Copyright 2026 by Bill Ectric
Chapter 1: Owl, 1969
I’ll never forget the sight of that big brown owl in the black of night, perched on a limb over a dirt road, illuminated by the headlights of Heavy Turner’s flat-black ’67 Camaro. It was the night Heavy told me about the man who jumped up and ran into the woods after someone cut off his head.
I was fifteen years old. Heavy Turner was sixteen. He showed off his driving skill and his extensive familiarity with back roads winding through the woods late at night in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. The dashboard lights glowed like a spaceship console. Loud swamp rock, Green River by Credence Clearwater Revival, surged from the crooked 8-track tape deck designed to fit a different dashboard. My exhilaration bordered on fright as we peeled through barely visible woods, no moon, no streetlights, and tree branches whipping against the windshield.
The road carried us up a steep hill until our headlights beamed upward onto the owl, perched on a limb, brown feathers mottled with white, yellow eyes set in great fanning discs and sternly arched forehead, watching us intrude into its dark territory.
“Did you see that?” shouted Heavy, turning down the music with his right hand.
“That was a big owl!” I said.
“It was a great horned owl, I’m pretty sure,” said Heavy, dashboard lights reflecting from his glasses when he glanced at me. “There’s one in the barn on my dad’s farm. He says it chased away the barn owls.”
The road levelled out. We drove past a row of rickety mailboxes and Hev jerked the Camaro into a hard right turn. No matter how sharp the turn, Hev’s considerable bulk kept him unmovable and unflappable in his bucket seat, while my boney frame struggled to keep from tilting and sliding with every twist of the road. I thought we were running into a ditch, but no, we were now bouncing along on a dirt road that had been virtually hidden. Hev hit the brakes and steered into a sideways skid, flinging dirt and gravel. The car stopped sideways in the road, facing an old house set back in a clearing. It was a modest, unadorned wood-frame two-story house. A wide gable served as the roof of a boxy second-floor balcony. Heavy killed his headlights, but not the engine. He was always ready for a fast getaway. The house was completely dark except for a single light shining through yellow curtains like a Van Gogh sunflower. The light in the window suddenly went dark.
“That’s the opposite of what usually happens when I drive up to a house in the middle of the night,” said Hev. “I’m surprised. I didn’t think anybody lived here. This will be a great story for your paper.”
“What’s the story?” I asked.
“Back in the 1940s, a man was beheaded in the back yard by a broad-axe.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, and it gets better,” he said. “There was a bet. A wager on whether or not a body could run after the head was cut off. Not a chicken. A human person. These two guys invited a homeless guy to this house. That night, one of the men pulled a gun on the homeless guy, took him to the back yard and forced him down, head on a tree stump.”
“No way.”
“Yeah, and one of the men said, this broad-axe might not be sharp enough to cut through your neck. I’m only going to swing this heavy ass thing one time. If it only wounds you, you’re free to run away if you can. But you better run fast, they said, or we’ll start shooting.”
“The axe was dull?”
“No! The thing was sharp as hell! They just told him it was dull to prepare him for running! They wanted to know if, when the blade hit the back of his neck, a fraction of a second before it severed his spinal cord, the last nerve impulse rushing from his brain to his body was a command to run!”
“Did he run?”
“Hell, yes. As soon as that blade came down, his head rolled onto the ground and his body jumped over the stump and ran into the woods!”
“Who says? That can’t be.”
“They never found the head, but they found the headless body a mile away.”
“The body couldn’t have run that far,” I said. It should have fallen down in a heap, just a little way into the woods.”
“Exactly.”
“Who are the people who supposedly saw this? Are they still alive?”
“That’s what we look into next,” said Hev. “Miss Evie has the newspaper archives and city records.”
The Camaro’s engine was still rumbling quietly.
“Why are we still sitting here?” I said, glancing around. “It’s a wonder someone hasn’t come out here with a shotgun.”
“Yeah,” said Heavy. “It’s time to go.”
He turned the wheel, hit the gas, and flicked on his headlights. Driving back over the hill, something fell with a thud onto the windshield. It was the severed head of a rabbit, oozing blood from the neck. Great wings flapped away in the dark sky.
“Ahhhh!” we both shouted.
The rabbit’s dead eyes were open, like it was looking at us through the windshield.
“Holy shit,” said Heavy. He hit the brakes on the downhill slope, so the head rolled and slid off the front of the hood. “That was freaky!”
“Did somebody throw that at us?” I asked.
“The owl dropped it. They do that sometimes.”
“Drop bloody heads on cars?!”
“Sometimes they decapitate their prey.”
“I never knew that.”
“It’s a fact.”
The Astral Pages 