Dread

By Jason McIntyre

One year after the startling events of reader-favourites “Shed” and “Bled," we go back to the island for another startling tale, this time in the autumn of 1978.

“Dread” is the story of Mac and Dave McLeod, thirty-something bachelor brothers who are back in the tiny island town of Dovetail Cove after more than a decade away. They're here for a funeral, despite Mac's looming feeling that things aren't quite right in their childhood home, nor anywhere else across town. It doesn't take long for a mysterious visitor at the wake to embroil the McLeod boys and the island doc in a game of whodunit involving one of Police Chief Birkhead's unsolved files. Things get macabre when the boys discover a link to their parents in the mess. And the visitor who starts it all might just be a walking cadaver gone missing out from under the coroner's nose.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jason McIntyre
• Release date: Mar 8, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310565625

Jason McIntyre

Born on the prairies, Jason McIntyre eventually lived and worked on Vancouver Island where the vibrant characters and vivid surroundings stayed with him and coalesced into what would become his novel, On The Gathering Storm. Before his time as an editor, writer and communications professional, he spent several years as a graphic designer and commercial artist. Jason is the author of more than two dozen short stories, several novellas and full-length fiction.Currently, Jason is at work on new novels and stories in the Dovetail Cove world -- companion books to BLED and SHED.His latest full-length novel, THE DEVIL'S RIGHT HAND, is out now!Synopsis:The saga began with The Night Walk Men, the #1 Kindle Suspense novella by Jason McIntyre. Now it continues with The Devil's Right Hand. And a war is brewing.Meet Benton Garamond. He's lost. He careens through the wet streets of downtown Vancouver on a collision course with a dirty lawyer named Levy Gillis. He wants something from Gillis and he aims to get it.Meet Donovan Lo, former drug kingpin and not bad with the ladies if you ask him. He's in hiding and has a plan to leave his empire for good. But something -- and someone -- aims to put a bullet through his last big score.Now meet Sperro. He has a lot to say about his job, about Benton Garamond and about Donovan Lo. Sperro will be your tour guide."We are Night Walk Men, imbued with the lives of at least ten men, and we walk among you like a blur, unseen but often sensed or smelled like pollen in the air when you can't see flowers--or the tingle you get when the hairs on your neck stand up."If you hear footsteps on the parched earth behind you, or if dry autumn leaves scrape concrete with a breeze, that's most likely one of us, walking just a little ahead or just a little behind. If it's dark and you climb into your car and for once--for no reason at all--wonder why you didn't check the back seat for strangers, one of my brothers is mostly likely back there as you drive off."We are everywhere at once and nothing can stop us. We are Death incarnate, walking under long robes of black and chasing down the winds to read from a discourse that may be the last words you'll hear..."Be prepared to shake The Devil's Right Hand.

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Dread

A Novel by

Jason McIntyre

Published by The Farthest Reaches

Copyright © 2014 Jason McIntyre

Smashwords Edition

Fiction titles by Jason McIntyre:

On The Gathering Storm

The Night Walk Men

Shed

Thalo Blue

Black Light of Day

Bled

Nights Gone By

Walkout

The Devil’s Right Hand

Mercy And The Cat

Dread

Learn more about the author and his work at:

www.theFarthestReaches.com

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

This work contains MATURE CONTENT

Dovetail Cove

Monday, October 16, 1978

Part One: The Wake

Do not stand at my grave and weep,

I am not there...I do not sleep.

I am the thousand winds that blow...

I am the diamond glints on snow...

I am the sunlight on ripened grain...

I am the gentle autumn rain.

When you waken in the morning's hush,

I am the swift uplifting rush

Of gentle birds in circling flight...

I am the soft star that shines at night.

Do not stand at my grave and cry—

I am not there...I did not die...

—Traditional Irish Elegy

1.

My brother and me, we carried a wooden box through the rain while Mrs. Troyer watched with disdain from under the tattered red awning of the Kresge. Bearing the pall, they call it. When you heave a coffin off to be buried in the mud, that’s what they call it: the pall. A gloom. A burden to struggle under, a heft to strain beneath while shoulders sag.

