I wrote this fiction piece in 2016, it was supposed to be a ghost story but it got very involved. Please enjoy and let me know your feedback in the comments below.
“Going to the End, be back Tuesday”
My friend Kay rented my house for the summer in Huntington, between the Station and the Village. The neighborhood was decent, it was my childhood home. Down the street was a retired cop and his son. Across from them was an Indian family who ran a restaurant in town. Next to them was a retired couple whose kid became a photographer for Time Magazine. Across from my house was a family I grew up with.
It’s the sort of neighborhood where everyone knew everyone, and it wasn’t even that annoying. I traveled quite a bit and decided to make a little place on Keuka Lake in Upstate New York my permanent address. I kept the old little house. It’s got terrible memories, but it’s prime real estate. People have been getting priced out of the Hamptons for years. Huntington and other little villages are getting flooded with douchebags from the city. Not that I mind. At least the neighborhoods are getting safer with a bigger police presence. Storefronts are getting facelifts. Of course, I don’t have to live here.
My friend Kay was a random person who came to the shop one day. In the town nearest to my lakefront property, I maintain a studio space where I try to sell some acrylic abstract paintings while selling my services as a graphic designer. The key word here is 'try'. I haven’t sold a painting yet. It’s a good attention grabber to get people in the shop. I sell cheeky tee shirts and mugs alongside design services. There are examples of stationery, letterhead, and invitations. I also have a workspace in the rear of the store. I work on website design, banner design, and whatever social media management things for businesses both local and far away. I’ve been lucky, I learned a trade and it’s served me well.
Kay came to town years ago as a tourist. I don’t know why he was nicknamed Kay. That’s how he signed his check and it didn’t bounce so that’s a plus in my book. He drove a cab in Manhattan for years before he retired up here. He ran the only wine and liquor store in town, selling mostly local wines. This area is dotted with vineyard/ bed and breakfasts that are postcard picture perfect. I never knew the details about how he came to this area but everyone has their stories here…
He comes to the shop often enough, buying two of my trademarked mugs with the slogan “Don’t make me drop a house on you” with the simple graphic of a witch and the hashtag #coven life because, yes, I am that obnoxious. He said he’s giving one to his neighbor as a ‘general warning’. I snorted so hard I tasted my coffee in my nose.
All in all, he is a good guy. He comes in and we banter. I go into his store and I get the local wine on occasion. I really only bring booze to parties It’s probably a bad idea to be drinking in public or at gatherings at someone’s home. Those events haven’t ended well for me in the past.
But this isn’t really about me, this is mainly the lead-up for what comes next.
“Lost?”
I admit I must have looked a bit frazzled. I had a rented car, trying to find a vineyard my friend, a former co-worker, had purchased with her husband. They were transplants from New Mexico but had worked with me at a big nameless, faceless publisher in Manhattan for years. I don’t blame them for packing it all up and coming to such a lovely place. It really was a dream of mine. On the long drive up here from Queens, I had fantasized I was moving here for good. I was single and most of my life fit in a small box of a studio apartment. Why not pack a car full of all my gear and move on a whim? Oh yeah right… I’m lost.
I parked in front of a small bank next to a church. Across the street was a little park with a gazebo with an ornamental screening on the mesh. Musical notes dotted the decoration on it. I must have really looked out of place because my car was a shiny red Jeep and I was outside the car holding the map, looking for a street sign.
“Yeah, I guess…”
“Wherever you’re trying to get to, you can’t get there from here,” said the random stranger, a man clad in jean pants and a shirt with a trucker hat and aviator sunglasses, walking toward the bank.
I had to chuckle, “I never can…” I said back. He smiled and approached me. It was fine. I wasn’t too far off course. I was at Mel and Stevie’s place in about ten minutes.
“We were having drinks with a friend who grew up around here, he was saying how there’s nothing to do but get in trouble as a kid. It’s all dairy farms and whatever… But my wife googled the area and found that it’s a big huge tourist trap. It’s a big wine producer and we came up here to visit. Turned into, well… You know.”
I knew Stevie first, we were in college at a state university on Long Island. We never really talked except via the Internet. We found each other on social sites. Her pics were always amazing to me, so we started instant messaging. All the years prior, I didn’t know much about her. I found out she was happily married to her childhood best friend. She happened to be another woman. Mel is so bubbly. She was a perfect fit to run the bed and breakfast on Franklin Street, this big green colonial near the public park on the water. They lived modestly for a few years until Stevie’s grandmother passed away and left her with her house in Nassau County. It was a modest house with two bedrooms, but worth at least a million with just the location and the property is taken into account. Stevie sold the place with her mother’s blessing and used it to buy a vineyard/ bed and breakfast here. Pleasant Valley Inn was up for sale for at least a year before they bought it. It was right on Route 54, this large pink house with a vineyard attached. It was a ready business, turn-key, as they say. But I think running that place was just the beginning. It was a trial to see if they could actually do this long-term. After a few years, they decided to expand the business and found some land for sale up in the hills around the lake basin.
