Category: Postcard Stories

Hey, there! You don’t know me yet, but I’m Haylee. I just moved in with my husband Connor next door, and I’m doing a little goodwill tour around the neighborhood just to say “hi!” so…”Hi!” I’m a little surprised that no one came to see us yet, but I get it: we’re all busy this close to the holidays, and so many of you are working full time.

Your house is absolutely one of the ones that sold us on living here. We love the clapboards, the vintage windows, the little hanging lights from Target on your pergola out back…I admire the ambition! I saw online that you bought in for just $225,000 ten years ago, which was totally a steal, so good for you. I saw a few refinances, so I hope everything’s okay. If you ever want to talk about it over a mimosa, I’m always serving!

Something you should probably know about me is that I’ve got a gift. Not the house – well, that was kind of a combination wedding and college graduation gift from my parents – but a certain talent, as some have said, for making the world better for my being in it. Like, I raise the standards of things around me. You know, so that they’re neater, cleaner, more dignified, more human.

I am so looking forward to helping everyone on this street raise their game. You don’t have as far to go as some of them, like those people over there with the moldy gnome statues imported from the year 1990. Ugh. My mother always said that wealth isn’t just a matter of money, and I guess they must have slunk in during the $200k days when you did.

She also used to say, “No one’s ever too poor to own a broom,” and that’s kinda my motto. I’ve got it stitched in a sampler over my rolltop correspondence desk.

Anyway, I see so much potential in you and your property. You don’t strike me as someone content to stay mediocre, or otherwise why would you have moved here like we did? The people who owned these houses fifty years ago deff weren’t mediocre, and I think you and I can bring a little of their spirit back.

Lawn parties, Halloween Trunk or Treats, Christmas wassailing, ladies in sundresses and men in ties, drinking Manhattans from little metal trays…I see the gears turning in your head too.  

The color of your place is so close to nice, and I can’t wait to take you with me to the Sherwin Williams store to match a new palette with what Connor and I have picked out. We’ve also found a great guy to resod your yard at the same time as ours. We’ll split out the cost through Venmo when the time comes.

Do you have a church home nearby? Am I allowed to even ask that these days with the elites listening to us through Facebook? Ha! I might as well ask your original gender and your race.

Oh, no, I’m not expecting you to tell me. I have a good feeling about you anyway.

Well, I won’t keep you any longer – I see your dog has eaten whatever sandwich you fixed for lunch, so it must have been good! – but I just wanted to let you know that of all the people on this street, I already feel like you’re kind of a sister to me. That’s one of my gifts, too, drawing good souls closer and scaring the dark ones back into messy old Hell where they eat ethnic foods for all eternity like trailer dwellers.

Oh, hey, I wanted to ask about that feral cat that’s been sniffing around our houses. I went ahead and got a trap from the humane society because the bells on his collar were too rusty for someone to still love him. Has he always been here? He seemed pretty comfortable.   

Well, anyway, keep an eye out for an invitation to the “Welcome to Our Neighborhood” soiree that we’re throwing. The dress code will be inside.

If you ever need anything, just wave through your kitchen window to mine!

Why, come on in! No problem at all. Kick the dust of your boots first, though, if you please.

This is it, the ol’ homestead. Built ‘er from plans out of the Sears catalog, and I milled the boards myself instead of buying the kit like some kind of effeminate city dweller. You can’t trust those kits, anyhow, because they’re not all made from true American timber. Some of that gets shipped down from Canada or up from those savage islands, and you can’t never get them spirits out.

You like that bear, huh? I do all my own taxidermy, just like I do all my own hunting. That’s not one of the bigger bears I’ve gotten, but he was wily in a way that some might call preternatural. I found a revolver back in his den. How about that for a kick in the seat? Was it his? Did he find it? I guess I’ll never know now.

Oh, we ain’t bothering Minnie. Deaf as a post, or so I hope. I guess you could say I built her too, though not from plans out of the Sears catalog. Met her back at the church, courted her a few Sundays, and then asked her father for her hand in marriage. One thing led to another and we had a good year, year and a half before she died.

What, you think she just moves real slow?

