Someone had to come up with a schematic design, which Cabot would critique and move along to the next steps, design development and production of working drawings — the blueprints the general contractor would need by next spring, when ground on Berkshire Acres was scheduled to be broken.
As of the moment the Federal Express man rang his buzzer, that someone was Nick.
They ate out.
Only once was the evening bittersweet — once, when the conversation turned to the next several weeks, when Nick would be setting up shop in Smithfield, the town closest to Elmwood. They would be together weekends, but it was still the first time since his doctor days that they would be apart more than the occasional night or two. It was going to be a little weird, they agreed. It was going to be a little lonely.
And it was going to be what both of them wanted.
After dinner, after coming home, after another half bottle of champagne that spun their heads firmly into orbit, they made love.
Sharon did not check the clock. That was intentional. When you were in the daycare business, morning came early; right now, she did not need a reminder of just how early. Her head pounded so badly it had awakened her and her stomach was about to lose the battle to keep her dinner down. She craved Alka-Seltzer, and she found them, two foil-wrapped tablets that she plunked into a Dixie cup filled from the bathroom tap.
As she waited for the bubbles to taper off to a drinkable level, Sharon wandered the apartment. Out of the bathroom and down the hall. Past their bedroom, where Nick snored. Through the kitchen — checking, as she automatically did every time, to be sure the stove was off. Into the living room. At the front door, parting the curtains to look across a darkened city that seemed to slumber easily. Into Nick’s study.
She paused — it was not the first time, nor was it unreciprocated — to admire her husband’s achievements. An entire wall was covered with framed sheepskins and certificates. His B.S. from Brown. His M.D. from Harvard. His membership in the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. The founding charter for CAN, Children’s Advocacy Network, the group he and she had established to push for legislation favorable to youngsters. His architecture degree, earned from Rhode Island School of Design at the age of 38 (not even close to senior member of my class! he’d reminded everyone at graduation. That’s Joe Blake, 51!). His certificate from the state Board of Examination and Registration of Architects.
Like Sharon, who with her sister had built one of the state’s largest daycare centers, Nick seemed to have come into this world with the word ambition imprinted on his forehead. Not blind ambition, the kind that combines with intelligence to make supreme assholes out of certain people. Not silly ambition, which propels certain others to make names for themselves in channeling or crystals or ufology. Not vulgar ambition, the sort associated with pinkie rings. Like Sharon’s, Nick’s ambition was gentle. Nick did not step on people to get where he wanted to go. He did not lie, cheat or chant mantras. He simply set goals, then reached them.
Sharon lifted the Dixie cup to her lips and swallowed, letting out a deep belch of relief as the Alka-Seltzer snuffed the blaze that heartburn had lit in her gut. She was at Nick’s desk now, her tongue working to cleanse her mouth of the taste of chalk. Unconsciously, her free hand found the gooseneck lamp and turned it on. Ambitious, yes, but not tidy. Not Nick. His desk was a foot high with papers. The Elmwood project, in all its glory. Surveyor’s charts. Aerial photographs. Ring binders filled with pages of building dimensions, maps of utility lines, locations of steam tunnels. Topographical surveys. Several dozen pencil sketches.
He’s nothing if not thorough, Sharon thought. Not content with the materials made available by Cabot, Nick had done his own research before submitting his proposal for Berkshire Acres. He’d read library books on institutions, gone back through his college texts for ideas on reuse of turn-of-the-century, red-brick schools and firehouses, which many of Elmwood’s buildings resembled. He’d made a day trip to the institution, a trip on which Sharon had accompanied him. He’d visited the Berkshire County Historical Society in nearby Pittsfield, where he’d ordered prints of several photographs, including one labeled “Field Day, 1941” showing middle-aged men in three-piece suits and clerical garb flanked by patients wearing clown costumes and rubber noses. The group was assembled on what appeared to be a bandstand. In the background was a lake.
Sharon pulled the photograph from the pile and held it to the light. It was black-and-white, grainy, slightly out of focus. An amateur job.
She’d seen it before — the day Nick had returned from Pittsfield with it. In his reading, Nick had discovered that field day was a tradition almost as old as institutions themselves. It was usually outdoors, usually involved a picnic and a parade and carnival games and dressing-up, usually included a visit by a bishop or the local mayor. Field day often ended with the crowning of a king and queen and, in some cases, fireworks and a ball. The idea was benevolent — even praiseworthy: make the demented and deranged feel special, at least for one day, by giving them a holiday. There might well have been therapeutic value, Nick and Sharon had agreed. But that still didn’t make it any less bizarre. The idea of taking a bunch of mentally ill people — people who heard voices and saw snakes and Lord knows what else in the ordinary course of events — and propelling them into some crazy fantasy world — well, it was like that absurdly comical film, The King of Hearts. Staring at the photograph that first time, Nick and Sharon had had a good howl.
Now, studying it again, Sharon was not amused. She was...
Spooked.
I don’t like this picture, she thought. There’s something weird going on in it. Something more than the clown costumes and rubber noses. Something deeper, disturbing.
