by john | Apr 4, 2017 | Promos/Giveaways, Writing
I have a bunch of stuff coming out in the next couple months, and I’m fortunate enough to have an amazing cover artist, Natania Barron, working on them. She’s already got the covers knocked out for the next Quincy Harker book, which will be out this month sometime, the next Shadow Council book, which will hit e-stores next month, and a brand new standalone project that’s coming later in the spring.
First up, here’s the cover for Devil Inside, the next Quincy Harker novella. Devil Inside continues the 8-book crossover event that I’m tentatively calling Quest for Glory. If anyone comes up with a better name, I’m all for it.
In this story, Harker is dealing with some of the fallout from Season 2, then moves on to hunting down the first of the Implements of the Archangels that he has to find. His quest takes him to Charleston, SC, and of course it isn’t as easy as he hoped.
He has to deal with the city’s mystical guardians, who aren’t very trusting of a random new wizard in town, plus a sorcerer who wants to sink the city beneath the ocean, AND he has to find a magical book and his best hope lies in a dotty shopkeeper that speaks only in Shakespeare quotes.
Life can get tough when you’re the Reaper.
Angel Dance is the next episode in Quest for Glory, and I’m currently writing this one. This novella features Adam, Frankenstein’s monster, in New Orleans looking for the Horn of the Herald. The Horn was played by the Archangel Sealtiel in the War on Heaven, and it’s now lost in a sea of musical instruments in one of the greatest cities for music in the world. Needle, meet haystack.
And of course that can’t be the only thing going on, so Adam has to deal with the fact that someone or something is hunting down practitioners of magic in the Crescent City and murdering them, including one of Adam’s few friends. He doesn’t like it when people hurt his friends.
Don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. For real, folks, he’s friggin’ Frankenstein’s monster, why would you piss him off?
Fireheart is a bit of a departure for me. One, it’s a full-length novel, and y’all know I don’t write that many of those. Two, it’s more of a YA thing than a snarky adult thing, which was a fun changeup to write. And three, it’s a standalone rather than part of a series, so this book is all you get with these characters. It’s something I’ve had kicking around for a while, and I finally dragged it out, finished it, and polished it up. It oughta be out late spring.
In Fireheart, a mountaintop removal mining operation wakes up a sleeping dragon. That’s not a euphemism, they really wake up a damn dragon. Of course, the dragon has been asleep for a few hundred years, and he’s pretty grumpy when his alarm goes off. Rachel Hampton’s father is one of the head geologists at the mine, and he’s injured in the attack.
Rachel’s life is complicated enough with her best friend crushing on her and the cute boy she ran into on her bike (literally!). Then she’s riding through the woods and sees this really cute guy standing in the woods. Butt naked. With golden skin. Because dragons don’t always wear their scales.
So there’s a love triangle. And a dragon. And black helicopters. Because why wouldn’t there be black helicopters?
That’s a little news on the latest upcoming releases. As always, you can join my email list to find out about all this stuff, too! There’s a link over on the side of the page.
by john | Mar 23, 2017 | Business of publishing, Writing
As a lot of folks here know, in 2016 I started a small publishing company, Falstaff Books. As such, I look through a fair number of manuscript submissions. I don’t read all of them at first, there’s a team of slush readers that do that. But I sometimes poke my head into the slush pile, and I read everything that gets kicked up the food chain to me.
That means I see some truly interesting things done with formatting of documents. Despite the fact that we publish pretty clear submission guidelines on our website (click the big red button that says “submissions” to see these), we’ll occasionally get some manuscripts that do not follow the guidelines. I don’t know if this is ignorance, hubris, or just stupidity that causes people to ignore the clearly stated guidelines, but it will frequently result in a rejection without the submission ever being read.
Here’s why – I have enough books under contract to not accept another title for publication before 2020, and we’d still be really busy.
We are a very small press. We do not pay advances at this point. We do not have national bookstore placement yet. We have a very small media footprint. We have won no major awards for our books, and have only a few thousand people on our newsletter and social media reach. And we still have so many amazing books in the pipeline that if I didn’t accept another book for two years, we’d still be able to publish multiple books every month for the next three years.
If we are that inundated with talented writers and quality manuscripts at this point in our evolution, how backed up do you think places like Apex or Angry Robot or Baen are? Those folks have been around much longer and have much better distribution, so if you think they aren’t way busier than I am, you’re smoking the good shit.
