Christmas Eve on Haunted Hill

By
Bryan Smith

First Digital Edition

Copyright 2015 by Bryan Smith

All Rights Reserved

www.thehorrorofbryansmith.blogspot.com

Cover design copyright 2015 by
Kristopher Rufty

All rights reserved.   No part of
this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means
without the permission of the author.  All the characters in this book are
fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is
coincidental.

The gray sky started spitting snow
again as Luke Herzinger pulled his 1973 Oldsmobile Delta 88 into the parking
lot of Sal’s Place.  Less than half a dozen cars were parked up in front of the
place, leaving two spaces open adjacent to the sidewalk.  Instead of pulling
into one of those open spaces, Luke opted to park one row back, turning the car
about so it faced the street instead of the entrance to the bar.

          There were multiple
reasons for this.  He didn’t want anyone in the place getting a good look at
him just yet, for one thing.  None of his old cronies knew he was back in town
and he wanted to keep it that way a bit longer.  If he parked facing the place,
he ran the risk of being spotted prematurely by a regular.  Luke reckoned the
likelihood of that happening wasn’t too high, of course.  Anyone inclined to
spend their Christmas Eve at a dismal old dump like Sal’s was almost certainly
only interested in the glass of booze sitting right in front of them on the
scuffed and dented old bar’s surface.  Also, he’d been gone so long the current
regular crowd might not much resemble the one he remembered.

          But he figured better
safe than sorry.  The joint’s lone pool table was situated right by that big
window to the left of the entrance.  There was always a chance, albeit a remote
one, that a couple of the old boozers in there might get a wild hair up their
ass and decide to play a game or two.

          And then one of them might
well peek outside and see him sitting here.  Luke wasn’t quite ready for that. 
More to the point, he wasn’t quite drunk enough for it yet.  As he stared
through his windshield at the swirling snow and the occasional car passing by
in the street, he worked at addressing that deficiency by draining what was
left of the bourbon in the old silver flask he carried with him wherever he
went.  The flask dated back to World War II.  There was a dent at the bottom
where, if you believed the story that had long ago become part of Herzinger
family lore, it had deflected a Nazi bullet, thus saving Luke’s grandfather’s
life.

          Luke supposed the story
was true.  It was a matter of record that his grandfather had served with honor
on the battlefields of Europe during the Great War.  He’d seen the medals when
he was a kid.  They were impressive.  He stared at the dent, rubbing the ball
of a thumb in the slight depression.  It was a weird thing to think that he
owed his very existence to this otherwise unassuming bit of metal.  If the
flask hadn’t deflected that bullet, his father wouldn’t have been conceived
during the baby boom that followed the war.  Luke often thought that might have
been for the best.

          He put the flask to his
mouth again and tipped it straight up, his tongue eagerly lapping up the last
few drops of cheap bourbon.  Once he was sure the flask was thoroughly
depleted, he screwed the cap back on it and tucked it away in an inner pocket
of the garish red overcoat he was wearing.  After a final moment’s hesitation,
he blew out a big breath and got out of the car.

          The driver’s side door
squeaked loudly as it swung open and did so again when Luke threw it shut.  The
sound grated on the ears, but the door’s hinges were beyond the help of even
the most liberal application of WD-40.  It was fair to say he hadn’t maintained
the Delta very well since inheriting it from his father ten years ago.  A cynic
might find some correlation between this and the shoddy job he’d done of
looking after his own health over the last decade.  And maybe there’d even be
some merit to this observation.  But it wouldn’t be entirely fair, either.  The
Delta wasn’t his main ride.  Its paintjob was a shade of olive he and his
childhood friends had called puke-green.  Mostly it stayed in the detached
garage behind his house over in Boonesville.  He only took it out a couple
times a year to make sure it was still running.

          But today was a momentous
occasion.  He was returning home for the first time in almost ten years, having
departed under a suffocating cloud of sorrow and tragedy.  But that wasn’t the
only reason today was important.  He was somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty
percent sure it would be the last day of his life.  If it happened, it would be
by his own hands.  There was no late-stage terminal illness ticking down his
clock.  Not that he knew of, anyway.  Hell, it’d been a lot of years since he’d
last visited a doctor.  Anything was possible.  But that remote possibility
aside, the tentative plan was to put a shotgun in his mouth and blow off the
top of his head at the stroke of midnight.

          In light of this, it’d
seemed only right to take the Delta out for a final road trip back home.  The
suicide option was something he’d been considering for months, and the odds of
it actually happening fluctuated many times throughout any given day.  Late
last night the likelihood had been significantly higher, somewhere north of
seventy-five percent.  In other words, much more likely than not, but still not
a dead certainty.

