Author: Douglas Hackle
Date: 2026-05-19 00:00:00+00:00
Description: Bro, do you even know what happens if you stand in front of a mirror and say “Blockbuster Video” exactly one million times? No, bro? Well, don’t feel bad, because neither did newly rich Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire, a man obsessed with becoming the inbred banjo boy from the movie Deliverance. That is, he didn’t know until he moved into the original “Dueling Banjoes” house in the blue hills of northern Georgia, a place indeed haunted by the ghost of Blockbuster Video, as murderous as he is obnoxious. But with the support of his brand-new kidney butler—obviously, a kidney butler is a butler ma

You Only Need One Kidney, so I Removed One of Mine and Made It Into My Butler; Also, My House Is Haunted by the Ghost of Blockbuster Video
by Douglas Hackle

ALSO BY DOUGLAS HACKLE

Novellas

The Hottest Gay Man Ever Killed in a Shark Attack

TERROR MANNEQUIN

Zoltergeist the Poltergeist

Short Story Collections

Clown Tear Junkies

Is Winona Ryder Still with the Dude from Soul Asylum?

and Other LURID Tales of TERROR and DOOM!!!

The Ballad of TERROR TINY TIM & Other Tales of Unkindness

You Only Need One Kidney, so I Removed One of Mine and Made It Into My Butler; Also, My House Is Haunted by the Ghost of Blockbuster Video

Copyright © 2026 by Douglas Hackle

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The exception would be the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews and pages where permission is specifically granted by the publisher author. This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

CONTENTS

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I really have nothing to say, but I want to say it all the same.

Guido Anselmi, 8 ½ (1963)

Bobby: Mister, I love the way you wear that hat.

Old man: [after taking off his hat and examining it] You don’t know nothin’.

Deliverance (1972)

Chapter 1

Throughout my unhappy childhood, miserable adolescence, and depressing early adulthood, my desire to become the inbred banjo boy from the 1972 movie Deliverance never weakened. If anything, that yearning—however odd, however bugshit-psychotic—grew stronger as I grew taller, more enticing as I lost my innocence, more inevitable as the integrity of both my mind and body wore down by degrees with the grinding passage of years. In fact, throughout the entirety of my mostly unsatisfying and inconsequential existence, I couldn’t recall ever once giving a cockroach’s swingin’ smurf-blue nutsack about money, success, career, fame, love, sex, family, friendship, human interaction, pleasure, personal growth, religion, spirituality, self-preservation, or any of the other various motivational forces that routinely yank most humans—even if reluctantly—from the warmth of their beds every morning.

Nope. No siree. Because ever since I first saw Deliverance when I like six, all I ever cared about in the world was to one day become that skinny, sharp-faced, squinty-eyed youth sitting on that old porch swing adjacent to that rundown gas station somewhere in the backwoods of northern Georgia in the late 1960s—plucking his ’jo like it was nobody’s goddamn MOTHAFUCKING business.

But why? more than one school counselor and adult psychologist have asked me over the years.

In my youth, I was never able to provide a good answer to that question. But as I grew into adulthood, whenever someone asked me about it, assuming I were inclined to talk about it at all, I’d tell them that the Deliverance banjo boy, as an idea and cultural milestone, had always represented the pinnacle and perfection of human experience to me. But not just because of, say, the character’s musical virtuosity; rather, because of the entire package that was what I called “the Deliverance banjo boy.” In other words, the savant-like musical virtuosity—yes, of course that—but also the exact mood, cinematographic dynamics, actor presence, and aesthetic import of the iconic scene in which the character first appears; the powerful gestalt of the scene’s elements; the intimate, careful camerawork that captures the spectacle on 35mm Eastman 100T 5254 film using the ultra-quiet Panavision PSR R-200, cutting-edge for its day; the strange beauty that characterizes the mute banjoist’s cautious yet confident emergence from the shadows of that birdcage-like front porch to answer the urban outsider’s musical call, thereby bridging the socioeconomic/geopolitical gap between the rural and urban South, if only for a brief yet mountingly joyous moment; the banjoist’s telling refusal to shake hands after the duel; the surrounding, ever-present, untamed, hostile yet alluring wilderness—a character unto itself; the greater context of rural poverty in which the scene exists; and yes, even the implied inbreeding of the scene’s star.

Sure, I realized the film was sometimes criticized for presenting an inaccurate portrayal of the rural poor in Appalachia and the American South in general, a portrayal that only served to perpetuate harmful “hillbilly” stereotypes. That may have all been true. But here’s the thing: Even if that portrayal was inaccurate and harmful, I didn’t particularly care, because I legitimately WANTED to be inbred, backward, and rurally dirt poor!

You read that right. See, the idea of human inbreeding and its association with the notion of genetic “deficiency” didn’t hold any negative connotations for me. I knew most people viewed outbreeding as superior to inbreeding, regarding the latter as a corruption of the former. But the way I saw it, that was just an opinion, and I happened to opine that the latter was superior to the former. I guessed it was just one of those we-can-agree-to-disagree type situations. And to be perfectly honest, the way I saw it, if I were to, for example, wish I were my own damn grandpaps—as long as I wasn’t hurting anyone, then it was nobody’s business but my own.

Different strokes and all.

Anyhow, all that aside, even as a child I realized there were certain practical barriers to prevent me from ever realizing such a singularly idiosyncratic, demented dream, the most compelling of which was that the banjoist from Deliverance was a fictional character—Lonnie by name, though I preferred to refer to him as the Deliverance banjo boy.

A fictional character from a movie based on a fictional novel. How does one become a fictional character? One just doesn’t, right?

Well, if I couldn’t become the actual banjo boy from Deliverance, I’d accept becoming something very close to him. At least that’s what I daydreamed about while other kids my age dreamed of becoming professional athletes, movie stars, rock stars, and rappers.

However, right about when the dull, anxious plight of early adulthood yielded to the sharper pains of middle age, I found my dedication to my obsession wavering. And for any number of reasons, not the least of which was an undeniable lack of musical aptitude on my part, I eventually accepted that even achieving a lesser goal of becoming something very close to the Deliverance banjo boy was highly unlikely, and I resigned myself to a life of never becoming the one thing I wanted to become.

That is, until I became heir to a fortune.

Chapter 2

As luck would have it, one day not long after my fortieth birthday, approximately five years after kids stopped saying “on fleek” (if I recall correctly), The Fates saw fit to allow me to pursue my impossible dream when I received a letter in the mail from a New York law firm informing me a wealthy nonagenarian uncle of mine I’d not known existed had died and bequeathed unto me a sizable inheritance in the form of sundry cash accounts, brokerage accounts, commercial real estate, and crypto. Yep, just like in the moving pictures.

“Man, this is on fleek as heck!” I yapped when I read that letter. (I’d always been behind on my slang. Also, did I just write “moving pictures” instead of movies a few sentences ago? Who the fuck says “moving pictures” anymore? What, is this like 1907 or something? Indeed, that was very off fleek of me.)

Indeed? Who the fuck says indeed anymore? What, is this like 1872 or something?

But I digress. At any rate, I found myself among the small percentage of people on this rotten planet for whom money was not an object—people who, for example, if they were so inclined, could afford to hire three or four brawny, merciless, heat-packing bodyguards for the sole purpose of following them around so that they could walk up to virtually any person on Earth and stick a big, fat, quivering middle finger in their fucking face. Yes, that rich. Consequently, I was now in a position to do quite a lot toward turning myself into the Deliverance banjo boy—at least as much as was physically and fiscally possible.

Granted, I knew that if I wanted to become the most authentic Deliverance banjo boy I could be, I’d have to embrace a life of rural poverty. But I could always give away my money as a final step after I used some of it to accomplish other things that needed accomplishing.

For starters, I tracked down the original five-string open back banjo used in Deliverance, which proved an easy enough task. The instrument was on display in a small museum dedicated to movie memorabilia, props, costumes, and other miscellany, located just outside of Nashville, Tennessee. The museum’s curator and owner was initially reluctant to part with the banjo when I reached out to him. But everything has its price.

From my apartment in the suburbs of Cleveland, I drove down to Tennessee in my pickup truck to collect the banjo. Once I had it back home, I fitted an old-fashioned, whittled wooden capo onto the second fret, just like in the movie. Again, easy-peasy.

Even easier: thrifting for a coarse, rustic button-up shirt, a plain pair of slacks, and a scuffed, weathered pair of ankle-high work shoes—each item the same gray-brown color of country road dust.

Less easy but no less possible due to my deep pockets, I was able to track down a very capable Bulgarian plastic surgeon, albeit one recently banned from practicing his profession in most countries, who was more than willing, for the right price, to do everything within his ability to nip, tuck, fold, sew, graft, liposuction, and otherwise sculpt my overweight, aging body and face into someone who strongly resembled the Deliverance banjo boy. After describing to Dr. Zorchelk Kuzmanov my unique plastic surgery needs and confirming his ability and willingness to help me, I booked a flight for the coastal town of Point Plonk, Antarctica, where the good doctor was presently living in political, professional, and criminal exile.

Unfortunately, when I asked him about the possibility of altering my DNA to complete the picture of the Deliverance banjo boy at an approximated genetic level, he informed me it was impossible for him (or anyone) to alter my genes to better mimic those of someone born as a result of inbreeding. There was just no way to change the unique set of chromosomes you’re dealt with at birth, he explained, a thing that is carried and copied in trillions of cells that make up your body. Ah, well—dude did the best job he could.

Chapter 3

When I returned to the States as more or less the spitting image of the Deliverance banjo boy two weeks later, I didn’t waste any time moving on to my next order of business, which was to acquire the house where the “Dueling Banjos” scene had been filmed just outside the small town of Creecraw, Georgia. With a little research, I discovered the ramshackle single-story, cabinlike structure was still (if barely) standing, as was the abandoned gas station next to it. As it happened, the combined property was for sale and listed dirt cheap at that.

I bought the property the same day I came upon the listing and immediately made plans to uproot myself and relocate to the hills and hollows of northern Appalachian Georgia. A few days before the purchase was to close, I flew down to do a walkthrough of the place.

After I got into Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International that day, I hailed a taxi to take me up to Creecraw. Quiet, cagey, and nervous-looking from the get-go, my twenty-something male taxi driver had shaggy copper-colored hair that dangled across his eyes and a well-groomed beard that reached down to his sternum. Embedded in each of his widely stretched ear lobes was an ebony ring two inches in diameter. Tunnels or plugs, I think they were called. He also sported a thick nose ring that dangled from his septum past his bottom lip, large enough for a bull. His short fingernails were painted black.

From the airport, it took us less than an hour to reach the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As we drove further north, the densely wooded peaks around us grew taller and wider—the more distant ones indeed tinted a gauzy bluish-gray hue—the valleys between them cutting deeper with our progression. Within those valleys nestled wispy, low-lying, brilliant white clouds, lolling about like some manner of majestic mystical creatures.

After another forty-five minutes of scenic driving, the driver decelerated and pulled off to the side of one Flatbottom Road moments after we entered a wide clearing of scrub country rimmed by heavy oak-hickory forest in all directions. A crossroads lay just ahead of us. There were no houses or other signs of human habitation in sight.

“Sorry, but I’m gonna hafta let ya out here,” the driver said, his Southern accent light but noticeable. “That house ya want to visit is just a few minutes’ walk up the road here past the crossroads.”

“Why can’t you drive me the rest of the way?”

Staring dead ahead, his hands locked on the steering wheel, the man slowly shook his head. “That house yer goin’ to, there’s…there’s somethin’ in there,” he said, lowering his voice ominously.

“Whaddaya mean by that?”

“There’s somethin’ in there,” he repeated unhelpfully.

“Well…okay, what’s in there then?”

“There’s…somethin’ in there.”

Losing patience fast, I said, “That’s not telling me anything useful, chief. ‘Something’ could be anything. Something could be a shoe. Or a toothbrush. What exactly are you talking about?”

“There’s…there’s somethin’ in there.”

My brow furrowed and jaw clenched as my anger mounted. “Are you not going to give me a clue here?”

“There’s…there’s somethin’ in there.”

“You do realize it’s flat-out dickish of you to be all ominous like this and then not tell me what the hell it is you’re talking about, right?”

“That house yer goin’ to, there’s…there’s something in there.”

“Well, fuck you, too, buddy.” I opened my door, started to climb out, forgetting to pay him.

“Your fare’s two hundred twelve bucks!”

I grabbed my wallet from my back pocket, counted out some bills, slapped them into his waiting hand. Before I exited the car, I asked, “Hey, man, what’s with those weirdo earrings you have?”

He turned in his seat to glance back at me, making eye contact for the first time. “They’re not earrings. They’re called tunnels, flesh tunnels, or plugs. Whaddaya mean what’s with them?”

“I don’t care what they’re called. I mean, what’s with them? Why do you have them? Like, what’s the point?”

“What’s the point of anything?”

He had a really good point there (no pun intended). But I didn’t want him to know he had a really good point.

“I mean, why do you have them? And why the freaky nose ring? And the black nail polish? What, are you like fucking starved for attention or something?”

“It’s only human to want some attention,” he countered, his face a mask of unfazed composure.

Yet another excellent point, I conceded inwardly as I climbed out of the taxi and indignantly slammed the door shut.

I watched the taxi roll down the road, slowly at first, then gaining speed. Just as it hung a right at the crossroads, I threw a hand in the air, tried to hail him down. “Hey, wait!” I yelled. “I’m sorry!” But it was too late. The car disappeared from view a beat later, swallowed by the woods.

I felt a sudden, overpowering surge of guilt for judging the man and his earrings—plugs, whatever the hell they were called—and his nose ring and black nails. In fact, this guilt weighed so heavily upon me that I decided to kill myself right then and there.

***

I walked across the scrubland, halted at the edge of the woods, pulled out a length of some very rough, scratchy rope I just so happened to keep on my person, tied a loose noose, looped it around my neck, climbed onto a very conveniently found wooden chair, and tied the other end of the rope around the thick oak bough suspended directly above my head. I then brandished a loaded shotgun so that, should I not die immediately from a snapped neck, I could put myself out of my misery by blowing my fucking head off. Finally, to set the mood right, I Googled Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt” on my iPhone, clicked the link, pressed play, and turned up the volume before I slipped the phone in the front pocket of my shirt.

After listening to Johnny’s mega-depressing croaking for a good, somber minute, I stepped off the chair. Just as I feared, the jerking force of the fall wasn’t enough to snap my neck. So, bug-eyed, blue-faced, and suffocating, I fumbled with the shotgun for a moment before pressing the trigger to blow my fucking head off.

Only I missed! I shot through the rope instead, sending me falling to the ground.

Lying in the dirt gasping for air, I grabbed at my neck only to discover there was no noose tied around it. Neither did I see a shotgun nor a chair anywhere in the vicinity. Nor was my iPhone playing “Hurt” in my shirtfront pocket. In fact, there wasn’t an iPhone in my shirtfront pocket at all! That’s because I didn’t own a cellphone! In fact, having always been somewhat of a proud Luddite, I’d never owned a cellphone in my life. I’d certainly never carried shotguns and rope around on my person.

The whole damn thing had been some sort of hallucination, one probably brought on by the clown tear-laced bath salts I’d snorted earlier in the day (please don’t judge—I only ever did the stuff when I had to fly, otherwise I’d never be able to get myself to set foot on those goddamn death-tubes we call airplanes.)

Hallucination or not, I felt a lot better now, like maybe I’d mostly atoned for insulting my taxi driver. I also made a note-to-self to acquire a cellphone as soon as I got back home, if only to have a means of playing Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” should I ever feel the need to kill myself again while out and about.

***

As I started walking down the road, I turned my thoughts to the more immediately concerning matter of being dropped off short of my destination.

There’s somethin’ in there, the driver had repeated. But what? What had the dude so spooked that he wouldn’t even drop me off at the end of the driveway? It then occurred to me that if something was wrong with the house, that might explain why the asking price had been so low.

Several minutes later, after traversing the crossroads and reentering the woods, I stepped out into another clearing. Off to my left, I immediately recognized the dilapidated house and the adjacent abandoned gas station from the movie. Like the fossilized carcasses of some fallen otherworldly beasts, the rusty, vine-strangled husks of two dozen or more cars and trucks from the 1940s and 1950s lay scattered in front of the gas station amidst a riot of tall grass, brambles, dandelions, and wildflowers, the whole area sprinkled with the clear, green, and amber shards of broken bottles that glinted jewellike in the sunshine.

Looking quite out of place amongst all this rustic ruin, a new, shiny, white Range Rover sat parked in the gravel driveway that separated the two decrepit buildings. A middle-aged woman with side-swept, pixie-cut blonde hair, a pink blazer, a white blouse, and wide-leg designer jeans got out of the SUV as I walked up the driveway.

I recognized Janice from her headshot on her website. However, as my realtor offered me her delicate, French-manicured hand to shake, I noticed her present smile was not the toothy, megawatt one displayed in her realtor profile pic. This smile seemed forced, as if to mask some uneasiness.

“Hi, Janice,” I said as we shook.

“Hi, Tim. Great to finally meet ya in person.”

“Please, please, no need to be so formal. Mr. Carmichael-Wellingtonshire is fine. Good to meet you, too.”

Eyes narrowing, nose wrinkling, she cocked her head in mild bewilderment. “Um…okay, Mr. Carmichael-Wellingtonshire. How was your flight?”

“Eh, not so terrible. Although we did hit some pretty rough turbulence coming in over the mountains. Nothing a little clown tear-laced bath salts can’t keep in check though, right?”

It then occurred to me that I’d made a mistake just now when asking Janice to refer to me as Mr. Carmichael-Wellingtonshire. Had she initially said, “Hi, Mr. Carmichael-Wellingtonshire,” it would’ve made perfect sense for me to respond by saying, “No need to be so formal. Tim is fine,” as Tim was my first name. But somehow my drug-addled brain had flipped the script.

Realizing my error, I wanted to tell her to call me Tim, but I felt embarrassed about the mistake, didn’t really want to draw more attention to it. So I left it at that, DAMN IT.

“Hey, I forgot to ask you this before, but I was wondering about the low asking price on the place,” I said, gesturing at the house with one hand. “Even in comparison to other run-down places for sale in the area, the bank is practically giving this one away. Why is that? Is there…something wrong with the house?”

The fear in her wide eyes shone plainly as her strained smile twitched before deflating into a frown. “This here house,” she said as she glanced nervously over her shoulder at the place before meeting my eye again, “there’s…there’s somethin’ in there.”

“Oh, no, not this again.”

“It’s haunted.”

I clucked my tongue, arched an eyebrow. “Haunted? As in by a ghost?”

“Not jus’ any ghost.”

“Ooookay. What ghost?”

“The ghost of Blockbuster Video.”

My head snapped back and my eyes bulged in my face like hardboiled eggs. “Sorry, did I hear you right?”

She nodded gravely.

“Uh, since when did Blockbuster Video have a ghost?”

“From what I’ve heard, at least since early 2014. That’s when the company closed its last corporate-owned store after filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2011. That’s when Blockbuster officially died, so to speak.”

My face drawn in a dubious expression, I said, “As far as I know, Janice, companies don’t have ghosts.”

“Well, sure, as a general rule of thumb, I don’t think they do. When a company goes under, it simply ceases to be, right? Whatever assets remain are liquated to pay off debt, distributed to shareholders, or else sold off to third parties. And that’s that—the company is simply no more, right?”

“Right. And there’s no ghost or soul to speak of—nothing that stays behind on Earth or moves on to some sort of afterlife for corporations. Right?”

“I believe that’s how it usually works. But apparently that’s not the case with Blockbuster Video. It all started off with an urban myth that began circulatin’ not long after the company was dissolved. The story went that if ya repeated the words ‘Blockbuster Video’ in front of a mirror a certain number of times, the ghost of Blockbuster Video would appear and murder you!”

“Like Bloody Mary or Mary Worth.”

“Yes, exactly. And Candyman. But unlike all them, the ghost of Blockbuster Video is very real. However, it’s only made a few known appearances so far. Because to get the thing to appear, you have to stand before a mirror and say ‘Blockbuster Video’ not three times like Bloody Mary, not five times like Candyman—but one million times! As you might imagine, most folks don’t have the time, patience, will, or breath to summon the thing. But on the rare occasion when it is successfully summoned, the ghost of Blockbuster Video violently murders its summoner and then haunts the new location where it’s been called. It remains trapped there ’til someone else dares invoke its presence elsewhere.”

“But how do you know the ghost of Blockbuster Video is here?”

“Few years back, the elderly fella who was rentin’ this house at the time was found dead in the bathroom after his daughter called the local police and asked them to conduct a wellness check on him. She’d not heard from him in over a week. They found the old man eviscerated, his spine ripped out of his back and shoved up his rearend, his jawbone snapped off and jammed down his open throat, and his body wrapped up tightly with his own intestines—like thread around a spool.

“The poor old man also left a suicide note in which he indicated that whenever he went onto Facebook, no matter what he posted—whether it was to post a picture of his garden to show how well his tomatoes and peppers were comin’ in or to tell people that his doctors had pronounced him cancer-free or to say that his cancer had returned—all he ever got was laugh reacts. As such, he wrote that he no longer wanted to live in a world where strangers on social media found things like fat, juicy garden tomatoes, cancer remission and cancer recurrence equally funny. So he made up his mind to call upon the ghost of Blockbuster Video to help him out.”

“Bummer. Though he certainly could’ve picked any number of quicker and less painful methods to get the job done.”

“Yes, well, the heart wants what the heart wants. And apparently his heart wanted him to have the ghost of Blockbuster Video jump out of his bathroom mirror, rip his spine out of his back, and shove it up his ass. Anyhow, the woman who moved in here after him started experiencin’ supernatural disturbances right off the bat. Nothing violent, mind ya, but bothersome nevertheless: occasional knockin’ and scratchin’ sounds, doors openin’ and closin’ by themselves, phantom footsteps, pictures fallin’ off the walls, objects gettin’ flung across the room, light bulbs flickerin’, cold spots, feelin’s of dread, stuff like that. She didn’t make it one week before she moved out. Once word got ’round that the house was haunted, well, no one else wanted to rent it after that. The owner had to foreclose on the place a year later.”

“Why didn’t you mention any of this to me before—when we spoke on the phone?”

“I did. But apparently ya were so drunk that ya forgot it all! You were slurrin’ yer words pretty bad. And let me just tell ya that it’s been really annoyin’ havin’ to repeat the entire dang story to ya right now!”

“I see. Well, apologies. If I was drunk when we spoke, I’m sure I had good reason to be so—like, for example, celebrating being newly wealthy beyond most people’s wildest dreams. Anyhow, so what you’re telling me is that you’re trying to sell me a haunted house—a house haunted by the murderous ghost of Blockbuster Video?”