If you mail me the good shit, I might forgive some of your formatting stupidity.
So that’s what it boils down to with some guidelines – give an editor the shit they want in the format they want it, because doing anything else gives them an excuse to reject your manuscript and move on the next amazing submission in the pile.
But I’m going to go point by point in our guidelines and tell you exactly why they exist. So you don’t sit there and say “That Hartness guy is just an arbitrary asshat that hates kittens and rejected my manuscript because I mailed a hard copy in on cat stationary.”
First off, we only accept email submissions. I don’t have a PO Box, I don’t want a PO Box, and there is no way in hell I want you crazy fuckers showing up at my door with rose-scented perfumed manuscripts.
Secondly, fuck you, I love cats.
See? That’s my cat. In a Bojangle’s box. He’s fucking adorable.
So here are the guidelines, pulled straight from our website as of today, March 22, 2017.
All submissions should be sent to info@falstaffbooks.com with a query letter and the requested sample, sized by format as indicated above. Should your work be accepted by another publisher during the 45-60 day period of your manuscript’s consideration, we would appreciate you letting us know.
If I have met you personally, you can send it to my email address. Otherwise, use the main email address. This is because all the editors have access to it and everyone checks that email inbox. That means that your manuscript gets seen and evaluated faster. It helps us be more efficient.
Send a query letter. I want to know a little something about you and the book before I dive in. There are a lot of websites out there that will teach you how to write one. They won’t tell you this – if you don’t include anything, I won’t read the submission. I’ll email you a form rejection letter and move along. If you don’t care enough about the book to write a query to get me excited about the book and about working with you, then I don’t care enough to read your query letter. Also, without a query letter it’s just a random email with an attachment. And those get deleted immediately.
Simultaneous submissions are fine, but if the book gets picked up, let me know. That’s just basic courtesy.
Please format your work in Standard Manuscript Format, which is:
- MSWord documents ONLY (.doc and .docx format)
- I fucking hate RTF Files. I’m getting old and I need to be able to adjust the size of a document easily. Word lets me do that. I don’t write in Word. I don’t care what you write in. The publishing world works in MSWord, so fucking get a copy of it. Some of the free stuff out there is great, but some of it the formatting looks like a pile of assholes when you transfer it to Word, so you better be able to look at it in Word before you send it. And if you can look at in Word, why not just make it there?
- 12pt. Times New Roman Font
- Yes, goddammit, you have to use the right font. I find serif fonts easier to read, and 12-point is about the smallest my old eyes ca handle. When your business card says “Publisher” on it, you can set the rules to make your life easier.
- 1-inch Margins
- It makes things look uniform, and gives me some idea of how long your paragraphs will appear on the printed page. It’s a small thing, but the idea of blocks of grey space is something I think about, and at this point if a submission follows traditional guidelines, I get a sense of how dense the text is.
- Double-Space between lines
- I mentioned I’m getting old, right? I never expected to survive my twenties, and there are plenty of people who hung out with me who also didn’t expect it. But since I did, and now I’m in my forties, I’m fucking blind. Double-spaced used to be for manual edits, now it’s for old bastards who need help reading.
- DO NOT INDENT MANUALLY
- We make a shit ton of ebooks. Ebooks hate hard tabs. So don’t fucking use hard tabs in your document. Gain some facility with the rod processing software and set your preferences to indent the first line of each new paragraph. It’s one of the things you can do when you’re fixing the font and spacing. Someone is going to have to go back through and do this anyway, so you may as well do it from the start. I sure as fuck am not going to do it, so if you send me a manuscript full of manual indents (hard tabs), you’re getting the thing back with a note that says “get rid of all the fucking hard tabs” before edits.
- Number your pages in the UPPER-RIGHTHAND CORNER starting on the SECOND PAGE
- Help me keep track of where I am. Again, it’s something you set up at the beginning of a document.
- Please include your name, email, address, and phone number on the COVER PAGE
- I would like to know how to get in touch with you, just in case you’re fucking amazing.
- CHAPTERS must start on a NEW PAGE.
- Because that’s how fucking books work. Have you ever fucking read one?
Finally, please wait 45-60 days for our response to your submission. We will request more of your work or send a rejection during that time. Due to the large number of submissions we receive we will be unable to send a personal rejection with each submission, though we will do our best to do so when it comes to novels and novellas.
