“Maybe Ray told you already.”
“Maybe he did.” Her expression gave away nothing. “He’s dead, you know.”
“Oh, yes. I know.” And there was the first tell. She should have at least given a quick expression of shock if she didn’t already know, and the news had not spread around yet. It hadn’t even made the news except as a mention of a murder near the campus. “Did you kill him?”
“I was there when he died.” The smile she cast was enigmatic and infuriating. He had to resist the temptation to lash out at her.
“Where is Carrie?”
“Where she can do no harm.”
“What sort of harm was she planning on doing to you?”
“She’s not the one who’s been doing me harm, Neil Harrison. Her brother has been doing enough of that for the entire family.”
“Really? And what harm have I done you?”
“You’ve taken my picture with your cameras and you’ve given my image to the constables of this town.” Her voice was sharp, stern, and came with an odd reverberation to it. The sound was so off from what he expected that Neil stepped back, confused and frowning.
“What the hell are you talking about?”
The odd doubling was still there, as if two women spoke at the exact same time. “I’ve no desire to be seen, to be examined. I’ll not tolerate the interference of your likes in my works.”
“Tell me where my sister is.”
“Safe for the moment. That will pass unless you swear by all you hold dear to stay away from me and mine.”
Neil started to see red. The girl had to be working with someone else, someone who had a few tricks to scare away anyone who got too close to whatever they were hiding. He needed to make the girl understand that he wasn’t kidding around and he wasn’t going to let anything happen to his sister.
“Listen, you let my sister go, or I’ll make a point of ruining you, do you understand me?” His voice was harsh, demanding, because he had to make her understand he wasn’t kidding, wasn’t bluffing.
She laughed at him. Not a loud sound, but a mild scoff, as if his threats meant nothing at all in the grander scheme of things.
“You are a fool.”
Neil stepped toward the girl, looming over her. She was young and while she might have been athletic, she was slender. He was trained in hand-to-hand combat, and even if he weren’t, he had her by ninety pounds.
“That’s about all I’m going to take off of you.” His hands caught her wrists and he hauled the girl toward him, fully intent on subduing her and dragging her to the police if he had to. “Tell me where my sister is, you stupid bitch!”
The blue eyes widened with anger and the girl’s hands moved, twisting and thrashing as she spoke.
“Never touch me, foolish man.”
The pain that lanced through Neil was worse than anything he’d ever experienced, ever imagined in his life. His vision jittered and fragmented and his nerves shrieked inside his flesh. He tried to scream but couldn’t find the strength, the energy to do more than gasp as his knees collapsed.
Neil fell on his face on the hard asphalt of the parking lot and shivered, unable to control his body. Slowly, after what could have only been seconds but felt like a month of pain, his vision came back to him and he saw his hand in front of his face, twitching spasmodically.
“Your sibling is the least of your concerns.” The girl’s pretty face was made ugly by the sneer she cast at him. Not merely dislike, but hatred and contempt marred her features.
It was thinking of Carrie that gave him the strength to try again. She had been through enough already, lost so much in so short a time, and he was damned if he’d see his sister lose anything else.
Neil forced himself to his feet, swaying drunkenly, his pulse hammering at his ears.
“Wha’dchoodo?” What did you do? The words should have been simple, but he couldn’t make his lips form them any more than he could make his limbs obey simple demands.
The girl moved closer to him, but not, he noted, quite within reach of his hands. She was cocky, but not foolish.
“‘Tis but a little hex, a tiny storm cast upon your mind. It will pass if I let it, or it will grow larger, until the storm consumes you completely.”
Neil shook his head as best he could and felt the world tilt around him in a maddening display. He fell back to his hands and knees, retching and fighting against an overwhelming tide of nausea.
The girl’s laughter echoed through his head and he saw her feet only a few paces away, seesawing along with the ground below him.
“I like you, Neil Harrison. You’re a very pretty man. But I do not like you enough to risk the constables knowing me or mine.” It took all of his concentration to look upward, to see the girl where she stood over him, her body seeming gigantic in comparison.
“Whyyy?” He tried to speak more, but the saliva in his throat gagged him before it drooled down his chin. Why are you doing this? How can you do this?
“’Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.’”
The girl squatted, her legs primly held together, her knees inches from his face. Delicate fingers curled into his hair and held his head up so she could study him better.
“Who do ye love more, brother to Carrie?” That odd effect was back, the doubling of her voice. She spoke with young lips and a crone’s gravelly tones. “Is it yourself you’d save? Or your sister and her man?”
“Ray is dead.” The words came easily, and he knew it was because she let him speak.
“He is as dead as I decide he is, no more, no less.” She shrugged. “Will it be you, or them that lives this night?”
Oh, how he longed to lunge for her, to strike her down and beat her savagely, his vision blurred from the shedding of tears that glistened at the edge of falling. But his arms were like lead, his legs almost useless, barely able to hold his weight.
