The Sculptured Rocks

Contents

Copyright

Dedication

Acknowledgments

To My Readers

Chapter 1 The Bully

Chapter 2 The House

Chapter 3 The Ghost

Chapter 4 The Best Friend

Chapter 5 The Beach

Chapter 6 The Problem

Chapter 7 The Plan

Chapter 8 The Training

Chapter 9 The Chase

Chapter 10 The Sculptured Rocks

Chapter 11 The Heirloom

Chapter 12 The Retaliation

Chapter 13 The Practice

Chapter 14 The Details

Chapter 15 The Guest

Chapter 16 The Awakening

Chapter 17 The Stone

Chapter 18 The Haunting

Chapter 19 The Translation

Chapter 20 The Descent

Chapter 21 The Fight

Chapter 22 The Psychic

Chapter 23 The Confession

Chapter 24 The Answer

Chapter 25 The Search

Chapter 26 The Assault

Chapter 27 The Storm

Chapter 28 The Confrontation

Chapter 29 The Journey

The Sculptured Rocks

Copyright 2015 J. Lee Graham

All Rights Reserved

Smashwords Edition

For Leo

Acknowledgments:

My eternal thanks to Ken, Emmy, AK, Terry, Joe R. Dina, AF, JC, and all the ghosts and friends of Cape May, New Jersey.

Cover Art Design by Ken Hornbeck

Cover Layout and Lettering by Dina Shadwell

To my Readers:

While it seems silly to us to think of Dan and his mother rejoicing at making $24.00 for their ghost tour work in 1971, that amount today in 2015, due to inflation, would be equal to $140.29. Also, a $2.00 ghost tour ticket in 1971 would now be equal to $11.69.

Some other facts to consider. In 1971:

A gallon of gas cost $.40.

A movie ticket cost $1.50

Malibu Barbie cost $1.94

and

A jar of peanut butter was $.59!

Chapter 1

The Bully

My mom once said I was born an Indigo Child. She said I had special powers.

Like Superman?

Better than Superman.

Whatever powers I supposedly had, now would have been a great time for them to kick in. Curt Krenshaw was four houses behind me and he wasn’t letting up.

Hey, cream puff! A voice much deeper than a twelve-year-old. It boomed like a sixteen-year-old quarterback calling numbers.

I sneaked my head back pretending I was looking up a tree, but he had his eye on me like a snake.

Yeah, you! I see you looking at me. I want to talk to you, sissy boy!

I didn’t know which was worse: the word sissy or the fact that he was yelling it at the top of his lungs and we were on a tree-lined side street in this bucolic small town on the coast of New Hampshire where we both lived our entire lives, and nobody was coming out to investigate.

Creeeeam Puff, Curt Krenshaw crooned like Elmer Fudd in a cartoon.

I mean, seriously, was that the best he could come up with? It was what every boy said and it got old. I’ve been called baby, bookworm, teacher’s pet, sissy, momma’s boy, wimp; you see, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the words themselves that bothered me, well they did, it was the low hiss in the hallway, or the shouted proclamation on a tourist-town street at the beginning of summer with an entire two months of stretched out bliss, a yell that was full of anger and hatred and what the hell did I ever do to you?

Krenshaw came closer. His blond, almost white hair and his chubby red face made him look like a horror movie kewpie doll pinned to a wall of a twisted midway game booth. He was short and stocky, but his arms were big and he was gaining on me. I was three blocks from my house and I never expected this blockhead to appear out of nowhere. A lot went through my mind. I wished I could turn around and deck him one, but I didn’t know how to do that. My father left for the war when I was seven and never came back. I was an only child; I had no cousins, no uncles, nobody except my mother and she wasn’t going to teach me. I’m a pacifist, she said. I could ask Tom Erlwein, my best friend, but I was too embarrassed and didn’t want to give the impression I didn’t know how to handle myself.

I was the starting shortstop in Little League but no one on our team, despite our name, the Wildcats, got into fights because the coaches broke it up before it even started. They had a sixth sense about that, maybe because they used to be boys themselves, but whenever they felt the inner rumblings of trouble, like when Mike Reeker and Jimmy Fulman started snarling at each other like dogs, the coaches sicced the hose on them. The full force of water in your face was about the best solution to that problem.

