Spirits of the Woods and Other Stories

Spirits of the Woods

And Other Stories

Randal Doering

Spirits of the Woods and Other Stories

By Randal Doering

Copyright 2014 Randal Doering

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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This is a work of fiction. All characters and events portrayed

in this book are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

Cover image: Mysterious Place © Tjapa2007 | http://www.Dreamstime.com

ISBN: 9781310593307

DEDICATION

This collection is dedicated to my parents.

Keep on keeping on.

CONTENTS

Introduction

In the Murk

Spirits of the Woods

Pay Dirt

Old and Useless

The Bedbug

The Phantom Terrorist

The Smell of Success

Little Sister

Parallax

Mirror of Years

Corncob Girl

Jailbreak

Alignment

Jumper

Social Ills

Eligible

Promises

Lord of the Air

Leafy Green Vegetables

Black Scarab

About the Author

INTRODUCTION

Every year I bring out a new collection of short stories. I comb through the stories I’ve written for that year and pick the ones I think are the best reads and arrange them into a collection. For this year this means a bunch of contemporary fantasies, several science fiction stories, and a horror story.

People always ask me where I get my ideas from, and I am forced to answer, From life. I get ideas just from everyday living. And from newspaper stories, and from books I’ve read. Ideas are easy. It’s the sitting down and writing them out that takes the sweat.

My method has changed over time. These days I suffer from a severe mental illness called schizoaffective disorder, and so I can only write for about an hour a day. This tends to be in the mornings, when I’m fresh and my illness doesn’t act up as fiercely as it does in the afternoons. In that hour I usually can write about a thousand words, which is a respectable amount of verbiage, but nothing exceptional. What is amazing to me is how much you can write over the course of a year if you just stick with 1,000 words a day. In the average year I write a novel and a collection of short stories, about 170,000 to 200,000 words, which isn’t bad for someone who has a head full of noise.

You’re in for a wide variety of stories in this collection. There are child protagonists and grown-up antagonists herein. There are several stories about dryads and several more about space aliens come to Earth. The horror story is about a terrorist who commits a suicide bombing and then comes back from the dead to do it again, over and over, and how the terrified Americans who witness this deal with him. There is a historical fantasy set in Cairo where a sorcerer reaches the highest levels of magical power, and how he copes with becoming the city’s most eligible bachelor. A couple of the stories deal with the down side of demon worship, and one absurdist fantasy deals with a young woman with strangely-shaped nipples who wants plastic surgery to cure her defect.

There are twenty stories in this collection. I hope you find at least a few of them to be to your liking. I always write my stories to be fun to read, so here’s to a good time!

In the Murk

My mother’s father was a coal miner with forty years in the mines of Eastern Kentucky. Sometimes he worked with a few close relatives in family mines and sometimes he worked for large mining companies, but it was always hard, dangerous work under extremely demanding conditions. When I was a boy he told me stories about fossils he would find in the mines and swore that he once found a fossilized rattlesnake in a coal seam, curled up and ready to strike. Thinking about my grandfather and his fossil stories inspired this tale.

The young man set down a small plastic instrument on the coffee table and said to the older man, Do you mind if I record this conversation?

No, go ahead, said the old man.

Good, said the young man. My memory isn’t so great, and I want to be sure I get everything. He pressed a button on the tape recorder, and a small red light flickered on. Tape four, Hugh Moughram interviewing Murphy Higgins. July twenty-first at eleven thirty a.m.

Today I want to tell you a special story, said the old man. He picked up his coffee mug and blew across the surface of the coffee, then he took a sip. This was about fifteen years ago, when I was still workin’ in the mines.

Just for clarification, that’s coal mines, said Hugh.

"That’s right. We was working the coal mines just north of Kay Jay, Kentucky, following a seam deep into the mountain. It was a good seam, about ten feet high, and it was heading deeper into the mountain, and we was following it into the rock. There was only six of us working the mine, it was a small operation. We was blast mining, using dynamite to break up the coal seam and then loading the coal onto rail cars. It was a room and pillar operation, leaving some rock in place to hold up the ceiling, and we’d been at it for about a year.

We was about a thousand feet into the mountain, and the work was hard but was going all right. We was making good money from that mine. It was soft coal, not anthracite, and it was high-quality and fetched a good price on the market. Lots of men wanted to work our mine. We called our mine the Bluebird mine, for all the bluejays on the mountain where we worked. We were all middle-aged men in the Bluebird, we wanted experienced miners and not young bucks. Fewer accidents with experienced men.

You were about fifty at this time, is that correct?

