The toughest thing about living in a small town in America is the boredom.
When you live in a big city, there’s plenty of distraction. You have plenty of options to keep your mind occupied.
Coyote Hollow is the kind of place where the biggest event is a church social. It’s hard to keep one’s self entertained in such a place, unless you’re the kind of person who prefers to just sit back and laze around all day.
Al Cannington was one such person. It would be unfair to call the boy lazy. He was a hard worker, but when he wasn’t packing peaches at the local plant, he was at home, in his favorite chair, either watching TV or playing video games. He had friends, but he wasn’t the kind to bother driving all the way out to Macon or anything for bar hopping. He much preferred to host dinners at his own place, and thanks to his talent in the kitchen, he never had to worry about people not showing up.
Al was one of those people who figured out early on what takes others a lifetime to realize: real happiness is found in being happy with what you have. It’s absurd that so many people ask so much out of life, thinking the world owes them something. They do everything for money, social status, whatever, and all under the false impression that it’ll somehow lead to a happier, more fulfilling life. It’s only when they get everything they wanted and are still unhappy that they realize the mistake they made. Al had nipped it in the bud. He wasn’t rich, but he had enough to get by. He had food in his fridge, a roof over his head, and enough frills to his life to remind him that it was all worth it.
His little brother, Billy Cannington, was the same way. Billy had made a name for himself working at a factory in Macon, and while others would’ve wanted to move to upper management or used this job as some kind of stepping stone, but Billy was content where he was. He had refused all promotions that had come his way because he was good at the job he had and he had made himself irreplaceable. Why mess up a good thing, right?
And then there was George, who worked with Billy at the factory.
Every workplace has a George. Someone who does the bare minimum and yet expects to be running the place inside of a year. Entitled, obnoxious, and in terms of the workplace in which he was hired, just plain useless. The only thing that made George and Billy friends was their shared love of Halloween and anything macabre.
Al wasn’t exactly fond of George but he put up with him for Billy’s sake. More than once he’d talked with Billy about how George was going to get him into serious trouble one day, but in the end he figured Billy was an adult and had to learn life’s lessons through experience. Al wasn’t the type of person to step into a situation until he was asked.
It was when Billy and George asked him to take part in their idea for that year’s Halloween that he tried (and failed) to put his foot down.
One of the few places of interest in Coyote Hollow was an old jailhouse. It was more of a temporary housing arrangement than a jail. It was where the police had kept prisoners during their trials and it sat comfortably on the hill overlooking the Coyote Hollow courthouse. Of course, time took its toll and the jailhouse was now a sort of museum, hosting tours for schoolkids and the like.
When Billy and George came to Al and told him they wanted to spend Mischief Night inside that jailhouse, Al wasn’t content to just say no. He tried his damndest to convince them not to do it either. He explained to Billy and George how something like that would be laughed off for a couple of teenagers, but for three twentysomething men, it could mean prison time and the destruction of their simple but peaceful lives.
Unfortunately, Billy and George weren’t content with rest and relaxation like Al was. They were always looking for that bigger, better experience, particularly around Halloween. First it had been corn mazes, then professional haunted houses, and now it was going to be the Coyote Hollow jailhouse and nothing would convince them otherwise.
Al never would’ve admitted it out loud, but it was more than the prospect of arrest that made him wary of that place. He knew the old stories just like Billy and George did, but unlike them, it shook him to the core. Al was superstitious that way.
Like most towns of its ilk, Coyote Hollow had been a sundown town during segregation. It wasn’t in the Green Book, so few black folks knew about it. One such black man was named Ty Nichols. When he stopped in Coyote Hollow in 1944 looking for a hotel to stay the night, he quickly found himself at the mercy of a group of very angry, racist policemen. There was whispers of lynching, but the policemen decided to make an example of Mr. Nichols.
They brought him to the jailhouse and threw him into the cell, amid righteous protests from the young man himself. The poor Ty cried out for hours protesting that he’d done nothing wrong, but of course they fell on deaf ears. To those policemen, Ty’s abundance of melanin was more than enough to keep him in that cell for at least a week. After a night of restless attempts at sleep and screaming for his freedom, Ty was visited by the head of the local police. Ty had a small hope that the man was there to reprimand those who’d imprisoned him and set him free, but it turned out that was not the case.
Before Ty could do anything, the captain of the police unholstered his gun and shot him three times in the stomach, point blank. They let Ty bleed out on the cold floor of his cell, crying and wondering what the hell he had done to deserve this. Of course, they trumped up some bullshit about how he’d tried to escape and not one of them faced any sort of charge.
The whispers in Coyote Hollow spoke of a haunting of that cell. They said that every night but especially around All Hallow’s Eve, the crying and moaning of Ty Nichols could be heard out of the jailhouse, along with the cruel snickers of the men who’d let him die.
