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

by Douglas Clegg

  But the AA meetings never quenched the thirst. She desperately wanted a glass of wine. Just one glass. Just a few sips. Anything to take away this feeling.

  She waited at the bathroom mirror until the feeling passed.

  After showering, she checked her messages. One from work, mentioning the all-night poker game that was to go on that night after closing. Two messages from Tad just calling to say hi and that everything was cool at his dad’s. The last one, from Dr. Cobb.

  All he said on the machine was, “Rebecca,” he was always so formal with her, “I’ve done something terrible here at the office. Something truly . . . psychotic ... I need some help. I need something. Please come see me. Don’t call. I won’t answer the phone, and when they find out what I’ve done they’ll lynch me.”

  2.

  “I’m on shift in an hour, Dr. Cobb,” she said as she walked in the door to his office. It was brightly lit, not just the fluorescent bulbs, but every lamp in the place. When she saw the look in his face, as if his spirit had died, she wished that she hadn’t sounded so harsh. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  Virgil Cobb sat in one of the waiting room chairs. “I told her parents that I had an ambulance take her over to Stone Valley. They were so exhausted from last night that they bought it. I made up some completely cockamamie story that if coma patients are disturbed in their first forty-eight hours that they might easily bleed to death. It was total fabrication, total, she’s not in a coma, she wasn’t even alive, not really.”

  Becky O’Keefe stared at him as he babbled on.

  Finally she said, “What the hell is going on?”

  Virgil Cobb looked at her sadly. “It’s Patty Glass.”

  The name didn’t register with Becky at first. Her mind sometimes worked like a computer, albeit an inefficient one. She could practically hear the ticka-ticka-tick of a machine as the two words, Patty and Glass rolled around until she hit the jackpot. She remembered a little girl in third grade with long hair and owl eyes. “She’s dead,” Becky said without further hesitation.

  “I know,” Virgil said. “Of course she is. Of course she’s dead. Of course.” His words melted into a loud booming laugh. As Becky stood there, her coat still on, she wondered if the pressures of a failing practice had taken its toll on her former employer’s mind. Maybe he should’ve retired before now.

  She immediately went to feel his forehead. It was cool. He stopped laughing and, instead, looked at her with cool eyes, too. “You think I’ve lost it.”

  “Not totally. I just don’t understand. Patty Glass died when I was ten. Unless you’re talking about some other Patty Glass.”

  Without bothering to explain, Virgil Cobb stood up and wiped at his face as if it were dirty. He walked through the waiting room and into the examination area. She assumed he wanted her to follow. She had known Virgil as Dr. Cobb since she’d been able to speak, and had always had great respect for him. But everybody cracked every now and then.

  Still, she gave him the benefit of the doubt.

  She followed him into the room.

  3.

  The room was dark. The blinds drawn. She could tell from the shapes that the room had remained as it was when she had worked for him: charts on the wall, a stainless steel counter and cabinets taking up an entire wall.

  Something lay on the examining table, but it was too dark to see it.

  “What is it you believe in, Rebecca?” Virgil asked.

  “Electricity, Dr. Cobb. Could we have some light in here?”

  “Not yet. You’re not ready.”

  “Okay. I believe in the basics.”

  “You mean, God, country, and all that jazz? What about the not so basics. What about the things under the bed, or the strange light at the window? What about the other side?”

  “Dr. Cobb, I don’t know—”

  “The other side, Rebecca, from where we are. Maybe the dead. Maybe the not so dead. Maybe some species that exists between dimensions.”

  “Look,” she said, “I’ve had a bad morning, what the—” and then she reached over to the wall, found the light switch, and turned it on.

  Things happened simultaneously for her then:

  Dr. Cobb was shaking his head as if she were a foolish child jumping ahead of the lesson plan; she noticed that he had painted the examination room, green from off-white;

  she noticed the blood on one of the off-white walls; the blood in several large jars set on the stainless steel counter; and, on the examining table, held down by leather straps, the decapitated and eviscerated body of a little girl.

  Becky O’Keefe had never fainted before in her life— fallen down drunk or passed out, yes, but never a genuine faint.

  But she saw pinpoint and swirling curls across her vision and thought: am I seeing stars? I’m seeing stars for the first time in my life.

  And then her legs gave out and at about that point she felt a sudden, precipitous drop in energy or perhaps even blood sugar.

  She hoped she wouldn’t hit the floor too hard.

  4.

  She awoke sitting up in a chair in the outer office. The plush, leather chair that she used to sink into in the late afternoons when she had been Dr. Cobb’s office administrator.

  Becky rubbed the back of her head; no bumps here.

  Virgil Cobb knew enough about her not to offer her a brandy. Instead, he made some Celestial Seasonings peppermint tea. “Good for settling the stomach,” he said, his voice cracked a bit, as if taken over by exhaustion.

  “I’m glad I didn’t split my head open,” was all she could think to say.

  “Me, too. I saw your skin go white. I knew you were going to faint. I managed to get over to you in time to catch you. I’m not as nimble as I used to be. Practically threw my back out.”

  A few moments of silence hung in the air. The tension was enormous. Her head was throbbing, but not from the faint. The room seemed suffocating.