Yes, I was fifty-two when this incident I’m fixing to tell you about occurred. We had just blown a couple sticks of dynamite at the far end of the seam, and we was getting something weird. Cold air was coming into the mine. Now we was way underground, mind you, and nowhere near the far side of the mountain, so we knew we hadn’t punched all the way through the mountain. Besides, if we’d punched through we’d have warm air coming through, not cold. It was high summer when this was going on, and it was hot in those Kentucky hills. Hot and sticky, you know how it is.

Yes, like today.

Like today. Now, I was the oldest man in the crew, and I usually took point when we was going deeper into the mountain, because I had an eye for dangerously loose rock. Could just tell when the ceiling was going to come down, or the floor was unstable. That’s an understanding you build up with years of experience, young men just don’t have it.

So you were in the lead.

I was first one back there where we’d set the dynamite, and I brought a sniffer with me up to the blast area. That’s a detector that tells you if there’s poisonous gas in the air. Lots of different kinds of poison you can get in a coal mine. There’s pockets of old gas in coal, you blast your way into them and release the gas, and you have to be ready to get your behind out there in a hurry if you get gas. Let it dissipate. We was working a high-quality seam, but there was gas pockets every few hundred feet, sometimes big ones, and we lost whole days waiting for the gas to dissipate.

Was there gas this time?

There was gas, but not enough to hurt you. Enough to give you a bit of a headache, but not dangerous. But more important, there was a chamber back there. We’d blasted our way into an underground cave.

How big was the cave?

"It was huge, something like a hundred feet wide and two hundred feet deep. The rock was limestone, and like I said it was full of pockets. So a cave wasn’t wholly unexpected. That’s where the cold air was coming from. So I was standing there, with the air full of black dust from the blasting and tons of shattered rock all around me, shining my headlamp into this chamber. Lots of sounds of water coming out of that place, dripping and that sort of thing. But lots of it. I went back to the other men and told them it was a cave and full of headache gas, and there was some complaining but not much. We had a good crew."

Did you explore the cave?

Not at first. There was too much coal in the way to get into the chamber, at first. So we dug coal and put coal into the rail cars, and then we ate lunch and talked it over. We had four guys in the mine and two up topside, and we decided three guys would dig coal while I went into the cave. Business of the mine had to keep goin’, you know? It was a mess at the entrance of the cavern. The ceiling had come down, tons of coal in the way, and it took an hour to clear the entrance enough so I could get through. I took my headlamp and a sampling pick with me, then I went into the cave.

What was in there?

It was all frozen waterfalls and stalagmites and stalactites and little pools in the limestone, with what they call ribbons of bacon in formations on the walls. I walked around a while, just looking, and then I came down to the edge of the lake.

An underground lake?

That’s what it was, yes. The roof there was twenty feet high, and the water was so clear I could see bottom out to ten yards in the light of my headlamp. It gave me the frights, that cavern. It was like a place the good Lord had plumb forgot about, some place that was made long ago and then just went out of memory. Left to its own.

Maybe there were some blind fish in the lake?

"There was more than fish out there, but we didn’t know it at the time. I walked along the shore of the lake for a ways, shinin’ my light this way and that, and I was admirin’ the rock formations and the perfection of God made manifest. It was a pretty cave, and our dynamitin’ hadn’t done it much harm. Coal seam didn’t go into that cavern, that was limestone; coal seam went around it, and we would follow the seam.

"I walked the length of the room along the shore of the lake and saw that the water was rippling farther out, almost beyond the range of my headlamp, which I have to admit wasn’t too far. I thought there must be a wicked current to make the water ripple like that. So the underground lake was connected to the surface streams in the area, and there was a current. I was wondering if there was fish in that lake when I heard something splash, way out on the lake, past the range of my light. It was a heavy splash, like a twenty pound fish had just jumped, and that got me to thinking about fishing, and snapping turtle stew, and that made me hungry. So I gave up on the lake and went back to the other miners, who was loadin’ coal.

One of the men, Alvin Shaughnessy, said to me, Well, Murph, anything interesting in there?

Underground lake, I said. With some big fish in it.

No kiddin’, he said. Anyone mind if I go have a look?

Go ahead, then, said Paul Evans. If the lake monster ets you up, I’ll take to banging your wife to keep her happy.

That got laughs from all of us, and Alvin gave Paul the bird and went through the breach into the lake cavern. I ate a sandwich from my lunch pail, and the three of us loaded coal into the mine car for a while. It was heavy, sweaty, cumbersome work, and it was noisy, too. So we didn’t hear anything from Alvin for a while. Then all of a sudden-like we heard several gunshots from the lake cavern entrance.

