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

by Chet Williamson

  Finally, they bagged her and put her on the gurney.

  “There’s no way we’re going to be able to keep this under the lid,” Russell said. He thought so much about his own daughter that his ears were beginning to hurt from the sounds of her giddy voice so loud in his mind. He’d already called home and told his wife to keep the doors locked, get the spare gun out of the drawer and load it, keep it handy. She knew better than to question him, she’d haul up their little girl from her swing set and stay inside until he got home and told her it was safe, if he could manage that.

  “We’ll do it.”

  “What was he waiting for, Sheriff? Why kidnap her so far in advance? Because he wanted to keep her?” He felt wrong, talking about the case out loud like this, but there it was. “This guy’s been keeping her a prisoner, hiding, living with her for so long, doing what, making friends? Looking for a lover? All the time knowing that he was going to do this to her?”

  “He’s kept quiet too long,” Hodges said. “Now he’s screaming for attention. You can feel it.”

  “What about A.G.?” Russell said.

  “What about him?”

  “Does this mean he’s innocent? Did—?”

  The word “innocent” didn’t sound the same in this place anymore. “So he’s a lunatic with a partner. Or partners. Does an innocent man sit with a goddamn skeleton and somehow foul up a child’s mind so much that the kid goes catatonic?”

  “So he was part of something bigger.”

  “We’re missing something, Russell. Something. Someone. And you’d better start helping me to find out who and what it is.” Hodges forced himself not to go over and kick Karragan’s assistants in their asses, grab somebody by the back of the head, twist, and demand satisfaction. They were already too intimidated to even talk, thank Christ, so he didn’t have to hear whatever it was they whispered back and forth while they put the pieces in bags and jars. “And if we give him any attention it’ll feed his hunger even more. If we starve him, maybe he’ll slip up, maybe we can bait him.”

  “I hope to Christ you’re right.”

  “Me too.”

  Russell was surprised to hear that, and wondered if the food metaphor was accurate. He decided to roll with it for one more turn. “And if the others are still alive, won’t that mean he’ll just gut them even more quickly, trying to feed himself?”

  Hodges didn’t hear. “If this guy is from town, then I don’t want him to be able to get his rocks off every time someone mentions this girl’s name. Those other kids might still be alive somewhere, and we have to find them before he decides to…”—to do what, how did you put a name to any of this?—”… to do it again.”

  “Sure.”

  “We’ve got to be tighter than ever before,” the sheriff said, more to himself than to Russell or Karragan. When he became this emphatic he began speaking with such a strained focused gaze that you couldn’t tell anymore if he was staring at you, into you, or only within himself.

  “Tighter than before what?” Russell asked. “What do you compare it to? When the Fredrick brothers knocked over each other’s stills? When Henderson’s girlfriend found him in bed with his wife?”

  “Maybe you should phone Sheriff Bradley,” Karragan suggested. “I heard he had some problems like this over in Gallows a few years back.”

  “No.”

  “Why not?” Russell knew why not, but had to put the question out in front anyway. “If there’s a chance he can help, then let him in on it.”

  Hodges merely stared at the side of Russell’s face until the deputy shook his head and checked the ceiling once more, watching the spiders poised in their nests, examining from a distance the cut wire still hanging from the rafter, detailing the inches, the traces of madness. The sheriff spun and looked at Karragan, who simply stared back at him, the two of them locked alone in this because they understood each other so much better than the rest, and understood at least a part of this new phase of blood. “She’s a sign. A note to us.”

  “Yes, Louis,” Karragan said, coughing into his fist.

  Russell looked down at the circle on the floor. “What does it mean? Those two words.”

  “I don’t know. After we finish up here I want you to go to the library and check it out. Ask Millie the reference librarian for help if you need it, but only Millie. She’s the only one who’ll keep her mouth shut.” He tried to pronounce the words and couldn’t; how did you say Yhwh? What kind of clue was he leaving behind? “The bastard left them for us to find, so we know there’s a reason. You know how to read.”

  “What did you mean by saying she was a note?” Russell asked.

