A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Chet Williamson

  “Let’s see what you’ve got,” the lieutenant said. Mathers joined them as they rolled the plans out on the hood of the police cruiser, and Kesselring said, “Capwell says he’s got the hostages locked in a room in the produce section. Where would that be?”

  “Here,” Thompson said, tapping the plans with his finger. “It’s for cold storage, and it can be locked from the outside.”

  “Where’s the office?” Kesselring asked.

  “Here.”

  “If he’s in the office, can he see the place he’s holding the hostages?”

  “No,” Thompson said without hesitation.

  “How do you know Capwell’s telling the truth?” Mathers asked.

  Kesselring sighed. “We don’t. But he’s obviously put the hostages somewhere. There’re about thirty people in there. He can’t have them running around all over the store.” To Thompson he said, “Is there anywhere else he could put them?”

  “Meat locker.” He tapped the plans. “Here.”

  “Visible from the office?”

  “No.”

  Kesselring and Mathers exchanged glances. The lieutenant said, “If I can get him on the phone again, we can hit the place from the front and back. We’ll know where Capwell is, and there’ll be no danger to the hostages.”

  Mathers nodded. “I sent for a bus we can roll in between the store and the guy he shot. We going to need it?”

  “No. If he’s in the office, he can’t see us. As soon as I get him on the phone again, we can simply drag the guy away.”

  Mathers frowned. “What’s going on here, Steve? The way this guy’s going about all this don’t make sense. He’s leaving himself wide open. He has to know we’d get plans of the place. Hell, the Donovan woman could have told us what we needed to know if she hadn’t freaked.”

  “Just because the guy’s gone wacko doesn’t mean he’s smart.”

  “Doesn’t mean he’s dumb either.” Mathers frowned, staring at the plans, obviously not liking the feel of it.

  From within the store came a series of muffled shots. Kesselring, Mathers, Thompson, and the cop who’d delivered him all jumped.

  “We gotta move,” the lieutenant said. “Your guys ready?”

  “They’re ready,” Mathers answered.

  Kesselring scrambled back into the van, dialed the number for the grocery store. It took twenty-two rings, but the guy answered.

  “Hi, Lieutenant,” Capwell said.

  “What happened in there?”

  “I just shot a bunch of people.” There was something about his voice, a quiet excitement, the way a normal guy might sound if he was about to make it with the woman of his dreams, some plasterer’s assistant about to score with Cybill Shepherd. The guy was getting off on killing, getting high on it.

  “Tell me about it,” Kesselring said, and Capwell started explaining how he’d shot a woman first, then a guy in a brown shirt because he hated brown shirts. Mathers looked at the lieutenant questioningly. Kesselring nodded, waved him toward the store. Capwell was still talking about it, telling him how he’d shot another woman, then a little boy. He was in midsentence when the phone went dead.

  Scrambling out of the van, Kesselring ran toward the store, drawing his service revolver. Once inside, he made his way toward the office. He spotted one of Mathers’s SWAT guys in his dark blue jumpsuit uniform. He was carrying an M-16. Mathers appeared from behind the meat counter and motioned to the lieutenant.

  “He’s still in here somewhere,” the SWAT sergeant said. “Watch your ass, Lieutenant.”

  “What about the hostages?”

  “Five dead in the produce department, plus those two there.” He inclined his head toward two bodies sprawled by the meat counter. One was a man, the other a woman. “Guy in the office makes eight, and the one outside makes nine.”

  “Jesus,” Kesselring said.

  “All the exits are covered. He can’t get out. I told my guys to give him one warning, then take the fucker out. That okay with you?”

  Kesselring nodded. “How you handling the search?”

  “We’re starting with the part of the store the customers usually don’t see, the place where they bring in the deliveries and the meat locker, like that. Once we’re sure he’s not in any of those places, we’ll move into the rest of the store.”

  “I’ll keep you company.”

