Widowmakers: A Benefit Anthology of Dark Fiction

by James Newman Benefit Anthology

  Rallies started getting cancelled now and then. Weird how that works, isn’t it?

  Fifteen months after the very first meeting of the Church of Answered Questions, Kristin Mayfield disappeared from campus. No body was ever found. Rumors started floating around that the church had something to do with it. The police were called in, but never found anything to indicate that she had ever even attended a meeting of the church.

  One thing of note: it was the first time anyone who wasn't a member of the church ever saw the basement level of the house where they held their functions. According to the rumors, there was an altar in the basement and a statue of what was supposed to be the god of the church. It took some doing, believe me, and it was years after the fact, but I saw pictures of that statue. It was a crude thing, carved from what looked like concrete and painted. It squatted on its haunches and had hands on its hips. There were large breasts, and an even larger phallus present on the thing. Though the photo was too dark to make out clearly, I could see a face, wide and bestial on the thing.

  I thought it looked like a bad prop. I still do. Something bothered me about that statue though, and I’ll get to that when the time is right.

  When rumors got out about the idol, the local churches went a little crazy. Oh, I don’t mean they stormed the Dungeon or anything that foolish, but you better believe the signs in front of the places and the sermons behind the doors went on about worshipping false idols. I do know that several parents insisted their children drop out of the Church of Answered Questions. Believe me, everyone on the campus got to hear about those incidents. The outrage was almost as strong as if they’d pinned their children down and started pulling teeth with a set of pliers. Those very same children were among the first to let out cries of religious oppression and it would have been funny if it hadn’t been a little scary. I think there might have been a few kids who quietly and meekly agreed to their parents’ demands, but a surprising number got vocal about it. Some of them managed to work things out with their folks in due time. Some of them lost the income they were getting from their parents and discovered that all the promises of the church meant remarkably little when they were suddenly without funding for their classes and dorm rooms. Of the latter group, I think five total managed to work something out with the church. They stayed in the house that Jack Chambers owned and got jobs to cover their tuition.

  It should have been funny. It wasn’t.

  It was scary. A little rebellion from the parents is one thing, but to walk away from the stability of a life with parents and rules and security to become a member of a church? It smacked too much of fanaticism for my tastes. Not that I would know firsthand, because I was still considered a pariah as far as church members were concerned.

  I know because my roommate was considering joining the church before his death.

  My roommate, Mark Burkes. The boy who died during the last congregation of the Church of Answered Questions. Mark wasn’t really the sort to join into religious fervors. He wasn't even the type to actually go to church unless it was a holiday. But he was exactly the sort who would have gladly joined a church or even a knitting club if he thought there was a good party to be had or, better still, a possibility of getting laid. In the long run, those were the most important things to him.

  Don’t take that the wrong way. I don’t mean to speak ill of the dead. I just want this to be clear to anyone who reads it. Mark was a good kid in every way that mattered. He was the one who told me about my being off limits to the church members. It wasn't that they were to hurt me or even say negative things about me. Simply that they were not to associate with me. He was puzzled about why and asked me. All I told him was that Jack and I had a history and we hadn’t really parted on the best of terms.

  His response and mine were about the same: shame I wouldn’t be going to any of the cool parties. He was my roommate and we got along well. We were never close friends, but we could tolerate each other and that was more than I could say for several of the other people who got stuck with roomies they wouldn’t have minded seeing dead.

  I don’t really know all of the details about how he got hooked into the church in the first place. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say he got recruited at one party or another. I can’t imagine Mark ever falling for any girl to the extent that she could get him to consider going to church, mostly because I think he was terrified of waking up married someday.

  Enough of that. I’m avoiding dealing with my culpability in Mark’s death, I suppose. He warned me. That was against the rules of the church. He wasn't supposed to tell me about being a pariah. I don’t think it mattered to me at the time. I doubt he even cared himself. He wasn't into the church, you see. He wouldn’t have taken it seriously. I guess there were a lot of kids that didn’t take it too seriously. It’s just that people that come across as lunatics always leave a stronger impression.

  Mark wouldn’t have had any idea about the lunatics. He hadn’t been following the growth and development of the Church of Answered Questions the same way I had. I should have warned him. I should have told him about the idol, about Kristin Mayfield and Tanya, and mostly I should have told him about Jack.

  I didn’t tell him a damned thing. I don’t know to this day if I was indifferent or scared.

  The raid on the church provided nothing useful to the police. They didn’t even find a single joint or a pot seed in that house. If the people attending the church were guilty of anything, I guess they made it a point to clean up after themselves with a vengeance.

  It wasn’t long after that when Mark got interested in attending the church functions. At first I thought it was a lark and maybe it was, but within a month he was scheduling his time around when the church would have meetings and actually blowing off parties that were exactly the sort or parties he lived for.

