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

by Chet Williamson

  Whoever had brought them here was surely weakening by now, so tied to him and unable to let go even now, since his death would mean release.

  The daemon peeled its human mask and wormed into the lake.

  It came after him, driving through the water, a turmoil of waves erupting around a giant buzzing, thrashing figure; this other form of Adiel’s was built to ravage, though Matthew couldn’t make out its hidden shape inside the whitecap foam and sediment it stirred. The hexes filled him. Spindly ropes and curving limbs chopped through reeds and mire and anything else they touched. The Ripper searched him out as Matthew floated, too cold and trembling in the water, Jesus, not like this, not yet, holding on because his enemy couldn’t control the spell much longer. Adiel swallowed the water, following his trail easily. He’d been wrong to try this, I’m so goddamn stupid, it was on a perfect collision course. Another failure added to the heap of the night. There was no way for him to get away fast enough, nowhere left for him to escape.

  Matthew hesitated for a half second before he made a decision, another wrong decision, regretting it and hating himself for it, yet knowing, of course, that it was his only chance, even as it was the worst thing to do. Watching the daemon hunting in this wet grave of the dark, he let out a grunt of resolve. He shut his eyes and raised his hands, kicking to stay afloat, calling up the power that was his and the Goat’s, focusing on the pressure pounding in that space behind his soul, as he recited the words and launched these hexes, his fists incendiary, cursing the world and groaning. The blast of heat reached out for him in the same instant the Ripper’s lashing limbs struck him across the temple, its jaws spread apart and flashing alien fangs to bite him into a thousand pieces. Matthew opened his eyes and looked into another pit, screaming for all the murdered, screeching for his God.

  The lake exploded.

  Chapter Seventeen

  “Go over it again, Henry,” Hodges said.

  Charters glanced at the collage of snipped photographs, sat back in his chair, and wondered if his second wife, Melissa, would have eventually divorced him if only she’d lived long enough to grow tired of him. He sometimes believed that she, of all of them, was the one who would have stayed, making her death that much more ironic. Somehow, though, he thought, yes, even she would have learned to hate him.

  “Henry?” the sheriff repeated.

  “There’s nothing more to go over.” Charters took the ice pack off his swollen jaw. “After Roger and I left the boy’s room we came here to my office. I wanted to speak with him at length over what he’d experienced, but after I shut the door he apologized and coldcocked me.”

  “Wakowski slugged you?” Russell Stockton asked, leaning back against the desk. “Guy like that has to think he has a reason. He apologized first and then actually slugged you?” Russell sort of grinned, as though it would be funny to walk up to somebody, say you were sorry, then land one on the button.

  “How perceptive of you, Deputy.” Charters tossed the ice pack across the room, feeling where his dentures had come loose, the few remaining teeth in his mouth having shifted now thanks to Wakowski’s fist. “What was your first clue? This bruise or the fact that I’ve repeated myself a half dozen times now?” There was still blood seeping from his gums, and he took a breath, held it, knowing how much Melissa despised when he’d lost his temper, and let it out slowly. “I’m sorry.”

  Russell nodded. “There’s a mass of nerves there that will lay you out if the punch is thrown just right, and the guy doesn’t even have to be strong. It’s happened to me, hurts like a bitch.”

  “That’s just it, your question isn’t as superfluous as I took it for, Russell. Wakowski didn’t actually punch me. His fingers pressed into the spot, almost gently, and he merely poked me. Makes me feel goddamn ridiculous as well as ineffectual.” He sighed. His teeth hurt like hell. “Forget it. Are you protecting the boy?”

  Hodges said, “I have one of my men over there now.”

  “I don’t think Roger would harm Richie, quite the opposite actually. It appeared as if he was guarding the child. Something horrible spooked him, but even if I’m wrong your deputies won’t be able to stop him.”

  “Okay, he poked you in the face, but get over the Superman crap. Listen, Henry, I know this guy was a Marine, but please, don’t tell me my goddamn job.”

  “Nor you mine. We’ve got to move Richie Hastings to a safer place.”

