A Haunting of Horrors, Volume 2: A Twenty-Book eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult

by Brian Hodge

  He slid onto the shoulder with the wheels locked and made a washboard stop just shy of the ditch. A glance in the mirror showed empty road behind him. Out of the car, around to the front, onto his knees he went, inspecting for damage. The left side of the bumper was smeared with viscera and a swatch of fur—red fur. Very red. What the hell was it? He peered back up the road. It was smoothly capped. He hadn't seen an animal flying off to the side after the collision, so it still must have been moving on its own. But, Lord Almighty, it appeared to be already injured before it ran across the road: bloodied and misshapen and … and—he thought, and this was really crazy—it had only three legs.

  Long, skinny stick legs.

  But then how could you tell much about something that was running? It had to have been wounded before it loped out into the road like that, though. Maybe it had been in a fight with another animal. Only, it was big enough where you wouldn't think it would fare so badly. Unless the fight was with another dog. That was it. Chewed up by another dog. Or hit by a truck. And the red fur, that was just blood.

  He pulled the few hairs off the bumper and saw that they were dry and smooth. Not bloodstained, just red. Redder than a red fox. Of course, you couldn't be sure with such a small sample. But that was one horribly mutilated pooch. And yet "mutilation" wasn't the right word either. Because it was smooth, almost featureless. Denny had seen the eye, the sharply pointed ears, and one more thing he was obviously mistaken about.

  He could have sworn it didn't have a mouth.

  There in the sunshine of a pastoral midday, Denny Bryce sensed an unseen actor just offstage and twisted around suddenly. He scrutinized the underbrush beside the shoulder of the road. Then the trees. No squirrels, no tattletale jays, no grasshoppers or butterflies. In fact it was very still. He wanted to go back and look for whatever it was he had hit, but something was warning him: Get back in the car!

  No way for a rationalist to act, he told himself.

  He stared hard at the embankment, but the feeling persisted that the stillness meant just the opposite—an invisible turmoil. It was like one of those puzzle pictures where you searched for hidden animals. Was he picking up bits of some nearly discernible form in the underbrush, hearing a faint patter? Nyet. Nein. Nonsense. Turning in a complete circle, he crossed the road and stood on the edge of the ditch.

  Some kind of gossamer-like vine was entwined through the embankment, he could see now. Up close he could detect that its green, heart-shaped leaves were faintly trembling like the skeins of a vast spider web. He looked toward the spot where the creature had crossed in front of his car. Dead still. The leaves stretched like ivy, unbroken as far as he could see. And then he saw a ridge appear in the glossy green bank and begin to ripple toward him. Exactly like an ocean swell it came, lifting and accelerating with a rush. It was the acceleration that finally got to him. He jumped, turned and skipped to the car.

  When he dove into the front seat, he slammed and locked the door. Then he felt silly. The wave or the shadow, whatever it was, did not pass him. He craned around to look and saw the same even green ground cover as before. A breeze, that was all. He had let himself be mocked by a breeze.

  It was only another half mile to KNEAL, and when he arrived he was surprised that the stagnancy he had sensed on the road seemed to reach this far. He got out of the car and stood beneath the willow, rubbernecking the branches of all the trees he could see and the roof of the farmhouse and the window where yesterday he thought he had seen the face like his dead sister's before the fire had scarred Tiffany for life. It felt like aftermath. Whatever had happened up the road seemed to have happened here as well. It was like hunting season where the first shot recoils through the woods and everything freezes and you know that the next shot will bring pandemonium.

  "So, did you bring my cigarettes?"

  He looked up just as the screen door banged the jamb. It was the brightly dressed erg of a woman who had warned him not to have his picture taken—Beverly Swanson, her name was. She smiled effortfully and for once neither of her eyeteeth was smudged with lipstick.

  "Sorry," he said, reaching into his shirt pocked as he strolled to the porch. "But I think I've got your glasses."

  She slid off the blue pearled pair of spectacles she wore and, with a jeweled finger, pressed the bridge of the glitter frames he handed her to seat the stems over her ears. "So it was you. I'd pegged your old man."

