Kelpie Dreams: Kelpie Tales, #1

By Steve Vernon

Meet Lady Macbeth--a high school librarian, ex-assassin, and part-time kelpie, whose mother wanted to name her Hemorrhoid at birth. Now she has to take on a Sea Hag--eight legs of Godzilla-ugly poured into a bucket full of meanness--with the help of a one-woman army named Rhonda, a 200-year-old Sea Captain, and a hunky lighthouse keeper who won't admit that he's dead as well. KELPIE DREAMS is a funny, action-packed, shoot-em-up paranormal romance novel for folks who HATE to read romance novels.

"If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." - Bookgasm 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Steve Vernon
• Release date: Sep 1, 2019
• ISBN: 9781393173915

Steve Vernon

Everybody always wants a peek at the man behind the curtain. They all want to see just exactly what makes an author tick.Which ticks me off just a little bit - but what good is a lifetime if you can't ride out the peeve and ill-feeling and grin through it all. Hi! I am Steve Vernon and I'd love to scare you. Along the way I'll try to entertain you and I guarantee a giggle as well.If you want to picture me just think of that old dude at the campfire spinning out ghost stories and weird adventures and the grand epic saga of how Thud the Second stepped out of his cave with nothing more than a rock in his fist and slew the mighty saber-toothed tiger.If I listed all of the books I've written I'd most likely bore you - and I am allergic to boring so I will not bore you any further. Go and read some of my books. I promise I sound a whole lot better in print than in real life. Heck, I'll even brush my teeth and comb my hair if you think that will help any.For more up-to-date info please follow my blog at:http://stevevernonstoryteller.wordpress.com/And follow me at Twitter:@StephenVernonyours in storytelling,Steve Vernon

Book preview

Chapter One—The Color of Mourning

Ionly wanted to say good-bye. Do you know what I mean by that? I sure don’t. A woman’s last thoughts on this earth really ought to mean something deep and profound, but for some mysterious and inexplicable reason, at this moment all I could really think of was the memory of my mother.

I know what you are thinking. You are saying to yourself that it is only natural to think about the woman who brought you into this world at the moment when you are getting prepared to step out of this world. Well, listen—you have to understand that my mother is one of the strangest human beings whom I have ever had the pleasure—as well as the undeniable displeasure—of knowing and sometimes not knowing. My mother always told me that my middle name should have been Hemorrhoid—partly because that was the only true gift that she ever remembers me giving her during my nine months of slowly getting around to being born—but mostly because, as she put it, I was the world’s greatest pain in the butt.

Hemorrhoid isn’t really any kind of a name, the delivery doctor had argued with my mother, after she had quietly confided her choice of a name for her firstborn child to approximately half of the hospital’s five and a half floors’ worth of patients and staff in one long lungful of a screaming shout: Jesus dying nail-palmed Christ almighty, Margaret Hemorrhoid Sally Anne Macbeth—will you just hurry the Hell up and get born!

Hemorrhoid really isn’t a name at all, the delivery doctor told her. It is more along the lines of a minor and yet somewhat irritating medical manifestation.

I have an Aunt Hermione, my mother tartly informed the delivery doctor. That’s close enough to Hemorrhoid, isn’t it?

Jazz hands, Mom, big-time jazz hands.

I want to name the child Hemorrhoid, my mother insisted. I have the right to, if I want to do so.

And yes, indeed—that was most definitely the single biggest jazz hands, hallelujah, and please-pass–the caramel-coated-popcorn moment in my entire lifetime.

Thank God and all the saints in heaven that my mother was a stubborn and staunch Catholic and that the attending priest that she had insisted upon being present for the delivery somehow managed to talk my mother out of naming me Hemorrhoid about ten minutes before the final push. I think that his argument might have involved a threat of excommunication and quite possibly her being unfriended and permanently blocked from the Vatican’s Facebook page.