  “We’re in a damn asylum for the criminally insane already, what’s going to be safer?” Hodges looked out the window and saw the beginning smears of rain pelting against the glass. He turned and regarded Charters, glancing back and forth between the doctor and those photos he was so interested in. Hodges waited a moment longer, considering the camera’s point of view, and said, “Wakowski isn’t here, so to take the kid out would only increase the risk of putting him in danger. O’Malley will do his duty and shoot the fucker if he comes back.” He shifted his gun belt, wondering, Jesus, where did this stomach of mine come from? “I’m going to tell you something, Doctor, and that’s only because I need for you to know it. You won’t tell a soul. No one. Are we clear on this point?”

  Charters kept a steady gaze. He knew Hodges was a man beyond either subtlety or exaggeration. “Yes.”

  “We found one of the missing girls this afternoon. Joanne Sadler. She was mutilated, and only been dead a few hours when we discovered the corpse. Which means that the psycho we’ve already got locked in your tower has a partner …”

  “Or is innocent.”

  “… and that partner might still have the other kids alive. And now on the very day we find the girl, that nut’s best friend, Matthew Galen, shows up after having been gone five years, and your chief of security cracks his pot. You don’t have to be a cop for half your life to be a bit suspicious of that. And we all know that Galen doesn’t come from a family with the most stable background, don’t we?”

  Charters’s eyes narrowed.

  The sheriff continued. “I won’t accept your professional opinion on whether you think he’s involved, because I know you and he go a long way back, and far as I’m concerned, anybody who spends much time in this place is crazy anyway. Don’t bother hawking him to me. Galen’s a suspect, and I fouled up and blew my stack and now may have lost him. When I get him back, though, I’ll keep him under wraps. I’ll also tell you that I don’t think this hospital of yours is worth the sweat off a flea’s balls.”

  “How poetic.”

  “Shut the fuck up, I think you shrinks screw up more people than you could ever possibly help, and that you let too many of the wrong ones back on the street again.”

  “I believe a good number of people agree with you.”

  “And now this thing with Wakowski might, or might not, have something else to do with it, and the whole mess is giving me the runs. If he’s involved with A.G. it would explain a lot.” Hodges sneered, at Charters or perhaps everyone. “Maybe he was trying to kill Richie because the kid could identify him somehow, but then why not just do it? And why go to the trouble of pretending to be caught in a flashback, unless he wanted to get off on an insanity plea, get the jury to wring their hands for the vet? What’s the point? From every angle I’ve looked at it, this thing falls apart.”

  Insanity in individuals is something rare—but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule, Nietzsche had said. Charters wished he could remember more. “I’ll give it to you as clinically as possible, whether you want to hear it or not, but I believe Roger isn’t involved in any of this.”

  “Now who’s cracked?”

  “He’s got problems, but whatever they are, he understands them and is fighting them in his own manner. He remains a soldier, and has survived by living and adapting to the insanity of war. I believe you can understand that.”

  “Not quite,” Hodges said.

  “I also think he would agree with you on the value of formal psychiatry, but whatever Wakowski is, he is not a sociopath in the clinical sens
e, despite what he may have done in war. I also don’t accept that A.G. is your kidnapper or killer, and since he doesn’t say a word or respond in any way to treatment, there’s no way for me to reach him. He is where he belongs, but I think he’s innocent of the crimes you’ve charged him with. You’re looking for someone other than these two men.”

  “Jesus Christ, is that a lot of horseshit. A guy sitting with a skeleton, doing God knows what to a kid, something so awful the boy’s flipped his wig too, but we’re not looking for him, huh?” Hodges swallowed the bitter taste in his mouth, knowing from experience that there were two things you could do when you couldn’t do anything. You either flowed with this tide instead of allowing it to drown you, as he’d done on the search-and-destroy missions he and Karragan had been party to, or you simply went without answers. “I want to talk to A.G. He’s got answers, and I want them, and he’s going to give them to me tonight. Now.”

  Melissa’s left eye peeked out from beneath her sailor’s cap, regarding Charters, reminding him of just how firm a hold this place had on him, even then. “No, he’s my patient. I can’t allow that. You have no authority here, Sheriff.”

