"The Pink Hare"
A Christmas Ghost Story from Prompt One
Earlier in the week, I posted a writing prompt based on a Victorian Christmas Ghost Story that I reviewed.
The prompt was - “With John Gibson Lockhart’s “Little Willie Bell” in mind, write a story or poem about a ghost that has unfinished business.”
Below is my story based on the prompt. I would love to read yours as well. Cross-Post or post yours in the comments.
I was hesitant to even tell this story.
Though I have changed the names and will leave out the exact location, a few online searches could provide the reader with, at the very least, the basics from news articles and looky-loos.
Yet, my tale is not about the basics. My tale haunts me, and I hope that writing it down, even if it just stays as a file on my computer and never sees the light of day, will help me close my eyes and stop seeing the pink hare staring at me from the edge of the wood.
My wife and I are fans of Christmas inflatables, but the apartments and townhomes of our early married life were not conducive to displaying them. So, when we bought the big house near the end of a cul-de-sac in a middle-class neighborhood in Eastern Tennessee, the first holiday was spent buying as many as we could fit in our yard.
The problem with this was that the wiring of the house was poor. So, any time it rained, the cheap cords I had running to the inflatables would trip the breakers on the outside outlets. That would not be that big of a deal, except that the garage fridge and the deep freeze were on the same breakers. So, I had to deflate the decorations anytime it rained.
On top of that, my dog, the ass that he was, would choose to do his business on the deflated decorations any time that I would let him out.
This is all, in a way, the backstory for why I was standing out in the chill of a late November morning waiting for my dog to bathroom anywhere but on the deflated Santa and his minions.
There had been a huge storm the night before. The biggest thunderstorm that I had seen since moving to Tennessee. I kept my bare feet on the sidewalk as I walked out to the road to see if any of my neighbor’s decorations had survived the night. I saw a few sets of lights still on. One house with the inflatables still blowing.
I was trying to recall the name of the person who lived there when a movement across the street caught my eye. It was a slight twitch close to the ground in the short grass just outside the wood. There, in the dark, sat something bright pink.
At first, I thought it must be a bag or some neighbor kid’s ball. Yet, as my eyes adjusted to the dark, I saw that it was a rabbit. One of the largest rabbits I had ever seen in the neighborhood. It was not unusual to see two or three rabbits in every yard as you walked the streets around where my house resided. Yet, I had never seen one this large or this pink.
I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and stepped into the street to take a picture. The flash made its eyes shine, but the rabbit never moved. I wondered if it was someone’s pet. Surely someone had to have dyed the rabbit’s fur that bright pink. It was not a color that appeared in nature.
The sound of my dog moving up the front steps of the house distracted me, and when I looked back again, the rabbit was gone.
I thought little of it. Moved back into my house and started to get the children ready for school. My day was busy with work. So, it wasn’t until that evening that I opened the picture and took a closer look.
The coloring of the rabbit looked more subdued in the shot, leading my wife to conjecture that it was a trick of the low light that made it seem so bright. I had to agree that the rabbit could be white. The wood behind the rabbit looked dark and foreboding in the low resolution of the cell phone camera. More perplexing even than that, there was a strange shimmer of light resting just above the small animal. My grandmother would have said that it was an angel caught looking out for the precious thing. The mind did create a humanoid shape out of the anomaly. Yet, it had not been there when I took the picture, so it could be nothing more.
That night, I was awoken by my wife’s hand on my shoulder. “Your phone is going off!” She turned away and placed a pillow over her head. Sure enough, my phone was playing a song I had never heard before. A simple melody on piano without any vocals of accompaniment. I picked up the phone and silenced it. The clock on the front read 3:01 am.
I set it back on the table and was about to turn around when my dog whined from the side of the bed. Shaking my head, I grabbed my phone and moved to take him out once again.
Though the thunder had stopped the night before, the rain had kept up throughout the day. So, I trudged barefoot onto the wet sidewalk once more, on guard for the waterlogged decorations. As I stepped around my car, I saw the rabbit. It sat in the exact same spot. It was as bright pink as the last night. I pulled my phone up and used two fingers to zoom in on the creature. Seeing that the pink was quite visible on the screen, I once again took a picture.