No, friend, she’s almost as dead as that bear, except for the dreams she still gives me. I sewed her back together after that bear got her, built her a nice new skeleton out of good Douglass Fir, and sometimes I can position her around if I get a mind to. Mostly I don’t because it’s just as good to talk to her from my chair with her working on that sewing project.

A lot of people say that, but that’s just a, what do you call it, optical illusion. Your brain jelly wants her to move so it pretends she does. At most she’ll sway a little at night if the windows are open, or a little more when I’m carrying her upstairs.

Does she smell? What kind of question is that to ask in front of a lady? Of course she doesn’t smell. She doesn’t do anything.

As you can see, your boy ain’t here. I reckon he’s just run off to the woods like they do, but if you wait here while I get my hat and rifle, I’ll come help you find him.

Around the third day, Hoppsapop stopped caring about his make-up. Which, I have to say, is about 48 hours later than I expected him to. We figured he’d come in, pose for a couple of pictures, shake Walter’s hand, and then bolt back to his favorite bar back in the city.

We would have been fine with that.

But the name of the essay contest was, “Why I Want to Spend a Week with Hoppsapop,” and Walter won it fair and square, and some lawyer at the clown show must have worried that we’d sue if he didn’t spend an even seven days streaking our guest bed sheets with makeup and leaving kinky strands of bright red hair in our sink and toilet.

If he’d stayed even sixty seconds longer, though, that’s when I would have sued.

…

I’m Walter Neussman, and I live in a boring town called Junction Falls full of boring people who think that John Birch is a hero and anybody who isn’t a Baptist is going to hell. It’s the kind of place where the librarian with the skin and whiskers of a potato will call your mom if you try to check out The Lord of the Rings.

This town’s made it pretty clear already that they don’t need or want me (or people “like” my whole family back to the Stone Age), but there is one thing I’m sure they can use: something that doesn’t quite fit into their brains. That could be a Russian invasion or an alien landing, but I figure a big sweaty clown like Hoppsapop flopping his shoes up and down Main Street would do the trick, too.

…

What did they do all day? Well, Hoppsapop woke up each morning with a groan I could hear through his bedroom wall, staggered into the bathroom for a long sonorous piss, and then dabbed on his makeup.

On the two days it rained, they played checkers and built model airplanes and made a puppet theater from old lumber in the garage. When it was sunny, they went fishing at the pond with old stick poles or on bike rides with Walter perched on the handlebars and Hoppsapop pedaling away. I think they built a fort in the woods, too.  

It wasn’t until later when I saw the muddy footprints that I realized they were sneaking out at night.

…

I’m not even that different on the outside, not like a clown would be. I have no idea why guys like Peter Riggins won’t let me play any of the pick-up games in the lot. My old man says that’s just what people do, find the outsider no matter how tight their group is. If everybody was born a clone of everybody else, they’d still hang the one who parted his hair the other way. Maybe Dad’s right, I don’t know.

Maybe what this town needs is someone REALLY different to come along, different on the inside AND the outside.

…

No, Walter didn’t know any of the missing boys, except from school. He didn’t play with them and, if I’m being honest, a few of them weren’t very welcoming or kind. He’s an independent kind of kid, though, off exploring the woods or reading in the park by himself. I was a little surprised he even wanted Hoppsapop to stay with him.

…

So that’s why I want a clown to come to town. He doesn’t have to do much, maybe freak people out a little, stare in a couple of windows, leave his nose under some pillows, honk a few kids awake in the middle of the night, laugh insanely from inside a closet, that sort of thing.

I’m open to suggestions if he’s got any.

Anyway, thanks for your consideration. I’m looking forward to spending a week with Hoppsapop.

…

What do you mean, Walter didn’t win the contest?

[From time to time, I write a short story based on a strange image and share them. Sometimes, I’ll post a classic one from long ago, too.]

As the Alzheimer’s disease took hold, Nannah’s art got stranger and stranger. Not that it was ever normal — she was what her instructors in the extension classes liked to call an “enthusiastic” artist.

She had a curious way of making ordinary artistic mistakes that somehow turned out creepy. Her stained glass frieze of the Last Supper looked like a pack of tyrannosaurs besetting their feeble young. Her lopsided bowls seemed ergonomically designed for pounding brains with a pestle. Her portrait of Grandpa in oils had slightly crossed eyes that always seemed to focus right over your shoulder, as though to warn you something was sneaking up on you.

