The Haunts & Horrors Megapack: 31 Modern & Classic Stories

by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

  “That’s quite a story.”

  “It’s the truth.”

  “Sure. But if it is, then the flute is probably worth a fortune. Certainly more than what I paid for it.”

  “But it’s cursed. If you hang on to it long enough, terrible things will happen.”

  “Whatever you say, old man.”

  “No, really! I’ll give you a hundred dollars for it.” He pulled a banknote out of the pocket of his grimy coat.

  Steve looked at the money and licked his lips. Then he shook his head.

  “No. You’re going to have to leave. Take your beer and go.”

  “I must have that flute. You don’t understand.” The old man grabbed his beer bottle.

  Steve heard a little voice shout a warning. “Steve! He’s going to hit you with the bottle and steal me!” The voice was high-pitched and distorted, like a speeded up recording of a child. He looked toward the source.

  It was the flute.

  “Kill him!” It said. “Kill him now, before it’s too late!”

  Steve jumped up and seized a chef’s knife from the butcher block. As he turned toward him the old man muttered.

  “Oh, God, not again.”

  He threw his bottle at Steve and ran for the door. Steve caught up with him in the hall, plunging the knife in again and again and again, continuing to stab even after the old man collapsed and stopped moaning.

  He looked down at himself covered in the old man’s blood.

  “Oh, my God. What have I done?”

  “You did what you had to do.” The voice of the flute answered. “He deserved it. He attacked you. He was going to rob you. You were only defending yourself.”

  “Yes, that’s it. He was going to rob me.”

  He rifled through the old man’s pockets and took the hundred-dollar bill. He hid that and the flute in his bedroom and then called the police to report a prowler.

  It was hours before they were through with all the statements and photographs. The police detective was dubious of Steve’s claims of being attacked by a deranged drug fiend in his own home but couldn’t come up with a more plausible scenario.

  “Just don’t leave town for a while. We may have more questions,” he told Steve as he left and those words haunted him.

  “He knows.” He whispered. “He knows but he can’t prove anything. Not yet.”

  That night the flute sang to him in his dreams and told him what had to be done. It was self-defense. The cop was out to get him. He had to do something.

  “Besides,” the flute sang to him. “We will need his gun for the next time. Knives are so messy and guns make such a cheerful noise.”

  * * * *

  Meanwhile, the old man came to his senses in the locker of the morgue, kicking his feet against the door until it opened. The attendant took one look at the corpse crawling out of cold storage and fled screaming into the night to seek another career.

  The old man glanced at his wounds, even now healing, the bloody cuts scabbing over into puckered scars as he watched.

  “Oh, God, this curse is too much for me to bear.”

  He received no answer to his prayer, and expected none. Cain knew he would never be granted the peace of the grave until he recovered all the shattered pieces of his brother’s body and gave them the burial his necromantic arts had denied them for millennia.

  Taking the attendant’s overcoat from a hook by the door, he pulled it around his shoulders and let himself out.

  A FAULT AGAINST THE DEAD, by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  You can’t keep dead people happy all the time.

  Thursday night I was walking on the beach, and five ghosts were following me, one friendly, two whiners, one halfway on its way to somewhere else, and the last one potentially a client.

  “Julia,” said the friendly one, a dead guy named Roger I’ve known for eight of the nine years I’ve been a counselor to dead people (talk about a job whose rewards are intangible), “are you getting enough sleep?”

  “Probably not,” I said. I flumped down on the cold sand, lay flat on my back, and waved my arms up and down to make a sand angel amid the footprints of people who’d come to the beach by day. The breathing hush of waves coming in and going out, the shifting grains against my back, the coolness under me, and the scent of sea, with a faint undertone of something small and dead a short distance away, all combined to lull me. Roger was right. I needed sleep. But it was exam week at community college, I had been cramming for four nights in a row, and there was more ghost activity than usual. “I won’t get much tonight, either. I have an anthro exam tomorrow to cram for. Minnie and Hiram have too many complaints. Nothing I say seems to help.”

