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

by Brian Hodge

  “You don’t wait well,” Loi said, coming up behind her and putting her arms around her waist. “Best to work.” She grasped her shoulders and turned her around. “Put the fancy monogrammed linens in the cardboard box in the hall.”

  Ellen worked, but her mind was turning over and over, she couldn’t stop it. She was worried about Brian and Bob, and that was a fact. She possessed none of Loi’s fatalism.

  The two men had been gone thirty minutes by the time the women were finished with the packing. “Loi, we’ve got to go out and look for them.”

  “Ellen, I am waiting. I will wait a certain time that is in my heart. Then I will go.”

  “Do you—I mean—I know nothing about Eastern religions. Do you pray for him? What are you?”

  “I am somewhat a Buddhist. As much as Brian is a Catholic. Also, my people have their beliefs. Their understanding.” Suddenly she went to the front door, threw it open.

  “What?”

  “Be still.”

  The sedan appeared.

  The three women streamed out into the driveway, followed by the boys. Brian leaned out of the passenger’s window. “Your car’s gone, Ellen. Not a sign. Just treadmarks.”

  “Any—”

  He shook his head. “The site was as clean as a whistle.”

  “So we’re leaving, then?” Nancy’s voice had an edge in it.

  “Let’s go, Dad,” Chris said.

  His younger brother added his voice. “Dad, I don’t like it around here at night. There’s bears!”

  They divided into two groups: Ellen and Brian and Loi rode together in Ellen’s rental, and the Wests went in their own car. The plan was to continue on to Albany, and meet up again later.

  They went in procession down Queen’s Road to the four-way intersection where Main became Mound. From here they could see up into the heart of Oscola. “It looks as empty as Towayda did,” Brian said. The fact that the roads weren’t yet full of refugees seemed a bad sign. He felt sure that each empty house represented a dreadful tragedy. “Turn on the radio.”

  The Oscola fires were the big story. “Prominent local farmer and professor Brian Kelly” was mentioned as having survived one of the two fires that had struck the Oscola community the previous night.

  All the land seemed to be smiling, so beautiful, so completely benign, so harmless.

  They were about halfway to Ludlum when they came upon the first sign.

  “What’s that?” Loi asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  Ellen peered beyond the windshield. A cloth object, torn, lay on the roadside. “It’s a shirt. Was.”

  “Look at the red on it.” Lois voice was small.

  Then they rounded a curve and found a car lying on its side amid a great tumble of possessions. There were shirts and sheets and toys, furniture that had been tied to the top, a lawn mower, an exploded television, all manner of smaller debris.

  Brian hit his brakes, and so did Bob behind him. An instant later Bob ran past. Everybody else crowded out of the cars. “It’s the Michaelsons,” Bob shouted. He clambered up onto the wreck.

  “Boys, stay back,” Nancy said. She and Loi took their hands. Ellen went forward with Brian.

  Bob looked around. “Not a sign of ’em.” He dropped back down to the road. The group came together.

  “Should I know the Michaelsons?” Ellen asked.

  “They’re new people over from Rochester,” Brian explained. “I don’t think the family’s been around here more than thirty years or so.”

  “They must’ve walked away from it.” Bob peered into the woods. His words sounded hollow in the roadside silence.

  “How many kids do they have?” Ellen asked.

  “Three,” Bob said.

  “I think I see someone.” Loi was looking toward the tree line.

  “Where?” Brian asked. His voice had become soft. He could smell the death, too. They all could.

  “Get the kids in the car, Nance.” Bob’s hand went to his hip. There was, of course, no pistol there. He ran a few feet toward the trees. “Hey there, you OK?”

  The figure did not move. But its outlines were clear. There was no question but that a man was standing in the woods about two hundred feet away.

  “Hey!”

  “Could be in shock,” Ellen suggested.

  “Maybe.” Bob went forward. Both of his sons grabbed him. “Daddy, no,” the smaller boy said.

  “Get in the car! Nancy, take care of ’em!”

  “Stay here, Bobby.”

