Paranormal Short Stories Read online

  Book Description

  Salting Dogwood

  “Salting Dogwood” is a tale of heartache and retribution, set at the turn of the 20th century, where the ghost of a young girl must seek out her father’s killer across decades.

  …. The vision faded and she found herself standing before the ladies’ room door. She shook her head, trying to clear the frightful vision, and walked in. She stepped up to the sink, turned on the water and started at her reflection in the mirror. The face seemed almost foreign to her, and a chill coursed its way through her body. She leaned down, splashed her face with water and lifted her head.

  It was not her own face looking back at her, but the face of a teenage colored girl in a plain, thread-bare dress of gray covered with a dingy apron. It should have surprised Madge, but it didn’t. She merely stared at the face and knew the girl’s name was Harriet . ….

  Tasty Morsels

  “Tasty Morsels” is what you get when you cross the X-Files, Iron Chef, and Big Trouble in Little China. In it, a down-on-his-luck FBI agent nearing the end of his career has one last chance to be a hero. Unfortunately, his one shot at redemption may end with him as a tasty morsel.

  …. I suddenly understood exactly what my boss Dickerson had felt. Some things the mind just didn’t want to latch on to. And without a firm grasp, the mind tended to cast the impossible aside with a big fat BULLSHIT label stamped on it. But I’d seen what was left of the bodies, and I couldn’t argue with Francois. Everything fit.

  “To it,” Francois said quietly, “we are nothing more than tasty morsels.” His eyes burned with fierce determination. “But tonight, the tables will be turned, non? We shall track the beast to its lair and end this reign of terror.” ….

  The St. Elmo Dämonjünger

  “The St. Elmo Dämonjünger” pits a veteran demon hunter from a distant land against evil threatening the residents of small Colorado town in the old west.

  …. “You are very observant,” the padre clarified. “I’m actually both an ordained Jesuit priest and a practicing witch of some ability.”

  Earl, Tate, and Bob—who had remained silent the whole time—stared at the padre in disbelief. “How the hell can you be both,” Bob asked incredulously. “Don’t you believe in God?”

  “Believe in God? Of course I believe in God.” There was a terseness in the padre’s voice that had its roots in Germany when he was a young Jesuit. “I know it personally. I don’t particularly like the son-of-a-bitch, but it does seem to have its uses for me. I am a dämonjünger because it wants me to be one.” ….

  PARANORMAL SHORT STORIES

  Copyright © 2017 Quincy J. Allen

  “Salting Dogwood” Originally published in

  Out Through the Attic, from 7DS Books, 2014

  “Tasty Morsels” Originally published in

  Slayers from 7DS Books, 2014

  “The St. Elmo Dämonjünger” Published by

  RuneWright, LLC, 2017

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the express written permission of the copyright holder, except where permitted by law. This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination, or, if real, used fictitiously.

  Cover Design by Quincy J. Allen

  www.RuneWright.com

  Book Design by RuneWright, LLC

  www.RuneWright.com

  Published by

  RuneWright, LLC

  Contents

  Book Description

  Title Page

  Salting Dogwood

  Tasty Morsels

  The St. Elmo Dämonjünger

  About the Author

  If You Liked …

  Salting Dogwood

  July 17, 1918—Hemphill, Texas

  Time is a funny thing to a ghost. It stretches and bends and squats down in hot times like wax. It can fold over on itself or even break when the world is cold. That’s how Harriet Truth’s ghost knew it was just about time to move on. It was the promise she’d made to her daddy that held her to earth when the Lord’s light called her, but what pulled at her now came from elsewhere.

