Suspense Magazine November 2012

Dark Minds,
Empty Souls
Sometimes as I lay in bed at night, when
everything’s still, I can remember what my
life was like before moving to Eureka Springs. Not
the Eureka Springs in Arkansas, by the way. This
Eureka Springs is a two-by-four town buried in the
mountains of West Virginia. Deep in a “holler” as
the locals like to say. But I’ll tell you one thing: when
John Denver sang “almost heaven”, he wasn’t referring to this
particular part of West Virginny.
I was fifteen and my family was living in Scarsdale,
New York, when my father got the crazy notion to move.
He claimed he was tired of the rat race, the hectic pace that
enveloped all the communities around New York City. He
wanted peace and quiet to fully concentrate on his writing.
At the time, he was a very successful writer with five novels
under his belt; all of which had shot to the top of the national
bestseller list. My mother balked, my younger sister cried,
and I threw one of my best teenage tantrums. But it was all
to no avail. My father was the head honcho and breadwinner
and that was that.
Goodbye twelve-room mansion and swimming
pool, and hello five-room fixer-upper and backwoods
springs. Adios five-star high school and hola three-room
schoolhouse. Arrivederci varsity basketball and ciao possum
hunting. To say it was a jolt to my system would have been
an understatement.
My father immediately rejoiced in the solitude and
slow pace, alternating his time between writing and using
his carpentry skills to improve the house. Mom, always the
subservient wife, accepted her lot by starting a garden and
canning vegetables. She even took up quilting. Sarah, my
eleven-year-old sister, wailed and whined for a spell, but
eventually fell into line, making some friends and doing what
By Gerald E. Sheagren
girls do. As for myself, I sensed there was something wrong
from the get-go. At first, I couldn’t quite put my finger on it,
but I had a near constant chill stirring my short hairs. Like an
uneasy dog sniffing trouble, but not knowing what or where
it was coming from.
It took me a full week to nail it down. It should have
taken me less than a day, but I was totally wrapped up in
a funk, longing for my home and friends back in New
York. The citizens of Eureka Springs weren’t quite normal.
Correction—they weren’t normal at all. No one seemed to
smile. No one joked. They all walked around in what I would
call a semi-robotic state, their eyes lacking both joy and
empathy.
The person who first woke me up to that fact was my
teacher, Ms. Seymour. She was a reedy, bare-bones woman—a
spinster in her mid-sixties—with a hawk-like nose and zinccolored
hair, which she gathered tightly into a bun. When
she smiled, she resembled a shark in chum-filled waters.
When she talked history, she favored the plagues and
famines of the Middle Ages and the cruel reigns of Ivan the
Terrible and Vlad the Impaler. The Great Depression and
Ireland’s Potato Famine were also hot subjects. For English,
our reading list consisted of “The Road,” “1984,” “The Grapes
of Wrath,” and “Lord of the Flies”; four of the most bleak and
depressing novels ever written. Science was given to the illeffects
of global warming. Math—well, you couldn’t very fool
with math, unless you insisted that one-plus-one was three.
And all eight of my classmates gobbled it right up, regaling in
the horrors and miseries and the misfortunes of others. My
first assignment was to research and write about the torture
tools that were popularly used in Medieval Europe. Oh, by
the way, Ms. Seymour always dressed in black, without fail.
A female Johnny Cash.
2012 Short Story Contest Submission
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