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

by Stephen Jones

  It wasn’t Nick.

  “Saw you on the news just now,” said a female voice, roughened by years of smoking.

  “Liv,” Cassie greeted. “What’s up?”

  “What the fuck do you think is up?” Liv said. “You, standing in the back, dark glasses on a live broadcast? Think I was born yesterday?”

  Cassie tried to make light of it. “Didn’t even realize I was in shot. Sharp eyes. You should have been a copper.”

  “Swear to god, Cass,” Liv rasped. “I am going to smear that splash of shit so thin he’ll think he’s paint. When are you coming home?”

  Cassie turned onto her street, a row of red brick houses set in squares of fenced-off patches of grass. It wasn’t the quaint rural cottage she’d half-imagined when Nick had decided they were moving back to his hometown. She pulled onto the blank oblong of concrete that was their driveway and killed the engine.

  “I am home,” she said.

  “If Dad was alive today, he’d already have sent someone up there to sort him out.”

  “If Dad was alive today, he’d be in prison,” Cassie told her. “It’s late. I just want a glass of wine and something to eat. Can we do this another time? I’m fine. I promise. I’ll call you.”

  “Bloody pigs,” was her sister’s venomous parting shot.

  The house was in darkness. Cassie opened the door and flicked on the hallway light. She could hear the television burbling from the front room.

  “Nick?” she called, hanging her bag on the banister as she passed the stairs on the way to the darkened kitchen. “Sorry I’m late. It’s been a crazy day. Have you eaten? I’m—”

  The first punch blindsided her, flying out of the darkness of the kitchen where he’d been waiting. His closed fist thumped against her ribcage hard enough that she felt something give. The second sent her reeling sideways, her forehead connecting with the wall, hard.

  “You fucking bitch,” he snarled, face looming above her. “You did that deliberately.”

  Cassie pulled herself upright. “What? Nick—”

  “The dark glasses. I’m going to be the butt of every joke going on the farm tomorrow.”

  He came at her again, aiming higher this time. Cassie intercepted his fist before it reached her jaw, her open hand clenching hard around his closed one. She saw the split-second flicker of surprise that glinted in his eye. She always had been stronger than anyone gave her credit for.

  “I’ve told you before,” Cassie said, calmly. “Not the face.” She let him go, pushing him away with enough force that he took a step backward to regain his balance. “I’m too tired for this right now,” she told him, then. “I am going to make something to eat. I am going to have a drink. Then I am going to go to bed.”

  Cassie moved farther into the kitchen, reaching for the fridge door. She couldn’t remember what they had in: her head had been so full of the case for so long that it was an age since she’d been to the supermarket. She stared at the plastic box of graying diced beef on the second shelf, it’s packaging slightly blown. It probably should have gone out weeks ago. An image flashed back to her, of that hell-pit below the barn floor. She opened the salad compartment and retrieved an onion, glancing at the worktop and the box of eggs there. An omelet would do.

  “You’re so smart, aren’t you?” Nick hissed, behind her. “Always in control. Always know exactly what to do. Little Miss Perfect.”

  Cassie turned around to face him. She’d thought he was a nice guy, once. What a fool she’d been. As if she hadn’t already seen enough evidence of what even the nice ones were capable of given half a chance. And Cassie, she’d given him all the chances he deserved, because she’d wanted her marriage to work. She’d wanted to prove that she wasn’t either of her parents, that she could come from a place that bad and still have a nice, normal, law-abiding, happy life. But she’d picked the wrong man and this move North had been nothing but a forlorn hope. She wasn’t sure, anymore, what she was trying to prove. It was almost the cliché that upset her the most. Almost.

  He stepped closer, head and shoulders over her and almost twice as broad. “Don’t ever try to make fool of me again. Understand?” He lifted a hand and jabbed her hard with one finger, right where he’d punched her in the ribs just a few minutes before. “We could have been happy, you know,” he added. “If you weren’t such a fucking cold bitch. Sometimes I wonder if you actually feel anything at all.”

