The Girl in the Green Dress
By, Phil Keeling
Savannah kept its secrets, and it kept them well.
It was a necessity: it had a long history of being conquered, after all. That devil Tecumseh Sherman had arrived, spattered with gore and flames lapping at the leather of his boots, and Savannah’s people fixed a drink and let him in. Better to grant the outsider access than to take your chances with him burning your front door down. Someone had to pay for those doors, and it was almost never the person who destroyed them. This strategy for outsiders continued for generations, right up to the introduction of kitschy trolleys and dehydrated, sun-stroked tourists. The bricks in Savannah’s walkways were made up of drinkers, not fighters. Anything that could be killed for was a more worthwhile victory when gained over a few glasses of whiskey and wine. So the image of Georgia’s first city as a town of peaceful drunks wasn’t completely undeserved, but it was easy to question their motivations as hosts and hostesses.
Sheriff Tom Shellens was familiar with such motivations, because he was a Savannahian. He had been born to a dock worker and a waitress, both of whom lived south of Gaston street, in a narrow townhouse with a two-hundred year old oak frame and sturdy iron bars on the windows. The Shellens weren’t wealthy by any stretch of the imagination, but they were locals: something that the old money families on Savannah’s famous squares could never take away from them. It afforded them a place in the social ladder, albeit on one of the lower rungs. And as a Sheriff, he had seen secrets: bribes and violence and human ugliness. But what swayed at the end of the live oak before him was a secret of the older kind. He pondered its reflection in the river below and an old secret returned, unbidden, to his memory.
When Tom was a little boy, Halloween had been his favorite holiday in the world. The camouflage and the spoils: Halloween was a glorious warzone to the right child. There was smoke in the evening haze, and the heavy cream smell of pancake makeup settled into Spanish moss and around the rungs of ladders. At the end of the nighttime skirmish they would strip themselves of their costumes, the false faces and polyester rags would gather in the corners of children’s rooms all over the world: a ritual sacrifice in the name of white sugar and the mystery of strangers behind doors and windows.
As he grew older, Tom would sometimes wonder if the strange, pagan holiday had meant the same thing to his father. Had he even celebrated it? Every year it was more and more difficult to remember the details of his father. The angles of his fingernails, forever outlined with miscellaneous grit, and the pungent scent of brackish salt. Even today, Tom liked the smell: it was the smell of strength and comforting security.
Tom had just turned ten years old and the chocolate bar in his grip seemed massive. He had purposefully grabbed the one with almonds in it. Not because he liked them, but because his mother, a notorious candy thief, hated them. He was dressed as Blackbeard, just as he had been dressed last year, and the year before that. As he got older, various pieces of the costume began to get too small, so piecemeal replacements would be found. Eventually he would have replaced so much of the costume that nothing from the original existed. He didn’t know why he insisted on the dread pirate year after year: he knew he liked the sword. It was grey plastic, but if he concentrated enough he could imagine it as a true blade. A cutlass that could tear through rigging and sailor alike. He liked the sword because he liked the idea of being scary. He imagined his black yarn beard filled with burning fuses, casting his face in a skull-like grimace. He imagined the terrified whoops of the sailors and rival pirates who drew his wrath. He saw his home and filled it with silks, Spanish bullion, and exotic treasures from around the world. He was caught in these bloodthirsty fantasies when he came upon a mansion just off of one of the city squares.
The enormous manor was a quiet one: nothing Tom would have ever called foreboding. But perhaps that was the point. During the night’s plunderings of candy it had caught his attention, and he escaped his father’s guarding eye to investigate. Years later he would never be able to pinpoint exactly which mansion it was: the majority of the memory had gotten hazier and hazier as time wore on, and the colorful streets of Savannah was thick with manors, townhomes, and elaborate city gardens. As Tom had become an adult, it had become less than a memory, but more than a dream.
The mansion was painted white. Or it was white plaster. He didn’t remember brick or the rough gray textures of fitted stone. He did remember that it seemed to loom out of the background, the gentle swirl of mist seeping in and through its walls and gazing windows. It was the time of year that burned in the daytime and chilled at night, so the cool autumn breezes that blew in from the river would worm their way into the soil, sending the silent shriek of steam upwards and around the streets and houses. Savannah lived in a cloud in those evenings, his mother would always say. But to Tom it looked like every terrible werewolf movie he had ever seen.
He remembered pillars. The mansion had pillars. The windows were dead, black eyes, with not even a candle to illuminate whatever was hidden inside. No shutters were pulled—no curtains were drawn. It was as if the mansion wanted you to believe that it had nothing to hide.