  "I found them lying around."

  "You don't look like a kleptomaniac."

  "What does a kleptomaniac look like?"

  "Like your old man. Martin collects things as if civilization is on the verge of collapse."

  This time Denny didn't deny it.

  "Quite a ladies man," she added.

  "Dad, a ladies man?"

  "Lets you know how he feels, that's for sure."

  "Uh-oh. What's he done now?"

  "Nothing James Cagney wouldn't have done."

  "I don't get you."

  "Well, they'll tell you inside, if it's worth telling. I'm not a gossip. I came out here for cigarettes, and you don't have any."

  She was a gossip, but she had learned how to control the flow of information to disguise that fact. "What kind do you smoke?" he asked about the cigarettes.

  "Anything but chocolate or peppermint. Do I look fussy?"

  "You look elegant. Like you might use a cigarette holder."

  "Aren't you the sweetheart, telling a wart of a woman things like that. I’m not surprised, seeing as how you’re the son of a ladies man. If you want to humor me, get something without filters and enough nicotine so that I don't bust an artery sucking the damn things."

  "I'll do that."

  "And don't worry about your old man. Everyone's upset about last night, and I guess your dad sensed that. It made him edgy. He's lost, poor guy."

  "What are you talking about? Upset about what?"

  "Cat burglars. Or maybe just cats. Last night something yowled on the roof and fell off. Ruta swears it was a red scarecrow trying to climb down the lightning rod. But that woman thinks she's gang-raped once a week by horny aliens, so who knows what she saw."

  Denny exhaled a laugh. You had to like this woman.

  "Mr. Bryce?" Someone calling from the shadow of the screen door.

  "I won't forget the cigarettes," he said and passed into the house.

  Molly faced him with the assurance of an accuser.

  "Did Beverly tell you?"

  "Tell me what?"

  "Your father hit one of the women."

  "What?"

  "With his fist."

  "You mean an actual punch?" She looked at him condescendingly, and he added, "I mean was he pushing or swinging?"

  "It wasn't ambiguous; he looked like a boxer. Your father doesn't like to sit for photographs, does he?"

  "No, but—"

  "The photograph was when he started to get testy. Then when Dana tried to get him to take a shower, he hit her."

  "Is she all right?"

  "He left a mark."

  The big woman looked at him with her cartoon-perfect button nose and large brown eyes, and Denny got the mandate. "All right," he said. "I understand. What was the woman's name—Dana? Let me apologize to her, and then I'll go talk to my dad."

  "She's doing laundry in the cellars. Second door past the kitchen. Watch the steps."

  Cellars? With a plural? He shouldn't be surprised, he thought – a farmhouse as old as this.

  The narrow steps were cupped and worn to velvet, and the side walls leading down were damp stone mottled with runes of mildew and mold. No handrail. Hauling baskets of laundry up and down would be a feat for a British charwoman, and Denny pictured a stalwart female with a yellow brick for a face and a right cross that could have dislocated his father's jaw. The light in the cellars banked from the left at the bottom, and he found himself on the hard dirt floor of a storage room lit by the splintered glare from a single naked bulb. It was dusty and oily and dank, and the tempera
ture was at least twenty degrees cooler than that of the level above. The opposite end of the storage room funneled into darkness that emitted a steady churning. This must be the washer, of course, though in the context of the bowels of the house it sounded gastric and digestive.

  A half dozen steps across the dirt floor and he was groping through the vague illumination of the passageway. Curiously, it had a kink – right, right, left, left – around some hidden substructure in the house before it guided him into the moist chamber that held the washing machine and three slate set tubs. The ogress of ablutions had her back to him as she worked in the middle tub with a stick, but she had ankles and calves more like a Swedish Cinderella than the Brit charwoman of his expectations. And the way she jumped when he spoke suggested a certain frailty of nerves.

  "My apologies," he said and stuck out his hand. "Denny. Denny Bryce."

