The Mammoth Book of Halloween Stories: Terrifying Tales Set on the Scariest Night of the Year!

by Stephen Jones

  For a monster, he was oddly pathetic.

  A movement to his right drew Cassie’s attention. A second officer was holding the missing arrow. It was strung with bodies: rabbits, four of them, fat little things, pinioned through their skulls like the slaughtered moles her father-in-law hung from the barbed-wire fences of the family farm.

  DI Evans stepped forward, reaching out to tap the spindly bones of the crossbow with his forefinger.

  “Got a license for this?”

  The suspect said nothing. Cassie watched his flaccid face. He seemed so out of it that it crossed her mind that he might be high. Beside her, Evans shifted his weight to his heels, nodding at the silence. Cassie saw Evans’s fist tighten around the radio.

  “What’s your name?”

  Silence.

  “Is Kelly here? The others?”

  Still nothing. Just the sound of rain dabbing rhythmically into the mud at their feet. Cassie could feel it beginning to soak through her coat and onto her shoulders.

  Evans jerked his chin. “Get him out of here.”

  The suspect seemed to wake from his slumber as he was being led away. Cassie followed Evans as he strode quickly toward the nearest barn, but the turbulence behind drew her attention back to the courtyard. The man was trying to turn in her direction, struggling against two pairs of hands. He was back from wherever he’d been, and his eyes were wild.

  “Don’t let her out,” he croaked, as he was pushed into one of the vans. “Don’t—” The rest of his warning was severed by the slamming shut of the vehicle’s doors.

  “Sir?” Cassie called after Evans, who was already ducking under a sagging lintel. “The B team. We should wait—”

  Evans lifted the radio to his lips so quickly that she wondered if he’d simply forgotten that they weren’t there alone. He spoke into the radio, a brief order sharply barked.

  “B team—search the house. DS Wish and I have got the barns.”

  Then he was off again. Cassie followed quickly, the heavy black shadow of her coat swinging out to snag against the splintered doorframe as she passed through it. Inside, the barn was dark but mostly dry aside from shallow pools of greasy rainwater. Evans and Cassie kicked through detritus on the barn’s concrete floor: dried leaves, wisps of straw, dirt, the faded silver corpses of ancient tin cans, all coated with the white spatter of bird shit, old and new, years of it, years. As they passed beneath the skeleton eaves, there came the sound of winged things in hurried flight: an exodus of feathered creatures from the cavity of the roof. Cassie looked up, saw the phantasm shapes of birds disturbing the air as they escaped into the wet sky. Faint plumes of debris tumbled down the dim shafts of light in their wake, a precipitation of brick-dust added to the incessant fall of rain.

  There was nothing here. No spatters of blood, no echoing screams. No sign of murder, of torture, of pain. No sign that any had been cleared up, either.

  Although …

  Was there something?

  Cassie looked around, trying to get a fix on whatever it was that had wisped across her copper’s senses, but there was only emptiness. Dereliction.

  She followed Evans through the first barn and on into the second. In the corner was a makeshift camp, comprised of a low-slung canvas bed on foldout metal struts, a battered camping stove, a bottle of lighter fluid, an empty pan, and a five-liter bottle of water. Cassie thought of fat rabbits strung on the shaft of an arrow and wondered if, actually, there could be more than one displaced soul with a crossbow tramping around Cumbria. As campsites went, a homeless person could do worse, especially if they were able to hunt their own food. Maybe the guy they’d just nabbed was innocent, after all.

  Don’t let her out. Don’t.

  Ahead of her, Evans uttered a frustrated curse. His radio crackled.

  “The house is clear,” said the voice, scratching into the dim light.

  “Have you checked for a cellar?”

  “There isn’t one.”

  “A coal bunker, then. A wood store—anything.”

  There was a pause, another crackle. “There’s nothing guv. I’m sorry.”

  “Search again.”

  Another pause, teetering on the edge of argument, then, “Guv.”

