The Folks 2 Read online

  THE FOLKS 2: NO PLACE LIKE HOME

  By Ray Garton

  A Macabre Ink Production

  Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press

  Crossroad Press Digital Edition 2019

  Original publication by Cemetery Dance — February 2008

  Cover art by Jill Bauman

  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, short stories, and essays for more than 30 years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, suspense, and even comedy. Live Girls was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 1988, and Garton received the Grand Master of Horror Award at the 2006 World Horror Convention. He lives in northern California with his wife Dawn, where he is at work on a new novel.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  NOVELS AND NOVELLAS

  411

  Bestial

  Biofire

  Crawlers

  Crucifax

  Dark Channel

  Darklings

  Live Girls

  Lot Lizards

  Loveless

  Night Life

  Meds

  Murder Was My Alibi

  Ravenous

  Scissors

  Seductions

  Serpent Girl

  Sex and Violence in Hollywood

  Shackled

  The Folks

  The Folks 2

  The Loveliest Dead

  The Man in the Palace Theater

  The New Neighbor

  Trade Secrets

  Trailer Park Noir

  Vortex

  Zombie Love

  COLLECTIONS

  Methods of Madness

  ’Nids And Other Stories

  Pieces of Hate

  Slivers of Bone

  The Disappeared and Other Stories

  The Girl in the Basement and Other Stories

  Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth

  DISCOVER CROSSROAD PRESS

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  This book,

  like all the others

  is for

  Dawn

  Table of Contents

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  One

  I kept looking at her as I bowled.

  Most of the time, I looked at her out of the corner of my eye. When I did that, I could see that she was looking at me. When I turned my head and looked at her, she quickly looked away.

  She was staring at me.

  I was used to that. People had been staring at me since I was a little kid.

  Balls thundered down the lanes on both sides of me. Pins clattered.

  I let my ball go with a spin. Watched it tear down the lane. A strike.

  I spun around.

  She quickly looked away. She’d been staring at me.

  It cowed me a little. It reminded me that I was different from everyone else, that I wasn’t as good. When I was a kid, my mom got drunk—she was drunk most of the time—and fell asleep while smoking. She burned the house down with me in it and I was badly burned, and badly disfigured. Ever since then, I’d looked like the Phantom of the Opera without his mask. People looked at me in horror and stared at me in disbelief. In my face, they saw something that could possibly happen to them, or to someone dear to them. I frightened them.

  I wondered what went through that girl’s mind when she stared at me. I wondered that at about the same time that I remembered—

  I don’t look like that anymore.

  I bowled often, and at all hours of the day and night, so bowling before ten on Tuesday morning wasn’t weird. I never bowled with anyone, just myself, shooting balls down the lane, one after the other, getting better and better at it. It was the only thing that was really my own. Nobody in the family knew about it, not even Dad Bollinger. I kept my ball in the trunk of my blood-red Lexus. Dad bought me a new one every year.

  I don’t know if he would have approved of it. The bowling, I mean. He would have approved of my secrecy even less. He didn’t like secrets, that was his big thing. It wasn’t that I was deliberately keeping it a secret—there simply had been no reason to tell anyone, no point. As a result, no one knew but me, and I liked that. The Bollinger house, as big as it was, was crowded, and sometimes privacy was slim, even with my very private room. It was nice to have something that was no one else’s, something no one knew about but me.

  I went over the mountain to bowl at Mt. Crag Lanes. The girl worked in the Ten Pin, the snack bar that was just to the left as you entered the bowling alley. It was all orange-and-yellow plastic in there, and the girl was forced to wear the matching uniform—an orange-and-yellow short-sleeve top and black pants. But the tacky uniform couldn’t hide her figure. She was tall and had long legs, long black hair, and an olive complexion. Her lovely face always smiled at customers, even during breakfast hours: high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes, a full lower lip with a thinner upper lip that always seemed to be on the verge of a smirk. And she stared at me whenever I came in. It was wide open in front, the snack bar—there was no door, it was just open. You could see in there from anywhere in the place. And from inside the Ten Pin, you could look anywhere in the bowling alley.

  From behind the counter, when she wasn’t waiting on a customer, she chose to look at me.

  Almost every time I left the house, it took me a while to remember that I was no longer disfigured.

  Three years ago, the old man had sent me to a plastic surgeon at a hospital in Dallas. I was there for seven months and had four operations on my face and three on my scalp. When I came back, I looked a lot different. A lot better.

  But I still didn’t look…quite right.

  At first glance, I looked fine, perfectly normal.

