Sleeping Bags

“What could possibly go wrong?”

I sighed heavily and then said,”

I don’t know? Maybe hearing or seeing something while sleeping in an alleged haunted cemetery?”

“Come oooooon, you don’t really believe in ghosts and goblins and stuff do you?”

“I…well…I don’t know…maybe…”

Alexander guffawed at my reticence.

“Come oooooon! It’s just one night!”

I shook my head at his boldness, but continued to roll my sleeping bag.

“I have flashlights, bottles of water, some snacks, a book of ghost stories, and, oh yeah, a bottle of tequila!”

With that he laughed and closed up his bag.

Again, I shook my head and checked to make sure I had my own flashlight, water, and unlike him, a baseball bat to ward off, well, something that might require physical violence.

“Let’s go! We want to make sure we find our spot before Midnight”.

“Yeah, okay”.

Alexander and I had decided to accept the Halloween challenge of the radio station 66.6FM and spend a night in one of their chosen ‘haunted’ cemeteries. We loaded up our camping items into the back of my 1980 Chrysler Volare and headed on our way.

The cemetery is only 5 a minute drive from where we live, but in that distance the neighborhood gives way to nothing but trees and darkness. We arrived at the cemetery which is basically a dilapidated fence surrounding headstones. The fencing is of the old wrought iron style and in ‘haunted’ fashion the gate is laying open, bent down on its hinges.

I pulled into the cemetery and turned to the right off the main entrance to the designated spot where we were to sleep for the night. We had been assigned to Victor & Alexia Korsakov plot #247, West wing to sleep at. Alexander and I unloaded our camping gear to settle in for the night.

“It seems curious that we haven’t seen or heard anyone else assigned to this particular cemetery”, I observed.

“Maybe everyone else are a bunch of scary cats”, he said gleefully. “We are bound to win!”

“As long as we can survive the night”, I sighed.

“This is bound to hold off any spirits”, Alexander chuckled, and extracted a monstrous boombox from his bag. Next, he pulled out a case full of cassettes. “This should keep us rockin’ until Sunrise!”, he exclaimed.

Alexander slammed a tape into the box… “Come on feel the noize..”, blasted from the boombox.

“Girls rock your boys”, Alexander howled along.

I grimaced for I could tell it was to be a long night.

“Let’s have a shot of tequila!”

“Perhaps we should keep our senses about us”.

“Oh, come oooooon! One shot!”

I could foresee how this was going to proceed.

“Okay, just one shot”.  

Alexander poured drinks into cups that held about a quarter of a 750ml bottle each.

“Ba da da dat da dah da, Tequila!!!!”, he pseudo-sang and laughed, slugging the entire contents of his cup.

I sighed, took a sip, and coughed.

“Come oooooon! Keep up!”

“I’m tellin’ ya, Quiet Riot wrote the greatest heavy metal anthem with this one!”

I looked askance at Alexander and asked him, “You do realize this song was written by a band in the ‘70s called Slade?”

“What!? No way!”

“I’m afraid so.”

“Ahhhh, who cares! Anyway, it rocks!”

Have I mentioned that Alexander is a nerd trying to be cool? Yeah, I didn’t think that I needed to. His light brown hair is slightly longer than average, he wears contacts in his dark blue eyes as the glasses he used to wear were Coke bottle bottoms, and he refuses to take his black leather jacket off. Ever. He probably showers in it. Oh! And his mom won’t let him get his ear pierced, so he wears clip-on earrings.

The next song up on the mix tape is more to my taste. Black Sabbath: Heaven and Hell. I find his enthusiasm infectious and start singing along too.

“Sing me a song, you're a singer

Do me a wrong, you're a bringer of evil…”

It must be the tequila talking, I’m usually far more reserved.

Me? My name is Sam. Alexander and I have been friends since the 4^th grade when my family moved into town. The phrase that opposites attract couldn’t be more true when it comes to our personalities. And yet, we are the best of friends.

“Time for another shot!”, he exclaimed.

“Don’t you think we should take it easy?”, I asked. “I mean we’ve only been here 10 minutes and the bottle is almost half gone”.

“Bah! Who’s measuring?”, he commented while pouring us another drink. Have I mentioned I’m not a drinker? Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to. I ‘accidently’ poured the vast portion of mine out on the ground when he wasn’t looking or I would have been passed out already.

The next song on the mix tape was by a local band we were both enamored with. They were called Werewolf Priest and they were from our high school. The release of their 4 song EP on cassette only had caused quite the buzz around the area.