I looked around for a spare hose now, peering into people’s yards, but no such luck.

Buchanan! Curt Krenshaw shouted.

Well, it was a step up; now he was using my last name. When he starts calling me Dan, I guess that would make us committed life-long enemies.

My blood was pumping harder. I was breathing more intensely as that Fight or Flight adrenaline rush kicked in. Frankly, I was scared. I was only 5’2" and 95 pounds and this bully had twenty pounds on me. He also had a reputation in our class for being not only dumb, but stupid. Many times during the school year, I walked past the principal’s office and there was Krenshaw, sitting at the desk for recalcitrant kids, usually alone, no books, no homework, no pencil, staring out the plate glass window with a sneer of a tiger.

And I like tigers! But the temptation to give him the finger, or stroll up to the long rectangular desk and say, What’d you do this time, idiot? was very strong and it was all I could do to saunter by and pretend I didn’t see him.

Today was Saturday, June 26, and we got out of school yesterday and already Krenshaw was starting his summer off with a bang. It was noon and Little League practice ended ten minutes ago, and I was planning to go home, hop on my bike and go to the beach with my best friend Tom Erlwein, and this moron was on my tail. I envisioned a bloody mouth at the very least and a lot of explaining to do to my mom. The distance between us grew shorter and I could smell the sweat and the hatred oozing off of him. If I had a bat, I’d slug him- odd for someone only twelve years old to say, but there it was. Crack his knees open and as he hit the dirt hear him deliciously say, Oh gosh, Dan, I’m so sorry. I didn’t know what a douchebag I’ve been. I promise never to do this again.

My mom said I tended to live in a fantasy world.

Out of the blue, Krenshaw pounced. He shot into a full sprint and I heard his sneakers hitting the dirt like a wolf going after a deer. My legs took over, no time for any more inner dialogue. I raced to the end of Delmont, banged a left onto Rosewater and remembered the ‘secret’ alley that looked like a driveway. I did a fast right that took me out of that idiot’s view. Baseball practice helped a lot when you have to avoid a bully. So did fear.

And I hated myself for doing this.

Where are you, you scaredy-cat! Krenshaw yelled at the top of his lungs. He was on the corner, trying to figure out which way I went. Where did you go, you coward! again, that roar, like the call of the wild.

Shut up, you moron! a man yelled from his doorway, the house on the corner where Moron was standing.

Why don’t you make me? Curt Krenshaw retorted.

See what I mean about being stupid? He didn’t know when to quit.

Instantly, I heard the man’s construction boots thump down the porch steps to the small gate to the sidewalk. Through the pine tree branches, I saw Krenshaw’s feet lift off the ground next to a pair of large legs in a pair of jeans.

Get out of here! the man said, and I saw Curt Krenshaw’s full body lying face down in the street.

Cape McAllister, this coastal town where I lived, had little traffic in general, and on this particular corner, there was zilch, so unfortunately, no station wagon ran over Krenshaw. But I took it as my signal to zip home and I did, knowing this wasn’t over and the very stark and unwavering truth that at any time he felt like it, a moron like Curt Krenshaw could beat somebody up, no matter who, and he would.

My time was coming, I feared.

Chapter 2

The House

The fake alley that looked like a driveway dumped me out onto McDougal, I banged another right onto Corgie Street, and eyed the distance. Fourth house down, past the Saylor’s, past the Claron’s, past the Busing’s, was mine. I didn’t stop running, even when I hit the porch, sprinting up the six steep steps, thinking foolishly that if I actually went into my house, through the door, I would magically disappear and Curt Krenshaw wouln’t know where exactly I lived. At times I actually believed the phone book had never been invented.

