Hell Town RV Park
Where one man’s trash is another man.
From The RV Files
By Clara Bush
Episode 2 (for Episode 1 click here)
(Rated Mature for Adult content)
Yesterday, the day before, and the day before that joined the ranks of the uninvited along with Brodie and Spooky. She made a game of the weirdness in Hell Town RV Park by going out of her way to make direct eye contact with her new neighbors. But as hard as Spooky tried, she had yet to crack the unspoken code among the park’s residents. An occasional nod was offered from time to time, but hi brought a quick retreat from the residents into their shadowy homes on wheels.
Since she knew none, she made up names for their neighbors. To the left lived No Windows Man and to their right Sprite Can Chick. Chick decorated her tumbleweeds with empty Sprite cans. Spooky speculated the can laden tumbleweeds were a homemade alarm system. The contraptions were staked and surrounded Chick’s old 1975 Holiday Rambler. Nothing in or out without setting off the scratchy tingling of empty cans against thorns and other empty cans.
“Why would someone need an alarm system like that?” Spooky asked. She was surprised to hear her voice. She’d been in her head and not intent on a conversation about the matter.
Brodie inhaled then expelled the air in a snit. Spooky was familiar with the sound. “Use your head. Why does anyone need an alarm system? To keep out intruders.”
Spooky quit listening after the huff. The question wasn’t, why set up an alarm system? It was more like, who is Chick so afraid of she’d rig up this primitive means of alerting herself. Why didn’t she google Amazon and buy a better contraption than tumbleweeds and Sprite cans? And what’s with the antiquated trailer?
These were the questions Spooky wanted to ask her husband, but his annoyance prohibited further exploration into the Chick topic. She’d never seen Chick, but laundry draped over the dilapidated picnic table indicated a woman. She couldn’t figure out how the laundered garments changed from time to time. But they did.
On the nineteenth night of their stay, Spooky woke to a scratchy, tingling sound interrupting the otherwise dead silence of Hell Town RV Park. She raised the blind on her side and peered out the mini window.
Something stood in the circle of canned tumbleweeds. Its eyes burned red and glared at her. She flopped back bumping Brodie almost off the bed.
“Wait till morning?” he grumbled and patted her bare bum.
She knew better than to wake him. She pulled the sheet over her head and inched closer to the window. It was gone. She couldn’t call it a he or she, because it was not human.
“Did you see it?” she asked her not imaginary friend.
A slight pressure on her cheek communicated the answer yes.
“What was it?” Spooky asked.
“It was an it,” her friend whispered in a breath only she heard.
“Should I be scared?”
“I’m here. But be scared if you want.” Friend offered his standard response. The same response he’d given over the many years of whisking away Spooky’s fears. He caressed her cheek and eased through her hair to soothe her to sleep.
***
The next morning, Spooky typed.
Depravity rules Hell Town RV Park. This deviancy hid from me until the nineteenth day. I discovered—in the obscurity of night—what I should not have discovered. Because of this encounter, I believe the strangeness will take liberties with me, showing me at every turn how much it perverts the earth I walk upon.
She was alone, as usual. Brodie frequented the gas station every morning for coffee with the sheriff and other notorious locals. Children’s laughter halted the frenzy of Spooky’s fingers. She took her last sip of Earl Grey, crammed her toes into a conveniently placed pair of flip-flops and toppled out the RV. Twenty days had past and this was the first sound of children. She figured kids meant family, parents—something good.
A withered man stood outside the trailer across from her. He watched two brown children play in a blue plastic pool. The kids kicked in the water and splashed each other, giggling with relief at the coolness. The boy noticed the man and studied him. He climbed out of the pool, dirt and dry grass clinging to his feet, knelt beside the pool, and shoved the little girl’s head underwater.
“Nooooo,” Spooky screamed.
The man and the boy turned to her. Their upper lips curled into a snarl.
She heard the thrashing girl come up for air. Spooky wanted to save the child, but with one step forward the man landed beside her as if telekinetically transported. He grabbed her and dug his claws into the tender underside of her arm. She winched. Her blood trickled down. His eyes fixed on his prey, he grinned and licked the blood with his black tongue. In a motion indicative of wings, he waved at the plastic pool.
