I got the inspiration for this about 2013, wrote it in a day or two in 2022, and finally am releasing it unto the world after an editing pass.

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The house was set far back from the highway, but still clearly visible if you happened to glance that way during the second or two it would remain in sight as you sped along at a comfortable 10 miles or so over the posted speed limit. “Blink and you’ll miss it”… but there wasn’t much to miss. A beige ranch-style home, probably built in the early 60s, with nothing distinctive about it, except perhaps its isolation. No other house could be seen from the road for a mile or more in either direction.

Oh, there were probably more, further away. Somewhere, north or south of the highway, there must be more. At least, there were more, in the past, when the houses by the roadside were at the edge of tiny towns surrounded by sprawling farms, towns dying over decades when the interstate took all the pass-through traffic and the farmers started making 100 mile trips every few weeks to the Wal-Mart, supplemented by 20 mile drives to the truck stop which was also a McDonalds and a 7-11 and camping supply store and (three days a week) an urgent care clinic. One by one, the houses that marked the line where Eminent Domain had stopped were abandoned to rain and wind and fire, their corpses no longer easily spotted, but one or two would hold on, slowly falling into disrepair, but not yet abandoned.

Carl Zamvier looked for them, driving as slowly as he could without attracting the attention of bored cops who figured anyone driving at the speed limit was trying to avoid being pulled over, and therefore, should be pulled over. Sometimes he’d circle back if he caught a glimpse of one but couldn’t tell if it was still alive, or so recently deceased the corpse had not begun to rot. From the road, it wasn’t easy to tell if windows were broken, if the satellite dish was rusted to uselessness, if the door was open to let in breeze or long-since bashed-in by scavengers in jeans and t-shirts, seeking whatever the scavengers in suits and ties had not seized during foreclosure.

This one, though, Carl sensed was alive, however feebly, as soon as he passed it. He’d been looking at roadside houses for a long time now. He smiled. It was becoming an instinct, like touch typing or riding a bicycle or using his word processor — what had once required conscious consideration of each step was now done intuitively. And if he turned out to be wrong, nothing would be lost but a little time.

The next exit was fifteen miles ahead. He kept glancing to the side, in case there was a second prospect on the way, but saw nothing.

At the exit, there was a rest stop featuring a handful of amenities, chief among which was a chance to check out Google and find a path to his goal. The house could be reached only by a maze of back roads, which had been photographed once by a satellite some 15 years ago, and Carl knew from experience that automated guidance tended to sputter and die in these places. He traced a viable route by eye, looking for landmarks likely to still exist in some form or another, finished a lukewarm hamburger, and left.

The town of Oakville was not entirely dead; the single building serving as post office, town hall, and police station was still lit up, there was a gas station, a few churches with well-trimmed lawns, and a graveyard less well-trimmed but not fully overgrown. His route would take him north a few miles from “downtown”, past abandoned farms, to what had, many decades ago, been a cluster of new homes well-situated between no less than three thriving farm and factory communities. Two were gone, and Oakville was nearly there. The satellite imagery showed houses close by Carl’s target, but they were gone, now. Only one house remained.

The roads were not well maintained, and the final step involved some backtracking as a condemned bridge awaited repairs that would continue to be put off until the budget allowed for it. Carl contemplated chancing it, then considered the time spent finding a different route was less than the time that would be spent waiting for any kind of emergency service to get here in the event the risk didn’t pay off. Thus, by the time he finally entered the long gravel road marked “private drive”, the sun was dimming. This  cheered him a bit, as he could now clearly see lights on in the house ahead. Someone was home.

He pulled into the gravel driveway, which terminated in a car shelter containing an early 2000s light pickup. Despite spots of rust and one door a notably different color than the other, there was only a slight layer of built-up grit, maybe two or three weeks worth. So whoever lives here drives off occasionally, but not too often, Carl thought.

