This isn't really the right time of year for stories like this, but I didn't want to wait until Halloween....


Tales of the Midnight Storytellers' Club

We planned to hold our first meeting on what turned out to be a chilly, rainy fall evening. We couldn’t have asked for a more appropriate atmosphere. Unfortunately Lee’s transmission took out on her the day before, and her car was still in the shop at the dealership on Colonel Glenn Road. This meant that I, as her roommate, was responsible for transporting both of us to the evening’s meeting.

On my motor scooter.

We bundled up as best we could in our rain gear, and bungee-corded a watertight bag containing the apple cobbler I’d just baked onto the little luggage rack on the back end of the scooter. Then Lee scrunched her little self up between me and the luggage rack, and away we went. I strained to peer through my rain-streaked face shield as we headed up University Avenue. Fortunately it wasn’t raining too hard at the time, and it was late enough that the evening rush traffic had cleared out. Once we were past the busy intersection at Markham we just about had the street to ourselves. The main issue was coaxing my bike’s little engine to carry both of us up the succession of steep hills that we had to cross north of Markham.

At Evergreen Drive we turned right and went over a few blocks to Kavanaugh Boulevard. Amy and Sara’s apartment was on Kavanaugh. They lived in an unusual place that looked more like an old house from the front than an apartment building. It had a porch like you’d see on a bungalow-style house, with a porch swing to the right of the front door. As we slopped around from the parking lot and up the front steps, I found myself wistfully remembering that mild weekend afternoon we’d spent visiting our friends just a few weeks earlier, lazing around on the porch and porch swing, watching the cars and pedestrians passing by just a few feet away.

The building had a little lobby right inside the front door. A door to the right led into a neighboring apartment. A short flight of steps straight ahead ran up to Amy and Sara’s place. The stairs were old and creaked a bit. The creaking stairs and the cold lobby’s dim light made the lobby feel just a little bit spooky, even with the muffled sound of the neighbors’ TV set.

And then the door to our friends’ apartment opened, and the doorway was full of light and Amy being her usual sunny self. She told us to leave our dripping boots and other rain gear out in the lobby. She could see when we got inside that the gear hadn’t kept us completely dry on our ride.

“Oh, you shouldn’t have come in the rain on a motor scooter like that!” she cried, when we’d explained to her about Lee’s car. “You should’ve called for me or Sara to come get you!”

“Ah, it’s not that bad out, really,” I said. “We couldn’t make you make that round trip all the way down to our place, when you’re the ones cooking most of the supper.” Lee didn’t say anything.

In the apartment’s little kitchen we found Sara managing the meal. They had a pot of stew on, and a pot of green beans, and a pan of cornbread in the oven. It all smelled wonderful. “That stew will be just the thing to warm us up on a night like this,” I said.

“Well, everything’s almost ready,” said Sara, looking up from her stew-stirring. “Now it’s just about time for the guys to get here.”

And sure enough they did arrive, barely a minute later. There was Clay, the ringleader of the group, with that fantastic smile of his and a hot roast chicken that he’d snagged at half-price from the grocery store—it’s a wonder they hadn’t sold completely out of them on a rainy evening like that. Then came Tyler, chubby and cheerful and carrying a pre-made bagged salad that he’d found at a mark-down. And there was Jamie, bringing up the rear with the soft drinks. We didn’t mind the fact that the guys’ contributions to our little potluck supper were kind of economical—after all, we were all impecunious college students.

We wasted no time getting ready to eat. Tyler ripped open his bagged salad. A few moments later the rest of us ripped open all the apartment’s windows. Now we knew why the salad had been marked down! It was bad enough for a few moments there that I had to go over to a window and stick my head out in the damp, chilly night air.

When I did so, I thought again how unusual it was that this apartment building in the middle of Little Rock had a stretch of dark woods right in back, behind the parking lot. It was a finger of Alsopp Park that extended into the surrounding neighborhood. The finger of woods was only a few hundred yards wide, and less than a mile long. But in the dark and rain like this it made the building feel as if it was on the edge of a tract of lonely wilderness. Really, we had picked the perfect time and setting for our night of tale-telling!

Once we’d gotten rid of the funk from Tyler’s superannuated salad the meal was a great success. The stew was wonderful, the cornbread and green beans went with it perfectly, we picked the chicken’s bones clean, and everybody liked my apple cobbler and said they couldn’t believe it was the first I’d ever made. Over supper we chatted about the day’s events at UALR, and Lee’s car trouble, and all the other stuff we had to catch up on in the brief time since we’d seen each other last.