  Two of the SWAT cops hurried the survivors past the spot where Kesselring and Mathers were standing, everybody keeping low because a crazed killer was still in the store somewhere, still armed. They seemed to be in shock, most of them drained of color, staring straight ahead, moving along like a group of zombies. A woman was sobbing softly. A man moaned.

  “Anybody need medical attention?” Kesselring asked.

  Mathers shook his head. “If he shot them, he killed them. No wounded. Just the dead and the uninjured.”

  Kesselring thought of the group of survivors who had just gone past, the zombielike looks. Uninjured in the physical sense maybe, but ahead of them lay a lot of nightmares, a lot of vividly recalled horrors.

  “You ready?” Mathers asked.

  “Let’s find the son of a bitch.”

  They went through the meat locker, moving hanging sides of beef, looking behind boxes of lamb chops, prepackaged chicken breasts. They moved on, using a small forklift to move a stack of cartons containing canned vegetables, looking behind boxes containing everything from catsup to sanitary napkins. Finally they moved into the main part of the supermarket, cautiously working their way up to each aisle and taking a quick peek before going on. They moved all the way across the store, looking behind the deli counter, the movie rental displays, finding nothing.

  They gathered at the produce counter. Mathers used his handheld radio to check with his guys outside. No one had come out except the surviving hostages, they assured him.

  “Could he have somehow been among them?” Kesselring asked.

  “No way they’d have let the son of a bitch slip out with them,” Mathers said. “Not after what he did.”

  “What about the bodies? Could he have been one of them, just pretending to be dead?”

  Mathers sighed. “Ordinarily I’d say no chance, but shit, the guy’s got to be pulling something or we’d have found him.” Using his radio, he told the officers outside to make sure none of the hostages left the scene and to start IDing all of them. “Let’s go check the bodies,” he said. “Make sure one of them wasn’t just being creative with a bottle of catsup.”

  “Where would you find catsup in a place like this?” one of the SWAT guys said.

  Mathers gave him a dirty look.

  All the red stuff on the bodies was indeed blood, and they were all unquestionably dead. The cops outside reported that all the hostages checked out and confirmed that the man who’d been gunned down outside was dead. The SWAT team got ready to comb the store again.

  “I’m going to use the phone in the office to let downtown know what’s happening,” Kesselring said. He wasn’t happy having to be the one to explain that nine people were dead and that the guy who did it was still in the building somewhere—they thought—but, well, they couldn’t exactly find him.

  The office was nothing but a cubbyhole with a desk, a computer, and some file cabinets. Stepping over the body he presumed to be the store manager’s, Kesselring reached for the phone, then hesitated. Should they dust the thing for prints? He decided it wasn’t necessary. The shooter had been identified, and there was a whole group of witnesses to what had happened. He picked up the receiver, started to dial. Particles of something sifted down on him from above.

  Dropping the phone, Kesselring spun around, pulling out his service revolver. He was too late. The office had one of those suspended ceilings, and Capwell had pushed up one of the panels, climbed up in there, put back the panel. At the moment he was looking down at Kesselring, aiming a big Magnum at him.

  Although he knew he had no chance—none whatsoever—Kesselring went
through the motions, trying to raise his weapon and shoot before the man above him could squeeze the trigger and make one less cop in the world. To his amazement, he had his weapon aimed at the man, and Capwell still hadn’t fired. Kesselring did, though, and he did it so hastily that he missed, his .38 punching a hole in the ceiling about a foot from Capwell’s face.

  The two men stared at each other.

  Still Capwell didn’t shoot, didn’t do anything except look blankly down at him.

  “Throw down the gun,” Kesselring said, his voice so shaky he wasn’t sure Capwell could hear it.

  Capwell cocked the Magnum. “It made me do it,” he whispered.

  Kesselring fired again, and a hole appeared just below Capwell’s right eye. Then the man tumbled from his position in the suspended ceiling, crashing onto the desk, the phone squirting from under him and hitting the wall. Kesselring stared at the body on the desk, realizing that what Capwell had done was commit suicide. Often these guys blew a bunch of people away, then turned the gun on themselves. Capwell had made Kesselring do it for him. There was no other explanation for why Capwell hadn’t killed him when he had the chance.

