Thrice Told Tales Read online

  With renewed energy, with the stump grinder now madly thrashing about, no one at the controls, Van Helsing literally threw himself over the lip of the hollowed out stump. Panting, face down over the beautifully hollowed out stump, seeing the array of deep white roots creating a maze of a stark white labyrinth against the backdrop of eternal earth, Van Helsing knew in his soul that two things could be trusted—that the legend of the white oak and its efficacy in combating to the final consternation and a final death one Vlad Dracule must be true, and secondly that Eldred Jasper Giddings had dug a shrine to this end, finishing his life with his most impressive stump grinding ever.

  Yes, poor Eldred had done a stunning job of hollowing out the white oak fortification, and too, too bad he was not present to witness Van Helsing’s victory, his having found the Holy Jail.

  No time for premature ejaculations and kudos just now, Van Helsing clawed his way to the clanking metal grated ladder running alongside the Vladverbooten, the steps taking him up to the cab of the voracious Russian monster, its muzzled still feeding from the white pit. Van Helsing grabbed onto a loose cable extending down from the machine, and with his leg spilling blood along the metal plates, dripping over the rivets, he managed to pull and tug his ancient weight aboard and into the cab.

  Then he stared at the control panel, not unlike that of a 747 airliner. “Shit!”

  Grabbing hold of the enormous joy stick, the size of a New York City cop’s baton, Van Helsing snatched back the controls, backing the dinosaur off. Even as it went into reverse, its ratcheting teeth extracted the now torn and crumpled refrigerator. Dracule, the Freezer Queen, and Dracule’s greasy smoky essence was coming up with the bloody machine jaws--the whole becoming more and more engulfed in a strange, odorous cloud of fog. It was he, Dracule the fiend, in the form of fog coming full-blown now!

  No mistaking the foul odor or the oily, grimy smudge fog. The stench of the undead’s decay down to the cells that now morphed into this shapeless escape. In the fog, even over the din of the machine, Van Helsing heard the maniacal laughter he so dreaded and knew so well.

  Van Helsing, spying a large red-vinyl padded button, smashed it like a desperate Jeopardy guest. Result: he watched the freezer and the attached morphing fog catapult back into the pit, sending up a dust cloud of wood chips and sawdust. “Back to your grave, you vile bastard thing!” Now Van Helsing laughed hysterically, on the verge of conquest.

  “Macovoy, you sonofabitch! Where are you with that cement!” he screamed into the cell phone now. “Hurry! Hurry now! Now!”

  The cement truck backed to the stump hole, its black and tan drum rolling at breakneck speed, loose empty cement bonding bags flying in every direction, their labels reading: White Oak Cement Bond. Van Helsing had chosen well, and had himself blessed the water used to thin and then congeal with the mix. He had stirred it with his cross and had spoken the ancient Latin words of exorcism over the virgin batch destined to become a huge heavy lid over the white stump coffin. This insured the entire mixture blessed and holy.

  Both Macovoy and his man thought Van Helsing crazy on seeing this; however, they were content with the promise of twice their normal rate and a break in their monotonous existence with a bonus—a fine story to tell their children and wives at dinner table.

  Now as Van Helsing backed the grinder off, displaying the aggregate pool of two generations of stump grinders’ blood as he did so, in rushed the cement men, Macovoy on his cell phone, struggling to hear Van Helsing.

  “OK, like you want your load dumped over top of this here stump, right?” asked the cigar-smoking Macovoy, scratching at his crotch, and then he repeated louder, “OK, like you want your load dumped over top of this here stump, right?”

  “Bloody God damn you, man! Right, so do it! Do it now!”

  “Dump her, Sims!” Macovoy shouted to his man in the cab.

  “You got it!”

  Hydraulic lift. Raise. Hoist. Pour. The process felt like a lifetime to Van Helsing as more and more of Dracule found itself forming into one…beginning to shape up into a rough simulation of a ghost, and soon a semblance of a man in cape. And now into a kind of hologram as his molecules began fusing in that strange and eerie process known only in the alchemy of the undead soul.

  “Hold up, Sims! There’s a man down there!” Macovoy shouted around his cigar. “Holy shit!”

  “Drop your load man!” shouted Van Helsing, eye to eye with Sims, having brought the grinder round to the side of the cement truck. “Now, Sims, now!”

  Seeing Sims hesitate at the controls, Van Helsing rammed the cement truck with the grinder, and for a moment the two titan machines seemed in battle. Van Helsing locked eyes with Sims. Sims, for his part only grew more determined, his rough-hewn features screwing into stubborn Tennessee antagonism, until he literally felt Van Helsing’s grinder lift the concrete mixer’s tires off the ground on this side.

  Sims slammed down the throttle controlling the cement mixture, and it slid down the trough at breakneck speed, a mudslide of heavy, rocky White Oak, the most expensive money could buy. Hell this fellow was a Britisher and a nutcase. Sims wanted now just to drop his load and get out of here.

  Sims had taken the threat to heart and had slammed the stream of heavy gravy that filled the white oak chalice created by Eldred. “My cup runneth over,” muttered Van Helsing, finally relaxing his grip on the controls and shutting down the thunderous 2004.

