I consider myself a multi-genre author. Here is a little horror story I wrote a while back…

                 The Sight of a  Hearse   copyright 2001 Brian Cahill                                                                                                                                                                               John stood up in the booth of the small North Eastern Pennsylvania dinner and greeted his friend Ken with his usual handshake. At sixty-two years of age John was a strong, burly man. Ready to retire in 3 weeks from his job as a foreman for the electric company, one would think he hadn’t a care in the world. But as Ken greeted him he could tell that John was upset, visibly shaken.

“What’s the matter, buddy. You look like hell!” Ken said with a chuckle in his voice.

John sat down and took a sip from his coffee, his hands trembling as he spoke,

“I was up there last night. I was back at that God awful place.”

“You mean region three?” Ken’s voice grew serious.

“Yeah, right by the freakin’ gate! At 3 o’clock in the morning, blown transformer…”

“John!” Ken interrupted,

“That happened 28 years ago.”

“Well it’s still fresh in my memory!” John shot back defensively.

“I still hear those kids screaming, I can still smell that burnt flesh odor coming from the farmhouse. And those people have the nerve to use that place for a security office, if they only knew.”

“But they don’t know, John! It’s not their fault.” Ken tried to calm his friend.

“And you know what else? I went up the pole by the gate to check a fuse, I looked over towards that red shack of hell, and I saw the hearse. I saw the goddamn hearse, Ken.”

            John took another sip of coffee and was approached by a high school boy who was obviously staying home from school.

“Where you guys up on Pond Road last night?” the youth asked.

“I was, but not by my choice,” John replied, “what were you doing out there at that hour?”

“Oh, I just go up there by that horse stable and drink with my friends. You know, something to do.” 

The two older men were taken back by the way the teenager casually admitted to drinking up there.

“Hey kid, you oughta’ find a better place than that to drink,” John scolded.

“Oh it’s okay, it’s quiet up there.”

Ken perked up,

“Sit down kid, we gotta’ story to tell you, and you ain’t gonna’ believe it!”

            The boy pulled up a chair to the end of the booth and hunched over the table.

“It’s like this,” Ken started,

 “Back in 1972, on October 29^th, that’s when it happened.”

“What, what happened?” the boy asked, challenging Ken.

Ken continued,

“There was this school trip from Central New Jersey, I don’t know what town any more, but a bunch of little kids…”

“Second graders, seven year olds.” John added.

“Yeah, right, second graders. Well, they went up to the big waterfalls for a field trip and by the end of the day it had started to rain. You know how fast the fog settles in the mountain. So the rain is getting heavier and one of the busses wouldn’t start.”

“The drivers screwed around ‘til 6:30 getting the bus started,” John added, excitement growing in his voice.

“Right,” Ken said assuredly,

“So they finally get the two busses rolling and they make a wrong turn. They go all the way to Pond Road and turn left. The lead driver evidently had no idea where he was.”

“I think you guys are jerkin’ me!” The youth shook his head and started to get up.

“No, this is for real, hear us out.” John eased the boy back into his chair.

Ken continued,

“They went all the way up Pond Road, and by now it is about 7 o’clock and, you know, they could hardly see the road, what with the fog and rain. It really started to pour when they started back down the road.”

            John, growing more excited and nervous, took over and started to tell the story.

“So they don’t know if it was from a brake failure or wet leaves, whatever. But the bus in the rear started to gain speed and rear-ended the front bus. It pushed the front bus off the road right across from that red farmhouse up there. The first bus knocked down a power pole and tumbled down the embankment. It came to a rest upside down in a creek and burst into flames. The second bus continued down the road and hit a tree. Only the teacher on the second bus was killed.”

Ken started,

“Yeah, but the first bus, the one that burned, all those kids, dead…”

“So Ken and myself had to go up there and work on the power poles. What a mess. It was a small town then, only one ambulance and a beaten up fire truck. They had to call ambulances from as far away as Jersey.”

Ken sat back and spoke quietly,

“Truth be known, all they needed was hearses.”

            John swirled his empty coffee cup,

“Lisa, more coffee for me and Ken, and bring this kid a pastry please.”                           “She’s all right that girl, nice little ass,” John laughed and continued the story.

“So the farmer in the red house offered, well, he had no choice really, to let the authorities use his first floor as a temporary morgue. By the time they got done that night there was like what, forty burned up bodies in the house, downstairs and upstairs.”

“All I know was the smell was sickening,” Ken added.

John poured cream into his fresh coffee,

“So they were using all available ambulances and hearses from the area to take the bodies out of the mountain to the village below. This way the parents wouldn’t have to come all the way into the mountain. Then at about 1:00 am one of the hearses swerves to miss a first-aider carrying a body across the street to the farmhouse. The undertaker turned the wheel so hard he went out of control and went down the same embankment the bus went down. Poor guy, wedged the hearse between two oaks. They got him out, dead of course. But they left the hearse there to rust away in the woods. Some say you can still see parts of it down there. The tires, an empty casket, some old curtain material from the windows, stuff like that.” John stopped for a moment and swallowed hard. “But I saw that hearse last night, pulling out of the farmhouse driveway. Big black sucker, limo type, white curtains, music playing on the radio. Big black hearse, you can hear the fan belt whine as it glides past you.  I saw it, I swear I did…”

“Okay, John, calm down. It’s okay.” Ken shook his friend a little to stir him.

Ken’s voice was shaking,

“So they say the whole area is haunted. We had a guy go up on a pole across from the farmhouse in October of 1983. The next thing you know he is blown from the top of the pole through the farmhouse window. Dead. The company said it was high voltage. But I saw him, and he had no burns on his body.”

Ken paused for a moment,

“Then there was the old guard they finally had to put in an asylum. The poor bastard would look out the farmhouse window at night and see a little kid looking back at him through the glass. He used to say it was a ghost. And the kid was like, all burned up. The guy ran out in the street screaming one night, so they just put him away to rot in that place down in town.”

“And when I go up there,” John started to breath heavier as he spoke,

 “I see that hearse, and I see kids in the upstairs windows of the farmhouse. And I hear music, like a kid’s nursery rhyme, or something…”

But it only happens in the middle of the night, and only towards the end of October.”

            The youth believed them. There was something in the tone of the men’s voices that was serious. Or perhaps it was fear. The boy spoke,

“You know what the real kick in the ass is?”

“What’s that?” Ken asked, expecting a smart remark back from the youth. But the boy was not joking as he spoke,