All right – so I lied about that last part. Facebook hadn’t been invented back when that priest was arguing with my mother over my name – still, however he managed to convince her to change her mind, I am eternally grateful to the attending priest. I mean, just think about it. Can you actually imagine spending your entire lifetime constantly spell-checking your own first name? Go ahead—just try to close your eyes and spell h-e-m-o-r-r-h-o-i-d without having to resort to a discreet peek at a medical dictionary. I dare you.

God bless spell-check.

I AM NOT QUITE SURE just exactly why I was thinking about my mother’s peculiar choice in birth names at this particular point in time. It wasn’t like I had lost my mother. I knew exactly where I left her, even though she was certain in her mind that she wasn’t really there, where I had left her, at all.

So where was she?

Depending upon the direction of the wind, she was standing somewhere between forty and sixty years ago in her mind. Either way, she was a whole lot younger and a whole lot prettier and was waiting for my Dad to come home from the war.

Which war, you ask? Well, any war, actually. You just name it. Depending upon the day of the week my mother would tell you that she was waiting for my dad to come home from World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, or even that little British brew-up in the Falklands. Mind you, my father had never actually served in any of these particular wars. He hadn’t even been a member of the Canadian Armed Forces or any armed forces at all—unless you count the fact that he filled two sleeves in every dress shirt that he ever wore—but he was not a member of any actual army that I have ever heard of.

My mother made up that tiny little itty-bitty detail as well. She has always been a bit of a fabulist—which is a high-faluting, froufrou way of saying that she was a stone-cold, natural liar on any given day of the week—and her deteriorating mental situation at this point was giving way to that whole magnificent stretch-the-truth tendency of hers.

The mind is a wonderfully talented origamist that way. Whenever it wants to it can fold reality into any number of possible permutations and combinations. I do not know everything that there is to know in this life, but I do know this: dementia is God’s greatest practical joke on anyone who has ever meant to get around to sitting down someday and finally, once and for all, writing her own life story down for posterity.

Any publicity rep will tell you—never buy into your own PR.

Now I can hear you thinking that dementia is actually not something to be joked about, but I learned a very long time ago that it was better to laugh about something that you cannot do anything about, rather than breaking down and crying. In fact, when it comes right down to it, tears are nothing more than slow, wet giggles running snail tracks down your cheekbones.

So what was I really waiting for?

I stood on the side of the Lunenburg highway, close to Blue Cove and what the locals refer to as the Lonely Point Lighthouse. The wind was calm and the morning was clear and I could see the distant lighthouse that had given the area its name in the first place.

The lighthouse was actually not on a point but rather a lonely little spit of an island situated just beyond the cove. I believe that at one point the island might actually have been connected to the shore by a thin stretch of low-rising land, but the vagaries of the tidal shift had gradually erased all memories of the earthen connection.

I stood there alone, bathed in the early morning light of a Nova Scotia morning and holding a white-painted wooden picket-cross gently in my left hand, while leaning upon the handle of a slightly rusted garden spade. I know, you are wondering to yourself just what exactly a picket-cross is. Well, it is a cross made out of two wooden fence pickets that I kicked out of my garden fence.

Are you satisfied now?

I probably looked just a little bit like Bram Stoker’s old vampire-hunter, Abraham Van Helsing, in drag or possibly some sort of a strange roadside born-again penitent reverend mother in a tropical print polyester windbreaker and a pair of tangerine dress slacks. I wondered yet again if I shouldn’t have worn black. Black was the color of mourning, wasn’t it? No, not black.

Black was definitely not the color of mourning. Black was a color that was worn by international spies and by people who did not happen to suffer from the lingering embarrassment of dandruff. Black was worn by old school nuns and by Anglican ministers and by the occasional chain-smoking neo-bohemian performance poet.