  “I’ll do it.” Brian took a step toward the woods.

  “No!” Loi threw her arms around his waist.

  Silence fell. Nobody moved. Obviously, the fathers and mothers could not take the risk.

  3

  Ellen began to walk toward the forest. Nobody stopped her and that was all right. “Are you hurt?” she called into the silence. The figure didn’t move or speak.

  “Everything OK?” Brian called.

  “So far.” As she walked forward Ellen recognized a new set of reactions—lack of muscle control, extreme tightness of throat, whistling breath. This was a state of fear she had never entered before. Then her vision blurred. She shook away a great flood of tears. Her heart was humming, her face was hot, every cell in her body screaming at her to turn and run.

  Brian stayed back, unwilling to leave Lois side, yet also unwilling to completely abandon Ellen.

  She took a jerky step forward, then another. This was ridiculous, she was barely in control of her own body. Instincts she didn’t even know she possessed were being engaged. If she’d had a pistol she might have done something outrageous, like empty it right into that shadow.

  The drone of flies was loud. She could see the definite shape of a man, even that he was wearing a blue denim shirt. “Hello? Can you hear me?”

  No reply. She took three quick steps closer.

  “Be careful, Elbe!”

  She sucked in a breath, let her hands go to fists, and forced herself to step into the forest, pushing aside the leaves of some maple saplings.

  Her first clear impression was of a glaring eye. Then teeth, a tight smile. She did not exactly scream, but rather made the kind of gasp of surprised agony that comes from stepping on a scorpion or having a centipede bury its red legs in your thigh.

  She twisted against herself, her fists coming up to her throat. There remained a tiny spark of self-control. But when she saw the horrific distortion of the man’s neck, she shrank back in panicky confusion. It was a ropy stalk an impossible three feet long. It was the color and consistency of dried beef jerky.

  Then she saw the left arm.

  She shrieked, a terrible, inarticulate wail that brought them all running down from the road, even the boys.

  Brian was the first into the woods beside her. “Ellie!”

  “God help us all!” She threw herself away from it, as if the mere sight of it was a slamming, crushing blow across the face.

  Brian gagged, bent double, stumbled back.

  Under its ripped, bulging clothes, the body was a great mound of tight, twisted flesh jutting with bones. Knots of muscle and fat distorted stomach and thighs.

  The right arm was a bloated dirigible of black, wet skin, covered almost completely with flies. It was as if all the man’s fluids had been pushed into that one arm.

  The face above the hideously stretched neck was grinning, the teeth visible all the way back to the molars. Unlike the right arm, the head had been sucked of every molecule of blood. It was the face of a mummy, the eyes pulled wide, the cheeks sunken against the bones. Flies raced between the teeth, and the tongue within was the shape and color of a rotted fig.

  The neck was as tight as wire, and with every stirring of the air the head bobbed on its spring-like neck.

  But they weren’t looking at the head, not at the swollen right arm, not at the bulging humps.

  They were watching in horrified fascination as the left arm grew and grew and grew. It se
ethed, its fingers turning to claws, its muscles bunching and popping, an awful, crunching creak coming from the torsioned bones.

  This was the fate of the people who went to the judge’s house: before their eyes was unfolding the future not only of their little community, but of all mankind.

  A smell filled the air, of hot electric wiring, as if a machine somewhere nearby was working at extreme speed.

  “We’ve got to go,” Loi rasped.

  Suddenly Bob grunted, plunged off into the wall of leaves. He charged forward rapidly, thrashing through the dense foliage. Then he was coming back, and the others saw the dangling arms and legs of a child.

  Bob emerged carrying the poor little burden, a dead naked girl. Her hair was blond and long, still done up with a pink plastic barrette. There was no visible damage. Even her skin still seemed to glow with life.

  As they got closer, though, Ellen saw that this was very far from the case. In some infinitely delicate and inhuman operation, the outer layer of the girl’s skin had been eaten from her body.

  And the glow came not from life—it came from something inside the child, something packed in tight under the remaining skin.

  Ellen had seen them before.

