The Ride with the Stranger – 1
Song: “Haunted” by Jon O’Bergh
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A black, ‘61 Chevy Impala convertible pulls up to the stop sign as I cross the street — only it’s not the shiny, gleaming black of a well-kept classic car but a weathered, dingy black like ash. The car idles roughly as the driver, a gaunt-faced twenty-something with dark glasses and a black hooded sweatshirt, watches me pass in front.
“Can I give you a ride?” he asks.
“Well, uh, actually —“
He leans across the passenger seat and opens the door, which groans on its hinges. I hesitate, looking down the street ahead of me, then slip off my backpack and climb in, pulling the door shut. “I’m going about two miles down that way,” I point to the right. The car backfires as he accelerates and turns without signaling.
The car smells of age and must. Cracks criss-cross the dashboard. I must be looking intently at the dials, because he says after a few moments, “Radio’s busted.” The hood of the car stretches beyond the windshield, the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. I start to say, “They don’t make cars like this any more,” then realize it sounds trite, a poor attempt at small talk. Instead, I look to my right at the houses we’re passing.
“I’d like you to tell me a story,” he says.
I hear his words, but the request startles me. “What?”
“A story. You know any good ones?” He senses my hesitation and adds, “I always ask people to tell me a story. Anything you want.”
“You mean like a real story, or something made up?”
“Tell me about something you remember.”
Maybe it’s the slightly tattered hood covering his head in this bright sunlight, but I suddenly think of the summer I spent with Joan and Rich and the camping trips when, each night as firelight from the adults’ campfire cast long shadows against the side of our tent, I regaled my nephews and their friends with ghost stories, long epics that continued from night to night.
“Okay,” I said, and told him about the old, deserted farmhouse.
The Teanaway River cuts through the Cascade Range that is the backbone of Washington state, creating a narrow valley dotted with farms and orchards. On one of our camping trips that summer it threatened to rain. Rich had a friend who had recently purchased a neglected farmhouse on the Teanaway River, not far from where we were camping, and we arranged to sit out the storm in that drier refuge. We drove down the quiet country road and arrived at the farmhouse as dusk chased the already wan light from the sky. Spotlighted by the car headlights, Rich opened the rickety gate. We jostled down the driveway to the sound of gravel crunching under the tires.
The farmhouse sat ahead of us, presiding over a wide, overgrown field. A line of dark trees marked the path of the river at the far edge of the field. As we got out of the car, the trees that bunched protectively around the farmhouse were creaking in the wind. We entered through the back door, which led through a hallway into a large kitchen. A single, bare bulb on the high ceiling illuminated the kitchen, whose corners remained half in shadow. Joan went over to the sink and turned on the tap, testing the water. Beyond the kitchen were a side room with two beds, the main parlor, and a huge bathroom that dwarfed its tub, toilet and sink. Joan speculated that the room had been converted to a bathroom sometime after the second world war.
From the back hallway, a closed door sat on the bottom step of what must have been a stairway to the second story. It seemed odd to build a doorway off the floor like that. I opened the door and groped for the light switch. Flicking the switch several times resulted in no light, however.
“Here, give me one of the flashlights,” I said to the other boys. I shined the beam up the stairs into the dark recesses above.
“There are thirteen steps!” my nephew Dennis counted, thrilled at the discovery, but that only added to my trepidation. Dennis nudged me forward, and we started up the stairs. As we neared the top, we sensed the light from the hallway behind us suddenly dim, and turned to see the door noiselessly shut. Dennis screamed and we bounded down the stairs, flinging open the door so hard it banged against the wall. Drawn by the commotion, Rich ran into the kitchen where we were breathlessly cowering.
“What happened?” he asked.
“A ghost closed the door on us,” Dennis whimpered.
Rich went over to the door in the hallway and opened it, then let go. We watched as the door slowly swung shut. “It’s not sitting evenly on its hinges,” he explained. He opened the door again.
“There are thirteen steps!” Dennis blurted out, this time with foreboding.
Rich shined his flashlight up the stairs. The wind suddenly raced outside, howling through the rafters.
“I think I’ll stay down here,” he said, shutting the door.
As Joan prepared dinner, we took turns bathing in the unsettlingly oversized bathroom. I sat in the tepid bathwater, listening to Rich and my sister talk in the kitchen.
“I’ll bring in the cots and sleeping bags from the car,” Rich said. “We can set them up for the kids in the front room.”
“I want to sleep in your room,” Dennis insisted.
“I want to sleep with Dennis,” mimicked Kenny, the youngest.
“Okay, we’ll all sleep in the same room.”
We ate dinner seated around the kitchen table. Rain began streaking the windows. The wind continued to howl intermittently, spitting the rain against the panes like a schoolyard bully. The bare bulb sputtered, then went out.
“I’ll get the lantern from the car,” Rich said, grabbing his flashlight.
Someone went, “Woooooo.”
“Stop it!” demanded Kenny.
A skeletal face appeared at the window, the nose eroded away, jagged teeth splintering out from the gaping mouth, thin blades of hair falling across the forehead, dull eyes gazing from dark, shrunken sockets — the Phantom of the Opera, whose Silent Screen photo haunted my childhood.
I heard the tread of Rich’s footsteps on the back steps, growing louder as he entered the hallway and rounded the doorway into the kitchen, carrying a lantern. The light chased away the face at the window. What is it that we fear? There are monsters real enough in the world that we hardly need to manufacture them to populate the spaces under our beds and in our closets. Perhaps what we fear is our capacity to become them.
The fortress of cots and bed frames is assembled in the side room, wagons circled protectively. We assume our positions in bed, side by side, to wait out the night. No one sleeps soundly. When the wet, gray dawn arrives, our nightmares are at least temporarily washed away.
“I liked that,” the driver says. He slows for a stop sign. “How much farther?”
“It’s still a ways,” I say.
We shoot through the intersection, the car backfiring. “Tell me another.”
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[oil painting of farmhouse by Carl O'Bergh]
