Have Spacecat, Will Travel: And Other Tails by John Hartness (top ebook reader .TXT) 📕

“Is this what I’m after?” I asked the air. “Did they find your pipe in your old office and bring it here, Mr. Stephenson?” This time the air that surrounded me was warm, and I knew I had the right idea.

“Okay, what do you want me to do with it?” I asked. “The old school was torn down, and I think there’s a used car lot on the grounds now. I don’t think you want me to bury your pipe under a Chevy, do you?”

Apparently old Colvin didn’t have much of a sense of humor about his remains, because he let loose with a blast of air that put frost in my eyebrows. “Okay, I got it! Do you want me to take it to the cemetery where you’re buried?”

No cold, so that must have been the right answer. Now to figure out where he was buried. These small southern towns have more churches than houses, sometimes. I guess it was just going to be process of elimination. I closed the cabinet, scrawled “the pipe was haunted” on a notecard, slipped that under the librarian’s door, and slipped out into the hall.

“Are you Baptist?” I asked. Cold blast. I crept down the darkened hallways toward the exit nearest my truck. I didn’t expect to run into anyone, but it paid to be careful. Eddie had already surprised me once tonight with his heightened security measures. More like some random guard who wanted to burn one in his old Algebra classroom, but whatever.

“Are you Methodist?” Cold air.

“Presbyterian?” Cold.

“ARP?” Nothing. Okay, so I needed to find the Associate Reformed Presbyterian cemetery in an unfamiliar town, bury the pipe of a long-dead principal in the middle of the night, and manage to avoid getting arrested as a grave robber. Yeah, sounds about as easy as walking a rookie through his first battle royal. And at least as painful.

The school was completely deserted, and the crash bars weren’t tied to an overall alarm system. At least, not one that was loud enough to worry me as I hightailed it across the parking lot to my truck. Fortunately, Eddie and his wife’s brother’s nephew or whoever the stupid kid I’d had my shitshow of a match with earlier hadn’t broken a window or flattened my tires. There might have been a new scratch in the paint from somebody’s key, but let’s be honest, on a twelve-year-old pickup, how the hell would I notice?

I pulled out my phone and looked up the location of the nearest church that matched Mr. Stephenson’s preferred denomination, and drove over there, hoping it didn’t have a parking lot that doubled as a popular make-out spot for local kids, and therefore was a popular destination for the local po-po. It looked pretty deserted when I pulled up, which was good. But it also earned me a blast of icy air on the back of my neck from my dead-ass passenger, which was less good.

There was another ARP church on the other side of town, so I turned the truck around in the driveway and headed that way. At the rate I was burning gas on this trip, it wouldn’t take me much more than buying a happy meal on the way home to use up my payday for the match. But that’s the life of an indie wrestler—get paid next to nothing, work shitty venues, and get your ass kicked for years, all in the hopes that one day the right person will see your match and you’ll end up on TV. It happened to Cedric Alexander. I wrestled that kid in crappy gyms and armories all over the Carolinas, and now he’s working every week on network television.

I don’t have any illusions about hitting the big time. I’m too old, for one thing, and I’m not big enough, or talented enough to get there. I’m a middle of the road guy, barely making ends meet driving a forklift all week stacking tires. And on weekends I jump around in my underpants with other dudes, and then hunt ghosts in my “free time.” Yeah, my life is weird. I blame my grandpa, but that’s a whole other long-ass story.

I pulled into the church parking lot, and it was appropriately deserted. It oughta be, it was well after two in the morning, and this was a church-going town. Everybody was supposed to be in bed, already praying for forgiveness for the trouble they’d got up to the past two nights. I wanted to be in bed, too, with a couple of beers and maybe a sandwich in my belly. But here I was, tromping through the graveyard with a pipe in one hand and a shovel in the other, letting a dead high school principal direct my steps by blowing in one ear or the other. It was not my greatest Saturday night ever.

But it was quick. It only took me ten minutes to find the tombstone, dig a small hole, and drop my cargo in. As I covered up the scrimshawed pipe, a final blast of cold air rushed up out of the grave, and a hazy form took shape in front of me. It was a man, about six feet tall, with a big pot belly and a salt-and-pepper beard. He stood before me for a moment, looking me up and down, then nodded, took the hazy pipe from his mouth, and waved goodbye. He turned and walked away, and as I watched, a trim woman stepped out of the mists to join him, twining her fingers with his and leading him off into a tunnel of pale white light.

I watched them go, then patted the little hill of dirt down smooth with my shovel and headed back to the truck, thinking that maybe my gig wasn’t so bad after all. I tossed the shovel in the truck bed, slid behind the wheel, and drove off home, with visions of lifelong love dancing