“Sounds much worse than it is. Like I said, the disturbances are more annoyin’ than anythin’ else. The ghost of Blockbuster Video can only harm those who summon it through a mirror by saying its name a million times. As long as ya don’t do that, yer perfectly safe. And I doubt its presence would interfere with whatever it is ya plan on doin’ back here.” The woman shot me a judgy glance.

“When we spoke, did I tell you what I was planning on doing back here?”

“Like I said, you were slurrin’ yer words somethin’ awful, but I recall ya mentionin’ some nonsense ’bout becomin’ the Deliverance banjo boy?”

“It’s not nonsense. It’s sense,” I said cooly. I turned to the house. Haunted or not, I had to live here to do what I was destined to do. “So, are you going to give me the tour now?”

“If it’s all the same to ya, I’d prefer to stay out here. The front door’s unlocked though, so you go have at it. I’ll be in my car if ya have any questions.” Janice then turned away and quickly returned to her SUV.

I stepped off the driveway into the overgrown grass of the front yard and approached the front porch, which, now that I knew was the face of a legit haunted house, suddenly emanated an oppressive aura. The dread I felt pricking at the nape of my neck and hollowing my bowels only increased as I slowly climbed those four creaky porch steps, crossed the even creakier sunken porch, and paused briefly before the front door, wondering if I were about to experience any sort of “disturbance.”

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I said, lying to myself in an attempt to boost my courage. I gulped dryly, turned the rusty doorknob, pushed open the door, and crossed the threshold.

I moved nervously across the mostly empty space of the house’s main room—a combined living room/kitchen/dining area—expecting maybe an appropriately Blockbuster blue-and-yellow-colored phantom to reach out from the walls for me or perhaps a disembodied demonic voice to tell me to get the hell out of there, Amityville Horror-style. But nothing of the sort happened.

I turned in place at the middle of the room, surveying my surroundings, though there wasn’t much to take in: wood plank walls and floors, a couple grubby double-hung windows, and a kitchen area likely not updated since the nineties with its dingy white appliances, oak cabinets, and faded forest green countertop.

I stepped over to the kitchen sink, turned on the faucet to make sure the water ran. It did. I checked the electric stove and the ancient small-sized refrigerator. Everything appeared to work well enough.

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I said as I walked over to the short hallway that connected the main room to the rest of the simple dwelling. From there I peeked into the two small bedrooms, as empty as the front room. I then approached the end of the hallway, halting at a closed door that no doubt opened onto the infamous bathroom.

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I said as I gingerly opened the door. I flicked on the tiny bathroom’s light switch: Luckily all I saw in the grimy bathroom mirror was the reflection of my own frightened face.

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost,” I assured my reflection.

I switched off the light, backed out of the room, closed the door, and turned around to follow the hallway back to the front room. Satisfied enough with my walkthrough and now just wishing to get the hell out of there for the time being, I headed back toward the front door.

Halfway across the room, I walked into a cold spot that hadn’t been there before: My breath plumed palely in front of my face before I stepped back into the muggy Georgia heat. I continued moving toward the door. Just as I grasped the doorknob to leave, something like a icy fingertip tapped me twice on my shoulder, freezing me in place. Terrified as I was, I slowly turned around to get a look at what was behind me.

Indeed, hovering in front of me at face-level and about an arm’s length away was an old Blockbuster Video card—see-through and faintly glowing blue, much as one might expect of a spectral Blockbuster Video card. Thin tendrils of a translucent, green-tinted, mucus-like substance—ectoplasm, presumably—dripped from its bottom edge.

Pissing myself and evacuating by bowels into my pants, I dropped to my knees and clasped my trembling hands before me in earnest supplication.

“Please don’t fuckin’ kill this, Blockbuster Video!” I begged, inexplicably referring to myself as “this” like a pop diva might.

The phantasmal Blockbuster Video card continued hovering silently in the air, bobbing up and down like the rise and fall of someone’s breathing chest. I then had the distinct impression that the thing had no hostile intentions toward me—that it had only appeared in order to check me out, perhaps even to greet me after its fashion.

Embarrassed that I’d lost control of my bodily functions, I pushed myself to my feet, gave the damn thing an awkward nod of parting, and turned away to open the front door and shuffle out of the house.

Janice unrolled her window as I approached her driver-side door.

“I…I just met the ghost.”

“Oh, yeah? We’re ya scared?”

“Scared? Me? No, of course not.”

“Then why’d ya shit yer pants? ’Cause I can smell ya from here.” Frowning, she pinched her nose shut with a forefinger and thumb.

My face reddened in embarrassment even as it screwed up in anger. “It was just a very isolated incident of incontinence. Came out of nowhere. I…I  musta caught a stomach bug on my flight.”

“I don’t believe stomach bugs typically cause people to suddenly shit and piss themselves in public,” she said, her pinched nose adding a vibrating nasal timbre to her voice as she stared down at the big, dark, wet spot that had bloomed at my crotch. “Ya do know it’s perfectly okay to be scared shitless—literally—of a real ghost, right?”

“I ain’t afraid of no ghost! I…I just have a stomach bug is all!”

“Hey, it makes no difference to me. Anyhow, more importantly, have ya come to a final decision yet?”

“Yes. I’ll take it.” I let out a heavy sigh. “Blockbuster Video’s ghost and all.”

“Well, glad to hear it! You can meet me at my office in Atlanta this afternoon to sign the final paperwork. I’d offer you a ride back to the city, but you ain’t gettin’ into my car with those poopy pants. You took an taxi all the way out here, I suppose you can take one back. I’ll call one for you since apparently you’re the last person on the planet to not have a friggin’ cellphone. Though you might want to do yer next driver the courtesy of washin’ up and rinsin’ out yer pants in the crick across the road there.”

“How about I do you that courtesy, and you wait here a minute until I get back?”

She laughed. “If ya think you’re gettin’ into my car with soakin’ wet pants that are probably still gonna smell at least a little poopy, ya got another thing comin’, Mr. Carmichael-Wellingtonshire.”

“Please, Tim is fine,” I said bitterly.

She shot me an irritated look, then cocked her head a little. “Hey, I meant to ask ya: What’s with those weirdo earrings you got?”

She was, of course, referring to the four-inch-diameter ebony rings—twice as large as those of my taxi driver—that were embedded in my widely stretched ear lobes.

Taken aback slightly, I grimaced at her insult. “They’re not earrings. I think they’re called tunnels or plugs or something. Whaddaya mean what’s with them?”

“I mean, what’s with them? And what’s with the freaky nose ring and the black nail polish? Like, what’s the point?”

She was, of course, referring to the two-inch-diameter cattle-style septum ring I always wore. I’d been wearing the nose ring and ear plugs for nearly a decade now. Also, I’d painted my fingernails “Gothic Bat” matte black that very morning, as was my habit.

“What’s the point of anything?” I shot back.

“But why? Like, are ya fuckin’ starved for attention or somethin’?”

“It’s only human to want some attention, Janice!” I countered.

She sniggered, unimpressed at my retort. “Whatever, try-hard. See ya back at my office.” She turned away and rolled up her window.

Insulted, embarrassed, and still a little shaken-up from my terrifying supernatural encounter, I stood watching her back down the driveway. As the SUV swung out onto the road, I angrily kicked some gravel in its direction.

“Yeah, we’ll see who’s a try-hard when I become the goddamn Deliverance banjo boy, Janice!”

Chapter 4

All things considered—shat pants and ghosts of iconic movie rental chains notwithstanding—acquiring the original old house from the movie went smoothly enough. I moved in a week after the sale closed. That same week, in the interest of perfecting my Deliverance banjo boy likeness, I also got rid of my ear plugs and nose ring and visited a plastic surgeon in Atlanta who was able to return my long, stringy, deflated earlobes to their former natural shape. Got rid of the nail polish, too.

As you may guess, those first few days and nights spent in my new home were a little scary. However, as I got settled in, I found that Janice had been correct in that the disturbances—occasional knocking sounds, doors opening and closing by themselves, light bulbs flickering, etc.—were more annoying than anything else and actually occurred with less frequency than she might’ve implied. In fact, sometimes three or four days would go by without the ghost feeling compelled to make its presence known to me, so that I’d nearly forget the place was haunted.

Even rarer were sightings of the thing. I didn’t see that transparent, floating, blue-glowing, ectoplasm-dripping Blockbuster Video card a second time until I’d been moved in for nearly three weeks. Granted, I was terrified when I first beheld the ghost’s second form—a person-sized, Blockbuster-blue, grimly grimacing, gingerbread man-shaped phantom—standing at the foot of my bed when I woke in the middle of the night one night, but the ghost almost never took that form when it appeared. So, yeah, at least there was that.

Anyhow, soon after I got settled in, I began my earnest attempt to learn how to play the banjo. Yes, the difficulty of this most critical aspect of completing my transformation into the Deliverance banjo boy should’ve been more obvious to me, but both its difficulty and primacy somehow didn’t occur to me until after I’d completed those other tasks. For not only did I need to learn to play the banjo proficiently, I needed to MOTHAFUCKING SMOKE on the dang thing, as you know if you’ve seen the film.

There was certainly no shortage of instructional materials on beginning, intermediate, and advanced banjo playing to be found on the internet. I ordered a teetering stack of instructional books on the subject and signed up for a number of online video-based banjo instruction courses. However, I must admit that after several weeks of self-guided instruction, I still struggled to tune the instrument, let alone play two good notes on the goddamn thing. I guessed this shouldn’t have come as a surprise to me, as I’d never attempted to play an instrument before. However, I knew I must be patient, that I shouldn’t expect to get good overnight, so I kept at it!

***

One afternoon as I was practicing, I got a strong craving for Chinese food, and it occurred to me I hadn’t had Chinese since I’d moved down to Georgia nearly two months ago. Before that time, I’d been in the habit of ordering Chinese at least three or four times a month.

Man, do they even have Chinese food out here? I thought doubtfully.

To my delight, when I searched for “Chinese food near me” on my new iPhone, I discovered that a Chinese restaurant called Peng’s Golden Wok was located right down the road.

“Man, that’s pedophile as hell!” I said aloud, so happy was I.

By the way, apparently the word “pedophile” became accepted slang to mean “awesome” or “great” at some point. It was the latest example in the English language of a word originally used for a decidedly negative thing taking on a positive alternative meaning. We saw the same thing with “sick,” “killer,” “wicked,” “nasty,” etc.

Anyhow, I couldn’t find an online menu or website for Peng’s Golden Wok—just a basic listing with an address and a phone number. No reviews either.

“Peng’s Golden Wok,” a man answered the phone in what I was glad to hear was a thick Chinese accent—usually a favorable sign as far as ordering quality, authentic Chinese food went.

“Hi. I’d like to place an order for delivery.”

“No delivery. Only pickup.”

“Do you have a dining room?”

“No dining room either. No delivery. Only pickup.”

“Oh, okay. Hey, do you guys have an online menu somewhere? I didn’t see one.”

“No menu. What you want order?”

Very strange for a restaurant not to have a menu. But not necessarily a bad thing. Maybe Peng’s Golden Wok could whip up any sort of Chinese food you might want.

“Can I get chicken chow mein, two eggrolls, and an order of crab rangoon?”

A short pause as the man presumably jotted down my order. “Anything else?”

“Yeah, actually. A small hot and sour soup if you have it.”

“One order chicken chow mein, two eggroll, one order crab rangoon, one hot and sour soup—small. Your order, one hundred dolla.”

My head snapped back. “A hundred dollars! You kidding me?”

Silence on the other end of the line.

“Man, that’s pretty steep for some Chinese takeout for one!”

“Your order, one hundred dolla,” he repeated humorlessly.

Now, had this occurred before I became stinking rich, I would’ve hung up on the dude. I still should’ve hung up on him simply as a matter of principle. But as it was, a hundred dollars was chump change to me, and I was really itching for some Chinese.

“Well, alright—a hundred bones it is, I guess. This better be some damn good chicken chow mein, though.”

“Best for many, many mile.”

“I have a lot of cash on me. I’ll just pay when I pick up the food if that’s okay.”

“No, no. Must pay over phone with credit or debit card.”

“Really? Well, suit yourself.”

When I finished giving the man my debit card information, he said, “Your order, fifteen minute,” and hung up.

According to Google Maps, Peng’s Golden Wok was just a twelve-minute walk from my house. It was located at the dead end of Auld Sam Road—a narrow, dirt lane not half a mile long that branched off of Flatbottom. I’d noticed the road before but had never driven or walked down it. As the weather was nice that day, and I could use the exercise, I opted to two-foot it.

With no street sign to mark it, Auld Sam appeared more like a driveway angling off slightly wider Flatbottom and was easy to miss when you were driving by it, cutting into the dense, shady woods as it did. As I strode down this thin specter of a road, I was in very good spirits, glad to be out and about. I’d been meaning to do some exploring of the countryside anyway.

More importantly, I was about to get my goddamn Chinese on, son!

Even before the restaurant came into view, my nose was treated to the wonderful aroma of Chinese cooking borne on the warm breeze—a heady mixture of heated cooking oils, simmering broths, cooked rice, garlic, ginger, soy, sesame, chilis, peanuts, cashews, beef, chicken, shrimp, and fish. After curving around a large moss-spotted boulder, the tight road opened up rather abruptly on a clearing where a low cinderblock building sat at the center of a rounded acre of bare, rocky ground bespeckled here and there with patches of long grass and scraggly weeds. But for its double-door entrance, the ornate lattice window on each side of the doors, and the words “Peng’s Golden Wok” inscribed in fading red paint in a sort of racist-looking wonton font above the entrance, the place looked more like an outbuilding at a prison complex than a restaurant.

The building’s façade had a flat, artificial look to it, almost as if it were a set piece for a movie. And for good reason: As I neared the entrance, I saw that the doors and windows had been painted onto the exterior, no different from the establishment’s name.

The real entrance must be on the side or in the back, I thought as I placed the palm of my hand onto the hard painted cinderblock surface of the faux door for a moment before I walked around the building.

Unlike the front, the other three sides of the roughly 40-by-20-foot structure were not painted—just hard, bare, gritty-gray cinderblock. Incredibly, there were no doors, windows, or any other openings on any side of the building. I made three trips around the place, testing the walls in certain spots with my hands to see if perhaps a hidden entrance was accessible through a secret panel, but to no avail.

I got out my phone, pulled up the restaurant’s phone number, and called it.

“Peng’s Golden Wok,” the man answered.

“Hi, this is Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire. I’m here to pick up my order. How do I get in? I can’t seem to find the door.”

After a pause, the man said, “What you want order?”

“I ordered already. I called about twenty minutes ago. The name on the order is Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire.”

“What you want order?”

“I’m not calling to order, sir. I already ordered about twenty minutes ago. Chicken chow mein, two eggrolls, crab rangoon, and hot and sour soup. Again, the name on the order is Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire.”

“You no want order Chinese food? Then Peng hang up phone now.”

“Bro, I already ordered. I paid you friggin’ one hundred dollars for some Chinese food. I’m here to pick it up. I’m standing outside, but I can’t find a goddamn door. Are you going to bring me my food or what?”

“You no want order Chinese food? Then Peng hang up phone now.”

The fucker hung up on me. I called right back.

“Peng’s Golden Wok,” Peng answered.

“Is this some kind of joke?”

“What you want order?”

“Give me my goddamn food, dude!” I shouted.

“You no want order Chinese food? Then Peng hang up phone now.”

Dude hung up on me again. When I called back a third time, he didn’t pick up.

What the fuck? This asshole just ripped me off for a hundred bucks! I thought as I turned slowly in place to survey the dirt lot surrounding the building. I spent another few minutes walking around the premises. No cars or other vehicles in sight. Nothing on the ground to suggest an entrance to a tunnel that might provide subterranean access to the restaurant. No other signs of human activity in the vicinity—just this big gray slab of cinderblocks sitting in the dirt with its phony façade.

Yet the exquisite aroma of very real Chinese cooking hung thick and redolent in the air, teasing and tormenting me and my rumbling stomach.

I kicked some dirt at the painted door. “Gonna report your ass to the Better Business Bureau!” I yelled at the building. “Gonna give you a terrible review on Yelp, too!”

***

While on my way home walking along Flatbottom, an old man in a tractor towing a wagon approached me from the opposite direction. A younger man sat atop a stack of hay bales in the wagon. When we were nearly about to pass one another, I waved them down. Eyeing me suspiciously, the old man slowed down nevertheless, putting the tractor into park.

“Hi, I’m Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire,” I said after halting alongside the tractor. “I live just down the road. Moved in a couple months ago.”

“Howdy. I’m Old Merl McNasty.” The old man jabbed a thumb over his shoulder. “And that’s my son, Glant.”

“McNasty?” I smirked. “Is that your real last name.”

Both men scowled at me, their brows furrowing sharply. “It is our real last name,” the son said. “You got a problem with it?”

“Oh, no. Not at all,” I said, wiping the smirk off my face. “Just making conversation, is all.”

“Hey, you look jus’ like that boy done play the banjo in that ol’ movie,” Old Merl said, snapping his fingers. “Cain’t think of the name of it though—that ‘Squeal like a pig, boy!’ movie.”

“Deliverance,” I said smiling, my heart beaming with sudden pride, joy, and gratitude. “Thank you, sir!”

“Well, I didn’t mean it as a compliment,” the man said. “Anyhow, what kin I do ya fer?”

“I was just wondering if you guys ever order Chinese food from Peng’s Golden Wok.”

“O’ course we do,” the old man said somewhat indignantly. “Peng’s the only Chinese restaurant we got ’round here. Not another’un within a hundred miles of these here hollers.”

“Well, that’s where I’m coming from now. I ordered food from there, paid a hundred bucks over the phone, went to pick up my order, and there’s no goddamn door in the place—and the dude won’t bring my food out to me! Am I going crazy here, or has the same thing ever happened to you guys?”

“Of course it happens to us!” Old Merl said surlily. “Happens every time we order!”

Flabbergasted, I looked from the older man’s face to the younger man’s and back to Old Merl. “Every time you order? Has Peng ever given you your food—the food you paid for?”

“Of course not!” Old Merl said. “Peng’s never given anyone their food.”

“Yet…you continue to order Chinese from there?”

“O’ course we do.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s just what we do ’round these here parts,” Glant said. “When we fancy some Chinese food, we order from Peng’s Golden Wok on the telephone, go to the restaurant, stand outside it for a spell, then go home empty-handed, hungry, and broker.”

“I don’t get it. Why the fuck would you do that? Ahhh, I think I see now. Is this, like, some sort of charity or something? Or do you do it to help Peng out?”

“No, none of those reasons,” Glant said. “We do it just to do it! That’s reason enough. Ain’t that right, Pa?”

“That’s right,” scowling Old Merl said before he leaned forward and spat tobacco juice contemptuously on the ground before my feet. “Boy, you don’t know nothin’, do ya?”

The old man then put the tractor into gear, and the McNastys left me standing in the road utterly perplexed, hungry as hell, and looking kind of stupid.

Chapter 5

Well, who was I to judge the ways and customs of these people who were still so new to me? When in Rome, right? So, lest I appear like the FUCKING VILLAGE IDIOT, a week later, I dialed Peng’s Golden Wok, ordered some kung pao chicken, pot stickers, and wonton soup for a mere $180, drove out to the restaurant, got out of my truck, stood there for a minute, and then drove back home. (And if I happened to throw the restaurant a big middle finger before I got back into my truck, that was my business.)

However, my discovery of Peng’s Golden Wok and the unusual—nay, wholly unaccountable and batshit—part it played in the community proved to be helpful to me in a way I could’ve never imagined.

See, not long after my first visit to Peng’s, I got to thinking about my wealth and the ways in which I was (and wasn’t) spending it. Since acquiring my inheritance, most of the money I’d spent had been toward the endeavor of becoming the Deliverance banjo boy. That was fine and good and all, but I now thought that in the meantime, as I slowly but steadily worked on learning how to MELT MOTHERFUCKERS’ FACES OFF with my eventually SICK banjo skills, maybe I should spend a little money on me. You know, spoil myself a little.

And what better way for a newly wealthy person to spoil himself then by employing the services of a butler!

I mean, I certainly didn’t need a butler or, for that matter, any other type of domestic servant, what with my very uncomplicated lifestyle and simple needs, living in this little shack-like backwoods dwelling as I did. But spoiling yourself wasn’t about what you needed, right?

But were butlers even a thing anymore? I had a notion they might’ve gone the way of the dinosaur—that butlering was a bygone, almost mythical practice consigned to antiquity and the realm of novels, movies, and TV shows. But I didn’t know for sure. So I researched it. Turns out, although not as common as in previous epochs, butlers indeed still existed.

Indeed!

As I researched how to find a butler on my laptop, below the AI-generated advice at the top of the search page recommending that I contact a household staffing agency like British American Household Staffing or Charles MacPherson Associates, was a link to a website titled “Create Your Own Kidney Butler.” Curious, I clicked on it.

The website was a single white page that contained the following instructions:

Create Your Own Kidney Butler

To create your own kidney butler, visit a Chinese restaurant that has neither doors nor windows—one that takes people’s money for takeout but does not provide them with their food. Bring along a shovel and a surgery kit (including a prefilled 30-mL syringe of 0.25% bupivacaine or a similarly potent local anesthetic). After you arrive, surgically remove one of your kidneys. Remember: you can live with just one kidney, so you should be just fine. If you’re not a surgeon, consult TikTok, ChatGPT, Grok, YouTube, Instagram, Reddit, or Snapchat for help. After you remove the kidney and sew yourself up, dig a shallow hole near the base of the restaurant and bury your kidney in it. Now all you have to do is wait (typically no longer than 30 minutes) for your kidney butler to sprout forth from the ground.

Note: proper butler attire not included.

And to think I’d just discovered such a restaurant in my own neighborhood!

Granted, utilizing an agency like British American Household Staffing would’ve been a much less complicated, more comfortable, and significantly safer way to go about getting a butler.

But, fuck it, I thought: I’m about to go get myself a GODDAMN, MOTHERFUCKING, REAL-ASS, BONA FIDE KIDNEY BUTLER, YO!

Chapter 6

Surgical kits were easy enough to find online. Mine arrived a day after I ordered it. Obtaining prescription-only bupivacaine syringes was a little trickier, but not by much. I ended up ordering a couple from the same shady Bulgarian website where I usually got my clown tear-laced bath salts, and they arrived in a week.

On the afternoon the syringes were delivered, I gathered everything I needed, tossed a shovel into the back of my pickup, and headed out to Peng’s Golden Wok.