As far as I was concerned, the color of mourning was neon yellow. You don’t believe me? Just give me a minute and I swear to you that I’ll convert you over from black to yellow thinking. Besides, Abraham Van Helsing was supposed to be a heroic figure, unless maybe you counted Anthony Hopkins’s rather dubious portrayal of the fearless, overeating, flatulent vampire hunter in Francis Ford Coppola’s overrated 1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula—and who in her right mind would want to count that?

Don’t listen to the critics. Critics know nothing. Let me just gather my thoughts for a moment, if I might. That might take me just a little bit of doing, kind of like the sort of doing that it would take to sit down and reorganize a yarn ball factory after a large herd of giant kittens had rambled their way through the back stockroom of yarn balls. What was I really doing? I must be freaking crazy. What on earth was I doing out here? I looked again at the wooden picket-cross that I was holding.

I was pretty proud of that picket-cross. I had managed only to bend one single, solitary, ten penny Dollar Store nail and to bang my thumb only twice hammering those fence pickets together. If you did not count the splinters in the heel of my left hand and the toe that I had stubbed when I had kicked those pickets from out of my garden fence, you would almost swear that I actually knew what I was doing.

I wish I knew what I was doing. I looked down at what I had written upon the face of the picket-cross. HAMILTON ARTHUR MACBETH. The name was neatly written in a black indelible marker that I had also purchased at the Dollar Store. I sometimes think that a person can satisfy the logistic demands of her entire lifetime with one concentrated shopping spree at a good-size, well-stocked Dollar Store.

As I said, I was proud of that picket-cross. I hadn’t even misspelled my son’s name. That would have been a terrible sin, now wouldn’t it? Misspelling your own dead son’s name? Now that would have been bad form, indeed.

Now why in the world did you want to name him after a city? Mom had asked me repeatedly on the day that I gave birth to Hamilton in the Halifax IWK Grace Hospital. And why on earth did you have to pick the name Hamilton? At the very least you could have chosen Halifax or New York or Toronto or somewhere decent. I mean, Hamilton isn’t really a city, is it?

Jazz hands, Mom.

Big-time, Bob Fosse jazz hands.

A battered, primer-red Oldsmobile Vista Cruiser drove by slowly. A woman gawked through her fly-spattered windshield at me, as if she had never seen anyone standing on the side of the road with a homemade picket-fence crucifix in her hand before. I caught a glimpse of her wide country face sporting a set of snowplow jaws that looked as if she had chewed on bubble gum and beef jerky and cases of anabolic steroids for the last twenty-three years or so. I suppose that she could have been admiring the fit of my brand-new tangerine dress slacks and my carefully playful salmon-pink Hello Kitty T-shirt, or maybe she could somehow discern that I had actually lost ten whole pounds in the last three weeks—because grief beats the hell out of Weight Watchers.

She could have been thinking anything at all. Anything was possible when you stop and think about it.

Three weeks ago my life had almost made sense. Three weeks ago my eighteen-year-old son, Hamilton, had still been alive.

I looked out and down at the ocean below me, where Hamilton’s stolen/borrowed neon yellow Audi had smashed directly through the highway guard rail and plummeted over the cliff and down into the deep and cold Atlantic Ocean.

Why had he done it? I didn’t really know.

It was quick, they told me.

He couldn’t have felt a thing, the police officer who had come and knocked at my door the morning after my son passed away, had informed me. That water in March is so cold it would have taken his breath away and stopped his heart, quicker than you could say gesundheit.

The police officer had kept a straight face while he said it all to me, and I knew that he was just trying to be kind in his own way about a duty that he would rather someone else were doing. I wondered whether there was a workshop on delivering bad news in person that police officers had to take before they were allowed out of the police station and onto the city streets.

I wondered whether he carried a card with a printed response for a situation like this.

I wondered if that hypothetically printed card actually said, quicker than you could say gesundheit.

I mean, what else could you say at a time like that? Death often happened this way—quickly, like an unexpected sneeze.

I tried to put myself in his place and imagine just exactly what I would have said to me if I were him, aside from, Thank God that it happened to you and not me.

