Ghost stories and beer © C.D. Carter There on the barstool harder than concrete I sat, sipping on my cranberry-but-mostly-vodka and unable, no matter what I tried, to shake off the chill that skittered across my thighs and the nape of my neck.
Flipping up my jacket collar, rubbing my hands against my jeans hard enough to start a brush fire – nothing worked. It was one of the first truly chilly days of autumn, and I was in Annapolis, where the breeze from the Chesapeake can freeze you where you stand, even in October.
Maybe that explained it. Maybe it didn't.
My wife and her friends had taken me to the state capitol's downtown bar scene for something they called a ghost hunting bar crawl. Both the hunting and the crawling were for losers, I had told my wife, Melissa. Combining them was some award-winning achievement in loserdome.
“Then you're uninvited,” she spat back at me when we parked in Annapolis. “I forgot how much you hate fun.”
Melissa told me to park my fun-hating hind parts at the Maryland Tavern, a cramped little restaurant with an even smaller bar that would serve as the last stop on the five-bar crawl, where a tour guide would tell the gullible pack of beer gulpers how so-and-so had died some terrible or heroic or ironic death way back when everyone was under five feet tall and dead by forty.
It was October, a week before Halloween. People wanted to hear this stuff. They ate it up, and I can only suppose the alcohol made the otherworldly fictions go down smooth.
I ducked into the dank bar, the Maryland Tavern, and took in the must that permeated the place before plopping down next to a girl dressed for Miami in July and her boyfriend from the nearby Naval Academy. He clearly liked the unsubtle reminder of South Florida in the summer, and she clearly liked his uniform, impeccably white down to the shoes.
They left a minute later.
I sat there, wriggling on the hardwood barstool, seeking some basic level of comfort, when the chill first came. It started on my left thigh, and spread to my right. I rubbed my left leg lazily, wondering if it had lost circulation, when I felt the same cold – even colder, maybe – sweep across the back of my neck.
Had the Navy man or his lady friend pressed an ice cube against my neck in some strange drunken prank? I turned and found nothing but a coat closet made probably three hundred years ago, for those tiny Colonial people who died early.
I ordered my drink – the cranberry and vodka – and watched the elderly bartender pair a splash of the red stuff with a glassful of the clear stuff. I sipped it and winced. The bartender cracked a crusty smile.
It was then that the chill returned. The bartender, wiping down plates, saw me rub the nape of my neck. Again, our eyes met and he smiled. The geezer muttered something undeterminable, and I thought it might've been a name, a name with two parts.
“Huh?” I said.
“Nothin',” he responded, and shuffled away.
Half an hour passed before the Maryland Tavern's bar door swung open and slammed against the worn brick wall, and there, at the top of three concrete stairs, were the boozing brood of paranormal investigators: Melissa, her two friends, and eight others who had shelled out thirty-five bucks a pop for this kind retelling of campfire stories.
My dear wife was still pissed. She sat three stools away.
“Here at the historic Maryland Tavern,” began the tour guide, a dark-haired college girl with wild eyes, “there've been dozens – nay, hundreds! – of eerily similar reports from beyond.”
The inebriated crew ate it up; they hung on the guide's every syllable.
“Up above this little establishment,” the tour guide said, pointing and looking at – beyond – the ceiling, “was once Annapolis's most famous brothel. Men arriving at the nearby docks, after months at sea, would race each other to the tavern.” I felt the iciness spread across my legs again. Instead of rubbing the chill, I gulped my drink.
“And these sailors, they'd all ask for the same girl,” the guide said. “They'd request Marybeth Parker, a gorgeous nineteen-year-old girl whose mother had run the brothel for many, many years.”
“One day, after falling in love with a merchant from Spain, Marybeth asked her mother to release her from her duties at the tavern. The mother, wanting anything but to lose her best earner, said no, a resounding no. Eventually, Marybeth Parker refused to accept any more clients, and instead, reserved her bed for the man she loved.”
“One night, while entertaining her lover” – the guide used air quotes; her customers snickered – “the … ahem … activity became so rigorous that unbelieving bar patrons watched as Marybeth's bed came crashing through the bar's ceiling. Both Marybeth and her lover were found impaled on a bedpost.”
The crowd gasped. So did I.
“The corpses of Marybeth and her lovely Spaniard were face to face, the bedpost shoved through their bodies, searching each other's eyes,” the tour guide said. I nearly toppled off my barstool this time – the cold didn't just touch my neck, it rubbed across it, back and forth.
“And ever since,” the guide continued somberly, “untold scores of men here at this bar, at this tavern, in this city, have told stories of Marybeth Parker. Not of seeing her, no – but of feeling her.”
“Like she did during her time here, before her gruesome death, Marybeth sits on the laps of her potential customers, and wraps her arm, ever so gently, around the backs of their necks.”
_________________ Between his full-time job as an education reporter in Washington, D.C., and his freelance gigs for local magazines, C.D. Carter has written tales of the macabre for a host of horror publications, including Dark Moon Digest, Flashes in the Dark, SNM Horror, Static Movement, Lost Souls Magazine, and Death Head Grin. Much of Carter's short-story horror is based on the life of a journalist in the big city, or his favorite day, Halloween. Carter credits his wife, Melissa, for green-lighting his best ideas, and telling him which stories should be buried and left for dead.
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