Chapter 1

Ever since I was about five years old, about the time when most kids show each other their God-given implement of peeing, their gender awareness a new and exciting thing to share with the world at large, I saw things. Strange, mysterious, butt-ugly and downright scary things that mostly lacked a body in any sense of the word.

I once told my teacher, Mrs. Resenbaum that some scary looking ghost of a one-eyed person who might've been a pirate when alive was ogling her in a very sexual though quite incorporeal way. Of course, I was only twelve at the time so I just said, "Lookit! There's an old dead man with a beard full o' lice wants to grab your titties, Mrs. Resenbaum! He means bad, I tell ya!"

As the natural course of events ran through, I got spanked and she got raped by the ghost of a black (what they called negro back then) miner. Or that's what the papers in Perry County Ohio reported that she insisted telling the good doctors at the Ridges even while they fastened her straightjacket.

Call them what you will, ghosts, spirits, demons; any name is just as good cause it sometimes just doesn't do these creatures justice. Whatever you want to call them, I had the dubious privilege of having some sort of affinity with the otherworld, the afterlife, the world of the spirits if you will. Some would call it a gift, others would call it a curse. I certainly had no name for it. It was as natural to me as sight and the fact that old people smelled weird.

Around where I grew up though, Rendville, Ohio, seeing dead things meant that I was just a boy with a wild imagination that needed some good ol' spanking with a wet plank, even if I was an only child. That's what I mostly got every once so often I couldn't keep my mouth shut 'cause "I just saw a mammoth's ghost burn down a zombie dinosaur with a blue slimy kind of fire, pops!"

My father was a miner, my uncle too; grandpa as well. Almost everyone in Rendville was a miner, except for the whores and the bartenders. And Mr. Calliburton, the grocer. At an early age I realised being a miner was just as natural as the ghosts and the other weird stuff that I alone could see and talk to. I began working at the mines before I finished school, because the times were hard and bread, lard and meat didn't come free and something about Roosevelt being such 'a god-damn two-nickel sunava-', which is as far as I ever heard my father swear.

Once I got into the mining business, I got the hang of it really fast. All you had to do was keep digging and chipping stone and blowing up new tunnels all day long, six days a week, twelve hours a day. There was a lot of soot involved and most of the days I missed the sun, but it felt exciting. It wasn't just my hard-working, God-fearing, swamp-mouthed colleagues in the coal extraction business that helped me ease into the job; it was the sheer number of dead things that would talk to me and try to claw and possess their way past me, the number of heads and assorted tails and life-threatening incorporeal body parts growing the deeper one delved into the bosom of the earth.

It was just as well though because I had seen the shittiest, weirdest, most awful, God-forlorn things from the other side that I just felt like I couldn't be surprised anymore. It came handy, really. When one of them tried to possess a man, I gave it the stare and it just felt so bad about it the next day it got me candy (well, maggots, but that's candy for undead things and their ilk). When they plotted about haunting the mines so they could turn them into a mini-golf club, I read them their rites, God bless my mother's soul, and that made them shrill and shriek and go back to playing poker with the dwarves really deep down (who, I might add, are really not as hairy as people think they are).

Yup, it was thanks to my mother that I could turn most evil spirits away with a prayer. Or a nod, a flick of the wrist and sometimes just breathing their way. She took me to church, insisted that I become an altar boy, and each andevery time I swore she made sure I had my share of pepper and read the Good Book aloud. And the Prayers. And the writings of Thomas Aquinas. And the latest Opus Dei journal. And every kind of book labeled Religion at the school library. She used to say that "only God can save your soul, Robert Clovis Barhoe, you wicked devil's child!". I still can't believe how literally right she was without ever knowing it. I also miss her raspberry pie.

That reading thing kind of grew on me and on Sundays, right after church, I would take my bike to New Lexington and get on the bus to Cambridge, which sadly wasn't all that active, paranormally speaking. As a lonely poltergeist put it, 'Cambridge? Deader than a dodo, deader than me'. Once I realised it wasn't the prestigious site of knowledge and lore famous around the world that I had hoped for, I settled for the homely library of St. Benedict's School, whose sole staff member at the time, a centenarian by the name of Mr. Galsworthy, was kind enough to leave at my disposal since the library was mostly empty on Sundays. The old man, God bless his soul, snored heavily. He died peacefully on the job too having fallen asleep, much like every day.