Carl grabbed a canvas tote emblazoned with a logo for “Associated News and Press”, double-checked to make sure all of his necessary gear was there, and ambled to the front door. Dried leaves crunched on the way. A garden gnome, so scarred and pitted it looked like it was dying of a hideous pox leaned precariously against the wall, partially uprooted by some storm and not reset.

The door was wrenched back with surprising force, before he could even knock. A man’s face, contorted with contempt, and surmounted by thinning whisps of white hair, stared back at him through the screen. Eyes with obsidian pupils took him in and dismissed him. A rifle hung down from a strap slung over his shoulder, one hand held so as to bring it up into firing position on a whim.

“You’ve no business here. Whatever it is, I don’t want it. Fuck off.”

He should have slammed the door then, Carl thought, but he didn’t. He just kept staring, waiting for Carl to leave or respond.

Carl remained calm. He knew that no matter how crotchety or antisocial, the people who lived in places like this were desperate for companionship, even the most perfunctory, though they couldn’t admit it. He smiled, “I’m not selling anyth…”

The sneer somehow grew more contemptuous. “I go to Saint Thomas’, and ain’t interested in becoming a Mormon or a Jehovah’s Witness or whatever it is you’re preaching. Get out. I don’t waste time calling the cops. No one’s going to find your body ’till the coyotes’re done with it, and they don’t leave much to ID you by.”

“I’m not selling religion, either. Or asking for money. And my boss knows where I was heading and when I was supposed to get here and back, so they’ll know who any coyote leftovers belonged to.”

“Hmph. Bluffing? Could be. So your boss sent you here? Who’s your boss, then? What’s he want?”

“Well, my editor, technically. And he wants about 500 words, and he wants them yesterday.”

“If he wants words, tell him to buy a fucking dictionary.” There was the barest hint of a smile under the scowl. “So you got one more chance for a straight answer ‘for we find out how fast anyone’d look for you. What the hell do you want?”

Carl smiled his warmest, most ingratiating, smile. “You. Your story. Why you’re here.”

The man’s jaw twisted and clenched slightly, as if he was literally chewing over the words. “I’ve done nothing worth telling about,” he finally said, in a much softer tone.

“I think everyone’s done something worth telling about. That’s what I’m doing out here. Looking for the people no one ever writes about, and writing about them.”

The contemptuous scowl returned, but less certain of itself. “So how’d you stumble on me, then? There’s a whole lot of people no one cares about. Someone in Oakville send you here?”

Carl shook his head. “No. I drove through it, but didn’t talk to anyone.” He sighed and smiled ruefully. “Here’s the thing. I needed a hook, a… a gimmick, if you will, to get my editor to let me do this. So I sold him on ‘The Houses By The Roadside’. You know, you’re driving a long drive, you spot these isolated homes just off the road, you wonder who lives in them…”

Behind the screen, the man shook his head. “I never did. Who the hell would care?”

Carl shrugged. “My readers, I guess. A lot of people like my articles. And…” his voice became a slightly conspiratorial whisper, “I get to drive all over the country and my boss pays for it. Pretty sweet deal.”

That got something close to a genuine smile from the old man. It clearly involved using muscles that hadn’t been exercised in quite some time. After a few long seconds of contemplation, the man said, “Show me what you got in that bag.”

Carl did. The man tilted his head back and forth, scrutinizing the laptop, the recorder, and the folder full of clippings. “Alright. You don’t have a gun, I do. And I saw you pulling up, no one else in your car. You can come in, provided you don’t stay long.”