Hi, nice lady. My name is Officer Michael Wallace—and no, I was not actually named after the CBS 60 Minutes newscaster Mike Wallace. I have a pair of squinty blue eyes and a badge and a cracked tooth that almost makes my grin look charming if you did not count the coffee breath and that speck of unchewed lettuce stretched boldly across my yellowing left molar—and oh, by the way, your eighteen-year-old son Hamilton just stole a neon yellow Audi and took it out for a joyride and was hit with a sneezing fit when an unseasonable blackfly flew directly up his right nostril and made him sneeze just before he lost control and rolled that neon yellow Audi around that rusty angle iron of a highway corner—right before he ran that Audi down into the ocean, where he drowned.

But hey—it was quick. "Gesundheit," I said. I am laughing. I am crying. You can do both of those things if you really want to—or even if you don’t want to. It is a kind of a black and yellow sort of way of doing things. You can call it a study in contrasts, if you will. Sometimes, you can laugh and cry at the very same time, and it is a good thing and it is a bad thing and it is nothing at all.

Of course, any other time the act of laughing and crying at the very same time is not so good a habit to fall into. It tends to confuse the unwary, the young, and the unlearned audience.

A gray-winged herring gull sitting upon a weathered pine stump turned and looked directly at me. He was probably wondering whether I was speaking to him. He might even have been trying to figure out whether he had somehow sneezed without knowing it, thus causing me to say "Gesundheit," as I had said. He might even have been worried that he was possibly catching a cold and that he ought to stock up on his vitamin C and echinacea.

Or maybe I was just making the whole thing up.

I made my way slowly down the rocky hill, carefully carrying my wooden picket-cross and the spade that I had brought for digging. I felt a little bit like some sort of a one-woman protest march or possibly even a solo wildcat strike aimed directly at the Atlantic Ocean.

Way to go, Norma Rae.

Of course, if Hollywood was ever foolish enough to make a movie based upon my life, I would never have been played by Sally Fields. Sally was far too playful and too mainstream and too narrow-hipped and well-meaning to portray me accurately. Not to mention that she was too darn short. I had always been built along the lines of a tall drink of water.

No, if there were ever to be a movie made out of my life, it would most likely have turned out to be a modestly budgeted, made-for-television movie, and my part would most likely be played by Mariska Hargitay from the tenth season of Law and Order.

Yes, Mariska certainly possessed that necessary somber, thick-haired, exotic gravitas that I always felt I should have possessed in another lifetime or so. Of course, I could have also been played by a Bette Davis or possibly even a pre-Munsters Yvonne De Carlo, although both of them were too darn short.

I wasn’t really all that fussy, come to think of it.

And how did you like that choice of words, anyway?

Gravitas.

I always did like that word. Gravitas. It sounded to me like something that you would take for an upset stomach or maybe even a case of sea sickness, which was an apt thought, given that I was getting ready to walk into the ocean.

I looked about me at the rocks and the water. I could hear the sound of seagulls calling out in that screaming happy sob of a song. I could hear the waves rolling and slapping upon the rocks. I could smell the ocean waiting patiently below for my grand entrance. I am ready for my close-up, Mr. DeMille.

And don’t you dare tell me that I am misquoting because anyone can quote something that somebody else already said. It takes style to misquote something in your very own way.

I think somebody else said that before, but don’t quote me on it.

The rocks were slick from the morning damp and the churning waves that rolled and tossed below me. There were clumps of blue-eyed grass and thickets of alder shooting up among the scatter of coastal bric-a-brac. The supple early-spring branches of the alder bushes already bore the small, fluffy catkins that would eventually fall away and grow into buds that would mature into more branches and more leaves and more simpleminded hopefulness. There was order here, amid the apparent chaos. Nature always knew what the hell she was doing.

I wish that I knew what I was doing. What in the name of blue blazing hell was I really doing? It wasn’t as if anyone were really going to get so much as a lousy stinking chance to see this stupid little homemade, rinky-dink, white-painted Red Green picket-cross all the way down here, hidden by the rocks and the waves.