Life went on uneventfully for some time. I worked in the mines and kept them from being haunted with very little effort. Sometimes I helped the occasional exorcist or vampire hunter that seemed to be at a loss around our parts (you won't believe how amateurish these kind of people are; they think vampires, of all paranormal creatures, are nocturnal). And in between, I discovered old and exotic tomes at the library, some containing surprisingly lewd pictures and others boring me to death with their Latin. I also picked up a couple of languages on the way: not only Latin, which seemed essential at first, but useful stuff nonetheless like Tauric and Cimmeric. I generally had a blast back in those days, eating Sundaes on Sundays and exchanging thoughts and ideas on the medicinal and religious usage of hallucinogens from first-hand accounts of long-deceased native indians, i.e. their ghosts.

All that changed dramatically when we entered the war in '41. I know that the war started in '39, but nobody really gave a rat's ass about what happened in Europe (largely, nobody does even today). When the Japs hit us, the nation was shocked. Quite frankly, I wasn't because a leprechaun who had invested heavily in rubber along with a Japanese cousin of his (in case you're wondering, they're called Kappa and they look like frogs or something equally slimy) told me that the 'big fellas' (the Japanese) were going to war and 'pretty much anyone who reads a newspaper can tell'.

Suffice it to say, from then on things are known history, but I felt kind of bad about not doing anything about it. I finally decided to enlist in the Army, because I always had a disdain about the sea, it being a big, salty, flat blue nothing that reeked of fish.

I remember Mother was all teary-eyed when they waved me goodbye at the train station and father looked rather thoughtful and reserved; I later learned he had been terribly constipated that day. He did warn me not to get killed or do anything equally stupid because I would have to make up for all the shifts I'd lose in the mines when the war was over. Grandpa was there too and surprisingly enough a long list of long ago deceased members of my family, going all the way back to the first Barhoe that set foot on American soil, the honourable Jedediah Pontifer Barhow Sr. (supposedly a judge at a time when the judiciary system consisted of a set of scales and a couple of coins). It struck me as heartening that they all looked very emotional for dead people.

When I arrived at boot camp though, I was quickly disillusioned about what it meant to serve ones country: at first glance, it seemed that wars were fought in the latrines and the kitchens, while winning probably involved a lot of yelling and cussin' for no particular reason. The army had failed to turn me into a man (whatever the saying implies) and instead of shooting Japs or Krauts I was polishing boots and making sure I was clean shaved, every damn morning. I rarely if ever saw dead or undead things during basic; a passing banshee told me there was no point in trying to drive already half-insane people crazy.

Once basic was complete, I was picked practically at random for specialty training as a signal corpsman because my squad leader had remarked, on paper, which made it sacrosanct for the Army, that "Pvt. Barhoe can read and write Inglis". Someone in Personnel thought that was some sort of foreign language probably, so I was trained as a radio operator. Sadly, that involved polishing boots, shaving every single morning, cussin' and yelling just like basic training, the difference being that I was shown to a radio and told that "that with the dials and all, that's a reey-dee-o".

Through divine providence seemingly, it came with a manual which was easy to familiarise myself with. I soon became an expert in communication, direction finding and signals intelligence, but no-one knew that because no-one had told me to use the radio, because we hadn't seen combat yet.

Almost three months after I had left home and joined up, I realised that until that time we were losing the war without a lot of effort. I was itching to actually get in a fight and show them Japs what men are made of (sometimes literally) as did most of the boys, although I really felt bad for them and wished there was some other away other than blowing each other up.

Expectation turned into excitement after the news about the battles at Coral Sea and Midway. It had been six months since the war had started and all I could think of was that the Navy was getting all the action (even though the sailor's outfit is actually rather overrated in terms of manliness). I was beginning to think that I had just about enough of sending fake signals for practice to the room next door, when the higher-ups deemed that our time had come and I was shipped along with the rest of the 79th Signals Battalion to Hawaii, in preparation for some kind of operation against the Japs, codenamed Winter River (which to my resentment, did not involve snowmen, snowballs, or any form of snow other than the unfrozen one, water).