Despite his superstitions, Al was a skeptic by nature and even though he wasn’t sure if ghosts existed, he still didn’t feel comfortable spending the night in a jail cell where an innocent black man had been gunned down in cold blood. Billy and George reassured him that he didn’t have to spend any time whatsoever in the cell itself; they just wanted him to serve as a lookout in case anybody came snooping around and ran the risk of them getting caught.
Al tried to assure them that the best way to make sure they wouldn’t get caught was to not do it at all, and Billy seemed to be swaying over to Al’s side, but George was as stubborn as they come and he wouldn’t back down. It took him a while, but eventually he managed to convince Al to serve as lookout on the condition that Billy do the same instead of joining him in the cell. George didn’t mind; the bragging rights would now be exclusively his.
On Mischief Night, the three boys made their way on foot to the jailhouse. The sun had gone down by the time they got there, and there was no security to be seen. Even then, Al was looking for any excuse to turn around and go home, but in no time the lock on the door was picked and the boys stepped inside that old jailhouse.
The jailhouse was creepy enough during daylight, but after dark it was something right out of a nightmare. Even though it had been re-dressed and refurbished in recent years, the city had taken extra care in making it look more like it would have back when it was in use. Obviously the boys couldn’t turn on any lights, so they had to rely on their flashlights to get around. By this point Al and Billy were on edge; they half expected to see Ty Nichols’s wide-eyed ghost around each corner.
The jailhouse had the one cell on the ground floor, while the office and restrooms were on the top floor. The plan was that Al and Billy would stay on the top floor, laid out in little sleeping bags and keeping an eye out for anyone while George would take his own sleeping bag into the holding cell.
Now, you’re probably expecting them to have heard or even seen the ghost of Ty Nichols, or the cruel laughter of those racist pig cops that killed them. I hope you’re not too disappointed to know that the night went by without incident. Not a peep, except for maybe a frog or two in the grass surrounding the ground floor. George was deeply disappointed while Al and Billy were quite relieved. They left before anybody arrived, locking up the place as they’d found it and nobody was ever the wiser.
For a week afterwards, George wouldn’t shut up about how disappointed he was. He bragged to he and Billy’s co-workers about what they’d done, but he only told them about it so he could continue on about what a waste of time it had all been. None of the people at the factory had any good opinions about George and after the jailhouse, he became nigh intolerable.
Then one day, the other people at the factory asked Billy to ask George to keep his mouth shut about what they’d done. It was enough that George didn’t pull his weight around the factory without him running his mouth all the time. Billy obliged.
He walked over to the mangles where George worked to find him sitting on a stool. He wasn’t surprised. George wasn’t the kind of guy to stay standing for very long. Billy was VERY surprised, however, when he walked closer to George, called out his name, and George responded by turning towards him and spraying a cascade of brown-red vomit onto the floor and Billy’s shoes. Billy responded by jumping back in shock and disgust, falling over onto his backside and immediately running to phone a hospital.
They took George to the local doctor but they couldn’t find anything wrong with him. They checked for everything from stomach bugs to food poisoning to whatever, but there was nothing in his system that should’ve made him have such a violent reaction. On the rare occasions that George could open his mouth without throwing up, he would complain about terrible pains in his gullet. Again, they tried everything they could, but the pain never subsided and there was nothing anyone could do about it.
One morning George was found missing from his hospital bed. They put on an alert and searched for over an hour before finding him in one of the ORs. He’d managed to get his hands on a scalpel and from the looks of it he’d started just below his pectorals and stopped just above his groin.
His innards were spread out all over the place, the skin at the end of the ragged tear down his stomach blue and black from the resistance he’d faced. The blood on the floor was still slightly warm to the touch. The poor nurse who found him fainted dead away the second she saw it.
They figured that after a week or so of being hooked up to IVs and constant vomiting and unbearable pain in his stomach, George had snapped, snuck his way into the OR and tried to somehow stop the pain by… well, cutting it out. At the risk of sounding insensitive, I guess you could say he succeeded.
People may not have particularly liked George, but they were shocked at the idea that he’d died so violently. A good many tears were shed, including by Billy. Al wasn’t the type to cry easily, but he hated seeing his little brother so distraught. More than anything, Al was troubled by it all.
Even after he killed himself, the doctors could find nothing wrong with George physically. There was absolutely no explanation for the pain or the vomiting. Nothing that they could detect, anyway.
And that’s how it is sometimes. There are some happenstances that just can’t be explained, not by any kind of science or medicine. Most people go about their days ignoring these happenstances because life is much easier without wondering if there are powers at work that we can’t understand.
Eventually, the people of Coyote Hollow would move on from this tragedy, and no one would ever be the wiser. No one would ever by privy to the more disturbing aspects of the story, like how the pain George felt happened to be in the exact same part of the stomach where Ty Nichols had been shot, or that George himself was the great-grandson of the man who pulled the trigger.