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

by Brian Hodge

  A new thought now occurred to him. He had assumed that this phenomenon was confined to the Silver Ridge locale; but what if it was not? All the more reason to contact someone outside the area. Ed Stratton at Homeland Security? Why not? Might as well start at the top.

  Once he pulled into Lynette’s driveway, the first thing he did was walk around the house to observe the distant ridge where he had seen the strange light, his intuition suggesting that if these phenomena were related, then manifestations in one place might be reflected in another. At present, nothing seemed amiss. The late afternoon sun burnished the tree-crowned hillsides with gold, and a few birds sang longingly to each other in the nearby woods.

  The fact that everything seemed perfectly normal troubled him all the more.

  “Looking for something?”

  The voice felt like a velvet glove on his tense nerves, and he turned to see Debra and Lynette coming around the house to greet him. Debra’s brown eyes were curious, her face a shade paler than usual. But she gave him a tiny smile.

  “I think I just found it.”

  “We saw you pull in. You look like you’ve seen worse than a ghost.”

  What should he say? Debra was the one person who might understand, but it seemed unfair to add to Lynette’s burdens. On the other hand, keeping her in the dark was neither fair nor practical. If he intended to report his experiences to Ed Stratton or anyone else, he might better get some practice explaining it.

  He finally said, “Whatever happened to Rodney appears to be the tip of an iceberg. And the berg is getting bigger.”

  Debra’s eyes narrowed. “As I was just telling Lynette…a quarter of the school was absent today. No notes, no calls from parents. And Dad couldn’t reach a one of them by phone.”

  “Damnation. Well. You recall what you saw yesterday, out by the Barrows’?”

  “No way I could forget that.”

  “I just saw something very similar.” He described his vision of the fog-shrouded chasm, and the fact that Billy Hart had also witnessed it. As she listened, Debra stared broodingly at the distant sunset.

  “You didn’t believe me yesterday. What do you think now?”

  “There’s more. Something’s happening to people. At first, I didn’t put it all together. But that lost old man at Cooper’s, the missing employees there and at the Chicken House, hardly any cars on the road—and all those kids out of school. No way it could all be coincidence.”

  “God forbid anyone else should end up like Rodney,” Lynette whispered.

  Debra nodded, her face losing another shade. “Or Zack Baird, for that matter.”

  “Assuming old Mr. Hart made his report to the sheriff, I shouldn’t be surprised if we hear from him again.” He looked at Lynette. “Sorry to bear more bad tidings. I know you don’t need any more stress.”

  “But there is more.” Her eyelids fluttered with apprehension. “You knew I had sleepwalked the other night. I had pretty much written it off as nerves…anxiety…something.”

  “What?”

  She turned to Debra. “I saw a thing just like what you described. Out by the ridge—last night, after Russ had come to get me. When I got back inside, I looked out the window, and there it was, just for a few seconds—this tall tower that looked like it was made of stone. It had a kind of glow about it.”

  “And then?”

  “Then…just like you said. It suddenly wasn’t there anymore. What was I supposed to think? I couldn’t believe I had dreamed it. Now I’m not so sure I was dreaming when I heard Rodney calling me, either.”

  For a minute or so, no one spoke. Finally, Debra heaved a sigh and looked at Copeland. “So what do you do when you’ve run out of logical explanations?”

  He shook his head. “I’ve never run out of them before.”

  “Logical or not,” Lynette said, “there must be a reason for what’s happening. Rodney died for some reason. And I want to know what it is.”

  “Lynette, you know I work with people in the government. I’m going to make a few calls this evening. Not they’ll have any immediate answers, but I’m far more inclined to put the ball in their court before looking to the sheriff for a solution.”

  “Wise choice.”

  Satisfied that, for the moment, the world wasn’t coming apart beneath their feet, they started walking toward the front of the house, though Copeland continuously glanced back at the ridge. Just as they reached the front yard, he detected a faint vibration at the back of his ear, and when he halted and listened, he recognized it as the distant sound of music.