  Minnie and Hiram had gone, moping, down to the water, where they let wavelets wash through their ankles and stared glumly out to sea. The moon shone through them; they were translucent, like thin green jade. If there had been any way to ditch them, I would have taken it. But, though they hadn’t been able to figure out what was holding them in this world and solve it so they could move on, they were startlingly resourceful when it came to tracking me down and torturing me.

  “They don’t want to be helped. They just like you.” Roger drifted down to float above the sand near me. He had been a ghost long enough to look like someone specific. I wondered if he looked like who he had been. Some ghosts didn’t. A lot of them could posthumously turn into their dream selves, select an appearance they thought suited them better than the one they had been born into. I was totally freaked out the first time I saw someone I knew die and emerge from her mouth as someone else.

  Some of the people I saw weren’t even dead yet, and there, other rules applied.

  Roger was a good-looking ghost. Also, he wore clothes. Some of the dead acted like death was a nudist colony. I was still a little frisson about that, especially about the naked guy ghosts, when I could tell whether they liked me or didn’t. They enjoyed being able to get excited by live women without the women knowing, and sometimes it took a while for them to figure out I could see them and they should mind their manners. A lot of them didn’t care. I guess, why should they?

  Still, if they didn’t care about my feelings, I didn’t take them on as clients.

  With Hiram and Minnie, it was hard to tell if they cared. They whined a lot. They talked in my ears when I was trying to read my textbooks, and when Minnie went into Mother mode, she drove me crazy. Still, there were a few small flickers of what looked like affection in our relationship.

  At least they wore clothes.

  I stopped flopping around. Sand angels didn’t give a person the same satisfaction as snow angels. You couldn’t tell from the outline what a person had been trying for.

  “So who are you?” I asked the fourth ghost, who looked like lavender jade and drifted in the air about a foot from my head. I couldn’t tell much about her; she hadn’t decided on what to look like yet. She was small, though. A kid ghost.

  I had problems with kid ghosts. It was kid ghosts who sent me to the mental hospital for five years.

  She didn’t say anything. She just watched me with her black olive-pit eyes in their shadowed caverns.

  I sat up and shook sand out of my coat sleeves. “I can’t help you if you don’t give me anything to work with.”

  She flickered and vanished.

  Whew. Another bullet dodged.

  “So what’s your story?” I asked Ghost Five, more a colored, internally lighted smear on the dark sky than a person.

  It wavered like the Northern Lights. I heard a faint wind-chime sound, then a deep bell bong.

  “Great,” I muttered. The half-there ghosts were sometimes dream selves and didn’t need help. As soon as their bodies woke up, they’d disappear. I wasn’t sure Ghost Five was one of those. You couldn’t always tell. Some of the real dead spoke other languages. I hoped there were other me’s out there who could help them. Well, I’d met one other guy, Nick, who saw almost as many ghosts as I did, but he and I didn’t get along.


  Music as a language was a big problem for me. I had a tin ear. “Roger?”

  Roger went to Half-There and walked through it. He came shuddering out the other side, his face stained purple and pink, his clothes writhing. “Yech!” He flumped down onto the sand beside me and shook.

  “A dreamer?”

  “No, he’s dead.”

  “What does he need?”

  The stains faded from Roger’s translucent face, leaving his skin his more usual light brown. “Forgiveness,” he muttered. “I couldn’t forgive him, though. He’s polluted with the deaths of others.”

  God, I hated these guys. I could do it, though. The sooner the better, probably. Thin down the ghost herd and then go study.

  I stood up. “Okay, ghost guy. Here’s what I can do for you.”

  The smear wavered some more. Why couldn’t he have been a dream?

  “Walk into me and give me your sins. Walk out of me and leave them behind, and then you can go on. If this isn’t what you want, please leave me alone. I have other things to do.”