Those are our guidelines. They’re pretty simple, right? Just follow those, and your shit gets read. Don’t follow them, and you show me that you’re a special fucking snowflake that doesn’t take direction well. It speaks to how you will handle edits, and whether or not you’re a pain in the ass. Here’s a tip – working with a publisher is a multi-year engagement, and nobody wants to work with a pain in the ass for very long. So don’t suck. Put your best foot forward, because your submission is like a first date, and nobody farts at the table on the first date.
So take a fucking Bean-o and enjoy the lobster bisque.
by john | Mar 13, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
Chapter 5
Sheriff Dunleavy leaned back in his chair and looked at me, one of those long, steady looks that men do when they think they’re being all serious, but really all they’re doing is trying to figure out what box to put you in now that you have done escaped the one they thought you were supposed to fit into all nice and neat. I’ve known men like him all my life, and it’s better to just let them sit and “process things” and figure out what they’re going to say, then go on about your business and do things the way you intended to do them in the first place, rather than getting your blood pressure up fighting them over it.
“Ms. Carter, I don’t know what help you can be, but I don’t have a whole lot to go on with this case, and I don’t know anybody in this town, and Jeff, bless his heart, just ain’t as much help as I’d like for him to be. So while I’m not sure I believe you can do everything you say you can do, I think it’s gonna be a whole lot better for me to have you working with me instead of out on your own getting in my way.”
“Well, Sheriff, that’s certainly one way of looking at it, and since it gets me right to where I want to be, which is working on this case, I don’t expect I’m going to argue with you about it. Now what can you tell me that the child hasn’t been able to tell me herself?”
“I don’t know what the victim has told you—“
“Jenny,” I interrupted.
“Excuse me?”
“Her name is Jenny, and she is a girl. She is not ‘the victim’ or ‘the girl’ or ‘the body.’ She is Jenny, and I will remind you that she is still sitting right here and can hear every word. She is dead, and she is a ghost, but she is also still a little girl who is scared at what is going to happen next, and angry that she won’t go to the prom, or graduate high school, or get married, or have a baby, or grandbabies, or any of the things that she was supposed to do. So she will be treated with respect, and not referred to as ‘the victim.’ Do we have an understanding?” I might have slipped into my Sunday School Teacher voice, the one I used on Kacey Swicegood all those years when he was trying to be distracting while I was teaching the story of the loaves and fishes.
Sheriff Dunleavy looked appropriately chastened, although I don’t know if it was because of what I said, or if I just made him remember his own mama reading him out for talking ugly when he was a child. He nodded, then went on. “Like I was saying, I don’t know what Jenny has told you, but we know very little about this case. The…she came home from the football game, apparently went to basement for some reason, and apparently fell down the stairs.”
“You say ‘for some reason,’” I said. “Does that mean the power was on when y’all found her?”
“Well, yes ma’am, when we got the call Saturday morning the power was on and there were no blackouts the night before that got called in, so we didn’t have any reason to think the power was ever out. But that would explain her going down to the basement when there was no one else in the house.”
“What about her flashlight? Did she have a flashlight with her?” I asked. Jenny nodded for me to go on, but stayed silent.
Dunleavy looked at me, then picked up a folder from his desk and took some glossy pictures out of it. He spread the crime scene photos out on his desk and started looking through them. “I don’t see a flashlight in these pictures. The basement’s not the cleanest place I’ve ever seen, but there’s not much clutter,” he said.
“There it is,” Jenny said, pointing to one of the pictures. “On that shelf by the freezer. That’s my flashlight. But how did it get all the way over there?”
“What do you mean, sweetie,” I asked, then I saw where she was pointing. On the shelf over their big freezer, the one her daddy probably put a deer in every winter, sat a bright shiny flashlight, without a speck of dust on it. I could see in the photo how much it stood out on the shelf.
“Sheriff,” I said. “Jenny said that’s the flashlight she was carrying when she went down the steps,” I said. “We need to find out who moved it.”
“Yep, because if she had it in her hand when she was pushed, somehow I doubt it flew ten feet across the basement and just happened to land perfectly on that shelf,” Dunleavy agreed. “I’ll get Jeff to go over there and bag it, then we can bring it back over here and dust it for prints.”
“You might want to have him dust the fuse box while he’s over there,” I suggested.
“That makes sense. If Jenny’s telling you the power was out…”
“What’s the matter, Sheriff?” I asked.
