A Writer's Tale

We joined up with our families and thawed out as we began exploring. The kids climbed on rubble. My wife picked up a dry husk of tumbleweed and figured she might bring it home for our garden. We climbed on rubble, crept through doorways where we found trash and mouldering blankets in the darkness.

We found enough to know that the town was not entirely abandoned. It had those who dwelled in its ruins. Sometimes.

Floors were littered with junk. Walls were scribbled with graffiti.

Scrawled on a building’s front, in a jumble of white letters that roamed across most of its stone wall, was this peculiar inscription: “LEAVE RYLIGHT COST FACE UP OR THEREE FACE YOU DOWEN.”

Shortly after reading that, we found the body.

I got to feeling a bit edgy as we wandered up a dirt track toward a cluster of old buildings: shacks, a ramshackle dwelling that looked like someone’s home, and a bottle house. All of them were surrounded by the rusty hulks of old cars and trucks, refrigerators, bath tubs, tires, and every manner of junk. We didn’t see anyone.

Even though Frank tried to assure us that the place was deserted, he called out, “Hello!” half a dozen times. Nobody answered or appeared.

If I’d just been with my wife and daughter, my fears of being confronted by strangers would’ve stopped us. We were with friends, though. That made it easier to be brave.

While the ladies explored nearby, Frank and I went to the bottle house. Its walls had been constructed, during the boom days of Rhyolite, out of whiskey bottles from the local saloon. The necks of the bottles were turned inward so they wouldn’t whistle in the wind.

We climbed the porch. The front door stood open. Frank called, “Hello!” a few more times. Then we entered. The place was cool and dank inside, dark except for the murky daylight that came in through the door and windows.

We roamed from room to room, down dark hallways. A few things had been left behind by someone: scattered furniture, magazine pictures hanging on the walls, some bottles and nicknacks, even a carton full of old record albums.

We didn’t linger in there.

I was glad to get out.

Back in the gray daylight, we wandered about to look at the assortment of castoffs that littered the grounds. While we were at it, our wives and daughters entered the bottle house.

“Dick!” Kathy shouted. “Dick! Get in here quick!”

The way she sounded, I thought somebody’d been hurt.

Frank and I rushed into the bottle house. We found our wives and daughters in a small, dim room, standing over a coffin.

Somehow, Frank and I had missed it.

The black coffin rested on the floor in a corner of the room. It had a glass cover. Beneath the glass cover, shoulders tight against the walls of the narrow coffin, lay a human skeleton.

We were fairly amazed and spooked.

We photographed it. We videotaped it. Kathy slid the glass aside and poked a railroad spike between its ribs. It wasn’t a wooden stake, but it looked like one.

We puzzled over a few things. Who ‘was this dead person?

What was he or she doing here, left alone in a deserted bottle house in a ghost town?

Should we notify the authorities?

Should we take the skeleton with us?

We left it where we’d found it the spike removed from its chest and the glass returned to its proper place.

Maybe it’s still there. Someday, I suppose we’ll go back and find out.

The American hardbound of my new novel, The Stake, will be published in June by Thomas Dunne of St. Martin’s Press. It’s about a horror writer, his wife, and their two friends who go exploring a ghost town. While looking through an abandoned hotel, they find the mummified body of a woman in a coffin. She has a wooden stake in her chest.

Who is she? Who left her body in the deserted hotel? Should they go to the authorities about their grim discovery? Should they take her with them?

Is she a vampire?

What will happen if they pull the stake from her chest?

The writer decides to do a nonfiction book about his find.

The cadaver ends up in his home. Investigations turn up plenty of material for his book.

He finds out who she is. He suspects the reason for her death. But his book won’t be complete until he pulls out the stake.

All except the final pages of The Stake had been written before we went to Rhyolite and found the skeleton.

There, my Mystery Scene article ends. Weird, huh? Also weird is that the outing which takes place at the beginning of The Stake (when they find the stiff) is closely based on a trip we’d taken with Frank, Kathy and Leah in February, 1987. We had explored ruins in the desert, but we certainly hadn’t found a body. The character of Larry Dunbar was closely based on myself. The character of Pete almost is Frank De Laratta. Pete’s wife and Larry’s wife and daughter, however, were not based on our own family members. In spite of that, I ended up getting ribbed quite a bit because of my portrait of Pete’s wife, Barbara and Larry’s feelings about her. I still hear about it.