I flung open the screen door and dove up the steep stairs directly in front of me; they swallowed me up for if a creep like Krenshaw were standing at the front door, he wouldn’t see my legs beyond the fourth step. Cape McAllister had a ton of these homes, Victorian, my mom called them, Other people, like Mrs. Weiss, our 6th grade English teacher last year, called them Queen Anne. The fine architecture and design of our Queen Anne homes here in Cape McAllister have withstood the hurricanes of ’1923, ’46 and ’52, she said grandly, and will continue holding out for many a year!

Whatever you wanted to call them, my mom and I lived in one. It was built in 1877 and there was a plaque near the front door verifying this. My home was cool and I liked it. It has character, my mom said to anyone who listened, and though I wasn’t quite sure what she meant, I liked the funky rooms. They were small and angular and there was a bay window in the living room and upstairs the ceiling slanted in different places and my bedroom closet were irregularly shaped so that my clothes were squished inside it. The roof itself was very steep. The bannister for the stairs sloped at what felt like a 70-degree angle, so as much as it would be fun to slide down it, the speed would hurl you through the front door. Besides, there was a large round wooden newel post at the end which would knock the wind out of you. Tom Erlwein tried it last year and almost threw up his lunch.

The house wasn’t large, not ostentatious – I read that word in a book – but actually smug and tiny. Whenever I ran up the porch steps and through the front door and headed straight down the narrow hall, there was an archway at the end that led into the kitchen. If I didn’t go up the stairs or down the hall, there was a doorway on the left that opened to a living room that blended into a small dining room with a swinging door that connected me back into the kitchen. The entire house, it seemed, was designed to bring people to food.

Upstairs, on the second floor, were two bedrooms, and my room looked out over Corgie Street, so I could, at any given time, check to see what the weather was – either all clear due to sun or all clear due to no stupid bullies lurking about like Curt Krenshaw.

The front porch had an ornate wooden railing around it and contained two rocking chairs and two white wicker chairs. The front gardens were small but full of flowers and plants that my mother dutifully cultivated each year. I helped her haul off weeds or spread manure when she told me there was a certain neighborhood expectation to maintain a sense of decorum. It went against her, as she called it, hippie sensibility to join this mob mentality, but she knew Cape McAllister was a tourist town and many people came here just to wander the small, tree-lined streets and look at the Victorian homes. Mom lit a candle in the front window at night and sometimes she brought candles outside onto the porch and we sat there and watched the fireflies. We heard people walking by, mostly strangers, but if it were someone we knew, they’d call out to us since it was too dark to see.

My parents enrolled me in school when I was four years old. The teacher realized I was already reading and printing so they let the birthday requirement pass. My birthday is in December and while that was smart on my parent’s end, on my end it means I was the youngest in my class. I would be starting the seventh grade in the fall as a twelve-year-old. I know I’m not the only one, there are a few kids born in September and October, and November, but it feels like I’m still the baby of the class. My school had all the grades in one large building, so I was easily lost in the crowd, from the kindergartners in the far end of the building to the seniors who ruled the rest of the place. As I got older, for some strange reason, I felt the great urge to be invisible.

This was the summer of 1971, and my father was Missing In Action. He left five years ago when I was seven to fight a war in Vietnam and he never came back. One winter Saturday, when I was eight, two men came to the door and told my mother he was MIA. My dad was in the Coast Guard and the two men explained to her that the North Vietnamese captured his crew while they were on a reconnaissance on Phu Quoc Island. They started to pull out a map to show her where that was when my mother told them to get out her house.

At the time, I didn’t understand. Missing in Action. I used to be MIA all the time. I wandered into the woods during a field trip once and the science teacher, Mrs. Michaels, during head count at lunch, discovered I was missing.

At the New Hampshire State Fair, years ago, I was walking with my parents when the lights of the Ferris wheel mesmerized me to such a degree that I never saw them walk away. Twenty minutes later a lady touched me and asked me if I was lost, and I realized, with a small rise of panic, that I wasn’t lost, but my parents were. She took me to the Information Booth in the heart of the Fair and over the loudspeaker a man with a terrific reassuring smile announced, We have a young boy here who is missing, er, missing his parents. His name is Danny Buchanan and he is five years old, has brown hair and brown eyes, and if Marianne and John Buchanan are looking for him, he is at the Information Booth ready to be found.