The boy released the girl. She sat upright and gasped. Spooky twisted free, ran to the children, and plucked the girl from the water. “What is wrong with you people?”
With tiny fists, the girl punched at her savior’s arms. Spooky expected the child to be in tears, but instead the girl dove head first back into the water. And though the outside of the pool appeared to be only about a foot and a half deep, when Spooky stared into it, blackness stared back. She watched the tiny feet of the girl flip away into the inky chasm. The kid’s feet are webbed, she thought and flinched away when she saw something other than her own reflection in the water.
She tried to jerk the boy toward her but he inched backward. “Where is your mother?”
“Mother? What’s a mother?” the boy asked.
She turned to confront the old man. He’d vanished like a piece of unpicked cotton in a Texas dust devil.
—
Spooky learned at a young age to hide the truth from others. She and lies became comrades strictly for her survival. She quit telling Brodie about stuff like Red Eyes and Mind Control Guy years ago. He didn’t even know her daily routine consisted of online fortune telling, tarot card readings, and horoscope predictions. She justified the lie by convincing herself it would be awkward for Brodie to introduce her, to his work friends, as his wife who delved into the occult.
For over twenty years, she told him she spent so much time on the computer because she was writing a novel. He seemed okay telling acquaintances she was a romance novelist. Would rather she be a nurse or teacher, he’d say during these introductions, but, he’d add, he managed okay with the whole writer bit. He never asked what kind of a writer she was and invented the romance part. Nor did he ask when she’d finish or if he could read her manuscript.
Didn’t bother her. Much. Her haunts were her confidants. She communicated with three of them. Chetan, her shaman, taught her the power of animals and their magic. Singer, her druid, showed her the healing powers of herbs and essential oils, and how to read the stars. And Shayd, her idyllic lover, began her lessons on her thirteenth birthday. On that day, he gave Spooky her first organism. She didn’t know what it was, but it felt like nothing she’d ever experienced, and she was positive—due the Catholic upbringing and teachings inflicted upon her by her mom—it had to be as sinful as hell.
“Why does it make me feel so good down there?” she asked.
“It’s natural,” Shayd whispered. “It’s okay.”
She was sure he was wrong. How could anything feel so good not be sinful?
Shayd fulfilled her deepest, darkest desires even after marriage. On the job, Brodie’s colleagues dubbed him Quick Release. The name applied to him in bed as well as on the job. After Spooky’s lovemaking attempts with the impatient Brodie, Shayd finished what Brodie started.
“This has got to be wrong, isn’t it?” Spooky asked numerous times.
“Why would you think that? I’m not really here. Remember? He keeps telling you I’m only in your head.” Shayd assured her.
“Why did you pick me?” she asked over the years.
“We’ve always picked each other,” he’d say.
***
Spooky was convinced the inhabitants of the Hell Town RV were different than her friends. They’re not spirits. Not dead, she typed. The thought skated through her gray matter and made her entire normal explode like a rotten watermelon on a summer’s day.
She couldn’t tell Brodie. She hadn’t been able to confide in him since their second year of marriage when Dovie was born, and he told her he didn’t want her talking any of that supernatural shit around his kid.
With an absent father, a religious-zealot mother, and currently, an intolerant husband, Spooky had no choice but to allow her friends to mutate into her only anchor. Fleeting and elusive as her friends might be to the narrow-minded, to Spooky they were her stronghold on sanity. She not only recognized the absurdity in this, but also, how bat shit crazy it was.
“I admit this is my first RV park, but is it just me or is there something weirder than normal going down here?”
“I’ve seen what you’ve seen and there is a difference from our normal,” Shayd said.
Spooky was fully aware her normal was quite different than most people’s.
“Spirits of the dead have mingled with living creatures on this lonely plane of existence,” Chetan said. “There is no balance.”
“Why?” she asked, knowing this to be a poorly constructed question. Experience taught her they don’t answer her until she asks the right questions. At times, it’s hard for her to know what those questions are.
However, in the next instant an essential oil, Rosemary, she thought, penetrated the air. “The spirits war with the living. A constant undercurrent of evil attempts to replace what little good remains,” Singer said.
Yay, a right question. “What should I do?”
No answer.
“Should we leave?”
No answer.
“Uh. Uh. Should I make Brodie leave?”
No answer.