It was after nine by the time we had finished eating and cleaned and washed up afterwards. We all adjourned to the apartment’s little living room. Tyler took a seat on the couch between me and Sara. Amy made a point of dragging in a chair from the kitchen and told Lee to take the arm chair in the living room. Jamie sat on the floor and leaned up against Lee’s chair, which I knew Lee wouldn’t mind one bit. Clay grabbed a piece of floor right next to my end of the couch, which I didn’t mind a bit.

No sooner had Amy taken a seat when she bounced back up again saying: “Oh, wait just a minute! Wait just a minute!”

She disappeared into her room for a moment and came back with a ceramic candle holder she had found that summer at a craft fair somewhere. She lit a cherry-scented candle—Amy loved cherry-scented candles—and set the candle holder on the floor in the middle of the room. Then she switched off the light and sat down. “Now we can begin!”

The candle’s flickering light cast weird shadows around the room as it shined through the holder’s filigreed sides. Suddenly the warm, cozy apartment felt spooky. Nobody said anything for a moment.

“I guess we should have somebody call the meeting to order or something,” Tyler said.

“Clay should be the one to do that,” Lee suggested. “This was all his idea in the first place.”

“Okay,” said Clay, from his seat on the floor beside me, “the first meeting of the Midnight Storyteller’s Club is now in session! The rules, such as they are, are simple. We’ll all take turns telling stories until at least the stroke of midnight. You can tell any kind of story you like. Just as long as it’s the kind of tale you’d naturally feel like telling in a setting like this. Who’s going to start?”

It got quiet again. We heard the rain dripping outside, and watched the weird shadows.

Then Amy’s hand shot up. “I’ll start!”

And she leaned forward in her chair like a good storyteller and began.

What It's Like to Date a Vampire

I admit it. I kind of have a thing for older guys. Edwin—not his real name, by the way—looked like he was about thirty. He was a lot older than he looked. A lot older.

When we started to get to know each other, Edwin was very up front with me about the fact that he was a vampire. I was intrigued. He was a pretty good-looking guy, I must say. He had that thick, dark hair, and those smoldering dark eyes, and that face that showed that he’d seen a lot in his life, but was still handsome. True, his skin was awfully pale. But it’s not as though he looked like some poor Goth kid who didn’t look like he’d eaten in a week. Of course the vampire part was intriguing too. You know how romantic vampires are supposed to be.

It turned out Edwin was quite the romantic. He had this charm about him, and always seemed to know the right thing to say. He took me to neat places, like concerts—the kind where they don’t play electric guitars, I mean—and plays, and nice restaurants. He was always the perfect gentleman. He never tried to come onto me. And he never acted like he wanted to, you know, bite me on the neck. I’ve got to say, that would’ve been a deal-breaker!

According to Edwin, most of the things you hear about vampires and see in movies are just myths. They don’t go around attacking people to drink their blood, for instance. He admitted that it did sometimes happen back in the old days, when they couldn’t always get it as often as they needed and would start to get desperate and kind of crazy. Nowadays, though, it’s not hard for them to find discreet ways to get blood through medical supply channels. All they need is a little bit once every full moon—they can go a couple of months longer if they really have to—and otherwise they can live pretty much like anybody else.

Of course they don’t turn into bats or anything, and they aren’t vulnerable to silver and religious symbols. They are awfully photosensitive, which is why they tend to be night owls. But it’s not like they’d burn up and turn into a pile of dust if they got caught in the sun. They live a long time if they’re lucky and careful, but not forever. Edwin said the oldest vampire he’d ever heard of lived about a hundred and fifty years. Their age doesn’t really start to catch up with them until they’re about a hundred and twenty.

Edwin told me some things about himself. He was old enough to have been in World War II. He’d been married to a lady vampire for many years, until they ended up deciding they were tired of being together. Since then he’d stayed single. He’d built up a couple of different successful careers over the years, and was pretty well off. Sometimes he got lonely. That was why he went out with me, I think. He just wanted some companionship.

Well, we liked being around each other and had half a dozen or so very nice dates. Then came that night when I found out the truth about vampires. The awful truth!

We’d gone to this really nice restaurant. It was the kind of place where the waiters carry these big pepper grinders full of peppercorns and grind your pepper right there at the table on request. A waiter was doing that at our table when somebody passing by somehow managed to bump into him really hard. Hard enough to make him drop the pepper mill. When it fell it popped open and spilled all these little peppercorns all over the floor.

I heard Edwin kind of groan and say “Oh, no!” to himself. You won’t believe what he did next. He got down on his hands and knees on the floor and began counting all the spilled peppercorns, one by one!

For a moment the waiter and I just stared at him. We didn’t know what to think. Diners at neighboring tables started staring as well. Then the waiter tried to get Edwin to move aside and let him clean up the mess. Edwin told the waiter to let him alone, and kept counting. He was just frantically counting all those little peppercorns. He wouldn’t listen to me, either. He made such a big scene that I was afraid for minute there the restaurant manager was going to call the police! I about died of embarrassment.