  “Drop her! Oh my dear God, run!”

  Then young Chris cried out, “It’s Lizzie!” His voice was high and clear, and stopped the grasshoppers that were singing in the meadow. Chris sat down on the ground. His mother hid her other son’s eyes. With a child’s insatiable curiosity, he fought her. “I want to see, Mommy!”

  “Jesus,” Brian cried.

  Lizzie’s body surged in Bob’s arms. “What the hell?”

  Grabbing her by the hair, Ellen yanked the child clear of him and hurled the wet, breaking mass of her as far away as she could. The force broke the carcass open and they came pouring out, swarming, their wings buzzing, their red legs scrabbling.

  Bob lurched back, astonished, then horrified. He gagged, frantically brushing his chest.

  “Evidence,” Brian cried, “it’s evidence!” He plunged toward the mass of insects. But the father’s long left arm whipped around, and suddenly Brian was confronting one of those clawed hands in the light of day.

  All of them ran out of the woods and across the bordering meadow, and dove into their cars. “It’s evidence,” Brian moaned, but he started the engine as the hand swarmed out of the woods and the insects followed in a mass as cohesive as a jelly, dashing toward them like a shark in air. They took off at full speed toward Ludlum and safety.

  “They were trying to get away,” Loi said. She looked down the road. “They also knew.”

  “Don’t anybody panic!” Ellen’s own voice told her that she was about to do just that. Loi heard it, too, and touched her shoulder, a gesture Ellen found curiously reassuring.

  She cried a little bit as the car moved down the road. In the front seat Loi sat stiffly erect, staring out the windshield. They climbed a hill, and the tires complained around a sharp curve. The forest was thicker here, drawn close to the road on both sides. They drove in its dense shade.

  Without warning Ellen was thrown forward, her head hitting the back of Lois seat. “Brace yourselves,” Brian yelled, but too late. The car pitched, there was a terrific jolt, followed by an explosion of white dust.

  Silence. Both airbags hung out of their housings, deflated. “Are you OK?” Brian asked. With shaking hands he reached toward his wife.

  Loi was clutching her abdomen. “I think so,” she responded in a careful voice.

  Ellen was completely confused. “The airbags went off?”

  No reply. Then, from Loi: “Why did you stop?”

  “I didn’t. Jesus!”

  An enormous coil rose in front of the car, higher and higher, unwinding itself in the light. It was dead black, filled with rushing musculature.

  Loi shrieked in short, sharp bursts. Brian leaned back, staring, his teeth bared.

  Ellen jumped out onto the road. The thing was coming up from the ground, clumps of flowers and chunks of pavement ripping away as it surged out.

  Hundreds of gray threads surrounded the car like a web of fungus.

  Ellen tore at them, yanked Loi’s door open. She and Brian scrambled out. Ellen struggled, ripping at the curtain of threads. Where they touched her, they made her skin itch fiercely.

  There came a piercing sound. Brian shouted, Ellen shrieked, Loi went stumbling back toward the Wests’ car. The heavy coils were dropping down on the rental, crushing and pulverizing it.

  From the woods came a snapping, sizzling sound. They began to see purple light winking among the leaves.

  Then Bob was beside them. “Let’s move,” he cried. The whole group of them forced themselves into his car, crowding in, falling all over each other.

  They turned around, going in the only direction they could— right back into Oscola—the trap.

  Chapter 12

  1

  The car hurtled down the curving road, pushing through fifty, sixty, seventy. Brian drove hard, the images of what he had seen in the woods building in his mind. Surely those masses of sweat-stirring insects couldn’t think, couldn’t remember what they’d been. But the other things—those long, long arms, those hands…

  The filed nails he’d observed on the hand last night took on a whole new meaning. That had once been a person’s hand, those nails had probably been filed in a local home before the horrible transformation took place. Maybe he’d been face-to-face with an old friend.

  “It’s all because of me,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Ellen snapped. “Quit apologizing.”

  “You are not responsible, husband.”

