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

by Chet Williamson

  He was shaking and breathing hard. He pushed through the door without stopping and it slammed shut behind him as he carried her into the center of the house. He was humming; she felt the vibrations in the hollow of his neck just above the thick coat collar, and the strong beating of his heart almost but not quite loud enough to hear. The humming got thinner and louder, like a teapot getting ready to whistle. Faster and faster, he carried her through rooms and halls. Then they were outside.

  Not exactly outside. There was nighttime sky overhead, with a few cold-looking stars and a few snowflakes. There were bushes and a tree. But there were walls on all four sides.

  When Jerry set her down, she was on ground, not floor. She staggered and caught herself on a cold, wet metal bar—a fence or a railing. She was in a space in the middle of Jerry’s secret House, like a big box with the lid and bottom off, a room with no floor or ceiling.

  For a minute she couldn’t find Jerry, and she thought maybe for some reason he’d left her here. Then she saw him, squatting over in the corner of the courtyard, big and round and gray as a boulder. He grunted, straightened a little, and moved his arm up and over in front of him. She couldn’t tell what he was doing. She didn’t care.

  Then she saw that he was pulling open a door in the ground and laying it open beside the hole that it had been hiding. Opened like that, it looked kind of like book covers.

  Jerry came over and gathered her up again. He was still humming, still panting. This time he laid her over his shoulder and held her there with his forearm across the backs of her legs. Her head and arms hung down his back like the snout and paws of the red fox fur that Rae’d found that time at Goodwill. Its long body had been all skinned and hollowed out.

  He had a thick rope in his other hand, and he used it to pull the trapdoor shut after them. When that happened, Lucy’s ears felt funny, like when she’d flown in an airplane to Grandma and Grandpa’s in Texas. But they didn’t exactly hurt this time. She didn’t think anything would ever hurt her again.

  They were underground, underneath Jerry’s Louse. Lucy had never been under the ground before. They were inside the earth.

  Lucy thought of mites and spiders, of worms eating secret tunnels for themselves to ravel through. She thought of earthquakes, and those stone plate things that moved round down here; of volcanoes, because this vas where lava came from.

  After they’d gone down a whole lot of winding steps, Jerry stopped. Over his humming she heard the jingling of keys again, the scraping and clicking of keys in locks. The door he opened this time was in a wall, not in the ground, and it had padding on both sides.

  He took her through the door, into a secret chamber deep inside his secret house, and shut the door behind them. He crouched and slid her off his shoulder. Her legs wouldn’t hold her, and she collapsed onto something bouncy, like thick foam rubber. Jerry stood up again and ran his hands all around the edges of the door, the way Mom did when she sealed a container for the freezer.

  Lucy tried to look away from Jerry, into the chamber. It was so dark that she thought maybe she’d closed her eyes again without knowing it, and she stretched them wide until they hurt at all the corners.

  Then she started to see things. Shapes. Movement. On a couch or bed was a boy curled up on his side.

  Ethan.

  She started to crawl toward him. Her arms and legs were heavy. Her hands and feet didn’t seem to belong to her.

  But it wasn’t Ethan. Ethan was dead. It was Billy Duncan, from group.

  Somehow, for some reason, she’d kept crawling across the foam-covered floor, and now she was right next to him. He was asleep.

  She raised one hand. That made her tip sideways, but she didn’t quite fall over. She touched Billy’s shoulder. He opened his eyes. They were flat and white and didn’t have any light in them. She didn’t think he was seeing her or anything else. She heard herself say, “Hi, Billy,” but he didn’t say anything back, and he smelled funny.

  “Lucy.”

  Rae.

  Rae was coming toward her. Lucy wasn’t even surprised. Rae was as dark as everything else in the chamber, but her eyes were little white circles with black dots.

  “Lucy.”

  Then she realized that shadowy figures were coming toward her from everywhere, like fog. They were closing in. One or more of them touched her. Now she couldn’t find which one was Rae. Their faces all looked blurred. They were all saying her name.