The interior was familiar. Every home he’d visited on this assignment was simultaneously unique and yet identical. The last time this living room had seen major furnishing changes was probably the early 1990s. There was a flat screen TV that looked to be about 10 years old, and it rested atop a giant woodgrain-laminated floor model CRT set whose dual knobs and grey screen were covered with dust. A VCR also rested atop it, near the flat screen. Against the wall leaned a rickety looking faux-pine VHS tape rack, probably assembled at home with a deficit of screws and a surfeit of profanity. A couch, the right end notably more worn and compressed than the left, sat facing the TV. Every shelf or tabletop had some dust-covered decorative knick-knacks. Someone who had lived here had liked swans. Probably, they’d mentioned this once, long ago, so every friend got them swan-themed tchotchkes because, like most friends, they didn’t actually care enough to remember two things about them. Carl guessed they didn’t belong to the man who had let him in, and the state of the place meant the person they did belong to was no longer around. Matching end tables flanked the couch, one with a lit lamp, a remote control, and a can of beer placed next to, but not on, a swan coaster. The other had an identical, but inactive lamp, an empty coaster, and notably more dust. Through one door, Carl could see part of a kitchen; through another, an unlit stairwell leading down. Lastly, two chairs partially flanked the couch, the one one on the right angled towards the TV, the other towards the couch. Something about the whole seemed a little off, like one of the props had been misplaced. Plants, Carl thought. That must be it. No pots with nothing in them but a withered stalk, not even any plastic flowers covered with dust. Unusual, but not unique. He’d seen it a few times before. After so many interviews, even the oddities became patterns.

The man sat, arms crossed, gun beside him in the middle of the couch. With a surly wave, he gestured to the nearest chair. Carl angled it back towards the couch, waiting for a grunted complaint; when none came, he sat down, and carefully took an old-style cassette recorder out of his bag, placing it on the endtable.

“You ain’t just gonna type on your computer?”

“Hard to have a real conversation if I keep saying ‘Stop, I need to write this down’. Besides, I watched a lot of really old TV reruns growing up. All the reporters had something like this. Kind of shaped my idea of what a reporter should be like.”  He smiled, a little ruefully. “Genuine 1979 Panasonic. Almost cost more than my laptop, having it refurbished. Boss didn’t consider it a necessary expense, either. Cheap bastard.”

“They all are. Guess you don’t get to be boss by spending your own money.”

Carl decanted a blank cassette and slipped it in, closing the hatch. “Then there was the problem of getting a line on working tapes. Most of them are falling apart. They rot from heat, humidity. Only a few were stored so they’d last.”

“So you found some that lasted longer than they should, huh? Went hunting for some old crap hanging on past its time? Like me?”

Carl was instantly apologetic. “What? Oh, no, no, I wouldn’t say…”

“I would. ‘n fact, I just did. Turn that on and I’ll say it again, so you don’t forget.”

Carl pressed ‘Record’ and ‘Play’ concurrently. “You can do that, but if it’s alright, I’d like to start with your name.”

“Jerry. Gerald if you gotta be formal. Last name, Beck. You need a middle name?”

Carl nodded.

“Do we get your paper out here?”

“I doubt it,” he shrugged. “Mostly just major cities, now. I could send you a copy when it’s published…”

“Nah. Just didn’t want anyone here seeing it. It’s D, for Dante. I tell ’em it stands for David.”

“Dante, like the poet?”

“Poet? Don’t know, I guess, he coulda been. Would have had to write fast. He died in WW1, 16, 17? Great-grand-uncle, something like that. Back where we came from, my dad said. Maybe he was on my mom’s side. I think Beck used to be something else, too. They gave me all this when I was six, seven. Didn’t really care. Don’t see why anyone reading this would.”

He paused, his mind suddenly elsewhere. He picked up the can next to him, shook it, frowned at the sound of a few lone drops echoing around an otherwise consumed container. “You wanna beer? I want one.”

Carl shook his head, and Jerry headed kitchenward. He returned drinking from one can, carrying another.

“I really didn’t…” Carl began.

“Yeah, I heard. This way I don’t have to get up again. So what’s next?”

Next were stories of youth in the 60s, in a state far from here, ending with a draft notice and a few months in the waning days of Vietnam, a marriage that moved him to Oakville and a good factory job, some kids, the purchase of this place in 1980…

There’d been neighbors, then. Backyard cookouts. Little League games and dance recitals. A hobby of amateur photography, preserving all the events above, to be reviewed, perhaps, with visiting grandchildren. All the expected points on the arc of a life moving along the most common trajectory.

