Do not look past the curtain

Word Count - 1991

R Gene Simmons lived on Broomfield Road in Nineteen Hundred and Eighty Seven. Mr. Simmons was notorious. He made world news headlines and he was my neighbor.

Each day at ten minutes after four p.m. he would enter the grocery store where I worked in town. He would grab a buggy and head down aisle eleven. In approximately four minutes he would be back ready to check out his purchases.

Mr. Simmons always wore old green Army fatigues. The pants were baggy except at his waistline where the pants were tighter. He was stocky. Keeping cuffs rolled one turn. He sported an unkempt grey beard and mustache with streaked grey. His daily purchases were fifteen loaves of cheap white bread and a dozen one gallon plastic jugs of water. Mr. Simmons always paid in cash, and did not have a lot to say.

At some point during our brief transactions over many months I learned that he worked less than a mile away from the store. He was retired from the U.S.Military and was married with children.

The man used as few words as possible, and after five months of quietly quizzing him over his purchases I no longer tried to find out what that was about.

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For several months I had been working to finish my house on Broomfield Road, Dover, Arkansas. I was on a timeline from FHA and the pressure caused me to almost work myself to death.

The last three months of working on the house I switched to the night shift at the store. During those days I worked nailing sheet rock and sawing boards. When the kids would get off of the bus we all painted together and took turns with a pick-ax trying to dig a waterline in solid rock.

Every step of the way while trying to get our house built there were many obstacles to overcome. My children ranged in age from three to ten. The four of us worked hard to finish the house.

Every force of life seemed to try and keep us from move-in day.

On October first of Nineteen Eighty-Seven we finally finished the house and moved in.

For the first time in a year I was not working eighteen hours a day.

An incident, I would later remember, occurred the day I finished the house.
A man, a new neighbor from down the road stopped by to say, hello.
He was the guy from the grocery store.
He was the guy who bought water and white bread everyday.
He told me he noticed me when he was driving by,
and he recognized me from the store.
He explained that he and his family had just moved in down the road.

He wanted to let me know, that if I ever needed anything, to let him know.
It irritated me that he approached me like that.
There were more important things for me to focus on then, and it soon slipped from my memory.

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Broomfield Road sounds rural and boring. This road like most roads in Arkansas have several designations.
Broomfield, is also part of Hwy 164, which runs many miles east and west through several towns.
Highway 164 runs parallel to I-40, some thirty miles South of Broomfield road.

Our portion of the Highway called Broomfield Road East, gets very little attention or maintenance from Pope County.

Neighbors in that neck of the woods were spaced by acres not blocks.

Most folks out there are working what is left of their homesteads, and usually working another job or operating another business in town.
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With the house finished I went back to my day shift, and I would still see R. Gene Simmons every couple of days. Except for that day at the house he never spoke to me in a familiar fashion again, nor indicated he had made a more personal contact.
He was just another customer.
.
My days started at four-thirty a.m., and by the time I would pick up the kids from after-school care, feed them and made sure homework was finished finally get them bathed and into bed, it would be after ten p.m
.
Generally I would fall asleep on the living room couch, to the canned laughter of the Johnny Carson Show.

One morning, around November fifth, at about three a.m., a loud pounding outside on my glass storm-door jolted me awake and off of the couch. I rolled onto the floor in fright. It was a County Deputy standing there, trying to see into my house.

The odd sky color at that time of the day mixed with the yellow bug-light above my porch added to the reflection of the glass on my door. The fractured light skewed the face of the Deputy.

It made him look like he had monstrous face, or a frightening mask on.
Tall and bulky he was standing just outside of my front door.
He had seen my roll from the couch.
Once he spotted me, he just stared at me, with his hand on his gun hasp.
Living out in the country, at the far borders of the County it was unusual to have the law at your door, unless you had called them.

He yelled, "I thought maybe you was dead up here, with your door standing wide open and the lights all on. When I pulled up in the driveway, I saw some kids or someone running around to the back of your house. I Figure they done gotcha, and ran when they saw my car."

