Scary & Freaky stories: The Paranormal World

Waltzing In The Moonlight

Beyond the viewing window in the next room members of a small audience began to leave in ones and twos. Despite the beginning of a new day twenty-one minutes before, everyone looked tired and worn out. Every face was devoid of emotion. A man dressed in black with a thin white-collar around his neck was the last to leave. He mumbled quietly to himself, turned and headed down a long empty corridor. As the echo of his footsteps died a uniformed guard looked around the room to make sure it was empty, then closed and locked the door; the sound of its metallic latch snapping with a grim finality.

On the other side of the window, in a tiny chamber with pea green walls, a hollow body lay on a narrow table. A steel door opened and two figures dressed in green surgical gowns entered. One filled out forms on a clipboard and the other disconnected tubes and wires from the body. When each member of the team completed their appointed tasks they wheeled the table and its pale rider to the loading dock in the rear of the building where a small vehicle waited. Its driver stood nearby shivering in the cold night air, a cup of hot coffee steaming in his hand.

—–

That’s the way it happened. I can tell you that with a certainty because I was there. Saw the whole thing. Well, most of it anyway. I remember my eyes closing and the next thing I knew I was over there in the next room with the audience. I was a little confused at first until I realized what they were looking at. They were staring at my dead body back in the execution chamber.

I didn’t do it, but what do you care? What difference did it make to anyone at that point? The circus trial was over, appeals made and lost, and I’d had a lethal dose of the state’s best killer cocktail pumped into my veins. I hadn’t been a saint, but I wasn’t a criminal or a hypocrite either and I hadn’t lived a very long life before they took it away from me.

It had been a good-looking body at one time and I admit that I enjoyed using it. Now it lay beneath a red velvet blanket all full of poison, empty and still. Strangers now owned what had once been mine. I hovered over it, watching as they loaded it into the back of the vehicle like cast off furniture. If I’d had tears I would’ve cried a river. The green team finished transferring the body, the driver signed the release forms and minutes later the vehicle passed through the prison gate heading out along a lonely stretch of state highway. It’s destination, my hometown in Snow Hill, North Carolina.

The two men in green turned and headed back into the warm bowels of the building. One of them held the clipboard with the last records of my life etched in blue ink on its pages. I surged toward him and knocked it out of his hand with all the pent-up frustration and anger I could muster.

“Clumsy,” his partner said. The first man wasn’t so sure, having felt the energy of an unseen hand as it forced the clipboard from his grip. He stooped to pick it up and looked around. Seeing nothing he retrieved his paperwork and continued on into the building.

“Feel better?” a voice asked.

“No I don’t,” I said as I sailed off into the night in pursuit of the only body I’d ever had.

—–

I stood next to the mortician and watched as he pumped the fluid out of my body, washed and dressed it for burial. He did a real good job. When he was done, the remnants of my earthly presence looked nearly as good as it ever had. I heard Aunt Ethel say so when she and Mom came to see it during viewing hours. Late at night when no one was around I tried to get back into it, but it was no good. I couldn’t ‘get beneath’ it. There was nothing to grab onto, to hold me in. I can’t describe it any other way. It was like trying to get a grip on running water. Later on I did manage to move it a couple of times, just a little and from the outside, like the clipboard.