But she was sweet and well-meaning, and it was always a frantic race to hang and position her work when she came to visit because, as my father put it, “Who wants a hunchbacked clown cookie jar leering at you every night when you go for a brew?” They all were gifts made with love if not care and we didn’t want to hurt her feelings.

Though, as her mental capacity dwindled, that got harder and harder to do. It wasn’t so much that the artwork got worse but that it got…more cheerful? Sentimental? No, no: cloying. Like you’d imagine the smell of roses in a coffin, or the taste of your fifteenth white chocolate cupcake in a row.

What was scary was that she got better at drawing and painting and sculpting as her mind pulled away from her body, and that the things she produced were utterly alien in their innocence. The less creepy they were, the more creepy they were — because she made them. They grew more childlike, regressing, reverting, curling backward in the womb.

Her last work was what we’ve come to call “The Cat Painting,” and it was a gift for my sister Melanie with whom she’d always shared a love for cats. Nannah had come to visit for what we all knew would be our last Thanksgiving together — the talk had gotten more serious about places that could better care for her — and we were all forcing ourselves to be as cheerful as her scary paintings.

When Melanie peeled away the paper wrapping of the frame, though, she screamed. Poor Nannah only closed her eyes and nodded, soaking in what she thought was approbation, and my dad had to catch the painting before it hit the floor and shattered.

Nobody quite knew what Melanie had seen. It was a painting of a cat clutching a branch in a tree or bush, examining a butterfly with a certain scientific disinterest. It could be an illustration in a children’s book, or something stitched onto a baby blanket, or maybe even a little girl’s stationery. Weird like Nannah’s other recent work, yes, but nothing startling.

Except to Melanie. “It was like I saw two paintings at once,” she told me years later. “One right, one wrong.”

She recovered then as best she could, choking out a thank you to Nannah and taking the painting with the very tips of her fingers.

“Where should we hang it?” Nannah asked. “Oh, I know the perfect place!” She clasped her hands together and padded off to my sister’s room.

We all followed like condemned men because this time we were stuck. When Nannah only visited for the day, we could stow her work in a closet or the attic after she left. But as her health had gotten worse, Grandpa worried what he’d do if something happened to her on the highway, and this one night, this last night, they decided to stay over.

So there was nothing to do but hang the painting with Nannah’s swaying help, right across from the window above her bed.

“What am I going to do?” he muttered to Mom. “She’s here for one night. We hang it, we take it down, everything’s fine. She’s dying, for Christ’s sake.”

Which is how Melanie found herself awake all night, staring at that cat bathed in the moonlight.

When I got up the next morning, the door to the bathroom was locked and she was crying on the other side. I bent down and peered underneath to see her clutching her knees with the nightgown pulled over her entire body like a shield.

“What’s the matter?” I whispered.

She wouldn’t tell me at first, but I pressed my ear against the door for when she did.

“There’s a second cat,” she finally said.

When Melanie had gotten back from the center that time, Mom and Dad made me swear to tell them if she ever did anything weird or scary again. Being a bigger sister, everything she did was weird and scary, but this time, I knew it was important. So I pressed even closer to the linoleum floor and whispered under the door, “I’ll be right back.”

But of course I wasn’t. When I ran downstairs, my parents were already awake, already upset, Mom crying into tissues while my father held her close. Nannah lay still in the guest bed, peaceful and utterly quiet. I watched a long time and she didn’t move. Mom pulled me against her nightgown and I told her through the fabric that Melanie was in trouble, that something was wrong, but nobody could hear me. They only found her an hour later, still crying in the bathroom, knowing already that Nannah was gone.

Melanie went back to the center for a few months after that, and she comes and goes even today. Opinion in our family is strongly divided between whether there were one or two cats in Nannah’s painting when she first brought it; my parents say two while Melanie and I say one. I’m less sure than she is, but I figure somebody ought to agree with her.

Melanie’s an artist now, and she keeps Nannah’s painting above her bed. She’s had boyfriends leave in the middle of the night, saying they heard it whispering to them, saying that the cats switched places, saying that the butterfly touched down upon my sister in her sleep. I think it’s a kind of Rorschach test she puts them through, and I don’t think anyone has ever passed.

