ZACK HANEY'S PARANORMAL PORTFOLIO

     FILE 317: STREEPYVILLE, AUGUST, 1996

submitted by Zack Haney

Appanoose: The sullen gunmetal sky hung over North Central Iowa like a bloated liver. Then, as my faithful 1978 Caprice Classic, "Clarice", crested the final hill on the outskirts of Streepyville, a sunbeam split the dank clouds, splaying light across the valley. There was a mystery here in the heartland, and I, Zack Haney, was the only one equipped with the intellectual package to handle it. This is the burden I carry.

     I pulled Clarice into the parking lot of Danny's, a greasy spoon just off the town square, in the shadow of the courthouse, whose red bricks soaked up the summer sunlight like a really good paper towel. I put on my shades and stepped into the smoky bowels of the diner. Grabbing a seat at the counter, I snagged the local paper, the Appanoose County Obsessive-Compulsive , and flipped it to the front page headline. There it was. The reason I had come to this flyspeck on the map. The reason I was on the case.

     "Man, Ferret Die in Fire". The case was baffling the local galoots, but I saw through it from the get-go. A classic case of SHC: Spontaneous Human Combustion. The article was typical of the way small-town, small-minded types act when faced with a true mystery. "Might as well been an electrical fire, bein' as that house was purt' near a hunnert years old," the town's Fire Chief was quoted as saying, "but so far, we haven't been able to figure out just what did happen."

     The article also included the description that had piqued my interest in the first place. The body was found charred beyond recognition, and the legs had completely disintegrated just above the knees, leaving only a small pile of ashes. The house itself was untouched by the burning, although the walls in the room were covered with a thick, greasy soot. The very chair the victim sat in was undamaged, as was the TV remote control held in the corpse's vice-like grip. Strangely, Serpico-the unfortunate ferret-also appeared to have spontaneously combusted in his cage, leaving behind only a skeletal frame and a pile of well-toasted sunflower seeds.

     Having washed down a bitter cup of coffee, I pulled out my pack of Parliaments and enjoyed the crystalline burn of menthol as I began to question my waitress, Sally, about the deaths.

     "None of us can figure out how it happened, " she said with a sarcastic undercurrent that I found a bit confusing, "'course, Old Bill was narcoleptic and he smoked about four packs a day. But no, its quite a mystery about how he died." She rolled her eyes, which I could only assume was some esoteric local custom. She obviously didn't know anything useful, but I wanted to be polite, so I rolled my eyes back at her. Leaving my customary twenty-five cent tip, I went to question the dead man's neighbors.

     The first I questioned came to the door clad only in a pair of sagging briefs and a fairly advanced skin condition. Unfortunately, this man felt he had nothing to hide.

     "Oh, yeah, Bill. Well, I didn't know him that well," the old man said, his lone tooth wavering on his blackened lower gumline like a drunken sailor on a pier. "One time I went over there, he showed me his matchbook collection, which is apparently one of the biggest in the state. Oh, yeah---he was always messing around with these old oil lamps. Tryin' to fix 'em back up. Hmmm, let me see, he was also startin' to get into that whole home improvement stuff; installin' new 'lectrical fixtures- that sort of thing."

     I'd heard enough of Chompo's useless dissertation on the dead man's hobbies, so I thanked him and headed over to the house itself. As usual, none of the locals had known anything which might have helped unravel the mystery, but I was obligated as an unbiased paranormal investigator to at least talk to them and try to find some "rational" explanation as to what had happened to Old Bill.

     Finally, getting to the heart of the case, I stealthily cut across the yard, and ducked under the yellow police tape. I entered the victim's house. It smelled bad. Real bad. I don't recommend slow-roasting human and ferret flesh together.

     The salty, rotting odor intensified as I entered the living room. Here was the place where the sliding glass door into the unknown had been opened, because someone had forgotten to put the metaphysical stick down in the slot at the bottom. Perhaps I'm taking the analogy a bit too far.

     I approached the chair where Bill Flint took his last breath, and searched for clues. Scattered around the chair were everyday household belongings-a squeeze bottle of lighter fluid, some charcoal briquettes, a pile of oily rags, and several discarded taco wrappers from the local Mexican joint. No help there.

     There was also an iron sitting next to the foot of the chair, plugged into a nearby wall socket which hung askew, frayed wires projecting crazily from the wall. This was a room that had secrets to share, but like most of my dates, didn't feel like sharing any of them with me.

     I returned to Clarice and made an entry in my logbook. "Date: August 19, 1996. Streepyville, Iowa. Confirmed SHC." My job here was done. There were other mysteries to solve. Word from my ParaNet Webpage was that a brain-sucking variant of the Chupacabra was loose amongst the good folk of Fort Madison. I had a job to do. Where there's a mystery in Iowa, there's Zack Haney, Paranormal Investigator.





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