The Orangefield Cycle Omnibus

by Al Sarrantonio

  For emphasis he picked up the cleaned drumstick on his plate and snapped it in half.

  “There was someone else in that house. Someone very good, who didn’t leave a fingerprint or a mark of his presence.”

  Riley’s eyes were even harder. “Correct. Which means …?”

  He savagely tapped his head. “Farrow botched it, because he refused to consider that anyone other than Corrie Phaeder killed his mother. And you botched it even worse, because you wouldn’t look at it as what you call ‘weird shit.’ Farrow’s a moron, but you’re not, so you have no excuse. And it’s some of the weirdest shit this town has seen yet.” He gave a great sigh. “And I have a very bad feeling about it.”

  “Then who,” Grant said with emphasis, “killed Corrie Phaeder’s mother?”

  Riley took his baseball cap off, scratched his head, put the baseball cap back on. He looked out over the pumpkin fields.

  “I miss that Aaron Peters,” he said. “Remember him? Kid they used to call The Pumpkin Tender?”

  “You’re avoiding my question? All right, I’ll play along. I remember him. Blew his brains out last year.”

  “Yup. Suicide, plain and clear. Good kid. Got messed up in the Army in Somalia. He told me a few things one day when he was here, looking after my fields. I sat him down where you’re sitting, and after a couple beers he started to talk. The name Samhain came up.”

  “You mean that Lord of Death crap?”

  Riley looked at the sky, the horizon. “Yup. That Kerlan fellow, case you had with that beekeeper Willims involved, the name came up there, too, didn’t it?”

  “He wrote a children’s book—”

  “Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn’t. I’ve got a copy somewhere in the house. Cute book.” He tapped his head. “Big file in here with the name Samhain on it. Very big.”

  He gave Grant his hardest, keenest look yet. “In fact, over the years, seems like all my other files sooner or later end up in that one big one. Something I’d look into if I was you. You could start with a family named Reynolds. The father’s dead, but the wife and son live in Orangefield.” He smiled like the Cheshire cat. “You’ll like the son. He knows just about everything there is to know about Samhain.”

  Grant studied his friend carefully. “You’re not pulling my leg about any of this?”

  Riley’s smile turned into a glare. “You asked me who killed Corrie Phaeder’s mother. Well … I think it’s pretty clear, ain’t it?”

  Grant stared at him as if he had gone mad. Riley made a motion at the cooler again.

  “Gimme another one.”

  Grant did as he was told. As he passed the cold bottle into his friend’s hand he said, “You’re telling me this weird shit really is … weird shit?”

  “Have I ever lied to you, Billy boy?”

  “No.”

  “Something very screwy has been going on in this town, and for quite some time. And now I think it’s coming to some sort of a head.” Gates studied his beer. When he spoke again his voice was lower, ruminative. “Remember what happened that day with Kathy Marks and Corrie Phaeder, Bill?”

  Grant was silent.

  “I would have shot you, you know. If you hadn’t put down your gun when I told you to, I would have shot you dead to save that boy.”

  “I believe you.”

  “Then believe me when I say this. Every ounce of cop sense I’ve ever had tells me that we are in for a bumpy ride in Orangefield. And I want you to be ready for it. And whatever else you believe, believe this: Corrie Phaeder didn’t kill his own mother. You’ll have a lot less trouble if you get your head around that.”

  Riley Gates looked at his friend, and suddenly smiled. His beer bottle was empty.

  “Hand me another one, would you, Billy boy?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dreaming reality again.

  This was exactly as it happened: His mother came up with his lunch tray at exactly twelve thirty. She was always very punctual. He could hear the television set downstairs, turned very loud because she refused to wear her hearing aide because it made her ‘look crippled.’ Fifty-eight years old and still as vain as when she was twenty. It was one of the game shows, The Price Is Right, and after that would come three endless hours of soap operas: As the World Turns, General Hospital …

  She put the tray down on his lap as he sat in the wheelchair and backed away.