  The fingers that had flown to her breast came forward in a limp grasp. "Dana Novicki."

  They had to raise their voices above the noise of the washer, but the exaggerated conversation seemed to give them time to size each other up. Her slate blue eyes did not look angry, he decided; the boyish set of his middle-aged face was not defensive about his father, she thought. They moved away from the washer, and he took note of her sandy blond hair, tiny ears and ample lips. Her cheeks had that ephemeral ruddiness of women who blush easily and always look a little surprised. She could have been either side of fifty, though age seemed irrelevant to her quick and graceful movements. But the inescapably damning thing about her face, he saw now, was the faint mouse developing above her right eye.

  "I can't believe my father did that,” he said. “What can I say, except I’m profoundly sorry?”

  She waggled slender fingers dismissively.

  "He's never mistreated a woman before," he added with earnest assurance.

  "He's probably never had a woman try to get him to take a shower before either."

  "That's no excuse."

  "Maybe it's a little bit of one when you're getting older and some strange woman tries to help you off with your shirt."

  “It’s very gracious of you to say so."

  "Not at all."

  They looked at each other helplessly, because they were still shouting and the relentless chug of the washer was going to defeat any delicate conversation.

  "Look," he said as he reached for his wallet, "I hope you take this the right way. I'm not trying to buy you off or anything, but I'd like to give you the price of a good dinner, if you'll permit me."

  She shook her head. "That's not necessary, really."

  "You have a thankless job. I don't know what they pay you, but it isn't enough for what my father put you through."

  "Oh"– the ample lips parted in a rosy smile – "I don't work here."

  "But …"

  "I live here."

  His pale lashes blinked. Ariel had said they all pitched in. So now he had just insulted this woman by offering her money. "Okay," he tried to say in a nuanced way above the racket while nonchalantly sliding his wallet back into his pocket, "let me make it up to you some other way. Let me … take you to lunch."

  "Really, I can't."

  Just then the washer kicked into a new cycle best described as lift-off at Cape Canaveral.

  He pointed upstairs. "We'll talk."

  She nodded and he A-framed his hands in a gesture of indebtedness before starting toward the wrong end of the room to make his exit. There were two tunnels in that direction, he saw after two steps.You could lose a minotaur down here. At least she was laughing at his wrong turn, he noted, though he could only hear the rockets of the spin cycle reach full burn.

  His father didn't remember the incident. Didn't know who Dana Novicki was. Sometimes he faked forgetting, but Denny didn't think he was faking this morning. "So, I hear you got your mug shot taken, old man," he said, and the vague way Martin Bryce went along with the statement made Denny sure he didn't remember that either. He stayed with him for an hour, then spent another ten or fifteen minutes trying to relocate Dana. No one had seen her. No one had any idea where she might be.

  He sat down on a chair in the parlor to wait a few more minutes, aware of the curious looks he was getting and pretending to study the painting of the Garden of Eden that hung on the opposite wall. Something odd caught his eye. He got to his feet for a closer examination. The serpent was missing. The artist had failed to paint it in. But then again there was a ridge of paint all along the outline that wound round the Tree of Knowledge, as if someone had scraped the coils right off. Strange. Sneaky snake gone missing.

  Suddenly something else that was undersized caught his attention. A flash of blonde, a glint of green, and a girl, no more than ten years of age, darted through the archway and up the staircase. Tiffany! his eyes said. Only, it had to be the child he had seen at the window. What a striking similarity to the memory of his sib. Obviously a grandchild, but whose among these aging women?

  Like a missing piece returned to a jigsaw puzzle, that faint restoration of credibility to his father's insistence that he had talked to Tiffany seemed to make his old man whole for a moment. Always take him seriously, he reminded himself. Nothing infuriated him more than to have people talk over his father's head as if the old man wasn’t there, wasn’t in command of his daily destiny.

  Jigsaw. The painting had suggested that. A missing piece. And Dana Novicki was missing and he couldn't wait any longer, so he decided to check the cellars one last time before leaving.