“’Twas a bet, foolish man. A simple game of truth or dare. The children wanted to know if I lived and found out more than they should have. You do not know my name yet, but I know your ilk. You’ll learn it if I let you, if I grow careless. So you have one chance. Do I let you live? Or do I spare your sister? If it’s you I let survive, you’ll know I can kill you with a word and you’ll mayhap be wiser. If I let her live, she’s never seen me, has no clue of my existence and I can be freed of this worrisome task.” Her voice was a girl’s again, wistful, and perhaps a touch bored.
“Snot fayur.” It’s not fair. “Ebil.”
“No, my pretty man, it is not fair, but it is all that I will grant you. And yes, my lovely lad, I am most decidedly evil.” She looked away from him to the slim watch on her slender wrist. “I grow tired of this game. Answer now, or I shall simply kill the lot of you.”
One chance to save his sister, to save Ray. One chance only to save himself. In the end the decision was easier than it should have been. He could live with guilt if he were alive.
“Let me live.”
“In the end, Neil Harrison, that is always the answer I receive.” The girl stood and started walking away from him. “Tell your constables you were mistaken. Show them nothing of me, or I shall strike you dead.” Neil watched her go, his body still trembling and useless.
Fully ten minutes passed during which time he could not move, could not speak. No one walked the streets nearby or looked out their windows to see him in the parking lot, or if they did, they chose to pretend otherwise. He wondered if that too was the witch’s power, or merely coincidence.
At the end of ten minutes the fog that covered his mind lifted and his muscles were once more his to use. He felt control coming back to him as his cell phone rang and he answered it, closing his eyes against the tears that fell freely now, tracking down the planes of his face and spattering to the cold ground beneath him.
“Hello?”
“Neil, it’s Danny. I have good news, old buddy. Your sister is fine! We just found her at the hospital. Looks like it’s your lucky day. The ca
ll earlier, the preliminary identification, they were wrong. Ray’s alive.”
“What? How?” Oh the swelling of blood in his heart, the change in the tears that fell, from bitter to joyful. “How the hell did that happen, Danny?”
“Somebody mugged Ray earlier, my man. Preliminary ID was off his driver’s license, but it wasn’t on his body when we found it. There wasn’t...there wasn’t enough face left to make it easy to know for sure.” The apology in his voice was irrelevant; Neil was alive and so were his sister, her husband.
Had he seen her just then, he’d have gladly kissed the witch’s feet to show his gratitude.
Neil stood, a deep shuddering breath escaped him and he sobbed out loud.
“Danny, oh, God, Danny, that’s wonderful! I—” His words stopped abruptly and Neil dropped the phone from his hand, staring as it struck the ground at his feet and skittered under the rear tire of his neighbor’s car.
His hands were numb, his lips felt cold, but there was heat inside his chest, and a jittering muscle twitched inside his right eyelid.
Neil fell forward but could not catch himself, could not so much as move his wrists or his hands to brace for the inevitable impact.
The asphalt slammed into his chin and tore at the flesh with savage abandon. He felt the warmth of blood flowing and the sting of offended nerve endings.
His eyes fluttered again and his jaw muscles clamped together until he thought he could hear the enamel of his teeth cracking.
A moment later, the girl was back, her feet directly in front of his face.
“Auuuhhhnnn.”
“Shhh, child. There shall be no comfort granted you.” There was only one voice now, that of the withered old hag. “Thou art a greedy man, Neil Harrison. Had you chosen to spare your sister, I would have known I could trust you to keep your word, but you chose to spare yourself instead. Greedy men are notorious liars to my mind. A promise of reward shall make them lie, cheat, and steal.”
He felt her fingers touch his forehead but could not move, could not so much as blink.
“Yours are the last eyes to witness me. Ray loves your sister. He chose to spare her. I know I can trust him to do all he can to keep her safe.”
If he could have screamed, Neil would have howled his anger to the universe and sworn a thousand times over to avenge himself.
Instead he merely died and felt the final humiliation of having his soul torn from his body and consumed whole by the young woman in front of him.
There are some who say the spirit cannot be deceived once it is freed from the trap of living flesh. Perhaps that is true. Whatever the case, it was not the fair face of a young woman that Neil saw at the last as he was devoured. It was the ancient, withered face of Alvina Bathory, who some claim was the wickedest of witches.
In the end, Neil knew no peace, no solace from his suffering. The witch had sold her soul a long time ago, and now and then the powers she served demanded fresh sacrifices as payment.
The witch was not known for failing to keep her promises.
The Walker Place
“Chicken.” Larry’s voice teased, but with an edge that was accusatory. The tone said that he not only thought cowardice was funny, but maybe a criminal offense. If he were a fraction less restrained Tom would have called him a bully. He wouldn’t have been wrong.
“I am not.” Tom’s defense was hardly original, but it was heartfelt.
“It’s Halloween. We’re supposed to get candy, and we’re supposed to look for ghosts.”
“It’s Halloween. Our parents are going to ground us forever if we get busted again.”
The year before Larry Reddington, Tom Efron and Sam Kramer had all run off to the graveyard four blocks away and tried to summon a ghost to answer their questions about what lay on the other side of death. What they’d summoned instead was the nasty old bastard who cleaned up the cemetery every day, Elliot Burnside, who had called the police on them and locked the gates so they couldn’t just sneak back out.
