Kings Highway

Of course this starts with a ghost story, but it's one you might have heard of before. There was a movie made about it in the late 80s. The story—not the movie—tells of an overprotective mother lording over her daughter. The girl takes up with a young man and they run away together, never to be seen again. The mother, distraught by her daughter's leaving, spends the rest of her days (and after!) walking the shores of Lake Ontario, haunting the grounds of her old home. Sometimes the story tells of the White Lady with two giant hellhounds that she sends after young couples who cross her path.

The story isn't true, you see. The place that is now called "White Lady's Castle" was nothing more than the foundation of a cafeteria-type hall that once fed swimmers during the summer months. It's not even that old. There never was a White Lady, or her daughter, or the weaselly young man who ripped her from her mother. And, if you've seen the movie, no murder, no ring, and no creepy janitor.

But, the hellhounds? They didn't lie about them. They didn't lie about two spitting, frothing, spectral dogs, running as if the laws of time and space do not apply to them, that will grab you and pull you down into hell. They weren't lying about them.

We went up there to smoke some pot, okay? Joey was able to score a 12-pack of cheap shit from his dad's beer fridge. Ham 1 and Ham 2—twins, and not from the best home, either. Their dad got it in his head he was gonna get a pig and butcher it so they'd have meat for like ever. The twins, Sam and Max, in appropriate order, ate ham sandwiches with mustard for lunch every day that year—got their hands on some of their older sister's stash, so yeah, that's where we're headed, White Lady's Castle. If only to scare the bejeezus out of each other in the process.

Unless you're a local, you don't really know about Kings Highway. It's literally the worst. And once the fog rolls in off the lake, you're in for a twisty, winding, miserable ride up to Lakeshore. This is where the hellhounds are spotted, sometimes with, but mostly without, the White Lady. There have been hundreds of accidents on Kings Highway over the years. Hundreds. All from perfectly fine, working vehicles that somehow end up destroyed, off the road, or just quit while in motion. You can even go to the library and look up old newspaper articles that talk about it. And, the people going missing. No one puts that into the ghost story though.

The last one to go missing was a postal worker in his 40s. His mail truck was found a week or so after he'd been reported missing. Not a stitch of mail was missing from the truck, but the seat was chewed to bits, like a dog had gotten trapped in there and tried to eat its way out through the bottom of the seat. The article said they found no animal hair, no saliva, nothing. Just the postal worker's effects and the mail. Pretty intense, huh?

So, Ham 1 and Ham 2 were in the back of Joey's truck, a little no-longer-quite-red Isuzu that his dad had left in the fields behind their house, probably hoping that it would just rot away into oblivion like the rest of the vehicles he'd left out there. But Joey was handy around a motor and was able to get it up and running just by digging through the other junk. It became his truck, and we called it Rosy. It took us everywhere. And tonight, it took the four of us, a 12-pack and a bag of weed up Kings Highway to Lakeshore, were we were gonna turn east and head down to scare the shit out of each other.

Kings had another idea for us though . . .

The highway was deserted, and rightfully so, it was well after 11 pm on a Tuesday in June. The air was cool and damp with a side of the unmistakably-Rochester, chalk-white chemical smell that made a constant tickle in the back of your throat. You outgrew caring about it by the age of five or six, though. It was probably just the lead in the pipes. Ya know, they say folk from this area have the highest concentration of lead in our blood of anywhere else in the States? We're mutants, super-humans; I fully believe it.

When it got real hot during the day and real muggy at night, the fog from the lake would come up quick, especially on Kings. It was like a wall, and the closer we twisted and wound our way north, the closer it came until Joey lit the breaks with a squeal, nearly putting my dome through the windshield.

"No fuckin' way I'm goin' in there," he said with all the seriousness of death.

"Not like we haven't done this a thousand times in the last year. What's gotten into you?" I said. I'd been trying to roll a doob by the glovebox light, but Joey's sudden halt had sent the papers to the floor while I tried to save the weed I'd already broken up.

"Hey!" A shout and a thunk-thunk-thunk on the back window reminded both of us that the Hams were in the truck bed.

I slid open the little window behind the front bucket seats.

"What the fuck?" Ham 1 stuck his face in the open hole. "You nearly put us over the cab!"

I'm sure you're expecting me to tell you that the Hams are curly red-haired, bulbous faced kids with rosy cheeks and a lot of extra weight around their middles, but you'd be completely wrong. Both were long and lanky. Their legs and arms too long for their torsos; like one of those inflatable tube men they put up at used-car dealerships. They both had jet black hair that laid perfectly straight, and really, the only way to tell them apart was Ham 2's left eye was half blue, half green. Some weird genetic anomaly, his parents said. Otherwise, they were identical. They even played tricks on the teachers, switching classes, taking quizzes and tests for each other. It seemed like a pretty great deal, but their home life sucked, too.

"Do you not see the wall of fucking fooooog in front a' us?" Joey snapped, pointing at the windshield.

"Whoa," Ham 1 stood up in the truck bed followed immediately by Ham 2, who echoed his whoa.

Joey let off the brake a little to scare them and it worked. There were two quick thuds behind us as their asses dropped down onto the metal.

"It's just a five minute drive from here to the lake. Nothing happens in five minutes" I said.

"Tahoe's would serve me up a garbage plate in three," Joey answered, both of his hands at ten and two on the wheel.

He was right. One of the best late night meals in the whole city—the Garbage Plate. He could go for one right now.

"After a few beers we'll go get some, but we have to get there first," I said.

One of the Hams banged on the roof of the cab. "Let's gooooo!"

The truck moved forward. Into the wall of swirling, shifting fog. "Something doesn't feel right about this . . . " Joey whispered.

I went back to trying to roll the joint when we all heard the howl. It hadn't been seconds after we entered the fog.

"SERIOUSLY?" Ham 2 cried out. "Why the fuck did we come up Kings?! Why didn't you go the normal way, Joey!"

"This was quicker!"

"Not if the hellhounds get us!" Ham 1 yelled in through the window.

There was no wind, no rain, no sound other than the truck's engine and us talking. But then, there wasn't even that.

Joey punched the steering wheel, checked that the truck was still in drive and tried to turn the key—nothing.

Again.

Nothing.

A long, sorrowful howl surrounded us. And in another moment, one of the Hams screamed like he'd seen Satan himself rise up from the ground. But then there was a sickly wet crunch from the back of the truck. Joey and I turned to look through the little window in time to be sprayed in the face with an arterial gush of blood. Joey vomited.

I can't say I was any better. One of the Hams had just lost his throat, and his head had flipped over backward, bobbing inside the window with the rest of his body still in the back. The smell was fucking vile. Like an old can of beer that someone had used to dispose of their chaw mixed with the viscous, iron wetness that went with a bad injury. But the worst part, the part you can't even imagine, was the smell of week old, bloated deer that had been hit on the Thruway and left in the heat of summer. When you pass by it in a car, you just say Ew and wrinkle your nose.

But this . . . this smell was in my mouth, stuck there like peanut butter. It felt like it was rotting me from the inside. I guess I vomited too. Splashing some on the Ham face that I couldn't get away from either.

The other Ham lived only a minute longer. In a flash of dense black shadow, something flew over the truck bed, taking the other Ham by his face, over the side, and into the underbrush of Kings Highway.

Joey vomited again.