The Portal Potties

Listen, I know this sounds crazy, but my Uncle Chuck has been working DPW for 20 years, and he swears up and down that every road worker, park landscaper, and dump attendant in town believes the story about the portal potties.

The way Chuck heard it, it started back in the early 90s when a supervisor named Steve Naples murdered his girlfriend. Maybe she had been a prostitute or pregnant or trying to blackmail him — nobody was really sure. Her name was Christie, though, and pretty soon everybody in town knew it.

Supposedly, Steve thought he could make Christie go away by cutting her up and depositing her, one reasonable sized chunk at a time, into the collection of chemical toilets that the department maintained for their road crews and work teams.

He drove around town the Friday night after the deed, leaving an arm in the employee porta-john at the dump, a foot in the convenience shack for gate attendants at the park, some fingers down the crapper at the intersection where they were building the new traffic light, and so on.

Blue goo to hide the crime from any eyes brave enough to look down into that stinky maw. The signature smell to mask the odor. The perfect crime.

Christie had other plans, though.

On Saturday morning, when the dump opened, the two attendees heard the sound of a woman crying coming from their porta-potty. Confused, they investigated and found nothing, but during any moment the dump was quiet that day, they heard a muffled woman’s voice wailing in the distance.

A few hours later, the gate attendants were picking up trash at the park in anticipation of the big lunchtime picnic crowd. One of them found a used prophylactic and dangled it from his trash-grabbing claw in the other attendant’s face.

“Drop it in the porta-potty, you creep!” she told him.

As he went to drop the rubber down into the smelly blue water, he suddenly heard a woman’s voice echoing against the thin plastic walls.

“Please. Please help me.”

The attendant ran and never came back to work.

Around that same time, a homeless gentleman was admitting himself into the chemical toilet at the intersection construction site for a moment of private relief. He laid toilet paper carefully around the horn of the seat, like that scene in the Mr. Bean movie, but just as he was about to sit down, his eyes caught a glint of something shiny in the muck below. Holding his breath, he lowered his head to the opening of the tank and recognized three French-tipped fingers bobbing at the surface like murder buoys.

“THERE’S A BODY IN HERE,” the homeless man reflexively shouted.

“Just parts,” a woman’s voice replied from the air. “Help me!”

The homeless man rebuckled his old belt and jogged to the police station, about a mile away. When he got there, he was out of breath and still needed to poop.

“Please,” he begged the desk sergeant, “I found — there’s a — fingers! Fingers in the porta-potty.”

“You put your fingers in the porta-potty?” the old town cop asked.

“No — a woman’s fingers!”

“You made a woman put her fingers in the porta-potty, Jim? Come on, that’s just sick!”

“No, she’s dead!”

After several more minutes of circular questioning, the sergeant radioed a patrol car to investigate the chemical toilet near the new stoplight. When a shaky voice confirmed the presence of the fingers back through the speaker, the sergeant arrested the homeless guy on suspicion of murder.

As a precaution, the police checked all the other porta-potties around town and found the more or less complete body of Miss Christie Archer, 32, who had missed curfew at her group home Friday night. Her head was wrapped in a torn, blood-stained DPW jumpsuit with a name tag that said, “Steve N.”

Steve Naples’ murder trial became the event of the decade in Sullivan County. “Our own OJ!” some people would marvel with a sick smile. “You know, small town America is full of these guys,” others would say without a smile.

After a three-week trial, Steve was sentenced to life without parole. The porta-potties, which had all been held in evidence, were returned to the DPW, who had them triple-sanitized and put back into use. One by one, however, they were all decommissioned over the course of the next 3 years. Bad seams in the plastic. Leaks in the tank. Doors that seemed to knock like someone was rushing you to finish up. The occasional voice that you could only hear while you were pooping.

The way Uncle Chuck tells it, he was carrying a box of old thermostats to the mercury shed one Tuesday morning last year when he saw an old woman nosing around the Crisis Shed.

The Crisis Shed was a sealed Quonset on the back side of the dump that dated back to the Cold War. If the Russians invaded rural New Hampshire, the town government would relocate to the Crisis Shed and bunker down to lead the resistance. An amendment to the town charter stated it could be opened and used for no other purpose, so it sat locked up for years. Only the Director of Public Works had the key.

“Excuse me, ma’am!” Uncle Chuck said. “Is there something I can help you with?”

“Oh no, young man. Thank you so much. I’m just here to drop off my leaves.”

She pointed toward a station wagon about thirty yards away.

“Leaves over there, ma’am,” he said, pointing to the 50-foot-tall mound of leaf bags on the other side of the dump.

“Oh yes, of course! How could I miss that?”

She just stood there, clearly hoping he would walk away.

“Do you need a hand unloading those, ma’am? I can meet you over there.”

“No, that’s quite alright,” she said with a heavy sigh and trudged back to her car.

Uncle Chuck dropped off the thermostats in the mercury shed and walked back toward the entrance. He noticed the station wagon was gone, and there definitely hadn’t been time to add any leaf bags to the pile — especially for a frail old lady. He walked back to the Crisis Shed and took a look at the padlock on the main door. It was badly scratched, like someone had been trying to pick it.

On Saturday, the same old woman arrived at the dump again. Uncle Chuck let the other attendant check her sticker and gave her a 60 second head start before he started walking as quietly as he could back toward the Crisis Shed. Sure enough, she had a flathead screwdriver in the lock and was cursing under her breath.

“Come back to handle those leaves?” Uncle Chuck asked. She shot upright.

