The miraculous water of France, right up there with Perrier and Vichy.
Then it struck him hard, like a punch in his gut.
The miracle of Lourdes. The mother of God. The miracle...
“Dead doves and holy water, weird huh? I want to see the Madonna.” The boy ran to the dark room at the end of the corridor.
Stony followed. He stepped into a room lit entirely in deep purple. The boy stood before a glass case.
No, Stony thought, it’s a coffin.
A small, shriveled mummy lay beneath the thick glass. THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS—TOUCH HER FOR GOOD LUCK! was written on the placard set atop the coffin display.
Her skin had tightened like papier-mâché around the small skull. The only modesty allowed her was a long blue cloth that was loosely draped across her bones, and then rested like a pillow behind her head.
In her arms, what might have been a mummified baby.
“This is ghoulish,” Stony said. Then he laughed, clapping his hands together. “I can’t believe how sick this is. This is some little old lady and some little old monkey they’re trying to make look like the baby Jesus.” He shook his head. “Some people will do anything for eighty cents a customer.”
The boy tapped on the glass. “How can anybody touch her for good luck when she’s in this glass coffin? Ain’t this against the law?”
“You’d think.”
“A dead woman all wrapped up like that,” the boy said. “And a baby. Cool.”
Stony Crawford glanced at the Madonna of the Highways, and tried to shake the image out of his mind—the image forming from the jigsaw pieces of the past.
Nora’s voice in his head whispered, “It’s just something you see. It’s not real. They’re just pictures like movies or TV. Don’t start fearing the dark, Stony, not now, now when you got so much light in you.”
But behind his eyes, he saw the statue of another Madonna. He saw the crushed flower in her hand.
* * *
3
* * *
THE MADONNA OF THE HIGHWAYS! SEE HER! TOUCH HER! FEEL THE MIRACLE OF HER EXISTENCE! WHO IS SHE? WHERE DID SHE COME FROM? HOW CAN SHE CURE THE SICK? HOW CAN SHE MAKE THE BLIND SEE? HOW CAN SHE MAKE LEPERS CLEAN? YOU MISSED THE TURN OFF—TAKE THE AMHERST EXIT AND GO BACK ON THE SERVICE ROAD NINE MILES. FREE LITER OF COKE WITH EVERY FILL-UP.
Stony glanced away from the last sign advertising the Madonna of the Highways. The road ahead was all that mattered. The road and the descending gloom.
“What’s in the glove compartment?” the boy asked.
“Nothing.”
“Why you lock it then?”
“You try to get into it?” Stony asked.
The boy was silent for a moment.
The boy looked at Stony’s reflection in the glass. “Who are you anyway? Besides your name and stuff.”
It was time. The boy was not going to fight him. The boy was not going to try to run back to the others.
He told the boy, “Look at my face.”
“Seen it,” the boy said, but he turned around anyway. A slight recognition seemed to come across the boy’s eyes, like the light of a distant fire. The boy walked over to him and touched his chin. The boy’s fingers were cool.
“Are you my father?” the boy asked.
Stony Crawford’s eyes were dry, and his throat seemed to go parched at that moment.
“Where are you taking me?” the boy asked, and then asked it again when they were back in the Chevy
“North,” Stony Crawford said.
“What’s there?”
Stony said nothing. He felt better for having let the boy find out for himself these things, he felt that somehow all this was a sign—as if the universe were not the malevolent force he’d believed it to be.
Stony finally told him when they got onto the New Jersey turnpike, and it was nearly dawn again.
“A town called Stonehaven, up on the coast almost to Rhode Island.”
The boy cried out, briefly, as if something had shocked him.
“You okay?”
“It’s the pictures on me. They’re moving. It means something bad is gonna happen.” But the boy said this as if this were nothing out of the ordinary.
“Why did they torture you?” Stony asked, keeping his eyes on the road.
“They said it was for my own good. That I needed to let something out. It itches when the pictures wriggle. Like snakes or something.”
“It hurt bad?”
“No.”
“You hate me?”
“No.”
“I hate me,” Stony said. “For what I did. For what I had to do.”
“Whatever,” the boy said. “Tell me about this place we’re going.”
“Not yet,” Stony said. “We’ll be there soon enough.”
“Tell me,” the boy in the backseat said, and again Stony felt that something was changing—the boy’s voice was deepening, and the turnpike ahead seemed less a road than a river full of trawlers where there should’ve been trucks.
“It’s almost dawn,” Stony said. “I’ll tell you at dawn.”
“Now,” the boy said.
“All right, all right,” Stony said. “I wasn’t much older than you, back then, maybe sixteen—no, almost sixteen, but just fifteen. It was probably the happiest time of my life.”
“Yes,” the boy said from the backseat, his voice so startlingly adult that Stony felt a slight shiver as if someone had traced ice down his back. “I’ll tell you about what you saw back then, Stony, I’ll tell you everything that happened in that place. Because I know the secret, Stony, I know that secret. Sometimes it’s good to take off the mask, Stony. Sometimes telling all is the right thing. Want me to whisper it to you?”