  He made it clear to me that the parties couldn’t hold a candle to what happened at the church. A few times he came home drunk to the point where one of the other kids in the dorms had to help him up the stairs and pour him into our shared room. Other times he came home exhausted and content and smelling of sex. Rumors be damned. Either my roommate had become a chronic liar, or the congregation was doing a lot more than singing a few hits from the gospel charts.

  It was almost enough to make me jealous, really. All it took to calm that green-eyed monster was a moment to remember Tanya, Tazz and Blue. Jack Chambers might have gotten religion, but I also knew what he’d been capable of as a teenager and I had no reason to believe he’d developed morals later on.

  Even writing that down makes me feel guilty, for the record. I saw his life before the well. I can’t say with any sincerity that I would have acted differently if it had been me making the choices he made. I like to think so, but I can’t guarantee it. Still, the ends don’t always justify the means, and in the long run I think he was wrong.

  Mark went off to the Dungeon at least four times before he died. I know he hadn’t committed himself to the church, because if he had, he’d have been forbidden to speak with me. At least, I think he would have been. Really, the only proof I had was his word on the subject. Beyond that, I know almost nothing as fact.

  Here’s what I do know, what I was able to glean from the police files and the news articles: First, the Church of Answered Questions had reached an all-time high for the number of attendees that night. Unlike most of their sessions, this one was considered “closed” which I assume means they were initiating new members into the congregation. Including Mark, there were at least fifteen new initiates.

  The congregation joined in their ceremonies at 7:30 PM. The police were called just after midnight. Sometime between the starting bell and the arrival of the cops, my roommate was killed along with four other people.

  After the police arrived the entire building was searched from top to bottom. They found the five bodies in the basement of the building, where the chapel for the church was located. The officers did not find any murder weapons, but the
statue that rested on the altar was bloodied at the base. There were no visible signs of violence on four of the victims. The only body that showed obvious grievous injury was that of Mark.

  Autopsies later revealed that Mark had been beaten to death. Most of his bones were broken or fractured. The other autopsies (Louisa Cranfield, Harold Perlman, Robert Harris and Mina Orolagas) showed no signs of foul play and came back negative on their toxicology screens. They were even clean of alcohol.

  Those are the known facts. All of the students who stayed around for police interviews agreed on the following fact: The ceremonies were harmless and mostly for fun. When the ceremonies ended there was a small party. No one was imbibing in anything stronger than beer to the best of anyone’s knowledge, and lastly, the troubles started when Jack Chambers announced that he would be closing the church’s doors because the experiment had reached its conclusion.

  After that, almost everything else is a jigsaw puzzle of differing stories.

  Here are the facts that are known about the experiment: First, Dr. Calvin Harrison knew about the establishment of a false church and gave several suggestions for assisting Chambers and his cohorts in the creation of the institution. He was kept appraised of what was happening with monthly reports that showed the income of the Church of Answered Questions and was consulted regarding every step of political activity within the church. A copy of his copious notes as well as all of the financial files for the church was delivered to the police without hesitation as soon as the investigation was formally opened.

  Dr. Harrison was the first to stand up for and defend Jack Chambers.

  When the case was officially closed, the deaths of five people were listed with a cause of “death by misadventure.”

  The facts give us remarkably little to work with in some cases, don’t they?

  The following list of incidents is alleged to have occurred by numerous witnesses during the night in question. All of the incidents supposedly took place only after Jack Chambers made his statement.

  Almost everyone in the congregation, over one hundred people at the time, claimed that the building groaned around them.

  The vast majority of the people in the building also stated that they no longer believed they were in control of their own bodies. Within five minutes of Chambers’ declaration that the church was no longer going to be active, a mass orgy of sorts ensued. Though the details vary substantially, the general consensus is that the sexual acts committed were of a voluntary nature, even in cases where no one had been prepared for any sexual intercourse. An almost perfect split exists between the participants who stated that the orgies were a regular part of the church’s sessions and those who swore that nothing like that had occurred before.

  Sometime during the mass sexual indulgence, four people died of unknown causes and Mark Burkes was beaten to death.

  Three people claimed that he bashed himself in the head and chest until his hands were bloodied and his face was fractured in seventeen different locations.

  Seven people swore that it was Jack Chambers who beat him into the ground. There were no marks on Chambers that would have indicated any sort of physical confrontation and by his own admission, Chambers engaged in sex with at least three separate women.

  Most of the people at the church that night claimed that the carved idol climbed down from the altar and murdered Mark Burkes. Though descriptions vary greatly as to the chain of events, the general consensus is that the edifice lifted itself off of the altar and grew to roughly human size. A few claims included tales of the idol having intercourse with at least one woman after the vicious beating.

