Joe Lansdale - Lost Echoes

“Her head was near cut off,” Joey said. “Let’s see if there’s blood.”

They went over close and shined the light around. The blood had long since been cleaned off the floor and the jukebox, but there were little spots of something on the wall, and the trio decided to believe it was blood, even if it wasn’t.

“It’s stuffy in here,” Kayla said.

“Yeah,” Harry said. “And cold too.”

“I thought there was a ghost if it got chilly,” Joey said. “You know, they call it cold spots. She’d be in this spot, wouldn’t she? This would be the spot, right?”

“I look like an expert on ghosts?” Harry said. “How would I know?”

“There isn’t any ghost,” Kayla said.

Joey poked at Harry with his finger, making Harry jump.

“Don’t need a ghost,” Joey said. “Harry’s scared enough.”

Harry shoved at Joey. Hard. Knocked him back against the wall, stumbling into the jukebox, causing him to lean against it.

“Hey,” Joey said. “I didn’t mean nothing.”

Joey put a hand on the jukebox to right himself, jostling it further. The record on the spindle dropped and there was a clacking sound as it fell against the one beneath it.

The little snapping together of those old-style records was to Harry like the sound of two cymbals being slammed together, and there were bursts of other sounds, unidentified—sounds that seemed to lurk behind some invisible barrier—and there was lots of light, like he had experienced before, but brighter yet, and really hot this time.

And there was Loretta Lynn, singing about Fist City. The words to the song were at first muffled, like some kind of insect beating its wings in a bag, then they became identifiable and loud, as if the words and notes were solid things, invisible creatures hopping about the room, landing on his ears, crawling inside. And inside the darkness of his noggin a paint store exploded. Colors burst in every direction and there was a loud thump, and another sound like someone drawing a line on paper with a ballpoint pen. Then he felt warm, and there was pressure, as if he had been wrapped too tight in fuzzy wool blankets.

Then the images: a room, the very room he was in, lit up bright and very clear. Him standing alone in its center, and yet he was somehow viewing from overhead as well.

There was nothing else in the room in that moment, not Kayla, not Joey. Just the warmth and the light and the tight sensation, and then there was a woman in a short black dress, not a young woman, but someone his mother’s age. She was standing against the jukebox. And there was a man. Like the woman, he seemed to come from nowhere; shadows rushed out of some hole, gathered up, and made him. His face was unshaven, and he had a big scar on his upper lip, little ones on his cheeks. When he moved, his thick black hair shook as if it were a mop.

The man had a curved-bladed knife in his hand.

The knife flashed out and the overhead light caught the blade and made it shine like a glimpse of torchlit silver down in a mine. Then it moved out of the light and red beads leaped. The beads froze. In that moment Harry saw that the woman, who had turned and opened her mouth to speak, had a red cord around her neck. Then it came to him that it wasn’t a cord at all. It was a cut. A fine line growing wide.

The red beads came unfrozen and flew about, and she stumbled forward, and the man grabbed her, and slung her against the jukebox. She tried to get up, a hand at her wound, but he slashed across her throat again, cutting her hand, severing the tip of one of her fingers. When she jerked her cut hand away, she fell, one hand on the jukebox.

She looked up. Her dark eyes narrowed. Her expression was like the one you had when you found you’d put your hand into something you’d rather not touch.

Loretta continued to sing.

The man leaned forward, hooked the knife under her left ear, and pulled hard and slow under her chin, along the now thick red line he had made, pulled the knife almost all the way to the other ear.

Her head sagged, knocked against the jukebox.

Her eyes went flat and dead as blackened pennies.

Blood was everywhere.

The man stepped back and Harry could see his face, but just for a moment, because the shadows that had made him came apart and fled in all directions and the man was gone. It was the same for the woman, a flutter of darkness, and she was out of there, and the song went with her, as if the words were being sucked down a drain.

Harry was left with the tight warmth and the light. Then the light faded and it got cool and his head exploded all over the place in bursts of color. He ended up finally in grayness, then blackness.

“Harry, you all right?”

It was Kayla. She was holding her arm under his head, and she was leaning over him, her long blond hair dangling around his face like a curtain, and he could smell that fine shampoo smell, the overdose of perfume, and for a moment he thought the ghosts that had jumped on him, filled his head, sick and ugly as they were, might be worth it just to have him end up with Kayla’s arm behind his head.

“I saw the ghost,” he said. “More than one.”

“We didn’t see dick,” Joey said.

“You had to. The woman…the knife.”

“Dick,” Joey said.

“Kayla?” Harry asked.

“Dick,” she said.

“I saw it. I tell you, I saw it.”

“Dick,” Joey said. “There was dick. You fainted, you sissy.”

“No, you’re not,” Kayla said. “You got hot. It’s hot in here.”

“Sissy,” Joey said.

“Tell me about it,” Kayla said.

He told them.

“Sometimes some people see ghosts that others don’t,” Kayla said.

“We’d have seen it,” Joey said. “There was ghosts, we’d have seen them. What’s wrong with our eyes, huh?”

Harry sat up, hating to lose Kayla’s arm at the back of his neck. Hating it a lot, but feeling he had to do it, had to sit up, try and look a little less wimpy.

“I saw that on TV,” Kayla said. “Some people see them, some don’t.”

“You seen that on TV, did you?” Joey said. “Where’s that? The Sissy Channel?”

7

“Cut from ear to ear?” Kayla asked.

Harry nodded.

“Wow,” she said.

They were sitting on Harry’s porch, day after the night of the big event. Joey was not around. Harry was glad of that today. He didn’t need reinforcements for this.

“Thanks for pretending to believe me,” he said.

“You’re welcome…. Wait a minute. I’m not pretending.”

“Really?”

“I believe you believe it.”

“Then you don’t believe me? Which is it, Kayla?”

“I don’t think you’re lying to me, but I think you might have dreamed it, fainted from the heat, hit your head, dreamed it. We didn’t see anything.”

“I thought you saw on TV how one person could see it and another couldn’t. Saw it on the Sissy Channel.”

She laughed and punched his arm. Hard. It really hurt. He rubbed it.

“Sorry,” she said.

“You never know your own strength…. But you don’t believe I saw a ghost?”

“It’s just hard to accept.”

“You went to see a ghost.”

“Sure. It was fun. But I didn’t really expect to. I just wanted to go because you were going.”

“Really?”

“Really. I believe you saw something. Even if you dreamed it. You wouldn’t lie to me about something like that. Would you?”

“Nope. You’d beat me up.”

“Seriously.”

“Seriously, you’d beat me up.”

“I would. But seriously. You wouldn’t, would you, Harry?”

“Never.”

“I didn’t think so. Did you tell your parents?”

“No,” Harry said, shaking his head. “I couldn’t tell them where I was—you know.”