Stony kept his eyes front—an eighteen-wheeler was trying to cut him off from the fast lane, and the bright headlights in the rearview mirror were blinding in the dark purple predawn dusk. He felt the boy’s breath on his neck.
“Here’s the secret of your past, Stony,” the boy said, only it was not the boy, not his voice, not the Southern cracker accent, not the uncertain pitch of a twelve-year-old, but the voice was much older, the voice of an October day, sweet with late sap, the yellow jackets buzzing around it, the smell of burning leaves in the air, of time itself, turned back years to that moment when he went from child to man. The voice seemed to be of a woman’s timbre, and he remembered, with a shock, as if he’d forgotten the old woman, working at her loom, or sitting by the potbelly stove, sewing up trousers—it was her voice.
It was Nora. Only her voice was no longer in his head—
At least I don’t think it’s in my head. I think I’m not going mad. I think I’m still sane, hanging on to that last shred of clarity before the wrecking ball inside me smashes it all to hell. Watching the kid form the words with his lips but with her voice—
Nora, is that really you? Inside him? Coming up from his throat like a bird escaping its cage?
Then, the boy whispered the secret of all that had ever happened to Stony Crawford.
And you want to know what he whispered?
He whispered,
“Once upon a time, long ago, there was a village by the sea...
* * *
“The mystery of our birth is the mystery of those who brought us into the world...”
—Montague Thomas, Jr., The Seven Seals of Mankind, 1884
Chapter Three
I AM BORN
* * *
1
* * *
...And in the village, something remarkable happened, at least once that anyone knows of, but it may have happened a few times. Maybe never—you can never tell from legends whether there’s much truth to them or whether they’re just lies told by storytellers of a suspicious nature. There are many tales from the past, and many legends of Stonehaven. The one that began years ago and ended with the hand of God destroying the town—so say those who lived at its periphery and saw the squall, heard the wind, felt th
e power—began even before the beginning of Stony Crawford. The village of Stonehaven was founded in 1649. Imagine the coastline then, with its ragged uninterrupted line of primeval woods, rocky slopes, the touch of the rich sea, and the scattering of newly settled villages above and beneath what was then known by an unpronounceable Pequot word that meant, “Walk Alone.” This was the year that Charles I lost his head, and John Haynes was appointed governor of Connecticut. Silas Crowninshield was an Indian interpreter and displaced gentry from Sussex, England, who was originally given the acreage that is now the village, as well as ten acres of planting fields off the bogs in what is now Wequetucket. Then, it was considered Old Pequot territory, a haven for Indians and rascals, but Crowninshield carved out a large seaside plantation by 1650. Others followed, exiles from the North, up around the bay in Massachusetts, a few families with gold, servants, and the ambition to create a purer puritan. There was fishing along the coast of what would later be called Connecticut, and the peculiarity of Stonehaven’s geography—as if it were a thumb thrust slightly into a sound between a few barrier islands—made it an ideally inhabited place. The local Pequot Indians were, by and large, friendly, and in fact, none of the natives quarreled with the intruders taking the lands from Wequetucket Woods all the way to the water. The Pequot would not settle that land, although the new owners of it found it quite a successful place to live. In those days, the borough consisted of seven houses surrounding a Common. The various epidemics that broke out along the coastline on long hot summers would decimate the small population of the fledgling village, but children were born every season, and with them, hope. As the years went on, and revolutions were fought, the village grew to nearly two hundred homes. In the 1800s, Spanish and Portuguese fisherman came in, and helped establish an even more thriving fishing trade than had been known before, but most of these families settled outside the borough in nearby Wequetucket, for real estate was hard to come by in the borough even then. An ordinance had been passed the previous century, one that was never challenged, which limited the growth of the borough. Only the summer homes out at Juniper Point were added, and this because the Point was not officially in the borough proper. The famous writer Arland Bishop, a best-selling novelist of the early part of the twentieth century, wrote a short article for Liberty Magazine on Stonehaven’s charm. Bishop owned a house just off the cove, and wanted to attract his New York friends up to the borough with tales of its quaint and peaceful existence. But the residents of the village were none too pleased with his depiction, such as the line about “the local color here is both of New England and almost totally without color.” Or his damning praise of the village’s lazy approach to house maintenance, “The rooftops are in disrepair, the porches crumble, the clapboard warps, yet the houses along Water Street are like its people. Sturdy, long-lasting, ill-tempered.”
Stony Crawford’s great-great-great-great-grandfather ran the Custom House near the heart of town, and many is the time his grandfather, when alive, would tell Stony of the old piggery, or the great fire out at Land’s End, or the blizzard of ‘32 that just about wiped Stonehaven out, or the time the cove froze over with swans still stuck in it, and how his grandfather and four other young men had to go out with guns and put the birds out of their misery. “How we wept,” his grandfather would tell him, “for their plumage was beautiful, and we hated destroying any kind of beauty. But they were suffering and there was naught else to do.”