Of course, that idea was as ludicrous as the picture itself.
Or was it?
A scene from her youth flash-flooded her mind.
She is back in high school — the public high school at Salem, Massachusetts, on Boston’s North Shore. She is a sophomore. It is Friday night. Her boyfriend has the car and he and she and a bunch of their friends are joyriding, sharing cigarettes and apple wine and an eight-track of Led Zeppelin. Someone suggests they head a couple of towns over to Danvers. There’s an institution sitting atop a hill overlooking Route 1 there. The local loony bin. Everyone’s favorite funny farm.
So they go.
They tear ass over to Danvers and there it is, hulking, dark, a mini Gothic city in which every building has spires, every window iron bars, every slate roof a red light and fire siren. Off the main road they turn, the Boone’s Farm going down mighty fast. Up the drive, the windows down, the spring night crisp and clean. Shouting and hooting and stopping the car. Looking up at the nearest building, the one labeled FORENSIC — a word they can’t quite define, but instinctively understand means the worst of the worst. Unexpectedly, a silence. They sit, these six sap-is-running teens, their merriment melting away. They can feel it, each of them: the same feeling the grown-up Sharon will experience two decades later looking at a picture her doctor-turned-architect husband has unearthed in an archive.
Suddenly, the laugh none will ever forget. Barely a giggle at first, slowly getting louder, shriller, rising in pitch, expanding to fill the warm spring night until it seems as if it’s in the car with them, enfolding them, pressing down on them, suffocating the very breath out of them. It’s coming from FORENSIC. Coming from the second story, from behind black bars, installed with axe murderers in mind. A laugh that has known death. That has caused death. Louder, that laugh. More insane.
Finally, a face at the window. Too dark to discern features, but not too dark to hide the teeth... the grin... the whites of the eyes.
The spell breaks. The car rockets forward, leaving rubber, leaving Danvers State Hospital behind... for good. Never again, would Sharon go up there.
In her husband’s office, Sharon shivered.
No, she didn’t like that picture of Field Day, 1941. Not one bi
t. She hoped Nick would be taking it with him when he headed off to Elmwood. Re-burying it in the pile, she went back to bed. It was an hour before she found imperfect sleep.
CHAPTER TWO
In the dark of the night
The wind came in great gusts through the potter’s field, there in the distant shadow of Thunder Rise, rustling the leaves of the oaks that towered overhead, swaying the grass and milkweed and wildflowers that had grown uninhibited for season after endless season, whistling through concrete tombstones that were numbered but bore no names. Every now and then, a half moon broke through the clouds. When it did, the darkened shapes of slate-roofed buildings could be seen on the horizon. Most prominent was the white Victorian house — boarded and shuttered — that stood on the crown of a hill.
The voices were soft, no need to be loud, no need to carry more than a few feet.
“He’s coming,” the one named Saint Peter declared.
“Who?” Alphonse asked.
“The promised one. The one we’ve waited for all these years.”
“Balderdash,” Alphonse replied, and it was evident from his tone that he was not in the habit of believing the things his friend said — not immediately, at any rate.
“Ah, but you are wrong. I heard the train today. Train’s a-coming.”
“I didn’t hear any train.”
“You weren’t listening. Soon, he will be here. Soon, he will walk amongst us.”
“You have said so before — and where has it gotten us? Nowhere.”
“This time, there is no mistaking.”
“Balderdash.”
“You shall see.”
“He will never come. Have you not learned that by now? Can’t you see?”
“I can see,” Saint Peter said, “and what I see is him. Here. Very soon.”
And then the voices were gone — borne away by the wind, so warm and sweet this early-summer night.
CHAPTER THREE
Happy Times
From outside came the sounds of kids: kids in class, kids at recess, kids in the yard on swings and slides. Big kids. Little kids. Infants and toddlers. Girls and boys. Every so often, an adult voice — a staff member’s — could be heard. Summer was the off-season for Happy Times, the daycare center Sharon Emin and her younger sister owned and operated, but it was by no means down time. Fully four-fifths of their 125 children were year-rounders. Meet the modern family.
“So he got off all right,” Gail Metcalf said to her sister.
“First thing this morning,” Sharon said. “I imagine he’s there by now.”
They were in Happy Times’s inner office, having their morning coffee. As much as they liked kids — and it was their love of children, not money, that got them into the daycare business — they never passed on their morning coffee.
“Sounds like he’s into it,” Gail said.
“God, yes. He believes the Elmwood job is going to make or break him.”
“How long has he been working on it?”
“About a month.”
“You never said a word!”
“He wanted to keep it a secret.”
“Shame on him.”
“I guess he didn’t want to raise expectations. If he’d lost out, I don’t think he would’ve wanted anyone to know.”
“What would make him think he wouldn’t get it?” Gail said. “His father owns Cabot, for heaven’s sake.”
“That’s exactly what he’s afraid of,” Sharon said, sounding more irritated than she intended. “The perception he got it because of his dad.”
“Well, it couldn’t have hurt.”