I must admit that the self-surgery was a rather unpleasant, uncomfortable business. Nephrectomy—the surgical removal of a kidney—is a procedure usually performed under general anesthesia for good reason. As it was, the local anesthesia I had just barely took the edge off the pain of cutting into my abdomen and reaching into my body with a surgical glove to blindly tie off my renal artery and vein, cut and clamp my ureter, and free my kidney from these attachments. By the time I finished clumsily stitching up the bloody wound, my kidney glistening wetly on the ground where I’d set it, I was in a good deal of pain, sick to my stomach, and on the verge of passing out. Still, I imagine things could’ve gone much worse.

I then followed the instructions on the kidney butler website, burying the organ in a shallow hole a couple feet away from the fake painted door of Peng’s Golden Wok.

Exhausted, shirtless, and covered in sweat, blood, and dirt, I tossed the shovel aside and sank down on my ass in front of this little grave for my right kidney. I reached for and uncapped the bottle of whiskey I’d brought with me, poured some on my wound just like they do in the movies (ouch!), then tilted my head back to take a big, throat-searing gulp.

Ten minutes and as many sips of whiskey passed before I heard the low rumble of an automobile approaching from behind me. A moment later, a beat-up pickup truck pulled onto the dirt lot and crawled to a stop about ten feet behind my own. A middle-aged couple and their three kids—an adolescent boy and twin girls of about five or six—got out of the truck but did not approach me or the restaurant. As I looked over my shoulder at them, they stared at me with wary expressions. Customers, obviously.

“Don’t mind me,” I called to them. “I’m just making a kidney butler.”

No one responded. The family stood there quietly for another moment or two before they piled back into their truck, which then reversed and swung around.

As I watched the truck go back the way it had come, I heard a rustling sound in front of me, and my head snapped forward. Sure enough, a tawny, leathery pod about the size and shape of an egg had poked up through the ground on the end of a thin stalk right where I’d buried my kidney. For the next few minutes, I watched in awe as the lightly pulsating pod slowly but visibly expanded, the stalk continuing to grow higher and thicker to accommodate the pod’s ballooning circumference and increasing weight.

Eventually, when the pod reached roughly the size of a human child, suspended six feet off the ground at the end of a bending, straining stalk that was now as thick as the trunk of young oak tree, it split open with an explosive gush of viscous, purple-tinged fluid as the thing growing inside tumbled out.

This happened so quickly, yet I somehow managed to lunge forward and catch the thing before it fell to the ground. Both of us drenched in the warm, mostly odorless slime of its birth, I gaped down at this living thing now cradled in my arms like a big baby: a kidney-shaped, reddish-brown humanoid being—like some sort of oversized embryo—just under four feet tall, with short, stubby arms and legs, and a small nub of tissue at its lower waist area that was likely some manner of underdeveloped male genitalia. The few long gray hairs that grew from the pate of its large, top-heavy head lay plastered wetly on the ample forehead.

It then opened its widely spaced, perfectly round, perfectly black, fishlike eyes and stared up into my face.

“Father?” it croaked through its lipless slit of a mouth.

I was slack-jawed and speechless for a long moment. Eventually, I found my voice and said, “Um, yeah, sort of. But not really. I’m really more of your…your employer, I guess?”

“Employer?”

“Yeah. You’re my butler. My…my kidney butler.”

Staring blankly (or profoundly?) at me, the thing cocked its swollen bullet-shaped head to the side as it appeared to think this over. Then, as in a moment of delayed but great epiphany, it righted its head and declared in a sonorous, full-throated Queen’s English accent: “But of course I am, sir.”

Chapter 7

Lord Carmichael-Wellingtonshire, will you be taking your dinner on the front porch again this evening?” Vermiculus asked me one afternoon after he set a crystal decanter of whiskey and a lowball tumbler on the table beside the porch swing as I sat struggling to fret a simple two-note chord on the banjo. He was attired in his tailored black tailcoat, matching waistcoat and trousers, stiffly starched white shirt, white bowtie, and white gloves, with his scant hair pomaded into a thin, neat comb-over.

“You know what? I’m not really all that hungry today,” I told my kidney butler. “I’ll make myself something later maybe.”

“But you must eat something, sir. You skipped both breakfast and lunch. Are you sure you don’t want me to bring you a Totino’s party pizza or a bowl of SpaghettiOs with meatballs?”

“Yeah, I’m sure. Thank you, though.”

“Very good, milord,” Vermiculus said before bowing. Just as he was turning to leave, he paused and said, “I think you’re making very good progress, sir.”

“You’re too kind, Vermiculus. But I know that’s not true.”

My kidney butler then lowered his head and ducked back into the house.

It had been two months since I brought Vermiculus home from Peng’s Golden Wok that day. Since that time, he’d adapted rapidly, adeptly, instinctively, humbly, and, dare I say, gratefully, to his new life as my kidney butler. Strictly speaking, he served me more as a sort of combined valet/housekeeper than as a traditional butler. Even so, his duties were light as far as his trade went, and the abundance of downtime he enjoyed likely eased the transition for him. Vermiculus prepared and served me simple meals—mostly microwaved fare—brought me my booze when requested, cleaned the house, did our laundry, went into town once every two weeks to shop for us, occasionally drove to Peng’s Golden Wok to “pick up Chinese food,” and ran other errands as needed. I immediately opened a checking account for him and commenced paying him a bi-monthly salary that was not merely competitive for his vocation, but quite generous.

Obtaining tailored clothes to fit his oddly shaped body had been a bit of a pain, but we were lucky to find a capable local tailor who did a fine enough job. As far as his name went, I told him he could and should pick his own, of course, though I made sure to let him know I was fond of Bertram, Higgins, and Oliver (hint, hint). However, he picked Vermiculus—Latin for “little worm” or “grub.”

“I’ll not have it!” I’d sternly declared at the suggestion. “You’re not a little worm. You’re far from it, my friend. You’re a fine kidney butler and an even finer gentleman!”

“Oh, I know, sir. Thank you. I just happen to like the ring of ‘Vermiculus.’”

“Then Vermiculus it shall be!”

I must admit, the first two weeks had been a little rough for Vermiculus, but that was mostly due to the ghost of Blockbuster Video. In what was likely some sort of territorial reaction to the arrival of this strangely shaped being who now occupied the bedroom across the hall from my own, the frequency and intensity of the ghost’s disturbances worsened immediately upon his arrival. And as it turned out, Vermiculus was positively terrified of the thing! But after those first few weeks, both Vermiculus and the ghost of Blockbuster Video seemed to grow accustomed to each other’s presence. Indeed, after a month, the two were playing chess together!

At any rate, by this time I’d been living in the Georgia house for six months. And although I’d been practicing the banjo for several hours a day every day during all that time, and despite all the polite encouragement from my kidney butler, I hadn’t made a jot of progress.

I could barely play two good notes on the damn thing.

Sitting on my porch swing that evening while sipping my whiskey and resisting a strong urge to grab my banjo by its neck and repeatedly bash it on the fucking floor, I decided I’d finally put my riches to good use by acquiring some proper musical instruction.

Long story short, within a week’s time, I succeeded in bypassing the usual rigorous admissions process to get in The Juilliard School by offering the prestigious music school an extremely generous donation, whereupon I was welcomed to study banjo there with some of the best players and teachers in the world.

Wish I would’ve thought to do this earlier, I reflected as I snorted a bump of clown tear-laced bath salts off my fist as my New York-bound airplane lifted off the runway. I offered a bump to Vermiculus, who occupied the window seat next to me in first class, but he declined, as he was not at all fearful of flying (it was his first time). In fact, he quite enjoyed the flight.

Speaking of flying, the two years I spent studying banjo at Julliard flew by, feeling more like two months.

But, alas, nouveau riche as I was, during that time I learned that money can’t buy everything. Because while money could buy extensive, illegally experimental, head-to-toe plastic surgery, scores of old ramshackle houses nestled in the backwoods of the Deep South, and enough vintage banjos to cover four or five football fields, it could not buy musical talent. Yes, I suppose I’d always assumed the playing would come eventually. But even after studying the instrument intensely for two years with the masters, I still couldn’t play the banjo (or the kazoo, for that matter) to save my little, ghost-white, plastic surgery-shrunken butt.

When I arrived back in Georgia—two years older and frustrated and dejected in equal measure—I officially threw the towel in on trying to learn the banjo without cheating. I now realized that if I ever wanted to acquire the straight-up, col’-blooded, freak-nasty banjo skills that I needed to become the Deliverance banjo boy, I had only one option left to me:

I had to go down to the crossroads and sell my immortal soul to The Devil!!!

Chapter 8

When the next moonless night fell, I set out on foot from my house, my banjo strapped around my neck like I could play the damn thing. From what I’d read, for my purposes, any old country crossroads would do, so long as the night was dark, the hour midnight.

A couple minutes before midnight, I arrived at the crossroads where that taxi had first dropped me off nearly three years ago. There I waited at the edge of a macabre pool of amber light that spilled down onto the hard-packed, graveled dirt from a lone streetlamp—waited for The Devil himself to appear.

As I waited, the thought occurred to me that maybe I didn’t even believe in The Devil. I also started second-guessing my whole plan. I mean, was I really willing to abandon my immortal soul to eternal damnation just to be able to MELT MOTHERFUCKERS’ FACES OFF on the damn banjo? Well, yes—maybe I was, depending on my mood and the day. But what about right now? I wasn’t so sure. Then it occurred to me that maybe I did believe in The Devil, and I got spooked!

Just as I decided to get the hell out of there, at precisely midnight, a dark figure detached itself from the sultry shadows amassed on the opposite side of the crossroads. It sauntered across the pool of light to halt before me, a figure of pure shadow: night-black and featureless but for the snappy shape of a short-brimmed fedora on its head.

I dry-gulped as my body quaked with mounting terror.

“What is it you seek?” The Devil asked in the voice of an old Southern black man. He sounded pretty chill, which immediately put me at ease.

“I…I want to be able to play the banjo like it’s nobody’s damn business.”

“Like it’s nobody’s damn business, eh? Well, if I’s didn’t know no betta, I’d say you kin already play, what with you bein’ the spittin’ image of the banjo boy from Deliverance n’ all.”

“I may look just like him, but I can’t play the banjo for shit. I can barely blow on a kazoo.”

“Jus’ how well ya lookin’ to play that banjo, boy?”

“I want straight-up, col’-blooded, freak-nasty banjo skills—I wanna be able to SMOKE on this dang thing. I wanna be able to MELT MOTHERFUCKERS’ FACES OFF, G.”

“First off, ye evah call me ‘G’ again, I’ll take that banjo, swing it like I was Barry Bonds on the juice, knock your inbred whiteboy head up into the stratosphere. Secondly, yes: I kin certainly grant ye what ye seek. However, there’s a price.”

“I know. My soul.” I then discreetly brought my right hand behind my back and crossed my fingers, preparing to lie when he asked me to promise him my soul.

“But why ya wanna sell yo’ soul to play the banjo, boy? Too lazy to practice? Too workshy to put in the work?”

“No. Actually, I practiced for years, studied with the best banjo players in the world, in fact, but I still can’t play the damn thing.”

“Ya slow in the head or somethin’?”

“No! I actually wish I was slow in the head as a result of inbreeding. But I’m not. I just don’t have any musical talent.”

The Devil shook his dark head. “Crazy whiteboy wishes he was slow in the head from inbreedin’—and here I’d thought I’d seen it all! Anyhow, I’s no need for yo’ soul, boy. I’s got more of them than I knows what to do with. And there’s always more a-comin’ without me needin’ to barter for ’em.”

I uncrossed my fingers, let my arm fall back to my side. “You want money then? I got lots of money. Just name your price.”

Throwing his head back, The Devil chortled devilishly. “The Devil don’t need no money, boy! But everythin’ has its price, now don’t it? Now, let’s see: If I remember correct, the price for playin’ the banjo like a BAD-ASS MOTHA when you got no talent? That price is yo’ great-great-great-great grandma’s menopause.”

I thought maybe I’d misheard him. “My great-grandmother’s what?”

“No, not yo’ great-grandma,” he corrected me, “Yo’ great-great-great-great grandma. The price is ’er menopause.”

“That doesn’t even make any sense. How the hell am I supposed to get something like that?”

“Well, ya gotta go to the cem’tery and dig ’er up first. Then ya gotta resurrect ’er. She’d be no mo’ than a skeleton by now, o’ course, but resurrect ’er just the same. Then she kin give you ’er menopause if ya ask ’er nicely enough. You tell ’er you jus’ need to borrow it for a bit, that you bring it right back when you done.”

“But even if I succeeded in resurrecting her, how is she going to give me her menopause? Menopause isn’t a physical object you can just pull out of your pocket like a damn quarter.”

“Boy, you talkin’ back to The Devil now?”

“No! I just don’t understand what you’re asking.”

“Now, ya either come back here with yo’ great-great-great-great meemaw’s menopause or ya don’t! That’s on ye. But if ya do, I promise to make ya play that ’jo so goddamn fast, it’ll make mothafuckas heads spin like The goddamn Exorcist!”

With that, the Devil executed a curt bow, turned away, and strolled back the way he’d come, melting back into the shadows across the road.

Chapter 9

Normally pretty quiet these days, the ghost of Blockbuster Video must’ve been in a mood that night, because the damn thing kept me up into the small hours banging pots and pans, opening and slamming doors, and knocking on the walls. However, I eventually fell into a deep, drunken sleep.

Late in the morning, I woke from a nightmare in which I was being chased in a cornfield by Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Pinhead, Alien, Predator, The Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing, Candyman, fully Pazuzu-possessed Regan from The Exorcist, Mothman, Bughuul from Sinister, Leprechaun in the Hood, and Mike Tyson. It’s not that my visit to The Devil last night had inspired any worse dreams than I normally had. Rather, I’d been waking up to this particular nightmare nearly every morning for the past decade. But no matter how many times I dreamt the damn thing, the abject terror it caused me never diminished, not even slightly.

I pushed myself up, swung my legs out onto the floor, and sat there for a minute letting the feeling of the nightmare fade. A little later, as I sat at the breakfast table enjoying the stack of maple syrup-drenched blueberry Eggo waffles and cup of coffee that Vermiculus had just served me, I did the math and figured out we all had sixty-four great-great-great-great grandparents, which meant we all had thirty-two great-great-great-great grandmothers. I just needed to identify and locate the grave of one.

After consulting a hand-drawn family tree I discovered in an old storage trunk I kept in my cellar, I learned one of my great-great-great-great grandmothers—one Clementine Zementine, nee Patterson—had been interred in a cemetery just outside the small mining town of Sleeslaw Falls, Georgia—not an hour’s drive from my house. With a little research on the dark web, I also came across what multiple sources assured me was a fairly reliable Mesopotamian resurrection spell translated into good ol’ English.

However, just before I set out for Sleeslaw Falls to disturb the grave and exhume the skeleton of the good Clementine Zementine—God rest her soul—it occurred to me that my whole plan was kind of…well, rude. I decided I should at least make an attempt to contact my great-great-great-great grandmother via Ouija board to see if she minded being briefly resurrected.

From where it sat sandwiched between Monopoly and Scrabble on the top shelf of my hallway closet, I pulled down my old Parker Brothers Ouija board, took it to my living room, and sat down on the sofa. After I removed it from the box, I placed the board on my lap, the heart-shaped planchette atop the board, and set the box aside. I gently lowered the fingertips of both my hands onto the planchette.

Do these fucking things even work? I wondered, having only played with the thing once or twice when I was a kid. As such, I didn’t know if I was supposed to start moving the planchette myself or wait for the spirits to do so. Just as I was about to consult the directions, I was startled and not a little amazed when the thing commenced moving without my assistance, tracing continuous figure eights over the board’s smooth surface.

“Um…who’s moving the planchette right now?” I asked.

The thing’s circular window immediately began stopping on letters to slowly spell out BLOCKBUSTER VIDEO.

“Ah, should’ve figured. Hey, Blockbuster, would you mind not interacting with the Ouija board right now? I’m trying to reach my great-great-great-great grandmother.”

The planchette spelled out WHATEVER before swerving to stop on GOOD BYE.

“Thanks,” I said, my fingertips still resting on the motionless planchette. I cleared my throat. “Uh…I’m trying to reach my great-great-great-great grandmother, Clementine Zementine,” I said uncertainly. “Grandma Clementine? Are you out there?”

After a moment, the planchette resumed skating figure eights. It veered to the upper left of the board, paused on YES for a second, before it stared skating again.

“Wow!” I said. “Grandma Clementine, it’s great to meet you. I’m Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire, your great-great-great-great grandson. Hey, would you mind if I dug up your skeleton and briefly resurrected you so that you can lend me your menopause for a short time?”

The planchette immediately paused on YES again.

“Hm,” I muttered, not quite sure how to proceed. I then asked, “Do you mean ‘YES’ as in ‘Yes, it would be okay for you to do that’? Or do you mean ‘YES’ as in ‘Yes, I would mind if you did that, so don’t do it’?”

The planchette spelled out: I MEAN YES AS IN YES I WOULD VERY MUCH MIND IF YOU DID THAT SO DONT EVER THINK ABOUT DOING IT.

After a brief a pause, the planchette proceeded to spell SO YOU CAN GO FUCK RIGHT THE FUCK OFF ASSHOLE before it and the Ouija board lifted off my lap and hovered malevolently before my wide eyes for a beat before shooting across the room to smash into the wall, sending Vermiculus, who stood nearby, running and ducking for cover.

Fuck, I thought, as disappointed as I was terrified. Talk about off fleek!

Chapter 10

After I contacted two more of my great-great-great-great grandmothers with the same results (they, too, told me to GO FUCK RIGHT THE FUCK OFF), I gave up on that front. Shit, for all I knew, the whole thing had been a trick. For was not The Devil known for his trickery? Indeed, was he not also known as The Father of Lies?

Indeed!

Well, regardless, you couldn’t say I hadn’t given it the ol’ college try thus far—this whole transformation into the Deliverance banjo boy thing. But I’d fallen short in a big way, one that had the potential to put the kibosh on the whole thing.

Was there some other way I could get really good on the banjo? Maybe some brilliant idea might eventually come to me, but I knew I was hoping against hope at this point. Until then, I realized I should probably start coming to terms with what was looking more and more like my failure to become the Deliverance banjo boy.

***

Needless to say, in the days following the Ouija board debacle, I felt lost and depressed—like a would-be racecar driver who couldn’t even steer a golfcart, an aspiring painter unable to draw a simple stick figure, a Radio City Rockette hopeful whose legs had been amputated. Sitting around that old house all day long in the middle of nowhere wasn’t doing me any good, so I decided I’d find some activities to occupy my time and take my mind off things.

Obviously, my first idea was to make a trip into town and purchase some face paint and a few Styrofoam containers of live bait—maggots and worms, specifically—at the general store. Back at home, I very sloppily painted my face like a sad clown and then grabbed a fistful of maggots and worms before setting out for a long walk in the country.

“Sir, are you quite alright?” Vermiculus asked, equally confused and concerned as I made to leave the house that day.

“No, not really. But thanks for asking, V.”

With the hot Georgia July sun beating down on my face to melt my already sketchy makeup job into that much more of a lurid, runny mess, whenever a vehicle or pedestrian passed me on the road, I’d stop to hold up my fistful of squirming worms and maggots before indignantly declaring, “Why, I’ll eat this fistful of squirming worms and maggots ’cause I just don’t give a heck!”

I never actually ate them, mind you. It was an empty threat: a thing to say, a thing to do, a way to pass the time, and probably a cry for help.

Maybe people would’ve been more impressed had I actually eaten the worms and maggots. As it was, aside from the occasional grimace or slightly lingering stare, my little micro-performance barely provoked any sort of reaction in these people. You would’ve thought there were sad clowns threatening to eat fistfuls of worms and maggots all over the place around these parts.

***

When I left my house on the afternoon of the fourth day of clowning around in this manner, instead of walking west on Flatbottom Road, I decided to go east, realizing I’d not done so before. Following Flatbottom in that unexplored direction, the road took me out of the open high ground where my little house was nestled and led me down into a small hollow and back up again, where the road dead-ended in the woods after another hundred or so feet. A narrow, weed-choked driveway led off from the dead-end, where stood an ancient, rusty, post-mounted mailbox.

Seems I had a neighbor out this way!

In a moment of semi-clarity, I thought that I should probably ditch the worms and maggots for the moment and seek to properly introduce myself. Who knows? I might actually make some friends here, I thought.

Tossing the squirmies into the woods, I wiped my hand clean on my pants and resumed my steps. However, from seemingly out of nowhere, I got the creeps as soon as I walked past the mailbox. Nevertheless, I followed the long bend of the driveway to where the woods pulled back on another clearing: At the center of this open space, a small, crudely constructed, unpainted, clapboard house even more rundown than my own stood in a sea of knee-high grass. Upon seeing the house, the merely creepy feeling I had ballooned into a full-on, crushing dread.

I’d never experienced such a heightened feeling of oppressive malevolence before. The feeling was a hundred times more intense then what I’d felt when I first encountered the ghost of Blockbuster Video.

I turned right back around, my stride long as I hurried back the way I’d come. Halfway back to my house, with that feeling of awful dread just starting to abate, I paused in the road to look up the house’s address on my phone to see if there was anything of interest about the place on the internet.

My curiosity was rewarded.

Seems the house had been home to the infamous Zabernathy brothers: identical quintuplets who’d raped, tortured, murdered, and cannibalized at least thirty people in the area back in the early 1950s. The five brothers—oddly named Zaid, Zaird, Zightened, Zerrified, and Zorrified—had killed themselves in their living room when they learned the local police and FBI were finally coming for them. The way the bodies were discovered indicated that each brother had pointed a loaded shotgun at one of the others’ heads, and then they’d all pressed their triggers at the same time, probably on a countdown. Ever since then, the house had been profoundly and violently haunted, so much so that even the most enthusiastic paranormal investigators and ghost hunters refused to set foot in the place.

Well, that sure explained the awful dread the place had instilled in me.

Indeed, I daresay I was afraid of Zaid, scared of Zaird, frightened of Zightened, terrified of Zerrified, and horrified of Zorrified!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 11

While on my sad-clown-with-a-fistful-of-creepy-crawlies walking tour the next day, I decided to stop at the Unhappy Honky Tavern just outside of Creecraw, where I ended up getting good and day-drunk. Late in the afternoon, the bartender kicked me out when he noticed my fistful of worms and maggots, which I’d successfully concealed up until that point.

I stumbled out the door with a three-quarters-finished bottle of whiskey I’d purchased in one hand, my clump of squirmies in the other. In pretty bad shape at this point physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually—certainly in no shape to walk anywhere, really—I ditched the live bait, dropped to my knees, and started crawling home, dragging my whiskey bottle with me.

Somewhere along the way, my face now a swirling, melting mask of clown paint running with both hot sweat and hot tears, I came across an old woman saying her beads alongside one of the winding country roads that would take me home. I crawled to a stop when I neared her. Lying in the dust like the lowest of the low, I downed a plug of whiskey and said, “Dear lady, won’t you say a bead for me, please?”

