“It’s coming for us,” Lucy said.
“What?” Steven looked from her to Tony.
Tony dropped his beer can. “What the hell?”
The rider was clad in black, a riding cloak, shirt, trousers and boots. But the first thing Lucy noticed was his head. Rather, his lack of a head. The cloak was tied around the trunk of his neck, but the neck ended in a ragged, bloody stump. No head... and yet she had the feeling he could see everything. He seemed to be staring right at her through invisible eyes.
The rider held the horse’s reins bunched in his left hand because his right hand held a gleaming sword.
“Run!” Tony yelled.
Lucy was paralyzed. In that moment, she was sure she would have stood still as the headless horseman shoved the sword straight through her heart. But Tony grabbed one of her suddenly clammy hands and tugged her sideways. She stumbled after him, looking back, unable to take her eyes off the nightmarish apparition that had materialized out of thin air.
Steven trailed behind them, mainly because he had paused to grab his beer-filled backpack.
The horse whinnied and reared up on its hind legs. The rider kicked spurs into the horse’s flanks and it dropped down to all fours and galloped after them, its hooves pounding the earth with deadly determination. Lucy could feel the vibration in her shins and thought she would throw up any second. She realized she was sobbing.
Steven hadn’t paused to zip up his backpack. Every few strides a beer can slipped free and tumbled to the ground, letting out a protesting hiss of pressurized foam. Finally, he cursed and tossed the backpack aside.
Lucy couldn’t help glancing back every other step. She stumbled again and again, but Tony’s momentum kept her upright. She saw the horseman bear down on Steven and swing his sword in a whistling arc, determined to reduce the young man to his own headless condition or perhaps remedy his cranial loss by random substitution. Lucy gave an involuntary shriek.
The gleaming blade missed Steven’s neck by a whisker.
Steven must have felt its swift passage. He clapped a hand to the nape of his neck, as if checking for blood.
They were near the edge of the park, within sight of the municipal building, when Lucy was jerked to the side. She stumbled and fell against Tony for a moment before he led her to the right.
“What—?” she began.
“We need to split up,” Tony said, his breathing ragged.
“Can’t chase all of us.”
“But Steve...”
The vibration in her legs was gone. She glanced back but could no longer see the headless horseman. In his gray sweatshirt and faded jeans, Steven was a blur of motion running and stumbling toward Park Lane.
“C’mon,” Tony said, pulling her attention back. “Think we lost him.”
“What was that?”
“Sure as hell wasn’t the neighborhood watch.”
Steven had never run so fast in his life. At some point, between tossing aside the backpack he’d used to smuggle beer out of the house and feeling the horseman’s sword whistle past his neck, he forgot about everything that had led up to the nightmarish chase. He stopped questioning the impossibility of a man without a head riding a horse that had appeared out of nowhere. Every iota of his concentration focused on racing from his imminent death, while suppressing the powerful urge to vomit up every last ounce of beer he had imbibed. A single hesitation, for whatever reason, would mean the difference between life and death. Even so, a man, even a sober man, couldn’t outrun a horse for long. Steven veered close to tree trunks, favoring those with low hanging limbs. Unseat the horseman and the chase turned in his favor. But it seemed he couldn’t shake the headless rider, only postpone the inevitable. The thunderous rumble of hooves was never more than one false step away.
Face contorted in a rictus of pain, he burst from the edge of the park, bounded across the wide sidewalk and sprinted onto Park Lane. Several steps into his panicked flight across the blacktop, he stumbled and almost fell to his knees. Doubled over, he cringed, waiting for the hard steel to bite into his flesh. Then it occurred to him that the thundering noise of hooves had stopped. He looked back and saw that the headless horseman had vanished. He had never followed Steven out of the park.
Steven straightened and peered behind him. Nothing moving between the trees. No horse. No headless rider. Looking left and right, he couldn’t see Tony or Lucy. Vaguely he recalled them veering to the side, away from his mindless, straight-line flight. Sensible strategy, but he would have had their back.
Or would he?
Staring back at the park, he wondered if the horseman was confined within its boundaries. If his friends remained in the park now, were they in danger? Would the rider seek them out after his solo target had escaped? Steven could go back and warn them... but he had no idea where they had gone. Was the horseman even real? Could they have imagined the whole thing? When you really thought about it, it made no sense. How could it? Unless...something in the beer? Product tampering? LSD in the cans? No, because Lucy had seen it first and she hadn’t had any beer. Then how—?
BEEP!
A battered Ford pickup truck swerved around him, the driver leaving behind a string of curses with the truck’s pungent white exhaust.
Steven looked down at the painted line and realized that he’d pulled up in the middle of Park Lane. Fortunately for him, traffic was light in the evening. And the white exhaust was really spreading...
Not exhaust. The white, cottony mist he’d barely acknowledged in the park had spread out across the road, swirling around his ankles.
An accelerating motor—a deep-throated roar—drew his attention up again but this vehicle didn’t swerve.
