1984
January 1:
Today a new year begins. Mary loved this time of the year; she loved the idea of a fresh start for everyone. She always made a resolution, once a year, and unlike most people, she kept hers. And every year she tried to talk me into making one, but I could never see the point. I wish I could have seen her diary. Maybe it would help me remember her. Maybe it would clue me in to some of her secrets. Maybe that’s the point of a diary. Keep your stories, your life, from dying. So that other people don’t forget.
God I wish the boys could have known Mary longer.
This year I’m finally making a resolution. I’m going to find out what happened to my wife.
January 24:
Dean turns five today. I was thinking about where we’re going to be in the fall, because he should start school. Then I realized that I can’t leave him at school. Anything could happen. Maybe a place that has half-day kindergarten. Maybe that I could do. I know I should. I know he should be able to run around with other kids, who don’t know how to field-strip the Browning. Well, Dean doesn’t either, yet. But he’s learning. He’s got a talent for guns. I can see it already. And he’ll need it.
May 2:
Sammy is a year old. We spent his birthday in the mountains because I had to meet a guy named Daniel Elkins. The hunter culture is weird about how it breaks in new blood. Everyone you meet says you should go meet someone else, and learn something else, and everytime you meet someone else they take you out to hunt their favorite kind of monster. This guy Elkins lives in a cabin out in the middle of nowhere in Colorado, and according to him, he’s the greatest vampire hunter alive.
Vampires.
They’re real. I’ve never seen one, but Daniel says they’re real, and I believe him. He also says that the hunter’s journal is for research as much as for recording day-to-day whatever. So I copied this from a book called the Harleian Miscellany:
We must not omit Observing here, that our Landlord seems to pay some regard to what Baron Valvasor has related of the Vampyres, said to infest some Parts of this Country. These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves, in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living, and thereby destroy them.
Vampires, four hundreds years ago. There are other records, even older. Peter Plogojewitz, the Shoemaker of Silesia…
May 17:
This would have been our sixth anniversary. Six is iron. Sammy took his first steps yesterday. He walked toward Dean, then fell flat on his face and started crying. Life is tough, kid. Do I sound like a proud dad? I am.
November 2:
Mary has been dead for a year. I’m never going to be over it, and I wouldn’t want to be. But I’ve spent the last year getting better at revenge.
Maby this is a good time to write down everything I’ve learned about Lawrence.
- Corner of 8th and Massachusetts: Ghost, woman in nineteenth-century dress.
- 7th and Massachusetts: Eldridge Hotel. Word is the city’s going to rebuild it, so maybe the haunting will change —but Missouri says there’s something about the fifth floor. She gets visions more easily there, like the spirit world is closer somehow.
- Stull Church: abandoned since 1922. No roof, but you can stand inside it in a thunderstorm and not get wet. Rain will not fall on it. A crucifix still hangs on the wall, and it turns upside down when you approach.
- Stull Cemetery: Devil said to appear there twice a year, on the vernal equinox and Halloween. He is visiting the grave of one of his children, born of a human witch and dead after a few days.
- Haskell Institute: children’s cemetery near Taminend Hall, full of uneasy ghosts. Another ghost, a coed suicide, haunts the basement of Pocahontas Hall. Hiawatha Hall full of bad echoes, the sorrow and pain of generations of abused children. How many of them died?
I’m learning about hauntings. Everyone I’ve talked to and read thinks they know evertything about hauntings, but they all say something different. Or so vague that it doesn’t mean anything. I read this and that, and tell myself that if I keep doing it, I’ll start to see the patterns.
In the world of spirits is always a very great number of them, as being the first sort of all, in order to their examintion and preparation; but there is no fixed time for their stay; for some are translated to heaven and others confined to hell soon after their arrival; whilst some continue there for weeks, and others for several years… Ebenezer Sibly
This reminded me of Doc Benton. From William of Newburgh:
As soon as this man was left alone in this place, the devil, imagining that he had found the right moment for breaking his courage, incontinently roused up his own chosen vessel, who appeared to have reposed longer than usual. Having beheld this from afar, he grew stiff with terror by reason of his being alone; but soon recovering his courage, and no place of refuge being at hand, he valiantly withstood the onset of the fiend, who came rushing upon him with a terrible noise, and he struck the axe which he wielded in his hand deep into his body. On receiving this wound, the monster groaned aloud, an turning his back, fled with a rapidity not at all inferior to that which he had advanced, while the admirable man urged his flying foe from behind, and compelled him to seek his own tomb again; which opening of its own accord, and receiving its guest from the advance of the pursuer, immediately appeared to close again with the same facility. In the meantime, they who, impatient of the coldness of the night, had retreated to the fire ran up, though somewhat too late, and, having heard what had happened, rendered needful assistance in digging up and removing from the midst of the tomb the accursed corpse at the earliest dawn. When they had divested it of the clay cast forth with it, they found the huge wound it had received, and a great quantity of gore which had flowed from it in the sepulchre; and so having carried it away beyond the walls of the monastery and burnt it, they scattered the ashes to the winds.
Everyone agrees that you have to burn them to make sure they stay dead. Should have burned Doc Benton, too, but I’m guessing the chainsaw did the trick.