The rabbit just sat there. I thought about crossing the road to see how close I could get, but just then, my phone started to play that song once more. I looked down at the phone and scrolled through the open apps, looking for what could be causing the music. Yet, there was nothing open but my camera. I hit “close all apps” just to be sure, and the music stopped.
Smiling to myself for that shallow feeling of small accomplishments, I looked back up to see that the rabbit was gone.
Later that day, I showed the new picture to my wife. She agreed that the rabbit was pink. The color shown bright in the zoomed-in picture. The woods still loomed dark in the background.
“Wait,” My wife took the phone and angled the picture to look at something just above the rabbit. A light was there, just like in the last picture. Yet, this one looked like a small hand and arm was surrounded by the light. “That must be a glitch. The camera program trying to make sense of some strange light anomaly shining through the wood.”
My wife was always the scientist. A skeptic who wanted to believe but had a ready answer for everything that others would think was supernatural.
“Sure,” I took the phone back and used two fingers to zoom further into the ghostly lighted hand. “But look at that.”
“What is that?” she squinted to see the dark line between the ghostly wrist and arm.
“It looks like our light anomaly is wearing a bracelet.”
I was awoken again that night by the shove of my wife’s hand on my back. “Shut that freaking alarm off!” she said as she turned over and away from the noise.
I set up and looked at the phone. It was 3:01 am yet again. This time, I lowered the volume and walked quietly around the bed to grab my wife’s phone from her nightstand. I quickly stepped out of the room and opened a search engine that would look up music simply by listening to it.
I turned up my phone and let the simple piano melody play. It was less than a minute before my wife’s phone gave me a history of the song. It was a child’s song from some show with puppets and lessons. The name of the song was “Friendship Bracelet.”
My mind went back to the picture I had been looking at just hours before. The strange anomaly looked like an arm with a small bracelet at the wrist.
My dog whined at the door, and though it was dry enough to let him out among the inflated decorations, I decided to step out with him once again.
I walked slowly past the driveway and onto the sidewalk in front of our house. There was the rabbit. As bright as a stuffed bear my daughter had carried around as a child. Almost neon pink, shining in the darkness.
The thought occurred to me that I should just step over to the animal. If it was natural, it would dash into the wood. If it was something more, maybe I would solve the mystery. I took a timid step into the road when the voice came from behind me.
“Those damn hares! Their like fucking rodents. We should poison the whole lot of them.”
I turned to see my neighbor Walt. The grizzled old man stood on his porch smoking.
I stepped back and walked over to his front yard. “What did you call it?”
“Well,” he said and took a beat with a long drag from his cigarette. “Most rabbits around these parts are Eastern Cottontails. Tiny little things. But some of the ones you see around our neighborhood are bigger. The damn pencil necks will tell you that Tennessee used to have Snowshoe Hares but that they are all extinct. I say these big fuckers have to be hares, or they have to be some kind of crossbreed. I’d ask the college assholes, but they would just come in and smack more ‘protected land’ signs all over the place.”
“Those woods across from us is protected land, right?”
“That’s right,” Walt said with a laugh. “That’s why I can’t have a fucking garden. These sons of bitches are over there mating like the bunnies they are, spitting out little eaters that devour my crops. I got some traps in the shed out back if you want me to set some out.”
I looked at the man and hoped the darkness hid the horrified look that I knew was on my face. “That won’t be necessary. Besides that one, there must be some kind of anomaly. Have you ever seen a bright pink hare?”
Even in the low light, I could see Walt’s demeanor change then. He looked at me as if I had just told him he was going to die. “What did you just say?”
I forced a chuckle to try and lighten the mood. “I asked if you have ever seen a bright pink hare?”
“Where?” the other man gasped.
I turned and pointed to where the rabbit had just been. “Just over there. Well, it was there a minute ago. A hare, the brightest shade of pink I have ever seen.”
I turned back toward the man on the porch to see him flick his butt into the yard and retreat quickly into his house.
“Well, goodnight,” I called after, but the door slamming shut was all I got in return.
The next day passed without incident. My daughter had a play at her school that night. We were all in bed late, and I shut my phone off just in case the 3 am alarm was planning on waking us once again. I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow and suddenly jerked awake in the darkness of the early morning. My phone was still off, but I could swear that someone was humming the song softly somewhere in the house. The clock on the wall read 3:01 am. I stood once more and saw that the dog was at my feet, ready for his new nightly excursion.
