by John Everson
Cindy crossed the room and put her hands on Brenda’s shoulders.
“What is it? Did Bill cancel on you for tomorrow night?”
“It’s not about me,” Brenda had stammered. “It’s about…James.”
Cindy’s face stretched as her eyes widened. “What about him?”
“He—Your mom called earlier.”
Brenda gently pushed Cindy down onto her bed.
“What’s the matter with him? Tell me!”
Brenda’s face turned funny. Her lips pursed and opened, but then closed without uttering a word. And then they blurted it out: “Cindy, James jumped off a cliff last night.”
“Oh, God. Oh, my God.”
Cindy didn’t wait for the impact of the news to be felt. She jumped up and ran to her closet. Her suitcase was in the back, and she pulled it out and threw it on the bed.
“What are you doing?” Brenda asked. “Why don’t you call your mom before you go packing up?”
“I have to get home. I have to be there. I should have been there.”
Cindy sank down to the cold tile of the floor.
“I should never have left him. I should have known this would happen.”
“How could you know?” Brenda had asked, and then recoiled from the black look in her friend’s eyes.
“I knew if he stayed in Terrel he’d be doomed, just like all the others.”
Those words echoed in her head again and again all week. She heard them as she hugged Mrs. Canady at the wake, and then again as she knelt before her old boyfriend’s casket.
“Why wouldn’t you come with me?” she whispered at the still, white face before her. But he didn’t answer.
The wake had been bad, but it got worse.
When the funeral procession stopped at the open hole in the ground at the cemetery, a cold stone dropped in her stomach.
I will never see his face again, she thought as the casket was carried across the green to the grave. Never.
Then the preacher talked about God and taking lambs back to heaven and a bunch of other crap.
God had nothing to do with this! she wanted to scream.
But she hadn’t.
She’d watched as they threw dirt on the casket, as Mrs. Canady and Mrs. Kelly and Mrs. Sander stood around the grave. She saw Mrs. Sander talk to and then angrily walk away from a young man with a notebook. And she saw the crazy lady, Angelica Napalona, bolt from the cemetery before anyone else.
Then she had come home and cried.
His face kept coming back to haunt her. His picture stared at her from her old white bureau. The trinkets from their high school dances still hung from her mirror across the room. She could even hear his voice, telling her that he couldn’t go away to school. That he couldn’t leave Terrel.
She cupped her hands over her ears, willing that voice to go out of her head and instead become flesh before her. Willing James to be alive again. To be with her.
But the room remained silent except for the uneven gasps of her breath.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Despite the hawkeyed glares bestowed on whisperers by old Mrs. Malone the library wasn’t nearly as quiet as Cindy Marshfield’s bedroom. Joe could hear the quiet chatter of schoolkids gossiping in the aisles of bookshelves around him, and the microfilm machine spoke in its own rhythm, squealing of unoiled cogs and humming in complaint at power long denied.
Joe scrolled through screen after screen of old headlines, reading of school board elections and weather predictions, the zoning grant that allowed the construction of the warehouse-like Wal-Mart and the fence permit for Mrs. Ola Levinthal of Elm Street. The obituaries were slim but steady over the months of newspapers he searched; mostly older folks who had passed on from heart attacks and “natural causes.” A couple drownings, roadside accidents and even a domestic homicide.
Mrs. Malone had been no help at all to him.
“What is it you’re looking for, young man?” she’d asked, crone eyes boring into his own with uncanny brilliance.
“I’m trying to find the obituaries of Margaret Kelly and William Sander,” he’d answered. “They were a couple kids who jumped off Terrel’s Peak a year or two ago.”
“Yeah. I remember ’em,” she said. “Real bookworm, that Margaret was. It’s a shame she had to go do a thing like that. But I can’t help you on when it was they went. I think it was in the fall, both of ’em. Why don’t you just ask their families? They still live here in town.”
“I don’t want to bother them,” he lied.