  But on closer examination, it became obvious that there was something unusual about my face, something difficult to define. Maybe one side was minutely off-kilter, or one eye was bigger than the other? Something was not right.

  The problem was, the left side of my face was slightly smoother than the
right, and kind of shiny. My left cheek was slightly flatter than my right. Most people never quite figured that out, but they knew there was something odd about my face that they couldn’t pinpoint. So they still stared at me. But not like they used to. People used to look at me in horror or with a derisive sneer in their eyes. Now, they stared at me in a good way, with curiosity, with interest, and maybe even just a little admiration, because if I may say so myself, after all these years of being a freak, suddenly I wasn’t bad-looking. Hey, I wasn’t a movie star, okay? But compared to what I used to look like, I wasn’t the Phantom of the Opera without his mask, either. The left side of my scalp used to be pink and wrinkled and scarred and hairless—now, thanks to hair transplants, it was as if I’d always had a full head of brown hair.

  The first time I saw my new face, after the final operation—it was at the hospital, in my room, with Dr. Williker and a nurse, and my face was still swollen and bruised—I cried. I hadn’t even felt it coming on, that crying jag, it had just happened. As if the sob had been dropped on me like a bomb that set off tears long waiting for release. It was a completely new face in the mirror.

  As I left the bowling alley, I was pulled by temptation toward the Ten Pin. She was in there serving a cup of coffee to someone sitting at the counter.

  First I turned my head and looked into the snack bar, and she smiled and said something to the woman seated at the counter and didn’t even glance at me, acted like she was completely unaware of me. Then I centered my eyes forward but looked at her from the corner of my eye, and she lifted her head and watched me until I stepped out of sight.

  I pushed through the glass door, went down the four steps, then put down my ball in its bag in the small entryway with glass on two sides. I put on my down jacket, picked up the ball, pushed through the glass door, and went out into the cold. Crusty snow surrounded the paved parking lot. My breath clouded before my face. The air was like a frozen razor. I put my ball in the trunk, got in the car, and started the engine, then left my parking spot, left the lot, and headed up the mountain.

  Christmas had just passed, my fifth in the Bollinger house. When I first came, I’d been so determined to burn the place down and kill everybody. Five years later, and I’m still there.

  Christmas at the Bollinger house was like nothing else I had experienced. Matthew Bollinger, the old man—he likes me to call him Dad, and I do, but I’ve never entirely warmed up to it—plays Santa Claus on Christmas morning. He dresses up in the red suit and beard. The suit’s been altered for him, of course. His legs end at the knees, and he hobbles around on the stumps like some kind of waddling dwarf. His right arm resembles a large plucked turkey wing. Jowly flesh dangles from his large head, but it’s hidden behind the white beard. He comes out in his wheelchair—“Ho, ho, hooo!”—then hops off the chair and toddles over to the tree, where all the gifts await.

  The tree is decorated with homemade ornaments, most of which are rather odd. A butterfly in resin; a squirrel’s skull painted a festive red and green; a colander decorated with pipe cleaners and colored paperclips; a delicate, three-dimensional handmade construction-paper rose; those and other homemade decorations were all tied together on the tree with a multicolored chain made of round, glitter-sprinkled, construction-paper links.

  The gifts used to be homemade, as well. The Bollingers were so rich that Matthew Bollinger wasn’t even sure how much he was worth at any given time. He owned a lot of land around the local area and in other states. And yet they used to exchange only homemade gifts at Christmas that were just as strange as the decorations on the tree. I decided to change that, and I got Amanda to help me.

  First, we taught many of them how to shop on the Internet. Then we had those who could write make a list of gifts they would like to buy for family members. The family was enormous, so no one person bought a gift for every member of the family, of course—except for Matthew Bollinger. I’ll give him that, he always gave everyone a gift at Christmas once he learned how much fun it was to spend his money. Anyway, they passed the lists to Amanda and me, and using one of Bollinger’s credit cards, Amanda and I went to Iron Falls and bought everything on the lists. It was a lot of work, but it made for a much better Christmas than the one I observed my first year there in that sprawling, meandering house that crawled up the southern side of Mt. Crag. And I must admit, I enjoyed shopping with Amanda. She had the ability to make everything an adventure. She was fun to be with, and she was quite beautiful, so it was always good to be seen with her. If only I could forget the things about her that others couldn’t see and didn’t know about.

  Together, she and I changed Christmas at the Bollinger house. Now children squealed as they unwrapped their new toys, and adults kissed over just-opened jewelry boxes, or held new clothes up to their bodies with proud grins.