  It was a chorus of voices rising in a dark melody, slow and lyrical, reminiscent of Bach, perhaps, though he did not recognize the piece. Then a chorus of heavy baritones and tremulous sopranos joined in like the voices of restless spirits, rising harmoniously to weave a haunting, melancholy dirge. A deep, unidentified thudding sound punctuated the rhythm.

  “Is that coming from the church?”

  Lynette nodded. “I think so. You can sometimes hear the music when conditions are right. But there’s no service tonight, not that I’m aware of.”

  “It sounds rather odd.”

  Debra cocked her head and listened. “Yes, the rhythm is peculiar. The time signatures keep changing. Listen—that’s 11/8…now 6/8…now 7/4.”

  Copeland raised an eyebrow. “You’re very well-versed in music.”

  “I used to sing in the church choir.”

  Lynette kept staring into the distance beyond Debra’s house. “If the choir was doing a program—or even practicing for one—I’d know about it. How very odd.”

  “On the current order of magnitude, I’m not sure I’d rate it all that highly,” he said.

  However, as they made their way to the front yard, Copeland noticed that music began to assume a completely different character. The choir’s voices rose in sharp dissonance, the rhythm faltered, and the devastated melody become a cacophony of long, frenzied, nonsensical cries that pealed raucously and endlessly to the heavens. Then another, heavy, unidentifiable sound—almost like the rumble of an approaching train—gradually began to join the chorale.

  He knew then that he had spoken too soon, for this perverse chorus sounded positively unearthly.

  Very definitely on par with the rest of these recent bizarre events.

  Chapter 9

  The dark-toned choral music that drifted from the church took Loretta Gleasman by surprise because, as far as she knew, the building was empty. Earlier, Reverend Lee and Irma Rodgers, the church secretary, had been there to do whatever it was that church staffers did, but they had left at least two hours ago. Loretta gently set the chicken she was stuffing down on the counter and went to the window, which overlooked the lonely white building across Cheat Mountain Road. No cars visible in the parking lot, the doors and windows all closed. The odd-sounding anthem couldn’t be a recording, she thought; it was too full, too resonant to be anything but live singers. Whatever they were singing, it wasn’t the usual church music. In fact, the words weren’t even English—just disjointed strings of guttural, barely human-sounding barks and moans that made no sense to her.

  Behind the litany of nonsense, some kind of heavy percussion rose like a sporadic pounding of thunder, powerful enough to rattle the windowpanes. Loretta heard all kinds of noise when the choir practiced on Thursday nights, but never anything like this. It had better not become commonplace, she thought, or she would have to speak to the reverend. Church or no church, they had no right to disturb the neighborhood’s peace. Since she’d turned forty, unpleasant rackets set her nerves on edge far more quickly than in the old days, and the last thing she needed was a church choir competing with hip-hop cruisers for the royal crown of obnoxiousness.

  Corky, a calico of exceeding girth who enjoyed nothing better than yowling about his empty stomach, cast a thoughtful eye at the chicken as Loretta went to the sink to wash the grease from her hands. “This has nothing to do with you, so just take yourself right out of the kitchen,�
�� she said sternly, and he gave her one of his most potent condescending scowls. She picked up the baking tray, carried it to the oven, cat close at her heels, and promptly placed dinner out of harm’s way. Corky gazed at her, still perturbed, but kept his yowling to himself, which was rare for a thwarted cat. “Don’t fret; I’ll feed you before Daddy gets home. And he’s a soft touch, so you can con him for more.”

  Denied the prospect of an early dinner, Corky’s attention turned to the window, which he regarded pensively for a full minute. Then his eyes widened, his ears flattened, and he turned and raced out of the kitchen.