  Hands were under her, inside her clothes, raising her up into the dark air. She was swirling. She opened her mouth to breathe or to cry out. The fog got inside her throat, burning, pulling. The faces and hands and tongues and teeth got inside her body everywhere.

  Then she saw Jerry in the center of the foggy circle and heard him calling her name, too. “Lucy,” he said. “Lucy.”

  28

  She was naked, but not cold, not embarrassed. Hands were on her everywhere, rubbing, holding her down. Stephanie’s nails were digging into her left shoulder, but it hardly hurt at all. Rae was on her knees with one hand on each side of Lucy’s pelvis and her head bent so low that Lucy felt breath on her belly, on her pubic hair. That was okay. Rae was her sister. Other teenagers she didn’t recognize had hold of her feet, her knees, her hands, her hair. She couldn’t move. Part of her mind kept saying, Get out of here! Fight! and she knew that if she was ever going to get out of here, if Rae was going to get out of here, they’d have to do it themselves.

  She felt like a traitor for even thinking about leaving. She really didn’t want to go anywhere. Even if they hadn’t been holding her down, she couldn’t have moved.

  Everybody was humming. She thought she might be humming too. This underground chamber was full of humming, rubbing, sucking.

  Her head was in Jerry Johnston’s lap, held there by the insides of his giant soft thighs and by his big hands massaging her head and face. She knew it was Jerry by the smell of him, the feel of him; she couldn’t turn her head to see.

  Jerry was humming. His whole body vibrated, making her vibrate, too. Then his voice broke out into words. “Rage,” he said, and the word was big and hollow, hungry, “Rage. Sorrow. Terror. You are scared. You are sad. You are furious.”

  And she was, then, everything he’d said and more. She was more than sad; she was distraught. She vibrated with terror. She was enraged.

  She writhed under all their hands. Among all the hands that were on her, she searched in her mind for Jerry’s and was able to pick them out right away. They moved all over her body like a massage. Cupping, slapping, pressing, pulling.

  “Feel it, Lucy,” he murmured to her, just to her and not to anybody else. “Let yourself really feel it all.”

  Somehow he was inside her, inside her mind. Dimly she understood what he was doing: he was finding what she already felt and making it stronger, making it bigger, making it hotter and thicker and more to his liking and much more dangerous to her. So vaguely that it was almost unconscious, she understood that Jerry was using her, that he needed her hurt and fear and anger in order to stay alive, that even those feelings wouldn’t keep him going for long and so he’d use her up in a hurry and she’d be dead and then he’d find somebody else to feed him.

  Jealousy spurted brief and hot, deep inside her. She felt Jerry reach for it and grab hold.

  She would gladly give him anything she had, everything he could find in her and use for himself. She would die for him. That was all right with her.

  Rae cried a thin hollow wail, raised her head, and took her hands away from Lucy’s hips. Lucy couldn’t tell exactly where her sister was touching her until she wasn’t anymore. Now those spots were cold.

  Jerry was so close to her that she couldn’t tell which were her feelings and which were his, and she didn’t care.

  She saw a face, part of a face, a figure moving outside the circle. In the same chanting voice, Jerry said, “Rae,” and Rae, sobbing, put her hands back on Lucy’s pelvis and lowered her head over her again. Now L
ucy felt her sister’s tears on her belly, between her legs. But that was okay, because the circle was complete again, there weren’t any gaps, and Jerry was going to kiss her, she saw his face coming down over hers.

  His mouth seemed to cover her whole face. There were teeth in it that sank into the flesh under her jaw, and a tongue that lapped at her eyes and nose, but mostly he sucked. Hands massaged her everywhere, inside and outside. Humming and chanting rose. Rae’s sobbing was almost a scream. Jerry sucked. Lucy saw her mother’s face, her mother’s hands. But it couldn’t be her mother. It was too late for her mother to be here. She felt herself draining into him, and understood in a dizzying rush that she was going to die so that he could live.

  “Stop it!”

  Light. Cold air. Yelling. Jerry’s mouth, face, hands taken away from her. The hands and voices of the others taken away from her. Mom in the open doorway. Mom running into the room. Stephanie and the others (but not Rae) surrounding Mom, putting their hands on her, pulling her down.