  “Can you close the door when you leave?” he said, testily.

  She cringed at the harshness in his voice; he wanted to yell at her, “Don’t cower!” and at the same time he wanted her to hold him like he was a baby.

  “The noises—” she said.

  “I can’t do anything about the noises, dammit!” he shouted at her, and she almost dropped the tray and ran out of the room.

  That’s my mother, he thought. That frightened, twitchy, saucer-eyed skinny hag is the woman who brought me into the world, and is supposed to protect me. But she’s more frightened than I am. And now maybe I can do something about the noises, and the rest of it.

  He grabbed a corner of the quilt covering his lap and twisted it, angrily. He was suddenly ashamed.

  “I’m sorry—!” he shouted through the door, which she had left open — but she was too far away to hear. The television had been turned up even louder, and he could hear her banging around down there, in the kitchen, making her own lunch.

  Suddenly the room around him twisted out of shape, as if it was made of soft taffy and some giant had taken hold of it. The walls squeezed sideways, the baseball posters on them turning 180 degrees and contracting to long thin lines. The closet disappeared into the bubbling distorted wall and the window was snuffed out, making the room dark. A rhythmic thumping noise from somewhere above, undercut by a skreeee skreeee sound became louder and louder until he had to cover his ears.

  He closed his eyes.

  The sounds stopped.

  He opened his eyes, and the room was as it had been.

  He looked at the lunch on his bed tray — the inevitable tuna fish sandwich, cup of lemon tea and an apple. He picked up one half of the sandwich (cut diagonally, of course, the crusts removed) and as he brought it up to his lips the tuna salad within turned to something resembling sawdust and trickled out of the edges of the bread. As the sawdust bits hit the tray they turned into red ants, which scurried all over the tray, covering the apple, climbing into the tea cup to float, frantically swimming.

  He dropped the sandwich half, and as it hit the plate it turned into a tuna salad sandwich again, and the ants disappeared.

  He closed his eyes, jammed the same half sandwich into his mouth, and felt tuna salad turn into crawling ants as he took the first bite.

  He gagged the sandwich out onto the plate. Disgustedly, he picked up the tray and put it on the nearby bed.

  The room twisted sideways again, and then came back to normal with a twang sound.

  From downstairs, he heard his mother cry out.

  “Mother!” he called out, at first peevishly and then, when her cry of pain was repeated, with alarm.

  “Mother, what’s wrong!”

  Leave Orangefield, the voice in his head said.

  “How did you—”

  I know, the voice said. If you stay I’ll kill her. Talk to her, she knows now, too.

  His mother appeared in the doorway, eyes wide with fright.

  “You’re going to leave me alone,” she gasped.

  “I—”

  “Don’t deny it! The one thing I ever asked of you is that you don’t leave me alone. I’ve given you everything, done everything for you since you were a baby. Your father left me, and now you’re going to leave me too—”

  “Mother—”

  “I can see it in your eyes! If you stay this house will leave us alone! I know it!”

  “If I stay this house will destroy me. It’s wanted to kill me since I was seven years old.”

  “That’s not true! It’s just noises—”
<
br />   “It’s not just noises! For you it’s just noises! How many times do I have to tell you? The only time things are real to me is when I sleep! When I wake up the world turns into a nightmare for me!”

  As if on cue, the room canted again, his mother in the doorway suddenly horizontal and stretched out to twenty foot length. Then everything was normal again, though the floor now had valleys and mountains in it, and his mother looked as if she were a mile away, tiny at the top of a peak which filled the doorway.

  “You’re my son!” she pleaded, her voice a distant echo, and then she was there again, full size.

  Corrie said, “I can’t live like this anymore, Mother. I bought a ticket two days ago, over the phone. A cab is picking me up tomorrow morning at eight. The airlines will have a wheelchair for me, so I’ll leave this one here. Things will be better after I’m gone. The noises will stop.