  “Like in the war,” Karragan explained. “You would leave them nailed to a tree and they would leave us signs staked out in the jungle, usually with their eyes and genitalia gone. Just so we would never forget how much hate we could live with. So you remember your foe every minute.”

  “It’s working for me,” Russell said.

  Stepping on a spider, knowing it bore witness to everything that had happened here six hours before, Hodges told them, “Until I know what it is he thinks he’s doing, nobody else gets in on it.” You wouldn’t think you’d have to repeat yourself so much as this, but Hodges realized how effusive his orders were at the moment, how often death could come between him and his men instead of banding them together.

  “Too late,” Russell said, gazing beyond Karragan’s shoulder out into the field where the leaves kicked up into the rising shadows. “Hey, there’s already two guys standing over there watching us.”

  What had been set in motion continued to move.

  Now, Sheriff Hodges saw Matthew Galen reach out, unzip the body bag, and touch the girl’s forehead before anyone could stop him, pressing his palm against her tormented flesh and, with two flicks of his fingers, describing a mark on her skin.

  Time contracted as forty years and forty pounds disappeared, and with a growl that made them all look up, Hodges rushed over as if sighting the killer and backhanded Matthew with such ferocity that the sound of bone fracturing filled the room.

  Matthew’s nose shattered instantly as blood spurted and gushed down his face, the cartilage snapping with ease, and the sheriff recalled just how good it felt to let some of the venom escape. Almost crazy enough in this moment of red-trimmed vision to scream his dead son’s name, he grabbed Matthew by the shoulders and swung him around, slamming him full force into the station wall where the windows broke like ice crackling. Hodges heard yet another snap, maybe the guy’s clavicle or maybe his neck or back, as his hands closed over Galen’s throat and tightened, and tightened, and kept tightening.

  “Louis!” Karragan bellowed.

  “Sheriff!” Jazz yelled.

  Neither of them could get ahold of Hodges as Russell shouted into the sheriff’s ear and tried to pry his fists loose from throttling Matthew.

  “What the fuck is your problem?” Hodges screamed into Matthew’s face as the kid coughed, choking, his face mottling, but with a curl of the lip as if he was liking this. “You get your kicks out of touching dead girls, huh? Or maybe you just like making them dead, maybe you know where the rest of them are, eh, Galen? I remember you, you’re the fucker who thought he was hot shit just because he ran a football across a field once upon a time. I know you’re best friends with that other shithead in your mommy and daddy’s bugfuck house on the hill. I wouldn’t put it past you being a part of this thing from the beginning. Right? Say it now! Tell it to me now!”

  Jazz tried to break Hodges’s hold, grabbing at his wrists, but the sheriff shrugged once and elbowed him in the gut. Jazz went down on one knee. Blood spumed from Matthew’s nostrils onto the sheriff’s fists. “Maybe you thought it was time to leave a body behind, throw off suspicion, make it look like your pal was innocent. But it isn’t that simple, fucker. He’s not going anywhere except for when I put him and you into the cold ground, you hear me! You’re going into the ground! When I find out you had something to d
o with this girl’s murder and those other missing kids I won’t waste my time going through the system. Bet on it, just me and my Colt .45 will find you and make you pay. Believe it. You know what those words over there mean, don’t you, Galen? I know you do!”

  As the blood flowed down his face, his voice became a snarl torn from his throat, more feral than Hodges’s, if possible, with the blood filling his mouth. Matthew’s eyes deepened with all that dwelled in shadows inside them, and he said, “Take your hands off me.”

  Heartbeats thudded around the room.

  And Hodges released him and backed up a step, bottom lip trembling, the boiling rage turning to fear in an instant, and came this close to letting loose a whimper.

  Hodges thought of his son still racked with pain and his wife’s mangled face after smashing into the windshield—Jesus no—dropped suddenly into terror as solid as the cement floor but far colder, like nothing he’d ever felt or seen before, there in those eyes, the feeling already passing as he obeyed and Matthew fell backward out of reach and into Jazz’s arms.

