The Children's Hour - A Novel of Horror (Vampires, Supernatural Thriller)

by Douglas Clegg

  Dale Chambers, a third-generation Colonian, didn’t have anything on his mind as spectacular as burning the town down. He was thinking more along the lines of murder.

  Murdering someone, particularly someone you care about, is never a simple matter of planning and then executing. Things go wrong, fate steps in, life tosses in a screw or two. Dale Chambers was finding this out on this fairly chilly day in November when he felt, at the age of forty-eight, that life was still good and that his prime had not passed. These feelings were mainly because of his thing with Lannie.

  As affairs went, Lannie Barnes’s with Dale Chambers was going pretty well—she had companionship at least three nights out of the week, and he got some nooky that his wife Nelda had been denying him for the past twenty years. It couldn’t be said that the affair was a secret, but it also could be maintained that Nelda didn’t give a flyer who her husband put it to as long as he didn’t come wagging it at her. Dale had always lusted after Lannie, ever since the days he worked at the factory before he’d turned seventeen, long before he switched careers. All those times he had seen her on his drive home, at sixteen, on summer evenings, necking with farm boys out at the river.

  That had been years ago, of course, when Lannie was still the tease of the county, and was known for not wearing any underwear underneath her crinolines; later, she earned the title of town tramp; as time went on, she was known as liberated but deadly. She looked a bad forty, and had spun a hundred and eighty degrees in the other direction from her bare-assed youth —she ordered silky underwear from the Victoria’s Secret catalog just to entice the men. She had reached the stage where she felt to be attractive she had to hide more than she revealed.

  They were, at the moment Joe Gardner and his wife Jenny and their two children were heading towards the town, in a desperate embrace, tangled in the moth-eaten sheets of the Miner’s Lodge. They had a private room upstairs, and had greedily devoured a plate of oysters and cheeses, and had downed a jug of Chianti. Lannie’s blue eye shadow had rubbed off on Dale’s navel. Dale wore Cherries-In-The-Snow lipstick imprints on some places on his body that even he had never seen. What made this an important coupling for both of them was that Lannie announced her impending pregnancy right at the moment Dale was about to enter her—his spirit wilted as quickly as did his flesh.

  “I think I heard you wrong,” he said, pulling away from her, the suction of skin slurping as he did so. And then, thoughtlessly, he added, “And you’re too old, for God’s sakes.”

  She drew back against the pillows and covered her breasts with the sheet. “As it would turn out, Dale, hon, I’m not. I saw Dr. Cobb on Tuesday and it seems there’s a little Dale just gettin’ his fingers.”

  This was about the point when Dale decided to kill her. It wasn’t the most logical process. He didn’t want his wife Nelda to know, of course, that he had gotten the town tramp knocked up; neither did he want to be a father. He had one bastard in town already, and didn’t think there was room for more. To top this all off, he was furious with Lannie for letting this happen. She was supposed to be on birth control pills, which Dale felt was the woman’s duty, and so she must’ve wanted to get pregnant—Christ, at her age—as a trap for him.

  Well, it wasn’t going to work.

  Dale had killed someone once before, years ago, and no one had found out. It had been an accident, really. He had only been eight or nine, and it was another little boy who had tried to touch his weenie. That was a no-no as far as the Gump was concerned. So he had taken the kid to one of the old mine shafts that had since been covered over because of just such incidents, and shoved him down it. His intention then was not to really kill the kid, but just to put him someplace where Dale would never have to see him again. Nobody ever looked down the shaft; the boy was gone for good; and Dale’s conscience barely gave him a tweak over the incident. Dale Chambers was not quite as smart as he thought, though, because as he got older he would occasionally get the odd letter typed on a cheesy old Royal typewriter (he figured this out later, when he started using the ancient typewriter his wife used to write her pathetic poetry on). The letters said: I saw you. You’re naughty. Or, I know you inside and out.

  He had been scared of the letters at first. But the letters stopped just a couple of years before, and nothing had happened.