So I thought of missing as something that happened to most people, but they were found. At eight years old, I pictured my father getting off the boat, walking around the island, getting distracted, wandering down some path where, at the end of the day, his squad leader would say, John is missing again, everybody!

Now that I was twelve, I knew what MIA really meant, and while some of the other boys at Little League looked at me with a strange kind of respect, like I was the one Missing in Action, I didn’t feel very proud. Once in awhile a father threw his arm around me and said, Hear anything from your dad, yet? and Tom Erlwein’s dad often took me with him and Tom to go to the movies. When that happened, when I was flying out the door to get into their car, I’d catch a look of gratitude on my mom’s face.

Vietnam was not that large of a country. It seemed to me if someone was missing, it would be very easy to find him. In the picture of my dad that was on the mantle in the living room, he was in his military dress, before he was sent to Vietnam. He was smiling and clean, like he just took a shower. The photograph was in color and his brown hair was parted on one side. He had blue eyes and nice teeth and he wasn’t very big or anything. He wasn’t skinny, he was just normal and my mom said that when she danced with him, she would be as tall as his shoulders. My mom was 5’7 and had long straight dirty blond hair. Her eyes too were brown, like mine. When she smiled, you could see all of her teeth.

There was another photo of my father that my mom had laminated. It showed up one day in the local paper, she told me, after my dad was first shipped to Vietnam. A photojournalist had taken a candid shot of my dad carrying a Vietnamese boy about eight years old in a piggyback fashion. My father was moving toward something and had a serious expression on his face. The picture was in black and white, but it looked like the boy had an injury because his bare feet were stained with blood or dirt. There were other soldiers nearby standing there, not helping, just watching my father pass by, so that made me think he was in a terrible hurry. The boy wasn’t crying; he looked relieved. My father was in dusty coast guard fatigues and the cap on his head shadowed his eyes so it must have been intensely hot and sunny. I remembered when I first saw the picture I hated that kid, that kid who got to get a piggyback ride from my dad. My mom said she hoped the boy was safe. These pictures didn’t help me remember what my father looked like anymore.

Chapter 3

The Ghosts

The entire town of Cape McAllister, New Hampshire was haunted. Apparently, it had a reputation among ghost followers around the world because they descended here to take pictures and write reports. Every Halloween, the local news did a special expose on the town as if ghosts only came out during the last day in October.

Cape McAllister was an old beach town incorporated in the mid 19th Century when rich Boston folks migrated here for their summer retreats. The very wealthy went to Newport and Long Island, but the semi-wealthy supposedly escaped the heat of the city when they vacationed at this hamlet on the Atlantic Ocean. There were tons of photos from the 1890’s in the Cape McAllister Library of people escaping: walking on the sand wearing long dresses and long sleeves boldly holding an umbrella. Men wore suit jackets and ties and long pants and hats and shoes and I couldn’t imagine how much escaping the heat was happening with that many clothes. Maybe they only did that because they knew they were being photographed. Maybe, when the photographer packed up his gigantic camera and said, So long, folks! they all jumped out of their clothes, shouted yahoo! and dove into the ocean. I doubted it.

They built these Queen Anne homes and Queen Anne Bed and Breakfasts and a few Queen Anne hotels and Cape McAllister became a tourist destination and the local people rejoiced. Some of these homes, however, mine for example, were not B&B’s, but had regular people who lived in them the entire year around. My house, the yellow one with blue trim on Corgie Street, was the only one on the block with a widow’s walk on the roof.

On the third floor of my house, there were two small bedrooms for the maids who used to live there. Plus, there was a mysterious third room, for when you opened that door, it brought you into a small anteroom with a tiny winding wooden staircase that spiraled up from the middle of the floor. At the top of the stairs was a smaller door, only four feet high, which led outside onto the widow’s walk. The ‘walk’ was a platform with a two-foot high black iron grating all around it. From up there, I could see the large swooping beach of Cape McAllister, the inner roads, and most of the main downtown. Most importantly, I could see the Atlantic Ocean and its large expanse to the horizon. They didn’t build these walks up here