“Don’t mind me,” the towering house seemed to say. “My life is an open book.”
But it was a lie. It was an illusion of innocence, and somehow little Tom Shellens knew that. But the only way to be certain was to get closer. The only way to know for sure was to see for himself.
The pillars of the mansion seemed like teeth, and the dead eyes seemed to call to him. It would be such a simple thing, to peep inside the windows. It would only take a minute. Without even being aware of the hows or whys of the situation, Tom found himself creeping up the wooden steps to the front door. Were they wood? Or were they stone? Even as he climbed the staircase he wasn’t sure he could fully tell. The solid oak door was mirrored on either side with glass windows as tall as either of his parents. It would be the easiest thing in the world to get in close, and peer inside. And while he was at it, he could try the door—see if it was open. The possibilities of what might be hiding inside swam through his head like lazy eels. To hell with chocolate bars with almonds!
Suddenly he was at the top of the steps, mere footfalls away from his goal. Why shouldn’t he? Why shouldn’t he see what was inside this monstrous house? There could be anything inside. He was dizzy with fantasies of pirate’s treasure and sword battles to be had in the darkness that called his name. His face was mere inches from the glass: glass as black and opaque as the eyes of bottom-feeding fish.
But no uncovered window should be this dark. Not this close up.
There were no shutters—no drapes. But the inside was like India ink dripped into a goblet of water. Nothing but swirling dark faced him.
He didn’t feel good. He didn’t feel like himself. Then a sudden shimmer of confidence seized his foggy brain like the arm of a mousetrap. He didn’t feel like himself, because he felt like a pirate!
Tom wasn’t sure what he would have done if his father hadn’t torn him bodily from the stoop of the black mansion. He didn’t know how much closer he could have possibly gotten to the glass, or why he had felt so drawn to it. He had been deaf to everything but could tell that his father had been shouting. He knew that his child’s brain had trouble understanding why his father seemed so upset. Why his powerful arms seemed to wobble and shake beneath his meager weight. Why the normally gruff, baritone of his voice now seemed shrill and aching with fear. He wondered why, and then had a flash of something horrible pass through his eyes, ever so briefly.
In his mind’s eye he could see the blackened window again, but its glass had been smashed inward, with a small body that had pushed its way through. A body that was made of a cheap pirate costume and a yarn beard. The window was lined with long panes of shattered glass like tearing fangs, and the child pirate’s frame seemed to sigh downward on and over them, the unseen ends of the teeth pushing the costume upward at chaotic angles. And when the bleak red juice came, it seemed to pour out of the little figure all at once; soaking the front stoop of the mansion, and gurgling into the unseen darkness of the room within, coating whatever secrets were held inside.
This image came to Tom in an instant, and it must have shown on his face. When his father locked eyes with him, there was a deep swell in them both, as if they were both attempting to catch their breaths after a long game of hide and seek. They stared at one other, and Tom sobbed until he couldn’t anymore. His father stood there on the stoop of that mansion and allowed his son to recognize his own fear. It was the least he could do. As Tom’s father carried him from the porch onto a sidewalk that seemed miles away, there were no words that need be spoken. They both understood: there were places that you did not go. Places that, if you go too far, will trap you miles from where a father’s love can save you. The lesson for the evening—for the lifetime—was learned.
Over his father’s shoulder, Tom watched as the mansion got further and further away. His breath and the heat of his hands on the window had left the only traces that he was ever there at all. And then, for a long, low moment, Tom swore that he could see two shapes on the window try to match the prints of his own. They were like hands, but far too long, with narrow, impossibly bony fingers that ended in points. The tips tickered and tackered on the inside of the window, threatening to pull down and create a moaning screech against the fogged glass. Two albino-white hands cutting through the darkness—the only things in the hidden darkness of the mansion that Tom would ever be able to see. Until what appeared to be a thick, purple slug wormed its way up the middle of the glass and disappeared. Before Tom closed his eyes, the massive, bruised tongue licked the glass again, attempting to get at the condensation of breath on the other side.
When Tom’s father disappeared, they moved to the nearby town of Thunderbolt. His father’s dockworker paycheck had kept them far above water, but now that it was gone, they would have to live more frugally. At least that’s what Tom and his mother both assured each other was the reason for their move. It made sense, didn’t it? But he was never sure. It sometimes felt like they were running, instead.