“I’m talking like I believe this is all really happening, which I reckon I do, since I’m sending a deputy over to re-open a crime scene based on either the say-so of a ghost, or the say-so of a crazy woman. It’s just going to take me a minute or two to adjust to my new reality, I think.”
“Welcome to my world, Sheriff. Don’t worry, there’s plenty of room on the crazy train.”
“Lila Grace, did you just make an Ozzy Osbourne reference?” Sheriff Dunleavy asked me.
“I’m hardcore, Sheriff,” I replied. “Didn’t they tell you I worship the devil and bite the heads off live bats?”
“Oh, people tried to warn me, alright, but believe me, their warnings could not hold a candle to the reality,” he said.
“I’m so glad I could help,” I said with a smile, then returned my attention to the crime scene photos. Sheriff Dunleavy called Jeff on the radio while I perused the photos and sent him over to the Miller house to collect the flashlight and dust the fuse box. He also instructed the young officer to take pictures of the stairs, regardless of the fact that a dozen people had trooped through their in the days since Jenny’s death.
The scene in the photos was pretty normal for a basement, even as peculiar as a house with a basement was for Lockhart, South Carolina. The only reason I could think they would have it is the slope the house sat on made for a whole lot of usable space along the back of the house, so somebody put walls around it and called it a basement. There were some shelves with the kind of junk people usually put on their garage or crawlspace – old sports equipment, lawn furniture that’s out of season or too worn out for use except when the in-laws come over and every single chair that can come out into the yard already has a behind in it, some old cans of paint, a seed spreader, a wheelbarrow with a flat tire, and a dead teenage girl.
Jenny stood looking over my shoulder, silent after telling us about the flashlight. I didn’t say anything to the child, just let her look. Sometimes the dead need to see themselves lying there to really understand their new place in the world, or lack thereof. I looked up at the girl, and her face was sad, but determined.
“Are you alright, sweetie?” I asked after a minute.
“I’m fine. It just took me a minute to get my head wrapped around the fact that was me laying there. Did my mama or my daddy find me?”
I looked at Sheriff Dunleavy, then when he didn’t answer I remembered that he couldn’t hear the girl. “Who found her, Sheriff? Was it her mother or her father?”
The sheriff opened another manila folder on his desk and pulled out a pink sheet of a multi-part form. “It says here that the father discovered the…found her.” He caught himself before he called her “the body,” and I appreciated it.
“That’s good,” Jenny said. “Mama wouldn’t have been able to handle that. I mean, I’m sure it was bad for Daddy, too. But Mama would have just been tore all to pieces.”
“I’m sure she was that anyhow, darling,” I said. “A parent ain’t supposed to have to bury their child. It’s about the worst thing I can imagine.”
“You never had any kids, did you Ms. Carter?” Jenny asked, all of the melancholy of death forgotten in the irrepressible curiosity of the teenager.
“No, honey, I never married. I guess children just weren’t in the cards for me,” I said. I pushed all thoughts of a young man with glasses and a trim beard driving out of town in a fast car to the back of my head. This was not the time to dwell on old hurts or regrets. This was the time to find out who pushed that child down a flight of stairs.
“I can’t see anything out of place or unusual, Jenny,” I said, motioning to the pictures. “Can you?”
She leaned in closer, her body passing through my shoulder. I felt all the hair on my right arm stand up in goosebumps at her touch, like a goose didn’t just walk over my grave, but stopped and decided to tap dance on it for a little while. After several long seconds, she straightened up, and I rubbed some warmth back into my arm.
“No ma’am, I don’t see anything different. I didn’t spend a whole lot of time in the basement, though, so I might not know it if I saw it.” She looked disappointed, like she had been hoping the killer wrote his name in the dust at her feet or something.
“She didn’t see anything else out of place, Sheriff,” I reported. “What else do you have that we can look at?”
“I don’t have any more photos, unless you want to look at the autopsy?” He looked from my face to over my right shoulder, where Jenny stood. I thought for a moment that the good Sheriff could see her, then I remembered that I looked up at her whenever I talked to her, so he could easily figure out where she was from watching me.
“I don’t think will be necessary,” I said. I had no interest in seeing pictures of this sweet child all cut up, and wouldn’t be able to get any information that way anyway. I was no kind of doctor. All I’d get from seeing pictures of an autopsy would be nauseated.
“Good,” Sheriff Dunleavy said. “The findings were consistent with a fall down the steps, but the coroner was surprised to see that there were no bruises on the knees or hands. That made him think that she might have been pushed, because a person falling would naturally put their hands out to break their fall.”