He had a moment to register the color red, with a white stripe across the hood leading his eye to the driver, but—
Air exploded out of his lungs as his legs shattered and his body flipped through the air, bounding across the hood of the car, skipping past the windshield and tumbling up and away from the roof as if gravity had suddenly released any claim to his mass. But just as suddenly, it reclaimed him with punishing force, slamming him down onto the blacktop as if swatted from above by a giant hand. His head struck and his skull seemed to lose its rigidity, his vision splitting into two separate views a split second before one side went completely dark and the other began to fade.
Somewhere he heard a woman scream.
A man looked down at him, shock on his face.
“Oh, God,” Steven heard him say.
Steven wanted to tell the man not to worry, but the words came out jumbled and seemed to originate far away. Didn’t help that he was shivering as he spoke.
“I can’t believe—that guy—he hit you on purpose!” the man declared.
Steven tried to shake his head. Big mistake. Pain knifed through him so fiercely he blacked out for a second. Maybe longer. When the man’s pale face returned, this time with a cell phone pressed to his ear, Steven tried to explain what he saw before the moment of impact but only the last two words made it past his numb lips.
“...nobody driving.”
“What—?”
A young woman stepped into Steven’s diminishing field of vision. She grabbed the man’s arm.
“I—I can’t believe it!” she said. Her voice sounded distant and hollow.
“I called an ambulance,” the man told her.
“—tried to get the license plate,” she said, glancing briefly at Steven, long enough for him to see the horror and disbelief on her face before she looked away. “Blake, I—I couldn’t.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “It happened so fast.”
“That’s not what I mean,” she said. Her words were out of sync with her lips, as if she were an actress in a poorly dubbed foreign film. Movement began to leave smears of color across Steven’s vision. “I was looking right at the car and it... vanished.”
“Vanished how?”
Like the headless horseman? Steven wondered.
&n
bsp; “I don’t know how,” she said. “One second it was there. And the next it was gone.”
Steven blinked, but when he opened his eyes there was only darkness. He thought they might still be talking above him but the only sound he heard was a soft, rhythmic thumping, fading and slowing and then nothing...
ONE
The beam of Dean Winchester’s flashlight played over the pair of stained manacles dangling from an eyebolt mounted in the back of a stall in Cletus Gillmer’s horse stable. He didn’t need a forensic kit to guess the nature of the stains.
“Sick bastard kept the victims chained back here,” he said.
Across the aisle, his brother Sam examined the tack room, dominated by a sturdy wooden work table with eyebolts screwed into the surface at each corner.
“And chopped them up over here,” Sam responded.
“Not what old man Gillmer had in mind when he asked junior to take over the family farm.”
They’d found Cletus Gillmer in the farmhouse, sprawled on an old recliner patched with duct tape, his eyes bulging and bloodshot, his tongue protruding and his throat savagely crushed. On the round table beside him, he’d left behind an old, loaded revolver and a curious, apparently interrupted, to-do list. After “siphon gasoline from generator,” “bury body,” and “burn stable,” he’d written “burn” a second time before dropping the pen on the floor. Dean guessed that “burn farmhouse” would have been next, followed by “insert revolver in mouth” and “pull trigger.” Apparently old man Gillmer had grown weary of chasing thrill-seeking teens off his property, but not before somebody else decided to punch his ticket.
A local newspaper’s piece on the five-year anniversary of the machete killings and the sudden, mysterious disappearance of Cletus’ murderous son, Clive Gillmer, had created an urban legend to test the mettle of a new crop of teenagers. From deranged serial killer to phantom bogeyman in five years. The old man tried to scare the kids away, garnering “crazy old coot” status, but some had gone missing nonetheless. Dean suspected the old man knew what the Winchesters did: bogeymen have teeth.
On their way out of the farmhouse, Sam spotted the pink sneaker in the high grass beside the front porch steps, bathed in moonlight. Their flashlights had revealed the young woman with a broken neck stuffed under the crawlspace. And so the to-do list had led them to the horse stable...
As Dean walked toward the second stall—duffel bag hanging from his left shoulder, shotgun loaded with rock salt cradled under his right arm—he heard Sam open and search one of the tack trunks under the table.
“Dean!” he called. “Found a machete.”
“Keep looking,” Dean said absently. “Junior’s body’s gotta be here.”
He opened the next stall door with the tip of his shotgun. The eyebolt in this one was angled down. Dean grabbed it, wiggled it back and forth, felt the wood planking give, bits of rotted wood falling away like damp mulch. His flashlight flickered—
A loud crash broke the eerie silence of the stable.
Dean whirled. “Sam!”
Looming over him was the six-foot-seven, three-hundredpound vengeful spirit of Clive Gillmer, in mottled whiteface, wearing the traditional black-and-white striped shirt under blood-stained bib overalls. “The Machete Mime,” as the press had dubbed him.
Dean swung the shotgun up, but the Mime clubbed his arm away and rammed him against the back wall with enough force to split the weakened boards. The shotgun fell from his numb fingers along with the flashlight.
“Sam! Little help!”
Before Sam regained his soul, Dean was never sure when his brother would have his back. But that was before. Now...
The Mime picked Dean up and slammed him against the wall to the right and then to the left. Both were in better shape than the rear wall, if the sharp pain in his ribs was any judge.
“Marcel Machete here has anger management issues!” Dean yelled.