  “Shove your moral dilemmas, Henry. Are you really that naïve?” The sheriff walked over, sat on the desk, and pressed a finger to Charters’s chest, wondering if he could poke him hard enough to knock him out too. He whispered though he didn’t want to, couldn’t seem to find enough humanity to put into it, and coming out with a snarl. “If he doesn’t tell me what I need to know, I am going to put a bullet in the back of his head.”

  Russell stiffened. “Umm—”

  “Shut up, Russell.” Hodges kept poking Charters, shoving harder and harder, understanding that it was causing pain, with another nice mass of ganglia near the clavicle. But the doctor took it like a man with hardly a grunt, you had to give him that. “And you will swear in a court of law that it was justified, Henry, or I promise that I will shoot you as well.” He turned and eyed Russell closely, wondering about him. “Hey, you got a problem with anything I just said?”

  Russell thought about it, about how you couldn’t really run fast enough or far enough, not to Canada or anywhere else, and so sometimes just had to make a stand on your own. “No, I just wanted to say it was about fuckin’ time, Sheriff.”

  As the three of them walked silently together through the garbage-strewn tunnels connecting the buildings, Henry Charters looked out at the rain and thought of things he hadn’t thought about for a long time. Details, denials, repressions that even a psychiatrist could fool himself into not noticing, but only for so long.

  It had been years.

  The harder he tried not to recall Mattie Galen’s mother, the more fleshed she became in his memories, the smooth, pale, graceful arch of her chin now so firm in his mind that he could feel his palms tingle: her intoxicating white smile, that laugh, her ebony hair that flowed so thickly, and all the other qualities that would not fade from his mind. He chewed the inside of his cheek until more blood ran against his teeth.

  The worst part of all was that, though she’d been dead these many years, she still wouldn’t vanish from his most urgent fantasies; the vividness of them could be hideously tactile. He remained as jealous of Galen now as ever—realizing he fought a ghost for the love of a ghost. There had been times when Charters had been invited to their home only to find himself so anxiety-stricken and incensed at watching the two of them together that he couldn’t bear the sight of their loveplay any longer. Spilling his drink, knocking plates to the floor and reveling in the sound of breaking dishes, apologizing as he was forced to make pitiful excuses and scurrying off like the mighty mouse. His jealousy drove him home, where he’d stop Sophie or Melissa or Maureen from doing whatever they were doing, grabbing them from behind wherever they were, to start making love to them wildly right there. Heat devoid of real poetry, angst, and humor. Merely a sad mockery of himself screwing his wives while envisioning himself with a different woman, so lovely, even now bending to clean up the broken glass.

  They walked out of the last corridor and came to the elevator of Tower C. He pushed the button for fourteen, the ride up too slow, and Charters felt anxiety beating away inside of him, looking for a place to be freed. Once he’d been more comfortable here in the asylum than in his own home, knowing his wife was not the woman he wished her to be.

  Now he couldn’t help but feel as if he were about to witness yet another portion of his life, and this town, coming to an ugly end, first ruined and then destroyed for incomprehensible reasons. Hodges stood beside him like an escort to an execution, and Russell moved with the wary alertness of an animal. The video cameras captured them for something more than posterity’s sake. He tried to soothe his stomach by rubbing on it gently the way Melissa used to, or Maureen, or his teenage wife Sophie stroking him and kissing his navel. He thought he might vomit.

  When the elevator doors opened at last, Charters flashed his ID badge at the security desk. Despite his warning glances, the men went through their usual formalities to an extent. Hodges and Stockton were known, of course, and wouldn’t hand over their guns or turn out their pockets or be frisked. Breaking procedure like this could get you killed no matter who you were. Charters could see a small yet very real danger in his men’s eyes, as if they thought the police now invaded a sanctum that ran outside their influence. One of the violent offenders could make a move, grab a gun, kill everybody all in the name of Hodges’s pretension. “Leave your guns here.”

  “Fuck you,” the sheriff said. “You really want to get into this, Henry?”

