Original Sin

by Greta Cribbs

  Original Sin (A Crimson Falls Novella)

  By Greta Cribbs

  Copyright 2019 by Greta Cribbs

  This book is the copyrighted property of the author. Please do not engage in unauthorized redistribution. Thank you for purchasing this book. Enjoy.

  TAble of contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  The worst place to be in early October is the town of Crimson Falls.

  In the late 1800’s, two brothers stumbled upon an unnamed village, surrounded by thick forest and fresh water to keep them protected and alive. The brothers were cruel men who wanted a home to call their own. In their darkest hour, the brothers slaughtered the villagers, dumping their bodies over the waterfall at the edge of town. People say the water ran red for weeks, giving the town its terrible name.

  Ever since that horrible anniversary, Crimson Falls is haunted by its past with a present filled with violence and danger. Every October is filled with fear...and for good reason. On October 13th, the dreaded Founders Day, all the town’s crime comes to a head. And by the 14th, fewer will be alive than before.

  Crimson Falls is a fictional town, created and shared by 8 mystery, suspense, and thriller authors. Each novella paints a picture about life in Crimson Falls and the insanity that takes place leading up to Founders Day. Do you dare to read them all?

  1975

  Chapter One

  “So you want to know why I did it?”

  “Just a moment, we’re not quite ready to roll yet.”

  Samuel Rich, or Sam the Sound Guy, as the team liked to call him, checked his connections for the tenth time.

  A silver microphone with the word “Sennheiser” etched into its side hung from a boom pole suspended just over Duane Tolloch’s head. A cable protruded from one end of the mic, wound itself (or, more accurately, had been wound by Sam the Sound Guy) around the boom several times, then ran along the floor to the small table on which sat a Nagra 4.2 tape recorder.

  The Sennheiser and the Nagra were Sam’s pride and joy. He had barely been able to keep himself from talking about them throughout the entire two days it took to drive to the hospital. A recent film school graduate, he had, up until now, relied exclusively on his student privileges, borrowing from the college’s massive collection of recording equipment every time he was called upon to boom a production. Following his commencement, he had openly embraced his new “starving artist” status, proudly wearing patched jeans and rummage-sale shirts, but when it came to his sound equipment there was to be no cutting of corners. He had to have top quality gear and he had to have the newest models. So after months of working on construction sites and eating canned soup and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for every meal, he had invested in his own portable studio, and he was absolutely giddy about it. Almost as giddy as Carl the Camera Man (was alliteration a prerequisite for getting to work on this project?) was about his Arriflex 16 BL.

  Meredith Bowen, psychiatrist extraordinaire, smiled and shook her head. With all the new vocabulary she had learned so far on this gig, she would be a regular film buff soon. Roger should be pleased. He had been trying to get her interested in movies since they started dating back in college. His most recent effort had been a trip to the theater to see The Exorcist a couple of years ago, his assumption being that Meredith would enjoy the psychological investigation into the young protagonist’s alarming symptoms. Rather than being absorbed in the story, however, Meredith had spent most of the two hours observing the poor unsuspecting souls who ran, weeping and hyperventilating, from the theater. She had even stepped outside herself, taking a few minutes to talk with a poor woman who was so distraught she had actually vomited into her bag of popcorn.

  As for the movie itself, the medical details were interesting, but the conclusion that what initially looked like mental illness was in fact demonic possession was antithetical to everything Meredith believed about the human psyche. The story, if taken too seriously by too gullible an audience, threatened to set the psychological world back a couple hundred years.

  This movie they were now preparing to film, however...this movie fell nicely in line with her values. It promised a none-too-modest boost for her career as well. The opportunity to interview, then provide a psychological evaluation for, Duane Tolloch would elevate her status as a doctor in a way that no amount of plodding along at hospital work or in private practice could ever do. And, as all women who tried to break into that boys’ club known as The Medical Profession could verify, she needed all the help she could get if she wanted to succeed.

  Mr. Tolloch sat across the table from her, wearing a pair of white pajamas and a blue bathrobe, looking every bit the demented psychiatric patient. He could easily have been an extra in that new Jack Nicholson movie. Was this all part of an act, or were those simply the clothes he was required to wear during his sojourn at Fallsview Hospital for the Criminally Insane? Or had Greg the Director (so much for the alliteration theory) requested it, thinking his subject needed to be fully in character while his image was preserved on celluloid.

  Did they even use celluloid anymore?

  Meredith shrugged. Knowing the answer to that question did not fall within her area of expertise. Let the film nerds worry about the film. She was here to worry about the mental state of their favorite murderer.

  Sam finished fiddling and tweaking and said over his shoulder to Greg, “All set over here.”

  “Excellent. Carl?”

  “Ready.”

  “Okay. Roll sound.”

  “Sound is rolling.”

  “Camera.”

  “Camera rolling.”

  Greg held a slate in front of the camera, fed a few words about the nature of the project into the Nagra, brought down the clapper, and moved out of the way.