They had a bulldozer clear a path up to the property. A muddy dirt road came to the clearing where they had a prefab house dropped on a cement slab. They hired some local people to get a new vineyard going, and they now had five varieties of wine they were selling in town and online. They got a partnership with a retailer called “Demon Wines” which delivered wine in monthly subscription boxes. I don’t know why it’s illegal to ship wine out of state here in New York. They found a way around that with this subscription box deal.
Their property was about five acres in the hills around Keuka Lake. It was early June. Still cool in the mornings, but the heat in the afternoon was grueling. Thankfully the place was tucked into the forest. Dense trees made a canopy around the main house of the property. Although I don’t drink anymore anyway, it was a beautiful place to visit for the week. I had recently left a corporate gig, and ghostwriting someone’s memoir. I figured I could do this thing anywhere so why not here?
It took me about a year to move all my things and settle on a place of my own near the vineyard. There was a listing on a rental property website. It looked pretty perfect. It had multiple little cabins dotted around the property. It had been remodeled to suit at least ten guests at a time. I figured it was a minimal investment that would pay for itself. All the houses were trailers except one, which was a real wood cabin. I took that one for myself and thought I could relocate the other trailer homes, make them more spaced apart, and do some landscaping around them. I’d planned to make some outdoor patio spaces as well and rent these places out during the summer when the tourist season is at its peak.
This project took me about a year to complete, plus all my savings. I had some small investments I cashed out to live off of that first winter. A local realtor helped me ensure the cabins were booked through that first summer.
After about five years, I had enough of an extra income, and enough boredom, to go back to creative arts projects like silk screening tees and little souvenirs like mugs and pens. I opened a little storefront near the old opera house in the center of town. It was across from a coffee shop that I frequented often. It was finally getting easy, this life I’d been living. A few locals would come in just to look, but mostly I caught the tourists who wanted something more than just the odd sweatshirt that said “Keuka Lake” or baseball hat. I had a few designs already selling online but the store did well, and it was just a seasonal shop. Three-month lease only in the summer, then the owner took it over again as their own personal studio space. It was a wealthy artist whose husband had passed away about a decade before I showed up, her family name was familiar to me but I couldn’t place it. It suddenly dawned on me that it was a foundation for the arts that had sponsored a bunch of public television specials.
So that’s how I got here. Now, about Kay.
Kay was looking for a road trip but nothing too far away. He was still young-ish and fit enough to go cross country in his truck if he wanted to. But I still maintained the property on Long Island, and we had talked about the vineyards out at the end of Montauk. They weren’t so different than here, and Kay hadn’t ever seen the ocean.
I gave him some simple instructions, but thank goodness for Google. He texted me when he hit my house. It’s small but it’s always been kept up with some nice landscaping courtesy of my father after all these years.
When I moved to this area I noticed the Elmwood Cemetary passing in through town. It’s got some old headstones you just don’t see anymore. One was for a woman, and it had little dandelions on it. Some weeping willows framed the corners, and across the street was a funeral home. I would walk down this way sometimes in the mornings when it was quiet. I wondered if there were any good hauntings or ghost stories around here. So of course I asked Kay since he’s always around anyway. “Naw sorry, nothing fun up around here.”
Since he’s not familiar with where I grew up, I told him we have quite a few hauntings on Long Island; confirmed or otherwise. I suppose since it’s one of the first places people were successful as settlers. It’s an island, so there’s trade and fishing. It also has some of the oldest towns and, therefore, cemeteries. Huntington was founded in 1562, and the Revolutionary War cemetery has some gravestones that had to be replaced or replicated as early as 1450.
Of course, he asked me about Amityville and I set him straight. “No, it’s just some guy lost it and killed his family because the father was a dick and beat him. After he killed them he walked down the street to have a drink at the bar and that’s it. There are no ghosts or demon possession or anything like that. I feel bad for everyone in that neighborhood, to be honest, they get a lot of rubberneckers clogging up the street. Sweet Hollow Road on the other hand…”
There is a smell, not pronounced like perfume but an odor that is like a musk. The scent is only for a few to notice. Police found Kay at the bottom of the valley where Sweet Hollow Road curves and the lights flash for the tolls. There were no skid marks.
Kay wasn't the first to go down like that. The ill-fated odor was what drove wildlife over the edge. Even beloved pet dogs followed the scent.
The police counted it as another victim of Sweet Hollow Road.