Wolf’s Bane…      Hemlock…      Silver Bullet…  Rosary          

We sang along joyfully as we danced around our campsite.

“I love this next part!”, enthused Alexander. “It’s like Motorhead or something!”

Time to run!

We were laughing with the intoxication of the music when I heard a noise.

I stopped and strained to try to hear what it was.   

“Do you hear that? I think there is another car coming”, I stated.

At first the sound of tires on asphalt was faint, but grew louder and louder as the car approached. Soon we could see the headlights in the distance headed our way.

“I hope they know how to Rock ‘n’ Roll!” said Alexander with fervor. “Let’s turn it up!”

Iron Maiden’s Children of the Damned roared so loudly from the speakers that they distorted.

“He’s walking like a dead man… If he had lived he would have crucified us all!” crooned Alexander with Bruce Dickinson. “Children of the Damned!”

The car pulled up directly in front of where we were camping. 4 large and thuggish looking guys climbed out of the black Lincoln Continental.

Thug #1 addressed us, “What do you punks think you are doing in our cemetery?”

“Melting his face, screaming in pain!”, Alexander roared, ignoring the thugs.

“He asked you what you punks think you are doing in our cemetery”, spouted Thug #2.

“Did you say something? I can’t hear you over the music!”, smirked Alexander.

Thug #3 marched up and pressed the stop button on the boom box.

“What are you doing!? This is the best part!”, declaimed Alexander.

“For the last time, what are you punks doing in our cemetery?”, asked Thug #4 with more than a little bit of a temper.

“Hmmm… Your cemetery, huh? Are you dead or something?”

Did I mention Alexander can be lippy and has fear of nothing? Even in the face of almost certain death? Yeah, I didn’t think I needed to.

“We…we are here…here in the competition on… on 66.6FM”, I stammered, scared out of my wits.

“What kind of competition?”, queried Thug #2, glancing over at me for the first time (though it was out of turn, Thug #1 looked content to stand with his arms crossed and half lidded eyes, staring at us).

“It’s, uhmm… a competition to, you know, stay in a, errr… haunted cemetery on, uhhh,… You know, Halloween night.” I was thankful to get that all out.

 Alexander reached down and turned the boom box back on.

“Like candles watch them burn!”, he sang along.

Thug #3 gave a swift kick to the cassette player and it flew a few feet before reconnecting with the ground and the tape sounded like it had become entwined with itself before abruptly ceasing to make a sound.

“You bastard! You broke my boom box!”, screamed Alexander.

Thug #1 laughed heartily and told Thug #3, “Hold him. I have a gift for him.”

Thug #3 easily grabbed Alexander and held his arms behind his back. Simultaneously, Thug #2 did the same to me.

Thug #1 reached into his pocket and removed a set of brass knuckles. He smoothly slid them onto his right fist, obviously not the first time he had done so, and intoned, “You punks picked the wrong bunch to mouth off to. We deserve respect, and because of your discrepancies, we are going to teach you both a lesson”.

He smiled as he pulled his arm back to strike. Just as he did so, a pair of hairy, human-like hands, but much larger, reached out from behind the Korsakov’s headstone and twisted his head around with a loud snap. Thug #1 collapsed to the ground like he had become a jellyfish.

I felt Thug #2 yanked back, and he let loose of my arms. I heard him scream and then it came to an abrupt end, but as I turned around, I saw nothing. The other two made a mad sprint back to the car, but were leapt upon by what looked vaguely like wolves. The wolf-like things made short work of our antagonists and then dragged the Thug’s bodies away to another location in the cemetery.

I was shaking like the proverbial leaf on a tree. I looked around and saw Alexander sitting on the ground with his head in hands. I sat down next to him and embraced him best I could.

“Are you okay? What just happened? Alexander, I’m so afraid”.

“I can’t believe they broke my tape deck”, he said with exasperation.

He stood up and walked over to the tape deck and picked it up. He pressed the eject button and the cassette fell out, trailing tape stuck in the machine. Alexander carefully extracted the tape, and then with a pencil he removed from his inner coat pocket, proceeded to carefully roll the tape back into its encasement.

“Hopefully that will do the trick”, he sighed and placed the cassette back into the boom box.

It sounded a bit garbled at first, but then started to play properly.

Screams break the silence                                                                                                                                                                             Waking from the dead of night..

Alexander laughed hysterically as the song played…

Bark at the Moon!

“Time for another shot!”