Mrs. Malone unlocked the door to a room near the study carrels. She pointed to a row of small cardboard boxes, not much bigger than packs of cigarettes, stacked behind the microfilm reader. “Well, here’s the stacks of Terrel Daily Times film. I don’t think you’ll find much though. They don’t write much about kids who go and do stuff like kill themselves. Best not to talk of such things.”
With that, the old lady took her silver hair and eagle eyes from the room and left Joe to figure out the workings of the microfilm reader.
It didn’t take too long before he was scrolling speedily through issue after issue of the Times. He started with the film from last December and worked backward, not relying on a cranky old woman’s memory for much.
His heart jumped when his eyes picked out the words “Terrel’s Peak” from a death notice in the November 2 issue. But then his eyes saw the deceased was a Parker Matthews, age thirty-four, a salesman from out of town who had apparently parked his car to watch the sun set from the edge of the cliff and then dived after it.
If he caught up with the sun, it wasn’t in this dimension.
Joe kept scrolling backward, and was beginning to despair of ever finding a death notice for people he’d heard of when he saw it.
Margaret Kelly, 18, died on May 22. The wake will be held tonight at Folter’s Funeral Home. Services will be held tomorrow at St. Patrick’s Church at 11 A.M. The family has requested in lieu of flowers, that donations be made in Margaret’s name to the Troubled Children’s Fund, 535 Argathe Way, New Brunswick, NJ 08901.
Well, he had a date now, if no other information. Just over a year ago. On a hunch, he scrolled back a year to the previous May, and began looking through the obituaries.
And found one for William Sander.
Who died on May 22.
Joe felt the hair on the back of his neck begin to rise. Today was May 26. His obituary for James Canady had run two days ago, the day after the body had been taken out of the ocean. Which meant that James Canady had jumped off Terrel’s Peak on May 22. What were the chances that three teens would each jump from the same place on the same anniversary?
Three years in a row?
What the hell was going on here?
Joe grabbed another box of film from the wall. And searched for the Terrel Daily Times of May 23, 2001. His heart raced faster than the scrolling film as he advanced to the section of the paper that held obituaries.
There were none.
He continued through the film of the May 24 and May 25 editions, and found nothing. Nobody died the whole last week of May 2001 in Terrel or the surrounding suburbs.
He slumped back in his seat.
OK. So the chain wasn’t very long. But it couldn’t be just a coincidence that three kids had all jumped from the same cliff on the same day, one year apart each.
Why?
What was so special about May 22?
He picked up the rolls of film that were scattered around the viewer and began reinserting them into their boxes. And then stopped.
What if the chain had only skipped a year? And what about that death in October?
He pulled the film for 2003 back out and rethreaded it through the reader. The gears protested with an increasingly high-pitched whine as he advanced to the end of October. Nothing for May 30 or 31. Then he found it. November 2. But the date of the actual death was earlier, naturally.
October 31, 2003.
A shiver ran throu
gh Joe’s spine.
Why didn’t he believe that the out-of-town salesman who took a dive off that cliff last year had been suicidal?
He rewound the film and put on the roll for the fall of 2002. He advanced to November 1, and then 2. But there was no report of any Halloween deaths.
There was a story about the town’s centennial that caught his eye.
TERREL TURNS 100! boasted the front-page headline.
He skimmed through the puff copy. God, there were times he detested backwoods journalism! It read as if it were written by old women who thought journalism was just a creative step sideways from putting down their thoughts late at night in their farm journals after cleaning the supper dishes.
It was a century of change. The telephone, the radio, television, the motorcar. Through it all, the citizens and town of Terrel have remained nestled near the prominent outline of Terrel’s Peak.
“The river of time has rushed through Terrel and left us changed, and yet, somehow, still the same,” said Mayor Pierce Harden during the centennial ceremonies held Saturday in Memorial Park.