Tom’s mother had always maintained that his father had run off with another woman. “Off to start another life with one of his whores,” she’d say. And when she said it, it was in a voice altogether unlike her usual one. She would be speaking in the sweet, low tones that Tom had always heard from her, and suddenly the words would grate out of her, like hostages escaping their prison during a riot. And she knew it, too. The words seemed to take his mother off guard—as if she had never meant to utter them. And then she would move onto another topic, hurriedly. Like anything else in the world would be a better subject for discussion. But his father was a good man. He didn’t drink—he didn’t gamble his paychecks away. He was loving and caring to both his son and his wife. Tom didn’t believe his mother’s words. And he didn’t think she believed them either.
Something forced her to believe them.
Without either of them knowing the specifics, a horrible thing had happened. And then something had shut off in both of them. What it was exactly that had gone away wasn’t clear. But when Tom tried to remember the last time he had seen his father, it was like a light being turned off, with a long, pale finger flicking the switch. And then he would be wondering what was for dinner and assuaging the pain of his missing father with words of condolence that didn’t sound appropriate at all for a moment of such pain and longing.
My father is gone. He might be dead. He might be rotting. My father is gone.
Oh well. Ho-hum. These things happen.
Sheriff Tom Shellens wondered what sort of appropriate comfort he might be able to offer the two terrified goth kids leaning on the cruiser some 50 yards behind him, as far away from the river as his deputies would let them get. He wondered if comfort would be necessary this time tomorrow. He almost never thought about that mansion anymore, and he wondered about that. Was it a moment that he had forced out of his head? Or had it been forced out by something else? Did the deepest parts of his being have anything to do with that amnesia? He almost never thought about the mansion anymore. Except for on nights like this. He wondered if the shivering, half-naked kids behind him would also eventually forget the specifics of this horrible night.
It was a common enough occurrence. Bonaventure Cemetery drew all kinds. From the historian to the mild-mannered tourist to the fishnet wearing freaks. Sheriff Tom Shellens had been called out at 4am to remove trespassers from the Cemetery on many occasions. Built in 1846, Bonaventure was 160 acres wide and covered in Spanish moss, marble tombs, and haunting sculptures. Whether it was kids humping or performing new-agey pagan ceremonies or just plain vandalizing Confederate headstones, there was rarely a dull moment. This, however, had marked the first occasion that one of those kids had called to report themselves. Well, not report themselves, exactly. But to report what they had found.
"Christ," the Sheriff said to the corpse. "I fucking hate Mondays."
It had been a photo shoot. That was the story, anyway. No big surprise—they’d found the two of them with a camera and several pieces of lighting equipment: tripods with flash bulbs attached to what looked like short, fat umbrellas. The two of them were both college-aged, kids really, with the dark makeup splatter of what passed for being rebellious in this day and age. The boy was dressed comfortably enough in dark jeans and a grey sweatshirt. The girl seemed less comfortable, dressed as she was in an elaborate lingerie ensemble. All black, buckles snapped to garters that pulled on nylons beneath a leather corset. This was all before she concealed herself beneath an over-sized trench that probably belonged to the boy. Tom knew that the two deputies that he had met there would have been sorry to see the disappearance of all that flesh if it had been any other day in the world. She was a pretty girl, with pale skin and unnaturally black hair: Tom wondered what the appeal of all the lingerie was. Wasn’t the entire point to just take everything off? He wouldn’t have even known where to begin.
Whatever effect she had been attempting to produce an hour ago, it was a moot point now. They cradled each other, both weeping against the other’s shoulders. If this rendezvous had been anything beyond a professional photo shoot, then Tom felt sorry for them. A dead body was not the ideal backdrop for talking someone out of their panties.
At least it wasn't in the company Tom tended to keep.
The graves and mausoleums that the young photographer had set his lights around were just on the eastern lip of cemetery. From there was a border of dirt road that circumnavigated all 160 acres of it and danced just along the edge of the Savannah River. The tombstones and flickering lights of their makeshift studio did not sidle to the edge of the river in any meaningful way. But that distance couldn’t disguise the shapes that hung from the massive branches of the live oaks that lined the water.
Most of them were what one would expect: the twisted, gnarled insanity of the Spanish Moss that crept in clumps and curtains from trees, creating shade on even the sunniest of days. The sun was just coming up, and it seems to bring a breeze with it that rolled out over the river and shook the creeping vines. The breeze was not enough, however, to move the figure transplanted within them.