          As for why he was
planning to maybe off himself by the end of the night, well, it wasn’t that
complicated.  Things hadn’t been working out in general for a while.  He was
having money problems, having been laid off from his factory job six months
ago.  All these months later, he still hadn’t found new gainful employment.  And
then there was the wreck that was his personal life.  The one long-term
relationship of his adult life had ended a bit over a year ago.  Peggy had been
her name.  After putting up with him for almost five years, she’d finally
wearied of his ramshackle, unambitious lifestyle and had split in the middle of
the night while he was sleeping off yet another drunk, taking with her most
everything of real value in the house.

          Peggy’s breakup note had
been short though not exactly sweet: 
Fuck you, Lucas, you fucking loser
.

          Pretty unambivalent. 
Luke hadn’t bothered trying to track her down or make her change her mind.  He
reckoned she wasn’t entirely out of line for feeling the way she did.  Didn’t
mean he liked it or didn’t miss her, but he knew she’d be better off with
practically anyone else.

          A lot of people would see
these things as perfectly understandable reasons for committing suicide. 
Understandable, not acceptable.  Big difference.  He was well aware that the
majority of folks looked down on people who did themselves in, but they could
usually wrap their heads around the idea when the person who did it was
suffering hardship of some kind.

          And yet these things were
not why he was pretty sure he didn’t want to live anymore.  They were just the
final things pushing him over the edge.  No, what it all came back to was what
his father had done on this very night ten years ago.  He’d never gotten over
it, not even close, and the sadness he carried with him as a result never went
away, tainting everything else in his life.

          He was just tired of it.

          And he could think of no
more effective means of finally dispersing that ever-present gray fucking cloud
of sadness than a shotgun blast to the head.

          Luke took a wobbling
first step toward the bar’s entrance and almost toppled over.  He wheeled his
arms about and got himself back in balance.  Despite having been salted, the
parking lot was still slippery from the recent snowfall.  And now more snow was
coming down, exacerbating the situation.  But most of the blame for his
wobbliness was the bourbon he’d consumed.  He was already tipsy, but he planned
to be shitfaced by the time he emerged from Sal’s in a few hours.

          This was the other big
reason for parking the way he had.  With the Delta pointed toward the road and
parked away from the other vehicles, he wouldn’t have to worry about the tricky
mechanics of backing out of a parking space and getting the old boat turned
around while sloshed.  He didn’t want to get into a wreck and wind up in jail
on a DUI on the possible last night of his mostly miserable existence.

          Once he was sure of his
footing, Luke let out another big breath and went on into Sal’s Place.

The billiards table near the window
was not in use, and Luke had to wonder how long it’d been since anyone had
taken down one of the old cues from the rack on the wall.  Probably a while. 
Same went for the dartboard in the same deserted section of the establishment. 
No one here looked like the sort interested in games, at least not anymore.  Things
had been different once upon a time, when Sal’s clientele had been younger and
more optimistic about life in general.

          As expected, most of the
joint’s few Christmas Eve patrons were seated at the bar rather than at the
handful of tables in the center of the main room.  The sole exception was a
silver-haired old boozer at the table nearest the bar.  The geezer was slumped
over the table, passed out with his right hand clasped loosely around a nearly
empty glass of whiskey.

          None of the men at the
bar turned on their stools to look at Luke as he came into the place.  It was
possible they hadn’t heard the door open.  There was no bell above it to signal
the arrival of a new customer.  Also, the jukebox in a corner by the bar was
playing a mournful Hank Williams tune, so maybe they were too focused on the
hard luck lyrics to take much note of anything else.  Or maybe they’d heard him
enter and just didn’t give a shit.  Somehow that last possibility seemed the
most likely, given the overall depressed vibe of the place.

          The apparent lack of
interest remained in effect as Luke made his way across the main room and sat
himself down on a stool at the end of the bar, near the jukebox.  No one looked
his way, not even the bartender, whose attention was focused on an old
paperback pulp novel.  The slim volume looked almost absurdly small clutched in
his meaty right hand, its yellowed pages splayed open by a thumb pressed hard
to the book’s cracked spine.  Its garish cover showed a typical femme fatale. 
She was clutching a gun and looked like she was trying hard not to fall out of
her clothes.

          Luke cleared his throat
and pitched his voice above the volume of the music coming from the jukebox,
which had transitioned from Hank Williams to Waylon Jennings.  “Little help
over here?”

          The bartender didn’t
visibly react to the sound of his voice and kept right on staring at the page
in front of him for at least another ten seconds.  Just as Luke was about to
voice some degree of agitation, the bartender turned down a corner of the page,
set the book down on the bar, and approached Luke.