“If you knew his dad like I do, you’d know he got where he is the hard way. He’s a self-made man and he expects others to be, too. Including his son.”
“Don’t tell me he doesn’t have a soft spot for Nick,” Gail said.
Gail knew a thing or two about entrepreneurship — as did Sharon. They knew, for example, that without the financial backing of Gail’s college roommate, they might never have made a go of Happy Times. They knew that Sharon getting appointed to the Governor’s Commission on Child Care hadn’t hurt, nor had co-founding CAN with her husband, the ex-surgeon. They knew that in business — any business, architecture to daycare — success depended as much on who you knew as what you knew.
“Well, maybe he does have a soft spot for Nick,” Sharon conceded. “But Nick believes he won this one because he was the best candidate, pure and simple. I believe it, too. The fact that he’s a one-man shop — for now — that impressed Cabot. He can throw all his energies into this.”
Gail finished her coffee. The Berkshire Acres concept — it was unique, all right. Bizarre.
“I don’t know,” she said. “The idea of living in an old bughouse... no matter how fancied-up you make it...”
“Pardon the pun, but it does sound crazy, doesn’t it?”
Gail nodded.
“Until you start thinking about it. Thirty years ago people would have laughed you out of the room for suggesting you could make a home out of an old church. But that’s exactly what Nick did last year: took an old Baptist church and turned it into a house that went on the market for three quarters of a million dollars. Elmwood is the same thing, just on a larger scale.”
“Consider, too, what else the place has going for it.”
“What?”
“Location. It’s in the heart of the Berkshires — a pretty hot area these days. You can’t go anywhere without bumping into a New Yorker.”
“Just what we need,” Gail laughed. “More New Yorkers.”
“Yeah, but they’re the ones with the bucks. The marketing plan Cabot has in mind — Tanglewood, summer stock, the skiing — it’s right up their alley.”
“I can see the full-page ads now.”
“Not so crazy, huh?” Sharon said.
“No,” her sister conceded, “I guess it’s really not. You’ve convinced me.”
“Have I?”
“Sure. Reserve me a condo. In the meantime,” Gail said, checking the clock, “coffee break’s over. The little monsters have to be fed — and don’t forget, Rhonda called in sick. It’s you and me, sis, wearing the aprons today.”
“Not tuna casserole again,” Sharon said, rising.
“Sorry.”
“Yuck.”
“Healthy,” Gail corrected. “Nutritionally sound.”
“And still yuck.”
Laughing, the sisters left the office and waded through a sea of pre-schoolers gathered in classroom C for the start of story hour. As she passed through the children on her way to the kitchen, Sharon thought — as she did daily, and far more than daily on days she was menstruating — how ironic it was that life had not blessed her with a child of her own.
HEXES
By Tom Piccirilli
Chapter One
At least he thought he stood at his mother’s grave.
But in Potter’s Field one nameless marker abided as well as any other. Because of the weeds he couldn’t clearly make out the chiseled numerals on the few shards of tombstones that remained standing in the area. It didn’t make much of a difference. Their social security numbers, and perhaps a birth date, were the only way in which these dead were known.
Everyone in town realized that only a mile beyond Panecraft Hospital, somewhere on the hillside, hidden in the thickets beside the abandoned train station, there endured a graveyard of the anonymous, empty of remorse and family. Less gossiped about remained the section opposite the crumbling platform where another sunken meadow lay even more separate and untended. Along the trail were wildflower-covered graves of the stillborn, aborted, and murdered infants who’d never been given the chance to be held in their mad mothers’ arms. Whispered rumors allowed that there were one or two elderly women who still wandered the wards cooing to their own broken fingers and rag-stuffed dolls.
It made for good theater.
Matthew Galen crossed himself out of habit. Rose petals flapped fre
e in the breeze and swept against the empty October branches of the diseased sugar maples that leaned scattered across the field. He looked down from the hill and saw the lights of Summerfell coming on.
From here he could make out whatever sights there were to be seen on the edge of town, where you could catch a glimpse of your life unfolded.
He took the binoculars from his satchel and scanned his estranged home, feeling the nervous tension throb in him like his heart. He focused on the park and watched the lamplights lining the paths reflecting off the lake; benches and playgrounds slowly emptied with the arrival of evening. Glancing north, he noticed the windows of the high school gym glowing. He watched as orange flashes changed to a red that cooled to blue, cut to black, then lit up to white again. A school dance, possibly a costume ball if they still had the annual reception. Only the first week of the month, they were already set for the season of masquerades. They’d better be prepared, this year.
The Krunch Burger fast-food joint prevailed, spelled out in twenty-foot-high letters of blinding neon you could see as far away as Gallows, six miles across the river. A greasy short-order restaurant managed by Frankie “Screw with me and I’ll yank yer tonsils outtayashitter” Farlessi, with a region-wide reputation for hitting on teenage girls and killing dogs that wandered into his trash bins. Some of the Summerfell studs hung around the Krunch in hopes that Frankie’s wife, who occasionally flashed the boys extra thigh from her slit skirt, would cast her heated, luscious gaze their way.
A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult Page 589