“And most people who fall down the steps don’t land on their head,” I said.
“That’s right,” the sheriff agreed. “If it had been a normal fall, her legs and the rest of her would have been all bruised up. She wasn’t, just her head and a broken neck. Then when I saw you at the scene, I knew life was about to get a whole lot more complicated.”
“I am sorry about that, Sheriff. I would very much like for your life to be as simple as possible. Because when your life is simple, it means that my life is boring. And I like a boring life. I like to go to church on Sunday and on Wednesday nights. I like to go to the farmer’s market on Saturday and buy my vegetables. I like to read the newspaper every morning while I eat my oatmeal with strawberries cut up in it and just a little bit of brown sugar to make me feel decadent. I like boring, Sheriff. So I truly am sorry that I am complicating your life, but this poor child showed up on my doorstep crying her poor dead eyes out, and I couldn’t very well turn her away.”
“No, I reckon you couldn’t, at that. Well, right now I’ve got Jeff going out to pick up the flashlight, so do you have any supernatural advice as to our next step?”
I didn’t get the chance to answer, because as soon as I opened my mouth to speak, the woman who was painting her nails at the reception desk when we walked by rushed in, her mouth open wide. “Sheriff, you got to come quick,” she panted.
“What’s wrong, Ethel?” the sheriff asked.
“We just got a 911 call come in. There’s another dead girl.”
by john | Feb 27, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Fiction, Serialized Fiction, Writing
The reception to this reading at Mysticon last weekend was great, so I guess I’ll keep on scribbling on it. Y’all know we love comments, right? And remember, this is strictly first-draft stuff, so there will probably be spelling errors and plenty of proof that I don’t really know where the commas go.
Chapter 3
I wasn’t too surprised to see Sheriff Johnny sitting in my living room when I walked in with Jenny in tow. The girl stopped, though, and when I sat down in my favorite chair, I noticed that she was still standing in the open french door frame between my dining room and den.
“Well, come on in, sweetie. He ain’t gonna arrest you. Not now, anyhow.” I smiled at her to let her know I was only joking, and waved her into the room.
She came into the room and sat on the couch. I’ve never understood how ghosts can sit on furniture, but they can’t turn a doorknob or handle other objects. Most of ‘em can’t, anyway. But for some reason, they can all sit on a chair or couch just like they still walked around breathing.
“Now, honey, let’s start with what Sheriff Johnny here likes to call the real police work.” I nodded to Johnny, and he smiled at me. He looked like he was only half paying attention to what we were talking about, but I knew he was listening a lot more to what me and that child said than he was listening to another In the Heat of the Night rerun. I mean, I like Carroll O’Conner as much as the next woman, but back to back episodes five days a week is a little much. But Sheriff Johnny has got hooked on it since he showed up at my door the morning after his funeral, all mute and confused and lost.
Some ghosts can talk, some can’t. I’ve never known what makes one of them able to communicate over another one, and it ain’t like I’ve been dead to ask anybody. But Sheriff Johnny was one of them that couldn’t speak, so he had to resort to bad sign language and gestures to get his point across. The two of us spent many an afternoon in recent months watching YouTube videos on sign language, and we got to a place where we could communicate with one another pretty good.
I reached over to the antique chest of drawers I got out of Miss Ellen Ferguson’s house when she passed, and I dug around in the top drawer until I found an ink pen and a little yellow notepad. I leaned forward to Jenny and asked, “Now who do you think would want to hurt you, sweetheart?”
“I can’t think of nobody, ma’am. And I mean it, too. Carla Combs was mad at me for getting Homecoming Queen, but she got over it when she beat me for class President. Matt Ridinger was mad at me for being named Salutatorian, but then his scholarship to Duke came through and he stopped caring about stuff around here. So I can’t think of anybody that would want to kill me.”
I looked over at Johnny, who wiggled his fingers in the air for a few seconds. I nodded, and turned back to Jenny. “What about any of the other girls on the cheerleading squad? I asked. “Did any of the girls on the bottom of the pyramid want to be on the top? Or vice versa, or whatever girls get made at each other about nowadays.”
She thought for a moment, then shook her head. “No, nothing like that. I was captain of the squad, but I didn’t make up any of the routines or decide anything about who got featured or anything like that. And I was on the bottom of the pyramid, because I had strong enough legs to hold up some of those little heifers.” The corner of one lip turned up a little sneer, and that was the thing I’d been waiting for – the hint of mean girl to come out.