  Her ghost flickered and shimmered beside old Preacher Johnson, listening to him speak kindly of a lamb taken too soon and a woman who had already known too much loss. Her mamma’s crying was hard, and this, the second funeral in ten years. It was a long, drawn-out wailing full of agonized sobs and a bereaved suffering hurled at Heaven and He who ruled it with such apparent indifference. The cries pressed in on Harriet like fresh-dug earth on a coffin. Her mamma kneeled between the old grave and the new. She’d cried the same way when they buried Harriet’s daddy after the lynching. Daddy’s headstone was small and plain and not even paid for by the county like it had been for most of the others. Harriet stepped in front of her mother and traced fingers over the 1908 of her father’s stone and then the 1918 of her own. It was just one more 1918 added to the millions carved into wood and stone in the aftermath of the great influenza epidemic. Those ten years had passed quickly, the promise clouding over everything.

  With a fold of time, Harriet returned to those two dark weeks full of burning crosses and tightened nooses. She stood in the middle of that last, black night when white shrouds dragged her daddy out of the house, lit the house aflame, and set daddy in the nearest blackjack oak, waiting for someone to cut him down. Daddy had screamed and told mother and child to run out the back as fast as they could. Daddy would be the last of the nine killed. Mother clutched daughter, hidden in the woods till sun-up. Then they returned to the ash of their small home and discovered what had been left in the blackjack out front. Her mother had gone running and screaming to get help, but that was the spot where Harriet waited, looking up at her daddy, her hand resting on his still boot. That’s where she made her promise.

  The murder of a white man set it all off. Most around Geneva knew Hugh Dean. He was a peaceful man, not inclined towards the antipathy to blacks that was day-to-day in East Texas and much of America. He’d been shot to death in Rockhill church right there in Geneva, and rumor had it that the six who ended up in Sabin County Jail were responsible. A few nights after their arrest, a mob of over a hundred came, some in white, some not, and most carrying torches. The first five were hanged and the sixth was shot trying to escape. Two more black men were hanged the following night outside of Hemphill. The next night they got her daddy. He was the ninth man guilty of being black. The whites in East Texas all figured justice had been served and forgot the whole thing.

  Time folded in on Harriet again, revealing the truth. It was Dean’s affable nature that did him in. Harriet stood inside Rockhill church surrounded by white shrouds. Morning sunlight hit the congregation through stained glass, painting rainbows across a sheer white canvas. It wasn’t Sunday, and there was no preacher. At the pulpit stood a man in red who hollered into the sea of white like a hurricane building up waves into something terrible. He reminded Harriet of a dragon, eyes all aflame.

  “My brothers! I’ve heard that the town of Geneva is not pure!” He was a thick man, but strong, in his late twenties, and his malevolent eyes almost glowed beneath slim eyebrows of black. The congregation denied the accusation, but they knew the truth. “What’s more, I’ve heard that one of our own, a white man has taken to treating those mongrels like they were more than animals!”

  In one voice, they shouted, “Dean!”

  The dragon’s voice quieted almost to a whisper, but the fire in his eyes grew ten-fold. “My brothers, I have a plan that will allow us to rid Geneva
of the traitor and set many fruit in our righteous dogwood tree! All I will say is that when you find the traitor’s body, find dogs to collar for the crime and the Klan will serve justice. I will return when they are caged and rid Sabin County of the impure.” He paused, taking a long deep breath, and stared down at upturned hoods framing bright, hungry eyes. “ARE YOU WITH ME, MY BROTHERS?” he screamed.

  A chorus of unified, blood-thirsty hatred bathed him in its heat as the congregation shouted “YES!”

  Another fold set Harriet in a lavish office in downtown Houston days later. She stood just inside a closed door, the backs of three faced her, and a thick man with black hair sat concealed behind a desk and an upraised newspaper. She heard a satisfied chuckle from behind the newspaper and then watched it slowly descend, set upon the desk like a hard-won trophy. The face exposed was that of the dragon, but the fire in his eyes shone as a nothing more than a simmering spark waiting to be rekindled.

  “Gentlemen, Dean is dead,” the dragon growled. “Murdered in Rockhill. Six have been arrested and await us in the Hemphill County Jail. Send word and gather the flock. We will make our way to Hemphill tomorrow night and meet out the justice of the Klan.”