"Now that got us all standing to attention. All of us carried pistols, in case we came across rattlesnakes in the mine. Bastards come in at night and crawl into the place, and then their bodies cool down, and they fall asleep, and they’re there for you to trip over in the morning. We’d shot three dozen rattlesnakes in the year we’d been in operation, and it paid to keep your eyes peeled for them when you was walking around in the mine. So we thought Alvin had come across a rattlesnake in the lake cavern.

"We waited a few minutes for Alvin to come out of the cavern room, but he didn’t come. Finally I drew my pistol out and headed through the breach and into the lake room, the other men right on my heels. We found what was left of Alvin on the shore of the lake. It was some guts and his legs that was left, the rest of him was gone. There was blood everywhere, buckets of it, sprayed across the lake shore rocks and even on the stalagmites. Something had torn

Alvin to pieces and made off with the bulk of his body.

"‘Son of a bitch,’ said Edward Flannigan, our fourth miner. He drew his pistol, too, and the three of us walked along the lake shore in both directions until we walked it all. There was no sign of Alvin’s body. But far out on the lake there was heavy splashin’, and Paul said,

"’What do we do, Murph?’

’Keep your weapon in hand, and keep an eye out on that lake. Something came from those waters, I’m bettin’.

Did you see what it was? asked Hugh.

"Not just then. We retreated back to the coal seam and held a pow-wow, wondering how we were going to explain this to Alvin’s wife. We’d have to call it a mine accident, explosives failure of some sort. Accidental blast. We’d have to pay survivor’s benefits, which was no small thing. County mine inspector would come out to take a look at our operation, and we’d have to make it look good. Collapsed ceiling, and all that.

"’What about the remains?’ said Edward. ‘Sadie should have something to bury.’

"’I’m not going back in that room,’ said Paul. ‘Something’s in there, and it can kill an armed man.’

’We should get the remains,’ I said. ‘It’s the decent thing to do.

"’You can get his remains,’ said Paul. ‘Seeing’s you’re so excited to recover him.’

"’I’ll go back in there, if you come with me,’ I said to Edward. He nodded, and we set off back into the cavern room with our pistols in hand. Paul stayed behind, but he kept his pistol in his hand, too, like whatever it was in the lake was going to come after him in the coal room. I just hoped he didn’t shoot Edward and myself, he was so jumpy.

"We went into the cavern chamber and shone our headlamps around, on the shore and out over the water, and there were ripples on the water, big ones, and that made me about as scared as I’ve ever been.

"’Look, something’s in the water,’ Edward said.

"’I see it,’ I said. ‘Don’t hesitate to shoot, man, if you see something comin’ out of the lake.’

"’Yeah, I hear you,’ he said.

"We trotted along the lake shore until we got to the spot where Alvin’s legs was layin’ there on the beach. They was still there, but the guts was gone. We picked up the legs in our left hands and kept our pistols in the right hands and high-tailed it back toward the coal room. Then Edward gave a great cry and said, ‘Here they come,’ and I turned my head to look out over the water, and what should I see but two beasts risin’ out of the water. They was round of body, with flippers, and had long necks with a little bitty head on top. Necks had to be ten feet long. They had mouths just full of teeth, their mouths was open and they was making barking sounds like seals. They had great big eyes, shinin’ in the light of the headlamps, and I think I pissed myself about then.

"Well, Edward didn’t need no invitation, he was quicker to his wits than I was. He aimed his pistol at the closest one’s head and opened fire, but its head was small, and the lamp light was feeble, and the heads was bobbing around on the end of those long necks, and Edward couldn’t hit a thing. I saw all this, and I remember thinking, ‘We’re screwed.’ It was clear we was going to be meat for those things. They was big, their bodies was ten feet long, and they struggled out of the water on their flippers, like seals, and shuffled up the beach toward us. Man, they was movin’. Edward threw down his pistol and turned to run, and one of the beasties just snapped its head down and bit his head clean off. His body flailed around for a moment or three, then it fell down and lay there. The other beastie came at me, and I finally got control of myself and fired half a dozen shots at its head, but my hands was shakin’ so bad I missed every time.

"The second beastie raised up its head and looked at me, and I held out Alvin’s leg, and it snapped the leg right out of my hand and started crunching on it. I could hear the bone snappin’ and breaking as the beastie bit down on it. Oh, Good Lord preserve me! I just ran, blind, down the beach and into the breach into the coal room. Paul was standing there with his pistol held out in both hands, and he said,

"’Where’s Edward?’

"’Beastie got him,’ I said. ‘There’s two of them in there, and they’s big.’

