A Travel Guide for Ghosts
I’m a driver.
Since I snatched my first car keys— for a ‘91 Nissan Sentra, black, factory tape deck, cigarette lighter used more for power than smokes, and named, of course, “The Batmobile”—I’ve been addicted to 65mph and up. 65mph will take you pretty far after not too long, especially in the Midwest. When a college friend shamed me for not being in a rush to visit Europe, I asked why I’d waste my time with ruins and fancy trains when I had a whole country, dozens of states, each as individual as a cassette single, to coast in and out of? And I could roll through them from behind the controls of my own machine, my own radio in reach. Europe was better?
If you’re a driver, maybe you feel me.
There are too many odes to the Great American Road Trip to say much new. A reminder might suffice, which is that from kooky farm towns to hip city blocks, you get to ride that wave of something new while never getting stuck so long the buzz wears off. If you’ve got the gas and the time, there’s always another secret ahead. Even if you hit an ocean, what’s behind you has now shifted. It’s still a fresh experience, but suddenly carries enough familiarity to blend up a prime mix of peace and thrills. At least that’s what it does for me.
Here is where I march out the trusty comparison to an anthology. Each story is like a stop on the road and this assortment is different than all the others, yada, yada…
But what if it really is?
Because this one is for ghosts.
While editing this collection (more on that humbling madness in the future 😊), and especially while reviewing the final version, I kept coming back to how much I wanted to drive all over the Commonwealth of Virginia to visit the settings of each story or poem, all twenty-three. I wanted to see my adopted state through a pinballing journey of its most haunted sites. Abandoned tunnels. Houses of evil. Grotesque battlegrounds. Cursed swamps. Spirit-stalked mountain highways. High-class neighborhoods rented by the dead. Capital cities full of underground monsters. Rocky paths right to Hell. What a way for a driver and chaser of the macabre to get to know a place.
So, yes, this batch of stories is for ghosts. It’s Waze set to avoid highways but please let’s hit every burial ground and spooky destination. If you want to give yourself the creeps out on the streets, well, here you go.
But I’ve sometimes wondered, is it also for ghosts?
Are there travel guides for the departed? A Lonely Planet for the passed on to find each other, along with the many creatures we push to the other side of the fence? Phantoms. Demons. Cryptids. Soul-suckers. Mutants. Parasites. Monsters.
Do you think the dead take road trips?
And what are they looking for? Answers? Companionship? Salvation?
I don’t think road tripping, or turnpikin’, as His Highness of Horror Mr. King once called it, will ever be the same, especially at night. Just barely illuminated by the touch screen of my new dark hot rod, whether it’s glowing with a satellite station or a digital map, I wonder what I’ll look like to the other “travelers.” And I wonder, when I glance their way, if I’ll see some…one on a trek like mine, but headed to points much, much more grim?
I hope I have the sense to wave.
‘Cause who knows when I might join them.
For now, I say get out on the road. Better to race the devil than wait for it to run you down.
And if you want a map, maybe this is just the one you need.
May its contents guide you safely.
If that’s what you really want.
- Rook
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