Hauntings & Happenstances: Autumn Stories

By Daniel R. Robichaud

Are you eager for a meeting with the unusual and the unexpected? Prepare yourself, brave reader! The stories in this volume are not for the faint of heart.

Hauntings and Happenstances brings together five tales from the author of the ghostly Oil Smudges and the ghastly Circles Have Unsafe Dimensions. With these tales you will encounter:

A man who sees a figure from his past in reflective surfaces. Join him as he struggles to learn whether this strange specter is an embodiment of a past guilt never properly laid to rest or something far more malicious . . .

An unusual location in Japan serving as the locus for chilling brushes with the supernatural as well as recollections of warmer times . . .

A man haunted by his involvement in an accidental death, an event that triggers a lifelong obsession with perception and ultimately opens doors to another weird world just beyond the edge of our normal senses . . .

The uncanny balladeer Jim Sargent makes two appearances, battling strange Appalachian apparitions with a little more than a streak of courage, a handful of songs, and powerful plucking fingers . . .

These five tales present explorations of the dark side of the human condition and ghostly terror perfect for any autumn season of the heart.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Twice Told Tales II
• Release date: Sep 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781370476268

Daniel R. Robichaud

Daniel R. Robichaud has lived in southeastern Michigan, central Massachusetts and southern Texas. He is a Rhysling Award nominated poet and the author of over one hundred stories, articles and poems, which have appeared in such markets as Shroud Magazine, Rogue Worlds, Goblin Fruit, Rage of the Behemoth, Green Prints, and WritersWeekly. Daniel holds degrees in both Physics and English, and his career path has reflected these passions. In addition to his numerous writing opportunities, he has been an Igor For Hire (aka a freelance research engineer), a substitute teacher, an automation engineer, and a neurophysiology lab manager. Daniel enjoys entertaining people with his words and stories. If you enjoy a good read, why not try one of his works? You might just love them.

Book preview

Hauntings & Happenstances

Autumn Stories

Daniel R. Robichaud

So Dawn Goes Down To Day

My eldest son is grown sluggish of late, and sometimes it’s all I can do not to drown him in salt.

"Car, Larry. Now."

My son is fifteen going on three years old when he rolls his eyes and sighs and says Okay, all right, dragging each vowel as though it is an especially offensive thread on a sweater he is intent on unraveling. Not sweater strands, these are my nerves he is tugging, but he relents before things go too far.

He rises like the water level of a plugged toilet and slouches toward the garage to be born to school. I again note his sloppy appearance: his mop head of hair hangs over his eyes, his clothes are rumpled because he is too busy with the blasted game console to put laundry away, even the band name on his T-shirt is washed to near incomprehensibility . . .

Why has he turned out this way? His brother Wayne is the model of good looking: thirteen but always clean, sharply dressed, quick with a disarming smile—just like his old man—and never afraid to stand up for his opinions when he knows he is in the right. Wayne is even the spitting image of me when I was his age, while Larry . . .

Larry lives to drive me past the brink.

In the garage, he slumps onto the middle bench of the minivan. Wayne sits tall in the passenger seat, gazing through the windshield like a king surveying his holdings. It warms my heart to see him happy with all that is his, though eager to take a little more. Makes him seem somehow more American than his brother.

I try not to look in the back, seeing Larry will drag me some place I would prefer not to be. Yet, I cannot avoid him for long, as I check my rear view mirror to back out once the grinding motor finishes curling the door near the ceiling.

The mirror shows no one on the middle bench. Damn it, Larry. Enough fooling. When I turn around, he is sitting dead center, looking at me like a helpless victim.

Nice trick, I say, Now, buckle up.

He answers this by pointing to the fastened seatbelt.

Bussss-ted, Wayne says without bothering to turn away from his windshield view. Larry rolls his eyes.

Fine, I say and turn round in my seat.

The rearview mirror shows him sitting, then, still wearing his put-upon face. I take my eyes away to shift to reverse. When I ease my foot from brake to accelerator, I glance into the mirror again and suck a startled wind. My foot tromps down, jolting my boys forward. I am mostly oblivious to this because I cannot stop staring into that slender reflective rectangle. Even as we speed toward the street, my eyes are fixed, unable to blink. The hairs on the back of my neck rise, growing terribly sensitive to the fan currents. Cavities are forming inside my groin and head. It is as though I am dreaming, staring in that mirror, because otherwise how to explain the new passenger beside Larry? A boy—thin lipped, dark complexion, athletically slender, dressed some twenty years out of date—his hand high upon my son's thigh, and grinning at me. No pleasure in this, only a fierce determination, a kind of near berserk savagery. I have seen the look before, seen the boy . . . But I cannot say as to where. I can only stare, wide-eyed and breathless and full of dread.

It is Wayne's shouting Dad! Dad! that breaks my paralysis, that reveals the oncoming garbage truck speeding toward the minivan's side in time for me to brake, shift, and accelerate back into the driveway.

When we are safe, I ignore Wayne's pointless queries and spin in the seat, demanding "What's the big idea?"

Larry is alone, terrified to the verge of wetting himself.

Who's back there with you?

Barely intelligible syllables spill from his mouth.

"Don't mumble, Larry."

N-No one's back here, Dad.

I can see as much. I still shove the gear shift to Park and hurry around to check. Of course, no one is hiding behind the middle bench.

I drive the rest of the way in silence. My boys will not look my way, much less talk. Suits me fine. I check the rearview mirror every few seconds. Larry is always alone.

As he should be.

When I drop the boys in the Richards Middle School parking lot—Wayne's educational institute—I am somewhat calmer. While Larry slogs across the soccer field toward Davidge High, I note something different about his walk. Oh, he is still slouched, yet lively in a way he never is around the house. Then, I spot the waiting, waifish figure on the far side and realize what has livened him up.

A girl?

I feel a puff of pride, though I am not really sure why. I've always known Larry to be, though shy, not wholly without his old man's good looks. If only he will pull the hair from his eyes and maybe clean up a bit, he might find something more appealing than