  She ran forward and knelt in front of him. “You can’t leave me alone!”

  “If I don’t leave this house will kill me.”

  “You have to take care of me!”

  He turned the wheelchair away from her. “Go watch your shows,” he said.

  She moaned, and he heard her crying and then finally he heard her get up and leave the room.

  He turned the wheelchair around and faced the door.

  An unearthly scream filled the house. The television went impossibly loud, then silent.

  Corrie moved the wheelchair to the doorway, then bumped it over the sill out into the hallway.

  “Mother?”

  He heard a rhythmic thumping sound coming from downstairs.

  He rolled the wheelchair to the top of the stairs.

  “Mother—?”

  The word caught in his throat. At the bottom of the stairs, his mother lay bleeding and dead. The front door was wide open.

  “What are you doing!” Corrie screamed overhead. “You can’t do this!”

  Actually, I can do whatever I want.

  “I’ll go—”

  Too late, the voice said. Go to California.

  “You k—”

  Yes. And I’ll kill you, too, if you come back.

  And then it laughed.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “Hey Mom! The playmates want somethin’ to eat! Can they have something to eat can they can they?”

  Down in the kitchen, with the fold-out ironing board out and the 9 inch television showing the opening credits of Day of Our Lives, Marcia Bright groaned.

  “Tell ’em to come down and get it themselves!”

  “Awww, Mom!”

  Marcia turned her attention completely back to the television.

  In the back of her mind, something pinged, but she stored it away for later.

  Twenty minutes into the soap opera, Gina appeared in the kitchen, frowning.

  “They went away,” she said, frowning. “They said maybe they’d be back later but for now they have somewhere else to go but they’ll be back they said.”

  Marcia turned away from the television, where a commercial for fabric softeners was showing, and gave her daughter part of her attention.

  “How many times have I told you not to run your sentences together, Gina? Do you want to end up in speech therapy class in school?”

  Gina turned away and shrugged. “Whatever you say, Mom.” Marcia had to laugh as Gina was consciously trying to stop talking. It didn’t work.

  Gina turned around and put her hands on her hips. “But if you’d fed the playmates they wouldn’t have left, and then I wouldn’t be alone now and bothering you and—”

  That little ping sounded again in the back of Marcia’s mind, and she gave all her attention to her daughter, even though the soap was back on. She turned down the volume on the television set.

  “Gina, remember a few nights ago, when you were having a dream about Disney World, and then you woke up and there was all kinds of sounds in your room?”

  Gina eyed her carefully, as if weighing what to say.

  “Sure …”

  Marcia tried to sound casual, but knew it didn’t work. “Has that happened again?”

  “What do you mean?” Her daughter was still measuring out her words, which was always a sure sign that she was trying to hide something — otherwise everything would come out in a rush.

  Marcia knelt down and put her hands gently on her daughter’s shoulders, staring at her.

  Gina tried to look away.

  “Gina, look at me,” her mother soothed. “Good. Now, answer this question. Have any of the noises from the other night come back?”

  A light flared in her daughter’s eyes. “No, Mom. Can I go now?”

  “No you can’t. Have you heard any other kind of noises since that night?”

  Gina stiffened. “Well …”

  “What were they?” Marcia let a dram of parental authority replace her friendly tone.

  Gina looked away, up at the ceiling, then said. “Just other stuff. Waterfalls, and a fire engine bell.”

  “When?”

  Gina shrugged. “Whenever they want.”

  “Who’s ‘they’, Gina?”

  Her daughter tried to squirm out of her grip. “Let me go and play!”

  “Not until you tell me who ‘they’ is.”

  “Nobody! There’s nobody and now you’re hurting me let me go!”

  Gina twisted out of her grip and ran upstairs.

  Marcia, still kneeling on the floor, realized that she had been gripping her daughter too tight. She looked at her hands, and slowly rose. After a moment’s contemplation, she turned back to the television and her kitchen chores. She turned the television back up, but only loud enough to hear, and kept half an ear cocked toward the upstairs.

