STEVE VERNON: Cat Call: A Tale of Ghosts and Darker Things

EXCERPT OF CAT CALL

Steve vernon

Copyright © 2017 by Steve Vernon

Nobody really knew how long the old Funnel mansion had stood empty, waiting up there high on Carpenter’s Hill like a child’s forgotten lunch box, any more than anybody knew just how long that old gray cat had squatted in behind the screen of the front porch window.

  All we knew was somebody must be feeding it, because every now and then we would look in from the hedge on the far side of the yard and see the cat nibbling daintily on what looked to be raw hamburger.

  “Guts,” proclaimed Jeremy Hooter, making a thick juicy swizzling noise with his lips and tongue pressed against his stainless steel braces.  “It’s guts, is what it is.”

  “Great big gobs of owl guts,” amplified Charlie Roundbert.

  Charlie Roundbert was only half of Jeremy’s size and age, but he might as well have been Jeremy’s shadow. The two boys stuck together just that closely and yet as far as I knew the two of them never had anything nice to say to each other.

  “Owl guts,” Charlie repeated.

  We all took up the chant except Jeremy, who didn’t think it was funny at all.

  “Owl guts, owl guts, owl guts.”

  Owl was what we always called Jeremy, because of his last name. It didn’t help that Jeremy wore a pair of glasses that made coke bottle bottoms look like microscope slides.

  The glasses always reminded me of Dr. Cyclops. You know the guy from the movies? It always looked to me like Jeremy was staring at us through a microscope, like we were some kind of alien bacteria from Planet X.

  I had a microscope given to me on my tenth birthday, not one of those little bitty plastic toys they sell with the chemistry sets you order from the Christmas catalogue, but a big old-fashioned kind that my Dad found in a basement he’d been paid to empty. The basement had belonged to old Doc Hawcomber, and when the doctor saw the microscope he told my Dad to go ahead and take it, he had a new one he used anyways. My Dad always said that the microscope was probably contaminated with all kinds of plagues and diseases and he was likely being ten kinds of an idiot giving it to a kid like me.

  I told my Dad not to worry. Germs didn’t stick to dead things like microscopes and houses. Germs stuck to people. Germs needed meat to feed on, and he probably shouldn’t worry so much.

  I knew he wasn’t being all that serious anyways. He was my Dad, and the only person I had in this world, next to my dog Riley. The only difference was, Dad was real. Riley had been real, but he was imaginary now, since the timber truck ran over him.

  I knew my Dad liked to worry about me, like it was his hobby or something, and I loved him for this worry, imaginary or not.

  I got Riley from my Mom when I was two. Riley was a big black Labrador retriever, with feet as big as snow shoes in the pictures we have of him.

  We don’t have too many pictures of Mom, because it was my Mom’s camera, and Dad never felt that comfortable using it. He’s got his own camera now, and he uses it whenever he can.

  Riley was my dog, and he would play fetch with me with a worn out baseball from the time the sun got up in the morning until the time it crawled back into bed. He was killed when I was eight years old, because of a ball I had misthrown. The ball bounced out into the roadway and Riley followed the lure of the ball like a trout following a wriggling worm. The truck rolled over him before I even had a chance to scream.

  I got Riley when I was two, and my Mom died when I was three, and Riley died when I was eight, and I can still remember how I used to stare into his big black jujube eyes and see my mother smiling out from inside those eyes. I loved Riley better than I loved spaghetti, and I loved spaghetti a lot.

  Dad said I got my spaghetti eating habit from my Mom. Back before the accident, back when Mom was alive she loved eating spaghetti more than anything. I can still remember seeing her with two long strands of spaghetti hanging from out of her mouth like a Fu Manchu sort of moustache, until she sucked them right back up, giggling all the way, with a big loud shlooooping sound.

  It was the only memory I had kept of her. My Mom died when I was awfully young. A car wreck, Dad told me. It was a rainy October night, and the car wheels couldn’t hold to the road, and there was a sudden blast of lightning like somebody jumped out and said boo, and then Dad lost control of the wheel and they slid up against that big old beech tree down at the foot of Carpenter’s Hill. Dad had remembered to buckle up so he only twisted his back and broke his face against the dash board, but Mom forgot to buckle up so she went spilling right through the window glass and into the tree and Dad told me once one late night that he still saw the color of her blood in the leaves of that tree every autumn.

  My Dad walks with a limp because of that crash, and his left eye has a strange tilt to it from where his face was broken. His face sort of looks as if he is always getting ready to cry and every October he carries a bouquet of quiet red roses up the side of Carpenter’s Hill to the town cemetery where my Mom is sleeping.

  Jeremy, who is older than I am, told me once that he had watched from the bushes as the police ambulance medics scraped my Mom off of the trunk of the tree like she was so much hamburger meat. I told him he was a liar. I said that there was no way that would happen – that you just couldn’t make a person into hamburger meat.

  We got into a fight over that, and he probably would have beaten me up, but I think he felt bad for what he had said to me.

  Jeremy had said to me that some of the pieces of my Mom had been so small that the police had needed a microscope to find them.

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GIVEAWAY

Oh, yeah! Author Steve Vernon is just getting started by giving you a tantalizing taste of CAT CALL!!! It’s GIVEAWAY TIME and does he have something special for you!!!! Yup, it’s another EVERYBODY’S A WINNER DAY!!!! Steve is giving away his suspense/horror/thriller Cat Call: A Tale of Ghosts and Darker Things to everyone who wants it!!!

Just click on link and enjoy your FREE DOWNLOAD!!!!

Nobody really knew how long the old Funnel mansion had stood empty, waiting up there high on Carpenter’s Hill like a child’s forgotten lunch box, any more than anybody knew just how long that old cat had squatted in behind the screen of the front porch window. Three young boys are about to find out just exactly what the dark and horrifying secret is behind that cat.

Only two of them will survive.

This is a creepy and haunting story of the supernatural.

WHAT PEOPLE ARE SAYING ABOUT STEVE VERNON

"If Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson and Robert Bloch had a three-way sex romp in a hot tub, and then a team of scientists came in and filtered out the water and mixed the leftover DNA into a test tube, the resulting genetic experiment would most likely grow up into Steve Vernon." - Bookgasm

"Steve Vernon is something of an anomaly in the world of horror literature. He's one of the freshest new voices in the genre although his career has spanned twenty years. Writing with a rare swagger and confidence, Steve Vernon can lead his readers through an entire gamut of emotions from outright fear and repulsion to pity and laughter." - Cemetery Dance

"Armed with a bizarre sense of humor, a huge amount of originality, a flair for taking risks and a strong grasp of characterization - Steve's got the chops for sure." - Dark Discoveries

"Steve Vernon was born to write. He's the real deal and we're lucky to have him." - Richard Chizmar

AUTHOR BIO

If you want to picture me just think of that old dude at the campfire spinning out ghost stories and weird adventures and the grand epic saga of how Thud the Second stepped out of his cave with nothing more than a rock in his fist and slew the saber-toothed tiger.

Please buy my books.

Mom is beginning to worry about me.

For more up-to-date info please follow my blog at:

http://stevevernonstoryteller.wordpress.com/

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yours in storytelling,

Steve Vernon