  Now, Christmas morning was a big event in the Bollinger house, festive and happy, filled with a lot of laughter.

  All the children gather around the tree to the sound of upbeat Christmas music. Santa Claus hands out presents from the mountain of festively-wrapped gifts spilling out from under and around the tree, Santa hobbling around on his stumps from child to child, delivering the packages individually. The children—so many of them, you wouldn’t believe it, so many that more additions to the house had to be built a few years ago—all gather around and make lots of noise. The children with Down syndrome. The ones with the cleft pallets. The ones who were much worse, with nothing but a figure-eight-shaped hole where their mouths and noses should be, lower teeth jutting up into nothing, inward-sunken faces glistening with mucous. The microcephalics and hydrocephalics. The ones with flippers instead of limbs, or legs but no arms, or arms but no legs. Or Sharon and Karen—one body with two legs and two arms, but two completely separate, fully-functioning heads, which sometimes got into bitter arguments. The ones with tails, or those born with no eyes. And, of course, children do not remain children for long, so there were plenty of teenagers and adults there just like them.

  Matthew Bollinger was something different to all of them. To some he was just Daddy, while to others he was Uncle-Daddy, or Grandpa-Daddy, or Cousin-Daddy, or any other combination of titles. But on Christmas, he was Santa Claus.

  I was always the designated Christmas photographer. It used to be that I took the pictures because I refused to allow anyone to take pictures of me, not the way I looked then, not with my twisted, pink face. Now that I no longer looked like that, I still took the pictures because I confess I did not want anyone to see me in the photographs and try to figure out what was wrong with me.

  Of course, Amanda did not look like there was anything wrong with her. No, you had to go a little deeper to find her disfigurement.

  I had already done that.

  Two

  Snow covered Mt. Crag beneath a sky the color of freshly unearthed bones. The roads were clear, but the mountain itself was white. Jagged fangs of rock stuck out of the mountain’s side, each one capped with snow. On my way up, it began to rain. I turned on the windshield wipers.

  There was a time when I hated Matthew Bollinger and his family. But after he had my face fixed, after he sent me back to school at the College of the Hand of God there on the mountain in an accelerated program, where I got a degree in accounting and another in business, and after he put me in charge of his books and pretty much gave me anything I wanted, it was hard to hate him. I still felt somewhat dubious toward him and disapproved of his way of life, but it was difficult not to feel a certain amount of affection for him.

  I hit the brakes when a deer came stuttering down the embankment to my right in a shower of rocks, then crossed the narrow road, and disappeared down the steep embankment to my left.

  I had gone down that embankment about five years ago. In my Volkswagen Beetle. Just before finding myself in the Bollinger house. I had to be cut out of the car, and in the process my right arm was removed. Of course, Bollinger had me fitted with a prosthetic arm, top of the line, nothing but the
best. It had a hand on it that looked real at first glance. It opened and closed, but didn’t do anything too complicated. I’d learned to use it, practicing until my movements were smooth. Then, because I’d been right-handed, I had to learn to do everything with my left hand and arm. Learning to bowl left-handed was a good start.

  I wondered if the girl in the Ten Pin had noticed that I had a prosthetic arm.

  All the trees on the mountain were Christmas trees, even though the holiday had passed. All flocked and glimmering with speckles of silvery ice.

  I drove through Pinecrest, the small village around the college, and finally reached the top of the mountain, headed down the other side, then drove up the long driveway to the house.

  The Bollinger house was a blocky structure that climbed the mountainside in levels. So much of the exterior was made of granite that it looked like it was part of the mountain, part of the rock that jutted from the mountainside in sharp jags. Most of the house was hidden by trees and what was visible blended in with the environment. In order to see it, you had to know it was there, and you had to know exactly where to look.

  I parked my car in front of the house, killed the engine, and got out. Hunching my shoulders against the rain, which was coming down pretty hard now, I hurried to the front door.

  Double doors with long narrow rectangles of beveled, frosted glass on each side. A brass knocker on each door. I went inside.

  The place was a lot cleaner now, I’d seen to that. The living room had furniture in it now, new clean furniture. Well, new as of three years ago. I’d gotten sick of looking at the place. I’d gone through the house redecorating, replacing furniture. That was after I’d come back from Dallas. I’d felt aggressive with that new face, aggressive and creative. As a result, the whole house looked much better than it had when I’d arrived.

  “Andy, Andy,” Dad Bollinger said as he wheeled his chair toward me. “Where’ve you been?”