After it was all over, Edwin was very apologetic to me. He explained that there was one legend about vampires that, unfortunately, was true. It’s something most people don’t know about them. It seems that they’ve got some kind of very strong obsessive-compulsive issue about counting large numbers of tiny things. Like peppercorns, or bits of grain. Apparently it just applies to organic things that are loose on the ground—he didn’t have to count grains of sand, or kernels of corn on a plate.

But spill grain, or peppercorns, or berries, or anything like that on the ground in front of a vampire, and he or she just has to drop everything and count them all. In the old days, when vampires sometimes got desperate and attacked people for their blood, would-be victims who were smart would scatter something in the vampire’s path and get away while the vampire was counting it.

Oh, Edwin was so sorry about the whole thing! Even so, I couldn’t forget about that awful scene at the restaurant. Before too much longer I broke up with him. I know it sounds harsh, breaking up with a guy over something he honestly couldn’t help. But I just couldn’t go out with him anymore. I don’t like to date weirdos!

“Y’all do realize that’s just a story, right?” Amy said, while everybody was still laughing about the story she’d just told.

“Are you saying that in reality you do like to date weirdos?” Lee giggled.

“I think she means she doesn’t really have a thing for older guys,” Sara explained.

“Actually I was talking about the dating a vampire thing, but that’s true too,” said Amy.

“Who’s up next?” Jamie asked. “We need a scary story this time!”

Clay was on it. “I’ve got one. It’s about….”

Dark Footprints

In 1921 oil was discovered at the farming community of Smackover, down in Union County. It created an “oil rush” comparable to the gold rushes out west in the 1800s. Within months over 25,000 people had moved into the area. They lived in shanty towns that grew up overnight. For a brief period in the 1920s the Smackover field was the highest-producing oil field anywhere in the world.

At first Smackover was also as lawless as a gold rush town. There were some mighty rough people there. Those oil wildcatters weren’t guys you wanted to mess with.

Edgar Baker and Clyde Hamilton were said to be two of the toughest wildcatters in the whole field. Anybody who crossed them once knew better than to try it again. For all their hard-headedness, they weren’t too lucky when it came to finding oil. The worse their luck became, the more they argued with each other. Baker started saying that they should just sell up, get out, and go their separate ways. Hamilton wanted to keep going a little longer.

One day Edgar Baker just disappeared—along with almost all of the partners’ remaining money. Hamilton was furious. But with his partner and money gone, and no hope of tracking Baker down, there wasn’t much he could do. When he had cooled down and stopped cussing, he sold out all of his and Baker’s oil drilling equipment and gave up looking for oil. He did not leave Smackover. Instead, he somehow scraped together enough money to buy a little store that wasn’t doing too well. Under his new ownership, the store prospered. The previous owner hadn’t had much of a head for business, nor had he understood oilmen’s needs. Hamilton did. If he wasn’t one of the richest men in Union County, he was at least better off than he’d ever been as an oil wildcatter. Those who knew him said that he seemed pretty pleased with himself. He was even able to buy a decent little house in place of a shanty.

About a year after Hamilton went into the store business his assistant, a young man named Floyd Nelson, was startled when Hamilton bawled him out for making a mess around the store. Hamilton had come in early that morning to open up and had found oily footprints all around the store. Nelson insisted that he hadn’t spilled any oil.

In the days that followed, Hamilton kept finding oily footprints. There were usually only a few in one place at a time. They might appear by the front entrance, or by the back door, or somewhere around the side. Wherever they appeared, they had an uncanny way of starting and stopping very abruptly. Stretches of ground on either end of the string of footprints would be just as clean of oil as could be.

A number of customers and neighbors saw the footprints. One neighbor even took a photograph of them. His descendants in El Dorado, south of Smackover, are said to still have it. The photo is said to show a line of five or six dark prints, all made with what looked like a man’s boots. The man who took the photo said that the prints appeared on an otherwise clear stretch of ground in front of the store. He also said that they looked like they had been made by somebody who had stepped in crude oil, not in mechanic’s grease.

The mysterious footprints got to be the talk of Smackover. So did Clyde Hamilton’s reaction to them. People who knew him said that he seemed agitated. Like he was always worried. He got more and more short-tempered. He especially didn’t like to talk about the strange footprints around his store.

It got worse. According to Floyd Nelson, the footprints began appearing inside the store. They would open the store in the morning, and there would be oily tracks across the floor. There was no evidence of anybody’s having broken into the store—and Hamilton had the only keys to it. Nelson said later that Hamilton seemed deeply upset at seeing the prints. He told him not to tell anybody else about them. But word got around anyway, since Hamilton and Nelson weren’t always able to clean the up the prints before customers had had a chance to see them.