Founded by Broderick Terrel in 1893, the town grew from a lonely watchtower to a small, thriving community by the turn of the century and was granted township in 1902. Terrel’s lighthouse on the peak provided safety not only to ships navigating the dark and foggy coasts, but to the people who began to build a community at the peak’s base.
While Terrel never became a haven for large shipping commerce due to the treacherous currents of its shallow, rocky bay, for a time it was a well-used port for small crafts stopping down from Port Haven, fifty miles north.
After the sudden death of Broderick Terrel, however, the lighthouse fell into disrepair, and ships began to avoid chancy stops at the town’s tiny seaport. The lighthouse, both a landmark and memorial to the town’s found er, was destroyed in 1951 during a storm that also leveled several homes in town. It was never rebuilt.
More than he needed to know, Joe thought, scrolling past the end of the story. Terrel was a backward little town near the sea that didn’t actually get anything out of the nearby ocean but the view. And apparently even the view wasn’t safe to enjoy.
The obituary ran on November 4.
The body hadn’t been found for a couple days and was badly mangled and snagged on some rocks when a couple kids on a boat ran across it at the base of the cliff. The coroner’s report indicated that the woman had apparently died sometime between October 31 and November 1. The cause of death was a broken neck, presumably from hitting the rocks on the beach below the promontory. The brief obituary said the woman had been traveling through Terrel on her way to visit a relative in Virginia.
Go for three? Joe asked himself, and rewound the film. He didn’t really believe it could be that easy, that he could just scroll to the same week in year after year of the Times and find an obit for a suicide. But his heart started pounding faster as the 2001 microfilm spooled noisily through the machine. He wanted to find out that he wasn’t crazy. That something or someone was killing people every Halloween and every May 22 on the cliff, the shadow of which blanketed this town every morning and evening. And then again, he didn’t want to find that out. Because what was he going to do with the information? He couldn’t publish it. That had been made quite clear. And the police were apparently not interested in following up on it either.
November 1, 2001 was clean. No death notices.
November 2, 2001 was not.
Richard Chambers, 45, of New York City, was found dead on the rocks below Terrel’s Peak yesterday morning. Mr. Chambers suffered massive head and back injuries due to a fall from the cliff. The coroner’s report said Mr. Chambers died twenty-four to twenty-eight hours prior to the discovery of his body. Mr. Chambers was a computer salesman for Elek-Tek, en route to a convention in Sara Clair. The police have located his next of kin, who will hold services for Mr. Chambers in his hometown of Queens.
On October 31, 2000, it was an auto dealer from Georgia. And on May 22, 2000, it was a local kid named Bob O’Grady. Eighteen years old.
On October 31, 1999, it was a transient man from California. A John Doe.
But the death toll for May 22, 1999 was again zero.
Three more Halloweens were followed by obituaries, but the Mays were clean. Apparently Bob O’Grady had signaled the start of the May killings.
Joe could think of them now only as killings. This wasn’t a case of copycat kids toying with suicide, or the occasional lonely wanderer dropping off the edge into the blessed, churning peace of the ocean.
But now another question nagged at Joe’s mind.
If the May murders had started just five years ago, how long had the Halloween killings gone on?
He ran out of microfilm in 1985, and hadn’t missed a Halloween death yet. Joe packed up all the film and closed his notebook. Maybe there was another room with older film. He went to find Mrs. Malone.
“Oh, no, I’m sorry, young man. The library started putting things on fiche back in 1985. That’s when we got the grant to get the machine, you know. We never got around to putting all the old stuff on it, but we haven’t missed an issue of the paper since.”
“So there’s no way to find older copies of the Terrel Daily Times than 1985?”
“Sure there is.” Mrs. Malone laughed out loud at his discomfiture, and then abruptly silenced herself, looking around to make sure she hadn’t disturbed any of the patrons. “We have some bound copies of the paper in a back room. We don’t leave them out, because the kids get too rough on them. We have copies of the paper dating back almost as old as the town itself. Although I don’t know that you’ll be able to read many of those papers. The older issues pretty much crumble apart if you do much more than look at ’em. But if you’re careful, I’ll let you see what you can see.”
