Mansion of High Ghosts Read online

  Also by James D McCallister

  NOVELS

  King’s Highway

  Fellow Traveler

  Let the Glory Pass Away

  Dogs of Parsons Hollow

  Dixiana

  Down in Dixiana

  Dixiana Darling

  Reconstruction of the Fables

  (2022)

  * * *

  STORIES

  The Year They Canceled Christmas

  Fables of the Reconstruction

  (2022)

  The Night I Prayed to Elvis:

  The Edgewater County Stories

  (2023)

  Copyright © 2021 by James McCallister/Mind Harvest Press

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  No characters in this book are intended to portray actual persons, living or dead.

  ISBN: 978-1-946052-41-4

  For Allyson and Andria,

  Jason and Jack,

  Alvy and Max, too

  Contents

  I. A MAN IN THE GRIP OF A THEORY

  1. Devin

  2. Billy

  3. Devin

  4. Creedence

  5. Devin

  6. Billy

  7. Creedence

  8. Devin

  9. Creedence

  10. Billy

  11. Devin

  12. Creedence

  13. Devin

  14. Creedence

  15. Devin

  16. Creedence

  17. Billy

  18. Devin

  II. FACING COLLEGE STREET

  19. Billy

  20. Devin

  21. Creedence

  22. Billy

  23. Devin

  24. Billy

  25. Devin

  26. Creedence

  27. Billy

  28. Creedence

  29. Devin

  30. Billy

  III. A BAR CALLED HEAVEN

  31. Devin

  32. Billy

  33. Creedence

  34. Devin

  35. Billy

  36. Creedence

  37. Billy

  38. Creedence

  39. Billy

  40. Devin

  IV. ARCADIA

  41. Devin

  42. Billy

  43. Creedence

  44. Devin

  45. Billy

  46. Devin

  47. Creedence

  48. Devin

  49. Billy

  50. Devin

  51. Billy

  52. Devin

  53. Billy

  54. Devin

  55. Creedence

  56. Devin

  V. THE PRETENDERS

  57. Billy

  58. Creedence

  59. Devin

  60. Billy

  61. Devin

  62. Billy

  63. Creedence

  64. Billy

  65. Devin

  66. Creedence

  67. Devin

  68. Creedence

  69. Devin

  70. Creedence

  71. Devin

  72. Creedence

  73. Billy

  74. Creedence

  75. Billy

  76. Devin

  77. Creedence

  78. Devin

  79. Creedence

  80. Devin

  81. Creedence

  82. Devin

  83. Billy

  84. Creedence

  85. Devin

  86. Billy

  87. Devin

  VI. Epilogue

  88. Devin

  TEASER

  Teaser

  About the Author

  I would not want to make you unhappy by detailing pain, but there is a crucial sort of difference between pain and the narration of pain. I am telling you what happened. If there is vicarious pain in knowing, there is actual peril in not knowing. In aversion lies a colossal risk.

  Philip K. Dick

  One

  Devin

  The crash of the vehicles in the intersection, an everyday light-running near tragedy, came to the drunk’s attention through his gauzy, fermented scrim of consciousness only as a muffled thud. Had a chunk of headlight not glinted across his field of vision after glancing off a municipal wastebasket, Devin Rucker, be-bopping along the cracked sidewalk with a decent AM buzz, mightn’t have noticed the accident at all.

  Once he did notice—a hard knock between vehicles, smoke, a woman crying, nobody even out of the cars yet—he perambulated into the intersection without missing a beat or increasing his pace, waving lazy cig-stained fingers in the four cardinal directions to discourage approaching vehicles.

  At the cracked side window of the car with the crying woman Devin grunted, spat and asked if she could get her door open.

  “Smoke’ll kill you faster than fire, usually,” Devin’s wisdom, delivered through a cloud of his own. “Better get on out, now.”

  “It’s stuck.” The woman, flustered, held her hands a-flutter. “I can’t find my purse.”

  “Make sure it’s unlocked.”

  Once she diddled the knob Devin heard a faint clunk inside the door. He pulled. The door hung. A frame issue. They’d total it for a bent frame. Devin’s Uncle Hill, a car dealer, was among numerous voices from back home offering advice on a daily basis. The ones he couldn’t drink quiet, anyway.

  Devin pushed his yellowed fingertips along the top of the door frame until finding gap. He might have been close to dying, and with nary an ounce of fat nor much muscle, but this drunk knew when he needed to get a woman out of a busted-up car. And how to do it.

  He panted his left leg and found the most leverage he’d experienced in ages, yanked. The door all but peeled back like aluminum foil. He hollered, primal, and finished ripping it off the hinges. Tossed the door aside like the Hulk.