  None of the witnesses could say which woman their stone god molested. None of the women claimed to have been raped, nor to have had any sort of relations with the image of their god or to have had contact with the stone idol.

  Death by misadventure. There was a lot of speculation that someone spiked the proverbial punch with LSD or something similar. There have been theories about peyote and other hard to trace natural hallucinogens as well.

  No one believes the statue climbed down and beat a man to death before having its way with one of the girls in the church that day. That includes, if you talk to them, most of the people who were there to witness the entire event.

  The statue was taken into evidence and examined very carefully. There were traces of blood at the statue’s base that were a genetic match for Mark Burkes. The police believed that either the statue was cleaned up and the culprits missed a few drops or Burkes might have accidentally brained himself against the statue.

  All of the explanations make good enough sense, I suppose. In the end, Jack and all of the other participants were absolved of any wrong doing, though more than a few of the students transferred or were sent elsewhere by their parents.

  The good doctor behind everything was put on academic probation by the board of trustees, though everyone knew it was just lip service. He’d done nothing wrong. He was a sociology professor and it was a legitimate experiment being carried out by students who were monitored carefully, if from a distance.

  I suppose that should be the end of the story, but it wasn't for me. In the long run it was only another step into a place where things went horribly wrong.

  I said it should have been the end of the story. It was, except for one small detail: that damned statue. A cheap, homemade and hand carved piece of concrete that sat in the same location for most of two years by all accounts. It did nothing in all of that time. It merely observed; if concrete can observe anything.

  But here’s the part that made me even bother writing all of this down, the place where, when I look back, I still get an occasional chill.

  I know where the concrete came from. I was the one who poured it into Jack Chambers’ wishing well and sealed the damned place shut to stop him from making any more wishes.

  There had been surveyors going through those woods when I spilled the Quik-Rete compound into that clear pool of water. I might have mentioned that. Less than a year later, they were clearing the area, taking out the trees and getting ready to build an extension to the university, new homes, apartments and even a strip mall.

  I never thought about the wishing well after that, except to remember Jack’s rage when he discovered the ruination of his dream machine. I thought I’d done a good thing. I thought I’d stopped him.

  I never thought he might take the concrete with him, or that he’d make it into a statue for his new church, a new icon to be observed and maybe worshipped by the hundreds of people who came down to the basement of an empty house and listened to Jack’s sermons.

  Six people total died in that house or were at least associated with it before their disappearances. Those are only the ones who could be confirmed. I do know that several more students vanished during that time and that no one could locate them later. Oh, sure, students leave campuses every year and some of them never show up again. Possibly they drop out of the more civilized world and maybe they end up hooked on drugs and selling their bodies in the worst places we can imagine. I know it happens regularly enough. I also know that the numbers were just a little higher during that two-year span at Dunham than they were in other years.

  Nothing I can prove, not any more than I can say that I saw Jack Chambers carry the lump of concrete from the woods, or that I watched him take a chisel to the manmade stone and carve the face of a nightmare onto it. I couldn’t make any of those claims and pass a polygraph test. But that doesn’t make the words lies.

  One little case, an embarrassment more than anything else, except for the people who died. I guess their families saw it as something much worse. The house in question was off campus. The university denied knowledge of any wrongdoing and very successfully at that. Though at least three separate families attempted to sue the university, Jack Chambers, and others for the actions of the church, the lawsuits failed.

  I remember talking with a law student at the university not long after it happened. His
name was Cecil McCormick and he became my roommate later that year. We talked about the trials while they were going on and when it was all said and done he seemed genuinely surprised that Chambers got off without a hitch.

  Jack Chambers went to court every day of the trials, all of them. He made arrangements with his teachers and made up the class work that had to be done, I suppose. I’m sure they’d have made exceptions for him. He’s that kind of person: Popular and sincere.

  I saw several pictures of him, crestfallen and miserable with grief for the families that had suffered losses. A few of them made it into national magazines and his face was liked well enough that more people took his picture and plastered his image along with articles. CNN showed him leaving the courtroom the day he was exonerated, his head hung low, his handsome face still solemn when all around him people were smiling and celebrating his release.

  Cecil said something about it when we heard the news. He said, “That boy must have been blessed by God to get off so smoothly.”

  I remember how badly that comment made me shiver.

  It was just possible that Cecil was right. He just might not have been thinking about the same god.

  One last footnote: The statue that Jack Chambers used in his ceremonies was taken by the police and put into evidence. It disappeared before it could be returned to Jack. To my knowledge, it was never seen again.

  * * *

  Chapter Three: Dust of Ages

  If asked by almost anyone in the world, Carl Meriwether would have gleefully volunteered that he loved his job at the museum. Sure, the pay sucked, but that wasn’t why he worked there. He was there because he loved looking at all of the amazing pieces of history.