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

by Chet Williamson

  Carly went to the closet, got down on her hands and knees. At first she didn’t see anything, but then she noticed the baseboard. It seemed loose on the left side. Carly pulled on it, and it easily came away from the wall. Lying flat on her stomach, Carly looked into the opening. It was about two feet wide, four inches high. And it extended through the wall. Suddenly Carly realized she was looking into the bathroom, into the space beneath the built-in linen closet, space that would be concealed from anyone in that room.

  There was something in the space. A large book. Carly pulled it out. It was a photo album. When she opened it, she found herself looking at other photos of Paul making love.

  With other women.

  Some were strangers.

  Others she recognized.

  Trembling, Carly shook her head as fresh tears rolled down her cheeks. A part of her was still grieving for Paul. Another part suddenly hated him. And that portion of her demanded to know how he could have done this to her, thought of terms like bastard, son of a bitch, asshole. It was all too much for Carly to handle. It was like losing him twice in the space of a few hours.

  The album was blue, and on its cover was a single word in gold script: photos. Carly shook her head, for even at her age she had enough sense to know that this was a trophy book, the pictures it contained as grotesque in their own way as the mounted heads of slain animals.

  She closed it with a decisive snap. Getting up, she took the album into the living room, tossed it onto the bloody carpet. Then she gathered Paul’s magazines—Penthouse, Cycle World, Motorcycling—and began tearing out the pages, crumpling them up, tossing them into a pile on top of the photo album. She knew where the matches were. Carly got them from a drawer in the kitchen, returned to the living room. She struck one of the wooden matches, then stood there staring at the flame. The pain was gone now. Carly was empty inside, as if the part of her that manufactured feelings had been removed. She was hollow, numb, not even sure why she was doing what she was doing.

  She dropped the match on the pile of wadded-up magazine pages. At first it looked as though the match would go out, but then the flames caught, began to spread. The orange fire engulfed a pair of people riding a new Honda, then spread to a blonde proudly exposing her breasts, moved on to an ad for Bell helmets. The pages curled, turned black, more motorcycles and nude women being consumed by the blaze. It was the size of a campfire, then a small bonfire. Carly stepped back from the heat.

  She waited until she saw the cover of the photo album start to crinkle and burn, then she turned and walked out of the house. At the edge of the woods, she stopped and looked back at the house. Flames, bright and orange, danced in the living room window. Carly watched until they poked through the roof. Then she turned and walked toward the lake.

  She wasn’t going back home.

  She wasn’t going back to school and listen to idiots like Brittany Uhl extol the wonders of school spirit.

  Slipping and sliding in the slushy snow, Carly made her way to the boathouse. She went past it, onto the still-frozen surface of the lake. South Point was probably closer to the mainland than the place where the ice bridge and the ferry landing were located. It was only a few miles. She could walk it. You weren’t supposed to go out on the ice after the Split was declared, but only a few days ago the ice had been supporting cars. It could hold her without difficulty.

  But today was unusually warm, something inside her cautioned. Carly ignored the warning. The ice would support her.

  It was difficult walking because, despite the ice beneath it, the snow on the lake was also turning to slush. Her shoes were low-cuts, for school, and her wet, cold feet were becoming numb.

  She’d been struggling through the slush for an hour when she saw the break in the ice. A four-foot-wide gap that ran as far as she could see in each direction. Gray, icy water. Carly stared at it. Although all her survival instincts told her to go back, she had no intention of doing so. Back meant school, her parents, life on the damned dull island.

  And what was ahead?

  She didn’t know. But at least it wasn’t what was behind her.

  She backed up, turned, and ran at the break in the ice. It should have been no problem to jump such a short distance, but the slush slowed her down, and her numb feet didn’t seem to want to work right.

  Carly reached the edge, leaped.

  Her foot reached the other side, and for a moment she stood there, balancing precariously, waving her arms, and then she fell, splashing into the icy water. As did anyone living this far north, Carly knew about hypothermia. So she knew that her only chance was to pull herself out as quickly as possible, hope the sun could warm her enough to keep her alive. But when she tried to get out, her arms seemed unable to get purchase on the ice. Instead of pulling herself out, she was pulling the slush in. Although she knew she was doing something wrong, she seemed unable to figure out what. Her next attempt was feeble, as if she no longer had any strength. She tried again and seemed barely able to lift her arms.

  After that the water didn’t seem as cold, and Carly stopped trying altogether.

  9

  Kesselring stood at the ferry landing, staring off across the deteriorating ice. He had what he’d so desperately wanted. The thing he’d been pursuing for three years was trapped here. Now he had to find it. Before the ice thawed and the ferry started running. And before it could turn this place into its own private slaughterhouse.

  Anyone on the island could be its host. He had to find that person. And then he had to do what he had come here to do.

  Three and a half years had passed since that day in the Pittsburgh grocery store. Although he’d known it wouldn’t work, Kesselring had tried to convince himself it hadn’t happened, that he was suffering from overwork or an overactive imagination—or that maybe someone had laced the squad room coffeepot with LSD. He was reminded of Scrooge telling himself that the strange things visited upon him were just products of indigestion. It hadn’t worked for Scrooge, and it hadn’t worked for him. And Kesselring’s life had been changed even more drastically than Scrooge’s.