          He was a tall man with
broad shoulders, close-cropped salt and pepper hair, and a round belly that
strained the fabric of his flannel shirt.  His ruddy expression and bulbous
nose strongly suggested he liked to imbibe as much as any of his customers.  He
gave Luke a slow once-over and grunted, a corner of his mouth twitching briefly
in what might have been a grudging smile.  “Well, shit.  It’s Santa Claus. 
What’s your poison, Santa?”

          “Double bourbon on the
rocks, just for starters.  Give me a beer to go with it.”

          The bartender lifted an
eyebrow.  “Planning to get tanked?”

          “Yep.”

          “Okay then.  What kind of
beer you want?”

          “Pabst Blue Ribbon.”

          “Comin’ up.”

          The bartender opened a
cooler under the bar and took out a longneck bottle of Pabst.  After twisting
the cap off the bottle and setting it on the bar in front of Luke, he went
about preparing the liquor drink.

          Luke picked up the Pabst
bottle and took a long first sip, sighing and shivering in pleasure as the cold
brew went down the hatch.  Taking another sip, he saw that the boozehounds
seated at the other end of the bar had finally taken note of him.  One of them
was a fat guy in his early forties.  He was easily the youngest person in the
establishment on this frigid evening, with the exception of Luke himself.  His
face was round and jowly and he had a thick mustache that made him look like a
porn star from the 70’s.  Only fat.

          He smirked as he made eye
contact with Luke and said, “Better not get too plastered, Kris Kringle. 
You’ve got a long night’s work ahead of you, after all.”

          The much older gentleman
to the fat man’s immediate right chuckled.  “Gotta be sure you’re fit to drive your
sleigh.  Don’t want to get an SWI.  That’s ‘Sleighing While Intoxicated’.”  His
chuckle was significantly louder this time.  “Ya get it?”

          Luke took another big
gulp of Pabst.  “I get it,” he said, smiling indulgently.

          The ribbing didn’t bother
him.  You couldn’t walk into a bar on Christmas Eve dressed in a Santa suit and
not expect to hear such remarks, not unless you were a total idiot.  And while
Luke figured a wide array of uncomplimentary adjectives could accurately be used
to describe him, idiot was not among them.  He had made a number egregiously
bad choices in his life, but he wasn’t actually stupid.  His grades in school
had been middling, but that hadn’t been due to any lack of smarts.  It was a
focus problem.  He scores on the yearly standardized tests had always been well
above average, good enough to get into a good university.  Of course, he
eventually flunked out of college, but that was down to that inability to focus
issue rearing its ugly head again.

          Luke was a bright guy. 
He’d always known that.

          Problem was, he just
didn’t give much of a shit about anything.  Not since that snowy Christmas Eve
ten years ago.

          The bartender set the
whiskey drink on the bar.  “You paying as you go or do you want to start a
tab?”

          Luke dug out his wallet,
extracted two rumpled twenties, and handed them over.  “Let me know when that
runs out.”  He tapped the now empty bottle of Pabst on the bar top.  “Oh, and
bring me another of these.”

          The bartender smirked. 
“First one took you, what, three minutes?  Four, tops?”  He shook his head. 
“Keep going at that rate, that forty bucks won’t last you very long.”

          “Plenty more where that
came from.”

          This was true.  Luke’s
wallet was stuffed full of cash.  For his probable final journey home, he’d
drained much of the remaining funds from his checking account.  The account was
now lodged somewhere in the low double digits, dangerous territory if he didn’t
replenish it soon.  At the account’s current low ebb, it’d take just one of
those bastardly monthly maintenance fees to send it spiraling into overdraft
hell.  For once, though, the joke was on the bank, because he wouldn’t be
around to pay those extortionate fees.

          Probably.

          The bartender nodded. 
“All I need to know.”

          Luke smiled after a sip
from the double whiskey.  “What’s your name, barkeep?  Been a long stretch of
years since my pretty face last graced this fine establishment and I don’t
remember you from back then.”

          “Stu Lombardi,” the
bartender said, taking a fresh bottle of Pabst from the cooler beneath the bar. 
He twisted the cap off the bottle, tossed it in a waste basket, and set the
bottle in front of Luke.  “No relation to the coaching legend, before you ask.”

          “Luke Herzinger.”

          “Nice to meet you, Luke.”

          “Same.”  Luke knocked
back a gulp of whiskey and followed it with a sip of Pabst.  He wasn’t that
deep into his planned final bender yet, but already a warm glow of mild
inebriation was spreading throughout his body.  His only hope was to remain
just sober enough to get himself out to the old house on the hill come
midnight.  And once he made it up there, he could have his last ever drink and
prop that shotgun under chin.  Maybe.  “You run this joint these days, Stu?”

          Stu nodded.  “Took the
place over from Sal Jr., that’s my daddy, a few years back.  You remember him?”