Of course, we didn’t struggle alone. Four other men hoisted this box with us, four others bearing that encumbrance alongside my brother Mac and me out on Main Street. Though they surely didn’t haul the same balance of weight we did. Couldn’t have. Ol’ Doc Sawbones had a heart condition so he didn’t bear. Delia and Cordell Smythe didn’t bear either. Their stretch at a federal prison on the mainland wasn’t over yet. And, oh boy, wouldn’t that have been a hoot if they’d shown their faces around here again? Everyone else who either knew her or sat next to her in church or rode with her on the cripple bus downtown was either gone...or dead themselves.

So we had Danny Hellgarde, a gruff old son of a bitch from the drop-in centre. We barely knew him and he barely said a word. I worried he'd drop dead himself, and just at the prospect of taking the casket a half block down Main—but he proved himself sturdy when it came time to lift. We had Mr. Parson, the owner of the hardware store, Rod Davies, the postman, and Zeke, the town retard. Mac and me, we hadn’t called him that since we were kids. He was older than us by at least twenty years but he’d always looked old, always been pudgy with almost no hair. The few translucent white wisps he did have arced eighteen inches over his shiny head after starting above both ears.

Today, though, Zeke’s scant hair lay down the sides of his neck, wet with the pouring rain, like his grey coat and the rest of us in our blacks of the dead. We six, my brother and me at the head of the casket, all walked in deafening silence under the white noise of the rain, accented only by quiet grunts from the older men when we had to step down off the curb.

The rain had flooded out the east end of Main Street. Just shy of a week’s rain had the sewer basins backed up. Cobb’s Funeral Home stood at the low end of Main and the corner of Seventh, which went north-south, likely four feet closer to sea level than the high end. Mr. Cobb had stalled out his engine in standing water, which went up past the wheels on his only hearse. A town this size on an island this size, well, we didn’t need more than one carriage of this sort.

He’d gotten it towed to a higher portion of Main and boosted. It sat idling and Mr. Cobb opened the hatch with a rusty squawk. Mr. Parson’s knees popped behind me and he inhaled breath through his teeth with a whistle of effort as we all lowered ourselves and eased the casket down onto the outstretched rollers. Mr. Cobb pushed it forward from the back end and it tracked its way inside the darkened cave of the hearse, canted to the driver’s side. We backed away.

He closed the door, latched it with a clunk and moved off with no eye contact for either my brother or me. The other men stood back up on the sidewalk. Mrs. Troyer had moved along.

Did my brother and I think it odd that no one came for the service, except for the four men we’d asked to ‘bear the pall’ of it? Their wives came too, of course, those that had wives. And Zeke came with his elderly father. Did we think it odd that the men of the cloth at all of Dovetail Cove’s traditional churches had refused to hold funerary services? Did we think it odd that even the Pentecostal Church of Zion denied service under their holy roof?

No. None of that struck us odd.

But being back on the island after an increasing stretch of months and months away only made the mood of everything else painfully obvious. The sea was our home now, my brother and me—how many years away had it been? How many with just our rough and tumble fellow fishers and lobster men? I'd lost count. And now, back on land, I felt a gaping hole. We'd seen and done it all in our time away: the women, the swearing and dirty talk, the card games and the fights...the drink. We'd be back to that soon enough. But here, this other thing couldn’t be ignored. This...mood, it hung like heavy sentiment beyond the obvious pall of a funeral. The weight of it here now—had we not noticed it as teenagers before heading out to the blue yonder? Or could it be new? Wearing such a weighty coat burdened more than the casket, even without a division of six ways. We would talk of this weight later, me and Mac. In our stifled, truncated way of discourse, we would discuss it. Somehow, we would have to.

My brother Mac combed fingers back through his soaked hair and gave me a look as the driver’s door on the hearse slammed. Cobb plunked the car into gear. It gave a shudder and the tailpipe coughed. He drove away and sprayed our new black shoes. They had already soaked through anyway.

Mac stepped off from me. We’d have to walk back to get his truck, still parked in the lot at the funeral home.

