Lara Zielin - Author Your Life: How One Writer Changed Her Life Through the Power of Storytelling, and How You Can, Too

Young Adult Fiction

Donut Days

The Implosion of Aggie Winchester

The Waiting Sky

Young Adult Nonfiction

Make Things Happen: The Key to Networking for Teens

Romance (written as Kim Amos)

A Kiss to Build a Dream On

And Then He Kissed Me

Every Little Kiss

One More Kiss

This story begins where all good stories beginin Wisconsin. This beginning is also a ghost story, so this book is pretty much batting a thousand right now.

What happened was this: Two kids were driving west on Wisconsin back roads in the pitch-black dead of night. Think two a.m. Starless. Spooky. And they were the only car for miles.

This was, of course, when the passenger (lets call her Jane) told the driver (lets call him Ted) that she had to pee. Pick your spot, Ted said, motioning with his hand to the inky black woods all around them, the world is your toilet. To be fair, Ted didnt say this. My father-in-law says the world is your toilet when hes in the woods. Its a phrase I sometimes cant get out of my head.

Anyway.

Jane would have loved for Ted to just pull alongside the deserted road so she could pee in the woods, except she couldnt because she used a cane. And the way her body and her plumbing worked, squatting in the woods just wasnt an option. Our girl needed a proper toilet. So Ted put the pedal to the metal and kept hoping theyd come upon somethinganythingthat was open. And lo, they did.

The Roadhouse Bar in Hawthorne, Wisconsin, blazed bright in the night. Lights on. Music playing. Ted and Jane were overjoyed. They had heard locals talking about the bar because an artist, rumored to be from Disney, had just painted an enormous mural on the walls of the place.

They went in. Jane did her business. Ted bought them beers. And thats when they noticed things seemed a littleoff.

The jukebox kept playing the same song, Lets Twist Again by Chubby Checker, over and over. People wouldnt stop staring at them.

Jane told Ted she was unnerved. Ted told her everything was cool, and that they should take a closer look at this neato new mural. It was a saloon scene with gunfighters and poker players, with painted ladies on stage and a sheriff about to draw his weapon. There was a shootout in the dusty streets, and a bartender serving people amid the chaos.

Thats when Ted and Jane noticed that everyone in the bar looked like someone in the mural. The men playing pool in the bar looked like the men at the gambling table in the mural; the guy next to the jukebox in the bar looked like the guy next to the player piano; the women sipping drinks at the bar looked like the corseted ladies on stageon and on.

Of course, it was easy to explain. The local artist whod painted the scenes had surely drawn from real life and used local folks as character inspiration. Ted figured hed ask about it, so as he bought two more beers, he inquired with the bartender: Did the artist who painted that mural use you guys here as inspiration?

The bartender, a younger man, didnt reply. He just smiled and sort of nodded vaguely. Like he couldnt quite understand what Ted was saying. This was about the time Lets Twist Again was on its umpteenth repeat, and Jane was starting to get wigged the eff out. Both she and Ted suddenly realized that the people at the bar had drinks, but didnt seem to be actually drinking them. Men stood by the pool table, but didnt actually play.

Jane wanted to go, but Ted insisted they finish their beers. So they studied the mural a little more, and thats when they saw it. Something that hadnt been there before. Behind the saloon doors in the corner of a gun-slinging scene were two pairs of legs. And next to one of them was a cane.

Janes hair stood up on the back of her neck. Those were her legs, and that was her cane. She realized she and Ted were being drawn into the mural. In real time.

Naturally, they freaked out and ran from the place as fast as they could. The minute they exited the Roadhouse, all the lights went off. Everything went silent. They sped away, not saying anything. Figuring that maybe they imagined the whole thing.

Eventually, when they calmed down a few days later, curiosity overtook them. What had happened that night? It was surely explainable. So they went back to figure out what went down.

When they returned, it was a busy night, packed with folks and musicthough thankfully not Lets Twist Again. Jane and Ted sidled up to the bar and asked who was working the other night around two a.m. They described the young bartender who had served them, to which the current bartender said, No one like that works here.

Naw, naw, naw, Jane and Ted insisted. That was our boy. We saw him.

To which the current bartender said, My dad and I own this place. We are the only people who bartend. And that night? We locked up at midnight.

I heard this story on season one of the Spooked podcast, hosted by Glynn Washington, and I recommend that you go listen to it because the narrator does a much better job of actually, you know, tellingthe story than I do of recreating it here.

So why bother sharing the story at all?

The short answer is, when I heard this episode of Spooked, I was changed. (The long answer is this entire book, so theres that.) I was like Saul on the Road to Damascus altered.

What I realized was that something about the mural had impacted reality for Jane and Ted. The artists creation of the saloon scene had, in some way, brought forth that art into actual real life. The fabric of time and space had been altered that nightbecause of a painting.

Art is powerful. It changes hearts and minds all the time. I get that. But this was the first time I had considered whether art could literally change the course of thingsif it was powerful enough to create an entirely new reality that we humans could actually experience.

And while Im not an artist like that Disney guy, I am a writer. My art is books. So I was like,