  “That’s what I say too,” Loretta grumbled. She went to the little den and flipped on the television, but the persistent low thumping of percussion overpowered the voice of the broadly smiling weather woman on channel 6. A few bands of distortion rolled up the screen, and for a startling moment, the wailing chant actually seemed to be coming from the TV speakers. Well, so much for that. She turned off the box, went straight out the front door, and headed across Cheat Mountain Road (without bothering to look both ways, which out here was a waste of energy). The music was unnaturally loud, the number of voices prodigious. Without a single car in the church lot, how on earth had the performers gotten here? Some of the members who lived nearby often walked to services, but no way could all these singers have hoofed it unless they had met at a nearby house first. But why? Some kind of special event?

  As she made her way toward the building’s main entrance, she paused and grimaced as something swept briefly over her body: a noisome breeze, a disagreeable tingle of electricity. The sensation passed, but a feeling of clamminess lingered, not unlike the chicken grease she had washed off before leaving. Shuddering, she went up the short flight of steps to the door, now strangely nervous, half-afraid she had made a mistake leaving her home. But why? The singing was weird, but it was just music.

  Very loud, very bizarre, very spooky music.

  She tried the door, and, sure enough, it was unlocked. Pushing her way into the narthex, she stepped into a thick sea of gloom, as if a thunderhead had gathered inside the building. Here, the throbbing music assailed her nerves like a battering ram, and its tempo began to increase as she took a few steps toward the darkened sanctuary. She could tell before she passed through the looming archway that something here was very, very wrong.

  There were no singers inside the chamber.

  No choir in the loft beyond the empty pulpit. No parishioners in the pews on either side of the crimson-carpeted aisle. No trace of the mouths issuing these swirling vocal strains, which plainly originated in the shadowy spaces around her. It must be a recording, she thought, yet the sheer power of the melancholy harmonies and sinister-sounding drumbeats solidly refuted the notion. Her legs quivered as she took a few more steps down the aisle, her disbelieving eyes roving, her mind aching to latch onto some logical explanation. But every line she cast in search of one came back empty.

  Somehow, the late afternoon sunlight failed to penetrate the stained-glass windows; all were black as pitch and peered down at her like huge, vacant eyes. She had never been in the sanctuary when it wasn’t full of people, and now it seemed a starkly different place: huge, overpowering, as forbidding as a vast, subterranean chamber in which unseen eyes studied her with palpably hostile intent. Yet curiosity—or something—rooted her there, as if she anticipated the commencement of some spectacle she didn’t dare miss.

  A hint of a deep chugging sound, in counterpoint to the rhythm of the chorale, broke through her hypnosis and drew her attention to something that was just beginning to take form on the ivory-hued wall high above the choir loft: a huge shadow, distinct and well defined, yet totally unrecognizable—uncast by any light source she could discern. A slowly shifting black spider with long, crooked legs, becoming more and more solid with every passing second, as if materializing out of the bare plaster. The discordant locomotive sound intensified, a ghostly train inexorably closing on her.

  Loretta had stopped walking when the chugging sound began, and now she shifted into reverse, still just shy of panic. This was an event, inexplicable and frightening—but something surely profound, perhaps even an act of God. This was his house, after all. Still, as the huge, awful-looking shape on the wall continued to expand and solidify, she could never in this lifetime accept it as anything even remotely divine.

  As the otherworldly wailing and the unmusical chugging built toward a chaotic crescendo, the sanctuary fell suddenly, shockingly silent. A sharp ringing lingered in her ears like a needle in her auditory canal, and for several seconds she felt dizzy. Some moments later, she realized that the shape on the wall had vanished.

  Late afternoon sunlight now warmed the colorful stained-glass windows, transforming the great chamber into an ordinary, welcoming place of worship. Then, somewhere nearby, a door creaked sharply, and Loretta felt a thrill of terror more intense than during the height of the spectacular phenomenon. When slow footsteps began to echo through the great hall, panic at last exerted its hold, and she turned and bolted for the exit, her every instinct warning her to flee now or die. She shoved her way through the double wooden doors, sprinted across the parking lot, and into the road, too terrified even to think of pausing for traffic.