I slipped out of the room and could still hear the soft hum of the tune. Now, it sounded as if it was coming from outside. I looked out the window and saw that the inflatables were all down. Though there was no rain, the breaker had somehow tripped, and the yard was dark. I made a mental note to unplug the decorations and flip the breaker to protect the food in the garage fridge and freezer. Then, I opened the door and let the dog slide out into the dark yard.
From the top of the steps, I could see the bright pink glow from across the street. The creature I now thought of as a hare was lying in the grass this time. It looked almost like it was asleep.
I stepped to the sidewalk to get a better view and saw that the poor animal was laying on its side, still as the grave. I rushed across the street and knelt down to see the poor thing.
It was dead.
Its back foot caught in a metal trap. Blood covered its legs and mouth.
I felt rage rise up in me. I picked up the hare, trap and all, and marched across the street to my neighbor’s front door.
Damn the hour and damn the asshole. I beat on the door until lights came on from the inside and the front door flew open.
“What the…”
Before he could get out a sentence, I shoved the dead hare in his face. “You killed her! You fucking killed her! Why would you do that?”
Walt looked horror-stricken. All the color drained from his face. He stammered and staggered backward. “No,” he said. “No, no, no!”
I lifted the hare and the trap so he could get a better look. “You see the bright pink hare now, you fucking murderer!” I screamed. I felt a righteous anger that I could not believe was coming from the death of this animal, even if it was a travesty.
“Get the fuck away from me,” he screamed and slammed the door in my face.
I carried the pink hare into my house and out into the garage. There, I set the body on my workbench and pried back the jaws of the metal trap enough that the poor thing’s leg slid out. I looked at the creature, amazed by its beauty.
That’s when I noticed that it was wearing a collar. “Ah, so you did belong to someone.”
I lifted the head and saw that the collar was makeshift. It looked like it had been made of multicolored twine. There were beads laced in throughout. I found a knot and untied it to get a better look.
Once it was off the neck of the hair, I saw that it was not a collar at all. It was a friendship bracelet. Written on the side through the weave work was “Betha and Becky BFF.”
When my wife awoke the next morning and stepped out of the bedroom, I was sitting at the kitchen table with my third coffee in my hands. I had not been able to sleep a wink after the excitement of the night before.
I wanted to tell her about what had occurred, but she was in a hurry to get to her office for a meeting, and the business of getting the kids ready for school was the first priority. A few minutes after my wife left with the boys, my daughter came downstairs and grabbed her plate of bacon and a granola bar from the counter. There, she saw the friendship bracelet sitting in front of me. “What is that?” She picked it up.
“Something I found across the street near the wood.”
“Betha?” She said. “I bet I know who this belongs to.”
I looked at her, astonished. “Really?”
“Yeah,” she placed the bracelet back on the table. “Betha is not the most common name. There is a Betha in my play. Remember the tree sprite? She is two classes behind me at school, but she seems really nice. She actually lives here in the neighborhood. Like six or seven blocks over.”
I asked her to point out the house on our way to her school, and later that afternoon, I walked up to the door.
A woman who I had seen at neighborhood picnics answered, and I introduced myself. I asked if I could speak to her for a moment and we sat on her screened-in porch. Two small rabbits bounced through her yard as I summoned the courage to pull out the bracelet.
“I found this across the street from my house, right outside the protected wood.”
She took the bracelet from my hands, and tears welled in her eyes. “Oh my god! Please, let’s keep quiet. I don’t want my daughter to hear us.”
“Of course,” I said, checking my pockets as if a modern man carries a tissue.
She stood. “Give me a moment,” she said as she stepped into the house.
She came back with some fresh tissues and a framed picture. She handed me the latter, and I saw two young girls snuggling close and smiling. One was the girl who was in my daughter’s play the night before. The other was a girl with bright pink hair.
“They were best friends. My Betha and Becky Monroe.” She took the picture back and looked it over. “This was two years ago. That’s why you wouldn’t know. I believe you have only lived here a short time, right?”
I shook my head. “We moved here in June of this year.”
“Becky was here on a Saturday. She was over here almost every day. We all loved her. She left around dark. Said that her mom was on the way and that she would meet her up the street to save time. We found out later that she was usually walking home. Even though she lived three neighborhoods over. She didn’t want to put us out and didn’t want anyone to worry. It was only her and her mom, and she worked a lot.”