It took me back, and not to somewhere I liked going. I went right back to seventh grade gym class and playing dodge ball. All the teams were picked except me and little Mikey Miller, who had braces on both legs and a lisp. Karen Taylor and Laura Anne Mays were arguing over who got “the gimp,” and who got stuck with “Crazy Gracie,” as I was called until my junior year of high school.
But Jenny’s sneer was gone as soon as it came over her, and she looked up at me. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I hate to call them names, that’s what Miss Hope called us all. We were her little heifers, and she was our Mama Moo-Cow. I think she got picked on in school because she was a big girl.” Well, I’ll be. Maybe this child really was as nice as she was acting. That was going to make it even harder to figure out who wanted to kill her.
Sheriff Johnny caught my eye, and I turned to see him wiggling his fingers to beat the band. “Slow down, Johnny. You know I ain’t watched them videos as many times as you have.” It was true, too. Sometimes I left the sign language videos running on a loop so Johnny could practice while I went to church, or the grocery store, or just out to piddle around in my garden. He’d gotten downright good at that stuff, and when he got excited, like he was now, sometimes he was too much for me to keep up with.
He stopped, then started again. I watched his wispy hands closely, glad he wasn’t too pale today for me to see all the details. Sometimes Johnny would get wispy in the middle of the day, only to grow sharper and more distinct as night fell.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny was wondering if there was anybody that had a disagreement with your parents? Anybody that they argued with a bunch?”
“No, ma’am,” the girl said. “I mean, they got in little squabbles with Todd Ferguson about stuff at the church, and Mama didn’t shop at the Farmer’s Market no more since she caught that Riley girl putting her thumb on the scale when she was weighing her cucumbers, but nothing to come to no fights, or nothing like that. Daddy didn’t even owe nobody money, except the bank. And they ain’t usually the ones to go around pushing people down steps, are they?”
‘No, honey, I reckon they ain’t. Bankers are usually more sneaky than that.” Johnny was wiggling his fingers at me again, but I turned my head and ignored him. He hates that. Makes him madder than a frog on a frying pan to be ignored, but sometimes I had to use it like a mute button. Johnny had a bad habit of forgetting that he wasn’t Sheriff mo more. On account of being dead and all.
I stood up and walked to the kitchen. “You want something to drink, honey? I got sweet tea, and ice water. Oh, shoot, I’m sorry.” Sometimes I forget they ain’t ever gonna drink nothing again, especially the ones that can talk. I fixed myself some sweet tea in an old Tupperware tumbler and walked back into the den.
“I’m sorry about that, honey,” I said.
“It’s okay,” the girl said. “I ain’t quite used to it myself, yet. Being dead, I mean.” She got a pensive look on her face. “Do you know…why I’m still here? Does this mean I can’t go to Heaven?” She looked like she was going to cry, the poor thing. I knew better, cause ghosts can’t cry, but it’s still a good idea to keep the supernatural visitors on as even a keel as you can manage, emotionally speaking. When a ghost loses control of their emotions, things have a bad habit of flying around the room, and I had some nice Depression Glass piece in my china cabinet that I didn’t want to see get broken.
“I don’t know why you’re here, honey, but I’ve got an idea,” I said. “It seems like the people who don’t move on are either scared of what they’re going to find when they pass from this world, or there’s something unfinished keeping them here. Sheriff Johnny hangs around this old town because he ain’t convinced that the new Sheriff can take care of his people, so he tries to keep an eye on things. Miss Leila Dover doesn’t think her husband JR can take care of himself without her, not realizing that he took care of himself and her the last five years when her Alzheimer’s got so bad. And you got murdered, only nobody knows it, so ain’t nobody looking for your killer. So you want justice. I reckon when y’all get your outstanding issues resolved, so to speak, y’all will all move on to the land of harp music and fluffy clouds.”
“Are you sure?” The child looked scared to death, which I reckon was not a real good turn of phrase for her anymore.
“I ain’t sure of much, sweetie. If there’s anything I’ve learned in my fifty-seven years on this earth, it’s that we don’t know half of what we think we know, and we understand less than half of that. But I know this – if you were a good person, then you’ll end up Heaven. It don’t matter if you toilet papered an old lady’s house on Halloween, or skipped Sunday School more times than you went. It matters how you acted towards others, and whether or not you are really sorry for any harm you might have caused. I am not your preacher, and I am not here to cast judgement. But if I had to guess, I would think that once we figure out who pushed you down them stairs, you can move on to the next world and see anybody that’s waiting for you on the other side.”
