Shadow of the Other: An Anthology of Spooky Stories

By Dave Stanson

Here is a collection of four short stories written and set in the late 80's and early 90's by a generation X author. In the style of "what you don't see is scarier than what you do see," it is not a festival of gore, but rather a good read for a campfire or at Halloween. Science fiction story at the end is set in the distant future. Some R-rated language and sex references.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 8, 2018
• ISBN: 9780359143573

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Shadow of the Other: An Anthology of Spooky Stories

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Title Page

Shadow of the Other:

An Anthology of Spooky Stories

Dave Stanson

Stanson & Davis Publishing

Distributed by Lulu.com

2018

Copyright Information

Shadow of the Other: An Anthology of Spooky Stories

Copyright © 2018 by Dave Stanson

Cover artwork © 2018 D.T. Davis

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information address Lulu.com

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

First Printing: 2018

ISBN 978-0-359-14357-3

Stanson & Davis Publishing

Ottawa, IL 61350

Dedication

For my mother, who chased the monsters away,

especially the ones in my own head.

Foreword

If we were to assume that all things in nature are known, we would be confined to a very boring universe. For discovery is made every day on some small scale, while greater and more significant revelations appear less frequently, and profound knowledge of the greatest magnitude presents itself only a few times in a generation. And if what is known amazes us, then what is unknown must tantalize us.

In the modern age we try to rationalize all that surrounds us. With the invention of reliable recording devices, society discounts everything that has not been filmed or photographed. And if all we believe in is what someone else wants us to see, the evidence of someone else's video, which in this era can easily be faked, we can never know the truth. Yet mysteries remain that are not completely understood, but are nonetheless true.

But truth is subjective, since what one sees with one's own eyes is the product of perception filtered by experience. For the sake of sanity, peoples' minds spare them the implications of seeing something too weird to be true. Truth is also relative to what one’s community accepts as real. Maybe that's the word which is most accurate. Reality depends on consensus, truth is more individual.

A word about these tales is necessary for context. These stories were written decades ago, before the Internet, before smart phones, before political correctness.

They were written in an innocent, ignorant time by someone with an unsophisticated outlook on life. A man in his early twenties, when life was about flirting with girls and hanging out with friends and trying to figure out his place in the world. I have opted not to alter the language or the flavor of the text to align them with current attitudes. By today’s standards the characters are crude, vaguely sexist, and mostly unaware of the wider world. Their language contains profanity and their behavior is occasionally selfish and childish. They are nowhere racist or homophobic, but there are also no depictions of people of color or LGBT individuals at all. Not from discrimination, but simply because it was much less ubiquitous in those days in that setting.

The America they inhabited no longer exists, at least not in the mainstream. They came of age in a world comfortable with only two genders; where single women were as frequently on the prowl for a casual sexual encounter as were men. Where people actively objectified each other as a matter of course, and it was expected. Where social media wasn’t even on the radar, inappropriate jokes were told openly and often, people settled conflicts without police/legal involvement, and there were no safe spaces.

But also it was an America before terrorism, when children could play outside in relative safety of not being trafficked, go to school without the possibility of being shot to death by classmates, when people looked each other in the eye and had conversations instead of being constantly glued to their phones. The scariest prospect was a vague threat of the supernatural. It was neither a golden age nor a dark age. It was simply another time, and cannot be viewed through the lens of modern values and social behaviors. Read them with that in mind, and enjoy them for the time capsule of fiction they are. Not as an endorsement of the 1980’s, but as a look into the past.

-Dave Stanson, September 2018

The Vanger Road Horror

In the strange, aimless summer of 1988, between the end of high school and the beginning of real life, between the official end of childhood and the beginning of adulthood, I found myself melancholy and bored. This was an odd sensation for me, as I had never been bored or restless, always having plenty to do. But several things conspired to deprive me of my usual habits and haunts.

Most of my friends had gone on vacations with their families, a last hurrah before going off to college, and the girl I’d been seeing for the last year of high school had recently dumped me. She was no great loss, in retrospect, but the make-out sessions had been plentiful and regular, and I had widened my circle of acquaintances. Now, of course, they had sided with her, and the other girls from our group that I’d have liked to date were off-limits because she had poisoned their attitudes against me.

