by Wither
Wendy crumpled at the mention of his name, sobbing. But he was still alive! She had been so sure he was dead. Her father supported her with one arm around her waist and led her to the sofa. She covered her mouth, but made no effort to stop the silent tears streaming down her cheeks, and she choked.
Her mother took her other hand, pressed it within hers. “Wendy, dear, I know this is hard… but we need to ask you something.”
Wendy nodded.
Her mother looked to her father for help. He cleared his throat, “The press called,” he said. “They want an official statement from me.
Again, Wendy simply nodded.
“Honey,” her mother said, “I left you with Alex last night…”
Do you know anything about what happened to him? That was the question Wendy prayed her mother would not ask. How could she ever answer that? “We went out for a while,” Wendy said, finally wiping tears from her cheeks.
“To Marshall Field?” her father asked.
She shook her head vigorously. “No,” she said. “We went for a drive…we came back here, but he left around eleven. Said he was going back to his dorm”
Her father sat down beside her, stroked her hair again. “We’ll take you to see him later. I don’t want you driving just yet.”
Wendy buried her face in her mother’s blouse and let herself cry. She hadn’t realized just how much Alex meant to her. How could she tell them that she felt responsible for his “accident”? She was overcome with waves of guilt and relief in equal measure. You’ll be fine, she had told him. And now this. But thank God you’re alive!
She visited his bedside for only a few moments, which was all his doctor would allow and was almost more than she could bear. They had stopped the internal bleeding, bandaged his head, and put casts on both legs and his left arm. He was hooked up to an IV and had an oxygen tube up his nose. His face was a frightful study in contusions and abrasions. He was so pale from loss of blood, but his condition had been downgraded to serious.
He still had not regained consciousness.
Before she left his side, she squeezed his right hand, whispered fiercely, “I’m so sorry, Alex.” She kissed him lightly on the cheek. Then she placed the cloth-wrapped mandrake root under his pillow. Maybe the nurses, seeing it could do no harm, would actually leave it there.
After Wendy returned home from the hospital with her parents, she was still so distraught her mother gave her one of her machine-manufactured sedatives—which Wendy swallowed without a single protest—and it took the harsh edges off of jagged reality. Exhausted and sedated, she fell asleep on the sofa. Before her father spoke with the press he carried her up to her bedroom, placed her gently on her bed, then stood back as her mother placed a comforter over her. As he stood looking at his daughter’s tear-reddened face, Larry Ward couldn’t help but notice all the strands of gray hair around her temples.
“Karen?” a voice asked quietly, and she opened her eyes to see Maria Labajo looking down on her. It was late morning, and Karen was resting with eyes closed in the private room on the maternity ward to which she’d been relocated as she waited out the irregular Braxton-Hicks contractions of early labor.
The overworked ER trauma staff had been unable to reach Maria throughout the morning and had finally tracked her down to the Copley Square Mariott in Boston, where the obstetrician had been attending a medical conference on alternatives to hysterectomy.
Maria checked Karen’s pulse now at the wrist, then held her patient’s hand in her own.
“Honey, I’m so sorry about Paul,” Maria said. The sight of tears spilling down Karen’s cheeks brought tears to Maria’s own eyes, and for the moment she put aside the clinical stoicism she typically held as a protective shield against her patients’ sorrow. “They told me they’d informed you how he was found—”
“Yes,” Karen said miserably. When she’d been told an hour earlier, the news had come as neither a surprise nor a shock, but only a confirmation of what she’d dreaded. She’d known he was dead the moment he went out the bedroom window; only the circumstances of his death were new. He’d died defending her, defending their baby, and for that she would love him always, and fiercely. Already, though, she felt the merciless erosion of memory, that self-protective healing instinct that begins to blur the face of our beloved the instant they slip from us. She couldn’t bear it. And so she turned her attention willfully away from its own dissolution and asked Maria, “Is the baby coming…?”