“Like my Granny?” She said, smiling.
I remembered that child’s grandmother the second she said it. Vera Prustley was a foot-washing Baptist, as we called them. She was as devout a woman as any I’d ever known. Didn’t truck with playing cards or music on Sunday, but wasn’t rude about her religion, either. I didn’t know her too well, but she always had a friendly nod for me when we would pass in the grocery store, even when I was on the outs with my own church family. She had passed about six years ago, right about the time this child would have been in middle school. That’s about the time when children really start to understand death and grieving, so her Granny’s death was something she would have carried with her.
“Yes, darling,” I replied. “I think your Granny is almost certainly waiting to see you again. So let’s try to figure out where to go from here so you can go see Miss Vera again, and your killer can go straight to jail.”
Sheriff Johnny waved his arms so wildly I turned back to him. “Yes, Johnny?”
He wiggled his fingers at me, and I gave him a little smile. “I agree, Sheriff,” I said.
I turned back to Jenny. “Sheriff Johnny says your killer don’t need to go to jail, we need to send his sorry behind right to Hell.”
by john | Feb 20, 2017 | Amazing Grace, Serialized Fiction, Writing
It’s Monday, so here’s another Chapter of Amazing Grace. That’s at least what I’m tentatively calling it. Hope y’all enjoy it.
Chapter 2
It took a week and a half, but I soon found out just how right Sheriff Dunleavy was. I was bringing in tomatoes when I first saw the poor dear, sitting on the steps to my back porch with her head in her hands. Not literally, of course. Even the dead have some sense of propriety.
I walked past her at first, giving her a glance to make sure she was really dead and not just some misguided cheerleader from the high school selling candy for the prom, or magazine subscriptions for the winter formal, or seed packets for the study abroad program. I’ve disappointed so many of those children for so many years, it’s almost like a game now. They come up with new and even more interesting ways to get me to part with my money, and I come up with different ways to say “no.” But no, this wasn’t a living child here to be disappointed by an old woman on a fixed income. This child was dead, all her disappointments were now behind her.
I laid out the tomatoes on top of the washing machine on a dishtowel I’d put down that morning just for that reason, and went into the kitchen. I washed my hands and face, put my gardening gloves on the windowsill over the sink, and went back out to the porch. I sat down in the rocker my nephew Jason and his second wife gave me for Christmas one year and looked at the child sitting on my steps.
“Well, come on,sweetie. Let’s have it. What’s got you coming to see the crazy old woman that talks to dead people? Except you being dead, that is?”
The girl spun around on the step and stared at me, her mouth hanging open. I laughed so hard I almost spilled tea all over myself, but managed to get myself together before I really made a mess. “Oh my good Lord,” I said, “If you could see the look on your face, child! If you was still alive, I’d tell you to close that thing before flies got in it, but I reckon that ain’t much of a problem now, is it?”
“Y-you can see me?” the child asked. “You can hear me?”
“Of course I can see and hear you, sweetheart, ain’t that the whole reason you and your little girlfriends toilet papered my front yard two Halloweens ago?” It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a ghost blush, but it was still a rare enough occurrence to make me grin.
“I’m sorry about that. We didn’t think about…”
“About how hard it would be for an old woman to get all that toilet paper out of the trees and the grass? Of course you didn’t, that’s what being a teenager is all about. And don’t think you invented anything new, honey, I’ve been getting TP’d on Halloween since your mama was a young’un. It’s a lot easier to take care of than you think. You just take a lighter to it, it burns right out before any part of the tree catches, Easy-peasy. Now, what brings you to my front porch looking all distraught? And who are you, firstly? Ever since I quit teaching Sunday School at the A.R.P. Church, I don’t know as many of you young people as I used to.
“We’re Baptists anyway,” the girl said.
“Well, I forgive you,” I replied. The poor child looked terribly confused, which just made me laugh again, which just made her look even more confused. “Anyway, honey, you were going to tell me who you were?” I prodded.
“My name’s Jenny Miller, and I reckon you can see I’m dead.”
“I noticed that first thing. How did you die and how long ago?”
“About three days ago, I guess. Time is strange now, and I don’t have to sleep, so it’s a little odd. But they had my funeral today, and I think it was a Friday when I died, so it feels like about three days.”