In the distance, under her gold umbrella, Mrs. Troyer moved east on the sidewalk. The hearse passed her, sending a spray of rainwater but missing her as she widened her gate from where the waves pattered the concrete near her feet. The grey and flooded backdrop of Main Street stood pale behind a Mrs. Troyer, who hurried along without taking further notice. She still had her back to us, this group of black-draped men, doused and dour-faced, with our heads hung. Her short legs hustled—to either get somewhere, or, more likely, to get away from something. She didn’t look back, not once.

Like most in town, she had no need of saying goodbye to the woman in the casket.

We wouldn’t have either, Mac and me.

But we had to, didn’t we? We were her only sons.

2.

Ma's plot lay at the bottom of the hill, close to the road and as far away from Da's as she could get, apparently through a trade about four years ago. Da's hid further north across the creek that wound through the old cemetery. Mr. Cobb had us carry the casket from the back of his idling hearse up through the soggy grass and set it down on a set of straps across a hand-dug hole. Old Danny Hellgarde looked worn out and miserable in the downpour but he didn't complain. None of the men did. They were probably counting the minutes until a hot bath and a few fingers of brandy by a fireplace.

On account of the perpetual rain, we lowered Ma in without further ceremony. A nod between Mac and me indicated flat satisfaction. Neither of us needed to say anything. And Mr. Cobb certainly didn't want to add anything further than his glossy words at the funeral home. He likely hoped his engine wouldn't quit again on the way back.

Seven sets of men’s shoes squelched in the grass on the walk back to the road. On the walk with Mac back to his truck, the rain switched off—almost like God had grown weary of hand-wringing the clouds over Ma’s head the bulk of her life. Once we threw handfuls of mud on Ma in her space below ground maybe those dark clouds had finally been wrung dry.

Back at the house, more folks showed up than we expected. We didn’t mean to pick the Monday directly between Game 5 and Game 6 of the World Series, but we did, and that might have accounted for the extra traffic treading up Ma’s brown front yard from the broken asphalt of Lannen Lane. More than twenty poured through Ma’s front door, shaking their wet things into the living room carpet. Mac raised an eyebrow at me. But as was his style, he didn’t say anything. Not yet. He’d talk later, after the meat and cheese platters held only crumbs.

Likely it would be a dry comment about how Ma wasn’t worth their time to visit or help all the years she sat alone in this house watching TV, wasn’t worth their time to sit through a service awkwardly conducted by the town’s funeral director who had only read a half-dozen eulogies in his career. But when it came time to eat food in her living room as paid for by her meagre estate, they’d make the time and come in out of the rain.

And in his dry way, Mac would be right. Mac was nearly always right.

The wives and Zeke’s elderly father shook our hands with faint grip and said things like, our condolences and so sorry for your loss, but mostly Mac and I stood quietly and let the others eat and drink and mingle. Their hushed voices filled Ma’s house with a steady warble.

Parson and his wife sat in silence, though they spoke when others engaged them. Mac and I had been off-island for six years and knew none of the town's gossip. My little sister used to keep us up, but since she’d left home, we got sparse letters from her. The story we’d heard said Mr. Parson had inherited his uncle’s house north of the creek after more than a year of haggling over the estate and searching for heirs. Another year of dissent about what to do with the property followed—and that had led to marital tensions.

Fixin' to sell, Walt? someone asked Mr. Parson. Oh, I expect so, said Parson, his wife eyeing him sideways from a spot on my Ma’s sofa. Parson reached for a piece of cheese, maybe angling for a new subject. We'll be watching the Yanks tomorrow af’noon. Then we’ll sit down with an agent this week, see what kind of value they’d put on it. Maybe not.

Parson looked toward Mac and me, sharing the doorway to the kitchen but keeping mum. I have it on good authority there’ll be another of them acreages north of the crik up for sale this fall. Investor bought it 'round the first o' the year, fixed it up real nice. He's looking to make a little profit, a' course, but prices are still like stealin'. That stretch’d be a good place to raise a family.

Neither Mac or myself had married yet. Both of us had celebrated thirty-some birthdays and, truth be told, I hadn’t given the idea much thought. Look how Ma’s family had ended up.

Danny Hellgarde still looked winded. He had himself pulled up under Ma’s dining table but he downed his food and beer like he needed to get going. He paused then, and cast his eyes over at us boys in the doorway with Parson’s comment about raising a family hanging in the