Maria looked at her with concern. “Slowly. You’re dilating at less than a quarter centimeter per hour, and the baby’s hardly descended at all. At this rate you’ll remain in prolonged latency for another twelve hours.”
A male RN arrived with an IV bag of medication. “I’ll take that,” Maria told him, and connected the bag to an intravenous infusion pump. She connected it to the IV line already dripping hydrating fluids into Karen’s arm.
“This is synthetic oxytocin—to speed up the labor,” Maria said. “The contractions may be a little more painful, so let me know if you’re hurting too much and we’ll see about getting you some meperidine. The important thing now is to get you through this as quickly as possible, and without a C-section, if it can be avoided.”
“What about the baby?” Karen asked. “Is her heartbeat still strong? Will she survive the birth?”
Maria heard the hope in her patient’s voice, and knew in this rare case she should caution against it. “Maybe. But you need to prepare yourself that she probably won’t survive the night. Frankly, I’m amazed the baby has survived this long. Whatever genetic defect is at work here has kicked her gestational rate into high gear. She’s already the size of a healthy thirty-seven-week-old…”
“Healthy?” Karen said, clinging to hope. Maria took her hand and gave it a squeeze, looked at her patient sadly.
“I’m sorry, Karen.”
Art learned about his brother’s death on the noon news. He was holed up in the old vinyl archives of the WDAN campus radio station, where he’d come on foot last night after ditching Karen’s Volvo. He received the news in stunned silence on a little black-and-white portable TV he’d found among the junk of the back room. From its staticky screen he also learned that his own fugitive status had reached critical mass during the night, following his assault on Windale’s sheriff, his suspected abduction of eight-year-old Abby MacNeil, and brutal murder of her father in the hospital chapel Though not armed, the news anchor warned, Art Leeson should be considered “very dangerous.”
Art didn’t feel very dangerous. All he felt was miserable, squatting in a corner of a windowless back room that smelled of deteriorating cardboard and rotten carpet padding.
He wept loudly for his brother, confident he was buried deep enough in the cinder block bunker that he wouldn’t be discovered by the daytime student DJs. Half of WDAN’s back rooms were virtually inaccessible, the doors barricaded with collapsed metal shelves of archaic equipment and old record promos. Art cowered in the most remote one, wishing he could somehow stay here eternally and join the other obsolete junk—the eight-tracks and unspooling reel-to-reels—moldering quietly in darkness.
He tried to distract himself from his sorrow with questions: What had Paul been doing on a water tower? What had happened to the roof of Karen’s house? Where was Abby? And what was this goddamned curse that had chosen Art and anyone with whom he came in contact for its victims?
He drew his knees up beneath his chin and huddled in darkness through the long afternoon, with only questions for company.
In anticipation of the parade, most downtown employers released their office workers at three-thirty that afternoon. Sidewalk cafes and lunch counters closed early (most would convert to food concessions later, serving everything from fried dough to lobster rolls), while the boutiques along Main Street and College Avenue moved their prettiest wares into storefront displays, tricked out in autumnal splendor. Though there would be no sales this evening (by official decree), most retailer
s took consolation in the fact that King Frost—by enticing twenty thousand out-of-towners to Windale’s sidewalks—offered the year’s biggest night of free advertising.
By four, deputies Jeff Schaeffer and Reed Davis began rerouting traffic around the central business district, while volunteers from Windale’s lone engine and ladder company set up barricades and hand-painted signs in the four large municipal lots designated for festival parking. Parking alone was expected to generate in excess of fifty thousand dollars in revenue.
Meanwhile, at the pavilion outside the Danfield College gates (which also fronted the square), students from the school’s Sound Technology department were laying cable and tweaking audio levels in preparation for a five-o’clock sound-check. After heated competition, seven local bands had been awarded the coveted thirty-minute sets scheduled throughout the evening. Showcasing a representative section of musical tastes, the evening lineup included such perennials of the Essex tavern circuit as George “Hatback” Johnson (Chicago blues), Tyrannosaurus Sex (ska), Margo Rita (Jimmy Buffett covers), D.K. (goth), Tackhammer (indie), Grym Reaper (metal), and the bizarre acoustic quartet Bob &Ted & Carol & Malice (folk).