  Kesselring could hear the SWAT guys coming on the run. They must have been clean over at the other side of the store somewhere. And then he saw something that made him blink, because he couldn’t really be seeing it, because it was impossible—absolutely, totally impossible.

  Capwell lay on his back on the desk, his legs spread and his arms out to the sides, as if he were trying to make an angel in the snow. And something was rising from him, a darkness that seemed to be coming out through every pore in his body, creating a shadow that hovered an inch or two above him. Kesselring blinked again, shook his head. He was imagining this, had to be imagining this. Shadows could not be suspended in the air, could not rise cloudlike from corpses.

  Abruptly the darkness swirled, started congealing, taking shape. Kesselring backed away, his ass hitting the wall. He heard himself gasp, and the sound seemed muffled and distant, like the barely perceived noises you heard when you were sound asleep.

  Kesselring was looking at … something. The word creature came to him, but it was more an assemblage of creatures than any particular one. An assemblage that could not possibly exist. He was holding his service revolver with both hands, but it was shaking so badly he probably couldn’t hit the thing even though it stood no more than five feet from him. Not that shooting it would do any good. Despite the jumble of fear and confusion tumbling through his brain, at least on some level he understood this much: a thing that took shape after emerging as shadows from a dead man wasn’t the sort of thing you could shoot. He stared at it, knowing he could not blink it away but wishing with every fiber of his being that he could.

  It was big and furry like a bear.

  Its feet were hooves.

  It had the face of an iguana.

  It stared at him with glowing red eyes, and then it opened its mouth, revealing sharp alligator-like teeth. Suddenly a gust of wind slammed into him, swirling through the small office and sucking wadded-up papers out of the trash can, which flipped over and rolled across the room. The wind was hot and sticky and fetid, the stench so overpowering that Kesselring had to look down to make sure he wasn’t standing in a room full of rotting meat.

  No way can this be happening, a part of him asserted. This is impossible, abso-fucking-lutely impossible. He felt as if he’d been watching a horror movie and one of the monsters had reached into the audience and grabbed him, dragged him into the images on the screen, and made him a part of the film. He was the guy who was about to be eaten by the monster. And then the creature did move toward him, reach for him with its claws. Kesselring tried to back up, but he was already against the wall. Some primitive instinct told him the monster was not going to devour him—at least not in the conventional sense. What it wanted from him was something more complicated, much more profound than just a meal, and although Kesselring wasn’t religious, he found himself fearing for his soul. A rivulet of icy sweat trickled down his spine.

  “No,” Kesselring said, although he wasn’t sure why he was saying it. “Never.”

  The wind stopped, the papers from the trash can dropping to the floor like enormous snowflakes. The odor was gone.

  And so was the creature.

  The SWAT guys poured into the room.

  “You okay?” Mathers asked.

  Kesselring nodded, but he wasn’t okay. Nothing was okay. Maybe nothing would ever be okay again. “You … you see it?” he asked.

  Mathers shook his head. “It was all over by the time we got here. You better sit down, Steve. You look terrible. It must have been a pretty close call.”

  Kesselring took the sergeant’s advice and sat down. He felt brittle, as if moving too quickly might cause him to break. Inside was a chill, a chill so deep his core could have turned to ice. Charles Capwell was spread out on the desk in front of him as if he were being served for lunch. Put on a little A.1. Sauce and carve him up. Clearly no one else had seen what Kesselring had. Though confused and in a state of shock, he knew he had indeed seen it. He knew that after a few days he would try to write it off as imagination or hallucination. And he knew he would fail.

  “We heard two shots,” Mathers said, inviting him to tell them what had happened.

  “Yeah,” the lieutenant said, not sure how he was going to tell it but knowing his report wouldn’t exactly be the truth. It would make no mention of furry, hooved creatures with iguana faces and alligator teeth.