Hard to remember now, the details of the break-up, but distilled it came down to my desire to go away to college and her desire for me to stay in town and work some lame job and get married at eighteen. No thank you. My father had brought us to this little Midwestern town when I was five so he could work on his novels in peace, and he liked small towns. It didn’t mean I had any real future here.

I had taken a summer job working at a video arcade for pocket money, not expecting to make enough to pay for school, just cruising along until college. I liked Milky Way's because of the slightly dangerous atmosphere and the trampy girls there. If she smokes, she pokes, the conventional wisdom had it. It turns out that saying is only true if you’re a certain kind of guy: Driving a big overpowered hot rod, listening to heavy metal, long hair, and a serious disrespect for authority. I was not that guy. I guess I was kind of a drip back then. In two months, not even a phone number. So now my entire social circle consisted of two guys who were regular customers at the video arcade.

Bruce Goldberg had moved to town from Philadelphia when he was twelve. Bill Tidd was poor white trash whose family had lived in the area as long as anyone could remember. He hung around Goldberg because airhead girls seemed to flock to him, and Bill hoped to make some time with some of Goldberg's discarded bimbos. Unfortunately for Tidd, the kind of girls that went for Bruce Goldberg were interested in only one thing. They knew his father owned a liquor store and a restaurant. And where I grew up, eating and getting drunk were the main forms of entertainment, so the Goldberg family would not be running out of money any time soon. Tidd lacked the cash flow that appealed to the shallow, selfish skanks that fell out of Goldberg's bed. Still, you had to admire him for trying.

There were other reasons that probably kept him from being popular with the ladies. Tidd had a bad habit of flicking his cigarette butts on the ground anywhere, even when there were ashtrays readily available. I am no environmental crusader, but his littering and general disrespect for the natural world was so obnoxious it offended even me. I had seen him run the water in the sink for ten minutes while brushing his teeth, not even rinsing, just standing three feet away brushing, while gallons of water poured down the drain.

He also had a callous disregard for animal life. If someone’s pet was in his way he would simply kick it and tell it to move. He told me once (what he thought was) a funny anecdote, how as a child he had thrown his mother’s cat down the basement stairs nearly a dozen times to see what would happen. He said that every time the animal would climb to the top of the stairs, he would pick it up and fling it to the bottom step. Eventually, the cat collapsed with its tongue hanging out of its mouth. When I asked if it died, he said, No, it was fine. You’d think it would have learned to stop coming up the stairs, though, after that many times. That this didn’t bother him had always concerned me, as respect for the dignity of living things was part of my upbringing as far back as I can remember. What girl wants to date a guy like that?

My first encounter with the strange goings on at Vanger Road had been through the late-night and liquor-induced rambling of Goldberg.  He frequented Milky Way’s entertainment center on a nightly basis, lured by the opportunity to diffuse his daily stress and frustration with the world by annihilating faceless electronic enemies, and further motivated to indulge his need for horizontal refreshment as he called it, with Milky Ways' female clientele.

His doctor had put him on an anti-depressant, which reacted unfavorably with his drinking. These factors combined to make me make me skeptical of his stories each time he told one. However, I was able to detect a recurring theme in some of his absurd yarns; that of something weird going on out at Vanger road. I was intrigued and wanted to know more, so I started hanging out with him. Tidd was an unpleasant bonus.

We had been camping out in my parents’ old flatbed trailer, which sat in the driveway. My dad had envisioned long weekends in Wisconsin or Indiana, sitting by the fire outside the camper, having a soda and imparting the wisdom of the ages to my brother and me as mom washed the dinner dishes. However, the demands of his job rarely allowed us to go camping or vacation much at all, so the little camper had remained immobile for a decade at least.

My widowed grandmother had come to stay for a few months and took over my room. My parents would not be ousted from their waterbed on the grounds that it was necessary for my mother's back problem, and my brother was at that age when boys need their privacy, so I got stuck with the fifteen-foot Campmaster. I say stuck, but sentenced would be more appropriate a term, as, in summer, even with the windows open and two fans going, it approximated the comfort of a South American correctional facility. This worked out favorably, though, since I could come and go as I pleased, stay up late and play cards with the guys, even have the occasional drink and my family needed never know.