"He looked at me like I just grew a second head, and then he said, ‘We got seventy sticks of dynamite back at the fork. What say we bring this roof down and bury this place?’

"’Yes,’ I said. So we both ran back to the fork where we had the dynamite stacked, and grabbed twenty sticks. I twisted the fuses together, and he stood guard over me while I worked. Then we ran back into the coal room and set the dynamite in the breach to the cavern room. I lit the fuse, and all that while I heard the seal barkin’ of the beasties as they chawed down on Edward.

"’That noise them?’ Paul asked.

"’Yeah,’ I said. ‘Evil things, devil’s work they are.’

What color were they? asked Hugh.

"They was light grey in color, best as I could see. ‘Course, everything is light grey in the light of coal miner’s headlamps. The beasties had smooth skin, but there was bite marks on them, too. Just remembered that. There was crescent-shaped rows of bite marks on their bodies, like something had bit into them at some point. Maybe it was each other that bit into them, I don’t know. And they was big. Twenty-five feet long from tip of tail to top of head. I guess that lake was big and went on a ways, and was well stocked with fish. Wouldn’t surprise me to find it connected with ponds or lakes up in those mountains, through underground streams and rivers. It’s all limestone through there, porous and full of caverns.

"Anyway, I lit the fuse on the dynamite, and we got well back from it, and soon enough the dynamite went off and the ceiling collapsed, and there was a thousand tons of rock between us and the beasties. Our two guys on the surface heard the explosion and got on the walkie-talkie to ask what the hell we was doing, and we told them there had been a mining accident and two men was killed and beyond recovery. Paul and I had a hasty conversation and decided we wasn’t tellin’ anybody about the beasties. No one would believe us, and it would call our sanity into question. It made a better story as a dynamite accident. Paul and I went out of the mine and met up with our other two men, and the four of us left the Bluebird Mine and went into Kay Jay, where we called the county mine inspector with our story.

"That was the start of the investigation, and it was a mess. They sent a mine inspector to look at the fallen ceiling, and he could smell a rat right away. That was strong, stable rock, and he knew it had taken a lot of dynamite to bring it down, and he wanted to know why we was usin’ so much blastin’ powder when the seam was only ten feet high. We hummed and hawed, and came up with some bullshit story, and he attributed the deaths to ‘miner error,’ and we was on the hook for full restitution to the widows. Eventually we went back into the Bluebird and kept workin’ that seam, but away from the lake. We didn’t go anywhere near that place again.

"These hills, here in eastern Kentucky, they’s old. The coal is full of fossils, you find leaves and ferns and fishes all the time. Bigger fossils than that, sometimes, too. Years went by, but we never forgot Alvin and Edward. Paul and I talked about it sometimes, but never with other men.

"One day about five years ago I went to the library and looked up marine dinosaurs, and I found our beasties right there in that book. Plesiosaurs, they’s called. Terrors of the sea. Used to live in the shallow oceans a hundred million years ago. I reckon some of them got land-locked. Lot of Kentucky is no-man’s land, places where human beings never been. Who knows what’s livin’ in those lakes and rivers, and in the underground caves? But now I’m old, and I’m half-hopin’ that someone decides to dig out the old Bluebird mine and recover the bones of those men, if there’s anything to recover. Or at least put those beasties to death. Ain’t right for a man’s remains to lay underground. Ain’t a fittin’ end for a Christian man.

"So I’m tellin’ you this story, Hugh, in hopes that the mine people will see it, and the dinosaur guys will read it, and they’ll go in there and kill those damned tools of the devil and put them on display in a museum somewhere. Stuff ‘em and mount ‘em, that’s all they’re good for. I’m old enough now that people can say I’m soft in the head, and it won’t faze me. Bluebird mine is still in operation, it’s the kids of the original miners down in there now, and it’s still a blast mining operation, still with picks and shovels and mine cars. Alvin’s son works the Bluebird now, and Edward’s oldest daughter is a hard worker and digs out her share of coal. That seam just keeps on going. I warned them to keep the sniffers handy for poison gas, and told them there are underground rooms sometimes, and that’s all the warnin’ I felt I could give them. No stories about what happened to their daddies. Maybe after you publish this in your scientific journal I’ll give copies to the Bluebird miners and tell them the truth of what happened in that place. Been lies for fifteen years, it’s time the truth came out.

It’s time for the truth.

Spirits of the Woods

Every year people disappear in the United States, gone to national parks and hiking trails and never seen again. Massive manhunts are organized, and helicopters are called in, and the dogs go out, and a serious effort is made to find the lost souls. Sober-faced sheriffs give serious sound bites, and the newspaper runs pictures of the missing parties in case they show up somewhere, safe and sound, but no one knows how these stories will end. Sometimes the missing are never found, leaving a lifelong hole in the hearts of friends and family. This is the story of such a manhunt.