  “Brian, it’s an awfully long jump for me from some esoteric physics experiment to—what we’re up against.” Bob spoke for them all, Brian felt sure.

  “Jump or not, it’s real. Otherwise you’d never have been in my facility.”

  “I saw blue pipe. I can’t remember much else. That E. G. and G. logo. It could have been a lot of different places.”

  “No. That pipe was made especially for us, using an experimental fabrication process. It’s unique.”

  As they passed the Michaelsons’ wreck, Brian noticed that Loi closed her eyes. Ellen made a raw, empty sound that could have been a sob. Nancy held her boys’ heads down.

  The sentinel trees whipped past.

  “There,” Loi said.

  “What?”

  “Just where the road curves. Something is moving there.”

  He floored the gas and they raced past the spot at ninety. Purple light flickered in the corner of his eye. In the seat behind him, Nancy sighed and squirmed. Her younger boy’s head popped up. For a moment he drank in the light. “I like that,” he cried. “Stop. Stop, Uncle Brian!”

  Brian pressed the gas pedal to the fire wall and the car leaped ahead.

  Purple light, sizzling sounds… and pleasure—howling, insane pleasure: it didn’t hurt to be transformed bone and brain and gristle into one of those vile nightmares, it felt good.

  “If it looks like they’re going to get us, I think we should consider suicide,” Bob said.

  At that Chris burst into tears. His brother, now sucking his thumb, made no sound. “Bob,” Nancy said with soft reproach.

  “I don’t want the boys to end up like—God help us!”

  Ellen barely moved her lips as she spoke. “I want to win this.”

  “I agree. We must win.” Loi slipped her hand into Ellen’s, and Ellen laid her head against Loi’s shoulder.

  They all fell silent, all hearing the same thing—a drumming sound was coming up the road, moving fast.

  “The Viper,” Brian whispered.

  “Let’s get the hell out of here!”

  And go where? There was only one road between Oscola and the outside world, and this was it. The alternative was to go up to Towayda.

  “It’s not the Viper,” Loi said. “Listen carefully!”

  When it appeared, the vehicle proved to be
an ordinary pickup, blue and tired-looking. It was piled high with household goods.

  Brian got out and walked into the middle of the road waving his arms. He knew the family, of course. It was Jimmy Rysdale and his wife and kids. The Rysdales were really Ruisdaels, one of the original settler families. They had come with the Dutch landowner, the patroon, who had settled the area in the eighteenth century.

  When they stopped Bob gave them the story of the Michaelsons, speaking quickly, his voice so low that he sounded as if he was sharing a pornographic secret. He omitted the terrifying details of what had happened next, saying only that something very, very dangerous was guarding the way out of Oscola.

  “But you can’t cut off a whole town,” Jimmy said. “What about people tryin’ to come out here? FedEx and stuff, and the grocery truck and the beer wagon? And calls. What about phone calls?”

  “Our phone is dead,” Loi said. “Was before we were burned out.”

  “Yeah, well, ours has been dead since last night. That’s what decided us.”

  “Some phones are working,”‘ Ellen said. “I got through to the Wests from Ludlum, remember.”

  Brian thought: you were probably meant to get through. He thought also that the enemy was a careful planner, that he had a remarkable head for details and a highly developed sense of theater. But he was careful. He did not want them to lose what little hope they had, for he did not want death or suicide. He was herding them into his lair.

  Jimmy Rysdale was on the near side of fifty, balding and a little dumpy, but a good farmer and a smart businessman. He owned a piece of a specialty lumbering operation that made out pretty well. He and Brian had hunted grouse and deer together, and Annie made about the best venison sausage in the Three Counties. Their youngest, known as Annie Junior because she looked so uncannily like her mother, was ten, solemn, and said to be a math whiz. Their boy, Willie Rysdale, was a starting pitcher for the first time this year on the Oscola Patroons, and a pretty good one from what Brian had seen.

  “Let’s go, Jimmy,” his wife called from the truck. She had red O’Shaughnessy hair, and the flashing green eyes of that clan. “Jimmy, start the truck. We’re getting out of here!”