  “All right, Dr. Bowen,” he said.

  “So,” Tolloch said, his eyebrow arching and his lips curling up into a half-smile. He seemed to thrive in front of the camera. “You want to know why I did it?”

  Meredith smiled back. “Why don’t we just follow the script?”

  “Script? I thought this was a documentary. The true story of my life.”

  “It is. But I have specific questions I’m supposed to ask you. Specific things we’d like you to talk about.”

  “My relationship with my mother and all that?”

  “If it’s pertinent.”

  “You’re the psychiatrist. Shouldn’t you decide if it’s pertinent?”

  “I decide which questions to ask you. What you tell me will go a long way in determining what’s pertinent.”

  “So ask me a question.”

  Meredith shuffled the thin stack of papers on the table before her and cleared her throat. “You have occasionally made claims that a curse made you do it?”

  Tolloch inclined his head. “Yes.”

  “Tell me about this curse.”

  “You believe in curses, Dr. Bowen?”

  “What I believe doesn’t matter. What matters is whether you believe in it.”

  “Ah, but if you don’t believe, you’ll just see it as evidence that I’m crazy. That the real reason I killed those girls is that I’m secretly in love with my mother. I know your kind very well.”

  “I’m not a Freudian, Mr. Tolloch. I don’t believe that the entirety of the human psyche can be boiled down to the Oedipus complex and penis envy.”

  “Not a Freudian, eh? I thought Freud was your god. That all you psychiatrist types worshiped him.”

  “Things are changing. We have new theories now. New techni
ques.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re here to try some of these...techniques...on me?”

  “I’m just here to get your story. These guys,” she tilted her head in the direction of the film’s meager crew, “are here to record it. Now, please...tell me about the curse.”

  Duane Tolloch leaned back in his chair, still smiling. He examined his fingernails for a moment, flicked a bit of fuzz from the sleeve of his robe, scratched behind his left ear, then clasped his hands in his lap and looked directly into Meredith’s eyes.

  She shuddered internally under his cold stare but managed to maintain a facade of exterior calm.

  “It wasn’t Mother’s fault, you know,” said Tolloch.

  “I never said it was.”

  “And those guys...it wasn’t their fault, either.”

  “What guys?”

  “It was the date, you see. October 13. In the town of Crimson Falls, bad things happen on October 13.”

  “The curse?”

  “Yes.”

  “So tell me.”

  He leaned forward again, placed his clasped hands on the table between him and Meredith, and began to tell his story.

  ***

  Mother rarely went out after dark on a normal night. Whenever October 13 rolled around, she always took extra care to be home by sunset. But she had just taken a new job, serving beer and other types of aperitif down at Skip’s Bar on Main Street.

  It was 1945, you see, and the soldiers were all coming home from the war. Women were having to leave their factory jobs and their office jobs and all the other duties thrust upon them while their men were overseas. Because the men were coming home, and they were demanding their jobs back. And the men...well, mainly the men just wanted the comfort of a woman’s arms, but if they couldn’t have that they were willing to settle for whatever comfort lay at the bottom of a shot glass. Or a beer mug, if they were earnestly trying to pass themselves off as respectable. The really respectable ones, of course, stayed home with their good friends the Dry Martini and the Manhattan.

  So Mother worked at Skip’s Bar four nights a week. The pay wasn’t much, but the tips were good and anyway she still lived at home, so there was no monthly rent to worry herself over. The only trouble was the long walk in the dark back to her house. She lived over on the northwest side of town, in that part of Crimson Falls where all the roofs leaked and all the paint was either peeling or gone completely and where the good sirs Martini and Manhattan seldom deigned to visit. Where crimes were committed, not behind closed doors, as they were in the wealthier neighborhoods, but right out in plain view of God and everyone.

  She walked through the cemetery. A short-cut of sorts, it took her past a row of wooded vacant lots which felt ominous in the light of day. At night the shadows seemed to come quite alive, reaching out for her with their thin, claw-like fingers and causing her to unconsciously quicken her pace.

  It was autumn and winter’s ghost lurked just out of sight, going unnoticed by the townspeople for the most part, except in those moments, which became more frequent and more jarring as the season progressed, when it would raise its head to peek over the edge of the horizon and exhale its cold breath across the expanse of the world, rustling the trees and causing the good folk, as well as the not-so-good folk, of Crimson Falls to clasp one more button on their coats and tuck their hands a little deeper into their pockets. One such blast assailed Mother as she hurried home that night, tossing her skirt in the air and scurrying up her legs, encircling her and holding her in its frozen grip.

  She would never forget that seemingly innocent tossing of the skirt.

  She stopped, you see. She stopped walking and took a moment to adjust herself. To cover her legs and smooth the fabric of her dress.

  She never knew where they came from, those men who would alter the course of her life and, inevitably, the course of mine. They must have been lurking in the shadows of the trees. Must have seen her as she trotted along her well-beaten path toward her house. She never saw them.