  “You did that in there? To that girl?” she asked, wanting to understand. She didn’t believe Dr. Cobb was capable of murder, nor did she think he was capable of lying. Madness, however, was another issue.

  “She was already dead, I promise you. I just had to do a little outpatient surgery.”

  He was trying to make a feeble and sick joke, which was unlike him. Her warning buzzer, the one that went off in her head whenever trust and some man entered her life in one fell swoop, seemed to remain dormant.

  The weird thing was, she was briefly worried about work, as ridiculous as that seemed at a time like this. She knew that she should be calling into the pub to say she wouldn’t be in. “Oh, just because I saw a little girl slaughtered on a doctor’s table and I think maybe the doctor’s taken a touch too much of his own medicine on this particular night.”

  She watched Virgil’s face for some sign of insanity, but there was something so damned sane about the guy, it was as impossible to believe that he had murdered this girl as it was to believe that the body had really been Patty Glass’s at all. The whole world outside of the office seemed to fade away. “How is this possible?” she managed, after a sip of scalding tea.

  “Thank God,” he said, “Thank God you came. I thought I was a madman.”

  She said nothing. She watched him and sipped. She was moderately surprised that she didn’t fear for her own life. She couldn’t get past a certain intuition she had that Dr. Cobb was not crazy at all, no matter how much her logical sense told her that he very well might be.

  “She was one of them,” he said. “She’s the first one I’ve seen in years. I thought maybe we’d stopped it. Looks like I was wrong.”

  Neither of them spoke. She noticed that it was completely dark outside. She thought of Tad’s dog and of Joe Gardner. Somehow her mind connected all of these things. She said, “You’ve been like a father to me, Dr. Cobb.”

  He drummed his fingers on the edge of the coffee table, covered as it was with magazines. “I’m going to stop you right there. You’re already talking li
ke I’m crazy. I’m going to tell you about Patty Glass. She disappeared at the Feely farm over twenty years ago. Both you and I know that. The children with her told the authorities that she might’ve fallen down an old cistern in the barn, but no body was found in it. Yesterday, she was discovered. She was at her parents’ house. She was mute and didn’t seem to be able to focus on anyone. But I recognized her, Rebecca, I knew what was making her run. I’ve seen it before. When I took her blood, she had several pints of blood more than the human body is meant to hold. Her heart had been eaten away at, as if by rats. She had not fed completely though, so she did this.” Virgil Cobb stood and took his tweed jacket off, laying it neatly on the arm of his chair. Becky realized that he had begun shivering. Then he rolled up his shirtsleeve and extended his arm beneath a desk lamp for her to inspect.

  She got up and went over to him. She took his arm in her hands and turned it gently.

  A large black-and-blue diamond pattern just below the biceps. His forearm was swollen. She pressed lightly on it, and he winced. A small clear liquid leaked out from several marks on his forearm.

  “I’d like to tell you that it’s from a dog,” Virgil said, “Or from an enormous mosquito off the river. But it’s not. It was Patty Glass. Not that she put her face against my arm and bit down. Nothing that easily vampiric. It was very fast, how she did it. It was in a fold of her skin, near her neck. You see, that must’ve been her own entry wound. When she fell down the well at John Feely’s, whatever was down there waiting for her, it must’ve gotten to her neck first. But any major artery will do, I suppose.”

  Becky looked from his arm to his face. He was pale; sweat beaded the elderly man’s forehead. She felt a chill run through her. “I don’t understand,” she said. Her brain seemed to be shutting its computer works down. She felt as if she had stepped off the neat plane of reality into the dimension of nonsense. The weird part was that it was beginning to make a kind of sense to her.

  Virgil Cobb looked at her as if he were a child with his mother, telling the truth, and not being believed. He spoke slowly and deliberately. “I was bending over her at the table, checking her vision. Her eyes were dilated even with extreme light on them, and I wanted to see if I could detect any further abnormality there. I had already restrained her. To be honest, I already planned to ... well, you saw for yourself in there. As I leaned closer to her face, her eyes seemed to retract back into her skull almost, like a snail going into its shell, threatened. My gut instinct was that something was wrong, so I drew back. But I was too late.”

  Becky watched the purple bruises on his arm. They were growing darker.

  He gasped when he observed this. “I shouldn’t be afraid of death. Not at my age. But I am.”

  “You’re not going to die,” Becky said, comfortingly.

  “Not in the traditional sense, but Rebecca,” he said, looking straight through her as if she had no physical body, as if he were not in a room with her, but alone in a dark universe with nothing to comfort him but the echo of his own voice, “I think I may already be dead. I think this entire town may be dead, too.”

  5.

  Becky O’Keefe put her arms around Virgil Cobb and hugged him tightly. She closed her eyes. All she saw was the idiocy of darkness, yet it was oddly comforting to hold this man and to see nothing. His own arms were slack at his side, as if he didn’t know how to hug another human being.

  When she finally broke away from him, she said, “I don’t know what any of this really means, Virgil,” saying his first name for the first time in her life, “I know that there is a mutilated body in that other room. I know that you have always been kind to me. I consider you a very good friend. So I am willing to listen to anything you have to say. So please try and explain this to me in a way that I can get it. Because I’m not getting it right now. I can’t even figure out what you’re trying to tell me.”