With the sun behind her, the body seemed as black as the night that was slowly being pushed away. At first, Tom took this to be a trick of the light: the sudden brightness of the sun creating a silhouette from which nothing was distinguishable. It was only when he noticed that the sun didn’t seem to affect anything else about the body that he realized that she was a permanent shade of charcoal black. Her dress was a delicate, pale green, with intricate stitching and white lace edges. Despite the charred black skin of its wearer, the dress seemed almost untouched, as if the river breezes had kept the fabric clean and new. It wasn’t only her dress that gave him the general idea that she had once been a woman. Her body—what was left of it—was slight and feather-graceful. She hanged there like a morbid dress store mannequin that had been left on a funeral pyre. With the fresh, almost pastel shade of the green dress against the smoke black flesh that wore it, it occurred to Tom that the corpse was entirely the polar opposite of the wan, shuddering, would-be model that now wept against his squad car.
The corpse’s face had no features—only mounds and holes. It was almost more of a lunar landscape than a face, Tom thought. Her eyes were double pools of squid ink—staring forever into a skyline that could do nothing but stare back. Even the first hesitating rays of sunlight couldn’t fill them. They grasped at the light greedily, like two celestial black holes, threatening to drink up all the light in the world. In a horror movie, her mouth would have mirrored the sentiment: a mute scream of fury or frustration or loneliness—all in defiance of a world that she loathed or ached for. But the truth frightened Tom far more. Her lips were pursed delicately, like a serene Roman statue’s. There was no frown and no horrifying smile. Just calm acceptance of a fate that seemed inevitable, or even favorable, to the sport of life. It was almost as if her mouth didn’t exist at all.
"She looks dead," said Jerome Abernathy, one of the deputies. Relatively new to the team, but a good man. Smart. Not generally given to making blindingly, stupidly obvious observations. But Tom knew what he meant.
To say that the girl in the green dress looked dead was absolutely superfluous. But it was the first thing that had occurred to Tom, as well. Not even that she had once been alive and then died. But that she had never been alive in the first place. The rope that she dangled from was rough and coarse—the sort of rope that would turn a shrimping boat captain’s hands into spun steel. But the weight her body placed on it was nothing. The black grey of her skin was scaled and dry—like the outside of a burnt marshmallow. As Tom got closer, he could just make out two long, narrow slashes that made their way up her inner wrists and arms like twin exclamation points. What was once moist flesh that had pulled away from the even drag of a razor bristled like a desert of scales. Where thick blood should have dripped, only the dimmest motes of silt fell, barely visible but for the sun’s rays shining through them.
She had done this to herself.
And it meant absolutely nothing. It opened no doors. It didn’t even crack a window.
"Yeah," said Tom absently. "She looks dead."
Suicides Tom could account for. Hell, hangings he could account for, he noted sadly to himself. But putting the two together with a body that seemed to have burst into flames sometime shortly after the bars shut down put him in a position he had never before felt in his life. He didn’t know why, but something about the body made Tom think that it was some sort of a sign. A dark portent of things to come.
He hated the girl in the green dress.
He hated the way she made him feel. He hated the memories that seemed to come unlocked in his brain when he looked at her. Why wasn’t she swaying? Shouldn’t a body, no matter how light, rock back and forth in the breeze? He squeezed his eyes shut and turned his back on the river, the trees, the moss, and the girl in the green dress.
When he opened his eyes again, both of his deputies and the young couple were staring at him. They were paler than they had been previously. Their eyes looked strained, as if they had just been informed of a death in the family.
“Are you okay, sir?” That was Ricky Morales, a young man—not much older than the art students who had called them on this November morning.
Tom had been doing something. He didn’t know what. But when he closed his mouth, he realized for the first time that it had been open at all. His entire mouth felt how the dead girl’s skin looked: dry as an English art critic.
He sincerely hoped that he hadn’t been screaming.
“Cut it down,” Tom said.
Morales didn’t move. He knew that wasn’t the proper protocol in a situation like this. Then again, there had never been a situation like this. Was there really any proper way to handle a dead ash woman in a tree?
“Sir?” Morales asked, looking for some sort of clarification.
“Do it.”
The end of the rope wasn’t directly tied to the thick tree branch that supported it. Instead, its length wound around the branch and then to the oak’s massive trunk, some twenty feet below. When Ricky Morales noticed that pulley system, he breathed a sigh of relief: he hadn’t been looking forward to scaling the damn thing. Not for what he was convinced was a dead demon. His abuela had told him stories of the darkness that enveloped the world. Stories of la llorona—the specter of a weeping woman who had long ago lost her children. His abuela had told him that devils strode among the living—free to come and go as they pleased. He had never believed her.