  Why bother? It served no purpose, so far down this path already. “No.”

  The three of them proceeded down the hall and came to the secondary gates, where Wakowski had been posted five nights a week since A.G.’s arrival. Perhaps evil and insanity can be contracted through osmosis, he thought, absorbed through the flesh by being in close proximity to madness. It wasn’t a new idea. He wouldn’t deny his own questions any longer: Why did she go mad? Why had he allowed her into this filthy purgatory? Why couldn’t I save her? Why didn’t she love me?

  The locks opened for them, noise of the gates scraping across the floor loud enough to crack the walls. Charters had one of the orderlies open the door to A.G.’s cell.

  “Here,” the doctor said tersely, voice hoarse as if from all the shouting he did in his head. “You son of a bitch.”

  “You’re coming with us, Henry,” Hodges replied.

  They entered.

  A.G. was gone.

  “What in the hell!”

  Eugene Carmichael rushed out of the kitchen, looking ready to grab his shotgun from the closet, consternation marring his cherubic face. If that damn Jello Joe was back bothering his daughter again, he’d point the dubious particulars of that out to him, for sure.

  He found himself gagging, taking a whiff of something long rotten and thinking that the freezer in the basement must’ve broken. “Good Lord, what … ?” Checking the door to the cellar, he saw that the latch hadn’t been tampered with, nobody’d gone down there.

  Carmichael turned and jumped as something brushed his leg. He backed against the kitchen doorjamb and Gusto limped by more asthmatic than usual, wheezing horribly, brushing past apparently unaware that Carmichael stood there beside him. Gus slowly gazed up without interest, and Eugene moaned, stooped, and took the dog’s head in his hands, unsure of what to do. “Boy … ?” he whispered.

  The blood all over.

  Gus, was covered in mud and blood, and seemed to have been in a fight with a pack of dogs. It had happened a couple of times before, but never like this. A terrible slash parted the hair down the length of his flank, still dripping fluid, and the pouring rain hadn’t allowed a scab to form. Some kind of black sludge dribbled from the dog’s chin, striking the wooden floor with increasingly loud pip pip pips. Thorns and brambles spiked his fur, and wounds of all sizes covered his rotund body. Eugene looked at the basement latch again, the smell so bad.
His arms were covered with gooseflesh. “Gus, oh, oh my pal …” His voice shook. “You’re gonna be just fine, boy, just fine. Here, let me …” He didn’t know what he was supposed to do.

  Thunder rocked the verandah, and Gus peered behind himself. Farther back in the hall Eugene saw another figure in the dark. The light switch was over there, and he couldn’t reach it to see who the guy was first. He gritted his teeth and moved forward quickly but cautiously, coming closer and lifting the heavy statue of The Kiss from the table, hoping he didn’t have to splatter anyone’s brain with it. He thought that it might be Jodi, his baby girl lying there. My God, my God, why are you doing all of this to me now?

  Matthew rose and stumbled into the foyer, and with a muted groan fell against the wall, knocking La Pietà off the table. Carmichael stared at the broken pieces of the statuette on the floor until Matthew’s knees buckled and the boy joined them there. He splayed into a pink puddle of water and Carmichael hurried to help him, muttering frantically, “My God, what’s happened to you? Here, here, hold on, I’m right here.” Where was Jodi? Jesus.

  Rain lashed the screen door and kicked it back open just as Matthew managed to get to his feet. He reached out with a bleeding hand and threw an arm over Carmichael’s shoulder, the stench so incredible that the old man backed up a step, then another.

  “It’s all right,” Matthew said.

  “All right? That’s what you say, that you’re all right, bleeding like that?”

  “I’ll be fine, Eugene.”

  Poison still clung to his shredded, burned clothes, as he watched Carmichael drop the other statuette, it too crashing and bursting into fragments.

  “Sure, sure, you’ll be fine, son, I know you will.” Carmichael looked around searching for help. “The one time I need them two goddamn no-talkin’ chess-playin’ antisocial immigrants and neither one of ’em is in sight!”