“Well, let me go get the paper and we can see if you’re in the obituaries. That can tell us quite a bit.” I went into the house and pulled out the last three days’ worth of The Herald and carried them out to the porch.
I opened the first newspaper, Saturday’s edition with high school football on the front page, and a big picture of a smiling blonde girl on the back page of Section A. I compared the photo with the ghost on my steps, and sure enough, it was a match. “Yes, honey, you died on Friday night after cheering our Bulldogs to a victory over Dorman in overtime. It says here that you fell down the stairs in your house and broke your neck. But I suppose that isn’t what happened, was it?
The pretty blonde ghost looked up at me, her eyes brimming. “No, ma’am. I didn’t fall. I was pushed. Somebody pushed me down the stairs and broke my neck, now I’m stuck here until I get justice!” Her words built and built on each other until she was almost shouting. I felt the power roll off of her, full of anger and pain. I knew if I didn’t find a away to send her to her rest, that she could turn into a powerful poltergeist. This child needed to move on, and fast.
“Okay, sweetie, just calm down,” I said, putting my tea down and using the same tones I used to use to calm spooked horses when I was little. “Now tell me what you remember, and we’ll work from there.”
“I don’t remember anything,” she said, her voice shaky and thready. “That’s the problem. I remember leaving the game with Shelly, and then nothing.”
“How did you get home?” I asked. I knew if I could get her to realize that the memories were there, that it would all would all work out.
“Shelly drove us. She got her license last month, and this was the first game her mom had let her drive to.”
“Alright. Did Shelly come in with you, or did she drop you off in the driveway?”
“Neither one. She just stopped on the street in front of my house, and I got out. I walked up the steps to the front porch, unlocked the front door, turned around to wave goodnight to Shelly, and went inside.”
“Then what?” I kept my voice low, not wanting to break her out of the almost-trance she had slipped into as she walked back through the night in her memory.
“I reached over to turn on the lights, but nothing happened. I remember thinking that was strange, because the porch light was working fine, but then I remembered Daddy had installed one of them fancy battery backups on the porch light so we’d have some kind of light when the power went out. It was dark as could be, but there was a little bit of light coming in the door from the porch light, and that streetlight the power company put up in the front yard shines in through the living room window something fierce, so I could see plenty.”
“What did you see, honey?” I asked.
“Nothing. I mean, nothing unusual. It just looked like my house, you know? Only dark. I went to the kitchen and got a flashlight out of the drawer beside the sink where Mama keeps all the hurricane stuff, and I went to the basement to look at the fuse box.”
“Only you never made it down to the basement,” I added.
“That’s right,” the pretty little ghost agreed. “On account of some sumbitch shoving me down the stairs as soon as I got the door open good. I remember feeling two hands in my back, then I went forward, and I remember a big flash when I hit my head…then…I’m sorry, I don’t remember anything else. I woke up the next morning to the sound of my mama screaming, and I was looking down at my own body, lying there at the bottom of the stairs…” her words trailed off into sobs, and I wanted to put my arm around her and try to give the poor child some comfort, but I knew my arm would just pass right through her. I’d done it before with other spirits, and it never went well. It just made the ghost more upset and left me feeling a little bit embarrassed.
“Okay, sweetheart, it’s okay,” I said in a soothing tone. “Let’s go inside and have a seat while you try to think of anything else you remember from that night. You’re doing real good, better than anybody would expect.” I stood up and she followed me into the house.
She stopped by the washing machine and looked at the tomatoes all spread out waiting to be washed and canned. “Did you just pick these?” she asked. “I love fresh tomatoes!” She reached out for one, but couldn’t touch them. Her tomato days were over, unfortunately. She looked up at me, stricken.
“I’m sorry, honey. You can’t touch things anymore.”
“I know. I just forget sometimes, you know?”
I did know. I’d seen it for years with other ghosts I had known. Sometimes a very powerful spirit can move things around them, but that kind of poltergeist energy is real hard to sustain, and it makes a ghost become thin and wispy, and before long it fades away entirely. I don’t know if the spirit moves on, or just…fades.
That was something I didn’t dwell on too much. It was more for the ladies in my Sunday School class, and I tried not to ask too many heavy theological questions around that bunch. They just let me start coming back to Sunday School about six months ago, so I didn’t want to push my luck. I led the teenager’s ghost into the house to see if we could come up with any other clues about her untimely demise.