  So, the idea of murdering Lannie because of her pregnancy was not that farfetched. He knew it could be done—he had studied murder cases in his off-hours, and a few on the job, as well. He knew that sometimes people got away with it; and the ones who didn’t were stupid or scared or just plain wanted to get caught. Killing Lannie wasn’t the problem, not for Dale, it was all the baggage that went along with it: the time, the place, the alibi, the proper technique. He was a particular fan of true crime books, mainly dealing with serial killers, his idols being Ted Bundy and the Zodiac Killer, in particular, although he certainly was an avid reader of anything having to do with Jack the Ripper, too. Jack was amazing—he got away with it, apparently. That Black Dahlia Killer, from the forties, he got away with it, too. It could be done.

  He leaned against Lannie, pressing himself closer, and kissed her cheek. She couldn’t read his mind, could she?

  “You want me to get rid of it, don’t you?” she asked, sounding like a whiny kitten. “Well, I’m a good Baptist girl and I ain’t gonna do it.”

  He kissed her sweetly. Like she was already a mother. She had always had baby hunger; hadn’t she? She had been spreading her legs since she was twelve, and it wasn’t for pleasure or money or acceptance, it was for the basic reason, the most essential reason for having sex. It occurred to him that Lannie Barnes might be the most old-fashioned girl in all of Colony, because she probably had only ever viewed lust’s main function as procreation! And after nearly three and a half decades of trying, she had finally gotten the bun in the oven.

  “We’ll have the baby,” Dale Chambers whispered, “But let’s keep it secret for a while. You didn’t tell Virgil who the father is, did you?”

  She shook her head. Tears in her eyes; smile on her face. “Dr. Cobb ain’t the type to spread stories, if that’s what you mean. But I wanted to tell you first, before I told anybody else. I didn’t want it to get back to your wife. Not yet. Not something this special. You love me, don’t you, Dale? And you’ll love the baby, too, won’t you?”

  He answered her with kisses.

  After a bout of lovemaking where he pummeled her good, Dale Chambers showered, dressed, left the Lodge, and stood out in the early evening shadows, with the street lamps humming to yellow life. He wondered just how he was going to put Lannie Barnes out of her misery.

  He got in his car and leaned out the window to wave to Virgil Cobb, possibly the oldest practicing country doctor in the county, let alone the whole state, who was carrying three sacks of groceries to his old beat-up car. “Well, hey, Doc, how goes the trade?”

  Virgil was nearly seventy, but in pretty good shape, “spry” as the young called the old when the latter group could barely bend at the waist to pick up a penny, or manage a smile on a hot day. He was wearing his traditional Scots plaid bow tie, heavily starched white shirt, and tweed jacket; always in khakis, always with the argyle socks, always in penny loafers—Virgil was a walking add for 1958, which happened to be the year that Virgil’s wife had left him and gone off to New York for a bigger life. Virgil set the groceries on the sidewalk and practically trotted over to Dale. The old man leaned into the car window and said, “Hey, Sheriff.”

  Dale Chambers smiled, and thought: You don’t know the real me, old man, I have a secret and nobody in this town knows the inside me, the thing I am inside, the one who gets the letter telling me how naughty I am, the one who’s gonna make sure Lannie Barnes never sees too many more sunrises. The Gump is gonna do it, ‘cause he’s my inside man, my innard self, ho-ho.

  3.

  After he spoke with Sheriff Chambers, Virgil Cobb picked his groceries back up and took them to his car. He was beginning
to notice the change—not just in the temperature, although with this first nightfall of November, it was dropping fast—it might get as low as forty tonight, maybe some snow down here in the lowlands in the next couple of weeks.

  But something else, too.