  When the playmates came back, Gina read them the riot act: don’t be loud, and don’t leave again until she told them too.

  With hoots and whistles, they agreed.

  “And no more big tricks, like moving the walls around you hear me?” she scolded, and again the amorphous forms, which looked something like see-through children, nodded.

  Though she had enjoyed the window being on the opposite wall, and letting her look straight into the bathroom next door.

  They played quietly for a while, the playmates making hissing noises when they were annoyed and little doglike yelps when they were content. Gina had laid out a tea party on the floor, with all four of her cups and saucers for the playmates and an empty Play-doh can for her own cup. She served plastic carrots and yellow construction paper cutouts which she told them was corn. They played along, just as they always did.

  In the few days since the playmates had come, she had been able to tell the difference between the four of them, and given them names. There was Andy, the tallest one, who she had decided to marry when they were both grown up. There were the twins (they weren’t exactly alike, but enough so that she had decided they were twins) Harry and Mary, who were slight and sometimes faded out altogether. And then there was Judith, by far the most substantial, who looked almost real except for her animal legs (they looked like a donkey’s legs) and holes where her eyes should be. She could be the meanest, not only to Gina but to the other three playmates, and she was the one who usually told them to leave. Sometimes she didn’t act like a kid at all.

  “Are you their mother?” Gina asked her, as the thought suddenly occurred to her that Judith acted like one.

  There were hoots and hisses from all four, and Andy bent over double, as if he was laughing.

  “Guess not,” Gina said, “because if you were their mother you couldn’t laugh at them without being punished which is what my mother does all the time do you have mothers where you come from?”

  Again the hissing and hooting.

  Gina sipped at her imaginary tea, and ordered the other four to do so. So far they hadn’t been able to directly touch anything, but Judith had managed to knock over Gina’s pyramid of stuffed animals as she walked through it.

  “What’s it like in your wor
ld is it like this with trees and a river and clouds and ants that get into the kitchen?”

  She waited for an answer, but there was none; the four playmates just stared at her (or something like it) and then the room got very bright and she felt a ripple beneath her as if someone had taken the rug in hand and given it a snap to put runs in it. One wall got very long like a tunnel and turned dark as midnight and then with a loud click like a camera shutter was back to the way it had been.

  “You sure can do a lot of tricks in your world do you like magic?”

  The four of them, who were now fading and then becoming more distinct, just stared at her.

  “Drink your tea don’t you like it I made it just for you!”

  She picked up her empty Play-Doh can, which still smelled of that wonderful clay, and feigned sipping.

  The hoots and whistles increased in volume, and the floor began to spin slowly around, taking her with it, as if she was on a giant top.

  “Hey! Mom’s gonna hear be quiet!”

  The floor spun faster, and Gina snugged both hands down into the shag rug, gripping tight. It was fun, but she was starting to get dizzy. The walls, the window, the pictures over her bed were melting into a kind of buttery color.

  “I said stop!”

  The floor came to an abrupt stop amidst a loud bass drum sound. The four playmates were fading.

  “Where are you going stay with me don’t go!”

  Judith said something that wasn’t a hoot or whistle but words, and then they were gone.

  Gina still felt as if she was spinning, and stood up, laughing slightly as she stepped forward but went sideways.

  She took another wobbly step and fell down—

  —Into her mother’s embrace in the doorway, where she stood with a frozen look of terror on her face.

  “Gina—”

  “They’re gone. Mom the playmates are gone but they’ll be back later they had to go over to Mr. Phaeder’s house I met him last week sorry he seems like a nice man sorry.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  As he pried open the third can of new paint, Corrie watched, out of the corner of his eye, the car parked down the road. It had been there for nearly an hour with a single occupant in the driver’s seat. The driver hadn’t made a move to drive away or get out of the car.