She paints things like that herself now, and she says she understands. She tells me that an artist gives away a little of herself in every work if she’s any good, and all that happened with Nannah’s painting is that she gave away the last.

Once, drunk at a long distant Thanksgiving, she said, “When there’s three cats, you can have it.”

Boy, you know what kids with grades like these end up doing?

Cleaning sex robots.

Middle school is Waterloo-time, kiddo. Your whole world gets decided here, not just by your permanent school record but by your heart. And as I’m looking over this report card, I’m seeing one thing.

You’ve got the heart of a sex robot cleaner.

You’ll ride to work every day in an old filthy bus with people going to jobs just like yours, but a tiny bit better. You won’t be in a jacket and tie but a jumpsuit, and you’ll carry your paper bag lunch into a building with no markings on the outside. Then you’ll take your station beside a stainless-steel table with a hundred other sex robot cleaners like a giant morgue.

Day after day, hour after hour, they’ll wheel in wooden crates that look like coffins, and you’ll have exactly 17 minutes per cleaning to keep up your quota. Some will take less. Some will take much, much more.

And we’re talking about a thorough cleaning. Thorough.

That doesn’t mean a once-over with a sponge before you roll her back in the crate. It means a tray covered in picks and swabs like at the dentist’s office. It means hoses of pressurized water and air to get stuff out of crevices. It means a drain underneath. It means a black light on a swivel arm so you can see every glowing spot.

You’ll snap gloves onto your wrinkled fingers and get to work on the first one, trying not to think about the much wealthier man who sent it in for you to clean. He got A’s in school, that’s why he’s rich enough to own one. That’s why he’s rich enough to pay guys like you to pick it clean.

They’ll probably smell, the robots. If you’re lucky, it’ll be cheap lavender spray. If you’re not, it’ll be the reek of sweat and feet and the things rich men pay others to smell.

Sometimes — maybe most of the time — they’ll be damaged, and you’ll wonder how it happened. You’ll disconnect a speaker that’s still softly moaning, and you’ll wonder how the skull got cracked or why there are twenty circular burns on the inner thighs. You’ll find a broken blade or some frayed rope in the bottom of the box. You’ll swab something out of the ear or the nose and ask yourself how it could have gotten there. You’ll check the feet and see they’re filthy, but that’s impossible because these robots don’t walk. They just sit and lie around and sometimes kneel.

You’ll wonder why almost all the robots are female.

That bus will take you home to an empty apartment. You won’t be living with someone, that’s for sure — years of seeing what men do to woman-shaped things will either scare you at your own potential or thrill you. Either way, you won’t love human beings. You may love some plastic parts you’ve stolen from work and keep under your bed. You won’t be able to look women in the eye.

When Thanksgiving and Christmas come, there will be nowhere to go. Your mom and I will be dead by then, and I’ll be damned if I’m leaving you the farm. Maybe you’ll treat yourself to a milkshake at the mall food court or a gray steak at a diner. You’ll probably read a book or something because you’ll still like that.

Eventually, you’ll die. If you’re fortunate, you’ll simply go limp one day and ooze from the top of your last half-finished cleaning to the floor. More likely, some nut desensitized to a decade of working there will come in after a rape and murder spree, and he’ll mow all of you down with an assault rifle laughing and crying at the same time.

That nut may even be you.

Either way, bleeding out into the drain or gasping your last breath, you’ll think, “I really wish I’d listened to my dad and done better in Social Studies.”

Your mom and I just want the best for you, buddy. So let’s shape up, okay?

Such a book as this, plumbing the depths of everlasting human existence, could never be written alone, and the author is grateful to the following people and institutions without whom his expedition to Mosschase would not have been possible.

First, without the generous financial support of George M. Theerian, owner and president of the Theerian Wig Factory, this project could not have been executed at all. Though I never met his first wife Flora while she lived, she was clearly an extraordinary woman well worthy of her husband’s obsession with the postmortem persistence of spirit. I am sorry not to have made her acquaintance during our séances, but I’m told that women spirits deprived of their worldly bodies sometimes find my locus of masculinity too intimidating to confront.