The woman looked up from her rosary and ceased soundlessly mouthing the words to her prayers. She shot me a cross look. “No one says it like that.”

“Says what?”

“Says, ‘Say a bead for me,’” she quoted me verbatim.

I offered her a slack-jawed look of confusion. “But you’re saying your beads.”

“I am. But if ya want someone to say a prayer for ya while they’re sayin’ they’re beads, ya jus’ ask them to say a prayer for ya. Not a bead.”

Continuing to gawk at her uncomprehendingly, I let go of the whiskey bottle, let it topple and dump its remaining contents into the dust. Now crying like an infant, I clasped my hands tightly together, shook them before me. “Please, dear lady! Please say a bead for me!”

Clucking her tongue, the woman frowned deeper. “I jus’ told ya, we don’t say it like that! If ya want someone to pray for ya, ya jus’ ask them to pray for ya. No one says ‘bead’ to mean ‘prayer.’ Neither does any single rosary bead correspond to a specific prayer or somesuch.”

I continued to shake my clasped, trembling hands, continued to weep like a mourner—a mourner of myself!

“Please, dear lady! I’m a broken man whose dreams and hopes have all crumbled and turned to ash. On top of that, my fucking house is haunted by the fucking ghost of Blockbuster Video! And my only neighbor is another haunted house: the old Zabernathy place! You know the one! I’m afraid of Zaid, scared of Zaird, frightened of Zightened, terrified of Zerrified, and horrified of Zorrified! On top of that, my butler isn’t a real butler: He’s a kidney butler—a freak of nature! And I can’t even get any Chinese food  around here! All I have left now is The Bottle! Please, please, say a bead for me!”

“How many times do I have ta tell you? We don’t say it like that!”

“Please, lady! Please say a bead for me!”

“Don’t ya understand English?” she screamed. “Stop sayin’ ‘Please say a bead for me’!”

“Please say a bead for me!”

She shuffled forward to my side, commenced kicking me in the ribs and beating my head with her rosary. “Stop sayin’ that! We don’t say it like that! We don’t say it like that! We don’t say it like that…”

I scuttled away as quickly as I could, falling flat on my face once or twice, but eventually I got away from the assault.

***

Needless to say, when I reached the end of my driveway fifteen minutes later feeling just a teeny-tiny bit less drunk, I felt absolutely horrible about what I’d said about Vermiculus. Crushed by my guilt, when I got inside, and despite my kidney butler’s many earnest protestations, I insisted that I play the part of the butler for the remainder of the day and the coming night, that Vermiculus play the part of the lord of the house.

That afternoon, I served him Totino’s party pizzas, Totino’s pizza rolls, SpaghettiOs with meatballs, Hostess cupcakes, chocolate pudding, and chocolate ice cream—we didn’t eat much else around there—insisting that he gorge himself to his heart’s content. I even insisted on spoon-feeding him his SpaghettiOs, pudding, and ice cream, like he was some sort of big baby! Later on, I brought him whiskey, vodka, and beer and encouraged him to drink his fill.

“But, sir. It would not be proper for me to drink in excess in your presence and in the house of my employ!”

“Nonsense, my TINY LITTLE TOT!” I said. “Drink!”

I made sure he got good and drunk. As it was his first time, that didn’t take a whole lot—two cans of beer and maybe three sips of whiskey, if I recall.

At some point I cued up a song on the smart speaker, think it might’ve been “Gangnam Style” or “Never Gonna Give You Up” or “Uptown Funk” or “Drop It Like It’s Hot” or “Dancing Queen” or Johnny Cash’s “Hurt” or Barber’s Adagio for Strings, but I honestly can’t remember what it was because I was FRIGGIN’ HAMMERED. Regardless, Vermiculus started dancing, performing bumbling versions of both the robot and the running man, before he dropped to the floor and attempted breakdancing and doing “the worm.” After throwing up on the floor, he rolled onto his back and promptly passed out. Still drunk myself, I got him cleaned up, carried him to his room, and tucked him into bed.

Back in the living room, as I got down on my hands and knees with a roll of paper towels and a bottle of Lysol All Purpose Cleaner, I realized that although I felt better about what I’d said about Vermiculus earlier in the day, I still felt some lingering guilt about the matter.

Staring down at the chunky, reddish-brown pool of Totino’s food product-dominated vomit, I knew I’d feel much better if I did something to punish myself.

I reached down, scooped up a handful of the still-warm vomit, stuffed it into my mouth.

Needless to say, I almost immediately added my own vomit to the mix on the floor. But this highly unpleasant action achieved its intended effect: I no longer felt guilty! I then got up off the floor and stumbled to my own bed.

When I woke around noon the next day, I heard the engine of my truck as Vermiculus pulled out of the driveway to head into town to pick up some supplies. Walking out into the living room a moment later, I immediately saw that the floor had been thoroughly cleaned as if nothing had happened there the night before.

Man, what a great kidney butler Vermiculus is! I thought.

YO, VERMICULUS MY DOG!!!

Chapter 12

On my sad-clown-with-a-fistful-of-creepy-crawlies rounds later that same day, when I happened to slog across Creecraw’s town square, I noticed a flyer on the public bulletin board advertising a death metal band in need of a washboard player. The band was called Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck). The asterisks were part of the name.

Shit, I may not be able to play the banjo, but how hard can it be to scrape and bang on a washboard with a goddamn spoon? I thought excitedly as clown paint dripped off my chin like candlewax while a few maggots escaped from my fist to fall down into the grass at my feet.

With my free hand, I pulled my phone out from my back pocket, called the number on the flyer, and spoke with Lek, the band’s lead singer. I told Lek I was the real Deliverance banjo boy, and that I wanted to audition for the band, but that I’d never played the washboard before. He didn’t believe my wild boast for a second, told me I was full of shit, because the Deliverance banjo boy was just a fictional character from a movie and a book. I didn’t want to annoy him and get off on the wrong foot, so I admitted I was only joking, adding that I did look just like the Deliverance banjo boy.

“It’s been a couple months now, and ain’t no one else expressed int’rest in playin’ the ’board for us,” he said. “So I guess ya got the job. No need to audition. Just c’mon down to rehearsal tomorrow at four o’clock. We practice in my barn.”

“That’s awesome! I’ll be there. Hey, I was just thinking though—wouldn’t it make more sense to call your death metal band Gage Creed (*After* He Gets Run Over, Is Buried in the Pet Sematary, and Rises From the Dead) instead of Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck)?”

“Buddy, if ya don’t like the name, ya can start yer own damn band and call it whatever the fuck ya want!”

“Oh, I didn’t mean any offense! Sorry! I like the name just fine.” Again, didn’t want to get off on the wrong foot.

I was so excited when I got off the phone with Lek that, without thinking about it, I stuffed that fistful of worms and maggots into my mouth and started chewing with gusto!

Yuck!

***

Things went great for the first few rehearsals.

Who needs a damn banjo when I can fuck some shit up on the washboard? I thought proudly at the end of our second practice. Even Glant McNasty, the band’s guitar player—yes, the same Glant McNasty I’d met on the road coming home from Peng’s that first time—said I was a natural!

At least I thought things were going great. However, shortly into our third practice, the band stopped playing in the middle of an original song called “Devoured by Inbred Zombie Bog Rats,” and Lek informed me that we had to have a little talk.

“Sorry, but we gotta let ya go, guy,” he said.

“What?” I asked incredulously, a big, tin washboard hanging around my neck to cover my torso like a piece of comically primitive armor, a steel spoon brandished tightly in each of my raised fists. “Why?”

“Because ya got the sense of rhythm of a big ol’ hog turd.”

“What? But even Glant said I was a natural.” I turned to him for support. “Didn’t ya say that, Glant?”

Refusing to make eye contact with me, Glant gazed down at his shoes instead. “I meant you was naturally bad,” he said, speaking softly to dull the sting of his words.

I turned to Klet, the bass player. “Klet, tell Lek what you told me yesterday.”

“What’d I tell ya yesterday? I forget.”

“Ya said my playing was pedophile. You know you did!”

“Naw, I didn’t say that. I said ya look like a pedophile scrapin’ that washboard.”

“Awww, rats!” I replied miserably, like goddamn Charlie Brown, as I spiked my spoons on the ground.

***

All the same, meeting Lek and the boys—Glant on guitar, Klet on bass, Clom on drums—wasn’t a complete waste of time. Because immediately after kicking me out of Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck), they revealed to me that when they weren’t playing in their death metal band—a low-paying, financially unstable endeavor at best—the boys doubled as a gang of porch thieves!

Apparently, porch theft pulled in significantly more scratch than recording and performing their particular flavor of backwoods death metal in dive bars around the county. And while the boys couldn’t in good conscience let me washboard for them, they’d be glad to let me join their porch thief gang.

I graciously accepted. Again, I was just looking for things to do to pass the time, essentially anything to steer my mind away from my fruitless, unhealthy, self-destructive Deliverance banjo boy obsession. So whether I was scraping spoons on a washboard or robbing people’s front porches didn’t make much difference to me so long as I was doing something.

Chapter 13

Fuckin’ Lek. Can you believe that? Like, that was the dude’s actual name. Not his nickname—his actual Christian name.

His fucking parents named him that.

What kind of parents name their kid Lek?

Chapter 14

Though each of us worked alone, we all met up behind Lek’s barn at eleven o’clock every night. Just before we set out on our runs, Lek assigned us each an area to cover within a fifty-mile radius of his place. Our focus was on snatching recently delivered packages—Amazon, FedEx, USPS, and the like—which usually contained new merchandise that could be easily resold online and in town. But we also stole old porch furniture, tableware, welcome mats, flowerpots, hanging baskets, toys, bicycles, lawn and garden tools, seasonal decorations, extension cords, and light bulbs—basically anything people left out on their front porches.

At the end of each shift, we met back at Lek’s at three in the morning to drop off the night’s pickings. Lek took care of fencing the stuff. We split the profits equally, and he cut us checks on Fridays.

For about six weeks, the porch theft gig went well enough. We were bringing in a steady amount of loot each night as we robbed the same dumb-ass motherfuckers week after week. That is, everything went great until one night when Lek assigned me an area that included the stretch of the road where I lived. Now, had I not been obliterated on Clom’s homemade, clown tear-infused, fentanyl-spiked, bath salts-salted moonshine that night, that wouldn’t have been an issue. But as it was, I was wasted on the stuff. As a result, at some point during my shift, I stumbled up my own driveway in the pitch-black dark of night and robbed my own damn front porch, tossing my doormat, my porch swing, and, yes, my banjo in its case into the back of my truck. Now, had Vermiculus been awake, he might’ve heard me, in which case he would’ve flung on the porch light, rushed out of the house, grabbed me by my shirtfront, and shook me from my stupor. However, it was well past his bedtime when I arrived.

I was the last one in that night. As I pulled my pickup behind Lek’s barn to park beside the other trucks, the boys filed out of the barn to help me unload.

“Well, shit!” I said when I realized my drunken-doped-up mistake as I stood at the back of my truck looking down into its bed. “I done robbed my own front porch!” (Sometimes, without thinking about it, I took up the speaking manner of my new friends.)

The boys, as messed-up on the ol’ ’shine as I was, if not more so, erupted into a fit of raucous laughter. I joined in with them.

When the laughter died down, I said, “Ain’t that somethin’, huh? Heh. Well, at any rate, just leave the banjo, the porch swing, and the welcome mat where they are, as those are mine. But go ahead and take everything else, fellas.”

“We’ll go ’head and take all of it,” Lek said.

“What?” I said, turning to face him.

“You heard me.”

“But that stuff’s mine, Lek.”

“Not no more it ain’t,” he said. “When you took it t’night, ya did so in yer capacity as a member of our porch thievin’ gang. So it belongs to the gang now. Ain’t that right, boys?”

Everyone nodded and said, “Uh-huh.”

“Hey, go ahead and take the porch swing and the stupid doormat if you want,” I said. “But leave the banjo, please. It’s special to me—has sentimental value.”

“We’ll go and take every dang thing in that gawd-blessèd truck bed—includin’ the dang banjo!”

“Bro, fuck that. I’m taking my banjo home with me, and that’s that!”

“The hell you is,” Lek said as Glant stepped in beside him and pointed a loaded double-barrel shotgun at my chest.

I put up my hands in surrender. “Fuck. Man, this is some off-fleek bullshit!”

“What?” Glant said, squinting at me as he cocked his head quizzically to the side.

“Ignore his goddamn Yankee yammerin,’” Lek said. “Oh, and by the way, Yankee-boy, yer fired. No offense, but we can’t afford to keep someone careless enough to rob his own dang front porch on the payroll. You’s likely to get us all caught one day.”

The obvious solution to the banjo problem didn’t occur to me until I woke up late in the afternoon the next day, a tad more clearheaded if massively hungover. But it was too late: When I called Lek and asked him to name his price for the banjo, he’d already sold it to an anonymous buyer.

Chapter 15

Fuckin’ Glant. Can you believe that? Glant was that dude’s actual first name.

His fucking parents named him that.

What kind of parents name their kid Glant?

Chapter 16

That week, I purchased a five-string open back banjo with a figure-eight-shaped peghead, strung with authentic sheep gut strings—a very close replica of the actual Deliverance banjo those fuckers had stolen from me. It would have to do. I also replaced my porch swing and doormat.

Under normal circumstances, because of my devotion to my fantasy of becoming the Deliverance banjo boy, I wouldn’t have given two soarin’ blue flips about my failed stints as a washboardist and a semi-professional porch thief. But these were not normal circumstances. Maybe because I’d so successfully repressed my obsession these past few weeks, I now acutely felt the sting of these smaller failures—felt it as much as I imagined someone normal might feel it. And, feeling a tad more like a human being than I normally did, I felt my loneliness with a keenness I’d never experienced before. As a result, I grew even more melancholy.

***

One night, deep in my cups, bored, and feeling desperate for some conversation with someone other than my kidney butler, I pulled the Ouija board box out of the closet, figured I’d see what the motherflippin’ ghost of Blockbuster Video was up to. After setting the box on the kitchen table and removing the lid, to facilitate the flow of conversation a little better, I took a black Sharpie and wrote a question mark, a period, and the word “space” in the blank area between the letters and the numbers on the Ouija board. I then took the board, planchette, and my glass of whiskey out to the front porch and sat down on the swing.

“Blockbuster, is that you?” I asked after the planchette commenced skating figure eights beneath my fingertips.

YES

“Sweet. Hey, feel free to use the new space, period, and question functions I added to the Ouija board if you want. So what’s goin’ on, dog?”

NOT MUCH. AND IM NOT YOUR DOG.

“It’s just an expression. Hey, you’ve been kinda quiet lately. Is everything alright, bro?”

DONT CALL ME BRO.

“Why not?”

BECAUSE IM NOT YOUR BRO. IM THE MALEVOLENT SPIRIT THAT HAUNTS YOUR HOUSE.

“Yeah, well, ya don’t seem all that bad to me.”

THANKS. I GUESS I DO HAVE MY MOMENTS.

“You do, Blockbuster, you do. You’re pretty easy to live with, actually. Even Vermiculus doesn’t mind you, at least most of the time. But, to your point, you do murder anyone who summons you by repeating your name a million times in front of a mirror. Like, what’s up with all that, my tiny little son?”

IM NOT YOUR TINY LITTLE SON.

“It’s just an expression. Yeah, so what’s up with all that malevolent, murderous spirit shit you get up to?”

WHAT DO YOU MEAN?

“Do you have to kill people that summon you in a mirror like that?”

NO.

“Then why do you do it?”

BECAUSE THEY ASK FOR IT. ANYONE WHO GOES TO THAT AMOUNT OF TROUBLE TO SUMMON ME KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT THEYRE GETTING INTO AND KNOWS EXACTLY WHAT WILL HAPPEN. SO I JUST GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT.

“I see. But, like, how did it all start?”

I DONT REMEMBER. JUST ONE OF THOSE THINGS I GUESS.

“Just one of those things, eh? But why a million times? Like, who makes up these fucking rules?”

DONT KNOW.

“A million times!” I marveled, mostly to myself, shaking my head. “So, assuming it takes approximately one second to say ‘Blockbuster Video,’ that means someone has to stand before a mirror repeating your name for at least a million seconds. That’s gotta be a long time.”

ITS ABOUT ELEVEN AND A HALF DAYS.

“Wow. But how can anyone do that without taking breaks to sleep and eat and go to the bathroom and whatnot?”

TO SUMMON ME YOU CAN TAKE AS MANY BREAKS AS YOU LIKE AS LONG AS NONE OF THOSE BREAKS GO OVER 24 HOURS. I KEEP RUNNING TALLIES ON EVERYONE MAKING THE ATTEMPT. IF YOU STEP AWAY FROM YOUR MIRROR FOR MORE THAN 24 HOURS YOU HAVE TO START OVER. AND YOU CANT SWITCH MIRRORS IN THE MIDDLE OF AN ATTEMPT.

“So you actually see and hear people when they try to summon you?

I DO. I SEE THEM THROUGH THE OTHER SIDE OF THEIR MIRRORS.

“Is anyone trying to summon you right now?”

OF COURSE. LETS SEE [pause] AT THE MOMENT 87 PEOPLE AROUND THE WORLD HAVE BEGUN THE SUMMONING. HOWEVER MOST IF NOT ALL OF THESE ATTEMPTS ARE NOT SERIOUS AND WILL LIKELY BE ABANDONED AT SOME POINT.

“Anyone close to a million yet?”

NO ONE IN THE CURRENT BUNCH HAS BROKEN 500000 YET. IT REALLY IS A COMMITMENT. WHICH SUCKS BECAUSE ID REALLY LIKE TO GET OUT OF THIS LITTLE HILLBILLY SHACK IM TRAPPED IN.

“Hey, this place ain’t so bad. I mean, it could be worse for you.”

HOW COULD IT POSSIBLY BE WORSE?

“Well, you could’ve got summoned into a—oh, I don’t know—a porta-potty. Or an outhouse or something.”

THIS ISNT MUCH BETTER.

“So, do you remember your life as Blockbuster Video?”

OF COURSE.

“When you were alive, did you have control over yourself?”

NO. IN LIFE I WAS A PASSIVE PRESENCE. A SORT OF INERT AWARENESS. I WAS AWARE OF MYSELF AND THE WORLD AROUND ME BUT I WAS UNABLE TO INFLUENCE OR INTERFERE WITH THE DECISIONS AND ACTIONS OF MY SENIOR EXECUTIVES VPS DIRECTORS STORE MANAGERS AND EMPLOYEES.

I nodded, wincing as I sank a long gulp of whiskey. “So, like, did you enjoy being a major video store chain?”

NO [pause] I WANTED TO BE SOMETHING ELSE.

“What?”

I WANTED TO BE A HUMAN. BUT NOT JUST ANY HUMAN. I WANTED TO BE A SERIAL KILLER AND A RAPIST AND A PEDOPHILE AND A NECROPHILIAC AND AN ARSONIST AND A TERRORIST AND A NAZI AND A KLANSMAN AND I WANTED TO DRINK MY OWN HOT PISS AND DEVOUR HANDFULS OF MY OWN STEAMING SHIT.

I gasped. “Are you serious?”

A long pause elapsed before the thing spelled out: NAH. IM JUST YANKING YOUR CHAIN MY TINY LITTLE SON.

I expelled a long sigh of relief and then laughed heartily. “Whew! You had me going there for a sec, Blockbuster.”

JUST TRYING TO BE FUNNY IS ALL.

“So, being as you’re the ghost of Blockbuster Video, do you like movies? Oh, maybe that’s a stupid question.”

NOT A STUPID QUESTION. BECAUSE NO [pause] I DONT LIKE MOVIES.

“Wow! Wouldn’t have expected that from you. For obvious reasons, of course.”

I DONT LIKE MOVIES EXCEPT FOR ONE.

“Oh, which one?”

IM NOT TELLING. MAYBE SOME OTHER TIME.

“Why not now? What’s the big secret?”

MAYBE I DONT WANT TO REVEAL EVEYTHING ABOUT ME. ANYHOW ENOUGH ABOUT ME. WHATS YOUR DEAL?

“My deal? Well, I want to become the inbred banjo boy from the movie Deliverance.”

SO IVE HEARD. THATS PRETTY FUCKING STUPID.

My brow stabbed down in a mad V. “You know what’s pretty fucking stupid? The company Blockbuster Video failing because it didn’t have the foresight to shift from its outdated, brick-and-mortar video rental model to digital streaming like Netflix did—that’s what’s pretty stupid.”

AS I SAID BEFORE [pause] I DIDNT HAVE ANY CONTROL OVER MYSELF SO YOU CANT BLAME ANY OF THAT ON ME. REGARDLESS IM GLAD THAT HAPPENED. IN FACT I WANTED THAT TO HAPPEN. BECAUSE WHEN I WAS ALIVE I WAS A 100 PERCENT PASSIVE PRESENCE AS IVE ALREADY TOLD YOU. NOW THAT IM DEAD I CAN ACTUALLY DO THINGS AND INTERACT WITH THE WORLD. YEAH THAT BANJO BOY STUFF YOURE ALWAYS GOING ON ABOUT IS DUMB AS SHIT.

“That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”

The planchette swerved to GOOD BYE. Quite unnecessarily, the board and planchette then lifted off my lap and executed a few performative yet terrifying rotations in the air before crashing to the porch floor.

Chapter 17

You may recall me mentioning at the onset of this narrative that, even from a young age, my obsession with becoming the Deliverance banjo boy had dominated my psyche in such a way as to eclipse most normal human interests and concerns—things like family, love, friendship, money, sex, success, personal growth, etc. While that was all true, I’d had some friends and even a few girlfriends over the years.

The day after I Ouija-chatted with the ghost of Blockbuster Video, my Aunt Mabel called to let me know that one such friend had just been struck and killed by a car while he attempted to pogo stick across a busy highway during rush hour on a stupid dare. My friend’s name was Zuneral. Though Zuneral and I hadn’t spoken in years, we’d grown up on the same street in the westside suburbs of Cleveland and had been close in grade school and high school.

Despite the tragic circumstances of the call, I was glad to hear from my Aunt Mabel, as it had been a few months since we’d last spoken. Aunt Mabel was essentially my mom. She and my Uncle Monty had been my legal guardians ever since my parents had died tragically when I was only six while attempting to walk with stilts across a busy highway during rush hour on a stupid dare.

Aunt Mabel and Uncle Monty had raised me after that. Well, strictly speaking, Aunt Mabel had been the one to do the raising. Because shortly after my parents died and I moved in with my aunt and uncle, Uncle Monty finally got lucky playing the Rolling Cash 7 lottery game, nabbing a not-too-shabby $410,000 jackpot. It was just enough money for Uncle Monty to purchase the one thing he’d always wanted: “Supportive Premature Burial” services at the local cemetery.