  Not until one of them stepped in front of her, his two friends closing in on either side. They grasped her by her arms and held her there.

  She struggled. Naturally, she struggled. A woman would have to struggle, wouldn’t she? Otherwise everyone would say she wanted it to happen. Of course, in Crimson Falls, when a woman happens to be a Tolloch, when she happens to live on the “bad” side of town, when she chooses to work in a bar of all places, everyone will say that about her anyway. But I need to make this part completely clear: Mother did struggle. She did fight back. Did try, with every ounce of her strength, to break free from her attackers.

  But she was one woman against three men. They had her out of her coat before she even had time to scream, then when she tried to scream one of them put a hand over her mouth. They undid the buttons of her dress (none too gently, I assure you), ripped apart her underthings, then proceeded to push her to the ground and...

  Well, I’m sure your imagination can fill in the rest.

  They each had a turn with her, there on the dirty ground. She kicked at them and scratched at them and spit at them, then finally gave up and lay there, unmoving, while they concluded their vulgar business. Then, just like that, they let go of her, stood up, tidied their disheveled clothing, and walked off into the night, laughing and patting each other on the back as they went.

  Mother remained crumpled on the cold gravel for a time, scarce trusting her legs to support her if she attempted to stand. I don’t think she cried. Not yet. The shock of it was still too fresh.

  At some point, she pulled herself into an upright position and attempted to cover her bare breasts with the tattered remains of her frock. She was cold but did not take the time to retrieve her coat from wherever it was they had discarded it. The longer she stayed there on the narrow path between the cemetery and the woods, the more convinced she became that other men were lurking in the shadows, ready pounce upon her and take their pleasure the way the others had. This fear of men would remain with her and, as you will see, would come to shape my destiny in ways Mother never envisioned. Not that she was in any shape, on that night, to envision much of anything about her future. Or mine, for that matter.

  So she fled, shaking from both shock and cold, toward the small white house at the end of Fawn Street. Toward home.

  A warm orange light shone from the front window. Her father (my grandfather, though I never really knew him as such) was still awake. The knowledge made Mother shiver even more.

  Her father had not found himself involved in the most recent war. His war had occurred some twenty-five years previously. But the effects of it were much the same as those manifest in the young men who frequented Skip’s Bar.

  What I mean to say is my grandfather had a fondness for losing himself in the bottom of a glass. He took his drink in the comfort of his home, but it was not Mr. Dry Martini whose company he kept on those long, lonely nights. No, he enjoyed instead a close intimacy with the Messrs. Beam and Fitzgerald and others of their kind. And when he found himself lacking the financial means to procure such well-recognized brands, he and a few other “neighborhood chaps” possessed the ability to make their own.

  My grandfather was never sober after six o’clock in the evening. For Mother to return home and find his light still on well past midnight must have sparked no small amount of anxiety. And she in such a tousled state. What would his reaction be when he took in her tattered clothing and mussed-up hair?

  It was with considerable trepidation that she ascended the rickety steps, with shaking hand that she turned the doorknob (folks weren’t prone to locking their doors back then), and with ginger step that she slunk into the front room of the tiny house.

  “Twelve-thirty,” said a slurred voice from the chair in the corner.

  “Yes, Daddy,” she whispered.

  “Don’t you get done with that job of yours at midnight?”

  “Yes, Daddy,”
she said again.

  “Then why..?” He stood, a bit wobbly perhaps but still an intimidating figure, and took a step in her direction. “Why are you coming home thirty minutes late?”

  She pulled the remains of her dress more snuggly over her chest and turned her back on him as she closed the door. “I had to walk home,” she muttered.

  My grandfather took a step closer. “It’s only a ten minute walk.”

  “I was...” The tears nearly came then. Would have come if not for the fact that my grandfather would surely ask why she was crying, and the thought of telling anyone what had just happened, least of all her own father, was unthinkable. “I was detained,” she finally said.

  “Detained?”

  “Yes.”

  “Distracted too, I suppose. You forgot to put on your coat.”

  She turned a bit further away from him and clutched her dress to her bosom more tightly. “Yes,” she said.

  “Look at me when I’m talking to you, young lady!”

  She did not look.

  His hand was on her arm then, gripping her. Squeezing her. Hurting her. And for a moment she was no longer standing by the front door of her own home, but out on that gravelly street, with nothing but trees and gravestones standing witness to what transpired. With nothing but thin fabric standing between her assailants and the object of their cruel desire.

  Lost in these thoughts, she turned toward my grandfather and released her grip on her ripped dress, raising her arms in the closest thing to a defensive posture she knew how to adopt.

  The look in my grandfather’s eyes when he took in the sight of her nude chest would, in the coming months, haunt her more than the memory of those three sweating bodies pressing down on her as they mercilessly deflowered her. Because in that look there was more than just shock and suspicion, though those sentiments were certainly present. But underneath, she caught a glimpse of something resembling desire. As though some feeble sense of propriety was the only thing keeping him from doing to her what the faceless men on the road had done.