The Island Ch 6

[The Galiant Fuck]

She was different form everyone else in the vicinity. Alluring to some, and frightening to everyone else. It was not intentional within her to be either of those two things.


Perhaps it is the bane of them original types of people? Most folks might consider such things to be a curse, but her spirit was a blessing in no disguise for those of us who recognized her creativity and originality. Perhaps that is why these tales are being told by this here damned, drunken Injun. She left her mark in the world. For better, or for something even better


…and some have become infected by such a wild spirit; inured; and empowered.


The Island Chronicals Chapter 6 GET OUT



Now, before we head west, let me tell you a couple of secret things. Don’t tell anyone, nor ever post it on the internet. Folks steal, and this tale is ripe for the plucking. Maybe this shouldn’t be written on this private page?


Let me ask my two-handled bottle of black ink before I continue. Will you partake with me, my good friend?

3…

2…

1…


CHUG


Ahhhh… This curious bottle, she tells me to chase her dark fluid to the end. No harsh on you if you never give your bottle a hickey on her mouth part. Chalices are meant to be kissed as well, with mixers and ice and such. Always DRINK! Tahoo.


*ahem*


Before the leavening, there were some slightly innocent things that I did without her permission. I finally admitted them to her on her death bed, to make her laugh. These are the only ones I told her, and they occurred form back when we lived on the Island. I have never told her nor anybody else about what happened out west after that. Well, except for you, you secrets-holder.


…Shhh…


The fucked-up kids I grew up with would never let me smoke a cigarette that they stole form their own moms, aunts, and grandmothers. Nobody had a father, or everyone had the same fathers, or else maybe it was all confusion. Them kids called me “Professor” because I was born a nerd. I made robots out of discarded washing machine motors and busted stereos, and explosives back when I was eight. I re-joined their crew when I moved back home from the Rez by the ocean.


These friggin kids, why, they made pig bikes. They stole bikes form other kids over across the bridge, in town, and then they’d take parts that they wanted, and put together a Frankenstein’s Bicycle. It was called a pig bike, for some odd reason. Banana seats with sissy bars were all the rage.


They liked to sneak into the movies over at the local cinema where the YMCA is now. We’d go looking for returnables by the road side and in ditches form the drunk drivers who chucked them out of their windows on Friday and Saturday nights (so they wouldn’t have an empty container in their vehicle when they got pulled over for chucking an empty out of their car window) and save up enough cash for one of us to get a ticket.


Usually it was me, because I looked more innocent than I really was. I could ham it up, like what folks today mean by “work it.”


Then someone (me) would buy a ticket to a G rated cartoon or someshit because them were the rules. I’d wait and keep checking, and when the coast was clear, I’d sneak into the R rated movie we were after. I’d go down the aisle and open up the emergency exit door down by the screen. If other folks were in there, they would just chuckle. Proper church going people didn’t go to R rated movies back then. And no, Oett, there was no emergency alarm on the exits back in the 70’s.


We snuck into The Warriors and had a grand old time. It was still early in the year, but the sun had been shining for a couple of weeks so the snow melted enough for us to ride our pig bikes. After watching that movie, they wanted to call themselves The Choppers. Kids on bikes wanted to be a gang. Kinda cute, looking back. But we weren’t after cute. We needed to have a gang hide-out.


Now, there was a long-abandoned two-story house built in the early 1900’s with all the windows smashed out. It was the broken window rule. When someone throws a rock through the glass window of an abandoned building and it isn’t fixed soon enough, it becomes open season on the rest of the windows.


The paint was all worn off, and the clapboard was dark grey. It had an ominous appearance, like a tomb stone. It was lovely. All of the windows were gone, along with the square cupula for the weather vane on the ridge. That was gone too, and it left a square hole where all the rain and snow entered. I stuck my head up through the hole and I see over the treetops because the house was on a hill, with its own small hill to boot. I could see over town. I could see for miles and miles and miles. I could see the west coast and California.



I kid you on that part about seeing what the future would hold.



We explored that creepy place. There was one room with old mattresses piled up, along with nasty, moldy couches and broken tables. The kitchen was kinda cool, for a haunted house. The woodstove was crafted form heavy cast iron, like a black skillet. It had chromed ornates or the edges and a good size firebox on the side, like a steam-powered 55 Chevy could be. It was the heart of the whole place. Heat and the smell of food would rise up through the grates in the ceiling, and those were made from black iron as well. Except that nothing was black anymore. It was all coated with dust covered rust.


We moved in, which means that we snuck in candles and ash trays and other flammable things. No pay no mind. We were dangerous kids, but this is not foreshadowing. This not the house to explode. That would occur at another time, in the distant future.