  Like a reminder of his youth, he felt it: the town was changing in some way, maybe because half the young people left as soon as they could drive, and the other half took off when they turned legal age. It was a place people didn’t want to stay in anymore. He’d only had a handful of patients in the past two years, mainly the ones close to his age who had always been coming to him. These days, most of his patients drove over to Stone Valley to the spanking new HMOs and medical centers—they didn’t trust an old man with their ailments. In the winters, which could get harsh, come January, the Malabar Hills cut the town off whenever there was a good storm coming through; the summers had become unbearable with the mosquito population and the excessive humidity; and jobs. There were no jobs. People like Virgil couldn’t even afford to retire—he knew it was just a matter of time before he got forced out because of his age, but how were young people to ever keep the lifeblood going in a town where the jobs were so limited, and so coveted? When he had been a boy, he had seen how Vidal Junction, at the pass in the hills, had dried up and become a ghost town, and there were other places, too, small corners of the state that had died when the mining towns had closed or had dried up and blown away because there was nothing solid to keep them in place. Towns had lives just like people did, Virgil knew. You had to feed them, you had to nurture them, you had to keep their lifeblood pumping.

  Something his little brother Eugene (rest his soul) had told him once, when Virgil had first studied biology in high school. Hemogoblins. Virgil pricked Eugene’s finger to get some blood to test and see what blood type he was, and he tried to explain about blood, about white corpuscles and hemoglobin, but all Eugene had repeated back was, corporals and hemogoblins.

  Whenever he thought of poor Eugene, he remembered those silly childhood things.

  For a moment, he saw a face through a darkened shop window, and it startled him until he realized it was his own face. Looked like a ghost, he thought, for just a second, thought it was a ghost.

  But it was the Virgil Cobb that had grown creaky and cobwebbed and stooped from what had been a rather handsome youth, who had once turned down the advances of a few ladies because of his pursuit of the life of the mind: books and medicine. Loved books too much, maybe. Lived in them most of the time. Escaped into them, you could say. Half his bed at home was taken up with books and papers; he slept on the other half, occasionally feeling the spine of a hardcover as if tucking his wife in.

  Tried to die, though, but can’t. You can’t die when you never really lived, can you? It would be redundant. Virgil drew the collar of his herringbone tweed jacket up around his neck. Getting cold. He knew his thoughts were too depressing; maybe it was just his age. Maybe you live life long enough and you expect the world to die before you do. Maybe you expect all of them to disappear, the candle to extinguish, before yours gets snuffed. Virgil had been over the hill recently to see another doctor—well, not a doctor, who was he fooling?—a psychiatrist, which is a doctor, but not the kind that you could talk about openly in Colony—and the doctor had asked him to describe his symptoms. “Tired, forgetful, worn out. And sometimes I wake up thinking: it’s a good day to get in the car and die.”

  The psychiatrist had asked, “Die?” Virgil had chuckled, “Did I say that? No. I mean, it’s a good day to get in the car and drive. Just drive, anywhere.”

  “Dr. Cobb,” the psychiatrist had said, “You said, ‘die.’’

  And he had.

  He knew he had.

  Virgil Cobb didn’t think he wanted to die, but the concept just crept in there, under the fence.

  He put his groceries in the car and locked the doors. Used to be, you didn’t have to lock anything in Colony, least of all your car; things had changed. He was going to go for a walk out to the cemetery, see his brother. Hadn’t seen him in a long time. It’d be cold, but old Eugene had been out there with no one to check on him since maybe August. Virgil figured he ought to talk with him awhile, get some advice.

  Virgil was beginning to wonder if most of his friends and family weren’t out there, at Watch Hill, the ten acre bone yard just bordering the Paramount River, within the town limits. He could name at least nineteen people he knew who were currently (and indefinitely) underground, and might only be able to name another ten to twelve who were above.

  There should be a prize for survival, he thought. Old Man Feely, he’s almost ninety, he’d get the gold medal. Miss Risa DeLaMare would get the silver, at eighty-four. And Dean Lowell, weighing in at eighty-one, he’d get the bronze.

  Darn, he thought (since he had never been given to swearing, even when polite society embraced verbal obscenity), I wouldn’t even make it to the Olympics of survival.