  By now others had gathered to gawk. “Damn, bro,” a stout Latino man in dusty work clothes said as he went to help the woman get out of the car. The sound of a first responder’s siren came from a point increasingly less distant. “How you did that?”

  “The Lord helps those who help themselves. S’all I can tell you.”

  The workingman crossed himself, praised God.

  His part played, Devin went on loping his wobbly, untroubled yet disconsolate gait; not yet noon, he had already been ejected from his favorite daytime watering hole. It happened.

  Before long, however, messages left by his sister slapped a bigger fish down on the sizzling grill than another soul’s minor traffic accident, or, for that matter, where to get another drink.

  Getting booted so early in the day from the joint over in Silver City—cut off, and before the sun had gone down—represented a stinging rebuke. Amateur hour. Now he’d be drinking alone. Driving back to Commerce City on the other side of Denver, with the vehicular mishap written off as a hallucination brought on by encroaching sobriety, Devin pouted about getting the boot from one of his go-to joints. The sports bar a few towns over, where his shenanigans were not quite so notorious, would now be crossed off the list.

  Yeah—a barroom badass, only two ways his best stories ended: jail, or the hospital. Felt like that kind of scene coming on later tonight, in fact. But the outer intention of the world in which he operated often frowned upon such misadventures.

  One or the other—injury, or imprisonment. Sounded like a goal, though in lucid moments one he suspected already achieved. Neither outcome bound to conjure much emotional reaction, though. Not unless he failed to
drink enough to quell what ailed him.

  Out of liquor at home in this shitty apartment, he cracked a microbrew. He’d need forty such libations to get right.

  Wisdom, here gleaned from inside a clever bottle cap coexisting with itself also as a fortune cookie:

  Moments only pass

  to make room

  for more Moments!

  Devin, trembling, sat on his balcony and balanced the bottle cap between his thumb and forefinger. He had found it in the apartment complex parking lot. He tried snapping it between his fingers to make the smart-ass bottle cap, literal garbage, fly away into the air like a little frisbee, the way he and his friends in college once did in the dorm rooms with numerous bottle caps, or at one of the many bars they frequented in the Old Market entertainment district alongside campus.

  He dropped the moment-cap three times. Cussed. Gave up.

  Devin Rucker’s moment: His apartment, once fresh and clean but now a pigsty, lacked any semblance of stewardship. Long abandoned to forces of decay, an entropy had taken hold which featured garbage piled in the corners, food rotting in the refrigerator, and a general décor designed with the eye of a distillery rep.

  The sheer volume of empty liquor vessels, Devin often thought in admiration, lent a pleasing aesthetic quality to the surroundings, a preponderance of objets d’art representing the scope and entirety of one man’s life’s-work project. Of many men’s lives; they who’d done the distilling and the bottling, the labeling and QC-ing and shipping and delivering and displaying and selling, and bless their hearts and pointed little heads for all they did to make the world a better place.

  For Devin.

  For everyone.

  A-men.

  To Devin, a drunk’s drunk, a pro—they called him Ruck, or his friends did, anyway—the bottles weren’t trash, rather trophies suitable for display in any All-American high school lobby: records of achievement, though for outstanding effort in his own peculiar, dyspeptic field of athleticism. This, no mere trash pile. Grad students would one day sift this find for clues to the essential nature of his philosophy.

  A line of black ants, swarming, a bountiful day for the mound: a sack of dry cat food lay wounded and bleeding stale kibble onto the yellowed vinyl of the cheap and dirty kitchen flooring. A sack Devin had thrown against the wall and left lying there, split open. The pet food had been there fur-ever, it seemed.

  For a year, now.

  Longer.

  From somewhere in the apartment complex came the thumping of a hip-hop tune that copped the hook from ‘Love is Alive,’ an old 70s pop number Devin remembered from listening to rock radio with his sister Creedence back home in South Cack-a-lack.

  The beat, boring into his pickled brain.

  Stoking his rage.

  Pounding his palm against the wall, he gave a hoarse shout: “Turn that mess down, you goddurn college fucks.” A nearby state university satellite campus meant students lived in the complex, and often tunes could be heard thumping day and night. Devin, never nostalgic enough to join in with their parties.

  The bass-beat, undeterred, thudded on.

  Pacing.

  Trapped.

  Needing a drink.

  But not alone.

  And not here.

  Making for the outside world. Relieved, as always, to push his way out.

  But his apartment door, it wouldn’t close right. Like it no longer hung quite square. Swollen, like from the kind of tropical air Devin grew up breathing in the South.

  No mystery. His door had acquired a big crack down the middle. One night he had needed to kick his way out. Or rather, in. Kick his way in. To get some shuteye. A golden threshold of inebriation existed which had to be met, during which sleep would come dreamless. A big project, becoming dreamless, but the long journey was always taken as a series of individual steps until arrival. Someday.