  The vision faded before Harriet like smoke exhaled into a breeze. The dragon’s voice shrank to a distant whisper. The haze was replaced with the peaceful silence of her own grave after the last tear was shed, the last mourner departed. She kneeled upon the fresh earth covering her coffin and traced a finger over the date carved into her headstone. Harriet shuffled back across her grave and thrust her arm down through the cold, loose earth. She didn’t have to search. The postcard came up out of the earth clutched in her hand and she stared at the picture.

  On the night the first six had met Klan justice, someone in white took a photograph of their dogwood tree and its strange fruit. A few days later the Harkrider Drug Co. in Center, Texas made a postcard out of it. Such postcards were commonplace in those days. Lynchings were something people bragged about, and folks bought and sent them to friends and family showing what they’d seen, even boasting they’d been there or taken part. It wasn’t the first such postcard Harriet had seen, nor would it be the last, but it was the only one she kept.

  Harriet had been sick for a week before going on to the Lord’s grace. She had seen plenty go before her as a result of the sickness that swept around the world. On the fifth day of coughing, knowing what was coming, she asked her mamma to get the postcard out of her secret box under the bed where she’d kept it safe for ten years. At first her mamma fought her, cursing the card and threatening to burn it, but Harriet, laying in feverish sweat and coughing thick globs of death was suddenly very serious.

  “Mamma,” she said, “I needs that card … to remind me of the promise I made to daddy. And I wants you to bury me with it.” Another coughing fit took her and hot tears scorched their way down her face. “Promise me.”

  With tears of her own, a world of confusion crashing down on her, her mother made the promise and handed the card to Harriet with eyes closed and a hateful heart. Harriet took the card carefully in her hand, staring at the tree and the men in it. She flipped it over to the poem on the back. She’d never learned to read, but she’d heard the poem enough times to remember it. It was entitled “The Dogwood Tree,” and she recited the words to herself so her mother couldn’t hear.

  This is only the branch of a Dogwood tree;

  An emblem of WHITE SUPREMACY.

  A lesson once taught in the Pioneer's school,

  That this is a land of WHITE MAN'S RULE.

  The Red Man once in an early day,

  Was told by the Whites to mend his way.

  The negro, now, by eternal grace,

  Must learn to stay in the negro's place.

  In the Sunny South, the Land of the Free,

  Let the WHITE SUPREME forever be.

  Let this a warning to all negroes be,

  Or they'll suffer the fate of the DOGWOOD TREE”

  Slipping the postcard in her apron, Harriet’s ghost felt a tug upon her soul and drifted through silence to her next resting place.

  * * *

  March 27th, 1925—Indianapolis, Indiana

  Madge Oberholtzer locked her office door and walked down the hall of the State Department of Education building. For three years, she’d been teacher and administrator of the literacy program for disadvantaged children of any race. Her shoes echoed off tiled floors and stone walls as she headed towards the ladies’ room. It was because of her job that she met David Curtiss Stephenson.

  Stephenson had caught her attention back in January at the annual State employee’s dinner. He’d done his best to sweep her off her feet with a fire in his eyes that stirred something within Madge, but the stirring wasn’t amorous. It was attraction, like bees to honey, but bereft of desire. He was a few years older than her, heavy-set with a shock of black hair covering his head and slim eyebrows over narrow, calculating eyes. He was wealthy, very powerful, and deeply involved in politics. He’d been instrumental in helping Jackson win the ’24 Governor’s election only a few months earlier. He courted Madge throughout dinner and, despite having no actual interest in the man, found herself accepting his offer for another date that turned into a second. He was courteous and polite, taking her to expensive restaurants in his chauffeured Cadillac. And yet she felt nothing for him.

  When she was in her teens she wanted nothing more than to marry and have children, but her fever during the great epidemic seemed to have burned the dream right out of her. From that moment on, all she had cared about was teaching children how to read. And yet, in the back of her mind there was a strange sense of waiting for something and she wondered if Stephenson was it.