          Luke remembered Stu’s
father beating the living shit out of him one night many years ago.  The memory
was hazy—so many of them were—but the thing that triggered the fight was a
complaint from a female customer who accused Luke of stealing money from her
purse.  That detail he did remember.  Whether he’d actually done the deed was
another matter.  That memory resided somewhere in the more booze-pickled
recesses of his brain.  Either way, he’d reacted to the accusation in a less
than even-tempered manner.  Those details were also a bit hazy, but he believed
he might have repeatedly used a derogatory term rhyming with “runt” to refer to
his female accuser.  Tempers flared in every direction.  Fists flew.  Bottles
were thrown.  Someone whacked him across the back with a chair.  The whole
thing culminated with Sal dragging him outside and decking him with a solid
punch to the jaw.

          Making an executive
decision to keep this particular anecdote to himself, Luke lifted a shoulder in
a shrug meant to indicate uncertainty.  “Think so.  Like I said, it’s been a
while.”

          Stu’s eyes narrowed some
and he was silent a moment as he appeared to study Luke more closely than
before.  “You say your name’s Herzinger?”

          Luke gulped Pabst, wiped
moisture from his mouth.  “Yep.”

          Stu’s brow furrowed as he
scratched his whiskery chin.  “Huh.  I’ve heard that name before.”

          Luke’s hand shifted to
the whiskey glass.  He drained it and thumped the empty glass on the bar.  “That’s
interesting.  Refill, please.”

          Stu took the glass away
and set it in the sink at the back of the bar.  While the barkeep set about
preparing a fresh double whiskey for Luke, the fat guy with the mustache rapped
his knuckles on the bar.  “Herzinger.  I know that name, too.  Oh, wait. 
Herzinger as in…”

          The fat man’s rosy face
paled slightly and his mouth dropped open.

          Luke sighed.  “Yeah.”

          The fat man shook his
head.  “Holy shit.  You’re the one whose daddy--”

          “That’s right,” Luke
said, cutting him off.  “Rather not talk about that, if you don’t mind.”

          His second double whiskey
was in front of him now.  He picked it up and knocked back half of it in one
go.  Exhaling heavily, he put the glass down and closed his eyes, waiting to
see if the fat man would press the issue.  He was unsurprised when the man
allowed the conversation to lapse.  Prying into a man’s private business was
frowned upon in these parts.  If someone told you they didn’t want to talk
about a thing, you damn well left well enough alone.

          On the jukebox, a Buck
Owens song gave way to Bob Marley’s “Lively Up Yourself.”

          Luke opened his eyes.

          His head slowly swiveled
in the direction of the jukebox.  He stared at it for a long moment.  His gaze
shifted back to the bartender.  Stu had just picked up his old pulp paperback
and was about resume reading when he sensed Luke staring at him and glanced his
way.

          “Need another refill
already?”

          Luke shook his head. 
“Soon, probably.  But for the moment I’m a lot more curious about the current
musical selection.”

          Stu frowned.  “What?  You
got something against Bob Marley?”

          Luke took a contemplative
sip of Pabst before responding to this.  “Not at all.  Big fan, myself.”  In
reality, he had only a passing familiarity with the late reggae singer’s most
popular songs.  He thought they were okay, though the genre wasn’t really his
thing.  Neither was the shitkicker music that had been the norm here for as far
back as he could remember, but this was a blue collar dive in a small town. 
That stuff made sense here.  Bob Marley, maybe not so much.  “It’s just that
I’m pretty sure I never heard any reggae on the juke here back in the day.”

          Stu shrugged.  “I made
some minor changes to the music selection when I took over the run of the
place.  You’ll also hear some Grateful Dead and classic rock stuff now and
then.”

          The old guy to the right
of the fat guy said, “And thank Christ for that.  The rock and roll brings in
the babes.”

          Luke frowned.

          He took a look around the
place.  There were still no women present.

          He looked at the old
guy.  The guy was somewhere well north of seventy, Luke was pretty sure.  The
top of his head was shiny and bald.  His remaining hair was wispy and
snow-white.  His wrinkled hands were dotted with age spots.  If this guy was
scoring any “babes” on a regular basis, Luke would have to take it as final
confirmation that the universe was a strange and fucked-up place.

          “So where are all these
babes tonight?”

          The old guy snorted. 
“Hell, son.  It’s Christmas Eve.  They’re all at home with their regular fellas
or visiting with family.”

          The fat guy nodded. 
“It’s only us alcoholics here tonight.  The confirmed dipsomaniacs.”

          The old guy raised his
glass in a toast.  “To alcoholism!”

          The fat guy clinked his
beer bottle against the old man’s whiskey glass.  “To alcoholism!”