The wit, class, and emotional sensitivity of the present Mrs. Theerian, the radiant Pauline, could well have been my bedrock during the whole ordeal of Mosschase House. From her knowing glances to her sublime taste in hats, I couldn’t ask for a greater companion. Her shoulder rubs were almost as exquisite as her insights.

My own wife Opal, of course, proved ever helpful as well, attending to worldly matters back in Sussex while I attended to the otherworldly ones.

David Darley and the team from Westinghouse were literally instrumental to our exploration: without their durable electrostatic detectors, temperature gauges, spirit condensers, radium lanterns, Victrola voice capture machines, or ectoplasm containment jars, we’d have been marooned forever on the island of ignorance. May they soon conquer the fickle bitch of alternating current!

Beatrice and Chester Kleiner, present occupants of Mosschase, permitted free access to their home for all six weeks of our investigation. Both graciously accepted the daily company of twenty spirit investigators, not to mention their equipment, their foodstuffs, their sweat-soaked waistcoats and cravats, and their often coarse language. Some of the men proved quite excitable, and I beg the good Mrs. Kleiner’s forgiveness for my torrent of obscenity in the face of the First Manifestation (see Chapter One). As for the wreckage of the south basement wall, I am sure the inevitable profits of this book can easily pay for that damage as well as the charred library mezzanine.

My gratitude runs especially strong for Emil Kleiner, that scamp cousin of Chester’s, whose home-brewed absinthe accelerated both our quiet nights and our active ones.

My sincerest apologies, too, to young Master Heinrich Kleiner. To eyes aching from the lack of sleep, a ten-year-old boy in pajamas can easily be mistaken for an apparition, and we pray that the burns from the Faraday Net have long since subsided. Chin up, little soldier!

Mosschase wouldn’t be a delightfully sinister heap of misshapen stones without the clumsy architectural stylings of Sir Quentin Montrose or the slipshod workmanship of Charles Gaston. Together, they built the perfect haunted house atop that lonely chalk cliff, knotted with ancient oaks and strangled by vines: a veritable spectral honey pot. Well done, gentlemen!

And, though I am loathe to do it, I suppose I must also thank Baron Gerhardt von Klaugh for the underlying psychic trauma that makes Mosschase such an embassy for the damned. While I can’t condone his practice of sewing shut children’s mouths or hanging their corpses as puppets, it certainly suited his former home for my purposes.

I offer much gratitude, also, to the generations of terrified servants, wide-eyed children, and gibbering drunks whose local gossip served like linguistic lenses, compounding mere rumor into legend and finally, wondrously, into reality. So, too, must I thank my peers among the spiritual sciences whose dim fumbling against the shadows on Plato’s wall saved me decades of false starts and blind alleys. Who’d have thought the answer, gentlemen, was simply to turn around? 

Then there are the mediums. Where to start? Clearly with the ones who were less than successful. 

Though poor Madame Vladovich’s spiritual eyes proved to be as cataract-clouded as her ordinary ones, I’m quite obliged for her energetic table-lifting. It isn’t easy for an eighty-seven-year-old woman to heft an oaken table with rulers in her sleeves, but she certainly did. Brava!

Little Wendy Wexham, God rest her soul, gave us the last few weeks of her consumptive life just to communicate with souls as estranged from life as her own. I hope she’s found her well-earned peace.

And, lo, the poor successful Erwin Haste: how sorry we were to have to send a bullet through your brain. Would that your open mind had not been so roomy for evil, my friend. Would, too, that the leather straps had held. May God forgive us for burying you facing down.

Harry the Gardener deserves my gratitude for his enthusiastic work with the pick axe. If I’m ever trapped beneath a wall of infant skeletons again, their tiny bone hands clawing at my face, you will be the first man I’ll telegraph.

To the neighbors, I will say I’m sorry. We did determine the awful truth behind the ghostly lights and the keening screeches at midnight, but ending them was beyond the charter of our expedition. We are planning a second excursion to your wonderful countryside, one dedicated to expelling this darkness once and for all. Donations for our cause will be heartily accepted by the publisher and passed on to us. Stay calm and carry on, good worthies: we’re on our way.