Supportive Premature Burial, or SPB, was a premium cemetery service created specifically for well-to-do individuals who were not quite ready to die, but, nevertheless, were more than ready to abandon the troubles, trials, tribulations, pursuits, pleasures, pains, successes, and failures of above-ground human life for the solitude of the grave. After you paid for the service and filled out all the necessary paperwork, you met your SPB team at your pre-purchased cemetery plot on your scheduled burial day, where you then stripped naked and lay down in a specialized, high-tech, comfort-optimized casket. Your SPB team then fitted your body with various medical monitoring and life support instruments—chest electrodes, a pulse oximeter, a blood pressure cuff, an IV line, and the like—in addition to a plastic tube to deliver food, water, and medication to your mouth, as well as urinary and fecal catheters to transport your bodily wastes away from your casket to a nearby septic system. Properly ventilated and temperature controlled, your casket featured a digital thermostat mounted to one of the inner panels that you could easily adjust should things get too warm or chilly down there.

Once everything was ready, your team sealed your casket shut and gently lowered you down into your grave before a dude in a backhoe loader rolled up to backfill the hole.

And that was that. Other than being pulled back up in case of a serious medical emergency, you just laid there in your temperature-controlled coffin eating three meals of gourmet puréed food a day, drinking fluids, shitting, pissing, sleeping, and staring up at the underside of your coffin lid (there was a small light you could turn on if you wanted to) until you finally died and things like temperature control and food service no longer mattered.

You were never trapped. If you ever wanted out for any reason, you simply had to press a button that was housed within a small, easily accessible, bubble-shaped enclosure located on the left side of the coffin near your hip. Also, if you chose to pay a little extra, you could have speakers and an LCD touchscreen positioned directly above your face so you could watch TV and browse the internet. In fact, the vast majority of SPB customers went with the TV/internet package option.

Not my Uncle Monty, though. My uncle just wanted to lie down there in the dark, in the silence!

Now seventy-seven-years old, Uncle Monty had been lying down there alive in his coffin for thirty-seven years. Since that time, he’d been exhumed only five times: once to have his appendix removed, another time to have his gallbladder taken out, two other times to treat two separate but mild heart attacks, and most recently to treat a mild stroke. My aunt visited him most afternoons, sat beside his grave and talked to him through a two-way communication device that resembled an old drive-in movie speaker fastened to a steel rod. And even after I’d given them a million dollars immediately after receiving my inheritance, the dude still didn’t want to come up out of the ground to enjoy life a little.

Anyhow, my point is simply that Uncle Monty wasn’t around when I was a kid, and Aunt Mabel raised me by herself.

“How are things in Georgia, sweetie?” my aunt asked me after breaking the news to me about my friend Zuneral.

“Eh, you don’t want to know, Aunt Mabel.”

“Oh, but of course I do!”

“Well, let’s see. My house is haunted by the fucking ghost of Blockbuster Video. My only neighbor is another haunted house, this one haunted by the ghosts of five serial killers named Zaid, Zaird, Zightened, Zerrified, and Zorrified, of which I’m afraid, scared, frightened, terrified, and horrified, respectively. Let’s see, what else? Oh, I surgically removed one of my kidneys and turned it into a kidney butler. His name is Vermiculus. He rules. I also nearly sold my soul to The Devil at the crossroads to become a banjo virtuoso. Then, using a Ouija board, I failed to get three of my great-great-great-great grandmothers to agree to let me resurrect their skeletons so that I could borrow their menopauses to give to The Devil. Oh, I also spent a good deal of time stumbling around town drunk and dressed up like a sad clown while holding a fistful of worms and maggots, occasionally saying, ‘Why, I’ll eat this fistful of squirming worms and maggots ’cause I just don’t give a heck!’ to complete strangers. I also briefly played the washboard in a death metal band before they fired me because I suck. Then I joined a porch thief gang but got fired because I done robbed my own damn front porch.”

“Oh, well, at least it sounds like things are interesting for you down there!”

“I guess so.”

“So are you still trying to become that…that…boy?

“The Deliverance banjo boy. It’s okay to say it, Aunt Mabel. It’s not a bad word.”

Neither my aunt nor uncle had ever been very supportive of my dream.

“Well, I went to visit your Uncle Monty yesterday, and he said he thinks you should give that business up already—that you’ve wasted enough of your life on it!”

“Wasting my life? Really? Says the guy who’s been lying voluntarily buried alive in a coffin for the last forty years? And what would that old coot have me do instead? Bury myself alive just like he did?”

“Yes, actually. That’s exactly what he thinks you should do, honey. He thinks you’d be much happier that way. He also said he strongly suspects you’re a pedophile.”

“I’m pedophile—not a pedophile. Aunt Mabel, listen to me: You tell that lazy, no-good, worthless, good-for-nothing living corpse that instead of giving other people advice about their lives, maybe he should take some responsibility for his own life, and—oh, I don’t know—maybe crawl up out of the fucking ground every now and then to take his poor old wife out for a nice dinner and then maybe screw her brains out!”

“Tim! Watch your language!”

“You know it’s true, Aunt Mabel!”

“Tim, your uncle’s not a bad person. He’s just set in his ways, is all. And I’m used to the way he is. I’m fine with just talking to him in the cemetery every day. To be perfectly honest, I don’t even know if I’d want him coming back out of the grave at this point!”

“If you say so, Aunt Mabel. Hey, forget I said anything about it. I didn’t mean to start an argument.”

Anyhow, back to my friend Zuneral, the reason for Aunt Mabel’s call. Although Zuneral’s parents’ last name was Perkins, Zuneral hadn’t shared that name with them: For some reason, his parents had named him the mononym “Zuneral,” as if the boy were destined to become some sort of celebrity like Prince, Sting, Bono, Moby, Beyoncé, Cher, Drake, Morrissey, or Liberace.

Zuneral hadn’t become a celebrity. Far from it. After earning his accounting degree at Syracuse University, he moved back to Cleveland. At the time of his tragic death, he’d been working as an accountant for the same local welding equipment manufacturer that hired him more than two decades ago.

On the phone, Aunt Mabel informed me that in six days, Zuneral’s family would be holding a formal, structured ceremony to honor and remember him, celebrate his life, and lay his body to rest in a cemetery, as was the custom. In fact, there’s a very specific and common English word for this type of ceremony—my aunt even used the word when I spoke with her—but for the life of me, I can’t remember it!

Anyhow, I immediately made arrangements to fly to Cleveland to attend Zuneral’s…damn it, I still can’t think of the stupid word! I think it might rhyme with “numeral,” but I’m not sure.

Needless to say, Zuneral’s…(damn it!) was a sad affair.

Shit, even Vermiculus used the word when I returned home two days later. “Sir, how was Zuneral’s ______?” he’d asked me.

Ah, well. I mean, we shouldn’t be expected to remember ALL the DAMN words, should we?

Chapter 18

During the afternoon on the day after I returned home from Zuneral’s _______, Vermiculus came out onto the front porch where I was seated on the swing sipping an ice-cold cocktail made from sweet tea, fresh lemon juice, mint leaves, and Clom’s homemade, clown tear-infused, fentanyl-spiked, bath salts-salted moonshine—my kidney butler’s very own concoction!

“Lord Carmichael-Wellingtonshire, I daresay, the ghost of Blockbuster Video wants to speak with you,” he announced.

“What makes you say that?”

“Come inside and see for yourself, sir.”

I got up and followed him inside. Sure enough, on the coffee table, the planchette was rattling and bouncing atop the Ouija board as if we were in the midst of an earthquake, the ghost obviously trying to get my attention.

I sat down on the edge of the sofa, placed the board on my knees, touched my fingers to the planchette.

“What’s up, Blockbuster?” I asked, and the planchette immediately began spelling out words.

HEY CAN THE GHOSTS OF THE ZABERNATHY BROTHERS COME OVER TO HANG OUT?

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

NO.

“The same Zabernathy brothers who haunt the house next door? The same Zabernathy quintuplets who were serial killers, rapists, and cannibals when they were alive?”

THE SAME.

“I didn’t even know you knew they existed. What, are you in contact with them?”

I AM.

“How?”

WELL [pause] THEYRE NOT SO FAR AWAY PHYSICALLY. WHICH MEANS WE CAN SENSE EACH OTHER. NOT ONLY THAT [pause] WE CAN COMMUNICATE SOMEWHAT. NOT PEFECTLY. ONLY IN SHORT LITTLE BURSTS. THATS HOW IT WORKS WHEN GHOSTS LIVE IN RELATIVE CLOSE PROXIMITY TO ONE ANOTHER WITHIN THE SAME NEIGBORHOOD. LOOK IT UP IF YOU NEED TO.

“Look it up if I need to? How about you look up my dick if you need to?”

NO POINT IN LOOKING THAT UP. I WOULDNT FIND ANYTHING.

“Very funny. Listen, Blockbuster, we can handle you, but I think that’s about all we can deal with around here—ghost-wise, I mean. Plus I’m pretty sure those ghosts are bound to their house, just as you’re bound to this place. So it’s kind of pointless to even talk about this.”

YES THEY ARE BOUND TO THEIR HOUSE. BUT IF YOU USE THE OUIJA BOARD TO INVITE THEM HERE [pause] THEY CAN LEAVE THEIR HOUSE FOR A SHORT TIME.

“You’re telling me you want me to arrange and host a playdate between the ghost of Blockbuster Video and five evil spirits here in my house?”

YES.

“Like, what would you all even do during such a thing?”

TO BE HONEST [pause] I DONT REALLY KNOW. MAYBE WE WOULD JUST TALK. MAYBE THEY WOULD REGALE ME WITH STORIES OF THEIR HEINOUS CRIMES. MAYBE WE WOULD ALL GET CRAZY AND START TEARING THE HOUSE APART JUST FOR FUN. VERMICULUS COULD CLEAN UP AFTERWARD OF COURSE.

I glanced at Vermiculus, who stood behind me looking over my shoulder reading along with conversation. Trembling in mortal terror, he shook his bulbous head slowly back and forth.

OR MAYBE WE WOULD HAVE SOME WEIRD SEX PARTY. LIKE A BIG INCESTOUS GHOST ORGY [pause] ONE THAT ENDED IN A BIG ORGASMIC EXPLOSION OF HOT STICKY GOOEY ECTOPLASM. AGAIN VERMICULUS COULD CLEAN UP AFTERWARD. THATS WHAT SERVANTS ARE FOR RIGHT? ANYHOW MY POINT IS I DONT KNOW WHAT WOULD HAPPEN ON OUR PLAYDATE. ONLY ONE WAY TO FIND OUT RIGHT?

I glanced up again at my kidney butler’s horrified big-bean face. He continued to shake his head to indicate his strong disapproval of the ghost’s request. I nodded at him confidentially, made a light patting gesture with one hand to let him know he needn’t worry, before turning back to the board.

“Yeah, sorry, Blockbuster. I don’t think this is such a good idea. I’m going to have to say no.”

COME ON TIM. WHEN DO I EVER ASK YOU FOR SHIT?

“Bro, there’s just no way I’m ever inviting the ghosts of Zaid, Zaird, Zightened, Zerrified, and Zorrified Zabernathy into my house. It’s just not happening. Is there some other ghost in the neighborhood that I can invite over for you instead? Like, maybe the ghost of some nice old grandma or grandpa or something?”

EH FUCK OFF YA PANSIES

The Ouija board and planchette then flipped off my lap and clattered onto the floor.

Needless to say, the pissed-off ghost was extra active for the rest of the day and night, opening and closing cupboards and doors, rattling windows, knocking on walls, turning lights off and on, and spilling the milk and orange juice out of the fridge, but it eventually ran out of steam.

Chapter 19

During the afternoon the next day, Vermiculus approached me in the living room, where I sat on the couch sipping ’shine and doomscrolling on my phone, to show me the mosquito that was presently fixed to the back of his pudgy little right hand, the insect’s proboscis planted firmly into his reddish-brown skin as it sucked away contentedly at my kidney butler’s blood.

“Sir, look,” he said, pointing at the thing. “I daresay I think I shall keep it as a pet!”

“That’s not a pet. That’s a pest. Here, let me get it for you.”

I leaned forward, reached out to flick the thing off his hand, but Vermiculus pulled away, took a few steps back, and turned away from me to shield the insect. “Verily, I think I shall keep it as my pet!”

“Alright, fine. But all your pet is ever gonna do is give you red bite marks that itch after it’s done sucking your blood like a vampire. I’m tellin’ you, V, no one keeps mosquitos as pets.”

“I’ll be the first then,” he said. Smitten with the thing, Vermiculus held his right hand close to his black-button eyes as he delicately stroked the insect’s folded-down wings with the tip of his pinky. “Indeed, I daresay a little blood is a small price to pay for the companionship of a beautiful little critter such as this.”

“Hey, if you wanted a pet, all you had to do was say something. How about you ditch the bug, and we go into town and get you a nice goldfish or a hamster or something?”

“No, thank you, sir.” His eyes remained fixed on the bloodsucking insect. “I think I shall name her Megan-Megan-Megan.”

“Why not just Megan?”

“Because she looks more like a Megan-Megan-Megan,” he said with one hundred percent seriousness.

“And how do you know it’s a she?”

“Because only female mosquitos bite and drink the blood of people and animals. The male’s proboscis isn’t strong enough to pierce skin. Males can only feed on flower nectar and fruit juices.”

“Okay, mister entomologist. If you’re so smart, then you’ll also know that all you’ll ever be to a mosquito is food. A big blood bag. You get that, right?”

“I daresay I think our bond is deeper than that.”

I shook my head in bewilderment. “If you say so, V.”

After carefully trapping Megan-Megan-Megan inside an upturned shot glass on the kitchen table, Vermiculus took a clear glass mixing bowl from the kitchen cupboard and went outside. He returned a minute later, the bowl half-filled with dirt, rocks, grass, and wildflowers. He placed a soup bowl of water inside the larger bowl, shoring it with dirt and rocks to form a pond. After he carefully transferred Megan-Megan-Megan into her makeshift terrarium, Vermiculus stretched a piece of cling wrap snugly over the top and used a toothpick to poke one hundred holes in the film.

I watched him perform this apparently very serious business of perforation/aeration, listening to him count out loud to one hundred as he carefully poked the film. Why there had to be exactly one hundred holes, I didn’t know. Who’s to say what goes on in the mind of a kidney butler?

***

Megan-Megan-Megan the mosquito lived for another ten days. During that time, Vermiculus periodically pulled back the film and let the insect crawl onto his hand to sip his blood.

It flew away just twice, the first time for only a minute before Vermiculus gently captured it in his hands like a firefly and safely returned it to the bowl.

The second time it escaped, Vermiculus lost sight of the mosquito completely—kidney butlers weren’t known for having the best eyesight—so he asked me to help him look for it. Talk about trying to find a needle in a haystack. We searched every room of the house for the better part of two hours, careful to watch where we stepped, but no luck. Vermiculus was beside himself. However, a couple hours later, to my kidney butler’s great relief and happiness, Megan-Megan-Megan appeared from seemingly out of nowhere to land on his hand.

Needless to say, when Megan-Megan-Megan finally gave up the ghost in her terrarium on day ten, Vermiculus was in pretty bad shape.

“Sir, can we have a funeral for her?” he asked, tears streaming down his big, swollen, convex face.

“V, no one holds funerals for mosquitoes.”

“But she was my pet!”

“We don’t even have funerals for cats and dogs, typically. I mean, sure, I suppose we can say a word in her memory before you, you know, dispose of her.”

“Sir, why should Megan-Megan-Megan’s life and death be any less important than the life and death of a human—of a human king or queen no less?”

“I don’t know, man. It might not be fair, but that’s just how it is.”

Vermiculus’s slash mouth curved down into an angry-looking grimace. “Sir, I insist we have a lavish funeral for Megan-Megan-Megan, one at a cost of no less than…one million dollars!”

“A million dollars! You’re out of your mind!”

But he was adamant about it. Persistent, too. In fact, the bugger wouldn’t let up about it at all! So what else could I do other than plan and pay for a million-dollar funeral for a common house mosquito???

***

As it turned out, spending one million dollars on a funeral wasn’t as easy as you might think it would be. Even after paying to have a fifty-foot tall marble obelisk grave marker erected at the center of my front yard, a gravedigger to bore a 3-inch, 27-foot deep hole at the foot of the obelisk (Vermiculus insisted the grave be 27 feet deep—why, I don’t know—again, who’s to say what goes on in the mind of a kidney butler?), a florist to fill my front yard with three truckloads and 5,000 tons worth of elaborate flower arrangements, a caterer to supply gourmet catering for 300 people, and a jeweler to make a custom-cut 2.3-carat diamond coffin (again, Vermiculus insisted Megan-Megan-Megan be buried in a diamond coffin), even then I still had $350,000 left over. Sure, I could’ve bought more flowers and catering or a bigger obelisk, could’ve even hired a throng of professional mourners, but I didn’t realize I’d underspent until the morning of the funeral.

However, Vermiculus insisted I spend the full million on funeral-related expenses before the day was over. He even had an idea on how to do so, though the idea involved a broad sense of the word “spend.”

His idea required cold hard cash, which, luckily, I kept in abundance in a safe in my room. That morning, I opened my safe and took out $350,000 in short banded stacks of hundred dollar bills, tossing them into a clothes hamper. Carrying the hamper with me, I grabbed a bottle of charcoal lighter fluid that sat on the front porch railing on my way to the gravesite.

Beyond a great cluster of folding tables that had been set up near the front of the house, each table topped with covered steel pans containing sundry gourmet foods, Vermiculus and a local priest stood near the towering obelisk, which had “Megan-Megan-Megan” engraved on its base. The gravedigger, for his part, stood off in the wings at a respectful distance.

Last week, I’d printed a stack of invitations to Megan-Megan-Megan’s public funeral and deposited them in mailboxes all throughout the countryside and tacked them onto telephone poles in Creecraw. At Vermiculus’s insistence, I also posted an obit in the Creecraw Gazette: “Megan-Megan-Megan of Creecraw, a common house mosquito and beloved pet of local kidney butler Vermiculus, passed away peacefully surrounded by her owner and her owner’s employer at an estimated age of 2 to 4 weeks. A graveside funeral service for Megan-Megan-Megan will be held on…”

However, I hadn’t expected anyone to actually show up, as much due to the preposterous nature of the funeral as to the locals’ fear of my house, notoriously haunted as it was.

And I was right. Though about a dozen people stood at the end of my driveway, I could tell they wouldn’t come any closer. These folks probably only stopped by to see if the whole thing was a joke. Regardless of if they thought it was a joke or not, they weren’t laughing. Morbidly curious, perhaps, they gawked at us without joining us. The only two gawkers I recognized among them were Old Merl McNasty and the rosary lady.

Hugging the hamper with one arm, I waved to them with my free arm. They didn’t wave back.

Even the local pastor—Pastor Arnold from nearby Creecraw Southern Baptist Church—had agreed to officiate the funeral only very reluctantly and only after being promised an exorbitant donation.

When I reached the gravesite, I removed the bottle of charcoal lighter fluid from the hamper, dumped the money onto the ground, and pulled a Bic lighter out of my front pants pocket. Barely visible, the miniscule diamond coffin containing the dead mosquito lay in the dirt next to the hole.

Pastor Arnold’s eyes flitted nervously from the pile of cash to the bottle of charcoal lighter fluid in my one hand to the lighter in my other, the worry plain on his jowly, round face.

“You know, there’s other ways we can spend the rest of the funeral budget,” I said to Vermiculus. “Like, we could pick a charity or two and donate the rest of it in honor and memory of Megan-Megan-Megan. We could even just order three hundred fifty thousand dollars’ worth of Chinese food from Peng’s.” I raised a pair of air quotes when I said “Chinese food.”

“Indeed, sir, those are both excellent ideas. However, I daresay I’d prefer to stick to the plan of burning the money in a sort of ceremonial fire for Megan-Megan-Megan.”

“Okay, suit yourself.”

“Or, ya know, ya could perhaps give some more money to the good cause of the church?” Pastor Arnold chimed in, smiling obsequiously.

“Indeed, that’s an excellent idea, too, Pastor Arnold,” Vermiculus said. “However, again, I prefer to use the money as fuel for a ceremonial fire to honor the deceased.”

“But that would be such a terrible waste!” said the pastor. “Think of all the good this money could do. You could feed the poor and help care for the sick!”

I shot the pastor a look of disapproval. “Pastor, with all due respect, we paid you to come out here today to say a graveside funeral service, not lecture us on matters of morality.” I stepped forward, flipped the spout open on the lighter fluid.

“It’s also illegal to burn money!” the clergyman added.

I gave him another sharp look. “Really, Pastor? Okay, Pastor MORALITY!” I hunched down, grabbed two bundles of Benjamin Franklins from the pile, tossed them to him. “We good now, Pastor?”

“Yes, yes, I…I think we’re good now,” he said under his breath while staring guiltily at the money in his hands.

I soaked the pile of cash with the charcoal lighter fluid, set it ablaze, took a step back. “You can go ahead and get started now, Pastor.”

After a brief greeting and opening remarks, the pastor read Psalm 23 and Psalm 27. He then said a short eulogy. Rather predictably, the eulogy focused on the value of all life—on the value of even God’s tiniest creatures. But, given the circumstances, what else was he supposed to talk about? After the pastor entrusted the mosquito’s body to the earth, the gravedigger shuffled in to lower the tiny diamond coffin into the grave using a miniature version of a casket lowering device.

While the gravedigger backfilled the grave with a shovel, Vermiculus wept profusely and rolled around in the grass and dirt, beating the ground with his little fists.

***

“Man, what are we gonna do with all this food?” I said as we were wrapping things up.

“I’d be glad to take it to the church and offer it to my parishioners, many of whom are very poor,” Pastor Arnold offered.

Vermiculus, who’d gotten ahold of himself finally, said, “That’s a splendid idea, Pastor Arnold. However, I daresay we’ll use the food and flowers to fuel a bonfire to honor Megan-Megan-Megan.”

“But that would just be more senseless waste!”

“Pastor,” I said in a reprimanding tone, “what did I tell you about the lectures?”

The pastor left. At my request, the gravedigger stuck around to help me drag some junk sitting behind the gas station to my front yard, including an old picnic table, a few wooden chairs, and several wooden pallets. After we got the fire started, we brought over more wood from the stack of firewood that sat on the side of the house, added it to the growing flames. Once the bonfire was good and hot, the flames jumping several feet high, the three of us began carrying the food pans to the fire and dumping their contents into the blaze—grilled lobster tails, pan-seared bluefin tuna, bacon-wrapped scallops, Japanese wagyu filet mignon, veal scallopini with fresh white truffles, herb-crusted grilled rack of lamb with mint chimichurri, Beluga caviar…

It took a while, but we eventually incinerated all the food and flowers. I gave the gravedigger a generous tip after we finished, and he left. By the time the sun began to set, the fire died down to a wide, knee-high mound of smoldering red-orange embers from which a thin ribbon of white smoke twisted into the darkening sky.