He dodged a fist which punched a hole in the wall next to his head, but caught a knee in the gut and dropped to the ground, stunned.
The crash he’d heard earlier, after Sam discovered the machete...
“Sammy!”
Face it. Sam’s out of commission.
Dean heard a clanking of chains, then felt cold steel encircle his neck, bite into his flesh and inexorably tighten.
He managed to slip his fingers under the chain and alleviate the pressure long enough to suck in some air and clear his vision. His other hand scrabbled across the matted straw of the dirt floor until his fingers closed around the barrel of his shotgun.
The Mime’s booted foot kicked Dean’s arm against the wall and once again the shotgun slipped from his grasp. Dean’s vision began to dim again, fading to black at the edges, when he heard a shotgun blast from above.
In an instant, the pressure of the chains around his neck was gone and he was stumbling forward onto hands and knees, coughing and gasping for air.
Sam stood in the aisle, shotgun braced in his hands. His jacket was torn at the shoulder seam and a line of blood trickled from his scalp.
“He surprised me,” he stated.
Dean nodded. “Makes two of us,” he rasped.
Dean grabbed his own shotgun and Sam helped him to his feet. Brushing straw off his clothes, Dean scanned the ground for his flashlight and found it near the back wall of the stall.
“Let’s find the body before Baby Huey comes back,” he said, scooping it up.
“Don’t think it’s here,” Sam said.
Dean didn’t respond.
“Dean?” Sam said.
Dean stared through the gap in the broken back wall. He kicked a split plank out of the way.
“Behind the farmhouse,” he said. “You see that?”
Sam looked past his shoulder. “Wooden shed.”
“We assumed the old man planned to burn the farmhouse after the stable.”
Sam nodded. “Clive knew his father’s real target.”
They slipped through the gap in the wall and raced along the corral fence, behind the farmhouse to the unprepossessing tool shed in back. Ten feet square, it was open in front, revealing three walls with hooks for various farm implements long ago removed. The floor was covered with mismatched scraps of outdoor carpeting littered with old leaves, yellowed sections of torn newsprint and snack food wrappers.
“Nothing,” Dean said flatly. “More nothing.”
Sam walked into the shed, probing the corners of the single room with his flashlight beam. Boards squeaked under his weight. He stopped, looked down, then back up at Dean.
“You thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Root cellar?”
Sam crouched, lifted a few uneven squares of carpet and tossed them aside, revealing twin wooden doors secured by an old padlock with an elongated shackle.
“Bolt cutters?”
“Try this,” Dean said, passing him a crowbar from his duffel.
Slipping the straight end under one of the door handles, Sam levered it up and out of the rotting wood until the screws popped out. He repeated the process on the other handle and wiggled the padlock free.
“Here goes.”
He wedged the crowbar under the edge of the right-hand door and raised it enough to slip his fingers under it. He flung it open to the squeal of protesting hinges.
“Whoa!”
The stench assailed them like a physical presence.
Left hand pressed against his nose, Sam leaned over and flipped open the other door. Dean’s flashlight beam speared the darkness at the bottom of the rickety staircase and revealed the hulking corpse in the remnants of a striped shirt and bib overalls, curled on its stomach, with a pitchfork buried in its back.
Deep enough to puncture lungs, Dean thought. Or skewer his heart.
“Old man put him down five years ago. Left him to rot,” he said.
“Let everyone assume he’d run off,” Sam said.
He reached down for his own duffel bag and so was caught by surpr
ise.
Flickering into existence between them, the Mime’s spirit charged—
“Sam!”
—and shoved Sam down the stairs.
Both root-cellar doors slammed shut.
Junior spun around and rushed Dean, his marred white face stretched wide in a hideous grin that revealed years of dental neglect.
“I’ve seen your act, Tiny,” Dean said grimly, taking a step back to pump the shotgun’s action and level the barrel at the killer Mime. “It blows.”
He blasted a round of rock salt into the spirit’s torso.
The Mime vanished, buying them some more time.
Dean slammed the action bar down and back to chamber another round.
Then, rushing into the shed, he flipped the doors open and aimed his flashlight into the darkness.
“Sam! Sammy!” he called.
“Here, Dean,” came the reply. “I’m okay.”
Dean negotiated the rickety stairs, sweeping the underground room with his flashlight to reveal sagging multi-tiered wooden shelves lining the walls, filled with an assortment of mason jars and plastic containers, rotting vegetables and rancid salted meats long since abandoned. On the floor, sitting beside the decaying corpse, Sam massaged his neck with one hand while shielding his eyes from the light with the other.
“Let’s end this,” Dean said, tossing his brother a canister of sea salt. He rifled through his bag for the container of lighter fluid.
Sam climbed to his feet, pressed a hand to his lower back and winced. But he shook off the residual aches and pains of having rolled down the stairs and spread salt liberally over Clive’s remains.
“What is it with mimes anyway?” he wondered. “Clowns with a vow of silence?”
“This one forgot the rule about ‘no props,’” Dean replied.
Dean squeezed the aluminum container and flicked the stream of lighter fluid back and forth over the corpse, head to toe.
Supernatural: Night Terror Page 2