fine care of my Johnny Bree, will ya? Ya’ll give him none but the finest amenities this here white trash family can bestow…are you with me on this, dear mother? My heart, my love, my bestest and finest girl…”
“Shut up!” Stella snapped.
Poor Stella. Sweet sage of parental suffering, all right. Kurt had a mouth that was open twenty-four/seven and I could only imagine what living with that sarcastic bastard must have been like…let alone knowing you were his mother and he was the fruit of your loins.
“Johnny Bree? You there?”
“I’m here.”
My parents named me Johnny Breede, but everyone called me “Breed” or “Johnny Bree” which was just fine in my book since I’d been called lots of other things and most of them were not quite so complimentary. “Breed” was sort of a family nickname for the male members of the tribe. My old man, Louis Breede, had been called the same until he got in his fifties and by then everyone just called him “Louey the Lush.”
Kurt called down: “Don’t you be trying to make time with my pure and pristine mother, Johnny boy. Why, her virtue is legendary in all counties but this one. Mix my mom a drink, will ya? She’s getting dry.”
“You better shut up!” Stella warned him, stomping off.
I leaned up against the staircase, smoking a cigarette and shaking my head. What a family, what a fucking family.
3
Stella was a widow.
Kurt’s dad had been in Vietnam where he’d nurtured an innate love of violence that would not come to full flower until many years later. But when he was drinking—which was just about every day—Vic would tell Kurt and me stories about what a Viet looked like when he was cut in half by a .50-cal machine gun or how long it took a dead body to bloat up in the jungle. Happens quick, real quick, he’d say with a cruel, metallic gleam in his eye. You can almost see it happening like somebody stuck a tube up they asses and filled ’em with air. Buttons on they uniforms start popping off like bullets. Ping, ping, ping! It’s something, all right. You give it a day or two and they get all green and mossy, get toadstools growing out of they mouths and eye sockets, fungus thick as dog fur sprouting from they ass cracks. How Vic knew about what was going on with their asses, we never asked, but I always had an image of him flipping bloated corpses over with the scuffed toe of his combat boot, yanking down their skivvies so he could see nature filling empty cracks with fruiting life.
Vic hadn’t been much on the parental front, but both Kurt and I had been enthralled by the character he was. It wasn’t until later that we realized that old Vic Tamerlyn was a guy with so much baggage he had to push it around in a wheelbarrow. Vic had a cherry 1967 gloss-black GTO hardtop that no one was allowed to touch. It was sacred to him. And that made perfect sense later when, just shy of his 53rd birthday, he got behind the wheel one blustery October night and put the barrel of a 12-gauge Remington pump under his chin and pulled the trigger. Although classic car enthusiasts referred to the GTO as a “Goat”, since that time Kurt had morbidly called his father’s “The Coffin”.
Anyway, Stella had been screwed-up ever since, understandably…though Kurt was of the mind that she was not right long before. Like woodrot invading a deserted house, it did not happen overnight.
Regardless, Stella hadn’t been much since then. She sat alone in that old house, sucking down memories and martinis{MISSING SYMBOL}gin and vermouth in a water glass with a single olive floating in it like a dead man’s eyeball drifting in brine{MISSING SYMBOL}and cried a lot. Over the wreckage of her life. Her husband. Her son. Most things, in fact. Just crazy over it all. Crazy with grief. Crazy with life. Crazy with the fact that her son wouldn’t amount to anything and that she was getting older by the minute. But most of all, crazy with loneliness. And sooner or later, we all get to know that kind of crazy.
I felt sorry for her.
I teased her, baited her, got under her skin a lot, but I honestly felt sorry for her.
Mostly, anyway. She really loved Kurt’s dad. Maybe their relationship was more Weekly World News than Family Circle, but it was too bad how it all turned out for her. Fate was funny that way, though. It was not only cruel, but unbearably twisted in its machinations. What my old man called “the fickle fucking finger of funny fate”. I figured that when Stella was young and Vic had slipped that wedding ring on her finger she never guessed that one day she’d be mopping his brains off the dashboard of a ’67 Goat.
Stella wasn’t old. Vic had had twenty years on her—she was seventeen and he was 38 when he knocked her up in the back of The Coffin—and she wouldn’t even be forty for another year. She could still hook someone if it wasn’t for her drinking and that mouth of hers. She wasn’t bad looking at all. I thought she still had it going on (though I’d never say that to Kurt). She had nice legs and dark eyes, short choppy black hair and a cruel look around her mouth that was sexy in a hard, remorseless sort of way.
But Stella didn’t seem to want a new man in her life.
And maybe that was because she had yet to exorcize the old one.
When Kurt was away at college, I tried my damnedest to be kind to her. I tried to take care of her. I cut her grass, raked her leaves, shoveled her snow. Whatever it took. I figured it was the least I could do. It was funny. When Kurt was around, our relationship was cool and often volatile, but when he was gone off to school, it mellowed. I took care of her the best I could and she took care of me. She liked to play the good mother and feed me, even though she didn’t really know one end of a stove from another. She’d burn a casserole or start a chicken on fire and I would go out of my way to tell her how good it was. Afterwards, she liked to talk. To get things off her chest. It was something she needed and being without family or friends, I became her confidant. Now and again, I’d take a drink with her which was always a mistake because she’d get loaded and start talking about her dead husband like he was away on business and not planted out at Lakeside Memorial feeding the worms.
“I could tell you things about Vic that would turn your hair white,” she’d say over her third or fourth martini.
“What sort of things?” I’d ask.
But she’d just shake her head. “Secrets. Bad secrets.”
It wasn’t until later that I realized just how bad they were.
4
I got tired of waiting and went upstairs to Kurt’s room. “C’mon, already, fuckhead. Are we going out or what? I’m getting thirsty here.”
“You need to cut back on your alcohol consumption,” Kurt said. “Many is the day I pray to the good Lord above that the monkey shall be duly lifted from your back. Get thee behind me, Satan, you and your perverse imp of desire! Spare my fine young friend Johnny Bree from the evils of alcohol and the hell of intemperance! Take my hand, Mr. Johnny Breede, take it into your own and let us walk into the light together…”
“Shut up and get your ass moving.”
Kurt rolled out of his bed. “Oh, but to hear you speak like that! You should have some respect for my age and station in life! For I say unto you, my ass is fine, it’s the rest of me that’s seized up.”
He fell back into the bed, looking deathly. He was pale, and his eyes were bloodshot. He looked like a junkie after a hard night, like Sid Vicious must have looked after he woke up in jail and found out he’d stabbed his girlfriend about a hundred times. Thin, drawn, jittery. Worse by the day, I thought.
It took me about twenty minutes to get Kurt’s ass in gear and sometimes I didn’t know why I bothered. But finally I got him out of there and all the way out the door, Stella was bitching at us, telling us not to be getting drunk and causing trouble. And this with a glass of booze in her hand. What a pretty picture that made.
“I love you, dear mother,” Kurt told her. “I love you so much that when I tell you to kiss my ass, I mean it with complete devotion.”