  “This could ruin even one of Bosco Bob’s parties,” Jazz said.

  Matthew staggered from them all, past the girl’s body on the gurney, his fists bleeding black hexes as he stumbled outside and down the steps of the abandoned train station. He made it to Potter’s Field before dropping to his knees, spitting out precious blood, bracing himself against a crumbling tombstone as he tried to stand and failed.

  He staggered to the grave that might be his mother’s, dragging his feet through the weeds until at last he sank on top of it. Blood smeared the stone, and somewhere the Goat collected more power. He lay against the hard earth and soft crumbling roses.

  He stared at Panecraft.

  His enemy peered back.

  Chapter Twelve

  Debbi stood silhouetted on the horizon. She listened without interest as he gestured and drew weird pictures in the sand, talking on and on about stuff that didn’t mean anything much, though he really got into it: pagan rites, names of power, scrying, and summer solstices and witchcraft and the differences between Wicca and Satanists, and something called the Inquisition.

  She sighed and tossed a handful of broken scallop shells and periwinkles back into the sea. “But what’s all that got to do with the lighthouse?” she asked impatiently. “You’ve been going on about it for a half hour, and I still don’t know.”

  He could only shake his head and shrug. He wasn’t altogether sure yet.

  She watched the waves. “It’s pretty cool, all that. You mean it really drove them underground? Like down in the caves? Or are you just speaking like that, what they say, figuratively? Makes sense, though, if they were being burned and tortured and stuff. Even if most of it was just religious maniacs over in England and Germany, and like what you said, hysteria, fanatic people killing midwives and them herbalist-type folks, what if some of it was true? Don’t you think that some of it’s got to be true? And what if they came here?”

  Over near the reef, a group of little kids flew kites and threw pieces of driftwood to a barking golden retriever, who chased the sticks into the greenish-blue surf and returned to the children with seaweed and bits of kelp clinging tenaciously to its fur.

  “You’ll keep studying up on it, though, won’t you?” Debbi said, putting lotion on his sunburned shoulders, toppling a large pile of library books and comic books as she slid closer to him. “You’re really getting into it. I can see you’re having fun, going to those bookstores.” He reached out with a beach towel and wiped off the side of her sweaty face. He wanted to ask why she cared so much about this, but the questions lay back in his mouth the same way the two of them lay on the blanket, listening to the radio. Baby crabs skittered through their collapsing castle just as the waves came in and filled up the moat. The wet dog ran past, spraying water on their feet. “Uh-huh,” she answered for him, tickling his ribs. Her hands were too cold. “You’ll keep on studying. Of course you will.”

  Kites threw shadows across his pictures in the sand.

  Yes, of course he would.

  He would do anything for her.

  Chapter Thirteen

  There were strange sounds on what might be his mother’s grave, as if coming from the ground, or somewhere else, distant and yet too close, as farther away the breakers crashed and the ocean continued to croon.

  There were smells too, the dead roses so sweet, analgesic, and potent, overpowering the wildflowers no matter where you stood in Potter’s Field. These noises, like bones striking together, like shards of mirror drawing back into place, and groans pressed into the dirt, and wind shrieks whistling through the dead trees, both eerie and human, went on like that for only a few seconds more, and then there was nothing left except blood on his jacket and a chiseled social security number behind his back. He sat and waited, feeling the weight of murder on his shoulders, the dead girl’s face perfectly alive in his mind. After another two minutes he heard footsteps, and then Jazz hovered over him and helped him to stand.

  Jodi Carmichael had not spoken with her ex-boyfriend Jello Joe since the night she’d caught him in the Krunch parking lot with the giggling, squeaking, and, she thought perhaps, meowing Charlene Dorwette, while the two of them made an awkward version of love in the backseat of Jodi’s own six-cylinder rust-bucket ’79 Duster. He had that kind of audacity.

  At the moment, though, Jello Joe stood on the porch with his mouth curved into a grin that was undoubtedly intended to be irresistible, and would have been at one time not so long ago, she supposed. With his eyebrows knitted and hair mussed just enough by the breeze, and jaw dropped with little boy charm, it was exactly the same face that Marlon Brando gives Kim Hunter in A Streetcar Named Desire, when he walks in the door after work, seeking forgiveness again.