There was one thing that kept us interested. It was a tall mirror in the corner of the front parlor. Amazing that the mirror was still unbroken. The slivering on the back was veined with thin lines of tarnish, like varicose spider webs. The edges of the heavy glass were beveled to fit in the framing. It had coat hooks above its face, and a small sill on the front to take one’s boots off. The short legs holding it up appeared to be dragon feet, holding the balls of doomed knights. Atop, on each corner: gargoyle faces leered and snarled, frozen in perpetual damnation. This was no ordinary mirror.


We knew all the local folklore about how to play a game with red and black candles in front of it. Light two black candles and place them on the seat/sill, far apart as they would go. Then carry a lit red candle in from the other room and say these words, “elegantissimus omnium philosophorum literarum felicitimus” and then ask the mirror any question at all. You’d have to spin around counter clockwise three times and repeat the words and your question.

It was said that one young lady asked who she would marry. Mind you, those older teens had been partying to build up their courage beforehand. Hey, in this case, never mix your spirits. She asked her question and stood there with her red candle quivering in her hand. The flame flickered out and the mirror was lit from below, by the two remaining black ones. It made her face look odd in the mirror. Her face faded away and an image of a coffin with black candles at each end appeared. The flames blew out, and they all stumbled the hell out of there.


She was in a fatal car accident a couple of years later. But it must have been a coincidence. That is what we kept telling ourselves in our new club house. We were The Choppers, and we were little bad-asses.


Until we found the bones in the cellar a couple of weeks later. It went like this: in the root cellar, there were shelves for preserves. The last self case that still held Mason jars was at the far end, and I saw a door handle, behind an old jar of pickles that I was about to smash on the floor. We pulled the shelf case away and found a little door set into the stone wall there.


We figured that maybe someone was hiding something behind it, like a buried treasure. Of course that was it. Maybe it was cursed treasure, just like the mirror was cursed. We never fooled with the mirror. We kept telling ourselves that we were sensible, that we weren’t young chicken-shits. In being sensible, we decided to bust open the little door.


I got a hammer and a crow bar form my dad’s tool shed, and we met at our clubhouse after dinner one day. The summer sun lit the sky with a waning glow from the western slant. We would have to get back home when the streetlamps blinked on. If I was late, I’d have to kick out the one at the end of the driveway, run to the steps and then point at it for my dad’s information.


Greg held the crow bar and he pointed to Harry, who was handy. He said, “If you hit my hand, I’ll fuck you up.”


Harry looked over at me and said, “Hey, it’s your dad’s tools. You swing the hammer. It’s only fair.”


Darren said, “I’ll do it!” and we all said “NOOOO!”


Greg said, “Frig it. I’ll swing it. Tater, come over here and hold this pry bar. Point it between the door and the jamb.”


Tater said, “Duh, OK Greggy.” Tater was sometimes useful like that.


With two loud clangs, the wood splintered and the chisel end went in deep. Then we all tugged and pulled and the crow bar took out a big chunk of wood. Greg frowned. He said, “Looks like we gonna be here a while.”


I looked up the cellar stair well, past the red candles. The sky began to dim. I said, “We better get a move on. Streetlights will be on in a bit.”


After about ten minutes, we got the latch side of the door all busted apart. Then all we had to do was kick it the rest of the way open. That took some effort, I tell you. We ended up sweaty, and sneezing in the silt we’d raised into the air from our taking turns on it. I grabbed the flashlight and shined it in there. It was just mounds of dirt. Strange. So we set about poking the mounds with sticks and the crow bar and came across some bones buried there. That was our turn to get the hell out of there.


We ran and never looked back. We never returned. We left the candles going, and I left my dad’s hammer and crow bar down in that basement.


He always wondered who borrowed them and didn’t return them, but no one had any idea whatsoever help me Gawd.


Years later, I discovered that the last family living there used to keep dogs in the basement in the winter time. Maybe those were dog bones. That’s what I tell myself these days.



You know, that property for that creepy big house was eventually sold and the house demolished. Someone said that they watched the mirror taken out all dolled up in furniture wrap and shipped away in the back of a truck. Someone else said that whenever the mirror changed hands, it was because the new owner suddenly perished. The mirror was returned to the property, and it was put back into the house, in the corner where it originally sat. That part I saw to be true. I looked in through the window, and yup, there it was.


The house was demolished with the mirror left inside, and nobody ever built a house on that spot after that. Today, there is a double-wide on the far corner, away form where the house used to be. I don’t blame them at all.



Time for a deep draught of black ink. It’s warm out this afternoon, but I suddenly got a bit o’ the heebie-jeebies, the shivers, the willies.


Cheers, mate.


.

[oettinger]

Creepy tale young man.
Presonally I don`t belive in weird things like ghosts. Imagine all the empties you killed haunting you. Oh my

[Dear Booze]

Another fantastic from The Galiant Fuck. I wish these would show up more frequently. And ol' GF should join us on the Skype once in a while.