  He had truly seen it.

  A thing that emerged from a dead man.

  Reason could not explain what he’d seen, for reason denied the existence of such things. Reason said there were no werewolves, no zombies, no vampires. Reason said monsters did not rise from corpses, then vanish as if some unseen dude in a control room had pressed a button. That was the first thing Kesselring had to do, stop relying on reason. Under ordinary circumstances, that would have been an impossible task for a pragmatic career cop like him. But he had unquestionably seen the creature. And he sensed—as clearly as he could sense music or cold droplets of falling rain or the heat of a flame—that it was something ancient and evil and vile. And after what had happened in the grocery store, he knew it was a bringer of death.

  He dreamed about it, dreams in which the thing touched him, and through that contact he experienced a coldness that went beyond a mere drop in temperature, a coldness that did not exist in the world as Kesselring knew it. And wherever it touched him, his flesh began to fester, then rot, turning greenish yellow, then brown, and finally falling off in putrid tendrils, like molten toffee.

  Before long, he was thinking about nothing else. When someone touched him, his flesh tried to shrink from the contact, for the monster could be hiding in anyone. Kesselring was going crazy. Though aware of it, able to see it happening, he’d been unable to stop it. It was the firsthand experience, the knowing. The thing was totally evil, repugnant, an anathema. That something so awful, so contrary to everything he held sacred, should exist was intolerable.

  Though not religious, Kesselring knew he’d been face-to-face with something from hell.

  Although these things simmered and churned within him, overwhelming him and playing a constant tug of war with his sanity, he told no one. Anyone he revealed his experience to would think he was crazy.

  Six months after that day in the grocery st
ore, Kesselring took early retirement.

  He couldn’t do what he had to do and still keep his job. It was going to mean a lot of traveling around the country— and the world, as it turned out—and if he was successful, it was going to mean breaking the law. The traveling would have been too extensive to do on weekends and vacations. And he didn’t want to break the law while he was supposed to be enforcing it. Not all cops felt that way, but for Kesselring it was a matter of principle, and principles had always guided his life.

  Or maybe these were just the reasons he gave to himself. Because he was unwilling to admit that he was hopelessly obsessed.

  Kesselring shrugged. If he was obsessed, what difference did it make? He knew what had to be done. He knew how important it was. You could probably say Churchill was obsessed with defeating the Nazis. Maybe Jonas Salk was obsessed with finding a vaccine to prevent polio. Being obsessed wasn’t always bad.

  And what Kesselring had set out to do wasn’t unlike finding a vaccine for polio, for he too wanted to thwart a horrendous evil. The monster could well have caused as much death and suffering as the disease. Maybe more. The monster had been at it every bit as long, possibly longer.

  Knowing. That was the key. Kesselring knew it existed, knew what it did. Only a handful of people had seen what he had seen. Most tried to resume their lives. Kesselring could not. Not knowing what he did.

  At first he’d called it the Charley, after Charles Capwell, the man he’d killed in the grocery store. But the word failed to convey the vileness and destructiveness of it. Later, after he’d learned how it thrived on death, he’d called it the Grim Reaper. Finally, he’d settled on the Evil. Because that’s what it was, evil, pure and monstrous, its only function to cause death. Again and again and again.

  The Evil had been here for a long time. Maybe it was as old as the earth. He didn’t know. Other people in other times had bogey-beasts that could have been the same one he sought now. There were tales of goblins and demons and ghouls, thousands of such stories, and Kesselring had quit trying to sort them out.

  What the Evil was didn’t matter.

  Only destroying it mattered.

  As Kesselring turned away from the ferry landing and walked back to his rented car, he felt the weight of his responsibility. He was probably the only person on the planet who could destroy it.

  Six

  1

  Leaning against the door of his Cherokee police car, Don Farraday watched as members of the Ice Island Volunteer Fire Department hosed down the smoldering remains of Paul Edley’s house. Karl Zellner stood beside him. Karl had reported the fire. He’d taken his dog, Brute, out to Al McDougall’s place—Al was a semiretired veterinarian—and on his way back he’d spotted smoke coming from South Point. The blaze had apparently gone unnoticed for quite a while, because by the time the firemen arrived, only one wall had still been standing, and that had collapsed when the spray from a firehose hit it.

  “Think there was anyone inside?” Zellner asked. He was one of those people who seemed to grow ever thinner as he aged. When he’d come to the island three years ago, Zellner was lean. Now he was scrawny. The only thing that hadn’t shrunk was his large rudder-shaped nose. If he kept on losing weight, the nose would be all that was left.

  “Shouldn’t have been. The place was empty, and I locked up when I left it.”

  “You think this had anything to do with Edley’s murder?”

  “I don’t know,” Don said. He’d asked himself the same question.

  “First Edley gets murdered, and then his place burns down. And before any of this happened, that guy broke into the Abelson cabin and committed suicide.” Zellner shook his head. “If I’d known Ice Island was going to be like this, I’d have stayed in Chicago. At least the winters weren’t as bad.”