And then, as Carl gently prodded and encouraged, had come no great disaster, no tragedy, no epic downfall. Just a slow, progressive decay, the predicted arc of the future crumbling from neglect and wear, not any sabotage or attack. Roads were built as roads must be, and a quiet green suburb became a loud one choked by exhaust fumes. Neighbors left. Children left. The factory where Jerry worked left, his promised pension moved by financial sleight of hand from one institution to another, a game of monetary Three Card Monte where, as always, the player was left penniless while the dealer smiled insincerely and wished him luck.

Jerry stayed where he was because the house was paid for, something he called “a blessing wrapped in a curse”.

Carl nodded. “That’s an interesting way to put it.”

 “It’s paid off because my folks died pretty young. Accident. Not a lot of inheritance when it was all done with, but it let me keep this place. Of course, I’d rather have had them not die… I mean, die later, die when they should… everyone dies, right?… but if they hadn’t died then, if that truck had swerved a few seconds sooner, the kids could’ve known their grandparents better, but I’d be living in a box by now.”

“Or with your kids… Charlie and Jane, right?”

“Janet.”

“See, that’s why I record things. So I get it right. Nothing worse than having to print corrections.”

Jerry snorted. “Yeah, I know how you guys work. Call a man a crook in the headlines one day, then a week later you guys say ‘Oh, we meant cook‘ at the bottom of page 20. But you do got that tape, so, I guess you’ll be as honest as you can get. Hm.” Something clawed at his mind, his brow furrowing.

Carl continued. “So Charlie and Janet. You could move in with one of them? It sounds to me like you were a good dad. Not that I expect you to tell me every fight and argument you ever had with your kids, but I’m guessing things were good, overall.”

“I s’pose. Wasn’t happy they moved so far away, but what could they do? Stay here with no work worth doing? But…” he looked away, his eyes lingering on a wall covered with pictures whose inhabitants Carl couldn’t quite make out. “We ain’t talked in years. Don’t really even know where they are now. Elaine spoke to ’em a bit before she passed.” He shook his head and almost snarled, “They didn’t do a damn thing after that. Not even send a card.”

Carl nodded sympathetically. “That’s terrible. Is there anyone you know who can act as a kind of go-between? Someone still on talking terms with you and them?”

“Nope. Everyone like that’s gone, one way or another.”

“A pity. It really is. But I understand I’m opening old wounds, so unless you want to talk about it more…”

“I don’t.”

“That’s fine, no need. So how long has it just been you out here?”

“How long…” Jerry paused, looked out the window at the darkness, the sun long since gone. He looked back at the recorder. “You ain’t flipped that tape. Or changed it. We’ve been talking a lot more’n half an hour.”

“Ah. Yes. As I told you, I had to hunt up some tapes. High-quality ones, the ones that were stored properly. They’ve got a longer recording time.”

Jerry looked back and forth between the recorder and Carl. His left hand moved to the gun, still resting on the couch besides him.

“Y’said you’ve got some samples of your articles?”

“Oh, yes. I’m proud of my work.”

“Hand ’em over. Slow.”

Carl very carefully reached into his bag, pulled out the manilla folder, and placed it into Jerry’s outstretched right hand. Jerry’s left hand never left the rifle. He upended the contents into his lap and began picking them up, holding them to his eyes, his expression at first confused, then fearful.

“Evan Clamsden, 67, laid to rest after being found butchered in…”
“Karen Donaldson, 75, Mother and Widow, victim of a heinous and grisly murder…”
“Police were shocked to find the gruesomly mauled body of James ‘Jimmy-Boy’ Turley, former Tendysburg HS coach during our triumphant 1971 season…”

The others were all of a similar bent.

“Police reports? Obituaries? What the hell?” Both hands were on the gun now, as Jerry slowly managed to stand without pushing up on the armrest.