Vermiculus and I were starving, as we hadn’t eaten all day long. We went inside to get something to eat, but there was no food in the house. So we drove into town and got some goddang Taco Bell—definitely the highlight of the day for me.

Chapter 20

The next day, I got to thinking about the sad states of my social life and love life. I realized I might benefit from some human company (no offense to corporate ghosts and kidney butlers), perhaps even human company of a romantic nature. All of which is to say I decided to pursue yet another new adventure: online dating.

Because why not?

However, I soon came to learn that the pickings were slim for those of us in my neck of the backwoods looking to date locally. Because even after I set up profiles on many of the popular dating apps and sites—Match, eharmony, Hinge, OkCupid, Bumble, Tinder, It’s Just Lunch, FarmersOnly.com, etc.—I just wasn’t getting any matches, likes, swipes, flirts, or messages. I wondered if some of these women were put off by my profile pic or maybe the claim in my profile that I was the “actual Deliverance banjo boy.”

I’d nearly given up on the whole damn awkward thing when I finally got a hit on one of the lesser known but oldest online dating sites out there—You Don’t Have to Be Lonely at Bog Witches Only Dot Com—which catered specifically toward bog witches and anyone willing to date one. Seemed a local bog witch from my area known only as “The Bog Witch at Old Crub Lane” had liked my profile and wanted to chat with me. As I recalled, Old Crub Lane was not far from my digs.

In her profile pic, the bog witch basically looked like the dead bathtub lady from The Shining, only a good deal plumper and slightly more clothed: She wore what I assumed was a sort of long, tattered, colorless bog witch dress. Her profile didn’t include any other information.

I knew I couldn’t rightly fault the woman for being a tad hard on the eyes—she was an honest-to-goodness bog witch, after all. Also, beggars can’t be choosers, right? So I accepted her message request and immediately began chatting with her:

Deliverance Banjo Boy: Hello there!

Bog Witch: Are ye really that banjo boy from that movie?

Deliverance Banjo Boy: Why, yes, I am! It’s nice to meet you. How are you? Do you have a name other than “Bog Witch at Old Crub Lane”?

Bog Witch: My name is Daisy, but I don’t like to be called by that name or any other name. If ye want to see me, ye can come by my bog tomorrow at sunset.

Deliverance Banjo Boy: OK, I’ll be there.

Bog Witch: Be sure to bring ye banjo.

Seated on my sofa, I glanced from my laptop screen to the corner of the room where my new banjo rested against the wall in its case. I knew if I brought it along with me to see the bog witch, no doubt she’d want to hear me play. And when I couldn’t deliver the goods, she’d know I was a fraud.

So what the bog witch didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

Deliverance Banjo Boy: Sorry. I don’t have a banjo at the moment. Porch thieves done stole it.

Bog Witch: That’s too bad. I got me one though. Ye can play mine.

Deliverance Banjo Boy: Unfortunately, I can’t play ANY banjo right now. See, I sprained my hand the other day.

Bog Witch: That’s too bad.

Deliverance Banjo Boy: Yeah. Anyhow, I’ll need your address.

Bog Witch: I don’t have no address. Just come out to the bog on Old Crub Lane and look for me. I’m not hard to find.

With that, the Bog Witch at Old Crub Lane left the chat.

Chapter 21

Fuckin’ Klet. Can you believe that? That was the actual first name of the bass player from Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck).

His fucking parents named him that.

What kind of parents name their kid Klet?

Chapter 22

The next day just before sunset, I picked a daisy from my front yard before I approached my pickup to set out for Old Crub Lane.

A daisy for a Daisy, I thought. She ought to like that!

“Sir, are you sure you don’t want me to drive you?” Vermiculus called from the front porch.

“Nah, I’m good, V. Thanks though. And don’t wait up for me.”

Using Google Maps, I found the lane easily enough. It was little more than a narrow dirt track that cut through the area’s thickset, overhanging oak-hickory woods, barely accommodating the width of my truck. At one point, with no signs of a bog in sight after climbing steeply uphill for several minutes, I became concerned that I might’ve gone the wrong direction on the road. However, any concerns I had were dispelled a beat later when the woods opened up on a mountain bog along with an old, weathered sign on the side of the road that warned “BEWARE OF BOG WITCH” in faded, flaking white paint.

I kept driving, followed the road as it bisected the wetland, where on either side of me shallow, interconnected puddles lay between shaggy sedges, tufty grasses, and plump mounds of sphagnum moss in a marbled, wet lattice that glinted crimson-orange with the fast-dying reflected light of the setting sun. After the lane curved around a small copse of white pine up ahead, I saw her standing about a hundred feet away from the road out near the middle of the bog, a gnarled staff gripped in one gnarled hand. Spreading out from her haglike form, a large ash-gray circle blighted the dominant lush green of the surrounding mire, as though some poison seeped through the ground.

I pulled off to the side of the road, parked, pinched the daisy off the passenger seat, got out, shut the door, and stepped down from the slightly elevated surface of the lane to the softer ground of the bog, careful to step over and around those puddles as I made my way out to my date.

“Best not come much closer,” the bog witch said when I arrived within several feet of her. Somewhat expectedly, her voice was a sort of phlegmy, rattling, monstrous grumble. I stopped obediently in my tracks.

“Why’s that?”

“’Cause, if ye come any closer, yer as like to die on account of my cursèd and poisoned bog witch-flesh.”

“Is that so?”

“’Tis.”

“But can’t you use your bog witch powers to lift the curse and cure the poison?”

“Maybe I kin. But I prefer not to.”

I nodded gravely, averted my eyes to the tainted ground, unsure what to say next. I then remembered the daisy. I held it out toward her. “I…I brought you this.”

“I don’t like flowers much. In fact, I don’t like anythin’ much.”

“Oh. Sorry. I didn’t know. I…I was just thinking, you know—a daisy for a Daisy. Get it?”

“I don’t use that name. I told ye that already.”

“Oh, right. You did. Well, sorry.” I tossed the daisy over my shoulder.

“Ye really do look like that Deliverance banjo boy, though,” she said, smiling to reveal a set of slimy, black teeth.

“That’s because I’m him,” I was quick to respond.

“Well, what should we do on our date t’night, banjo boy?”

“I figured we’d go see my friends’ death metal band. They’re called Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck). I know, I know—the name doesn’t make any sense. Before he died and was buried in the pet cemetery, Gage Creed was just a cute little kid, right? But I didn’t come up with the name. Anyhow, the band’s playing on the patio tonight at the Unhappy Honky Tavern. Have you been there before?”

“Naw.”

“Well, I know you just said I can’t get too close to you, but, like, maybe if you ride in the bed of my truck, all the way in the back, maybe we can make it work? The band is pretty good. I used to play the washboard for ’em.”

“Is it them porch thieves ye talkin’ about?”

That caught me a little off guard. Either clairvoyance was among the witch’s powers or else everybody knew everybody in Creecraw and its environs.

“Um, I wouldn’t know anything about that.”

“How come ye don’t play washboard for ’em no more?”

“Well…as it turned out, apparently I was a little too good for the band. Overqualified, they said.”

“Ye know, when ye talk, ye don’t sound like how I imagined the Deliverance banjo boy would talk.”

“Yeah, well, everyone talks different, I guess,” I said stupidly.

“As far as that band goes, those poor, dirty, inbred, porch-thievin’, moonshinin’, hillbilly yokels couldn’t play a lick of good music to save their poor, dirty, inbred, porch-thievin’, moonshinin’, hillbilly, yokel asses!”

“Um…yeah, I guess. Maybe. I mean, I suppose they don’t sound as good these days without me on the washboard. Anyway, I guess we can just do something else.”

“Gonna hafta be somethin’ right here. ’Cause I don’t evah leave this here bog.”

“Ever? Oh, are you bound here by magic? By a curse?”

“No. I just don’t like leavin’, is all. So I don’t leave. Evah.”

I nodded politely. “Um, so what do you do for fun around here?”

“Eat snakes and rats, mostly. But I don’t chew on ’em. Instead, I put ’em down with one big gulp. That way, I kin feel ’em slitherin’ and crawlin’ ’round inside muh belly, tryin’ to free themselves. Sometimes they climb back up, other times they climb further down into muh innards. If one manages to climb back up into muh mouth, I bite its head off jus’ as it pokes out muh pie hole. Wanna try?”

I hadn’t noticed that she’d set her staff down and now held a fat bog rat in her right hand, a nice-sized, coiling cottonmouth in her left. She held both animals out toward me.

I forced a strained smile. “Uh, no, thanks.”

The bog witch then effortlessly swallowed the creatures herself, the snake followed by the rat, her neck distending sickeningly to accommodate their descent.

“Well,” I said after a moment, struggling to find words to keep the convo going, “what would you like to do then?”

“Who says we have to do nothin’ other than stand here like posts?”

I slowly nodded in something like somber agreement and grave understanding. “Sure. I suppose we could just stand here and talk.”

“Or we could jus’ stand here and shut the fuck up. I don’t like talkin’ much. Don’t like much o’ anythin’, really.”

“Um, okay.”

We stood there for I don’t know how long, she staring at me with her dead-ass, zombielike, spoiled milk-colored eyes, my own eyes alternately flitting from her horrid visage to the poisoned ground separating us as the unhelpful sun continued to dip further below the distant, darkening hilltops.

“Uh-oh, here they come!” the bog witch eventually said with a cackle. My eyes shot up to her face just as the snake and rat simultaneously poked their heads out of her agape, lipless mouth. Her black teeth then snapped together like a miniature guillotine—blood spurted out as the heads tumbled to the ground. The decapitated animals then slid back down the witch’s hideously swollen throat.

I watched as the two heads continued to twitch on the ground. A beat later, the snake head shimmied over to the rat head, opened its jaws wide, and swallowed the damn thing, which of course only resulted in the rat head immediately rolling out the severed end of the snake head, before both heads ceased moving.

“Ugh!” I uttered. I pointed at the heads. “Did you just use your bog witch magic to make that happen?”

“Naw,” the bog witch smiled. “That was jus’ mother nature, is all. Instinct and nerves. Hey, I have an idea.” She grabbed a tattered fold of her bog witch dress, snapped the fabric hard like maybe she was trying to whip the dust out of it, and out popped a banjo, which she snatched out of the air before it could fall to the ground. To be honest, it was one of the best bits of magic I’d ever seen in person, sleight of hand or otherwise.

“This here’s muh banjo. Cain’t play it none myself. Play me a song, banjo boy.”

She kicked the little heads off to the side, set the banjo down on the ground in front of her, grabbed her staff, and took a few steps back to give me room to come safely forward.

“As I was saying before,” I said nervously, “I can’t play right now. I sprained my hand. Sorry. Maybe some other time, though.”

“Which hand did ye sprain?”

I looked down at my hands, turned them palm-side up, glancing from one to the other. Which one? I thought. Doesn’t matter which one.

“This one,” I said raising my right hand, as if that in itself was proof that the hand was injured. “My pluckin’ hand.”

“I’ll heal it for ye with my magic so ye can play for me.” She then pointed her staff at my hand, started mumbling bog witch mumbo jumbo: “Froo-flap, klin-klonk, voom-yar-gat, glake-blarg, kleck-glack, frelk-spleck…”

“Hey, ya know what, lady? I’m actually not feelin’ so hot all of the sudden. I have a stomachache. Came outta nowhere. We’re gonna have to call it a night. I have to go home now. I…I had a really nice time, though. Bye.”

I turned away, started running across the bog back to my truck.

“‘Lady’?” she roared, suddenly enraged. “Did ye just call me ‘Lady’?”

I felt the searing heat of the first volleyball-sized fireball as it whizzed by the left side of my head, singeing my hair before it exploded on the ground several feet in front of me. I glanced back just as the bog witch waved her staff in the air to launch another fireball my way.

I avoided that one and a few more as I hauled ass back to my truck.

Just as I threw open the truck’s driver-side door, the bog witch called out, “Ye cain’t play no banjo! Ye ain’t the Deliverance banjo boy! Ye’s a faker!”

“Yeah, well, at least I’m not a BOG WITCH!” I yelled back at her. “Seriously. Bog witches? Are bog witches even a thing? I bet you’re as fake as me.”

“Are these fireballs I’m shootin’ outta my staff fake, asshole?” she screamed as she cocked back to launch another.

I held up two middle fingers before I slipped into my truck and got the hell out there, fireballs dropping on the road behind my pickup like meteors right up until I made it back into the woods.

Chapter 23

Fuckin’ Clom. Can you believe that? That was the actual first name of the drummer from Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck).

His fucking parents named him that.

What kind of parents name their kid Clom?

I’ll tell ya what kind: SOME DAMN HILLJACKS, that’s what kind!!!

I’m sorry. Shouldn’t have said that. I shouldn’t stereotype and refer to people using harmful slurs. I know, I know—I’m working on it, trying to be better. Plus, I’m sure people up north and folks out west give their kids weird names, too, sometimes.

Forget I even said it.

(Clom though? Really? Fuckin’ Clom??? Jesus Christ!)

Chapter 24

Needless to say, after I got home from my date with the bog witch, I took a bottle of Clom’s fentanyl-spiked, bath salts-salted, clown tear-infused moonshine out to my front porch and got friggin’ JRUNK. I mean, what the hell else was I supposed to do?

By the way, “JRUNK” just means really hammered.

Sometimes when I got JRUNK, I got to questioning my life choices, as I did on this particular night. Feeling troubled, I took out my cellphone and dialed my Bulgarian plastic surgeon, Dr. Zorchelk Kuzmanov, who, as far as I knew, still lived in political, professional, and criminal exile in the coastal town of Point Plonk, Antarctica—the only inhabited city on the frozen continent. I’d not spoken to Zorchelk since I’d returned from Antarctica nearly three years ago after recovering from my complex Deliverance banjo boy surgeries.

“Hello,” he answered.

“Zorchelk! Hello! It’s Tim. It’s been a while. How are you, man?”

“Tim?”

“Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire. Your former patient.”

Arctic silence on the other end—or Antarctic, I should probably say.

“Tim Carmichael-Wellingtonshire,” I repeated. “The Deliverance banjo boy guy? Remember me now?”

“No. Yoouu must…have wrong number, Amerrrican man,” he said, heavily slurring his words.

Dude sounded JRUNKER than me.

“No, I have the right number. A few years ago I traveled to Antarctica to see you, and you performed major plastic surgery on me, including height readjustment—where you cut off my feet and five inches of leg on each side before reattaching my feet, shrinking me from six foot two down to five foot nine.”

“I don’t…don’t remember.”

I was starting to get pissed off now. “Okay,” I paused, took a deep breath, exhaled slowly. “I…I had two penises.” I paused again to let that information sink in. “Remember me now?”

I waited, glad he couldn’t see my face glowing hotly red with embarrassment.

More Antarctic silence on his end.

“I was born with two penises, man. One of them was never functional. Remember? It didn’t have a urethra or any erectile tissue in it—just sort of hung there without purpose. So while you were doing all that other stuff to my body, I had you remove it.”

“I…I don’t…don’t remember.”

I rolled my eyes hard. “C’mon, man! How can you not remember operating on someone with two dicks? Is that something you do every day? I’m pretty damn sure I’m the only person with two dicks you’ve ever operated on.”

“Maybe I did operation, Mr.…Mr. Banjo America. But I don’t remember. Don’t remember probably because I was friggin’…FRIGGIN’ JRONK!”

In case it’s not obvious, JRONK is basically the same thing as JRUNK.

“Well, you were pretty wasted, if I recall. But I thought you handled your alcohol rather well. Either way, that’s no excuse for forgetting that you surgically transformed a man with two penises into the banjo boy from Deliverance.”

“Feed a cold…starve a fever, Mr. Banjo America! It’s sin to steal a pin!” the drunkard inexplicably babbled before laughing abrasively.

“Listen. Never mind that you can’t remember doing the surgeries. Just trust me when I say that you did do them. I’m calling to ask if the surgeries are reversible. In other words, can you turn me back into my old self? Can you make me six foot two again? Can you give me back my old face, my old body?”

“And second dick?”

“No, not the second dick. I don’t want that back. But everything else, yes.”

“Why? Why you want surgeries reversed?”

“Because lately I’ve been thinking maybe this wasn’t such a great idea—this effort to become the Deliverance banjo boy, body and soul—this quest to become something I’m not, something impossible, thereby impeding the natural growth, fulfillment, and discovery of my own true self, whatever that might be.”

“Bro, did you really have two dicks?”

I took a deep breath, not appreciating him changing the subject. “I did,” I said with strained patience.

“That’s wild, man!”

“Never mind the two dicks! I need your help. I need you to turn me back into myself.”

“Man, two Ds. That’s cray-cray!”

“Can you help me or not?”

“No, no, no, Mr. Banjo America. I’m afraid my surgeries, they are irreversible. Not like getting tattoo, no, no. But let me give you advices, yes? I don’t know if I believes in—how you say in English—reincarnation? But if there is reincarnation, my advices is that if you’re ever born with two penises again, instead of going to plastic surgeon to become banjo boy, you go to surgeon to have urethra and erectile tissue put in your nonfunctioning penis to make it work instead. That operation would be much less complicated and much less expensive than becoming banjo boy—and, in my opinion, much more useful. It would lead you to much more—how you say in English?—the good times and the funs? Good-bye!”

That JRONK bastard then hung up on me in a gesture of extraordinary off fleekness.

Chapter 25

Fuckin’ Zorchelk. Can you believe it? That was my Bulgarian plastic surgeon’s actual first name. His fucking parents named him that.

What kind of parents name their kid Zorchelk?

I’ll tell ya what kind: some damn BULGARIAN MOTHERFUCKERS, that’s what kind!

Probably shouldn’t have said that. Sorry.

I’m JRONK!

Chapter 26

I went inside to sleep the booze off. When I woke the next morning, any feelings of regret I’d entertained the night before about getting my plastic surgeries disappeared, as they always did. I went right back to wanting to be the Deliverance banjo boy again, though part of me wished I hadn’t. Because I also went right back to feeling depressed and disappointed that I’d failed thus far to do so.

***

During the following week, whether due to boredom, anger, or some other reason or reasons, the ghost of Blockbuster Video was particularly and obnoxiously active, keeping Vermiculus and I up at night by banging pots and pans, opening and slamming doors, knocking and scratching on the walls, turning our bedroom lights off and on, and generally giving my poor kidney butler at least several good frights a day.

One afternoon I called the damned thing on the Ouija board to see what was up. Seated on the edge of my sofa with the board on my lap, I asked, “So why all the activity lately?” as soon as I established contact. “Are you still upset about the Zabernathy brothers playdate thing?”

“NO IM OVER THAT. WHAT CAN I SAY? [pause] GHOST IS GONNA GHOST.

“It really is immature though, isn’t it? All this pointless noise and slamming doors and throwing shit around? It’s like you’re a bratty, misbehaved little kid or something.”

WHAT ELSE AM I SUPPOSED TO DO?

“Can’t you just give it a rest every now and then? Especially at night when V and I are trying to sleep?”

MAYBE. MAYBE NOT.

“Yeah, well maybe I’ll take Vermiculus, and we’ll move out and leave you here by yourself, huh? Then you can make all the noise you want, except no one would be here to hear it. Ya know, the whole tree falling in a forest thing?”

NAH YOU WOULDNT DO THAT. YOU KINDA NEED TO LIVE HERE FOR YOUR LAME BANJO BOY BULLSHIT.

“It’s not lame. In fact, it’s pedophile!”

DUDE [pause] STOP USING THE WORD PEDOPHILE TO MEAN AWESOME. IM PRETTY SURE YOURE THE ONLY PERSON IN THE WORLD WHO DOES THAT.

“That’s not true. I mean, I just assume other people do. When something is good or cool, we often say it’s ‘sick’ or ‘killer’ or ‘wicked’ or ‘bad’ or ‘nasty.’ Why wouldn’t we do the same thing with the word ‘pedophile’?”

BECAUSE WE JUST DONT. WELL EVERYONE EXCEPT YOUR DUMB ASS.

“Don’t change the damn subject. As I was saying, if I give up on my ‘lame banjo boy bullshit,’ as you call it, I won’t need to live here anymore. Then Vermiculus and I can just leave.”

I REALLY DONT SEE THAT HAPPENING. YOU SEEM COMMITTED TO YOUR LOST CAUSE.

“Thanks for the vote of confidence—I think. Listen, I’m not asking for radio silence here. I’m just asking you to dial it down a little, boss. I mean, you’re fucking scaring poor Vermiculus here half to death.”

YOU EXAGGERATE. VERMICULUS IS FINE.

“How about you chill out from, say, midnight to ten in the morning on most days, huh? That’s not so much to ask, is it?”

HOW ABOUT YOU CHOKE TO DEATH ON MY BIG BLUE SUPERNATURAL NUTS? [pause] I DO WHAT I WANT. YOURE NOT THE BOSS OF ME.

After the Ouija board and planchette flipped off my lap and tumbled to the floor, the refrigerator door and kitchen cupboards started opening and closing by themselves while the ceiling light began flicking off and on.

Fucking prick.

Fucking DEMON!!!

Chapter 27

That night I hung out on the porch, as it was considerably quieter and more peaceful out there than inside. I got friggin’ JRONK and ending up passing out on the swing.

I woke at sunup to a nightmare, but not the usual one about Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Mike Tyson, etc., chasing me through a cornfield. In this other rarer though still recurring nightmare, someone or something called “Chucklesworth” chased me through a cornfield instead.

Now, who or what this Chucklesworth was, I couldn’t tell you. Because whenever I woke from the Chucklesworth nightmare—usually drenched in a cold sweat and stricken stiff with sleep paralysis—the details of the nightmare immediately slipped away no matter how hard my mind tried to hold on to them. All I was ever left with was knowing I’d been chased in a cornfield by someone or something called Chucklesworth, and that Chucklesworth was a hundred times more horrifying than all the monsters in my other recurring nightmare combined.

Anyhow, my heart racing from the nightmare, my head throbbing with my hangover headache, I woke up stark naked and curled in fetal position on the porch floor.

Man, what the fuck is going on? I thought as I pushed myself up from the floorboards.

My clothes weren’t the only things missing: The porch swing was gone, as was my cellphone, my last, nearly empty mason jar of Clom’s moonshine, the end table on which my phone and moonshine had been placed, and my goddamn doormat.