It wasn’t like anyone who actually did somehow manage to see the picket-cross would actually know what the picket-cross was supposed to symbolize in my heart of hearts—and really, how many hearts can one person have?

I wasn’t even sure what the picket-cross—built out of those two white-painted pickets that I had kicked out of my bungalow’s garden fence—was supposed to symbolize. It’s not like I was even all that Christian of a person. I don’t go to church—not even at Easter. I have always believed that Sunday mornings were better spent sipping on a tasteful ceramic bucket of hot, black coffee and gnawing tastefully upon a box of chocolates approximately the size of an economy-class aircraft carrier, nose-deep into my e-reader, most likely reading a fat, spicy romance.

That was just the kind of a person I was. I wasn’t holy. I wasn’t heroic. I was just myself. About the only remarkable thing about me was my name—Lady Cordelia Macbeth.

Yes, I actually do go by my second name, Cordelia. I prefer to be called Dee, but it actually does still say Lady Cordelia Macbeth on my birth certificate and my driver’s license and on my Dalhousie University Master of Library Science degree. With honors.

The name was given to me by my very own mother, who had really wanted to name me Margaret Hemorrhoid Sally Anne Macbeth until, as I already told you, the attending priest had talked her out of it. The name had been her idea, though. Three weeks before going into labor she had spent one entire evening reading three Coles Notes abridgements of Macbeth, Romeo and Juliette, and All’s Well That Ends Well as part of a summer self-improvement plan that she had read about in the pages of a Cosmopolitan magazine. She had actually intended to read four of Shakespeare’s plays, but apparently she had fallen asleep halfway through A Midsummer Night’s Dream—and who could really blame her?

You see, my mother had a theory.

If I read each of these books aloud during the run of my pregnancy, my mother had told anyone who cared to listen, my child will grow up to have an IQ of 365, one point for every day of the year, give or take the occasional leap year. God has given me the gift of a blessed pregnancy, and he has ebbed the flow of my menstrual tide and allowed my egg to seed and flourish, and in return I am going to give the good Lord a son who will grow up to one day become the president of Mensa.

That’s right. My mother actually wanted to have a son. That was not all that unusual, I suppose. What was truly unusual was the way she constantly reminded me of that fact throughout my first twenty years upon this earth.

The way I figured it, my Mom was born with a permanent case of penis envy, and she was determined to pass that condition down to me as some sort of what-the-freak legacy of my continuingly embarrassing existence.

Fine, she said to the attending priest. If I cannot name my daughter Hemorrhoid, then I will name her Lady Macbeth. Lady is a perfectly good name, isn’t it? I had a dog named Lady once, and she was perfectly fine until a Mary-Kay-pink Winnebago motor home ran her over. And my husband’s last name is Macbeth, so how can that be wrong? That is almost positively biblical, now, isn’t it?

Sure, Mom. Lady and Macbeth. Walt Disney and William Shakespeare. Big-time, old-school, Al Jolson jazz hands.

It was an absolutely perfect name for a child destined to be picked on and left out and teased mercilessly for the first twelve years of her education.

My father, who had grown up bearing the last name Macbeth and the first name Dane, knew all too well just how often other people would make fun of such a name, had insisted upon adding the name Cordelia to the mix.

Way to stick up for your only daughter, Dad.

"If you have to name her after your dead pet dog and that damnable play, my father said to my mother, at the very least, let me name her after my favorite great-aunt."

Do you mean that great-aunt of yours who smells vaguely of elderberry tea? Mom apparently replied. "What kind of a name is that for a man’s daughter?"

You see what she did there, didn’t you? I wasn’t her daughter. I was his daughter. Not that it really mattered. You see, my mother never really cared to listen all that closely to anything that my father had to say.

You are afraid of life, Mom often told my father. "I don’t know what I did to deserve a husband like you for