  Down the worn narrow steps he went, through the storage room and into the passageway where the dim light behind him was squeezed to near nothingness. Ahead and still out of sight, the masticating washing machine was silent. He groped toward the peculiar U-turn that would go to the right and a few feet further on would make another U-turn to the left. Why did it do that? What could be in the earth that had to be negotiated around?

  He had been guided by light from the laundry on his first trip through, but now it was midnight in front of him. There was no point in going on.

  "Dana?" he called to make sure.

  How had she turned on the light in the laundry room? He ran his hand around the corner of the black rectangle at the first U-turn. The cold stone was damp, but not from sweating. It was saturated. The earth on the exterior side of the wall must be a quagmire. It made him wonder if the passageway led beyond the foundation of the house.

  No light switch. It must be in the laundry room.

  Well, hell, only a few feet and a couple of turns. Dana had done it. What if something had happened to her? She could be lying on the floor in there, though that would still leave the light burning, so maybe she had turned it off first.

  He groped ahead. One step, two—hands scraping for reference points, reaching for an end. Something like fur passed under his fingertips, only it was brittle and dissolved under his touch. The white crystalline mold, he thought with disgust. Enough spores down here to kill Mr. Clean. So now he imagined great puffballs and fruited fungi spewing around him. And could that be the faint phosphorescence of a fairy ring on the wall directly in front of him? Something was glowing. End of passage. He took the second U-turn, and a few steps later the clammy air of the laundry room expanded around him.

  "Dana?"

  He had the same feeling that had come to him out on the road after the thing with no mouth loped across. The sense that alien things were watching, smelling, feeling his heat. You couldn't have a place like this that was perpetually in the dark, in the damp, in the earth, and not expect dark-loving things to take up residence. Small, probably. Most of them. Very small. Bats, rats. Things like that. Even smaller. Noctivagant forms, feeling out territory, each contriving a means of sustenance. They lived pretty much off juices of things that were even smaller or the organic cells that dropped off laundry, but not human blood or big chunks out of your neck or something. So he, Denny Bryce, was the big kahuna down here.

  No sweat.

  At last he found t
he wall plate and threw the switch and the Cartesian world flooded back into being. Washer, dryer, three slate set tubs. No Dana Novicki lying there, sucked dry by vampire gnats who afterward turned off the light. But …

  What the hell was that?

  He could have sworn he saw something receding into one of the far passageways. It was small—or at least low to the ground—as it shrank from the light. He probably would not have even seen it, in fact, except that it was … red. Crimson, in fact.

  Red sweat sock escapes laundry room! Last seen limping into tunnel.

  Yeah, well, enough of this shit. She wasn't here. And he had done the brave thing, half out of curiosity, and now he wasn't curious anymore, and so he backtracked through the labyrinth and left the house and drove home, or at least to the spot where that other red thing had crossed the road. There he pulled onto the shoulder and studied the panoply of green heart-shaped ivy. Because there was something there now, he could see. Definitely a gap in the ground cover. And it was bright sunshine everywhere, so he got out of the car and leaped the ditch and waded through the ankle-grabbing network of vines until the flies all lifted in a blue cloud.

  "My God …" he murmured.

  Whatever it was—whatever it had been—there was nothing left now that was recognizable. Just purplish masses of tissue wrapped in bloody sinews, gnawed bones that his imagination could not re-assemble, shreds of glistening gore, swatches of red fur that he knew weren't blood soaked and a savaged skull with a very pronounced anomaly. The skull had been licked clean by something that had worked rather diligently at getting the brain out through the eye sockets and spinal opening. And that must have been a task, because there was no other orifice. Which is what you would get if there were no teeth, no jaw, no mouth …

  Chapter 8

  "Ammmber?"

  She said it in that slow, measured way adults have of leading you out of a lie, hinting at their power over you. And Amber was afraid of her mother's power. But she was still going to lie to her face about stealing the paint. Because if she gave up what she had—or what her mother thought she had—then she would be helpless again. "You always blame me!" she shrilled.