One night we were sitting around in the camper, Goldberg leaning against one wall, a sleeping and partially clothed brunette splayed across his lap, me leaning against the opposite wall nursing my twelve ounces. Tidd sat by the window, smoking and playing solitaire. Bruce was trying to shock me with the list of odd locations in which he'd had sex. I was not shocked, for unlike most of the yokels in Jesseville, I could read and had been borrowing my dad’s old Playboy magazines from his garage stash for years. Suddenly I saw an opportunity to get Bruce rolling on one of his Vanger Road stories.

You ever do it up by Vanger? I asked.

At this he became visibly uncomfortable and shifted a little so his latest girl (I never was sure of her name, though it might have been Anne, or Nan or Fran or something) rolled off his lap and untied my shoe, then passed out. The girl had put away a six-pack of beer in about 90 minutes, setting new standards of drunken idiocy. Goldberg gulped down the remaining half of his beer and crunched the can. He was a fairly muscular character, but he seemed preoccupied with proving his masculinity by way of petty showoff stunts like punching holes in drywall or crushing beer cans with one hand. He stuck the can on the ledge of the window and said,

Don't ask.

I was not going to pry and risk aggravating him, thus blowing the chance to find anything out. I figured I would bide my time and let him get a little more drunk, and then he would loosen up. However, the ever-unsubtle Bill Tidd had other plans.

Ha! You wouldn't want to whip it out in that place. Ghosts would rip it clean off, bud.

Now I figured Goldberg would clam up and we'd never hear anything. However, it had the opposite effect, and much to my surprise he said,

Only if you got something to rip off, Billy. Tidd didn't respond to the putdown. The face-down, drunken brunette lifted her head long enough to murmur, it's not the pen, it's how you sign your name.

Then she burped and giggled herself to sleep. Tidd went outside to sulk, and I felt that enough time had been wasted. I wanted to hear about Vanger.

So, Vanger Road… I said.

Sex is a natural thing; whatever is up there is unnatural and wrong. There's no way I'd take a woman anywhere near that place after what I've heard.

Now we were getting somewhere. I wanted to write it all down, but had no paper or pen, so I tried to remember and am committing it to paper now and hoping that the horrible reality of what I saw is not influencing my memory of what Goldberg said that night in the camper.

You know where Vanger is, right Doug? he asked.

Not exactly. I replied.

If you go north to Smith Road, west of the lake, south of the train tracks between the Forest Preserve and Route 58, Vanger runs for about three miles through it.

The old Neubaum farm?

Yep. That creepy swamp runs right next to it.

My dad told us never to go near there when I was a kid.

Well, from what I've heard, the farm is where the trouble started.

What do you mean? I had never heard this part of the legends before.

You know how they talk about the Ovaltine factory north of Vanger? It was really called the Ogilvie Laboratory, but you know the blockheads around here, they can't get anything right, so it degenerated into 'Ovaltine Factory'.

How do you know?

I had a delivery from my dad’s restaurant up there once. As long as I was up that way I decided to have a look. Through the electric fence I could make out the old sign. It said 'Ogilvie Research Laboratory'.

Electric fence?

Yeah, weird thing about it. Hasn't been anything going on in there since the Vietnam War, but the fence around the swamp and laboratory are kept in good condition. What’s important enough about an empty old lab to need electrified barbed wire?

A shiver ran down my spine as a dim picture congealed in my mind's eye. An unpleasant picture of experiments gone wrong and government cover-ups, of accidents resulting in horrors beyond their ability to control. I was hooked.

Wait a minute. You once told me that people disappeared out there. Have you ever actually known anyone that's disappeared at Vanger?

Not personally, but I heard that the Neubaum family went away under strange circumstances, and nobody's seen them since.

"There have got to be records somewhere, forwarding addresses, something."

I never thought about it. But if anybody cared, don't you think they would have looked them up after all this time?

He was thoughtful a moment.

Maybe they don't want to know. They're kind of content to just go along from day to day in a stupor. Ignorance is bliss and all that.

Bruce, I think we need to make a trip down to the historical society tomorrow.

Yeah, I could get into that. Sounds fun.

"At this point, Tidd came back into the camper, zipping