Cosmic Hound Dog

A Cosmic Hound Dog

Thomas Bolt

The Making of a Ghost Story

It’s four in the morning and like most towns Augusta’s size it goes to bed pretty early and anyone up past midnight on a weeknight is up to no good. Such was the case for India.

India was a dark complected silky black haired vixen with big dark eyes. He father, a full bred Navajo Indian, her mother, also Indian, but from Asia.

Blessed with such good looks she held convincingly onto twenty five year despite the fact that the night before she was celebrating her thirty sixth year on this earth. And despite her multicultural start in life she took a wrong turn somewhere along the way and ended up forever behind the eight ball with only her striking almost bizarre good looks to get her by.

She was too drunk to drive home. She’d have to leave her car at the bar until morning. The only available ride was on the back of a Harley; with someone she didn’t know. She hesitated at first but climbed aboard anyway.  After all, it was her birthday. She was invincible.

She wasn’t.

“My friends call me Bam Bam,” he said with a gravely voice, “buy my momma calls me Timmy.” He was almost embarrassed to admit the truth. He was hoping she’d see he was human despite the leather jacket, the chain on the wallet, the long scraggily salt and pepper bead and the bushy unkempt eyebrows.

She didn’t.

The ride was uneventful until they approached the Savannah River and the state line between Georgian and South Carolina. It was here that he made his move.

A captive on the back of a speeding Harley she felt him grab for her hand that was holding on to his belt buckle on the side. He would try and force it tighter in on his lap but she’d refuse. He’d squeeze her hand, crushing her fingers in his clenched fist but despite the pain she still resisted. Having enough of her passive resistance he threw an elbow into her side hoping to subdue her thereby forcing her to reach for his groin.

She wouldn’t.

When he elbowed her again he added a shove of her thigh. He foot slipped off of the foot peg and it slung free. She felt the wind rush into her cowboy boot as she was wore her signature jean cutoffs and cowboy boots for her birthday. She curled her toes upward in the hopes that the boot would hang on and not slip off her foot but the last thing she remembered was the boot slipping off, the top of her right foot scrapping the pavement, her screaming in agony and her letting go of his beer belly. She wouldn’t remember falling off the back of the bike. She’d remember being pushed.

The boot would tumble and land upright against the concrete barrier.

A passing motorist would almost hit a crumpled yellow and black Harley Davidson 883 Sportster lying in the middle of the road. When he swerved to miss the wreckage he’d once again almost hit its passenger lying against the concrete lane divider. He was unconscious. His arm bent unnaturally behind his back. Red splotches across his large beer belly where road rash took its toll told a story of him skidding before he tumbled into the barrier.

He would stay in the hospital for nearly a month and a half. While he recovered he told a remarkable tale of no good deed going unpunished, of a rider that was too drunk to drive herself home and who went into some mysterious rage screaming and fighting him all the while he fought to keep control of his motorcycle trying to slow down all the while trying to  protect his hysterical passenger.

The police were baffled by one detail in his story.

There was no passenger.

There was no sign of any passenger at the scene of the accident; Just a solitary woman’s cowboy boot.  The Georgia Bureau of investigation would come up with blood both on the bridge and some stains along the river bank below but no body.

Not until three weeks later.

Only what they found still wouldn’t fit with Bam Bam’s remarkable story because they only found half of India floating half submerged in the black Savannah River.

Bam Bam would leave the hospital and the inquiry would continue concluding that the cause of the accident was exactly how it happened.

His passenger grew more and more hysterical and before he could come to a complete stop his passenger leapt from the back of the motorcycle instantly causing her death. Her dismemberment would never be explained except that it may have been caused by impact.

No more remains would ever be found. Her remains would be sent back to Colorado for her family to bury. Her belongings would never be collected from her apartment.

A judge declared the case closed and no charges were filed against anyone involved.

That was in 1979.

The case might be closed but the legend certainly remains to this day.

As the story goes many people driving over the bridge late at night into south Carolina have told the same tale. Of a beautiful raven haired woman wandering in the emergency lane up along the middle of the bridge. You can’t see her face because of her long black hair. She’ll never find what she’s looking for.

She’s searching for her lost Cowboy Boot.

Part-2

Mirror Mirror

David Crenshaw kept the lab well below the required temperature. He was heavy and liked it cold while he worked. His lab coat had ancient stains on it as if it hadn’t been washed in months. He was mostly unkempt in his appearance since most of his time was devoted to finding what hundreds of years of gypsy fortune tellers and séance theatrics couldn’t convince the rest of us of.

Life beyond the living.

Ever since the death of his mother in their family home David’s been trying to make some kind of contact with her. He actually went the route of the séance but that just opened the door for him to prove that they were exactly what he suspected they were; frauds.

He went on to college and devoted his studies to that of physics especially in the realm of dark matter and other energies invisible to not only the naked eye but to the physical laws of nature. He attended every lecture, every seminar, every meeting of the minds on the subject of the paranormal in relation to the discovered laws of nature.

There weren’t many.

He gave most of them himself.

The attendance halls were often empty.

Dr. Crenshaw would always retreat back to his lab and review his notes on the subject. Many times he’d scoff at his own data as pure poppy cock. “Nonsense,” he often shouted. He wasn’t fully convinced himself that there was anything beyond the grave,

That is until Christmas Eve of 2024.

In 2011 the “God Particle” was first discovered by sheer accident during and atom smashing experiment. When it was discovered no one knew what to make of it other than it was a new particle. Dr. Crenshaw discovered that when you magnetized the particle it expanded into a field that when compressed between two silicone based sheaths produced a “window” that could span space and time when gazed into; it became a crystal ball in the size and shape of a stand up mirror.