  Evans turned toward Cassie. “It’s here,” he muttered, more to himself than to her. “I know it is. I bloody know it. Somewhere. It must be the house—”

  He took off again, back into and through the larger barn, making his way out. Cassie stopped following when she was halfway across the floor.

  It was there. The wisp. It was.

  Something.

  “Sir,” she said and then, when Evans didn’t stop, louder: “Sir.”

  Evans turned. Cassie pointed, finger angled down. He stared.

  “Bird shit,” she said.

  Evans grunted, impatient. “Yes. And … ?”

  “It’s everywhere,” she said. “Loads of it. Except … there.”

  He froze for a second or two, then came back toward her. Stopped at her side. Looked again. Saw. Two square meters or so in the center of the barn, covered in exactly the same dirt as the rest of the floor. And sure, there was bird shit, too. Just not as much of it.

  Evans lifted the radio to his mouth. “The barn. Get in here.”

  The two of them scuffed the dirt away with their feet as the B team arrived. Beneath the detritus was a wooden trapdoor, barely more than a meter square. It fitted so smoothly into the floor that Evans and Cassie could have walked across it and still not known it was there.

  “Black or not, DS Wish,” Evans said. “Your eyes are a bloody marvel.”

  It was the reek that hit them first. The copper with the crowbar almost passed out before he’d managed to lever open the hatch. The smell rolled out, rotting flesh and fly-blown corpses, snails and shit and gas-bloated innards, a paste of odor thick enough to coat the back of Cassie’s throat. Around her, the team coughed and gagged, retching as they turned away, a reflex as human as the need to defecate. The stench didn’t recede as the trapdoor thumped open with a dull whump. It got worse, so bad in fact that Cassie felt her own empty stomach heave, and God knew it took a lot to make her gut churn. It was genetic: one of only two useful things she’d inherited from her dad.

  Cassie pulled out her flashlight and flicked it on. The narrow beam of light sliced into the dark space below the trap door, and there she was, crouching in one corner: a folded-double white grub in the vague shape of a child. Her white head was either bald or shaved, and she was dressed in the incongruous shape of a nightdress that had once been white and pretty.

  “Jesus Christ,” Evans muttered, beside her, and it wasn’t just the girl that evinced the blasphemy, nor she who was giving off the worst of the smell.

  The walls and floor beneath the hatch were coated in gore, thick with it. Smears of blood in varying colors—black with age here, redder there, fresher. Rotting tissue, sinew, scraps of flesh, sections of yellowing cartilage, muscle—bodily remains plastered against the concrete like wallpaper paste. It was layered inches thick so that in places the surface undulated, grotesquely cushioned with its organic decoration. It made Cassie think of a uterus, thick tissue swollen with blood.

  In the midst of this miasma nestled the girl. She lifted her naked head, trying to look up. She kept her hands over her face, peeking through half-closed fingers as if she were playing a game.

  “It’s all right,” Cassie told her. Retrieving the kid seemed to have fallen to her, since her fellow officers were still retching and puking at the periphery. All but Evans, of course. He remained as stalwart as ever, watchful and silent. “You’re safe now. We’ll get you out.”

  Cassie shrugged out of her coat, heavy now, wet, and dropped it amid the barn’s more acceptable filth. She passed the torch to Evans and knelt at the edge of the hatch, stretching down with spread hands, encouraging the girl to reach up.

  The girl put up her arms just as Evans angled the light down toward her and in the same second t
hat it swept across the child’s face, the girl gave a high, inhuman squeal. She dropped her head, ducking away, but Cassie caught one wrist before she could twist back into the filth.

  “The light,” Cassie gasped, fighting to keep hold of the wriggling girl. “Switch it off!” She’d seen the child’s eyes as the torch’s beam had washed over them: pupils so huge that they were barely more than solid black orbs.

  Evans took the order.

  Cassie pulled the girl out, the child’s sharp fingernails scrabbling at her wrists as she stumbled backward onto her arse. Cassie grabbed at her coat and hauled it over the girl, head to toe, like a cocoon. She felt the child’s arms snaking around her torso, felt the press of a tiny, cold nose and mouth against the skin above the collar of her stab vest. She tightened her arms around the small body as it quivered, invisible under her coat, stinking like an abattoir. She looked up at Evans. The torch hung from his hand like a broken extra digit.