He was beginning to change his mind.
When she came down, it was as if someone had thrown a fistful of wet leaves. Gravity took its toll, but with no urgency, and little effort. The rope almost appeared to be the heaviest part about her. When the girl in the green dress hit the leaf-strewn ground of the riverbank, it was as if she imploded on two ends. Her legs didn’t collapse beneath her so much as they ceased to exist. They telescoped within themselves, disappearing beneath her skirt and dancing against the bank like blackened coins. The rope that had supported her bug’s nest frame just moments ago came down with a force that collapsed her ashen head, her neck, her face. And then, in an instant, that serene mouth and those bottomless eye sockets were extinct from every place in the world but the minds of those who had seen them personally.
"She's gone," Abernathy said, continuing his unspoken decision state the obvious for Tom's benefit.
"I'm glad," said Morales. And by the sound of the long, low shudders that let loose from their lungs, it was clear that the art students felt the same way.
Tom approached the remains of the green dress, though it was a bit hard to refer to them as “remains”. Despite the fall and the pile of staining ash that now weaved its way in and out of the skirt and arms, it was in pristine condition. He thought, momentarily, of giving it to his daughter.
"She'd hate it," he said out loud.
"What was that, Sheriff?" asked Abernathy.
"Never mind."
It was the dress of an old-moneyed girl on a beautiful spring day. Tom's daughter Tamara hated old-moneyed girls, and wasn't fond of spring. Neither was Tom, for that matter.
He stooped to inspect the ashes that the dead girl had left behind, and another breeze picked up from the river. They scattered like grim confetti over the calm eddy of the Savannah River, carried away and out of sight. It was alarming how fast the entire dune of blackened ash had disappeared. As if it had never been there at all. And suddenly Tom was just a grown man standing in a cemetery, holding delicately onto a green dress, the significance of which was starting to cool on him. He inspected the fabric and nodded, as if something in his mind had been made up.
"Yeah," he muttered. "Tamara would hate this."
He bundled the dress into a ball, watching its lace crumple beneath his dirty fingers, and tossed it unceremoniously into a nearby wastebasket. The girl in the green dress was beginning to blur in his mind. Her lips. Her eyes. The ash of her skin. And not just for him.
Even now they were all starting to forget: the goth kids, Morales. Abernathy was making a poor show of not staring at the goth girl's legs.
The memories were dancing out of sight.
Like Tom had forgotten the black mansion in Columbia Square. Like the horrors that hundreds of other Savannahians had almost certainly forced from their minds over years, decades, centuries.
Maybe more.
As Sheriff Tom Shellens gazed out over the last floating wisps of charred skin that bobbed downstream, he was already having trouble remembering the specifics of what had brought him out here in the first place. He turned back in the direction of the art students. Their black makeup was smeared, but they seemed calmer than they had been before. And why shouldn’t they be? There was nothing worth worrying over. Kids get in trouble all the time—it wouldn’t ruin their lives. He would take them in for trespassing. They wouldn’t complain much.
Savannah kept its secrets, and it kept them well.
Chapter Two: Low Country Tower Seven Podcast, Episode 54
(HEAVY METAL THEME MUSIC PLAYS, FADES OUT AS CRICKET BEGINS TO SPEAK.)
CRICKET: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, it’s begun. Not the global uprising, though: don’t panic! No, I can only imagine you would have already noticed that little detail by now, wouldn’t you? Or maybe you wouldn’t—maybe you’d already be dead. Maybe, maybe, maybe.
This is Cricket out of Savannah and welcome back to Low Country Tower Seven: where we will drag you, kicking and screaming, toward the truth, whether you like it or not.
And you never do, you fucking plebs.
And, you know, I was joking just then, but to be honest: based on the current state of readiness with your average American, I wouldn’t be surprised if the majority of us would in no way shape or form be ready for some sort of uprising. Hell, sometimes I wonder how we’ve made it this far in the first place. This country used to be ready for anything that could be thrown its way: commies, Nazis, witches, and cloaked lizardmen—we could kick all of their asses, because we took absolutely no shit, no guff, no political correctness. And nowadays, I’m not so sure. This beautiful country of mine: it’s a fucking sacrilege.
We have to be ready for the world.
There’s evil out there, my friends: you can mark my words. And I’m not just talking about the obvious antagonists that we’re all aware of: those politically correct college professors protecting their fundamentalist Sunni buddies. Buncha smooth talkers.