Five on the dot. The bass-heavy power chords of sound-check carried on the clear night… and could be heard as far away as the outlying residential neighborhoods of Windale, where the first trick-or-treaters were emerging. The bass gave the night an ominous pulse, an anticipatory heartbeat. In the neighborhoods, parents accompanying their little flame-retardant ghouls and drugstore goblins (not to mention Spice Girls) looked up at the sound of distant rumbling. Could that be thunder? But no—one look at the twilit sky dispelled that question.
It was that moment of an autumn sunset when lawns glow blue-green and the air turns the color of gasoline. The sky was untroubled except for the bellwether clouds that reached high smoky fingers from the west.
The air was hushed. King Frost was coming…
At that very instant downtown, strings of white festival lights and decorative orange paper lanterns twinkled on, as Mayor Alfonse DelTOlio threw a ceremonial switch. Behind him, arranged on the steps of city hall, the Harrison High School Marching Band began playing.
The Sixty-Fifth Annual King Frost Halloween Parade had begun.
Halloween was here.
Matthias had more foul work to do even though the Eve had arrived, cleaning up after the witches, burying the scraps of flesh and bone they discarded, burning the clothes and any personal effects left over after their feeding. He’d have to go into the barn to remove the latest steaming carcass or two before the stench of rot became too powerful. One time he’d had to tie a rag dipped in kerosene around his face to combat the putrid odor of a long-gone corpse. He still remembered the time, years before that, when he’d gone in without any special preparation and heaved up his morning meal to the cackling amusement of the witches. This time, however, he wouldn’t mind venturing into the barn, for the need was upon him again, as it came every month when the moon was heavy and bloated in the sky. It sickened him, his craving, but there was naught to do for it. By the time the moon was full, he’d walk through a sea of bloated corpses to have his need attended to by Wither or one of the others. As loathsome as the craving was, to deny it was a thousand times worse.
One time, sixty years ago and more, when the witches were lethargic and barely noticed him, he had tried to stay away, to wait through the cycle of the moon, to free himself from their hold. Wasn’t long before he couldn’t keep down solid food and not much longer after that when a mere glass of water triggered retching spells so violent he would black out from the coughing. He had crawled, squirmed almost, all the long way to the barn and had almost died with the effort of getting the doors open just wide enough for him to squeeze through. They made him come to them, that much he understood. If he died, they’d find another keeper. That cold winter day, his belly dragging in the dirt, he had discovered once and for all who was master and who was slave. Not that there had ever been any real doubt. When Matthias crawled within reach of her arms, Wither had offered him succor as always. But he had sensed her amusement to see him laid so low, weak as a runt-of-the-litter kitten, silent tears streaming down his leathery cheeks as he begged for the one thing only the witches could give him. That had been the last time he tried to break free of his servitude.
Freedom, he knew, would only come in death, and death for him, as it had been for his father, Warren, and for his grandfather, Ezekiel before him, would be a long time coming. Of course, he could always end his extended life prematurely, take his father’s way out, with a bullet through the roof of his mouth. But Matthias had never had the conviction of spirit to put an end to his part in the witches’ centuries-long legacy of evil. It was a small but essential part he played, and once a month he would be reminded of what they could give him for his service. Once a month made all the other days bearable.
He carried his old bloodstained shovel into the barn with him. Sometimes they would make him work first, other times he could sidle right up to them and have done with it. Usually they were contrary, so bringing the shovel, appearing ready for his gory chores, was his casual bit of insurance that they wouldn’t taunt him first. It also wouldn’t do to have the need so full upon him that he walked hunched over with the consuming ache of it. If they saw him on the edge of suffering, they’d take great pleasure in drawing it out, make him wait until the pain was truly exquisite and he was ready to drop to his knees and whimper for release.
