The Haunted Glass House

a novel that is a ghost story

This is an excerpt from my latest novel, out now in paperback, By The Light Of The Carnival,

Joe thought Carlos was crazy. Then he just wondered if that’s how most people from that religion talked. The Baptists he knew didn’t talk much except about their tractors and crops, guns and fishing boats. As they got near the end of the aisle to the last attraction, The Emperor’s Glass House, Joe noticed there were no worms before it. “Lucky us.”

“Where’d they all go? I didn’t see any birds.” Carlos walked around the trailer.

“There’s no worms. They sucked straight down to Hell!”

“They reincarnated.”

“Don’t get smart.”

Joe stood up and stretched his back. “I don’t care why there’s no worms right here. Just be glad. We’re done.” He walked away to dump the can into the woods again and then returned to Carlos.

Carlos pointed up at the trailer. “Nobody who works here likes to go into that place. Not for nothin’. So you might get bossed into cleaning the fingerprints off the glass. The new people get that chore. And you’re too new to be afraid.”

Joe regarded the maze, able to see through all the glass to the back wall, from where he stood outside. “It does look a bit claustrophobic in there. And just damn irritating, I suppose. Nobody wants to be the one who does the windows.”

“It has a past, that attraction. It came from Europe. They replaced all the s**t inside with new modern plastic glass stuff that don’t break, but that didn’t take out the devil ghost.”

“Devil ghost? Yeah right. Try to scare me. It won’t work.”

Carlos pointed at it. “I don’t have to scare you. The place can do that all for itself.”

“So… that’s a haunted Hindu glass house?”

“No! There are no such things in Hinduism. That’s just sitting there. It somehow got haunted in spite of, or… regardless of reincarnation and things. It has nothing to do with Hinduism or anything like that.”

Joe rubbed his chin. “So… it’s just haunted.” Then he remembered he’d been touching worms. He rubbed his chin on the shoulder of his t-shirt.

“They say it’s haunted. I didn’t make that up. That’s what they say.”

Joe frowned. “The power of suggestion is what you’re doing. You’re trying to make things seem more than they are around here to make it more exciting than it is. And you don’t turn into vampires at the end of the week, either.”

“Suit yourself.”

Joe continued, “You can make anything seem scary by making scary stories about it. I once had a dramatic uncle who made up all kinds of monsters for the barn and woods, outhouse and places. He made me afraid to go anywhere. But then I wised up and realized how much of my time he’d wasted with his spook stories, since being afraid makes you walk into places really slow.”