No, there’s more out there than meets the eye, if you only know how to look for it. And that’s why you’re here, isn’t it? That’s why you come to me. Because I know how to look for it, and you know that.
You need me.
Because you’re just like me: you don’t want to be afraid anymore. And you need me to remind you. Being afraid is beneath you. You’re Americans, goddamn it, and you’re not interested in being pushed around by anyone, whether it’s the shadow government, or your own fucking dad! You can’t push around someone who knows the truth. But every now and then we need help, and that’s what people like ole Cricket are here for. I’ve seen that look in your eyes, but my help is something that you earn. Subscribing to this podcast is the first step to showing that you’re better than the other cattle and sheep that populate this planet.
And that reminds me, today's episode of the Low Country Tower Seven Podcast is brought to you by Wicker Man records on Broughton street. Bringing you the best from the the heavy hitting sounds of the deep south: all your favorite rage punk, satano-rock, and Scandinavian style murder metal from the Low Country and beyond. Because your parents aren't afraid of your Dungeons & Dragons habit anymore, and it's time to up the ante. Wicker Man records, because: fuck you, dad.
All right, all right. Now that that's done. So: why is it that there are so few of us who are willing to do what’s right, you might ask? The answers are more obvious than you’d think—and that’s what makes the question seem so silly.
At first.
The government isn’t going to help you because they’refine with you being afraid. Fear makes people easy to control: you know that, and I know that. The gun grabbers are coming, my friends, and you can bet your ass that when they come to this man’s doorstep, they’re going to be staring down a loaded forty-five.
(GUNSHOT SOUND EFFECT.)
And why shouldn’t I protect myself? The news is coming in every day with more and more evidence of the shadows and skulking shapes that are out there waiting for you and your family in your most vulnerable moments!
(UPBEAT THEME JINGLE PLAYS, ANNOUNCING: “THE BAAAAAACK NEWS!!!”)
Let’s take a look at the back pages, shall we? Because, of course, the real news is never on display. What have we got here, what have we got…
(THE SOUND OF NEWSPAPER PAGES RUSTLING.)
Voter turnout at an all-time low for the local elections—well that’s no goddamn surprise. And don’t tell me about voter apathy, you disingenuous bastards—I don’t know a single good-hearted American who isn’t passionate about voting and taking their piece of the pie.
But here comes the day to vote and what do we get? “None of it matters, Cricket—it’s Stalin or Hitler!” “The voting booth’s too far away!” “I can’t vote, Cricket: I’ve gotta work!” Suddenly all of your idealism and brains and good intentions go out the window!
But I don’t blame you—there’s something in the water. There’s something in the food. And what you need to do, is what I do. You need dig your own wells—you need to grow your own food. Take care of yourself, people—you don’t owe the bag boy at Food Lion jack shit. Before you know it, you’ll being drinking ice cold groundwater, and you’ll have fifty different recipes for beets, squash, and cucumber. Don’t tell me that doesn’t sound appealing.
What else… What else…
(MORE RUSTLING.)
Alright, here we go: “Joshua Baird, 32 years of age, of Savannah, died of accidental drowning.” This was just this past Thursday. No other word on this Baird kid. Just “send flowers here” and blah blah blah.
32. Young kid.
And he certainly doesn’t look like he had one too many chromosomes or something like that. Nobody else think this is suspicious? And they don’t give you a single word about where it was that the poor bastard drowned. No need, if you ask me.
No, if this poor guy went down around where I think he did, then he was dead the moment his foot touched the water.
Now, I’m not going to name the spot in particular because I don’t want any of my younger listeners to get any cute ideas and try to play boy hero out there. No, I’m not going to be responsible for some epidemic of kids getting drowned.
Let me be perfectly clear: if that family pulls for an autopsy, they’re only going to get more questions. They’re going to get lungs full of water, and an ankle covered in bruises, scratches, and bite marks.
I know some of you think I’m going off the deep end when I bring shit like that up. “Cricket, you gotta focus on the government—the lies—the Bilderberg Group.”
And believe me: that shit is on my radar. Half the name of this podcast is “Tower Seven”, my friends—and don’t you forget it. I’m not blind to the masters pulling the strings. But the other half of this podcast’s name is “Low Country” and that puts a different spin on things. Because down here in the Low Country, we’ve got some unique problems.
A whole lot of you know what I’m talking about, and a whole lot of you don’t. And that’s okay. We all gotta start some place. There’s a lot for us to focus on, people. And I’ll take the crooked politician I know over the flesh-hungry creature I don’t. Say what you want about the beasts of big government—at least they’re just metaphorical monsters.