  She did not feel the jarring thud of impact with the grille of the oncoming vehicle. Her body sailed into the air and slammed to the pavement like a slab of old meat tossed by a careless butcher. Consciousness remained just long enough for her to realize that neither of her erratically jerking arms had any business bending in so many directions.

  The driver of the ancient, rust-coated Chevy 4x4 slid out of the cab with an annoyed frown, and his small black eyes briefly regarded the broken body. Then, with a dismissive snort, he turned and strode toward the front door of the church, unwilling to abide even a brief diversion from the business that had brought him here in the first place.

  Chapter 10

  After dialing a half-dozen numbers with no result, Copeland had about decided he would be better off pouring himself a double shot of scotch, joining Lynette and Debra on the screened porch, and drowning everything in his mind even remotely related to current events in Silver Ridge. The dial tone sounded normal, but each time he entered a number, the receiver went dead. Under normal circumstances, his cell was useless until he got closer to Elkins, and he had no intention of going out to that dark road. Putting away the phone in disgust, he plugged in his laptop, started the dialer, and waited to see if he could reach the Internet.

  No such luck.

  With no usable phone connection, no cable, no DSL, his computer might as well be a fencepost. He closed the laptop, went downstairs to the living room, and flipped on the television. The network news came on, but the picture appeared snowy and the sound came out garbled—which for all he knew might be normal here, since Lynette had no direct TV connection. He had to wonder how Rodney had ever entertained himself without 300 channels of crap to choose from. He tried the available six and found similar reception on each, but as near as he could tell, the news from the outside world revolved only around commonplace events. He was just about to shut off the tube when a new, flickering image on the screen captured his attention and actually caused him to gasp.

  The sound from the speakers rose to a shrill, unintelligible muddle of noise, which infuriated him now because, right before his eyes, he saw the unbelievable, monolithic tower he had earlier encountered out on the highway. Though warped, the image of the gigantic stone construct stood out unmistakably against a garish backdrop of arcing lightning and scrolling color bars, its upper reaches twisting and writhing serpent-like in the grip of video distortion. In the foreground, a strange shape appeared to be crawling across a wildly shifting landscape toward the camera—something pale and shimmering, moving with an undulating, worm-like rhythm, vaguely suggestive of a limbless man. Copeland involuntarily drew back, a cold, sick feeling in his stomach. Then the picture faded completely, becoming only a swirling, crackling field
of colorful video snow, and with a frustrated curse, he switched off the television.

  His regular daily routine involved extensive communication, electronic or otherwise, and here he was, essentially cut off from everything and everyone beyond the town limits. Since afternoon, a low, simmering fear had begun to erode even his firmest bulwarks of denial, and now, after this disturbing image, his nerves felt raw. The increasingly dramatic evidence of an insidious deliberation behind all that was happening clashed at every point with his natural inclination to believe in a logical, however improbable, explanation. Yet his initial hypothesis of a widespread hallucinogenic agent now struck him as more outlandish than accepting these events at face value.

  Until now, the only things that truly frightened him were serious illness, homelessness, and terrorism—not necessarily in that order. In the course of two days, all that had changed.

  With hands on the verge of trembling, he poured himself a scotch from the decanter on Lynette’s sideboard, went to the kitchen for some ice, and made his way to the screened porch where Debra and his sister sat in tense silence, their eyes on the distant ridge to the northwest. A bloody sun had settled above the long, wooded hump, lending it the appearance of a huge, charred animal carcass. Both women appeared mesmerized by the hazy, haunted-looking vista, and Copeland’s thoughts turned to that debased family whose domain lay beyond it—whose role in all that was happening he still firmly believed to be significant. Debra must know more about Levi Barrow’s interest in her than she let on, he thought. As the object of his unwanted attention, she likely faced the gravest personal danger of all.