  Cassie didn’t bother to reply. There appeared to be a fundamental truth about her that he hadn’t managed to grasp, not even when she took the hardest punch he could throw and still kept her feet. Did he think she was just that stubborn? She imagined him with a crossbow hanging from one hand. He seemed a far more appropriate match for the monster they’d been hunting than the pathetic bundle of bones Evans currently had in custody.

  It was a truth that had always fascinated her: that so often appearances had very little to do with nature.

  Cassie woke at 4:00 a.m., alone in a quiet bed. She could hear the television still on downstairs and knew Nick would be passed out on the sofa, another empty scotch bottle lying on the floor. She fantasized briefly about him going to work drunk or so hung over that he’d walk into the path of something heavy and dangerous, something that would mash him into the wet earth as surely as those remains had been mashed onto the walls of that cellar.

  Thinking of the crime scene led her to the girl. She’d eventually fallen asleep and Cassie had laid her on the bench in the darkness, locking the door on the way out and posting a constable to keep an eye on her through the observation window. Cassie had hated to leave a vulnerable child in such a place, but there was nothing else to be done. She’d put in another call to Child Services, but the out-of-hours emergency number wasn’t even staffed, just an answer-phone.

  Now she lay awake, watching as the orange light from the streetlamp outside her window made a quavering pattern of lace on her ceiling. She felt guilty—what if the girl woke before Cassie got back to the station? She’d be afraid and alone, and surely she’d already endured more terror than anyone should have to face across a lifetime. She could still feel the cold press of the child’s lips and nose against her clavicle, feel those thin little arms clasped around her waist.

  Cassie got up and looked out of the window. The October moon was waning gibbous as the month died. Blencathra was just visible on the horizon, the curve of the saddle on the fell’s back glinting slightly. A first spattering of snow, caught in the moon’s pale glare.

  Snow for Halloween, she thought. That seems very Cumbrian.

  She drove back into Carlisle on roads that were wet, though it was no longer raining. The duty sergeant nodded to her silently as she arrived, but made no comment about the hour. Cassie went straight to the room adjoining where the girl was being held, pushing open the door onto muted light and silence.

  “Morning, Cattrick,” she said, quietly to the constable on duty. “How’s she been?”

  “Morning, Sarge. She’s not moved so much as a muscle all night,” said the young woman, standing and stretching her legs. “Been curled up under that coat of yours so tightly I’ve not seen hide nor hair. Think you might have to write that one up as ‘lost in the line of duty,’ ma’am—I can’t see her giving it up easily.”

  Cassie smiled faintly and walked to the observation window.

  “Why don’t you go and get yourself some coffee?” Cassie suggested, peering at the huddle of coat just visible in the darkened room beyond the one-way glass. “I’m sure you could do with some. I’ll keep an eye for a while.”

  Cattrick grinned. “Thanks, Sarge. You’re a gem.”

  A moment later and Cattrick had gone, light footsteps echoing along the corridor and away. Cassie found herself enveloped in a silence that thickened the longer it brewed. She stood close to the window, watching the darkness, almost in darkness herself.

  The mound beneath her coat began to move. It grew, heaping like a new fell erupting from the earth. The
girl must have pushed herself into a crouch on the bench while the coat tented around her. Then the child’s head appeared, white and smooth, pushing out like a maggot emerging from a wound. The coat slipped back to the narrow grace of the girl’s neck, then slid down her shoulders, then across her back until finally it dropped in a pile around her bare feet. The girl unfolded herself from the bench. One small leg reached toward the floor, then another, her body opening up like a flick-knife until she stood upright. She stayed still for a moment. Cassie could see the child’s nostrils flaring, scenting something in the air.

  In the next second the child was moving, heading straight for the observation window, directly for where Cassie stood, so quickly and with such determination that despite the wall between them, Cassie took a step back. The girl didn’t stop until her face was pressed against the one-way glass, small white palms flat either side of her cheeks. She stood still. Her breath puffed against the barrier, pooling and dissipating, pooling and dissipating, as she looked up with the kind of eyes that Cassie had only ever seen once, years before.