“I’d sure appreciate it,” he mumbled, but Mrs. Malone was already motioning him to follow her behind the librarian’s desk.
She opened a door and turned the corner, and suddenly they were in a different building.
Gone were the white foam ceilings and bright cream walls of the main library. They walked down echoing cement steps to a gloomy room lit by two bare bulbs. The walls were bare brick, the air chilled.
“It ain’t much of a study carrel, but we’ve only got so much space upstairs.” Mrs. Malone shrugged, gesturing toward a lonely spot in the corner. “Here’s what you’re looking for.”
She motioned to a rack against the far wall. It was filled with twenty-inch-tall binders. Joe scanned the dates, marked in pen on the spines. Terrel Daily Times 1984, read the closest one. His eyes slid down the row, noting 1980…1974…1958…1930.
“You can use that desk over there to read, if you like,” Mrs. Malone said. “Or, if you know what year you’re looking for, you can just bring the book upstairs.”
“Actually, I’d like to skim through a bunch of years, if I may,” he answered. “So I guess I’ll stay here for a while.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, crossing her arms and shivering slightly. “Please be careful handling them, and put them back in order. When you’re finished, just come on back upstairs.”
Her steps click-clacked quickly up the stairs and Joe was left alone in the library basement.
Pulling out a sampling of years, he walked over to the desk the librarian had indicated. It was old and wooden, and its legs wobbled when he set the stack down. He pulled up the chair and began to read.
And the death toll mounted.
In 1980, an apparent gang execution had taken place. One Ricardo Hijuana, twenty-two, of Key West, was found wedged among the rocks at the base of Terrel’s Peak. His wrists were tied together behind his back. Twine bound his ankles together and stretched from his feet up his spine to connect to the gag that was lodged in Hijuana’s mouth. It was a very ruthless Halloween trick.
In 1976, another interesting Halloween snuff: After a child uncovered a dismembered hand while building a sand castle, the res
t of an unidentified Caucasian male was discovered floating in various parts of the bay. Police reports indicated that a stick of dynamite had been tied to the boy’s midsection and lit just before he was pushed over the edge of the cliff. A gruesome bicentennial bit of fireworks.
In 1954, the half-eaten body of a baby girl was discovered washed up on the beach on November 5. She’d been dead nearly a week, the obituary estimated. In subsequent reports, Joe found that police were unable to discover the child’s parentage.
In 1948, the grisly remains of a black woman were discovered by two grade school children playing by the beach. Joe had to laugh at the paper’s instant discriminatory supposition.
Police officials have been unable to establish the identity of the woman, however they theorize that she may have been on the run.
“A lot of these kinds of people steal the silverware and other valuables in the night and then head up the coast, looking for someone who will agree to turn their stolen bounty into greenbacks,” said Police Chief Billy Bob Grunson. “Why else would somebody from out of town have been up there after dark? She may have been so weighed down by whatever she was carrying that she fell right over the side of the cliff in the dark.”
Case closed. Joe smirked.
In 1935, the Times reported the death of a local man. But this account was not as abbreviated as those in following years.
Arnold Harver, 54, passed on after venturing too close to the deadly edge of Terrel’s Peak on October 31. Harver was among the earliest inhabitants of Terrel, having come here with his father, Arthur Harver, in 1910. Harver often visited the old lighthouse on his nightly walks. He had said that his strolls near the lighthouse brought him closer to the spirits of the past. Unfortunately, as many who failed to heed the warnings about the cliff have learned, those spirits have too often felt and slaked their desire for blood.
Joe shut the old newspaper binder with a thud. Bits of musty yellow newspaper fluttered to the floor. He didn’t know what to think. At first he had assumed there was some kind of serial killer at work here, something that the Terrel cops just didn’t know how to handle, and didn’t want to talk about with a relative stranger.