  At last, the bolt clicked into place. Nothing worth taking inside anyway—locking up, a habit from the days of his cat Prudy. To keep her close and safe.

  A brilliant light, flashing behind the aviators hiding Devin’s amber slits from the glare of the beer signs in the windows of Chubby’s Ale House: Not so much like a flashbulb, rather a glinting reflection of high midday sunlight off a surface of polished chrome. The image, coming accompanied as always by a disharmonious roar, a black-throated screech, an enormous out-of-tune instrument blown from on high: thus, the signal of his descent into abject, non-intoxicated despair. This condition loomed with nigh inevitability, but this a precursor, in his grand plan, to the blessed unconsciousness which awaited; else veering across the center line into wretched sobriety, as polarizing an intention as could be reckoned to a man like him.

  Short version: He needed a drink. Before the shakes took hold.

  Jim, his bartender at nearby Chubby’s, greeted him with a measured and cautious air. A softheaded idiot, Jim, but one who cared; who knew how to pour.

  A small freestanding tavern on the other side of I-70 next to the pyramid-like Marriott hotel—on the weekends bikers congregated here, and recognizing his condition steeped in past trauma, treated Devin with dignity and patience—the bar lay only three safe minutes of flat highway cut from the prairie-dog scrubland near the big soccer stadium. That made Chubby’s homebase.

  On the satellite radio—Jim liked oldschool authentic country, which they featured on one of the four or five channels devoted to the genre, the kind they’d have listened to back home at The Dixiana in Edgewater County—Devin enjoyed good-old Loretta Lynn warbling about ‘Somebody Somewhere,’ a plaintive number full of longing and loss and syrupy soothing steel guitar. This is music his father would have listened to, all of which reminded Devin of being back home. Which, as it happened, also made him annoyed enough to bite a nickel in half.

  Grumbling, wincing, clutching his right side and settling onto the stool at the corner—his spot, near the cigarette machine—Devin sparked a smoke with his typical aplomb and hollered over to a couple of the neighborhood guys shooting a money game. Other Saturday drunks, sitting hunched over and nursing lonely libations, ignored him or otherwise glared. A familiar and comforting scene.

  Jim, noting that Devin clutched his side, asked if he’d been injured.

  “These barbecue ribs? Yeah. A bit tender.” Devin, probing and pressing under his armpit, sucked in his breath and cussed. “You could say so. Training for the ’04 Olympics chugging squad.”

  Nyuck-nyuck. “What happened this time?”

  Leaning over, shaggy hair hanging down, beak shot through with spider veins, nail-bitten fingers; aviators perched, hiding the eyes. Confidential: “This lot lizard, see, she took a notion to go and take a kick at me.”

  “Kicked you?”

  Dismissive, waving a hand. “Pretty standard stuff. I had passed out, and this party girl, she figures to roll me.”

  “Not again.”

  “But damn if I didn’t wake up to catch red hands rifling my jacket. Foiled, I says.”

  “You kick that bitch’s ass?”

  “She had a weight advantage. Clocked me in the kisser and knocked me onto my ass. And then kicked me square in the side, all punitive and shit. Had on one of them—what ya call them spikes they wear?”

  Jim, blinking and rapt. “High heels?”

  “The colloquial term for them slides they wear.”

  Jim, confounded by this digression. “That who wears?”

  A comment came from Darla, another regular sitting a few stools away, drinking and playing trivia. Dry: “Alex, I’ll take ‘Come Fuck Me’s’ for two hundred.”

  “Right right right,” Jim said. “Like—high heels.”

  “There we go,” Devin said.

  “Was she a decent lay?”

  Insulted. “Christ, Jimbo. Why you want to ask me a question like that?”

  “Like what?”

  “How the fuck would I remember? If she was a decent lay?”

  Jim, ever more confused. “Me, I’d have those
ribs checked out.”

  Devin, regarding ‘his’ bartender, as much as any bartender could be possessed, with renewed trust and pleasure, pronounced an alternative cure: “Ain’t nothing wrong a double J-D rocks, and a pack of Reds, won’t fix.”

  “Pour it on top?”

  “On top of what?”

  “The round you already ordered.”

  Devin, discovering a half-consumed cocktail sitting in front of him, broke into a grin. “Make it so.”

  Jim gurgled the liquor, filling the drink to the rim. Colorful bar-light glimmered on the surface of the whiskey. Devin felt a shudder like reverence.

  About that time the Man in Black came on—‘Can’t Go That Way.’ Devin, thinking, nah; he could and would go that way. In his own time; and biding his time. Waiting for the moment.