  Stella took Stanley back, and look what she got for it.

  Jodi wanted to smash all of Jello Joe’s teeth in.

  She chewed the inside of her cheek and glared at him so hard that after a second she couldn’t even see him.

  “I heard Matthew Galen is back in town,” Joe said. “Is he staying here?”

  “Get the hell away from me.”

  “Listen, Jodi, can’t you give me a polite answer?”

  “Fuck you very much,” Jodi said. “That polite enough for you?”

  “That’s nice talk,” he said, doing his best to look offended. He was that kind of guy.

  “I know you enjoy meowing much better.”

  “What the hell’s that mean?”

  “Shut up. It means that I have no idea where Matt Galen is. In fact, I haven’t seen him yet. My father told me this morning he spent the night here. He got in late and missed breakfast. Jasper Metzner came for a visit, and I guess they left together, I don’t know.” The normal talk just about wore her out, holding back so much. “Now I politely request that you drop dead, preferably from a disease of the venereal nature so that poetic justice can be served.”

  “C’mon, honey, you aren’t still made at me, are you, babe? Listen, listen, I …”

  She wondered what the whine in his voice actually meant; was it just the little boy who’d had his toys taken away or lust because Charlene Dorwette had turned the frosty shoulder to him when she found out she couldn’t tweak his bank accounts quite as easily as she could his libido?

  Wind blew leaves over the verandah. Jodi kept the screen door latched. “Cut the crap. If you’re not off my porch in five seconds I’ll have my dog rip your heart out.”

  “I don’t think Gus could even find the front yard.”

  A bad bet. Gus, somewhere in the kitchen, rose from beneath the table at the sound of his name. He poked his tongue from within the mass of knots and licked his front paw, sneezed, and clambered forth. Despite his goofiness, he’d do whatever she commanded him to do, and that included attacking. You couldn’t see the fangs, but they were there all right. Gus barked happily and wagged his tail, but when he came to her, he sensed the atmosphere, and, almost in
audibly, began to snarl.

  Jodi crossed her arms. “Just as well. You don’t have a heart, anyway.”

  “Let’s be adult about this. I know I made a terrible mistake, Jo, but I really want to—”

  “Adult?” The word struck her completely wrong. She brought her heel back against the door stop, determined not to cry anymore. Gusto’s snarl grew louder. “Adult. Now all of a sudden you want to be adult? After what you did in my car with another woman? What, you think you’re going to be clapped on the back in the bars with that kind of story, about how you fucked Charlene in my car?”

  “No no, listen, Jo, you’ve got it wrong—”

  “Bullshit, Joey. Tell me the truth, you did it just because it sounded like a real joke you could tell the boys over a few pitchers. Yeah, let’s get adult.” Amazingly enough, she didn’t even feel like sobbing as she regarded him standing outside, all his charm gone, his hair too messy now. The anger in her became fluid, making her mouth water and eyes itch while she watched him.

  She smiled. Real fury didn’t leave her lacking, and welled, oddly enough, in her fingernails, which she kept digging into her palms. She thought about shredding that mouth she’d kissed so many times, so it would never grin or kiss anyone else like that again, she wanted to kick herself for ever having fallen in love with what stood before her so gracelessly.

  Not only had the sight itself been obscene that night—as if finding her car broken into by her own boyfriend and catching him humping another girl hadn’t been bad enough—but Joe had actually smiled up at her. Always with the grin. Always with the over-the-edge gall.

  “You’ve got to admit it was kind of a funny situation,” he said.

  “You stinking son of a bitch,” Jodi said. “No, of all the things I’ve had to do lately, Joey, that’s something I don’t have to admit.”

  He stepped forward and grabbed the screen door by its handle, and found it locked. “Look, I really care about you, so please, let’s …” The whine had turned into a full-fledged snivel of sorrow. Jodi couldn’t figure it out, why all of a sudden it should come to this.