This time he chose his time well. Near dusk was—he knew from long years of experience—the safest time to disturb them. With the approach of dusk, they began to stir from their daylight sleep so were less likely to lash out at sudden movements and sounds. And it would still be too early for them to be full of their cunning spitefulness and dangerous rages. He could expect to find them as docile and amenable as they ever were. Especially now that their Eve had arrived. They would be most powerful and destructive now, leading up to midnight. Tomorrow would involve a hellish cleanup if his long years of experience were worth a damn.
Sarah and Rebecca sat hunched in the deepest shadows, the farthest corners, deferring the vanguard position to Wither. They appeared as large, textured lumps to him, their occasional languid movements almost eel-like, serpentine as they unfolded their limbs in welcome to the night. Matthias stopped about six feet from the folded bulk of Wither, standing within reach of her long arms, as she demanded, but distant enough to be respectful. Even squatting she was almost as tall as he was. Her eyes were open, mere yellow slits but completely aware of him, he was sure, despite her apparent lethargy.
“The need is upon me,” he said without preamble.
Wither stirred, her arms unfolding, reaching out toward him. So there would be no games this day. No taunting. He laid the shovel carefully at his feet and stepped forward, afraid to say anything that might change her relatively good mood.
She pricked the tips of her index and middle fingers with a curved thumbnail, releasing a trickle of dark blood. After nearly a century and a half, Matthias could smell it on the air, and the scent unhinged his arthritic knees. He fell before her, pulling the fingers into his mouth, sucking on the strange blood that coursed through the witch’s veins. It satisfied a hundred needs within him, and hinted at a hundred more, secret pleasures forever out of reach but endlessly tantalizing.
Soon came the realization he was no longer with Wither. From where he lay, on a stale pile of straw clotted with fresh clumps of shit, he guessed she had tossed him bodily across the barn. He had been too lost in the rush of pleasure to notice the passage of time, the pain of his twisted arm, or the sickly sweet smell of her feces.
He rolled over, climbed to his hands and knees and retrieved his shovel. Wither had leapt up into the loft and completely ignored him now. Just as well, since he had work to do. He brought the wheelbarrow he kept by the door over to the remains of the first corpse and shoveled the one-eyed head in first. Generally they ate the i
nternal organs and most of the thighs. The rest they left scattered around the barn for Matthias to find in what amounted to a grotesque parody of a scavenger hunt.
His wheelbarrow was soon overflowing with the remains of three different corpses, one of them female, wearing the tattered remains of a Danfield College T-shirt, which he would burn later.
Wendy dreams she is alone in the dark, on the verge of sleep or just arising from a deep sleep. Without moving, she can tell she is in a confined place. The air is stale and earthly. Her eyes are staring, wide, but there is nothing to see.
She reaches out with her hands, feels wood at her sides and wood above her, inches from her face. Her legs move and strike wood as well. She is confined within a wooden box … not a box.
A coffin!
She has been buried alive. Wendy wants to scream but Wither will not allow it. Wither remembers. This is where she is supposed to be. Listen!
And she does. Her ears are hypersensitive, to her breathing,…to her heartbeat, frighteningly sluggish …to the steady chuff coming to her from above.
She has been waiting for just such a sound. The chuff chuff from above just as she expects. Wendy bites down on Withers lip, fighting the urge to moan. Soon, Wither seems to promise her. Very soon now.
The chuff becomes a thud as the shovel strikes the lid of the coffin. In minutes the thuds become more urgent. The coffin lid vibrates and dust sifts down on her face. She blinks her eyes to free them from dust. Then she hears a squeak as the coffin lid lifts slightly, then it bangs shut again, slipping free of the numb fingers that pull against it. The momentary blast of fresh air revives Wither slightly. She breathes deeply of it.
The lid raises again, more carefully this time, and she sees a sliver of moon, a sprinkling of stars, then the sweaty face of Ezekiel Stone looking down at her, fear expanding the whites of his eyes. The shovel falls from his hand. It is one thing to be told to dig up a coffin. Quite another to actually find a live body waiting for you under the ground.