  Half of him shifted up and the other half circled, rippled, pulsed. I stretched out my arms as though I were making a sky angel. The ghost flowed suddenly toward me and then into me, and then my stomach clenched. A river of blood, an orchestra of screams, sick hot excitement, the cold wracking shudders afterward, the irresistible need to find more of other people’s pain to taste, oh, God, I hated these guys. My stomach churned, my forehead burned, sweat burst out all over my body. He slid out of me, washed clean and pale and confused.

  I forgive you. I forgive you. I forgive you. You did it because you couldn’t find anything else that worked. You learned some lesson here. It happened for a reason. (Oh, God, what reason could there be? Yet this sort of thing kept happening. If I believed there was a reason—I needed to believe there was a reason. Otherwise I’d end up back in the room where you could bounce off the walls and not hurt yourself. There had to be a reason. I just didn’t know what it was.) You gave others lessons—you evil, sick fuck—no, no, focus, Julia. You are done here. You are forgiven. Please move on to your next lesson. Please be free of what hurt you in this life. Please find love and joy in the next.

  He shot up into the sky and was gone.

  “Is he gone?” I asked, even though I knew he was.

  “He’s gone,” said Roger.

  I screamed. I dropped to my knees and pounded on the sand. I screamed again, then lay with my face to the ground and screamed a third time, as loud as I could into the sand, vomiting up the things that ghost had done in his life, cleaning his taste out of my mouth.

  “Miss? Miss?”

  Uh-oh.

  I clenched my fists and pushed myself up.

  “Are you all right?”

  He was alive. He wore a big puffy dark jacket and dark jeans and knee-high rubber boots. On his head, a pale knitted cap; on his hands, dark gloves. His face was obscured by thick glasses. Even if the light weren’t solely moon and stars I don’t know if I could have figured out what he looked like.

  He knelt, reached for me.

  I scrambled away. I had forced the last ghost’s sick acts mostly out of my brain, but a residue remained, the way it always did. I could remember being the guy, or I could remember what he had done. When I remembered what he had done, I took the stance of his victims. If I remembered being the guy, I stained myself with his inescapable desire for power over something, anything, preferably something that would whimper and quiver when he poked it.

  Through a haze of killer memories, I looked at this live guy and thought: Killer.

  “Miss?” said this mummy-wrapped guy. “I don’t mean you any harm.”

  What my last ghost had always said to the women he managed to separate from everything they knew or could cling to for safety. Had always meant, up until the moment he harmed his victims, because he couldn’t let himself know ahead of time what he really wanted and intended to do, not and function. He had to pretend it wasn’t happening, had never happened, until it did.

  The other kind, the ones who had no consciences and no regrets, they must go somewhere else. I didn’t have to deal with those.

  Puffy guy stood slowly. “I just wanted to see if you were okay,” he said in a hurt voice.

  “Sure.” My voice was hoarse from all the screaming. “I come down here to scream because I figure it won’t bother my neighbors.” I could hardly hear myself, my voice was so thin. “Thanks anyway. I’m kind of frazzled.”

  “Frazzled,” he said, an amused note in his voice.

  Roger walked through him. “Julia, get out of here.”

  I climbed to my feet, stood swaying. From the tone of Roger’s voice, I knew this guy must be a wrong one, too. What were the odds?

  What chance did I have of getting away from this guy? He was a head taller than I was, and I was exhausted from too little sleep, too much studying, too much greasy food, and too much murder.

  Hiram and Minnie had drifted up from the water’s edge. Minnie heard Roger and flashed between me and the stranger. “Run, Julia,” she said.

  Run? Fat lot of good that would do me.

  Hiram streaked across the beach. “I’ll rouse Nick!” he cried as he disappeared. Nick was one of the few people I knew who could also see ghosts, and he might listen to Hiram. He might try to help me. We didn’t like each other, so I wasn’t sure that would work.

  Which direction should I run?

  “Frazzled,” I repeated. I walked past the guy, heading toward my car. If I could get most of the way there—

  If I ran, he’d bring me down. An image of a lion leaping to bite a gazelle on the neck flashed through my brain. Hah. Gazelle. As if. I glanced sideways at the guy. Lion. As if.

