A collection of  stories by G. Lloyd Helm: Train Wheels, Flying Saucers and the Ghost of Tiburcio Vasquez ~ Fantasy

Train Wheels: Fantasy

Buy at: Amazon, Barnes and Noble

Most of the people in these stories are at least tangentially based on real humans. Big Dave was a fellow I worked with many years ago and his description in the stories is accurate. The reader should also notice that all these stories start and mostly end in a bar somewhere. I don’t play adventure games but, I am told that most of them start in bars as well. There are still several Big Dave stories to be told, and I am working on them, but I just couldn’t get them done in time to come out in this book. Many elements of these stories are true. The fun and the trick is to figure out what is true and what is fantasy.

REVIEW:

Reviewed by Greg Didaleusky

5 Stars out of 5

1. Lloyd Helm’s Train Wheels, Flying Sauces and the Ghost of Tibuicio Vasquez is a cleverly written book of short stories about the narrator G and his six-foot-six friend, Big Dave Dodge and their harrowing escapades. The six adventures always include scenes in bars, either The Hole in the Wall, Mickey’s Mousehole, Spaceship Bar and Grill or The Windy City Saloon. Like a lot of bars, talk amongst patrons can be colorful, mysterious, informative or a combination of the three. G and Big Dave take advantage of these talks and seek out the truth behind the rumors or speculations. Helms descriptive narration of the events holds your interest throughout these six short stories. The subject matter in some of the stories include frozen bodies, frozen heads, a time machine, extraterrestrials, and a monstrous creature to name a few. Reading these short stories is like watching a six-part mini-series on TV. I recommended his book of short stories to all my friends and readers. Reviewed by G. L. Didaleusky, author of mystery/suspense novels.

EXCERPT: Train Wheels, Flying Saucers, & the Ghost of Tiburcio Vasquez

We stood for a couple of minutes, and I finally called out, “Okay Vasquez, where-in-the-hell are ya? You want yer pud back, come and get it!”

Dave started shushing me. “What are you trying to do, get us arrested?”

“I’m just trying to prove to you there ain’t no ghost.” That’s when I noticed Rita wasn’t with us anymore. “Where’d she go? She’s the one got us out here. What’d she do, run away?”

Out of the dark, Rita called, “Oye! Come here you two.”

I couldn’t exactly see her, but we followed the sound of her voice toward another part of the formation I knew pretty well. I used to bring my wife Michele up there before she was my wife. It was a nice private little place like an amphitheater scooped out of the solid stone with a wide bench at the back. It was away from the main part of the park, and on nights when the moon was bright, it was a pretty romantic spot. We’d park outside the gate, climb over and…well, you can guess from there.

When we got around the rock and inside the niche, it was so dark I couldn’t see anything. “Where are you Rita?”

“I’m here. Come and sit down.”

Annoyed but still willing to play along with the joke, I felt my way back to the bench with Dave right behind me. We sat and suddenly it was as though the dark little cavity in the rock had turned into a deep freeze. A silvery dot of light grew from a pinpoint to door size as though it was an aperture opening in the fabric of the night to let in an eerie crepuscular light.

I don’t know what big Dave was doing, but I started shaking with more than cold and it was ‘feets don’t fail me now!’ time, only my ‘feets’ did fail me. I couldn’t move! I felt frozen to the bench with the supernatural cold. My eyes were bugging out as the spectral light coagulated into the figure of a man, tall and lanky, with a mop of jet-black hair and a huge drooping moustache. He probably would have been handsome except his head seemed crooked on his neck and his face was twisted with pain. He was dressed like a Mexican vaquero and was holding his wide round sombrero in front of him as though to shield his loins.

Fear was squeezing my chest so that I could hardly breath, but I managed to ask, “Who…who…are you?”

From somewhere, “Rio Rita” Vasquez stepped into the glow, was part of the glow! She lifted her hand and touched the tortured face of the ghost. “Te quiero Tiburcio,” she said. Her voice was like the edge of a chisel drawn up my spine.

The ghost opened his arms to embrace her, and in doing so he moved the wide sombrero from his loins. The sight made me cringe with empathy, and I heard Dave gasp with the same emotion. The crotch of Tiburcio’s brown pants was blood stained from his belt line to his knees.

Rita looked at us and her eyes turned my insides to water. “Bring it,” she commanded, and her words lifted me from the bench to my feet. I stretched out my hand holding the jar, and Tiburcio took it from me. His touch was icy and malignant, and numbed my arm from fingertip to shoulder. I was being pulled into the glowing aperture and I was struggling to pull back when I felt big Dave’s hands on the collar of my shirt and the seat of my pants, hauling me back from the supernatural trap. He dragged me out of the niche, and just outside it, we took off at a dead run for the car. We jumped in and did not stop until we were in Lancaster.

A few days later, Dave and I went back out to where The Hole in the Wallhad been and found the place had burned down. There was nothing left but some charred sticks, and truth be told, they looked like they had been there for a hundred years.

What really happened that night I do not know, though Dave and I have talked it over a lot. Did we really see the ghost of Tiburcio Vasquez? And what the hell was Rita? Was she a ghost too? Maybe the ghost of Rosaria Leiva? But if it was Rosaria why didn’t she just take the jar down to Vasquez’s Rocks herself?

“Maybe she wasn’t able,” Dave said. “Remember she never touched the jar. You got it down and you picked it up from the bar to look closer at it and you carried it when we went up there. She never touched it.”

Maybe he’s right. Maybe she couldn’t, or maybe it was some kind of ghost conspiracy to catch a couple of live ones and she was the bait. At any rate that’s the story and it still scares the bejesus out of me when I think about it, but every time Dave and I have talked about it since it happened we always end up saying “Too bad The Hole in the Wallis gone though. It was a great bar.”

New Release