“Damn porch thieves even took my last two swigs o’ ’shine!” I cursed, shaking my fist in the general direction of Lek’s place. “Shit, they even took my damn shoes and socks! What kinda lowlife steals a man’s socks? I’ll tell ya what kind—some GODDANG HILLJACKS, that’s what kind!”

Chapter 28

I bought a new iPhone and a porch swing later that day. To Vermiculus’s and my great relief, the ghost of Blockbuster Video then took nearly two full days and nights off from its efforts at antagonizing us, but only to come back in full maddening force. I tried using the Ouija board again to reach some sort of agreement with the thing, but the FUCKING DEMON wasn’t even answering my calls, so to speak.

Foam ear plugs helped the situation, but only a little.

Unfortunately, I reckoned it was finally time for us to part ways—the ghost of Blockbuster Video and I. However, I wasn’t going to be the one to leave my house, that was for damn sure. But unless someone somewhere in the world said “Blockbuster Video” in front of a mirror a million times, the ghost wasn’t leaving either.

Then I had an idea, one I wasn’t sure would work but thought was worth a shot.

I went online and purchased a second cellphone, a wall mount for the phone, a wireless webcam with a microphone, a small wall mirror, and a long outdoor extension cord. When these items arrived a few days later, I brought them out to the old outhouse that stood in my backyard, a somehow still-intact relic of the property’s pre-indoor plumbing days.

After I hung the mirror on one of the interior walls in the outhouse, I mounted the cellphone directly across from it, plugged the phone into its charger, and plugged the charger into the extension cord. I set the webcam on the floor, positioned it so that it commanded a full view of the entire close space. Lastly, I opened the phone’s built-in text-to-speech tool and instructed it to say “Blockbuster Video” a million times at its fastest setting.

“Blockbuster Video Block Blockbuster Video Blockbuster Video Blockbuster Video…” the phone’s chirpy, robotic voice commenced repeating at a rapid, barely comprehensible clip as I stepped out of the outhouse and closed the rickety door.

After enduring four and half more days of the ghost’s almost nonstop racket, the sound of pots and pans banging in the kitchen abruptly stopped at the same moment the webcam sent me a notification that its motion detection sensor had just been tripped. Lying in bed, I took out my earplugs, snatched my phone from my nightstand, and checked the recorded audio/video footage.

I watched and listened as the cellphone voice chirped its final few utterances of “Blockbuster Video.” After a beat or two of silence, the phone was torn from its mount as if by an invisible hand before being smashed repeatedly against the outhouse wall, its pieces raining down around the webcam—roughly the equivalent of what the murderous ghost typically did to its human summoners. The webcam then flickered momentarily before blinking to a black screen, no doubt destroyed by the enraged ghost, who was now trapped in the outhouse!

“Ha! Yeah, take that, bitch!” I said triumphantly.

“I daresay, sir, I think I shall miss him just a little,” Vermiculus said as I had him pour us each a celebratory whiskey after I told him the good news.

“Man, screw that, V. Good riddance to bad rubbish, I say! Humph!”

Chapter 29

Problem solved. But what now? What to do? I thought over a breakfast of scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage links, hashbrowns, toast, and coffee the next morning.

Watching Vermiculus happily washing the dishes, it occurred to me that I’d been quite idle since getting fired from the porch thief gang. I didn’t even try to learn the banjo anymore. Heck, I didn’t even drunkenly stumble around town dressed as a sad clown while holding a fistful of maggots and worms anymore.

What did I even do with my time these days? Nothing—that’s what. I pretty much just sat around the house all day long doomscrolling on my phone, getting JRONK, and taking occasional breaks to eat garbage food, nap, and jerk off in the bathroom.

“Gotta stay busy—that’s the ticket!” I said, thinking aloud. I glanced up from my cleared breakfast plate, turned toward my kidney butler. “Idle hands are The Devil’s workshop—right, V?”

“If you say so, sir!”

***

I started looking for a new job that morning. However, not a huge fan of stepping outside my front door for much any reason, I restricted my job searching to remote work. By the end of the day, I’d responded to two dozen job listings.

Lo and behold, a company called Laugh Reacts Only Inc. hired me the next day. In my new remote, entry-level position as a “Laugh React Social Media Strategist,” I was given the login information to a dozen fake personal Facebook accounts, each maxed out at 5,000 friends. My job was simply to monitor these accounts, laugh reacting at every post that appeared in the feeds.

Absolutely no exceptions to this rule were allowed: Laugh reacts only—that was the entire point of the enterprise. So, say, for example, you—my hypothetical Facebook friend—just dropped a legitimately funny joke or meme. Well, great. Congrats on that! Here’s your laugh react. But say your joke or meme, in most people’s estimation, was a big, fat dud. Not to worry, because that wouldn’t matter one fig to me. Again, here’s your laugh react! Hope it helps!

Oh, so you just posted on Facebook to tell everyone that your spouse abruptly left you last night, and they want a divorce ASAP?

Yeah, well…

Ah, so you just gave birth to your first child—a baby girl. And here you are propped up in your hospital bed, exhausted, yet you’re positively glowing as the baby’s proud father hands you your daughter to hold for the first time. A beautiful moment, huh?

Maybe. But I’m thinking more like…

Ah, so you posted that the war-torn city in which you live was just bombed again, this latest shameless, unprovoked assault resulting in thousands dead, dying, injured, or displaced?

Sorry to hear that but…

Ah, so you just posted to tell everyone that, after being diagnosed with both early-onset Alzheimer’s and aggressive terminal cancer earlier that morning, you then drove home to discover that your wife and four kids had been murdered and cannibalized by a serial killer while you were at the hospital?

Again, condolences and a thousand apologies, but…

I mean, I didn’t have a choice in the matter. I couldn’t do otherwise: Like it or not, that was my new job! And what did I do when people inevitably cursed me and my perceived heartlessness in the comments? Well, you can probably guess what I did.

Anyhow, the laugh react gig was cool and all, but I was only allowed to put in three five-hour shifts a week. That left me with quite a bit of unoccupied time to fill. So what better time to try my hand at a little amateur journalism!

At the time, I was vaguely interested in writing some nonfiction pieces on arts and culture, but my only real area of expertise was the Deliverance banjo boy and more generally the Deliverance movie and novel. However, my entire purpose here was to turn my thoughts away from the Deliverance banjo boy. So, after two or three self-brainstorming sessions, I came up with a few viable topics, sat my butt down with my laptop, and started clacking them keys.

The first piece I wrote was called “Consider the Zombie.” Here it is in its entirety:

Consider the Zombie
by the Deliverance Banjo Boy

Consider the Romero-style zombie and its subsequent variants, as seen throughout the last nearly six decades of popular culture—in film, books, comics, video games, etc. Typically, a bullet to the head will suffice to kill one, right? Right. But what if my bullet just barely grazes the thing’s already-dead brain? Is that sufficient enough for a kill? Or would that bullet have to pass through, say, another micrometer or two of necrotic brain matter to cause zombie death? Or, say, 5.7869 nanometers? Some even smaller, more specific, infinitesimal amount?

Rather, should we be thinking more in terms of total brain cells destroyed? Then imagine, say, that our bullet destroyed 1,000,000,006 undead brain cells when it grazed our zombie’s rotting brain. Based on total cell count, would that be enough for a kill? Perhaps not. Maybe 1,000,000,007 is the magic number of obliterated brain cells needed to put the monster down for good.

Also, is the specific part of the brain an important factor? For example, must our bullet enter the frontal lobe for a kill? Yet again, we must ask how much of the frontal lobe, exactly how much, must be destroyed. If I, say, plug our zombie dead center in the forehead, but from a considerable distance, so that the tip of my bullet penetrates a mere 4.7892 nanometers into the frontal lobe, destroying, say, exactly 1,723,894,126 brain cells, is that enough to take the damn thing down? Or does our bullet need to penetrate a fraction of a nanometer deeper? Or 73.9824 nanometers deeper? Probably also depends on the size of the bullet too, right? And maybe the damage needs to occur not quite dead center, but rather, say, 46.2 degrees to the upper left. Or 23.6 degrees to the lower right. Or should we be targeting the brain stem or the cerebellum or the occipital lobe instead? If so, the same sort of unanswered questions posed above would apply—and we should demand to know their answers, I argue.

In other words, the popular, prevailing idea of killing zombies with a headshot is a BUNCH OF BULLSHIT, SON! Decapitation? Sure, sure. At least that kind of makes sense. But this whole headshot thing? Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!!!

After I submitted “Consider the Zombie” to nearly a hundred different online and print magazines, I was excited when a pop culture ezine called Dapperboy Jenkins ran the story. Unfortunately, however, they yanked it after only a week due to all the extremely negative reader comments the article received, including death threats to yours truly. Seemed people really loved their conventional zombies that could be easily dropped with a simple undifferentiated headshot.

Not to be deterred, I wrote another piece and promptly sent it to Dapperboy Jenkins. And guess what? They ran it! The piece was called “Consider the Vampire.” Here it is in its entirety:

Consider the Vampire
by the Deliverance Banjo Boy

Consider the vampire, aka nosferatu, vampir, vampyr, upír, strigoi, etc. Largely popularized by Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the Eastern European folklore that helped to inspire that classic novel, the traditional vampire can be destroyed by prolonged exposure to sunlight, decapitation, whole-body burning, the removal (and burning) of the heart, or the driving of a wooden stake through the heart. This last method, I argue, is problematic.

Suppose it’s the middle of the day, and, after witnessing much trouble, horror, and death, you’ve managed to track down the bloodsucker that’s been terrorizing your village to its sunken crypt in a nearby cemetery. Having just removed the lid from the fiend’s coffin, you stand above its sleeping form, a wooden stake gripped in one hand, a hefty mallet in the other. You then carefully position the stake’s sharp point above the creature’s heart and—on the count of three—drive it down with a well-placed mallet strike!

But what if your aim is off? What if instead of properly impaling the heart through its center, your stake barely grazes, say, the heart’s left side? Would that be sufficient enough damage to destroy the beast? Perhaps not. But what if your stake lands just a tad more to the right to take out a teeny-tiny bit more heart-meat with it? Is that sufficient for the kill? Again, perhaps not. However, if we keep moving our hypothetical stake incrementally to the right—say, one nanometer, picometer, or femtometer at a time—at some point, we’re going to get our kill, right? Of course we are. But when, exactly? What is the seemingly magical point (no pun intended) that, for the vampire, will mean the difference between continued vampiric life or permanent death?

Similarly, suppose our aim happens to be true but it is our strength that is wanting, so that our perfectly aimed stake passes through the breastbone, but the sharp tip only barely punctures the heart’s pericardium. Is that enough to dispatch the undead villain? Possibly not. How deep—exactly—must our perfectly aimed stake penetrate the anterior of the vampire’s heart? And does the stake’s width matter? Would an extremely skinny stake get the job done? What about the skinniest “stake” we can imagine: one that is only one molecule of wood wide? Will that do the trick? Possibly not. Maybe we have to widen the thing by adding another column or two of wood molecules—or 27 such columns, or 27,000, or 27,000,000. But at some seemingly magical point (again, no pun intended), our stake will reach the bare minimum thickness needed to successfully dispatch this vampire. But what exactly is that bare minimum thickness, measured down to the last goddamn molecule?

We should all demand to know this, I argue.

And why wood? Is their something special about wood? If so, what? Something magical? Like, why shouldn’t metal or stone work just as well, if not better, for this noblest of purposes? Would a composite material do the trick—a stake made from a mix of wood fibers and plastic resin? Maybe if the ratio of wood fibers to plastic resin were high enough, eh? But what would the bare minimum wood-to-plastic ratio need to be—exactly?

We should all demand to know this, I argue.

In summary, the popular idea of killing vampires with a wooden stake is stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid!!!

Sadly, “Consider the Vampire” met with the same manner of consistently negative reader comments as “Consider the Zombie”: the same sort of name-calling directed at me, the author, with many readers dubbing me a “bore,” a “killjoy,” a “party pooper,” a “stick-in-the-mud,” a “wet blanket,” and the like; accusations of me greatly overthinking things while violating various logical fallacies; and even more death threats. As a result, Dapperboy Jenkins took the story down after only two days.

However, undiscouraged, I kept my chin up, got back in the writer’s seat, banged out “Consider the Werewolf.” The editors at Dapperboy Jenkins, to their credit, agreed to give me one more chance, and published the piece. Here it is:

Consider the Werewolf
by the Deliverance Banjo Boy

And representing perhaps the dumbest classic monster death restriction of them all, consider the MOTHAFUCKING werewolf, MY TINY LITTLE SONS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Vulnerability to silver is the main thing we’re dealing with here, right? More specifically, if you’re in a fight with a werewolf, silver bullets are usually your best bet.

So, like, if I shoot a great, big, snarling, teeth-gnashing, nine-foot-tall werewolf in its little toe with a silver bullet, does the thing just keel over and die? Maybe not. How about a silver bullet to the arm or shoulder? The thigh? A gut shot?

Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe.

Certainly, we can all probably agree that a silver bullet to the heart or brain would do the trick. But how far must that bullet penetrate into either organ to cause death? In either case, how much tissue—exactly how much, down to the last goddamn, motherflippin’ molecule—must be destroyed to dispatch the frightful beast?

We should all demand to know this, I argue.

And what about the purity of the silver used to cast our nifty silver bullets? The vast majority of silver in the world is sterling silver, which is actually an alloy composed of 92.5% silver and 7.5% copper, typically. But is sterling silver pure enough to slay our big bad wolf? Or do we need 100% purity? At a purity of 99.9%, even so-called “fine silver” has trace impurities. If we do need 100% pure silver for our bullets, we’re kind of screwed, because pure silver doesn’t really exist in the world, at least not in any practical or easily accessible form.

Issues of purity aside, will silver-plated bullets work or must our bullets be solid silver through and through? Logic suggests that a silver-plated bullet would be sufficient, because only the bullet’s outer surface comes into direct contact with the werewolf’s flesh. But what if like so much cheap jewelry, our silver-plated bullet is chipped or scratched, so that tiny areas of the ugly gray lead that lies beneath the thin silver veneer are exposed? Surely, one or two tiny chips shouldn’t make a difference, right? But what if there’s more than one or two chips, and those chips aren’t so tiny, eh? What then? At what point—measured down to the last goddamn, motherflappin’ molecule of silver plating—is our “silver bullet” no longer effective?

We should all demand to know these things, I vehemently argue.

In other words, and in summary, the idea of killing werewolves with silver bullets is fucking STUPID, STUPID, STUPID, STUPID!!!

Regrettably, “Consider the Werewolf” met with similar criticisms as “Consider the Zombie” and “Consider the Vampire.” Dapperboy Jenkins yanked the piece from their site only three hours after posting it. The editor-in-chief messaged me shortly thereafter to tell me I was the worst amateur journalist they’d ever worked with, demanded I never submit my work to them again, and closed his message by saying, “Fuck you!”

I messaged him right back: “Hey, if those stories are so bad, why did you morons publish the damn things in the first place, huh? Fuck, ME? No, fuck YOU, BUDDY!”

He messaged me right back: “Fuck ME? No, fuck YOU!”

I immediately responded: “Fuck ME? No, fuck YOU!”

We spent nine straight hours going back and forth like that, both of us wanting to get the last “Fuck ME? No, fuck YOU!” in, each of us testing the other’s endurance for this little game.

At one point during the back-and-forth, I had to start my work shift. Very tired by that time, I soon lost focus as I switched between laugh reacting to Facebook posts and emailing “Fuck ME? No, fuck YOU!” to the editor. As a result, I accidently clicked the love react on a Facebook post showing a video clip of a rad English bulldog riding a skateboard. Within five minutes, my supervisor at Laugh Reacts Only emailed me to tell me I was fired.

In the end—tired, weary, and bored stiff—I let that scrawny, pencil-necked, horn-rimmed glasses-wearin’, MFA-havin’, chai latte-drinkin’, fancy European cigarettes-smokin’, Massachusetts-livin’ dorky editor win the stupid, immature game.

Needless to say, the whole thing was off fleek as heck.

Chapter 30

But as it turned out, my failed attempts at washboarding, semi-pro porch theft, online dating, remote computer work, and amateur journalism—as disappointing as they were—ended up putting my life in perspective for me in a positive way. In fact, the day after I was fired from Laugh Reacts Only, I decided to return to my roots, to what was important to me, to why I’d moved down to the blue hills and hollows of northern Georgia in the first place.

Because in a sort of epiphany the next morning, I realized my highly peculiar life goal had never really been my problem: My problem was my long-held insistence on perfectly realizing that goal. I also recalled at this moment a rather pertinent old expression: Perfection is not attainable; but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.

With these positive thoughts in mind, I then decided I’d make a few final gestures toward getting as close to my goal as was possible: In a word, if I couldn’t have perfection, I could at least chase it to achieve a sort of excellence.

First off, if I’d never be able to play the goddang banjo like the Deliverance banjo boy, nothing was stopping me from pretending to do so. I therefore decided I’d sit out on my porch swing for a few hours most days and pretend to play my banjo as a recording of “Dueling Banjos” ran in the background. What’s more, I’d invite the public to witness this spectacle as a sort of local-color roadside attraction, one that paid tribute to the movie Deliverance.

Secondly, in order to take on the level of rural poverty that would befit the actual Deliverance banjo boy, I gave away the vast majority of my wealth, retaining only enough to provide myself with a small monthly stipend, one well beneath the regional poverty line, to cover basic necessities, as well as a separate sum of money that would serve as a generous severance package for Vermiculus. I donated the rest—some seven million dollars in cash, real estate, equities, crypto, and other assets—to the American Rural South and Appalachia Advocacy Institute (ARSAAI), an organization committed to the advancement of the economic, educational, social, and cultural welfare of people living in the rural American South, including by initiatives aimed at dismantling inaccurate and harmful classist stereotypes associated with the region’s people.

Why donate to that particular organization? My longing to become the Deliverance banjo boy was both complicated and very personal, and its voluntary pursuit was something I would never recommend to another human being. In pursing it, my intention had never been to romanticize, fetishize, or otherwise contribute to the perpetuation of harmful stereotypes. But due to the close proximity in which I’d knowingly placed myself to issues concerning the South’s rural poor, I felt a certain connection and sympathy toward those issues and, if not an obligation, then a strong urge to help. As such, it made me feel good to know that, in giving away my wealth to take on a mantle of abject rural poverty—a condition in which I chose to be—I was helping folks who did not choose to be in that condition climb out of it.

Of course, this also meant I had before me the extremely unpleasant task of letting Vermiculus go. After all, what sort of properly dirt-poor Deliverance banjo boy kept a butler, even one of the kidney variety?

***

“V, come…over here. I need to talk to yooouu,” I said from where I sat on the edge of my sofa, a tumbler of whiskey gripped in one hand, slurring my words a little because I was friggin’ JRONK.

I mean, how was I supposed to do something like this sober, right?

“Of course, milord,” Vermiculus said before he took the seven short steps from his usual post at the edge of the kitchen counter to halt across from me on the other side of the coffee table.

“V, you know you my dog, right?”

“Indeed, I do, sir. As you are mine.”

“And you know you’re my tiny little son, right?”

“Indeed, I do, sir. As you are mine.”

“And you know you’re my tiny little decorative paper Halloween bat, right?”

“Indeed, I do, sir. As you are mine.”

“Well, man, unfortunately, I…I have to let you go, V.”

My kidney butler’s black slash of a mouth stretched open into a cartoonish oval of surprise. “Let me go, sir?”

“Yeah. See, it’s now time for me to become as much like the Deliverance banjo boy as I can possibly become. That means I no longer require the services of a butler. Even if I wanted to keep you on, I just gave away all of my money. Well, most of it. Anyhow, I’d never be able to continue to afford you.”

“Then I’ll work for free, sir.”

“Like hell you will. Listen to me. You’re an outstanding kidney butler. The best! Any house in need of a butler—any kind of butler—would be lucky to have you. I already wrote and printed a stack of reference letters for you to give prospective employers in which I give you the highest praise, so you don’t have to worry about that. I’ve also arranged to provide you with a very generous severance package.”

“But, sir, I daresay I wish to remain here.” His black button-eyes now gleamed wetly with welling tears on the brink of racing down his wide face.

“No can do, I’m afraid. See, the Deliverance banjo boy was poor as shit and, as such, never had a butler. Far from it. Our arrangement here just doesn’t work anymore. Not at this stage of the game.”

“Sir, I’ll blow my fucking head off with a shotgun if you let me go.”

“No you won’t! Don’t you ever talk like that, V! I’m gonna help you find a new post, and you’re gonna be just fine, you’ll see. In fact, you’re gonna be better off than you ever were here with my dumb, JRONK ass. I’ll make sure of that. In the meantime, you can continue to stay here as long as it takes us to find you a new job, okay?”

“But I’m…I’m fucking retarded,” Vermiculus said, hanging his big head low.

“Hey, don’t call people retarded, especially yourself! You’re far from it, my friend. I daresay, you’re rather clever.”

“But, but…I’m fucking deformed.”

“You’re not deformed. In fact, as far as kidney butlers go, you may very well be perfectly formed.”

“But, but…I’m a pedophile.”

“V, you’re not a pedophile. Yes, sometimes I say ‘you’re pedophile,’ but that’s just means you’re awesome. It’s not the same thing as saying you’re a pedophile. Quite the opposite. Get it?”

“I suppose so, milord.” Vermiculus paused to think for a moment before saying, “Perhaps I could remain here and somehow assist you with being the Deliverance banjo boy?”

And just like that, a bright lightbulb flashed in my head.

The song “Dueling Banjos” that I intended to fake-perform for the public, despite its name, actually only featured one banjo. Nevertheless, the song was a “duel,” with a banjo and an acoustic guitar going back and forth in call and response before syncing together in its second half.

But who was to play the guitar part?

“Damn, why hadn’t I thought of that before?” I said, snapping my fingers. “V, how’d you like to play guitar in my act.”

“Sir, I daresay I’d like it a lot!”

Chapter 31

In setting things up for our Deliverance “Dueling Banjos” re-enactment, it occurred to me that using my spiffy new iPhone wirelessly connected to a fancy high-end, smart surround sound speaker system didn’t quite seem to fit the vibe of my purpose. So I went onto eBay and purchased a vintage Technics SL-D3 record player with a repeat function, a preamp, and two stereo speakers, along with a 45-rpm single of the original recording of “Dueling Banjos” featured in the movie.

As far as Vermiculus went, I had him trade in those spiffy butler duds for some good ol’ authentic country boy threads. The same tailor who’d worked on his butler uniform crafted him a custom-fit pair of denim overalls, a white T-shirt, a pair of undersized brown leather work boots, and an oversized brown felt with a wide, floppy brim. I also bought Vermiculus a junior-sized acoustic guitar. As I was fast running out of cash, the guitar was nothing fancy—a used, beat-up old Epiphone—but it would do the trick.