And finally, most importantly, I thank you, the discerning reader, the curious and adventuresome explorer, for your excellent taste. It is your enthusiasm for the outré that makes it all worthwhile.

There was no denying that Mr. Gandy was smart – there probably wasn’t a chemical compound in the world he couldn’t whip up like a diner cook – but golly, he was slow with the talking, especially in an emergency.

“A lot depends on what you’re trying to kill,” he was saying while Mason examined the label of Mr. Gandy’s latest guess at what he needed, something called Ratinol. “Is it big, is it little, does it have thin skin or thick fur, scales or a shell…are you sure you have no idea what you’re dealing with?”

The truth was that Mason had a very good idea of what he was dealing with, though not really how it came to be. What he did know for sure was that his folks were coming home from the tractor show in Duluth in the next two hours and the thing under the house had to be gone.

“No, sir,” Mason said, rubbing his hand through his hair. “I mean, just from what it leaves.”

“What does it leave? Nesting materials? Some kind of spoor?”

“Nothing like that,” Mason replied. “Just these wavy lines in the dirt coming out from under the house when it kind of flops or slithers out at night. Also, it seems to like to gnaw on the clapboards.”

“Who wouldn’t?” Mr. Gandy asked. “The houses in this town are built from some of the finest lumber in these United States. Can you get any sense of the size from those, uh, lines? Or the teeth marks?”

The thing under the house was exactly six feet two inches long and weighed the same amount as a middle linebacker on the Artonville Armadillos football team because that’s what it used to be, Otis Doransky. Whose parents were going to be so mad.

“I think it’s pretty big,” Mason settled on saying. “Like, person-big.”

“Oh, dear. That’s going to require a few pounds of something, then. Otherwise you’ll just make it sick and angry.”

Otis, when he was human, was not someone to be made angry. Which is why they chose him for the experiment to begin with. If anybody would psych out the Wrighton Wildcats, it would be Otis looming in his uniform and pads, his skin gone gray and scaly and his already-porcine face now turned blunted and pink. The trouble was that he psyched all of the guys out first and they jumped in their jalopies for home.

Leaving Mason with a backyard full of beer cans and a human-armadillo hybrid snuffling under the house for whatever armadillos snuffled for.

Mason checked his watch. His dad was probably turning the old Ford onto Highway 58 by then, less than an hour from home.

“I think this’ll do the trick,” Mr. Gandy said, taking a yellow can out from under the counter with a faded skull and crossbones on the side. “You’ll want to wear gloves when you’re handling this. I mean thick rubber ones. And you’ll want to bury them deep into the ground when you’re done along with the empty can.”

“Do I need to just spray it on him or what?”

If Mr. Gandy noticed that Mason seemed to know the gender of the thing under the house, he didn’t show it.

“Ingestion’ll be faster. You’ll need to prepare some kind of bait that it will really enjoy.”

As far as Mason knew, Otis’s favorite foods were T-bone steaks and milkshakes from McCrory’s. He’d have to stop there next.

“It’s not going to be pretty, just so you know,” Mr. Gandy said. “This basically jellies them from the inside out and it leaves the nerves for last. Nasty stuff. Invented by the Germans, of course. A couple of days after it feeds, whatever’s under your house will be a glob of reddish-yellow lymph that you’ll probably want to scoop out with a shovel.”

That was fine. Mason’s folks went to church on Wednesday nights, and there’d be plenty of time to—

“Or you can wait for it to just dry up and blow away. It looks a little like mushroom spores.”

That was an option, too.

“Anyway, I’m not really supposed to sell this to a minor, but you seem like you’re in a jam so…let’s call it five dollars.”

Mason pulled the bill from his jacket pocket. He couldn’t believe his luck. An adult who wasn’t going to rat him out. It was amazing.

Mr. Gandy snapped the bill taut between his fingers and slid it into the register. He didn’t press any buttons.

“We’ll keep this off the books if it’s all the same to you,” he said.

Mason nodded.

“Now good luck, young man. Don’t get any of it on you.”

“Thank you, sir!” he said, taking the can from Mr. Gandy. He tucked it under his arm like a ball on a short running play and headed out for his Nash.

After the bells on the pharmacy door stopped jangling, Mr. Gandy shook his head.

Boys would always be boys.