  “You crazy son of a bitch, you can’t have my daughters!”

  Mom was sprawled on the floor now, against the cot where Billy was still asleep. She was held down by half a dozen members of the group (but not Rae, not Rae). Lucy longed to be one of those with their hands on her mother, but even though nobody but Rae was touching her now, she couldn’t move.

  “Well,” Jerry said from somewhere behind her. He was panting. “Carole.”

  “You sick bastard!”

  “I’m glad you’re here.” Jerry’s voice was husky with excitement as he moved farther and farther away from Lucy. A profound terror swept her: her mother was in danger; she was going to lose her mother.

  Jerry was bigger and needier and more powerful than her mother could possibly understand. Lucy understood.

  Jerry didn’t try to stand up or even to crawl. He just scooted across the foam floor toward her mother. The heels of his hands left little indentations for a second or two, and his legs and butt left a faint trail like a snake’s. Four people were holding Mom, although right now she wasn’t struggling. On the cot, Billy still hadn’t moved, and, suddenly, it occurred to Lucy that he must be dead.

  She shivered and tried to hide herself, mostly from her mother but also from Jerry and the others. When she was this far away from Jerry, when he wasn’t paying attention to her, she felt stuff again. Bad stuff, painful stuff, stuff she didn’t want to feel. So sad. Furious. Scared to death.

  Rae was sitting on the padded floor next to the pile of Lucy’s clothes. Her legs were spread out in front of her and her hands fell limply onto the mat between them. She was wearing jeans and a sweatshirt that Lucy recognized from before she’d disappeared; they were filthy, and way too big for her now. Her head was up and her eyes were open and at first she seemed to be watching what was going on, but when Lucy motioned to her to hand her her clothes, she didn’t move.

  Lucy thought maybe Rae was dead. Like Billy. Like Ethan. Like Mike Garver, she realized, who probably really had died of a heart attack or the doctors wouldn’t have said so but who, before his heart attacked him, had been full of rage and sorrow and fear, and had been used up.

  Jerry had used him up, and now he needed more. More and more and more. Nobody could fill Jerry up anymore. Nobody could make him happy. Maybe she could. Maybe she was the one person in the world who could make him happy. Now he really needed her.

  Feel it. Feel it as big and as hot and as hard as you can, and then give it to me.

  She’d have to get her clothes herself. She was so tired and weak and confused that it took her a long time to get to them, crawling across the padded floor and trying to hold on to the smooth padded wall. Then it took her a long time to put them on because she could barely remember how buttons worked, or sleeves. The cloth hurt her skin.

  “I get so empty,” Jerry said thoughtfully, reasonably. “I get so hungry. It used to be just sort of a small, nagging discomfort, and it didn’t take much to soothe it. When I was a kid, all I had to do was befriend screwed-up kids, once in a while see to it that they got in serious trouble or got badly hurt. That was easy.”

  Lucy couldn’t imagine Jerry as a kid. She couldn’t imagine anything. Her mind and body were all shapes and colors and loud noises, sorrow and rage and fear.

  “But the older I get,” Jerry was saying, “the more anxious and agitated I get. Lonely. Out of balance.”

  Hell fall on me, Lucy thought. Hell squash me. She wasn’t at all scared by that. In fact, she hoped it would happen.

  “Sometimes the hunger is all I am. I get ravenous. It’s life-threatening. You understand that, don’t you, Carole? I know my kids do. I have to do this in order to survive. It’s a matter of simple self-preservation. Basic, primal survival. I have no choice.”

  Suddenly Mom tried to pull away from Stephanie and the others who were guarding her. They must have been a lot stronger than they looked, because they didn’t let her get away. She did manage to kick or punch one of them; Lucy heard the impact, like a crumpled paper bag.

  Then they pulled Mom down. She cried out. One leg was twisted under her. Lucy saw that she was wearing Rae’s bright yellow socks and, under her open coat, the Boys’ Club sweatshirt Ethan had had years ago. Stephanie lowered herself over Mom and sat on her stomach. Mom cried out again. One of the others slapped her face.

