Norman Partridge - The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists

But necessity is the mother of invention and all that. The drive-in was only about a mile from my house. So was that new cemetery I’d worried about while watching NOTLD. Along with some of the other kids in my neighborhood, I began to put two and two together. Pretty soon we hatched a plan — we could sneak over to the cemetery at night, hunt up a spot where we could see the drive-in screen, and catch at least one movie before the eleven o’clock curfew most of our parents imposed.

It seemed like we could pull it off. It was summertime. The weather was California perfect. At night, our parents were happy to turn us loose so they could relax in peace after a hot day. Usually we’d play street football, tear around on our bikes and skateboards, or head over to someone’s house and watch television reruns if we got bored. We weren’t exactly missed if we didn’t show up for two or three hours.

I remember a lot of things about those summer nights. I remember the scent of anise, a hot licorice smell that drifted from plants we called “skunk cabbage.” I remember the buzz of mosquitoes and street lights, and the one-speaker backbeat of A. M. radio rock on KFRC and KYA out of San Francisco. I remember arguing about the real identity of the Zodiac Killer (who’d begun his murderous spree in my hometown), and whether Paul McCartney was really dead or not, and how many gunmen were on that grassy knoll in Dallas. And I remember our walks to the cemetery.

We’d start at the edge of our housing tract, where the street dead-ended. There was a marsh on the other side of the bent guardrail that marked the boundary of our neighborhood, and we had to be careful there… one slip and you’d end up with a swamped tennis shoe that would squeak all night. But if we were careful, and if there was a good moon, we could make it across the marsh easily. Usually we didn’t even need a flashlight.

At the other side of the marsh, we’d work our way through stands of cattails to the music of croaking bullfrogs, and when we left the cattails behind we’d find ourselves at the edge of the cemetery. There wasn’t even a fence around the place. No kind of boundary at all. Just a wall of cattails, and then a well-manicured lawn.

The cemetery sloped up a hill. A paved road wound through the place, but we never followed that. We’d cross the grass, picking our way around the grave markers—my own grandfather’s, the alcoholic barber’s, the neighbors we’d liked and disliked—and we’d climb to a little ridge that overlooked the road… and the drive-in screen.

There was a little shade tree with a canopy of low branches at the top of the hill. That’s where we’d get comfortable, lying flat on the cool grass where no one was likely to notice us. After the first movie started, one of us would sneak across the road and slip into the drive-in (there were a few holes in the fence, and I knew where they were courtesy of my friend Chris). Usually the last few parking rows were empty unless the place was really packed, and we’d turn up as many speakers as we could. This way we could hear the movie as well as see it, even from our vantage point across the road.

Sitting on that hill as one summer blended into the next, I was introduced to Count Yorga, the abominable Dr. Phibes, and Blacula. They left their marks on me, but they didn’t really scare me. Not the way the caretaker did.

All the kids in my neighborhood had heard stories about him. They said that the caretaker worked for the cemetery as kind of a night-watchman—he kept an eye out for vandals, or kids who might park in the cemetery to neck, or kids (like us) who might sneak up on the hill to watch drive-in movies for free. We’d all heard that he had a horribly scarred face, and that his face was the reason he worked nights at the cemetery—he was far too ugly to work a job where people might get a look at him in the daylight.

I’d heard that he was stone-cold crazy, too. That he did horrible things to the kids he caught. Chris’ older brother had told us stories about the caretaker dragging trespassers into the mortuary, where he’d lock them up in a pitch-black viewing room with only a corpse for company. And if part of the evening’s business was a cremation, I’d heard that the caretaker would force trespassers to watch his coworkers feed the dear departed to the crematorium oven’s flames.

Of course, I didn’t believe any of those stories. Not really. Though I didn’t know anything about “urban legends” at the time, I knew that the stories about the caretaker probably weren’t true. They couldn’t be, because they always involved “a friend of a friend,” and they never ended with the caretaker getting fired or arrested for the crazy things he did. But there was something about those stories that sent a chill up my spine, even so. They made me want to believe that they were true, even though I knew I shouldn’t. They were the kind of stories the human race had been telling since the first cavemen gathered around a fire, not much different from the stories my dad told about bloody footprints or the Green Man, or the stories my friends told about phantom hitchhikers or that ghostly haunter-of-bathroom-mirrors, Mary Worth.

So I didn’t really believe the stories about the caretaker, but that didn’t stop me from being afraid of him. I spent a good portion of my time at the cemetery looking over my shoulder, or listening for a quiet footfall on the well-manicured lawn.

But no one ever got close to us at the cemetery. Every once in awhile we’d hear a sound, or we’d see someone on the far side of the grounds walking around with a flashlight. And every now and then our eyes would follow the little road that wound through the grave-markers and we’d notice the mortuary door standing open in the middle of the night. Maybe someone would be standing there smoking a cigarette, and we’d glance at each other and we wouldn’t have to say a word, because we all knew that the only smart thing to do was run.

At moments like that, whatever was on the screen was instantly forgotten. Count Yorga, or Blacula, or Dr. Phibes… it didn’t matter. We’d run from the caretaker, hoping that we wouldn’t be locked up in a pitch-black room with a corpse for company, praying that we’d never find out what a dead body smelled like when it hit the crematorium flames. And when we reached the marsh, when we charged through the cattails and made it to the dead-end street beyond and the safety of its streetlight glow, we’d look back into the darkness and find that no one had followed us at all.

I’m sure there was no one to follow us.

I’m sure there never was a caretaker.

But that didn’t stop us from talking about him. When we were sure that we were safe, we’d sit there at the end of the street and tell all the caretaker stories one more time. It didn’t matter how many times I heard them. They always made me shiver.

I loved hearing those stories. I loved telling them, too.

And now I’ve told them to you.

I never really wrote about any of these things, until now.

I did write about the drive-in and the cemetery across the street. Much of the action in my first novel, Slippin’ into Darkness , took place there. But there weren’t any buxom vampires in that book. No George Romero zombies. No Frankenstein or Dracula, no Dr. Phibes or Count Yorga or Blacula. There weren’t any monsters at all.

Of course, there weren’t any hunchbacks with muscle cars, either. No dads nearly lighting the projection booth on fire with their friends. No kids eating buckets of day-old popcorn or drinking forbidden concession-dispenser Cokes. There was a cemetery caretaker, but he was a harmless old guy. He didn’t have a hideously scarred face, and he didn’t lock up anyone in a mortuary viewing room or crematorium.