I shook my head and let her fall back into her memories.
“She left here around dark, and that was the last we ever saw of her. Police believed that she must have taken a ride with someone, and they took her. Who would do that? Just take a poor girl?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” was all I could think to say.
She started crying again, and I rose to place my hand on her shoulder.
She wiped her eyes and stared once more at the picture of the two girls. “Do you think the police should know about the bracelet?”
She looked up, and I saw the hope in her eyes. “I think that anything we can give them would help. Do you have a number I could call?”
I walked to my car with the bracelet in one hand and the number of a detective in the other. On the drive home, I called the number, and the nice voice on the phone said she would come to my house the next day to take a statement.
That night was clear, and the full moon shone bright overhead. I had gone ahead and shut the inflatables off to save me any worry of them cutting the power to the garage. All was well until I woke from a dead sleep at 3 am. The song I had first heard as piano music and then as a humming was now being sung in the sweet soprano of a young girl. I slipped out of the room with the dog in tow and stood for a moment in the foyer, trying to figure out where the song was coming from.
The melody was drifting in from outside. I opened the front door and saw the figure standing across the street from my house. The pink-haired shade stood with the pink hare cradled in her arms. I could not believe what I was seeing. “Becky?” I called.
The figure ignored my questioning and, turning, stepped into the dark of the wood. I ran quickly across the street and followed into the darkness pushing small tree limbs aside to clear a path. I had not put on shoes, and the terrain was rough, slowing my progress. I saw the pink-haired figure in front of me moving along at a brisk pace and tried my best to keep up.
Suddenly, the singing stopped, and the girl cried out in anguish.
I rushed ahead and saw the girl had fallen to the ground. She was reaching down to her ankle. There, a trap, much like the one that had killed the pink hare, had snapped on her leg, breaking it just above the foot. The bone was clearly visible, pushing out of the skin.
She screamed and screamed as I ran to her side. In a panic, I moved to unhinge the trap and free her foot. Yet, my hands could not find purchase on the metal. I stood up and tried to help the girl stand. My hands moved right through her.
This brought my heart to the realization that my mind was already trying to tell me. I was seeing the ghost of what happened to Becky. There was no way to help the poor girl. I could only bear witness.
She screamed and screamed for help, but no one heard her. Then, the brave girl found the strength to pull the trap from the anchor that held it to the ground. She stood up with a long and agonizing wail and stood on one foot.
My heart leaped in my chest. Maybe she hopped out of here? Maybe she saved herself and then disappeared?
She took two steps before she fell under her own weight. I watched as the poor girl’s head slammed into a jagged rock, and she rose no more.
I knelt by her body and wept. The pink hare slid from the bushes, and I picked it up to pet as I prayed for the soul of this poor girl.
After what seemed like hours, I heard a movement in the wood. A flashlight landed on Becky’s body, and a man swore in the darkness. “You fool girl,” he said. “That trap was for the hares, not for you. What the fuck were you doing in these woods?”
The man came over and knelt beside the girl. He acted as if I was not there, and I reminded myself that I wasn’t. This was something that had already happened. I was only seeing the whisper of past events.
Walt stood back up and moved away toward our houses. A few minutes later, he returned with a shovel. As the first dirt was thrown into Becky’s grave, the scene faded from vision, and dawn showed through the trees. I looked down, and the pink hare was gone from my arms.
It was Saturday, and everyone but me would be asleep until late morning. I called the detective and asked her if she could bring dogs with her. I avoided looking at Walt’s door and locked mine when I went back inside. My neighbor wasn’t a cold-blooded killer, but he was the closest thing to it.
They found the body of Becky Monroe later that afternoon. The murder weapon was in a shoe box in my garage. It was the only thing there. The pink hare was gone.
The police knocked down Walt’s door around 6 pm that night. They found him hanging from the ceiling fan in his master bedroom. The note was rambling, but the police could understand that he was afraid he would go to jail for killing the endangered hares.
They asked me if I knew what he meant by the repeated line “Pink Hare, Pink Hair” that filled most of the page.
I told them only the bare minimum of the story I have written here.
I would love to read your comments on the story and/or stories of your own. Post them in the comments.
The last thing I would have dreamed of, an animal trap. Excellent circuitry to bring forth justice.
Chilling....