  They were hurting her mother. Before she knew what she was doing, Lucy had gathered her strength and was trying to get to them.

  Somebody grabbed her from behind. It was Rae. Lucy smelled her sweet-sour odor and remembered now that that was the smell Ethan had always left behind, like a snail, when he’d come on those weird visits to Mom. Lucy sniffed quickly at her own skin to see whether she was starting to smell that way yet.

  Jerry had moved himself across the mat to be closer to Mom. He had a hand on her neck, under her collar, and was trailing the fingertips of his other hand down her cheek, around inside her ear, through the white and dark strands of her hair. In the movies and on the soaps when the cute guys did that and pretty music came up, you knew they were going to kiss somebody and then make love. Lucy’d often wished there’d be music in real life to warn you when somebody was going to kiss you or when the murderer was nearby.

  Jerry cupped Mom’s face in his hand. She jerked away but he got it again, in both hands this time. Was he going to kiss her? Jealousy stirred in her, and moral outrage. This was her mother. This was Jerry.

  Mom’s lip was bleeding where somebody had hit her. Lucy didn’t think she’d ever seen her mother’s blood before, or even thought about it. She started forward, thinking to put herself between Mom and Jerry, but Rae’s thin arms got tighter around her waist, and Rae’s very thin whisper sounded in her ear. “Wait.”

  Lucy sat very still. Her sister’s body heat seeped into her body, and she sent hers back. They were breathing the same air. She felt the beating of her sister’s heart through her own rib cage, the coursing of her sister’s thoughts in her own mind as they started to make sense again.

  But there were her own thoughts, too, and the beating of her own heart. Not daring even to whisper, she formed a message to Rae in her mind: You’re so strong. The answer came back as if it had been written in red ink across the pages of her diary: So are you.

  It was almost as if Lucy and Rae had a plan, a secret code. They didn’t. They’d never talked about anything like this. But it was clear to Lucy that if anybody was going to save anybody here, she and Rae were going to have to do it. Some things your parents couldn’t save you from, or even tell you what they meant. Some things were yours.

  “It’s a gift that you’re here,” Jerry was mumbling. “A great good fortune …”

  “I came,” Mom said through clenched teeth, “to save my daughters from you.”

  “You’re—a good mother.”

  “Go to hell.”

  “Anger,” Jerry breathed. “And grief …”

  Mom wailed, “You killed my son!”

 
“And fear …”

  Mom didn’t say any words then, but she made lots of noise. Her sobs were swallowed up by Jerry’s padded and locked underground secret chamber, and because she was trying so hard to stop them, they kept getting more and more ragged and painful. Lucy squirmed. Rae whispered again, “Wait. Not yet.”

  Jerry was having trouble talking, but Lucy understood him to say, “Make the circle.”

  He stayed where he was, hunched over and panting, while Stephanie and the others dragged and carried Mom toward the center of the low-ceilinged room. Mom fought them. She kicked and scratched and shouted. It didn’t make any difference.

  When Mom was positioned and secured on the mat by all those shaking young hands on her hands, feet, hips, shoulders, neck, Jerry took a deep breath and, grunting, pulled himself into the circle. He reached out both hands and took Mom’s head into his lap. She whipped her head back and forth and spat at him. Grinning broadly, running his pale tongue over his bared teeth, Jerry pressed one huge flat fist hard against each of her temples and made her stay still.

  They hadn’t undressed her. Lucy was relieved, but she wondered why. Jerry’d taught them that you needed freedom of movement order to have freedom of thought, that it was easier to uncover your feelings if your body was uncovered. He must be in a hurry tonight. All he did was unbuckle Mom’s belt and raise her sweatshirt a little.

  Lucy tried to look away. Something awful was going to happen, and it was going to happen fast. There should be drums, creepy music. “Rae,” Jerry said. “Lucy. Join us.”

  “No,” Lucy said. But Rae pushed her forward, and one on each side of Jerry holding Mom, the sisters joined the feelings circle.

  Watching Mom’s face carefully from only an inch or two away, Jerry began. “Ethan is dead.”