Their parents had not been amused. Well, that wasn’t true. Tom’s dad had thought it was hilarious, especially when all three of them spent a week picking up trash at the graveyard after school, and for almost the whole day on the following weekend. Tom hadn’t thought the graveyard could lose its mysterious appeal, but he’d been wrong. It was still creepy and all, but he didn’t much feel like going out there again in an effort to find ghosts. He could think of better things to do than spend a week with that old fart groundskeeper yelling at him.
“So we won’t go to the graveyard this time.” That was Sam, whose voice had taken on a level of challenge even before the gauntlet was thrown. There was no mistaking that this would be a proper dare, a task that must either be met or dismissed and the latter would almost certainly guarantee the label of coward.
Tom crossed his arms. “Well then, where are we supposed to go to look for ghosts?”
“The Walker place.” Sam said the words and Tom looked from Larry to the other boy and knew they’d lost their minds. They were serious, and that was as scary as anything else he’d ever heard.
Parents didn’t talk about the Walker place. They also got irritated when kids brought up the house on Asbury Lane. Fully a dozen years earlier something very bad had happened at the place and no matter how hard they tried to hide it the parents couldn’t keep all of the details secret. Despite the best efforts of grownups to hide the facts from their children, the Internet had made it possible for kids who wanted to know the truth to find it with ease.
The simple fact was that every member of the Walker family had been murdered, and no one had ever found out who committed the atrocities. The murders were common knowledge. What was not known was exactly how the parents or the four children who lived in the house were done in.
According to Eben Murphy, the mom and the daughters were all raped and chopped into bits while the dad and the boys were forced to watch.
Kristen Brockheimer swore that it was devil worshippers. Her dad worked for UPS and she said he had delivered a package up there the day the bodies were found.
Megan Powers heard that the oldest boy, Joe, had taken an ax to everyone in the house and then hanged himself, and even if the story wasn’t true, it sounded creepy enough to give Tom nightmares, not that he would ever admit it.
Sabrina Cooper said it was all a drug deal gone bad, but she said everything was a drug deal gone bad. She was sort of the local anti-drugs poster, only with moving lips.
“There’s no way we can get into that place.” It was a weak argument. People had tried to get into the Walker residence before and the door was always locked. The windows were locked, and the whole place was considered off limits.
“See? I told you he’d pussy out.” Larry’s voice carried a note of disappointment. It was a deliberate note and it was meant to offend and to ignite moral outrage and it was very successful.
“You tell me how we’re getting in there without getting arrested for breaking a window and then maybe we can work something out.” Tom crossed his arms over his narrow chest and glared at Larry with as much menace as he could muster, which wasn’t all that much.
Larry smiled and pulled a single key from his jacket pocket. “With the key to the back door, dummy.”
“How did you?” His voice trailed off.
“My brother works for the city. He has to check out that sort of stuff. It’s his job.” Larry puffed up and his smile grew even cockier. Tom could have shot him down, pointed out that his brother’s job was to sweep the streets and pick up dead animals from the same—a job he didn’t do all that well, thanks very much—but he bit his tongue. He was far too worried with trying to figure a way out of the latest situation.
There was nothing he could say that wouldn’t have him looking like a big baby in front of his friends. Oh, they’d still be his friends if he said no, but he knew they’d hold it over him, his moment of cowardice. Larry and Sam would act like they were better than him, simply because he
had backed down from entering the scariest house in town, a place a lot scarier than whatever the Jaycees put together this time around, and The Jaycees were pretty much the only haunted house in town. Bowden’s Point wasn’t big enough to warrant one of the places run by Hollywood companies. You got what you got in a small town.
“Fine. When?” It was the best he could get out now that all the spit in his mouth had dried up.
“We go trick or treating. We go home. Then we sneak out.” Larry grinned and rubbed his hands together like a mad scientist in an old movie. “You’ll see, Tom. This time we’ll find a ghost.”
Tom nodded and tried to swallow the dust that had appeared in his mouth. That was what he was afraid of.
“So how come no one ever moved into the old Walker place?” Tom asked Mindy, his older sister, when their parents were out for their weekly game night with the other parents on the block.
Mindy was seven years older than him and ready to head to college in a year, and was a lot cooler than the big sisters they always showed in movies and stuff. Yeah, she could be a bitch when she had a boyfriend over, but mostly she remembered that Tom had a name and didn’t mind answering questions as long as he left her alone most of the time. She was his big sister, so it wasn't like they had that much in common, but come Wednesday nights, she had to watch over him and she wasn’t allowed to have boys over when the folks weren't home so they were stuck together and made the most of it.
She’d probably answered a million questions in the last hour, while they ate pizza from Carlotti’s, and he could tell her patience was starting to wear thin. He’d planned it that way. This was the last question he intended to ask before giving her some peace and quiet.
“Okay, you know what a will is?”
“A will?”
“Last will and testament?”
This is Halloween Page 22