  It had been in the London Aquarium, on a family outing that had constituted a rare flash of normality in an abnormal upbringing. She’d seen these eyes looking out at her from the shark tank. The girl had shark’s eyes, expressionless, depthless, nothing but voids that sucked in light. The girl could see perfectly in the dark, Cassie realized, and for her the glass wasn’t one-way at all. It was merely glass.

  The girl parted her lips. At first Cassie thought she was smiling, but the child’s mouth continued to expand, kept stretching wider and wider until it seemed her cheeks must surely split with the pressure. That little mouth opened so wide that Cassie could see the girl’s pink wet tongue, the fleshy tunnels of her trachea and esophagus. The child’s lips folded back until her gums were visible, except that where her gums should have been seemed to be more bone. There was a cleft in its middle, as if the bone was jointed above her central incisors.

  As Cassie watched, the girl’s teeth disappeared, angling back into the gaping cavern of her mouth. The joint popped, opening, not that far, just enough to create a point, like the prow of a boat. The motion made Cassie think of a snake dislocating its jaw. Then, from behind this new shape descended a fresh row of denticulation, then another inside that, and another inside that: three rows of progressively smaller pearly-white teeth, each sharper than the sharpest point of the sharpest knife. The girl had saw-blades inside her mouth.

  Four fat rabbits, hanging from the shaft of an arrow.

  Don’t let her out. Don’t.

  Cassie made herself stand there, smiling, until her skin no longer crawled at the sight. In any case, it wasn’t revulsion she felt. She recognized fear, had grown up with it, and had long ago decided she would no longer allow it to have any hold over her. Once its prickle had subsided, what Cassie felt most was sympathy. Understanding, too. Affinity even, perhaps, in some ways. The girl couldn’t help what she was, after all.

  Nature. It was such a difficult thing.

  “We’re getting nowhere with the suspect,” Evans told her later that morning. “Can’t get the bugger to say a thing.”

  “Anything from forensics yet?”

  Cassie carried the weight of her new secret around with her the same way she did all of her others: as if they did not exist at all. There was a wisp of something on her periphery, a blip on the radar of her senses she hadn’t quite worked out yet. She had learned long ago that silence was safety.

  She watched as the skipper rubbed a hand over a face gray with fatigue. DI Eddie Evans was a tall man in his fifties with a round, pale face running to fat. His hair was coarse and graying, cut short to disguise a creeping bald patch. She’d not been sure of him for a few months, but Cassie now thought of him as a decent copper and a good man.

  “It’s too early yet,” he said. “Poor buggers are still scraping down the walls. Although they did say they’ve found some anomalies they can’t explain.”

  Cassie felt a cold finger worming its way into her chest to scratch against her heart. “Anomalies? Like what?”

  “They think there’s a possibility that the victims were killed somewhere else and predated on before their remains ended up where they did. There are teeth marks on some of the bone fragments, but no signs of animal infestation in situ. Although they can’t work out what sort of animal made them, and I can’t see that being right anyway. They had to have all been killed and dismembered in that cellar. There’s no trace of matter anywhere outside it. I can’t see our suspect having the wit to be able to clean up after himself that thoroughly.”

  “I don’t know, sir. He hid that hatch pretty effectively.”

  Evans sighed. “True. Right, then. You ready to take a crack at him?”

  Cassie tried, but had no more luck than her senior officer. She thought about attempting a new tactic, something that would shock the suspect out of his silence. Cassie imagined asking him a question he wasn’t expecting.

  It’s difficult, isn’t it? Caring for a child? Being a single parent? You do your best, don’t you? You always do your best. Of course you do. Just like everyone else. But sometimes it’s not enough. Is it?

  Cassie imagined his eyes flashing up to meet hers, at the unspoken answer that would be there in the few seconds before he had a chance to cover his surprise. It would work, she knew it. The certainty was an instinct as sure as the one that had tingled against her skin in the gloom of that barn as she’d seen something at the same time as not seeing it. As sure as the one that kept her silent now.