  Smoke or no smoke, in moments, the bloody hole and Dracule and his new eternal white coffin lay confined and imprisoned. Van Helsing, feeling a great weight lifted from his weary mind and shoulders, climbed from the grinder to the ground and stepped to the edge of the lava flow of white oak cement. Fast drying, solid, he could already stand on it. He helplessly did an old Irish jig upon Dracule’s final resting place, singing, “A-high diddle, diddle, the cat and the fiddle, the plate ran off with the spoon, and the cow jumped over the moon. Finally…finally at last it is an endgame, our chase over, old nemesis that you are. Finally, we both have call to rest eternal, but your rest will be no rest whatever but a new definition for damnation as not even Satan will know what possible punishment suits an undead such as you. Vile creature rejected by even Him, the Prince of Darkness.”

  Sims, perturbed yet fascinated by the old man’s words listened intently as he looked about for Mac.

  “Yours will be eternal hellfire and brimstone boils and a cancerous incubation for all time, Vlad the incubus, Vlad the succubus. Vlad the vile.”

  “Where’s Macovoy?” asked Sims joining Van Helsing at the pit where the fast setting cement festered like a huge scab over the earth.

  “I’m afraid…” began Van Helsing, throwing back his robe with flourish and an energy born of victory, “…afraid your friend stepped into the way of the cement flue….” Van Helsing’s eyes pointed Sims to the already dry plateau lying over the white oak stump, the drippings of it like the tendrils of a stone octopus. “Afraid Mr. Macovoy is…got caught up in…”

  “Fuck me, I killed Mac,” moaned Sims.

  “I fear it so, my friend, but it was, after all, an accident, and the man got careless there at the end.”

  “He shouted for me to hold the load. Said something I couldn’t make out over the noise of that damn machine of yours alongside this’n. Just read his hands. His hands said to hold the load. Then you rammed my baby, and I knee-jerked and hit the controls to let her rip, and now poor Mac is gone. We wasn’t so close, but still…we raised a few together.”

  “Look, I’m the new owner of Georgia Stump Grinders, and you now have a wonderful opportunity, your own cement truck and business, and we could both of us do worse. It was an accident, an unfortunate miscalculation on Mac’s part.”

  Sims mulled this over, and his eyes slightly lit with a struggling new light, the eyes telling Van Helsing that this kind of thinking had appeal.

  Van Helsing snatched out a pack of English made tar-filled cigarettes and offered one to Sims who eagerly too
k it. They stood smoking for a while like old companions. Van Helsing took a much-deserved moment of silence to praise the work accomplished. He could finally breathe of air without the stench of Dracule fouling his nostrils.

  Then he caught a whiff of something odd and began sniffing doglike.

  “What the hell’s zat stench?” asked Sims.

  The smell of Dracule seeping up out of the pit? It could not be. No.

  Van Helsing saw Sims’s lit cigarette fall from the man’s lips. He then followed Sims’s eyes—glued as they were on a green dark distance where a flash of fur whirred through the brush. Van Helsing whipped out binoculars and found himself staring at a lone wolf on anxious paws, its unholy yellow to green light-emitting eyes watching Van Helsings’s next move.

  “Something out there. Maybe it’s Mac.” Sims wanted it to be Mac. “Maybe he ain’t in the cement after all.”

  “It’s not Mac!”

  “Maybe he’s wandering round out in them woods with ahh a c-c-cussion, am-knee-sia maybe.”

  “Mac is dead! It’s…it’s…”

  “I’m going after Mac!” Sims shouted and darted off.

  “Don’t be a fool!” shouted Van Helsing, but Sims was already a blur in the Georgia Tennessee border forest. “Damn it man, come back! It’s not Macovoy! It’s him, the Prince of Transylvania! Darkness, Evil, Dracule himself!” But even as Van Helsing got the words out, he heard Sims’s tortured scream, and he saw the white of Sims’s flesh and garment rising toward the moon, lifted on bat wings.

  “The bastard thing had escaped in the sawdust cloud as smoke and ash…escaped again! Damn me! Condemn me, oh God, for I have failed again. How many times, and how many ways must it die before I can rest?”

  # # #

  The sign out front still read Georgia Stump Grinder’s—We grind your problems to nothing. But a new--and thus suspect--owner had taken over Eldred’s baby, his trailer and his monster machines. An outsider with a foreign accent—British or maybe Australian—had taken over the business. The local sheriff had his eye on the man for sure. Name of Van Helsing, who’d so clearly taken up residence here in Grainbag County that he was occasionally seen drinking tea of all things down at the Blue Turnip where he would open a G-4 Macintosh laptop computer with a seventeen inch screen and an I-pod camera and go off in a world of his own making, or so it seemed. From the friendly confines of the Blue Turnip, he “…communed and communicated with a whole ‘nother world!” as Merle the waitress put it--the whole outside world, speaking with scholars, philosophers, engineers, NASA scientists, searching for answers to his business questions now that he was a “bona-fide” stump grinder, all the proper business papers filed with Lucinda Bates, the Grainbag County Clerk of Records.