  Things had gone badly at the end of their second date. The conversation had turned to more personal matters, and Stephenson mentioned with bravado that he was the recently anointed Grand Dragon of Indiana and leader of 250,000 of pure, white souls. Her stomach turned, and that’s when she’d told him about the nature of her students. She’d expected him to explode, to scream and curse her. But he hadn’t. He’d looked at her with a wicked little smile, as if he’d known all along, and his eyes sparked like the devil himself was dancing inside his skin. She’d excused herself, boarded a trolley and ignored his calls and messages for almost three months.

  And then he’d called … only a few hours ago. Madge had been seated in her small office grading papers and preparing for her next class when the phone rang. She normally didn’t take calls until after her last class. It was as if her hands belonged to someone else. She watched them put down the papers, pull the candlestick phone stand towards her and lift the small receiver off its hook. The receiver to her ear, she leaned in to the mouthpiece, her mouth shaping words that weren’t hers. “Indiana State literacy program, this is Miss Oberholtzer.”

  “Please don’t hang up.”

  It was a man’s voice, and one she recognized with immediate disgust. His speech was slurred, albeit slightly, as if he had been drinking, which surprised her since prohibition was well-respected in Indiana. She felt the urge to simply slam the receiver down, but something stayed her hand.

  “What is it you want, Mr. Stephenson?” Her question came through toneless and cold.

  “My reasons are professional not personal, I assure you,” he said in his firm, silky-smooth Texas drawl. He’d told her when they’d first met that he was raised in Houston.

  “What could you possibly have to speak with me about in a professional sense?” Her own curiosity surprise her.

  “I’m glad you asked. The truth is, I was speaking with Governor Jackson this morning. We both believe that someone of your distinct qualifications and demeanor would be ideally suited to a new position he’s creating.”

  “Forgive me if I’m not a little suspicious, Mr. Stephenson. We’re very different people.” She didn’t hide her distaste.

  “True enough, to be sure, but that’s the reason the Governor thought of you. T
his position is something for the good of the State. Would you be disposed to come discuss it this evening? I can send my car to pick you up.”

  She wanted to refuse, tell the wretch that she had no interest in anything he or the Governor, whom she knew was also Klan, had to offer. But she heard herself saying, “Certainly, Mr. Stephenson, as long as your intentions are of a professional nature. You may have your man pick me up at five o’clock.”

  “Thank you, Miss Ober …” She hung up the phone and stared at it as if she’d never seen one before. She wracked her brain for some explanation as to why she would have conceded to his request. It was impossible, and she couldn’t imagine what had possessed her.

  An image floated up out of her thoughts like cloudy mud rising when you step into a still pond. Madge had a vision of Stephenson, but it didn’t come from her memories, and it wasn’t in Indiana. The memory was ghostly, faded, smoky, like a dream seen through a dirty mirror. Stephenson wore crimson and screamed into an ocean of pious white spotted with strange patterns of color. His eyes were that of a fiery dragon and he breathed smoke.

  The vision faded and she found herself standing before the ladies’ room door. She shook her head, trying to clear the frightful vision, and walked in. She stepped up to the sink, turned on the water and started at her reflection in the mirror. The face seemed almost foreign to her, and a chill coursed its way through her body. She leaned down, splashed her face with water and lifted her head.

  It was not her own face looking back at her, but the face of a teenage colored girl in a plain, thread-bare dress of gray covered with a dingy apron. It should have surprised Madge, but it didn’t. She merely stared at the face and knew the girl’s name was Harriet.

  “I’s sorry for what I done to ya,” Harriet said apologetically. “You died of the sickness same as me. But I made a promise, and the good Lord is helping me keep it … through you. Don’t you worry though. It’s me that’ll endure what’s coming. I’ll take it all. He can’t hurt me no more.”