I was certain he couldn't read my face but my tongue was dried to the roof of my mouth with fear.
It seemed as if ten million comments, questions and replies were scrambling around in my brain, trying to find an exit toward my mouth.
Some instinct warned me not to say anything, or ask any questions.
Rubbing my arms to mask the chill bumps that were popping up, I calmly told him, "I'm sure you must have scared them and run 'em off. I doubt they would have hung around". I looked toward the hallway, "The kids are all still asleep, and they have school in the morning. I don't want to wake them. Thank you for checking on me, I will lock it down now. Have a good night."

He seemed relieved not to be asked to check the perimeter. Taking his large flashlight in hand, the Deputy swung the bright beam around some trying to be thorough. Finally, he folded himself into his County Car, creaking and jingling with all of his equipment and leather.

The car had been running the whole time.--

I could hear him yank the gears into reverse, and listened to the galloping sound of rubber on rocks, as he backed down the long and steep driveway. He took it much faster than was safe, raising a large cloud of brown dust, that was reflecting with a pinkish glow. Once he got to the pavement, he headed east, and barked the tires as he took off.

The silence boomed. Now that he was gone my legs finally gave away and I crumpled to the newly carpeted floor.

A tidal wave of thoughts and sound-bites of me dismissing the children's stories of being haunted crashed into my brain along with the plunge of adrenaline unused from the recent experience with the Deputy, sent needles of pain from my heart to my toes.
All of those months her poor kids had been telling me the truth all along.

The whole time we had been working on the house and sometimes camping out there, the kids would come running from outside or one of the rooms they were painting and cry, "Mommy, there are people walking past our bedroom windows". "...there is an old man standing outside of Christopher's window..." "...Mommy the old lady just keeps walking back and forth!" These occurrences were was not just at night but also when we were home during the day.
I would tell them "Close the blinds and don't look past the curtains."
I thought they were just being imaginative and playing games.

At the time I had put it down to their active imaginations, but a neighbor living several miles east of us further down Broomfield, had recently come through my checkout at the grocery store broke down. She talked a little bit about seeing the ghost of an old woman rocking in the rocker on her front porch.

She wrote something on her receipt handed it to me, and asked me to call her because she was not the only one around our road who had eerie experiences and sightings.

It is hard to remember a time when a person had to wait to make a phone call. When I called her on that following Saturday morning Mrs.Green spilled her guts and the things she told me made my short hairs stand on end.

I got a chill that would not leave me.

This woman, and her husband were business owners and from a good family. They did not go around making up ghost stories and they sure didn't feel comfortable talking about it.

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There was a rumor going around all of that year saying that according to some Wiccan calendar, 1987 was supposed to have been a "high year" for witchcraft.

I don't really know if what was happening up and down Broomfield Road could be explained by an astrology chart.
I can't say it was because of an alignment of stars, and planets, but I can tell you that there were very strange goings on then.
We had cases of missing women, people "committing suicide" in miraculous fashion and sightings of spirits and ghosts.
These happenings were more normal than not.

The unnatural and unexplained deaths per capita at that time were unreal and still unexplained.
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Our snug home that we finally finished sits on a concrete pad. The cement guys had to be creative when pouring the footing because the house was built on the top of a granite hill. Maybe it is just one giant rock formation with a little dirt on top.

Our "backdoor" was on the front of the house under the carport because a back door could not go onto the back of the house.

A backdoor, would send a person down a steep embankment.
Anyone who could be seen from our bedroom windows
walking around the back of the house, were walking on air.

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On December 28, 1987, R. Gene Simmons went on a shooting rampage in the town of Russellville, Arkansas.

His first stop was the convenience store where he worked. In military precision he went to one after the other of businesses where R. Gene Simmons felt he had been slighted. Two were former employers who had terminated him.

One of the victims of his shooting rampage was a woman, who he had asked out, and she turned him down.

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That day, I had taken an unscheduled day off of work. While my friends and I worked on a quilt, we listened to the radio reports because it was winter and we were worried about weather.

As we listened, there was a report of "Breaking News" of a horror film come to life.

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It was only after his surrender to police that the rest of the nightmare was eventually revealed.

From December twenty second to December twenty sixth 1987, R. Gene Simmons murdered his entire family (fourteen people) for Christmas.

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There have been a couple of books written about this murder spree, but there were facts and evidence that were never brought to light about case.

You can be sure that there are many close-mouthed Southern Homesteaders who felt it best to mind their own business and try to carry on with the task of living.