  The fool man had also gone into the depressed cement business in a town that preferred dirt roads, dirt parkways, and dirt driveways. But this man was off. Off in so many ways. Stocking up on White Oak Bond cement mix in every conceivable size and container, for instance--saying he would only deal in the best—his credit skyrocketing. Another bit of overheard information had it that this fellow, Professor Van Helsing, had put it out there that he was interested in any and all white oak stumps anyone might have to sell him! That he might like to uproot for free to display around Eldred and Charlene’s trailer (a location that would always be known to locals as Eldred’s place). It was meant as part of a campaign to draw more business his way. Something about making the white oak stump his new GSG logo. Logo is what many of the area residents privately called him. “Logo all right,” they’d drawl at the end of any conversation about Van Helsing.

  “Harmless logo though,” Sheriff Taylor finally, after weeks of speculation, said on the subject. This as he peeled an orange before every curious eye at the Blue Turnip Café. “Checked out his story. He’s retired from over England by way of Transylvania and Denland before that. Paperwork’s in order. Bono-fied and certo-fied.”

  “Certifiable I’d say,” replied one regular, making them all laugh in superiority.

  “Far as the law’s concerned, he certified. Just took the citizenship class, and by god, the Dutchy fellow knows more U.S. history than all the teachers at Grainbag High put together. He’s OK, and he talks like Tony Blair. Gotta like the man.”

  Story had it that he offered old Eldred Jasper Giddings so much ready cash that the man could not refuse the opportunity to get out from under the stump grinding business lock, stock, and barrel. Papers at Lucinda Bates’s county clerk’s office attested to this as well as the bill of sale on Macovoy’s cement mixer. Both men sold out in what was characterized as a heartbeat. And taking his daughter Charlene with him--as word circulated--Old Eldred and young Charlene wound up in someplace, Arizona …for the dry air, as everyone knew poor Eldred suffered mightily from allergies of all stripe.

  In a related story of fact, that foolish Bob Throgmorten disappeared for Pheonix as well in a sad bid to be near Charlene.

  Any change in these parts upset the locals to no end. But the confounded way in which Eldred Giddings simply uprooted—unlike him and mysterious as it seemed on the surface—this proved nothing to the far stranger story circulating about a pair of second cousins twice removed--Macovoy and Sims. Word had it they’d won the Irish Sweepstakes, a prize bigger than both the Georgia and Tennessee State Lotteries combined! And daring to tell no one, not even their wives, they’d simply vanished. To a sunny beach in Cancun with Margaritas that came in a glass and that came in a skirt, but this story soon metamorphosed to the South of France along the Rivera, where scantily clad French women like the nymphs and sirens of legend held them prisoner to their deepest, dark est most scatological sick desires. This reminded most of the old Kentucky hill ballads that so often warned of cigarettes and whiskey and wild, wild women.

  Men in rocking chairs at the feed store and at the Blue Turnip mulled over the possibilities for hours at a sitting. Sometimes long into dusk.

  No one questioned Van Helsing’s credit ever again around the town or the county, as he now had a business account with Capitol One. And to carry on the tradition for Eldred—as stated in the sales agreement, which had been sent off to Phoenix for the old pioneer’s John Hancock—the new owner of the Georgia Stump Grinder did indeed appear at the State Fair, and he indeed competed in the stump grinding competitions, and he indeed won first prize for the GSG as if nothing had changed one spit.

  And maybe it hadn’t.

  Stumped in the End

  From Rob:

  AFTERWORD or Aft-words regarding Conflict is not Violence: You don’t need violence to make a story work, but you can’t throw out conflict. The two are definitely not the same animal. This is among many of the lessons I provide in DEAD ON WRITING, also a Kindle Book you can find at the Kindle Store. Read on about conflict’s being at odds with violence in fiction. Yes, you can have a story filled with both, and you can have one without the other, but be sure you know which is which.

  TENSION’S High Wire Act in the NOVEL

  Quoting from Making Shapely Fiction by Jerome Stern, who really understood conflict and tension -- "Conflict is the high wire of tension upon which fiction balances." Or is strung and weaved into one's plot. Okay, paraphrasing but this makes sense. Violence is not the same thing as tension or conflict, and conflict is not exactly the same thing as tension. One can have conflict between two people who love one another. One can have tension between a father and daughter, mother and son, siblings, etc., and it don't gotta turn into no violence.

  Tension comes about due to conflicting character wants and needs. Conflllllllllict say two or more characters at direct odds over opposite goals or desires. To make a story compelling and thrill-filled, you must begin with a character that is obsessed! Truly, deeply obsessed. And both your protagonist and antagonist must have their own obsessions. Yes, in fiction, obsessions are gold. Your hero must run the gamut of a story about his or her goal(s), goals they'd die for! Or in the case of my next novel, DEAD ON, goals Marcus Rydel
l would LIVE for (put his suicide off for!). And when nature or another man or woman becomes an obstacle to the goal(s) of character A, it is due to the conflict created by charcter B who wants just the opposite. A "clash of desires" as in a Clash of Titans! And this is true in romance novels as well as suspense or thrillers, horror novels, science fiction and desent historical novels.