89. What Is Imagined and What Is Real

The soft and steady sound of the cicadas singing along with the crickets makes me almost believe this is a perfect night in April. Almost. Mounds and I are about an hour away from Solitary. We sit at the edge of the woods that open up onto a railroad bridge towering over a small river below. The bridge hasn’t been used in a long time, of course, but Mounds says that sometimes late at night people can hear the sound of a train whistle or even feel the rumbling of a runaway ghost train.

We’ve been here for an hour … and nothing. Mounds knows we’re probably not going to hear or see anything tonight.

I bring up the conversation I’ve been wanting to have with him all night.

“What would you do if you knew there was some kind of, like, real evil around you. Threatening you?”

Mounds doesn’t laugh, because naturally he believes in this sort of thing. “Like Paranormal Activity style? Pulling you out of bed and stealing your children?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“The first question would be what exactly are we talking about. A vampire? A demon? A ghost?”

“Someone who attacks at night. In the darkness. Draining bodies of blood.”

“Well, then, that’s a vampire you’re talking about.”

I don’t think Staunch is a vampire. I don’t think they really exist.

But demons do.

“But couldn’t like a demon do that sort of thing?”

“If it walks like a vampire and talks like a vampire and sucks blood like a vampire, then chances are high that it’s a vampire.”

“You really believe in them?”

Mounds takes out a candy bar, which I’m sad to see is a Milky Way. He offers me one, but I say no. So far I haven’t ever seen him actually eat a Mounds bar. I’m tempted to joke and ask if he’s really who he says he is, but I’m actually trying to get some info from him.

“I believe in anything that is unexplainable. These tracks, for instance. This one girl came here and for some reason walked to the middle of those tracks. People thought she was doped up, others thought she was trying to kill herself. She claims to have heard a train coming for her, and she ran and jumped off the end of the bridge. Broke both her legs but was fortunate she didn’t die.”

“You believe her?”

“Why not?” Mounds says as he chews his candy bar. “That’s the thing with unexplained phenomena.”

“So what would you do—about this evil—about this person who you think is a vampire?”

“You do what they’ve always done. The brave ones, of course. The heroes. You go and put a wooden stake through their heart.”

“You think that would work?”

“If a hundred or a thousand stories share the same basic info with you on how to kill a vampire, then you might want to believe in them.”

“Do you believe in the Bible?”

“Of course. But I believe there’s also room for interpretation, since there’s so much in the Bible that makes absolutely no sense.”

“I don’t think there are vampires in the Bible.”

“Yeah, but there’s other freaky stuff,” Mounds says. “Who’s to say that one of those demons or monsters isn’t really a vampire? Maybe they just didn’t call them that. Like Goliath. He was some giant. But what if he was like Frankenstein or something? Or maybe a god that had been thrown out of heaven?”

I think Mounds just managed to combine a gothic horror story with a Greek myth and a Sunday school tale.

That guy has a future in horror mash-ups.

“So you’d try to kill him?”

“What? A vampire?” Mounds chuckles. “Man, did you ever read Salem’s Lot? By Stephen King? I read it and then saw the miniseries and was like totally freaked out. Forget Twilight. These vampires scared you. These were ones you didn’t mess around with.”

“So no?”

Mounds curses. “Absolutely no way.”

“But you’re a ghost hunter.”

“Yeah, a ghost hunter. Not a ghost killer. I’m not Van Helsing or someone like that.”

“Van who?”

“What? You didn’t see the movie? Hugh Jackman?”

For a while Mounds gets off track talking about the movie and how it should’ve been an epic series like X-Men and other comic-book movies. He’s a big geek who not only loves horror movies and comic books but makes them his life.

“Let’s call it a night,” he says eventually, picking up his big body off the forest floor and heading back to the minivan.

As I follow, he asks me a question. “Is there really some kind of evil vampirelike thing you know about?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

“That means yes.”

“Like I said—referring to it like a vampire—I don’t know.”

“Think about it. Books and movies that twist and distort these things—like Casper the friendly ghost or vampires that glitter in the sun—I think they desensitize us to the original horror of the story. Like watching violence on YouTube. You know? Or porn. You watch enough of that—and believe me there’s enough of it out there—and you become numb to it all. You play a video game where people’s heads are being blown up around you, and suddenly you might not be so absolutely horrified if that actually happened.”

“You sound like you’re against that kind of stuff,” I say.

“Me? No way. Dude, I’m a two-hundred-and-fifty-pound dork who eats all day and hunts for ghosts. I’m online all the time watching everything. No. Not against anything, to be honest. But I do long to know the difference between what is imagined and what is real. The stuff we’ve seen together—that stuff is real. I don’t know what it is, but I know it’s real. Call of Duty or Van Helsing or Twilight—that stuff isn’t real. It’s just faking it, like a kid on Halloween. I do all this because I’m tired of seeing the costumes and eating the candy, you know? I want the real thing.”

I want to tell him that I don’t need to do anything else to understand that the evil in this world is real and concrete. I don’t say anything, however, because I can’t.

But I keep thinking of Staunch and Kinner.

I wonder if there’s anybody who would actually ever come with me to the Staunch house to see if he’s really sleeping in a coffin in the dark basement.

Then I remember the guy who told me about some of the skeletons in Staunch’s closet. Some of the literal skeletons that he found on Staunch’s property.

Brick.

He’d come along for the ride. He’s just crazy enough to not really care as long as it sounds kind of fun.