“Should I leave?”
“There is a reason you are here. That reason is not to leave,” Chetan said.
Damn a riddle. “You said, lonely plane of existence. What does that mean?”
“There are many dimensions. When scientists discovered there were more than four dimensions, fourth being time, they exposed a multi-dimensional universe,” Singer said.
Chetan hummed his low song that sounded like a breeze awakening fallen leaves to Spooky. “When a dimension is out of balance it can collide with another dimension causing both to be out of balance. A red-eyed person in one dimension is an anomaly, but in another dimension, it may be normal. Same with a person who can steal another’s free will.”
“Like the mind control guy?”
No answer, but Spooky imagined Chetan nodding, and imagined him as she always did in breechcloth and a headband with a single raven’s feather.
“Is there some way I can help bring balance?”
“Because you are here, then we must think, yes,” Chetan said.
Shayd’s lips pressed against hers. “Perhaps you are the key.”
Her vision of Shayd was ever changing. Sometimes he was her favorite movie star. Sometimes the first boy she crushed on. Sometimes the young man who paid her so much attention when her husband paid her none. Sometimes he was the hazel-eyed stranger at the grocery store whose eyes met hers and locked for an instant. In all forms, he was her perfect man. Not necessarily perfect looking but kind, happy, and supportive of her eccentricities. Things she’d never received from any man who’d been a constant in her life.
As for Singer, she could sense, hear, and smell him, but she could not visualize him. She guessed because, to her, he was peace. She knew those things she considered peaceful. The sound of ocean waves on a white beach. Bare feet in a cool stream on a hot day. The changing of summer to fall. A feeling. A sound. A smell. That’s what he was to her.
“I want to see you, but I can’t visualize peace,” she’d say to Singer.
“Try,” he’d reply.
She created his image into something that resembled the air beneath a dove’s wings. Nothing tangible. Merely an overwhelming feeling of a godlike presence, and a guarantee he was there, always had been and always would. Spooky figured this was the way religious people felt about their God. She couldn’t feel the god her mother preached nonstop to her about, but she could feel Singer on every breath the wind took.
Click on the link below to continue following the Hell Town Web Serial.
Author’s Comment
The reason I began writing a blog was to create a brand for my fiction. After almost four years of blog writing and much research, it dawned on me, I’m not doing what I love doing. Yes, blogging is a form of writing, but my love is creating characters with flaws, placing them in scary situations, and adding a little romance. Which is not the definition of a blog. My love is being so far in my imagination I’m living in a different dimension where I’m one of my characters and the other characters are leading me on a path to discovery.
As a way of keeping my blog active, and immersing myself in what I love most, I’m adding FREE FICTION to my blog posts. NOT FREE as in take for your own free, it is copyrighted, but FREE FICTION as in read and enjoy. It costs you nothing but a little time and perhaps, a supportive comment. I like supportive comments.
When I began writing, my goal was not to get rich or even make a living. My goal was to share with others my worlds. And I thought, if I had just one person read what I wrote, then my goal would be met, and I’d be the richest person ever.
Why FREE FICTION? As writers, we’re told not to give away our writing. People don’t treasure what is free. I was told. But then the light came on. I have so many story ideas rambling around in my head I’ll never get them all written. When a writer writes a book, whether it’s self-published or traditionally published, the editing and marketing takes a tremendous amount of time. No time is left to start the next book.
Free Fiction allows me to release some of those pent-up stories for others to read. No hassle. Hell Town RV Park will appear on a regular basis until the novella is complete. It is a work in progress. Feel free to comment on the discovery you hope the characters make. Hope you enjoy.
Copyright
The RV Files is fiction. Any characters and events depicted in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, extraterrestrials, demons, werewolves, or ghosts—living or dead—is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Copyright ©: 2017 by Clara Bush
All rights reserved. Published by TURTLE TOP COVE LP.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of the publisher.
For information regarding permission, write to:
TURTLE TOP COVE LP.
Attention: Permissions
P.O. Box 158
South Fork, Colorado 81154
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any mean, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of publisher.
- SS Ourang Medan Ghost Ship Lore - September 19, 2024
- The Ghost Ship of the Carquinez Strait Urban Legend - August 15, 2024
- Benicia Arsenal Urban Legend - July 18, 2024