In the months that followed, rumors began floating around town to the effect that Hamilton had begun seeing oily prints at his own house as well. Eventually Nelson confirmed that it this was indeed so. By now Hamilton was getting more nervous and agitated than ever. He was always jumpy and irritable, always looking over his shoulder. People who knew him worried that he was starting to fall to pieces.

About five months after the oily footprints first appeared, Floyd Nelson came into work one day and found that his boss wasn’t there. He went to Hamilton’s house and saw Hamilton’s car in the driveway. Hamilton did not answer when he knocked on the door. After spending some time knocking on the doors and windows, Nelson became alarmed and got the police.

The police forced entry into the locked house. There were oily footprints all over the house. It appeared as if somebody with oil-covered boots had walked repeatedly in and out of every room. There were more oily tracks outside. The chief of police said later that somebody must have spent half the night walking around with oily boots to make so many tracks.

The room that had the least tracks was Hamilton’s bedroom. Only a single set of tracks led across its floor, from the door to the side of Hamilton’s bed. And on that bed lay Clyde Hamilton, dead.
The coroner ruled that he had died of heart failure. Those who knew him weren’t too surprised that he had died that way. He had obviously been under terrible stress in the final months of his life. Still, they wondered what kind of shock could finally have pushed his heart over the edge.

The people of Smackover got an even bigger shock a couple of months later. Lion Oil, one of the main oil companies in the area, drained one of their big crude oil holding tanks for maintenance. And at the bottom of it they found a man’s body. The oil had preserved it by sealing it off from the air needed by decay-causing bacteria. Once the body had been cleaned up, it was still recognizable.

It was the long-missing Edgar Baker. He had died of a gunshot wound.

Now the story came together. Clyde Hamilton had killed his partner and made it appear that he had run off with all of their money. This had left Hamilton with sufficient resources to get into a new business. Somehow he had managed to sink Baker’s body into the oil tank, where nobody ever suspected its existence.

This theory explained how Baker had come to disappear, and why Hamilton had seemed so worried and haunted. He had to have realized that sooner or later that oil tank would be drained for one reason or another. And then Baker’s body would be found, and he would find himself in hot water. No wonder he seemed always to be looking over his shoulder! He had been killed, many said, by a year and a half of living with an increasingly guilty conscience.

There was only one thing the theory did not explain. Where had all the footprints come from? Who could possibly have made them? People had their theories about that as well. Theories that were pretty hard to believe. One thing was for sure. If Hamilton did murder his partner, he didn’t get away with it in the long run.

I don’t know how scary Clay’s story comes across on the page. It was scary enough for us in that dark, shadowy room the way he told it. Something about flickering candlelight, and dancing shadows, and the sound of rain dripping outside made everything that much spookier. We were having the time of our lives!

I don’t recall all of the next several stories that well. Jamie told about the “Sundown Killer” in Texarkana—a real-life serial killer who killed five people in the 1940s and was never caught. It was a truly horrible story.

Equally horrible, in a different sort of way, was this story called “I Got You Where I Want You” that Tyler told. He said it was something he had heard back when he was nine. It wasn’t so much scary as it was gross, and disgusting, and the sort of thing that I guess you’d have to be a nine-year-old boy to appreciate. The rest of us didn’t appreciate it one bit! We all warned Tyler that if he told another one like that we’d all swear an oath never to let him live down the bagged salad incident.

After we were done groaning over Tyler’s story, we decided to take a break and get some coffee and hot chocolate. Some of us even got seconds of my apple cobbler, which made me feel good. Those of us that needed to also took bathroom breaks.

I was one of them. While I was washing my hands, I stared out the window at the dark woods just beyond the last street light. I wondered what might be out there lurking in those woods. I loved walking in the woods of Alsopp Park in the daytime. It has walking trails, and hillsides, and little streams, and it’s just a joy to visit when you’re tired of the city’s crowds and traffic. But on a dark, rainy night it did not look like a place I’d want to be. I was glad to be in where I was.

As I watched the edge of the woods, I thought I saw movement. I saw it indistinctly, kind of out of the corner of my eye. But it sure looked like something moving…. I stared at the spot more carefully. Had I really seen something? Who or what could possibly be out there on a night like this?

I heard banging on the door. “Hey April, there’s a line out here!” Lee called. “What happened? Did you fall in?”

“Sorry!” I said. I hastened to vacate the premises. Back on the couch in the living room, I stared at the flickering candle flame and wondered what I could have just seen.

Then it was time to tell the next story. And it was my turn.