  Virgil Cobb went to the Watch Hill, now, just a few times a year. His brother, Eugene, hadn’t died, at least not officially. There was a stone marker for him, because they figured, given where he’d taken off to, he wouldn’t survive too long. But nobody knew for sure, except, perhaps, Virgil himself. Oh, he’d seen something happen to his brother, Virgil had, but what seemed real in an instant at the age of twelve, now, from the distance of an ocean of years, seemed like the paper-thin fragment of a dream. But Virgil had stuck to the official story: his brother Eugene had just disappeared, at fifteen, a runaway, perhaps, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that Eugene had died somewhere in the intervening years.

  4.

  Byron Cheever was nineteen and home on a presumed break from college. He was a smart boy, they all said it, but he knew different, he knew how he had gotten the high score on his SATS in high school, and why he had graduated second in his class—a little blackmail went a long way in a town like Colony. He had landed at Washington and Lee University over in Lexington, a college which was hallowed in the South, but particularly sacred to Byron’s family because he was the seventh Cheever since his great-great-grandfather to attend that university. The problem was, for By (as his friends called him), that he had just been expelled for cheating on his midterms. He was home for a few days, supposedly a fall break, but in reality, he knew he wasn’t ever going to be going back to Lexington, Virginia, and he had to somehow tell his mother and father without being expelled by them, too, for reaping dishonor and shame and all those things that they spoke of so highly. It was worse for him, because he might never see his Lambda Chi Alpha brothers again, and for By, social life had been the be-all and end-all.

  So he was doing what he always did when he got nervous—trolling the streets of Colony for a girl to ball or a buddy to get plastered with. Driving his daddy’s Cadillac convertible, the top down even in the cold; By didn’t mind, he thought it was more studly that way. And what, to his wandering eye should appear, but a girl of sixteen dressed in something that looked like it was baby doll and slut combined, standing on the corner of Princess Caroline Street, with a girlfriend about as ugly as any woofer on the planet.

  He pulled over, almost jumping the curb, and the dog friend stepped back into darkness.

  The Beauty, as he came to think of her, stood still. Smiled.

  She looked the fuckingest he’d ever seen a girl look, and he thought: screw college, all 1 need is a nice tight pussy and a Cadillac and this boy’s in hog heaven.

  “Hey, Beauty,” he said, “How’s about a ride with the Beast?”

  “Oh,” she said, stepping forward. Then, looking back into the shadows, “Mind if I bring my friend, too?”

  By glanced at the other girl, shrugged: hell, who knows? Maybe have me a bite of a little sandwich tonight, hot damn.

  “Depends,” he told Beauty.

  “On what?”

  “On whether you’re gonna worship at my love temple tonight?”

  “Oh,” she said, not taken aback at all, “I’l
l do more than that, Beast.”

  Byron Cheever grinned and got an instant boner. She was one fine piece of flesh, Beauty was. He’d just put a bag over her girlfriend’s face, and give them both the thrill of a lifetime. Damn, it’s good to be young and hung and studly. He’d have some good stories to tell his buddies, that was for sure.

  5.

  You could hear the sound of the Cadillac’s tires screeching, and the roar of its decrepit, sorry-ass engine as it careened up the street, turning left on Main, running the stop sign. In towns like this, the sound of a car burning rubber was like a cry in the night. Those who were at their windows, closing them against the cold, or locking up shop, listened to it as if it were a banshee’s howl.

  Main Street seemed to grow at night, with the yellow street lamps, and the feeble lights from storefronts. Everything was shadows and brick between the narrow streets. There were only nine streets in the town proper—Queen Anne Street, Princess Caroline, Main, North and South Angel, and then streets First through Fourth crossing each of these. The buildings were the old Federal style townhouses of the old towns built before the Civil War. Above every store was an apartment, many of them empty, going for the cheap rate of a hundred and fifty a month. A smart person could haggle the desperate landlord down to a hundred on a good day. Some of the college students from Stone Valley got places there—it was a forty-minute commute over the hills, but the savings were enormous on rent and utilities.