  Cassie did not ask the question. She was too busy mulling over other, more important ideas, questions she had no intention of asking anyone but herself.

  Later that day she intercepted Dr. Dixon as the woman went to enter the child’s room with a packet of sandwiches, a bag of crisps, and a bottle of water.

  “Poor thing must be starving,” Dixon said, as Cassie maneuvered herself so that she could enter the room first. “She didn’t touch what we left her this morning. God only knows the last time she ate. She doesn’t seem to have drunk anything, either.”

  The room was still mostly in darkness. From the heaped pile on the bench, Cassie could tell that the child had again retreated to the perceived safety beneath the coat. Cassie was relieved. She took the items Dixon carried and put them down on the table.

  “I’ll stay with her,” Cassie said. “I’ll try to get her to eat something. I’m sure you’ve got other things you could be doing.”

  Dixon sighed. “I’m still trying to sort out what to do about her welfare. I refuse to let her spend another night here.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Cassie said. “I can take temporary custody. She can come home with me. Just until Child Services get their act together, obviously.”

  “Oh, I don’t think that’s advisable,” Dixon said.

  From the corner of her eye, Cassie could see the dark shape moving slightly: the girl, waking. Cassie took a casual step away from the table, putting herself between the bench and Dixon.

  “Why not?” Cassie asked. “You said yourself I’ve had the training. And she seems to have bonded with me, doesn’t she?”

  “Well… .”

  Cassie saw a white foot protrude from beneath the coat’s edge. Then another. The grub, emerging.

  “Ah-ha, the sleeping beauty wakes,” Dixon said, cheerfully. “Would you like some dinner, sweetheart?”

  Cassie turned her head, watching the girl straighten up, nostrils flaring. The voids of her eyes looked past Cassie, fastening on Dixon instead. The doctor stepped forward, one hand held out in an attempt at reassurance. Cassie sensed rather than saw the girl move, just as quickly as she had that morning, a shark scything through the water to its kill.

  Cassie turned, one smooth movement with her arms outstretched, stepping sideways so that the girl walked straight into her. Cassie hugged the girl to her, the child’s face against her body. She felt the girl’s arms fasten around
her middle, heard a tiny keening noise and then, very slightly, the feeling of something being drawn lightly across her stomach.

  There was a second of stillness. Cassie looked down at the child in her arms. The girl lifted her head to look up at her, and Cassie mouthed the word, No. The black eyes blinked, once. Then the open obscenity of her jaws began to recede, her mouth shrinking back to its normal size. Cassie felt a wave of relief. Something else, too: pride, perhaps. She held the girl tighter, then looked over her shoulder to Dixon. She gave a bright smile, a slight shrug.

  “I really think she should come home with me,” she said. “I’ll handle Evans and the paperwork. Otherwise you know she’s going to end up spending another night here. Neither of us wants that. Do we?”

  The doctor watched her with a strange expression.

  “Hey,” Cassie said. “If you really think I’m not fit, that’s fine, but—”

  “No, no,” Dixon said, quickly. “That’s not what I meant at all, DS Wish. Your credentials are impeccable and as you say, you do have the training. It’s just … it could be difficult. Dealing with children in trauma can be traumatizing in itself.”

  Cassie smiled down at the strange child in her arms. The girl was calm now, no hint of the secret she harbored behind those black, black eyes. It was extraordinary, really, how much could be hidden, how completely, and for how long.

  “Believe me, Doctor Dixon,” she said. “Childhood trauma is something I understand.”

  Dixon was still watching her. When Cassie looked up again, the doctor’s focus was on the bruise still festering around her eye.

  “And you can guarantee she’ll be safe with you?”

  Cassie smiled. “Doctor, I stake my life on it.”

  It was after 8:00 p.m. when Cassie began the drive home, dark enough that the girl abandoned the shelter of the coat entirely. Beyond the car’s windows, the youngest trick-or-treaters were out on the streets, diminutive superheroes and miniature Disney princesses towing their parents through a persistent drizzle.