  One

  1

  Clad in pajamas, Don Farraday stood at his second-story bedroom window, looking out at the gray morning, the snow-covered rooftops of Ice Island. Smoke was rising lazily from the Sanderses’ chimney. An icicle hung from the Hansens’ big fringe-area TV antenna. The O’Gradys’ garage door was open, white exhaust coming from the tailpipe of their station wagon as it warmed up.

  All the homes within Don’s field of vision were two-story clapboard houses like his. Snow flurries sailed past the window as a gust of wind moaned in the eaves. Despite the dreary, wintry day, it was almost time for the Split. All the islanders, including his family, had already laid in enough supplies to see them through.

  Looking beyond the Hansens’ place, he could see the twin lines of orange barrels stretching across the ice toward the mainland, three miles away. The state police checked the ice daily now. Soon it would be too mushy-looking, or it could crack, lift in places, and the Michigan Highway Department would put barricades up on both the mainland and island ends of the winter roadway. Ice Island would be cut off from the rest of the world until the surface of Lake Superior had thawed enough for the ferry to start running.

  People who didn’t live in this part of the country found it hard to believe that a state highway could just keep right on going across frozen water. But up here on the northern side of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, there were days in January when the high was twenty-five below. Although Lake Superior didn’t freeze out in the middle, this close to the shore the ice got thick. You could drive an eighteen-wheeler across it, it got so thick.

  Another gust of wind howled in the eaves, and it occurred to Don that he should be getting dressed instead of standing at the window in his pajamas. After a quick shower, he donned his blue trousers and shirt. Using the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, he checked to make sure his badge was pinned on straight. Six-two and broad-shouldered with dark hair, Don looked good in the uniform. It used to be the Ice Island constable just pinned a badge to his shirt, but a couple of years ago the town council had decided that a more official-looking police officer would command more respect from the tourists. Don had made sure a uniform allowance was added to his salary.

  The smell of breakfast cooking wafted up from the kitchen. Hotcakes unless Don’s nose was playing tricks on him. He headed downstairs.

  “I was beginning to think you’d gone back to sleep,” Allison said as he stepped into the k
itchen. She was at the stove, flipping a hotcake.

  “When have I ever done that?”

  She faced him, frowning. “Let’s see. There was November fifth, December twelfth, not to mention January twenty-seventh, and then there was—”

  “Stop. You couldn’t possibly remember the exact dates.”

  “She’s just teasing you, Daddy,” Sarah said. “It’s her way of telling you that you can be a little hard to get out of bed sometimes.”

  “Oh,” Don said. “Good thing I’ve got you here to explain it to me.”

  Sarah gave him a look that probably said paragraphs to another teenager but was meaningless to him. The girl turned her attention to her half-eaten stack of pancakes. Don sat down at the table, and Allison put a steaming cup of coffee in front of him.

  As he sipped the hot liquid, Don watched Allison use a ladle to put circles of batter on the griddle. Like him, she was nearing forty, but while he was thickening around the middle, Allison seemed as trim as she’d been at twenty-two. Her hair was shorter, and a little gray was getting mixed in with the brown, but she still had the same pleasant smile, the same girlish laugh. She reminded him of Susan St. James.

  Sarah looked so much like her mother Don sometimes joked that his daughter must have been a clone. He was sure he had contributed some genes in there somewhere, but they were hard to find. Sarah looked like a sixteen-year-old Susan St. James—one with a frizzy, fluffy high-schooler’s hairdo.

  Allison put a stack of pancakes in front of him. He added butter, then some of the maple syrup they’d made themselves, the sap coming from trees on the east end of the island. The land belonged to Al McDougall, who said any islanders who wanted to tap his sugar maples in the spring were welcome to do so.

  “We going to make our own syrup again this spring?” Don asked. He washed a forkful of pancakes down with coffee.

  Sarah rolled her eyes. “Daddy, you can get it in the grocery store without doing all that work.”