Once Dr. Crenshaw utilized the new particle theory, hundreds of theories were proven wrong while new ones were created. Science took a leap not seen since Newton and the apple or Goddard and the first rockets. Crenshaw was awarded the Noble Prize for his discovery and it wouldn’t be until 2030 that he found the most practical use for this newly harnessed energy field.

It was a cumbersome thing consisting of compressed gas tanks, a coolant mechanism that exhaled vapors along with a computer interface. All these connected to a device with a reflective plane, framed in black graphite with blinking lights and digits spilling out codes in sequences only Dr. Crenshaw could decipher.

Once the lights were dimmed and the energy field engaged the reflective plane of the stand up mirror would glow a dim orange. A milky orange and black swirl would mix upright along the mirror’s frame as chemicals mixed and reacted to one another to produce the doorway that made Dr. Crenshaw a household name in 2024.

The orange glow would pulse and as the static in the mirror lessened and whatever was on the other side of the “mirror” would appear. Most times there was nothing but whatever was already visible but sometimes there were other things included in the reflection. When the “mirror” apparatus was brought to other locations things that weren’t visible on the other side of the mechanism were visible only by looking thru it; buildings long since toppled by progress stood strong again, vegetation, and people; some living most dead were now visible in an orange, hazy reception. Apparently what the device tapped into was what man has wondered about since before coming out of the caves. 

It was a door way to the afterlife.

It wasn’t called heaven or hell or even purgatory… it’s was labeled the “realm” by one of the non-religious interns at the lab. But that certainly didn’t change the over whelming amount of debate that was to follow this latest momentous revelation.

Other scientists became involved with better defining the images produced from the “Realm.” It wouldn’t be long after that it was realized that the “realm” was more of a new dimension, mirroring the same happenings as is happening in the physical universe we live in. This discovery led to the theory of relativity being thrown out the window in favor of new vision.

While experimenting with more images coming from the mirror it was discovered that many humanlike figures appeared to be floating in mid-air. “Ghosts,” someone suggested and the idea sprung from that one particular conversation that led to the first ever forensic use of the device.

All over the country there were ghost stories that were proven as non sense while others had a more relativistic background. One even more bizarre than the next but it was the ghost of the Savannah River Bridge that caught the eye of the scientists involved. 

A beautiful girl wandering a bridge all alone and legend has it she was looking for a boot she’d lost moments before a tragic motorcycle accident that left her dead and dismembered.

One night it was decided that the bridge would be closed and the apparatus set up. It didn’t take long to tune into an apparition. It came across the mirrors field of view as clearly as looking out a window; only not in color as we know it but in shinning bright orange with highlights of static and white sparkling like diamonds.

It was a woman.

The investigators on the scene had a photo of the woman who died tragically in 1979 in the early morning hours after her birthday.

It was the same person.

 She was walking around within “the realm” looking for what was believed to be the boot she lost moments before she fell off the motorcycle that killed her. Everyone was fixated to what was happening on the view screen.

Technicians coded in more information about the scene and the images on the mirror blurred and then refocused on the same bridge only the wandering girl had vanished.

What everyone saw next were images showing that of a woman struggling to remain on the back of a speeding motorcycle while the driver was intent on delivering her to the ground. It was all unfolding as if it were happening for the very first time. The woman fighting off the biker’s advances, him elbowing her in the side, her losing her boot and what wasn’t documented by the investigators is what happened next.

When the woman was finally elbowed off the bike she did pull her attacker off with her. What happens next, the biker couldn’t possibly take into account because he was too busy tumbling out of control himself.  The woman fell back on her back, tumbling over and over as if doing summersaults. She continued to twirl as the inertia from falling off the speeding motorcycle rolled her up and over the concrete guardrail of the bridge and viciously split her in half against a metal sign post marking the speed limit. She ripped in half as if sliced by a samurai sword.

Both halves of the woman would tumble over the side of the bridge and into the river below. One half, the lower torso, would be found downstream days later. The other half lost forever.

One of the younger technicians would notice the old pick-up speeding up the bridge from the Georgia side of the Savannah River. It was doing at least seventy if it was going a hundred.

“WATCH IT,” a technician shouted lunging for safety on the other side of the concrete barrier separating the opposing lanes.

The truck missed two patrol cars and one civilian car as it made a bee-line for the mirror and all of the apparatuses connected with it. It didn’t appear there was any concern for bystanders as he wheeled the truck violently about the bridge.

A single gunshot would ring out. It hit the driver just right above his left eye. His head fell back lifeless and his arms fell by his side as he melted into the floor. His foot fell off the accelerator and the truck slowed considerably before crashing into the guardrail that most of the scientists and technicians were hiding behind. The truck’s front fender crumpled under the immovable force of the concrete barrier and the lifeless driver poured even further under the dashboard.

With guns drawn, the police slowly approached the truck. It was silent and a brave policeman reached for the door handle, unlatched it and flung it open. The man was completely collected under the steering wheel; dead but identifiable. The identification read a familiar name but everybody in town knew him as "Bam Bam."  He was the same man that gave a young girl a ride home more than twenty five years ago. The same woman that now haunts the bridge in search of her lost boot. He had made it to his early eighties before suicide by cop ended his life. The paradox had spun full circle and to a final close.

     

While all this was going on no one noticed that the mirror was still producing images, and in the orange glow, if someone happened to have walked by they would’ve noticed a petite, dark haired woman fixated at the goings on surrounding the crashed pick-up truck.

Only she wasn’t standing among the throng of people just barely missed by the madman in the truck.

She was looking from the other side of the mirror, an orange glowing arm reaching out from the confines of the mirror’s graphite frame.