“Uh, yes.”

“Ma’am, I’m sure you know the Crisis Shed is strictly off limits.”

“This is my last chance!” The beads on her bracelets and necklaces clattered together as she shook.

“Ma’am, if it makes you feel better, my boss has been in there. It’s just a set of steel office furniture and some filing cabinets. Nothing too exciting.”

“Your boss is full of it!”

“Please, ma’am — “

“They didn’t amend the charter until ‘94! Did they have the inside track on a second Cold War? The town is keeping something very important here.”

“Like what?”

“Like a portal to the other side.”

“Like an escape tunnel?”

“No, like a spiritual gateway through which one might pass to cross over to the other side peaceably and cease to be trapped forever in this physical realm of torment.”

“Ma’am, I don’t think we have anything like that here.”

“Oh, really?” she asked, shaking her bony finger at him, “Then I dare you to meet me back here tomorrow after dark.”

“Dump’s not open on Sunday.”

“Fool, it’s the full moon!”

For some reason he couldn’t understand, Uncle Chuck drove up the hill to the dump Sunday after dinner, idling behind the gate hut. When the old woman’s station wagon pulled up, he let her through and chained the gate behind them so as not to attract the attention of any passing state troopers.

The dump closed at 4, so Uncle Chuck had never been there after dark before. It was not the same place. You couldn’t see the beautiful rolling hills in the distance — there was just darkness. There was no buzz of people complaining about the weather as they crushed boxes under foot. It was quiet and dense with energy.

“All right, hotshot, you showed up,” the old woman said with a smile.

“I did.” Uncle Chuck felt a little defeated.

“Bring a tire iron.”

There was no use arguing.

They walked back toward the Crisis Shed together, Uncle Chuck carrying his tire iron like he might need to wield it and the old woman fiddling with the beads around her wrists and neck. Maybe she was muttering to herself, or maybe she was just making old person breathing sounds — Uncle Chuck couldn’t tell.

When they got there, the woman asked, “Do you feel it?”

He felt something. It was spooky for sure, but he wasn’t sure if he was feeling it.

“Press your ear to the door,” she said.

He did. There was a sort of hollow groaning that could’ve been a whale song or a car being crushed into a cube. It sounded like the sound was very loud inside the Crisis Shed — that it was filling the space in a very profound way — but when Uncle Chuck took his ear even an inch away from the door, he couldn’t hear anything.

“I hear it!” he said

“Good. Now step back.”

He did, and she began muttering to herself (clearly not old person breathing sounds) in a language Uncle Chuck didn’t recognize. He thought maybe it wasn’t even a language — that she was speaking in tongues or making some kind of ceremonial sounds that had significance beyond connotation or denotation.

After she’d been chanting quietly for about 30 seconds, she raised her voice into a shout, and Uncle Chuck could hear the groaning noise fill the entire dump.

“What’s happening?” he asked.

“We did it, dummy! My last chance. Now break that lock so the sacrament can be completed.”

Not in a headspace to argue, Uncle Chuck slid the tire iron through the shank of the lock and twisted with all its might until the lock fell away.

As he pushed the door open, the groaning noise went into his nose and around his eyes, filling his skull with pressure. Inside, there was a steel conference table with 8 chairs around it and a file cabinet, just like the Director had said.

There were also 13 porta-potties lining the outer edge of the building.

“Oh my god,” Uncle Chuck said. “I thought they must’ve — “

“Can’t just destroy something that an innocent person was interred in,” the old woman said with a broad smile on her face. “Especially not my Christie. I always knew it. My last chance to help my darling child, trapped in between and all apart all these years.”

She began to mutter and chant again, and one at a time, the porta-potties began to shake and glow. As each of them joined in the action, the pressure in Uncle Chuck’s head got worse and worse. Finally, when all 14 seemed fully charged by the woman’s incantation, the doors flew open and bolts of light shot from each john, converging in the middle of the steel table.

Where the rays converged, an orb started to form, and gradually, one piece at a time, the orb began to pour outward, becoming more and more familiar in shape until Uncle Chuck realized it had become a woman made entirely of light.

The light opened its mouth and Uncle Chuck clutched his ears as the voice exploded into his brain like he was standing next to a cannon.

“Momma,” it called out, gesturing to the old woman, who began to cry.

“Baby, you can go. I’ll meet you there,” she said as she wept.

The light woman looked confused for a second, then relaxed and faded into thin air in a series of flickers.

Uncle Chuck sat in one of the steel chairs and gathered his thoughts, letting the old woman cry.

“Is it done?” he finally asked.

“This part of it is,” she said. “Or at least it will be once you replace that lock.”

“Where do you think is open this late on Sunday night?”

She whispered the name of a big box store in his ear, and he had a final shudder.

One morning before the next full moon, Uncle Chuck was reading the local news on his cell phone while pumping gas and noticed the obituary of a woman he recognized. She had passed away from pancreatic cancer. The article didn’t mention either of the most interesting things about her, he noted.

This story is part of 13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days. Each entry in the series was written and published in a single day during October of 2020. This idea was completely stolen from Mark Macyk.

Day 1: The Devil’s Diphthong

Day 2: The Podcasting Ghost

Day 3: The Portal Potties

Day 4: The Household Accident

Day 5: The Scarecrow Competition

Day 6: The Cursed Father

Day 7: When the Car Hits the Tree

Day 8: Thank Christ It’s Halloween

Day 9: The Greek Halloween Myth

Day 10: The Ghost & The Cockroach

Day 11: Pampered