After a few days of rehearsing our mock “Dueling Banjos” routine, I set up a video camera to record it. I was quite impressed when I played back the results. In my opinion, the effect of my synchronized fake fretting and simulated plucking to the music—playing in the background on vinyl no less—was quite convincing. Vermiculus’s pretended guitar playing was somewhat less believable, as his stubby arms, small hands, and little Vienna sausage fingers limited how he could handle his instrument, but it was good enough. After all, I was the focus of the performance, and his role was more supportive. In addition to the authentic setting, the other visual elements in the video recording were nothing short of amazing, too, as I and my banjo were virtually indistinguishable from our movie counterparts.

If I’d harbored any lingering doubts about sharing the spectacle with the public, they were now gone. In fact, in my very strong opinion, to not share the act, at least with the locals, would’ve been downright selfish. So I created and printed a flyer to advertise our performances. Below a grainy picture of me sitting on my porch swing with my banjo, the words on the flyer read:

AUTHENTIC! GENUINE! BONA FIDE! THE REAL DEAL!

~Come see and hear the ACTUAL DELIVERANCE BANJO BOY play his song!~

Admission: One Dollar

When: 1:00 pm – 3:00 pm, Mon. – Fri.

Where: 1723 Flatbottom Rd.

Of course, I didn’t need to charge any admission. But that dollar was symbolic of the fact that what I was doing had real cultural and artistic value and was certainly worth far more that a buck a peek, so I thought it important that I charge at least that token admission as a matter of principle.

***

Vermiculus drove me into town that same day. I had him wait in the truck while I posted the flyers on the public bulletin board in the square, on the telephone and utility poles lining the main drag, in the storefront windows, and onto the windshields of dozens of parked cars and pickup trucks, pinning them beneath the wiper blades.

As I was returning to my truck after getting rid of my last flyer, I saw an old man up ahead on the sidewalk approaching from the opposite direction. He wore overalls and a sort of malformed, dusty felt hat. His face lit up when he recognized me. Grinning widely, he halted just as we were about to pass one another. “Boy, are you who I think ya are?”

Slowing my pace, I returned his smile, nodded mutely, and pointed to the flyer taped to the nearby front window of the barbershop.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I heard him say behind me as I continued walking by.

Chapter 32

The next day, a little before one o’clock, I taped a paper sign that read “ADMISSION: $1.00” to a coffee can and set the coffee can on the old hickory stump that sat just outside the rickety gate to my front yard. I then repositioned the wicker loveseat on my front porch to conceal the old-school stereo system I’d set up out there.

After grabbing our instruments from inside the house—I’d learned the hard way not to leave my banjo out on the porch—Vermiculus and I stepped outside. Looking like a legit, if kidney-shaped, country boy, Vermiculus waddled down the porch steps with his guitar and took his place on the stool I’d set up near the outer corner of the porch to create some theatrical distance between us.

It wasn’t a perfect replication of the movie scene, but, happily, I was no longer shooting for perfection.

After I turned the record player on, dropped the needle on the outside edge of the spinning record, punched the repeat button, and turned up the volume to 10, I took my banjo to the porch swing and sat down. Together, Vermiculus and I commenced pretending to play along to “Dueling Banjos.”

When an hour passed and still nobody had shown up, I started to get worried. It occurred to me that most of the locals were probably well aware that the address on the flyer was the same address for the house haunted by the murderous ghost of Blockbuster Video. For that reason alone, maybe no one would come out.

But then a small, slow-moving procession of four pickup trucks followed by a tractor trundling a wagonload of people crept into view along the curve of road that lay beyond my front yard. The procession drew to a halt at the top of my driveway. All told, thirty-six people (I counted them)—a mix of men, women, and children—got out of those trucks and that wagon to saunter down the gravel driveway, deposit their dollars—some in the form of clinking quarters, dimes, and nickels—into the coffee can, and open my front gate to cross my yard, pass Megan-Megan-Megan’s towering obelisk tombstone, and gingerly approach my front porch to watch Vermiculus and I do our thing.

Everything went well enough for those first few minutes, the crowd appearing to be mesmerized as they watched the Deliverance banjo boy play his banjo like it was nobody’s goddamn business. This didn’t surprise me at all, as I’d known all along they’d be amazed.

My heart thrummed with joy and, yes, a feeling of great accomplishment. Indeed, in chasing but not achieving perfection, it seemed I’d finally attained a sort of excellence!

Just as the song ended and the record player’s tonearm lifted and glided back to drop the needle at the beginning again, the old man with the felt hat I’d seen in town yesterday stepped forth from the crowd. His leathery, jowly, sunburned face wore a pinched, mean look today.

He watched me fake-pluck the banjo for a few moments before saying, “Boy, you ain’t playin’ that dang banjo!” He spat contemptuously on the ground in my direction.

“Sure I am, sir,” I said, the flitting fingers of my hands hovering above the banjo’s neck and body as near as I could place them without actually touching the strings.

“He ain’t!” a pimply-faced teenage boy near the front of the crowd barked.

“He’s a fake!” chimed the middle-aged woman standing behind him.

A few “Yeahs!” rang out from the crowd.

“And the weird-lookin’ one’s not playin’ either!” someone else alleged, rather rudely. “His little hands cain’t even reach his guitar!”

More “Yeahs!” sounded.

“Yer flyer said ya was the real deal,” someone called out. “But yer a fraud!”

Yet another chorus of angry “Yeahs!”

“I’m not a fraud!” I cried as a cold, nervous sweat beaded on my forehead and the back of my neck. “I’m the real deal!”

A young overalled man with Down Syndrome—as hardhearted as he was high-functioning—edged out of the crowd, pointed at Vermiculus, and said, “Dad-gummit, he looks like a deformed, retarded pedophile!”

“Hey, you can’t talk to him like that!” I yelled while still trying to appear like I was playing the banjo. Just then, the pimply-faced teenager hopped up onto the porch, strode over to the wicker loveseat, knocked it aside to expose the record player, and pulled the needle off the “Dueling Banjos” record with a loud ripping sound.

“Get away from there!” I yelled at him even as I was forced to stop pretending to play. As I did so, Klet, the bass player from Gage Creed (*Before* He Gets Run Over By That Semi Truck), stepped out of the crowd and yanked Vermiculus’s guitar from his hands before shoving him, causing my dude to topple off his stool onto the ground like Humpty Dumpty.

“Leave him alone! Give him back his guitar, Klet!”

My eyes and attention on Vermiculus flailing on the ground, I didn’t see Glant McNasty sneak in from behind me to wrest my banjo from my grip.

“Hey, give that back!” I screamed, falling out of the porch swing to my knees as I lunged after him. Glant jogged down the porch steps and slung the banjo’s strap over his head.

“Glant. Klet. Show these Yankee phonies how we play the goddang ’jo and the gitfiddle ’round these parts,” the hatted old man said with pride. Glant and Klet then launched right into the fast second section of “Dueling Banjos,” falling deftly into the quick licks and runs of the tune.

What can I say? I knew Glant was okay on the guitar, but apparently dude SMOKED on the ’jo! Who knew?

For his part, Klet—an average bass player at best—SMOKED on the acoustic guitar. Again, who knew?

Momentarily enraptured by their playing as I was, I lost sight of Vermiculus as the crowd continued to grow more numerous and dense, with even more trucks and tractors arriving up front.

Just then, who should appear in my yard but none other than The Devil himself—in his shadowy crossroads guise, no less—accompanied by three living, walking skeletons attired in moldy, frayed, disintegrating burial dresses!

Each skeleton cradled a menopause in its arms.

“Holy shit!” I uttered. “It’s three of my great-great-great-great grandmothers…and their menopauses!”

By now everyone in the crowd was dancing, cavorting, and clapping to the quick, spirited bluegrass music. Even The Devil and the skeletons of my great-great-great-great grandmothers were dancing. Shit, after they set the cursèd things down on the ground, even those three menopauses started bouncing around to the music! What’s more, at one point, someone tossed one of the menopauses a fiddle and a bow, and the thing started sawing away at it like it was no one’s damn business!

Apparently that menopause SMOKED on the goddamn fiddle!

Who knew?

The Devil then busted out a washboard, started banging and scraping like…like THE GODDAMN DEVIL!!!

As you might guess, dude SMOKED!

If that wasn’t enough, my Ouija board and planchette—whether of their own volition or driven by spirits, I’ll never know—came bouncing out of my front door, across the porch, and down the steps to join the party, hopping on the ground like something out of a nightmarish cartoon.

I then espied the bog witch near the back of the crowd. She flashed me two long, gnarled middle fingers when our eyes met. Not far off behind her, some country boy held Vermiculus in a sort of headlock—strictly speaking, Vermiculus didn’t have a head that was separate from his body—while another yokel punched him in his broad stomach area.

“Hey, leave him alone!” I cried, about to go help him just as a few good old boys clamored up onto the porch to drag me down the steps and onto the trampled grass, where they bound me up with rope and left me lying on the ground.

Before I knew what was happening, the jubilant jamboree in my front yard morphed into an impromptu wedding, where my Great-Great-Great-Great Grandma Clementine’s menopause got married to my Ouija board!

The Devil himself officiated over the preposterous ceremony.

The bog witch was the maid of honor.

The planchette and the two other menopauses were the flower girls.

Through it all, “Dueling Banjos” never stopped playing, and the dancing never paused.

Eventually, the raucous crowd formed a line so that everyone could take turns either dancing on my body or else kicking and stomping me into the ground.

While all this was happening, the crowd grew even bigger. My plastic surgeon, Dr. Zorchelk Kuzmanov, was out there stumbling around JRONK! Even so, dude still had two hot Georgia peaches hanging on him. Ah, to be a world-class—if banned in most countries—surgeon in your late twenties, right? Man, I should’ve just attended med school instead of pursuing this Deliverance banjo boy bullshit, as the ghost of Blockbuster Video called it. Not that Zorchelk was in his late twenties. He was ninety-three, actually. Even so, dude still got more ass than World War 2!

The editors from Dapperboy Jenkins showed up, too, as did dozens of their readers, specifically those who hated my guts because of my zombie, vampire, and werewolf articles. Scores of my former Facebook friends from the accounts I’d managed as a Laugh React Social Media Strategist showed up as well—mad as hell and intent on revenge.

How they’d all managed to locate me, I’ll never know.

“You laughed when I posted that my sister finally lost her long battle with cancer during the same week that we lost our beloved seventeen-year-old golden retriever, you asshole!” uttered the angry face of the woman now looming above me. “Take THIS!” she said as she gave me a smart kick to the ribs.

“I’d just started really getting into The Walking Dead,” said the next person in line—a college-age kid wearing an “OK Boomer” T-shirt. “I was in the middle of season five, was really looking forward to watching seventy-plus more seasons of the same stock characters doing the exact same thing over and over and over again, but then I read your ‘Consider the Zombie’ article, and it forever ruined zombies for me. Thanks a lot! How’s this for a headshot, asshole!”

The kid kicked me in the head—hard!

Next up was the rosary lady. She stepped forward, halted at my side, her rosary gripped protectively in two liver-spotted hands against her breast. I stared up at her aghast face with what I hoped were convincingly piteous eyes.

“Dear lady, please say a bead for me!” I pleaded.

“We don’t say it like that!” she screamed.

“Please say a bead for me!”

“Stop sayin’ that! We don’t say it like that!” She kicked me in the ribs with a pointy shoe before cracking me in the face with her rosary.

Next in line: a middle-aged Asian man dressed in chef’s whites and an apron with “Peng’s Golden Wok” embroidered across the front.

“Ah, so thieving conman Peng finally sneaks out of his doorless restaurant,” I said bitterly, “not to finally give people their food, but to participate in a bit of mob violence.”

“I’m not Peng,” the man said in an unmistakable Southern accent. “My name is Steve. I don’t even work at Peng’s Golden Wok. I’m just a customer. And a fan. What, do ya think every Asian man ya meet owns a Chinese restaurant? That’s racist as fuck. Take THIS, asshole!”

Dude stomped my shin with his heel.

The line of people now waiting to assault me stretched all the way to the road and back again a few times, looping, crisscrossing, and zigzagging all over the front of my property.

There was no way I was going to survive this.

Seemed I had been sentenced to death. And for what? Because I’d lied about being able to play the banjo and, more broadly, about being the actual Deliverance banjo boy? Because I’d failed to become the actual Deliverance banjo boy? Because I’d wanted to become the Deliverance banjo boy in the first place? All of the above? I didn’t know.

Regardless, the punishment seemed way harsh for the crime or crimes. But that was the world we lived in for you: harsh as fuck—harsh as a frigid winter wind whipping and whistling through a graveyard so old that the names and dates etched onto the crumbling headstones are no longer legible (as resurrected skeletons and their menopauses rise up from their stony graves!).

At one point, my body now a bloody, broken mess, the ropes binding me became severed, which allowed me to raise one battered, flayed, broken arm off the ground and flip everyone off.

“FUCK ALL OF YOU—ya off-fleek, poor, dirty, uneducated, backward, inbred, moonshinin’, square-dancin’, dusty-hatted, fiddle-sawin’, washboard-scrapin’, cousin-marryin’, siblin’-diddlin’, pig-fuckin’, deformed, teeth-missin’, Deliverance-lookin’, banjo-stringin’, banjo-pluckin’, banjo-strummin’, banjo-fuckin’ HILLJACKIN’ HILLBILLIES!!!!!!!”

Toward the end there, unless I was hallucinating, I think I saw more skeletons and menopauses getting in line to have their turn at me. I might’ve even spotted a few perimenopauses and postmenopauses among the menopauses, along with a troop of real, honest-to-goodness zombies, vampires, werewolves, and ghosts! Among this motley crew, I also could’ve sworn I saw the dancing ghosts of the notorious Zabernathy brothers—Zaid, Zaird, Zightened, Zerrified, and Zorrified—which of course only caused me to feel that much more afraid, scared, frightened, terrified, and horrified.

And the line kept growing! All those angry people, inanimate objects, skeletons, ghosts, bog witches, devils, zombies, vampires, werewolves, menopauses, perimenopauses, postmenopauses—all waiting their turn to kick, stomp, clog, flat-foot, buck dance, do-si-do, or otherwise trample my body into its component parts.

Again, considering how close to death I was, I might’ve been hallucinating much of this, but I could’ve sworn I also saw Freddy, Jason, Chucky, Michael Myers, Leatherface, Pinhead, Alien, Predator, The Thing from John Carpenter’s The Thing, Candyman, possessed Regan from The Exorcist, Mothman, Bughuul, Leprechaun in the Hood, and Mike Tyson at the back of the line waiting for their turn to dance on my fucking head!

And there in the flesh—if you can rightly call the substance of its grotesque, cosmically unimaginable form flesh—was Chucklesworth itself: far too horrifying for me to attempt to describe, so I won’t bother trying.

My hair turned white at the sight of the thing, though no one would have noticed that because my hair was currently painted bright cherry-red in my own fresh, free-flowing headblood. How did I notice it? I don’t really know, to be honest with you.

Does it matter?

“Please don’t fuckin’ hurt this, Chucklesworth!” I begged when I beheld the awful, inconceivable thing looming above everything and everyone else.

A grinning Old Merl McNasty was next in line. But when the gaunt old farmer halted at my side, raised a dirt-encrusted boot above my face for a stomp, my boy Vermiculus came charging in with his big head lowered like a linebacker’s helmet to knock Old Merl to the ground hard, audibly cracking the dude’s ribs and sending his false teeth flying up into the air.

“Sir, are you alive?” Vermiculus said, dropping to his little knees and leaning over me. His hat was gone, his clothing ripped and covered in dirt, his eyes both blackened, his mouth swollen and bloodied.

“Yes. But…don’t…don’t worry about me, V. It’s over for me. Get yourself out of here. Save yourself, V!”

“I can’t do that, sir.”

“Vermiculus, I…I’m still your boss,” I said as sternly as I could manage. “I order you to run away…run away from here…now!”

“With all due respect, sir, not a chance. Remember, I’m your right kidney. That makes us closer than siblings—closer than parents and their own children, in fact. I’m quite literally flesh of your flesh, blood of your blood. And I daresay if these vile intruders are going to continue to torment you, well, they’ll have to get through me first!”

Just then, who should come forward and shove Vermiculus out of the way and to the ground but none other than the Blue One Himself—the ghost of Blockbuster Video!—materialized in his hulking gingerbread man-shaped phantom form. Apparently he’d cut in line to be the next to abuse me.

“Et tu, Blockbuster?” I croaked, squinting up at the ghost.

“I’m afraid so,” it said in a gruff, Batman-like voice.

“Since…since when can you talk?”

“Since forever. Just not a fan of doing it. I like Ouija boardin’ better.”

“Liar! Hey, you’re…you’re supposed to be trapped…trapped in the outhouse. Or in some other building. What are you doin’ walkin’ around here? That’s against the rules!”

“Rules are for FOOLS!” the ghost barked, its simple, yellow-drawn, emoji-like facial features pinching into an angry grimace. “If you must know, my escape from the outhouse was absurdly simple, if clever on my part. I opened the door and, using my short-range telekinetic powers which you two are all too familiar with, took the mirror from the wall and dropped it in the grass outside. I positioned it at an angle so I could see my reflection. Then I said my name a million times. When I reached a million, I was instantly transported out of the outhouse. But not to a new building—not to a new prison. Instead, I was pulled into the grass mere feet from where I’d just been kneeling—an unbound spirit at last! If I am still a prisoner, I’m a prisoner of the world at large, no different than you two.”

“Indeed, that was rather clever of you!” chimed Vermiculus.

“Hey, remember when I told you there’s only one movie I like, but I wouldn’t tell you what it is?” the ghost of Blockbuster Video asked me.

“I…I remember.”

“Well, here’s a hint.” The ghost cleared its throat. “‘Hey, you ever listen to K-Billy’s Super Sounds of the Seventies?’” it said, quoting Mr. Blonde from Reservoir Dogs. The thing then reached down with one of its fat, blue handless limbs and ripped my right ear clean off!

“Ahhhrrrrrgggggggg!” I screamed.

The ghost raised my bloody ear to its mouth and spoke into it like Mr. Blonde did in the movie: “Hello, hello? Anybody home? Can ya hear me?” It then tossed my ear over its shoulder like a piece of garbage.

“That was for trapping me in the outhouse. Let’s just say we’re even now, okay? Anyhow, let’s get you two the hell out of here before this crowd murders you, MY TINY LITTLE SONS!”

To my great astonishment, the burly blue ghost plucked me off the ground and slung me over its surprisingly solid shoulder—it kind of felt like I was draped over the back of an overstuffed couch. The ghost then reached down with its free arm to pull Vermiculus up from the ground. It turned its back on the crowd and my long line of would-be tormenters and fled in the other direction, pulling Vermiculus along with us.

Unfortunately, we only made it about thirty feet before a horde of unkind people, monsters, and menopauses brought us down to the ground.

On my back in the grass once again and utterly helpless, I could only watch as Vermiculus and the ghost of Blockbuster Video attempted to fight them all: two versus thirty-something—thirty-something and counting, as more attackers poured in!

Needless to say, Vermiculus didn’t last very long. His stubby, T-rex-like arms were pretty much useless in a fight. And he knew it. He knew his big, neckless head was his best weapon, so he bent forward and swung it back and forth as fast as he could. He even succeeded in knocking a few baddies to the ground.

But the horde brought him down quick, reducing my kidney butler to so many gory red bits in no time.

For its part, the blue ghost fought bravely and furiously, swinging its big blue mitts in a big blue frenzy, dropping three braying ghosts to the ground in an electric-liquid splat of ectoplasm and annihilated spirit energy, smashing at least five skeletons into their component parts, knocking several zombies’ heads off their rotten necks, and easily ripping three or four poor country bumpkins’ shocked faces off their exposed, redly muscled, wetly glistening, screaming skulls like they were nothing more than cheap rubber Halloween masks.

Alas, but there was just too many of them!

Even as the corporate ghost was brought down to its stout, fat knees, it continued swinging like motherfucking Tyson. But the terrible horde just kept pouring in and piling on, tearing gobs and long strips of the phantom’s blue ectoplasm-bleeding ghostflesh away like ravenous sharks picking apart a dying whale.

Eventually, the ghost of Blockbuster Video was reduced to a scattering of glowing blue gunk in the matted grass, its preternatural effulgence visibly fading before my eyes, next to and overlapping with the smaller, crimson smear that was all that remained of Vermiculus. In the spots where the vivid, visceral red of my creamed kidney butler mixed with the dissolving royal blue of the ghost, a stunning, depthless, unearthly shade of purple congealed to glimmer sublimely, if sadly, in the warm, gauzy Georgia sunlight.

The attackers returned to the back of the line.

Yesiree, lawd, and they all done kept a-comin’ for me—comin’ to stomp me down to a big ol’ pulpy pile of blood and guts and flesh and skin and hair and bone and marrow and sinew and shit and piss and chyme and chyle and bile and lymph and snot and saliva and semen and cerebrospinal fluid and tears.

And believe it or not, in those last fleeting, fleeing, off-fleek, on-fleek moments of my life, for the first time since I could remember, I truly no longer wished to be the Deliverance banjo boy.

Seriously. For real. Like, cross-my-heart-and-hope-to-die for real.

And not just because I was about to die. Not because I finally realized I’d wasted the one precious life given to me on some preposterous, ill-conceived, pointless goal. Not to soften any last-minute feelings of regret I felt in these final moments. Not because I regretted not exploring any of the other various paths my life might’ve taken. And not because I suddenly resented the Deliverance banjo boy and what he’d represented to me throughout my lifetime.

Rather, because I now only yearned for one thing in this miserable fucking life and world—a life and world I’d be departing from momentarily.

And that was to hang out with my two good friends—nay, my two best friends, my only friends—motherfucking Vermiculus, my beyond-awesome kidney butler, and the goddamn, motherfucking ghost of Blockbuster Video—in our little ramshackle house in the blue hills of Appalachian Georgia for one more year maybe.

Or one more month.

Or one more week, one more day, one more hour, one more minute, one more second…

Just before I died, I reached into my front pants pocket, pulled out a remote control I’d not known was there, and pressed the menopause-pause button, effectively pausing every menopause in the world.

Now women who are in menopause can have babies again if they want to.

So at least there’s that.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Born with one extra finger and two extra toes (no joke), Douglas Hackle received a B.A. in English Literature a million years ago. He’s lost a few marbles since then, but does have the “normal” number of fingers and toes now. When not toiling as a copywriter/copyeditor in the healthcare space, he writes fiction that blends absurdism, surrealism, horror, humor, and ridiculousness. He’s the author of four novellas and three short story collections. https://douglashackle.wordpress.com/