“I did say I was proud of my work. There it is. My work. I find the lonely, the exiled, the forgotten, and I bring them peace. It takes weeks, sometimes a month or more, before my articles are finally published. Papers are so short-staffed these days.”

Jerry was done asking questions. He fired. At a range of five feet, missing was not an option.

Provided the gun had been loaded.

Carl also stood, smirking, taking the bullets out of his pocket. “The Demon Rum… or the Pabst Blue Ribbon, in this case… has been the ruin of many a man.”

For a moment, Jerry stood, paralyzed with confusion and fear, as Carl was sure he would be. With slow deliberation, he removed a set of knives, each custom-made to fit his particular needs, from the case of the fraudulent recorder.

Jerry started to back away, still holding the useless rifle. There was no way he’d manage to use it as a club or shield, Carl knew. He’d try, perhaps, but his brittle arms and aging nerves were not up to the task. Carl liked knives, and only knives, and he’d learned all the ways to deflect and disarm, to get in under someone’s guard. He hadn’t even needed, really, to remove the bullets, but since the opportunity presented itself, he took it.

Jerry finally found his voice. “Please…I didn’t do anything…” he backed up carefully as he spoke, trying to somehow keep looking at Carl while looking back to make sure he didn’t trip on anything.

“Yes, that’s right, you didn’t. You didn’t live, you merely existed. And that existence is going to end, and no one will mourn you.”

Jerry’s slow backwards stagger had put him in reach of the basement door. “No, no, you’re wrong. I did things. Please… let me show you… down here.”

Carl’s face twisted into a thin smile. He loved it when they tried this. When they thought they were clever and could lead him into a trap.

“What, you’ve got some spare bullets down there, alongside a hunting vest you haven’t worn for decades? But why not? I’ll go down, you just leave the gun here.”

To Carl’s surprise, Jerry complied wordlessly, setting the rifle down cautiously, not taking his eyes off Carl. Then, slowly and with great care, he flipped the light on and began descending the stairs. Carl followed close behind, not so close the man could try to somehow knock him backwards, but close enough that a quick lunge from him would prove fatal to the man in front.

As he passed the door, Carl noted there was a deadbolt on the inside. Probably from his photography days. Keep the brats from opening the door while he was developing. Odd he didn’t even try to use it to keep me out, Carl thought. Too scared? Or too convinced whatever cunning plan he had was going to work? Either way, it would be over soon.

The basement, even with the light on, was dim and cluttered. Old boxes were piled precariously, contents long forgotten. Hanging on one wall was a chainsaw, which might have been a threat, had it possessed a chain. Some folding chairs leaning against a table leaf, waiting in vain for a gathering large enough to require both. A freezer, an ancient model but seemingly still functional, as it was relatively clean and there was a clear path to it. And as Carl had suspected, a table covered with a clutter of old photography gear, empty strings on which to hang the developing images running above it.

Jerry looked at him, then at a pile of milk crates filled with old magazines and a few yearbooks. “Can you… shove those out of the way? Or I can do it…” He bent down.

Carl put one of his knives within an inch of Jerry’s eyes. “I’ll do it.” He gave the pile a solid shove with his foot. The top crates fell off. A second kick moved the bottom one. Beneath was floor.

“So? If you’re stalling for someone to come, I think you know that’s not happening.”

Jerry shook his head and spoke contritely. “No, not stalling… there’ a lock there… looks just like a crack in the floor… need a special key… that rod over there, on the desk…”

“Why would you have a secret safe in the floor? Hiding some money? Don’t trust banks?”

“Heh. I really shouldn’t have, what with what they did with my pension… but no… uhm… well, back when I was a lot younger, sometimes I took pictures I didn’t want the kids to see if they were playing down here… you know…”

“I’m not interested in your dirty pictures. It’s time to end this.”