And people don’t want to hear it—they don’t want to know what’s going on. You’ve seen it. Hell, I saw it this past weekend. My sister had her first kid—that’s right ladies and gentlemen, Cricket’s the authority figure over a fledgling infant.
I gotta tell you, people. Holding that kid changed me. I went out for a quick drive, and before I knew it, I was visiting an old friend of mine. Been doing business with him for years. I’d tell you more, but I gotta protect my sources, you know?
So he sells me a nice little piece with a few extra clips—nothing flashy. American made, hell, he even threw in a few boxes of ammo. He’s a good guy—he knows I’ll be back. Because that’s what loyalty gets you. I know he’s listening right now—thanks again, big guy.
So I bring everything by—all wrapped up. It’s got a bow and everything. I tell them it’s a late baby shower present. And I tell you, folks: it’s unbelievable how ignorant people are. Even family.
Hell, especially family.
They’re going on about what a paranoid asshole I am and how I never listen and they’ve always been against having guns in the house. They throw those statistics at me, you know? How a gun is more likely to hurt a family member than an intruder and yadda yadda yah… And they never know where these statistics come from, do they? And when they do, it’s always some government funded propaganda machine—such bullshit.
And for the record, I did know that they didn’t like guns. But that was before, you know? Before the baby came into the picture. I mean, if that little kid put that much warmth and love into my heart, I can only imagine how much it put into theirs—so why wouldn’t you want to protect it?
That’s what the evolution of these pantywaist ideals has given us. Ribbons and trophies for everyone. Everyone loses because we all win. It’s imbecilic and it goes to such extremes that we are going to wipe ourselves out as a species before the things that go bump in the night even get a chance to dip their toes into our blood.
Unless, of course, that was their plan all along. Which is probably the case. I don’t have proof for that, but how much proof could you possibly need? It’s as plain as the nose on your goddamn face.
Anyway, I apologized about the gun. Made a big show of putting it away in my car. Went out, got the kid some clothes. Paid in cash cause I'm not an idiot. Whatever. But I did sneak back to their place the next night and hid it away. Yeah, I put everything in a nice airtight container so nothing rusts. Pried open some boards from the crawlspace under their front porch and gave it a little shallow grave. Nothing they need to know about right now, and sure they’d be pissed off if they’d caught me. I mean, I’m not crazy: I know how that would look. But it's better to bury a gun in case of emergency than to bury a family member because the gun wasn't around, am I right?
Hell: that's almost poetic.
And when the proverbial shit hits the fan, and they get a message from me offering a simple and patriotic solution for saving the lives of themselves and that little baby? They’ll thank me then.
Maybe if Joshua Baird, age 32, had himself a gun, he would at least have had a fucking chance.
Alright, enough for sucking my own dick. Up next we’ve got one of my world-famous guests. He runs a still out of Effingham County—makes his own vodka, and a brand of absinthe with more wormwood than a human should probably consume. Is it legal? Is it safe for bodily consumption? Probably a “no” on both counts, but who really decides what's right for their own body?
That's right, kids: you do.
Chapter Three: What Do We Do If They Don’t Drink?
The lobby of the Conrad Aiken Inn was filled with the smiling eyes of the armchair historian, the drunken whimsy of the visiting sorority sister, and the forced grins of the beleaguered tour guide. They filled the lobby to the breaking point every afternoon, and would disappear until their breath stank of ethanol, and their cheeks glowed like sinner-saints.
Simon hated them.
He hated them all. He glared out over their sea of grinning teeth and wished that they were all dead. This didn’t really have anything to do with the tourists themselves. He didn’t like them, but he didn’t like most people on afternoons.
Or mornings.
Or evenings.
The tourist locusts came from all over, looking to fulfill the expectation that they had built up in their heads for Georgia’s oldest city. The same way they had when they visited Baltimore the week before and Saint Augustine the week before that. The people of New Orleans knew which side their bread was buttered on, and so they would play up what they were known for. And the streets were alive with dead Voodoo practices and the stretched rubber band squeal of trumpets and trombones. It was in Savannah’s best interests to approach tourists in the same way; offering up to the outsider what they did best.
This was the reason that Simon gave for his drinking.