Anna O’Rourke went missing one spring, on a sunny April day when the last of the snow was melting and the streams were rushing and the birds were returning from their winter in the south. She was seen by her mother packing a big lunch in a picnic basket, and her mother asked if she was going to go out into the woods for a bit of lunch.

Anna said, More than a bit of lunch, I think.

Well, you be careful out there, said Anna’s mother. It’s easy to get turned around and lost in these woods. Take one of your father’s GPS counters with you, play it safe.

Anna set out of the O’Rourke’s country house with her picnic basket at around ten in the morning, the basket swinging from her right arm.

The O’Rourke family farm was at the end of Lilac Lane, fifteen miles away from town. The house was nestled in a little wooded valley right up in the mountains. Anna took her picnic basket and set out for one of the trails that lead into the mountains; her mother saw her go and thought Anna would be back by dinnertime. But she wasn’t, and when dinnertime came and Anna wasn’t back home yet her mother called her father, who was working on the back acreage, and told him their daughter was missing.

She probably got turned around in the woods, he said. Serve her right to be lost overnight. Teach her a little lesson about minding her bearings. Does she have a GPS?

I told her to take one, said Anna’s mother, But I don’t know if she did.

All right. I’m about to head in anyway. Does she have food?

She took a picnic basket loaded with food. Enough for four or five meals, by what I saw.

Sleeping bag, blanket?

Not that I noticed.

So she went out for a picnic lunch and maybe dinner, and she’s not home yet. Come morning we’ll call the sheriff, if she hasn’t come in. Maybe get some neighbors to come help us look for her. Hopefully she has brains enough to stop walking once she realizes she’s lost.

Shouldn’t we call the sheriff now?

No, they won’t search at night. Good way to lose more people. I know the land for ten miles in every direction, there’s some nice little valleys where she could have stopped for lunch. Don’t fret, mother. She’ll be all right. It still gets cold at night, but not killing cold. She’ll have an uncomfortable night and be a bit bedraggled in the morning, but nothing serious.

I’m worried, Hal.

I’m coming back right now, we’ll talk when I get in.

It took thirty minutes for Anna’s father to walk in from the back acreage, and he found the family gathered around the table and talking about Anna.

She made some weird comments to Teddy, said Anna’s mother. Teddy was Anna’s older brother, he was twenty. Made it sound like she wasn’t looking to come back.

Maybe aliens got her, dad, said Teddy, making the big eyes he always got when talking about aliens.

Don’t start that nonsense again, said the senior O’Rourke.

Lots of UFO’s been seen around here in the last ten years, everybody knows E.T. is surveying this part of the country, said Teddy. Maybe she’s getting anally probed right now.

You need a probe to locate your brains, said Anna’s father.

I’m worried about grizzlies, said Anna’s mother. They’re all coming out of hibernation, and they’ll be hungry. Anna might look good to a bear.

She’s too ornery for a bear to eat her, said Jeannie, the youngest. Jeannie was nine, a surprise baby, an example of birth control failure. The O’Rourkes had planned to have two children and then quit, but Jeannie came along, and they decided to keep her. She was devoted to her older sister, that much is established fact. Followed Anna around all the time, and always wanted her older sister to play with her. Anna was eighteen and had her boyfriend to play with, so little sister didn’t get as much attention as she’d have liked.

Anna’s mother didn’t say anything else about bears, and Teddy stayed quiet about space aliens. Anna’s father said, She might come walking in here at any moment, you never know. Let’s have dinner and keep our strength up. We’ll see what has to be done come morning.

So the O’Rourkes had dinner, and they watched the news, and eventually they went to bed and had a sleepless night worrying about Anna. In the morning Mr. O’Rourke pushed open the door to Anna’s room and found her bed unslept in. He went downstairs hoping to find her at the breakfast table, but there was no one there. As he fried up his bacon and eggs he rehearsed what he was going to say to the sheriff, and as his wife came downstairs he made the call.

Things happened fast after that. The sheriff was Paul Parker, a serious-minded, overweight fellow in his early sixties who had dealt with missing persons before and knew exactly what to do. He called out the deputies and phoned some reliable people he knew to act as searchers, and within two hours of Mr. O’Rourke’s call the O’Rourke farm was the center of an ongoing manhunt. Thirty people had shown up with GPS counters and an assortment of firearms to deal with grumpy grizzlies, and Mrs.