  “It’s not Kelly Stevens,” he said.

  Back at the station, they couldn’t get the girl to let her go. The child had clamped herself to Cassie’s body and clung there as tenaciously as a limpet.

  “I can’t delay the questioning,” Evans told her, as Cassie sat in an interview room with the mute girl straddled across her legs, still hidden beneath the coat. “I know it’s not fair on you, given the work you’ve done on this case, but—”

  “It’s all right, sir,” she told him. “If there’s a chance the others are out there, still alive… .”

  She let the end of the sentence hang, and so did he. Scenes of Crime Officers were currently scraping down the walls of the girl’s cell, though what good it could do the investigation as evidence was anyone’s guess. The best bet was that they’d still be able to isolate DNA from the bone fragments mashed into the softer tissue, because otherwise identifying individuals from the mess of human remains would be impossible. The closer one looked, the more it seemed as if the bodies had been sucked from their bones and put through a mincer, then systematically used to coat the walls.

  “There’s no clue as to who she is yet,” Evans told her. “There haven’t been any reports of any children going missing, not since Kelly Stevens. Our best guess is that she’s from a traveler family, but just getting them to talk to us will be a task in itself.”

  Cassie shifted in her seat. Her legs were going numb. “Maybe we should look further back. Try the national databases for missing people.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “You haven’t seen her eyes. I only had a glimpse, but they looked as if she hadn’t seen light for a long time. Her pupils are huge.”

  Evans grimaced. “She can’t have been down there that long. She’d have died of exposure. Anyway, why would he keep her rather than kill her the way he did the others?”

  Cassie thought. “Then maybe she’s different, somehow. Maybe she’s something else to him. A daughter?”

  Evans considered. “Bit of a leap there, Wish.”

  Cassie shrugged, the weight of the girl rising and falling in time with the movement. “Just a thought.”

  He nodded. “All right. Get a DNA sample when the doctor does the works. If neither of them are going to volunteer any information, it might help us work out who she is, at least.” Evans’s glance drifted to her hand as Cassie lifted it. He frowned. “You’re bleeding.”

  Cassie looked down at herself, surprised to see drying blood on her wrist. “She must have scratched me when I pulled her out. Her nails are sharp.”

  “You should have made cleaning those scratches up a priority,” Evans told her.

  “Yes, sir,” Cassie said. “Sorry. Didn’t notice. Adrenaline, I suppose.”

  The door behind them opened and the duty doctor appeared, a woman in her late forties called Mary Dixon. She’d already been in once, but the girl had coiled Cassie’s coat so tightly around her that Dixon hadn’t even got as far as seeing her face.

  “I’ve called Child Services,” she said. “They’re having trouble getting hold of the social worker on call. It may be a while.”

  Evans made a sound in his throat. “What else is new?”

  The doctor looked uncomfortable. “They are understaffed,” she reminded him.

  “Aren’t we all? Wish—I’ll see you later, all right? Keep you up to date. Or if you manage to get out of here, have a shower and join the interview.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  Evans’s attention dropped to the mass on her lap. Only the girl’s filthy bare feet were visible, caked with dried gore where they poked from beneath the coat. For a moment Cassie thought he was going to say something else. Then he gave a nod that encompassed both Cassie and the doctor and left, pulling the door shut behind him.

  It took another three hours before Dixon managed to perform the examination. The girl couldn’t bear any sort of light at all. In the end they switched off the fluorescent overheads and relied on intermittent bursts of light from the flashlights on their phones, placed far enough away across the room to give only the merest hint of illumination. In the darkness Cassie managed to coax the girl off her lap and out from beneath her coat, though she retreated to it periodically, usually when Dr. Dixon tried to get her to speak.