The Conrad Aiken Inn was a massive boutique hotel that overlooked River Street, Savannah’s tourist-laden answer to NOLA’s Bourbon. During the day, it was something of a generic, old-world style Riverwalk. But at night, the street and Savannah herself were in their prime, and the shops and hooch halls built directly into the stone would open their doors wide to the wet marsh air, drawing in guests with promises of oysters, libations, and innuendo-laden souvenirs. Men with saxophones and fiddles would play lazily on the sidewalks, and their notes would drift complacently over the murmuring water of the Savannah River.
The easy comparison to make was always to Louisiana’s own Sodom and Gomorrah, but Savannah had never reached the nitrous highs of New Orleans. It was far too much of a sleepy and lazy town for that. That said, it never reached the lows of The Big Easy, either. Discreetly violent and unabrasively queer, it was a comfortable mish mash of the South’s starving artists and obese debutantes. A swishing perfume of marijuana smoke in the stifling Low Country humidity. For Simon, it was the most perfect place to live in the world. The locals of the historic district were the same levels of drunk and sleepy as he was. His first few years of living in Savannah had come about by accident—the results of a post-graduation wanderlust that had led him from one friend’s couch to another.
Laziness and a disregard for ambition came to him naturally, and he’d never seen anything particularly wrong with that, no matter how much it seemed to confuse and concern friends and loved ones. Explaining this tendency to others was quite a bit like attempting to teach someone how to touch their nose with their tongue: an effort that only made you both feel embarrassed for the other the more you practiced it.
You’re either born to doze or you aren’t, Simon thought, checking the time on his computer again.
Naturally sleepy-eyed and low-speaking, Simon would have stood taller than most, if it weren’t for that aforementioned laziness and a round belly, full of all of the pointless and perfect food and booze that the lifestyle of a concierge provided. The general shift from bohemian bum to cultural attaché was certainly drastic, but in a way it made its own sense.
“I didn’t know it would be so sad-looking,” his most recent guest, an aging woman from Topeka, said to the slate sky that drowned the horizon over the Savannah river.
Simon had never been to Topeka. But he was certain that he hated it.
In those earliest Savannah days and evenings, Simon had found himself living on the government dole and getting day drunk on the front steps of all of the most illustrious Historic homes that did not belong to him. He had smiled and waved at out-of-towners in horse drawn carriages, tilting his half full cup of cheap wine in a toast to their own questionable health. They loved it. For years, Simon was essentially part of the grand tour of Savannah. And then he made the questionable decision to work for a living, and the tourism industry snatched him up. He was the true local, they figured—just the person who could offer advice on the best places in the Low Country to eat, drink and be merry.
Slowly, but effortlessly, he learned to loathe people.
Individually, people were not always terrible. But when forced into huge packs away from their home turf, he couldn’t help but notice how helpless they were. The simplest directions—the most obvious recommendations: nothing was too rudimentary that it couldn’t be repeated over and over again, in various speeds, tones and even languages. Being in charge of several hundred toddlers wouldn’t have been so bad if they weren’t so ungrateful for it all.
“I’m sorry,” Simon said to Topeka, attempting his best impression of a cheerful grin. “I’m a just a lowly concierge—they’ve made it very clear that our weather control powers are to be kept to an absolute minimum.”
The woman sniffed, as if considering to herself that the next time she visited Savannah, she would choose a hotel that made a more liberal use of their supernatural powers. She fixed Simon with a withering stare, which he responded to by smiling so hard that he was certain his skull would rip through his face and clatter to the floor. He made her reservations with a trolley tour, and for the moment she was satisfied.
Simon hated trolley tours.
If today’s hangover had a physical character, Simon decided, it would be a Christmas tree: intermittently bright with flashing bulbs: all dark green with reaching, vaguely scratchy edges. Not horrible, but if you could avoid falling into one, you probably should.
Some ten years ago, Simon had drunk like a bumbling satyr: in the pursuit of fun and a steadying of the nerves. He had always been somehow simultaneously lazy and tense at all times, like a vibrating slug that sweated its body weight in worry while traveling at two centimeters per hour. The liquid left him cheerful and calm. It left him a better man. In many ways, the booze had saved him.
Not to sound dramatic—but perhaps it saved me from himself.
He would roll that thought around in his head when he was particularly deep within the bottle. Sometimes it made perfect sense. And sometimes it sounded like a load of horseshit.
And as he got older, the drink became medicine. He drank to connect before. Now he drank to escape. He wasn’t sure how comfortable he was with that fact, but there it was.
This story is comprised of the first few chapters in a longer work titled "Drunken Vampire Hunting For Beginners”, also by Phil Keeling.