  Don had nothing to say to that. He had absolutely no suspects in Edley’s murder. Not even Kesselring. Don had managed to lift several good prints from the tire iron used to kill Edley, none of which had matched the ex-cop’s. It was good that he’d managed to get the murderer’s prints, of course. The problem was that the prints were useless unless he had a suspect. With the information he had now, the murderer could be anyone on the island—anyone but Kesselring.

  He wasn’t happy with the idea that an Ice Islander had killed Edley. Although he wasn’t equally friendly with everyone on the island, he’d known most of its residents for years, and he had trouble imagining any of them being vicious enough to do what had been done to Paul Edley. Jealousy still seemed the most likely motive. Edley’s murder was an act of rage. And Edley was known to be a womanizer.

  “You know Edley?” Don asked.

  “I recognized him when I saw him,” Zellner said, “but I really didn’t know him.”

  “What’d you hear about him?”

  “Not much. I understand he, uh, had a way with the ladies.”

  “Hear anything about which ladies?” Don asked.

  “No, nobody ever mentioned any names.”

  Don nodded. He hadn’t really thought Zellner would know anything that would be helpful, but the only way to learn anything about Edley’s love life was to ask around, and the retired schoolteacher was standing right there. The stream from one of the firehoses hit a particularly hot spot, causing steam and sparks to spew from the charred remains of Edley’s house.

  The two men watched the firefighters in silence for a few moments, then Zellner said, “Never did find out what was wrong with Brute.”

  Don glanced over at Zellner’s car. It was one of those Eagles, a high-centered four-wheel-drive sedan. The German Shepherd was in the back seat, peering through the bottom portion of the back window.

  “What seems to be wrong with him?” Don asked.

  “He’s afraid of everything. If the phone rings, he runs and hides in the bedroom. An icicle fell off the roof this morning, and he actually squealed.” Zellner shook his head. “It’s just not like him.”

  “What’s McDougall say?”

  “Said something probably scared him, and that he’ll get over it.”

  “Doesn’t sound like it’s anything to worry about.”

  Zellner frowned. “But what could have scared him that much? I mean, Brute’s gone from being absolutely fearless to being afraid of his own shadow. I’ve never seen an animal that scared.”

  The fire looked as though it was pretty much out. The men from one of the two fire trucks were rolling up their hoses. Brian Young, the fire chief, joined Don and Zellner. He was wearing a fireman’s hat with chief on the front. Beneath the hat was a round, soft face with blue eyes and a thick gray mustache that was turning white. He owned the grocery store.

  “Everything’s under control,” he said. “It’ll be hot for a while yet, so I’ll leave one of the trucks here, just in case it flares up.”

  “Any idea what caused it?” Don asked.

  “With that much destruction, there’s no way to tell. Could have been wiring, could have been the heater, could have been anything.”

  “Arson?”

  “Sure, could have been arson. Like I say, there’s no way of telling. We need the state arson investigator, I guess, but with the Split there’s no way to get him here.”

  Don had always looked upon the Split as just something you had to put up with if you lived on the island. A little inconvenient, and it made you feel lonely sometimes, but otherwise no big deal. All of a sudden, he was discovering how difficult the Split could make things.

  “You figure this ties in with the murder?” Young asked.

  “I don’t know,” Don answered. He could see that he was going to get asked that question a lot in the next few days.

  “Any idea who killed him?” Young asked.

  Don shook his head. That was another question he was going to be asked a lot. And he wondered whether a week from now he’d still be answering it by shaking his head and feeling overwhelmed.

  2

  “Well, aren’t you at least a little bit conce
rned?” Carolyn Pfeil asked.

  She and her husband, Reverend Douglas Pfeil, were in the living room of their church-owned house. He was sitting on the couch. She was pacing.

  “She’s late, that’s all,” the minister said.

  “It’s nine o’clock. We haven’t heard from her, and no one’s seen her.”

  “She’ll come home when she’s ready to come home.”

  She stared at him, not believing he could be this calm and unconcerned. What was the matter with him? “Douglas, that… that man she was seeing was murdered this morning.”

  “Do you think Carly did it?”

  “No! Of course not! But doesn’t it worry you that Carly hasn’t come home, and then that man was bludgeoned to death?”

  He looked at her, but his eyes seemed distant, as if his thoughts were elsewhere.

  “And then his house burned down.” She waited for a reaction, got none, and continued. “Don’t you see? Carly could have heard about the murder and gone there—to the house. Maybe she was inside when it burned down.”

  “They didn’t find any remains.”

  “They probably haven’t had a chance to look yet.”

  “She’ll be home when she’s ready. I already told you that.”

  For several seconds, she just looked at him, as if doing so might somehow help her to understand what was happening. “Douglas … you’ve been acting so … so strangely lately.”

  He didn’t respond.

  “I’m going to call the police,” she said. “Something could have happened to—”

  Suddenly Douglas was on his feet, towering over her, looking at her with eyes that were cold and cruel and full of feelings she was unable to identify. Taking a step back, Carolyn Pfeil realized she was afraid, afraid of her husband.