  Dixon cut off the nightdress, attempting to keep the garment as complete as possible for the evidence bag Cassie held out. Beneath it the girl’s skin was mottled and filthy. Dixon used sterile wipes to clean her, slowly revealing pale but apparently healthy skin.

  “She’s not undernourished,” the doctor said, frowning at the conundrum. “She’s not been mistreated, either, or at least it doesn’t look that way from a cursory visual examination. Her scalp shows no signs of abrasion or bruising. Or stubble, for that matter. Her hair hasn’t been cut, or shaved. It could be stress alopecia, of course.”

  “What about there?” Cassie asked, pointing to thin red wheals across the girl’s left cheek. “And her arms. Are they cuts?”

  Dixon smiled at the girl as she lifted one of the small hands toward her to take a closer look at the pattern of short, narrow marks that feathered between her wrists and elbows.

  “I don’t think they’re cuts,” said Dixon. “They look more like scratches, though some are quite deep.” Here she addressed the silent child directly. “Did you hurt yourself, sweetheart? With your nails, perhaps? We should give those a trim, shouldn’t we?”

  Self-harm was a reasonable line of inquiry. Cassie watched for a reaction, but none was forthcoming. The girl just hung her head, her eyes squeezed shut. She gave no indication that she understood that someone was speaking to her.

  “Could she be deaf?” Cassie asked.

  The doctor frowned, then held one hand a couple of inches from the child’s ear and snapped her fingers. The girl instantly turned her head, though she kept her eyes shut. Her nostrils flared.

  “Not deaf,” the doctor said, unnecessarily. “Language or learning impaired, perhaps?”

  Cassie shook her head. “I don’t think she’s an abductee,” she said, the conviction growing. “I think this is something else.”

  “Well.” The doctor sighed, turning away to reach for the clean pair of child’s pajamas she’d brought with her. “Whatever she is, she’s going to need specialist help. I don’t want to have her in this room longer than necessary, but until Child Services make an appearance… .”

  “It’s all right,” Cassie said, as she reached for the pajamas. “I’ll stay for as long as I can.”

  “That’s right. You used to be National Crime Agency, didn’t you? With the trafficking task force?”

  Cassie nodded.

  Dixon gave her a quiet smile. “You’ll have had some training then. More than most, anyway. I can imagine the sort of stuff you’ve seen builds up a tough skin. We’re lucky to have you with us, DS Wish.”

  Cassie didn’t answer that. She concentrated on getting the girl into fresh nightclothes, instead.

  She drove home to Penrith along the A6 with t
he rain screwing itself hard into her windshield. Large yellow signs had appeared since she’d come in the opposite direction that morning, warning that the center of town would be closed to traffic the following night for The Winter Droving. Traditionally, the droving was the time the farmers brought the sheep down from the high fells to more accessible pasture in preparation for winter. In recent years one of the town’s arts charities had reinvented it as a local festival, centered around an after-dark parade of huge wheeled animal lanterns formed of wicker and paper. Attendees were encouraged to join the procession wearing elaborate masks, the weirder the better.

  Cassie had gone the previous year and been caught up in the strange, feral nature of the night. It was a faux-pagan circus winding slowly through the streets of the small town, accompanied by drummers and torchbearers, fire-eaters, stilt-walkers, and acrobats. It had little to do with the droving of old, all the excuse Nick needed to discard it out of hand, but it was an impressive event that helped to bring in the tourists as the season tailed off.

  This year the organizers had spied a new opportunity and the droving had been pushed back a week to coincide with Halloween. The windows of the shops around the old market square had shivered with grotesquerie for weeks. They weren’t hawking the standard tat of orange pumpkins and witches on broomsticks, either, but gargoyles of an entirely more Cumbrian nature. Fairies with evil in the curve of their smiles, elves with teeth as sharp as needles, demon dogs with fiery eyes, green gods of earth and water—though not the sort you’d pray to or for.

  Her phone rang as she pulled off the main road and into the tangle of new streets that laced the hill overlooking the town. She glanced at the clock on the dashboard—it was gone 10:00 p.m. Cassie answered, expecting it to be Nick. She was late. He hated that.