  Virgil Cobb began another story, not about Patty Glass, but about something that happened years before Patty or Rebecca O’Keefe had even come into existence.

  Back in the olden days of Colony, when summer seemed to last forever and was always green, when the river was not only swimmable but drinkable, when the world was smaller and Colony was bigger, back when an old man named Virgil Cobb was sixteen and dared his younger brother to run up to a certain porch of a certain house.

  6.

  Virgil’s Story

  My brother was always so active, always running and jumping, doing cartwheels. I thought he’d never stop. He was a terrific little brother, Eugene was, with his Irish mop of red hair, inherited from our mother, and his grin, like the devil himself on holiday. It was 1937, and in many ways the Great Depression had never hit us here in Colony, for we were all as poor then as we are now. My father was possibly the most well-to-do of all the locals, for he was also a doctor and ran his practice at an office in town, where my niece’s shop is now. So we had material goods and food on the table at all times, that was true. And my friend Winston and I would get in trouble, usually with Eugene, the most adoring brother a boy could have. Once, I remember we three carried huge rocks from the quarry all the way across town and piled them up in the middle of Queen Anne Street. It was late summer. We covered the rocks with corn, still in its husk, and then we went upstairs in Winston’s house and waited to see if anyone would drive through the corn. Most folks had sense, and they drove around the pile of corn as soon as they came upon it. But the preacher, an idiot named Lee from over the hills, in his big shiny black Cadillac, drove right down the center of the road. He must’ve been thinking that he’d hit the corn and it would go flying; instead, he hit the rocks, and the engine dropped out of his car. Oh, we laughed about that one, and then hid because we knew somebody was going to come after us to tan our hides.

  But Eugene told. Not on us, but just on himself. That preacher was angry as the dickens, and when Eugene volunteered himself as the culprit, my baby brother got whupped right there on the road. I felt guilty about that for months to come.

  I just wanted you to know what Eugene was like. Even though he was my baby brother, he would take all the responsibility. He would let himself get punished instead of me.

  And then, there was that dare. I don’t know what month of summer it was, all I know is, it was hot as Hades. We both went around without our shirts, which my mother called uncouth and my father called unhealthy—the mosquitoes were positively rabid then, and I ended up with welts all over my back and shoulders. Winston got us to go over to the Feely place. Even then John Feely was called Old Man, and he probably wasn’t much older than eighteen. But his father had died two years before, and his mother was something of an invalid, and there were three sisters of his to feed, too, so John became the head of the household. But the thing was, he used to run around with us, some, too. But as soon as he was running the farm pretty much by himself, he got reclusive, and shouted Bible phrases at us whenever we came out to see him. He called us sinners and such, and then when we got tired of it, Winston and I went and threw eggs at his house. And John Feely, damn him, didn’t ever wash those blessed eggs off—they stayed there for weeks, drawing flies. People in town talked funny about John, how he would go out to Watch Hill and hammer crosses in the ground, even where there weren’t any graves. They said he walked around at night, when no one else was in town. He was the town freak. So, Winston and I decided we’d break into his house one night while he was out. We didn’t mean any real harm—you know, back then, folks left their doors unlocked all the time. Sometimes they didn’t even close them.

  So we drag Eugene with us, and he keeps telling us it’s wrong, it’s wrong, shaking his head, acting like a skunk. But we tell him about John Feely’s stolen goods. Winston started that. He was always a better talker than me, and had read a lot of science fiction like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells. Winston convinced my brother that John Feely had stolen the old stone angel from Watch Hill, the one that used to be at the entrance. How that was sacrilegious and how it was onl
y right that we go steal it back.

  I didn’t know that Winston was telling the truth.

  Turns out, Winston had watched John Feely steal it one morning at five a.m. when Winston looked out his bedroom window and saw John walking down the street with it, plain as day.

  So, it’s maybe ten minutes to midnight, and we’re all three staring at that old farmhouse. Our folks’ll all skin us alive if they know we’re out so late.

  And then Winston looks at me and Eugene both and says something like, “I bet you’re both too chicken to go in there.”

  To tell you the God’s honest truth, I was too scared. I don’t know what it was, but there was something about the Feely place at night that unnerved me. They say that there are some places where it can look perfectly beautiful and peaceful, but the eye detects something’s wrong. Even though our minds can’t notice what it is, our eye sees something without completely recognizing it. It’s called the sublime. That’s what I think it was, back then, that I felt. Call it a heightened awareness, but I was convinced when I looked at that dark old farmhouse that it was somehow alive, somehow it had some energy to it.

  And it chilled my blood on one of the hottest nights of summer.

  But Eugene was not attuned to that, I suppose. He accepted the dare from Winston. He barely waited a minute before he bounded up to the front porch and tried the door.

  Unusual for us, the door was locked. Eugene went around to the windows and looked through each one. One window, a small one, was almost too bright with the lights on. I was about to call to him to come back, to forget it. But he saw something through that window. I don’t know what.