  If I pretended I didn’t know what he was up to, maybe I’d have time to collect myself, restore my energy. I pulled a granola bar out of my coat pocket, ripped off the wrapper, and took a bite. I pulled a water bottle out of my other pocket, shook sand off it, unscrewed the cap and took a long drink. My throat felt better.

  He followed, weaving beside me on the sand.

  “See, what happens when you die,” I said, “You suddenly stop being able to forget all the horrible things you did while you were alive. You have to live with them or find someone like me to help you ditch them. You know? When I die I don’t think I’ll have that problem, because as far as I know, I haven’t done any horrible things to anyone else, just myself. Then again, memory is so tricky. I suppose I could have done awful things and just made myself forget.”

  “What are you talking about?” asked the guy.

  “Julia, what are you talking about?” Roger asked at the same time. “Why aren’t you running? This man has evil intentions.”

  “I know, but I’m too tired.”

  “Huh?” said stalker guy.

  I ate more granola bar, washed it down with water. I was feeling better.

  Minnie and Roger flanked me, Roger mixing edges with stalker guy because stalker guy was walking pretty close beside me. “Julia,” Minnie said, “Julia, don’t join us.”

  “It’s not my idea, but you know, sometimes things just happen.” I wished I felt as calm about all this as I sounded.

  The little lavender ghost returned, floated in front of me as I walked. The sand dragged at my feet. Breeze blew past my face, flavored with a faint whiff of woodsmoke from someone’s fire. Somewhere, someone was sitting in front of a nice fire in a living room, maybe reading a book and drinking hot coffee or some nice wine. Maybe they had slippers and a fluffy bathrobe on. Maybe there was nothing in the world that worried them.

  Lavender danced as she walked, and she walked backward, her dark eye-sockets the only features in her face.

  “I wish you’d tell me what you want. Maybe I can help you,” I said.

  “Are you nuts?” asked stalker guy.

  “Certifiably. I still have my ID bracelet from the mental hospital in my keepsake box.”

  “Really?” He sound
ed intrigued.

  “He killed me,” said the lavender ghost. “I want to kill him.”

  “I understand. Of course you want to kill him. You can’t, though, probably. I guess it depends on whether you’re so angry your rage shifts you into power mode. That happens sometimes. Then you can drive them to hurt themselves or maybe even die, if you try hard enough. But it’s a waste of energy, and it drops you into a lower mode of existence next time, as far as I know, which, I have to admit, isn’t that far.”

  “Who are you talking to?” stalker guy asked.

  “The ghost of one of your victims.”

  Roger groaned.

  “What?” said stalker guy.

  “He hurt me. He hurt me so bad. He put a dirty sock in my mouth so I couldn’t cry. I cried anyway, but I couldn’t make the noises. He wouldn’t stop.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s your name?”

  “Hazel Mindell.”

  “I’m so sorry, Hazel.” We were almost to the parking lot.

  There were two vehicles in the parking lot: my Mazda Protege, and an overmuscled pickup truck with tall tires and a camper shell.

  Sure. Closer to my car, closer to his. Here I was, making his job easy by walking myself to where he wanted me.

  Stalker guy grabbed my left arm. “Hazel?” he said. For the first time, he sounded upset.

  “Where’d he put you after he killed you?” I asked Hazel.

  “Just over there.” One arm rose, pointed toward a thick stand of shore pine to the right of the parking lot. I turned my head to look. Short squat trees hunched shoulder to shoulder in the night, their tops cropped and blown back by the constant sea wind. “I was still alive when he took me there. There’s a little clear place where one of the trees died. He did things to me there. Even after I was gone.”

  “Hazel?” said stalker guy.

  “How many have you killed?” I asked, then realized it was the wrong question in almost any social situation.

  “Seven,” Roger told me.

  Huh. He could walk through live people and pick up that much detail? I’d seen him walk through people before, but I just assumed it was an accident. I never realized—though heck, I did something similar myself with dead people.