“No, wait, please. That’s not what’s there now. Please, just open it, or let me…”

Carl considered that bending over would be slightly, just very slightly, risky, and was certain he could deal with whatever the old man might pull out. “You do it,” he said. He didn’t mind the delaying games. The more hope they had, the more beautiful it was to see it fade.

Scared, fumbling, Jerry took the thin metal rod, something like a crochet hook but with more notches, and inserted it into the almost invisible gap. There was a click, and an ancient spring popped the floorpiece up. With one foot, Carl flipped it open. There were books inside… no, binders, presumably full of photos.

Carl sneered. “Oh, is that it? Going to show me your wife and brats, make me feel sorry for you?”

“No… not them… just… just look, please.”

“Oh, fine. You take it out… slowly… and put it on that stool.”

Carl watched as he did so, waiting for the inevitable attempt to pull off a shocking move, to toss the album at his face, or reveal a hidden gun, or even try a sudden forward tackle. None of this occurred. The album was placed exactly as requested.

 Sneering contemptuously, Carl flipped it open, expecting washed out images of teens in baseball uniforms, picnic tables piled with carcinogenic hot dogs and flavorless potato salad, and a younger Jerry posing proudly with a barely large enough to legally catch bass.

That was not what he saw.

The photos were quite clear, the colors bright and fresh. They were of bodies… human bodies… in various states of extreme disarray. They were gored, mangled, ripped apart, bones glistening where flesh had been stripped. A face, half normal, half ripped almost bare to the skull, the frozen expression telling Carl that the face’s owner had experienced much of it while fully conscious — a look he knew quite well.

But these images went beyond anything he’d ever done, or even imagined doing. Mauled, vivisected, gouged… the marks were ragged, those made by claws and teeth, not clean blades… page after page, person after person, skin and flesh and organs torn out and then torn to pieces…

Carl hadn’t realized how long he’d been looking until Jerry spoke. “Like I said, not pictures of my pathetic wife and useless, greedy, spawn. Didn’t think of it at the time, and it was too late to take pictures when I was done. They wanted me to leave!” His eyes met Carl’s, and they weren’t human. They were a pale ice-blue, pupils glinting like diamonds. “Basically dragged me down here, the three of them, tried to make me pick a few things to take with me, to go away with them. Eileen was in it from the start, conniving, backstabbing…”

“What did you do?” Carl still had his knives, but the thought of using them couldn’t take root in his brain as he saw Jerry’s form melt and twist, his skinny limbs lengthening, the soft, sagging flesh of old age turning into corded muscle and taut tendons, wrapped around bones too long and curved to be human, skin tightening on his face to the point where the skull seemed ready to rip through, jaws extending and filling with jagged yellow fangs, legs twisting from an old man’s unsteady gait to a predator’s ready pounce…

“Do? I ate ’em! There’s old blood in me, that they woke! Beck? Becchino is who we were, my family, gravediggers, keepers of the catacombs! I had no idea! Doubt anyone did, for generations! We cared for the dead… and made room for new corpses!”

Carl’s survival instincts finally broke through the paralytic fear, and he lunged, slashing, no longer hoping to kill, but merely to wound enough to escape.

Jerry moved too fast to see, and spat out the mangled remains of Carl’s hand, bones and knife bitten into pieces as if they’d been made of wafers.

Screaming, clutching the pulsing stump, he ran for the stairs, managed to get up a few steps, but there was a bound, and the thing was on his back, biting and clawing.

“Had to eat them up fast! Didn’t know better! Got ’em all down, hair to toes, a few quick chomps! Like I said, she passed just after the other two! Minutes after!”

Carls vision blurred and his limbs grew heavy. He felt himself being pulled back down the stairs, his mangled back screaming in pain, unable to resist.

“Can’t move much, can you? That’s somethin’ I learned later. A few bites and they stay still, but they can hear and see and feel. And it tastes so much better that way!”

Carl’s body was pushed up against the wall, as Jerry picked his camera off the workbench. “Now… smile!”