“Did they have to die?” Stony, age four had asked, sitting on his grandfather’s lap, looking up at the old man, hunched over, the twin smells of whiskey and cigars emanating from his yellowing skin and silver hair. Stony liked to reach up and touch the silver hair, and watching the laughing eyes.
His grandfather touched the top of his head. “All of us die, Stony. I’ll die someday, too.”
“I’ll never die,” Stony said, and was determined to mean it.
When his grandfather died, Stony Crawford’s world changed, but there were things that changed the world of Stonehaven before he had even been a glimmer in his father’s eye.
* * *
2
* * *
Years before Stony came to be, in a distant country, a man of forty-two stood outside what appeared to be a cave, but on closer inspection was something of a cloister. Many nuns had lived much of their adult lives within these dark holes, and their paraphernalia had been abandoned when they had left nearly a hundred years previous.
The man stood outside for a moment, before entering the cavern, with his workers and his feeble light and his absolute knowledge that a great and forgotten treasure lay within these rocks.
He had been sent to see what the workmen had found beneath the rough-hewn chapel at the heart of the cavern. The bones of some creature embedded in an amber-like substance, a hardened resin from forgotten millennia. The superstitious townspeople were calling it “dragon.” Archeologists from distant places assumed it would be the bones of some dinosaur. Word had just leaked out, and the man had arrived from London on the first flight he could book, and then had rented a car from Paris, driving all night until he arrived on what seemed to be a lost and empty village. It had taken him three hours, beginning at dawn, to assemble a work crew, for he knew that if he did not get what he had come for, and quickly, then others would soon descend.
Since he’d heard the reports from one of his search agencies, he had barely slept or eaten anything. His energy seemed stronger, even so. It had begun simply as a report of boys playing inside an old cloister. Finding the cave paintings. Finding the relics.
Hearing about the light of dawn coming from two hundred feet beneath the ground.
The Azriel Light, that’s what it was called in one of the old musty tomes he owned. Crowley? Fairclough was positive that Aleister Crowley had been the one to call it that, the Azriel Light, and the darkness that spread from it. Azriel, Angel of Death. Azriel, Servant of God. Azriel, symbol of the Radiance beyond understanding.
Azriel, demon.
Azriel, Angel of Death and of the Magnificent.
Finding a bit of what lay beneath the flooring that the French sisters had laid down years earlier, perhaps three centuries back. Beneath this, where the rock wall had caved in at one time.
He knew he would find something in this dark stone world. He hoped it would shed light on the studies that had swept him up since he’d been a young man.
But when this man entered the flare-lit cavern, he did not expect to find what he had spent his life seeking. Only its shadow.
His name was Alan Fairclough, and he had once upon a time been a monk, and then an academic, and finally, now retired, a man of some wealth, acquired through inheritance, and much leisure.
He turned to one of the workmen. “I’ve had so little to celebrate these past few years,” he murmured, half to himself. “And now this feels so close. So close.”
“Oui, monsieur,” the workman nodded, only half understanding the language.
In French, Alan Fairclough asked the worker if there was anyplace a man could go in one of the local villages to satisfy certain appetites. He attempted to make it sound as if he were interested in religious matters.
The workman nodded, giving him an address.
That night, Alan Fairclough tied the woman’s wrists as tight as the torn strips of her blouse would go, and leaned over her, whispering, “You cannot even guess, ma chère, how long this night will be for you. But do not be afraid. I will not mate with you. I am saving you for something finer.”
The nun, whose mouth had been sealed shut with putty and tape, closed her eyes and Fairclough was certain she had begun to pray.
This was in southern France, thousands of miles and several years from the small town on the Connecticut coast where a boy would be born one spring morning.
* * *
3
* * *
In the village on the Connecticut coast, in a secret place, there was a room that was always dark, lit sometimes with
candles, but even they did not vanquish the inner night. Several rows of pews, side by side, an aisle running between them. Two small steps up to an altar made of primitively cut stone. The smell was thick, incense and musk. Some wild animal was caged nearby. Some beast from the nearby woods, snarling and snapping.
Upon the altar, a slaughtered lamb, its blood draining into a chalice kept beneath the stone slab.
The little girl, her eyes wide with terror, as her father guided her hand into the place where the animal’s heart still beat. She brought her hand back swiftly, wiping it across her mouth, her small face, flickering in the candlelight, painted dark with blood.
Shadows flickered in the candlelight behind the altar.
The little girl looked above the altar and prayed that it would be over soon. When she opened her mouth to speak, her tongue seemed to give off words other than what she wanted to say, words that no three-year-old could possibly speak, and the languages she used were many.
On the altar, the obscenity began.
This was long ago, before there was light, before there was summer, before the day when Stony Crawford was born.
* * *
4
* * *
When you live in a village with just a few hundred residents, legends of births and deaths tend to take on mythic proportions. When Old Man Randall died, he didn’t just fall down the front steps and go, he keeled over and cried out the name of the Savior three times, and as he lay bleeding, his nurse from over in Mystic saw a flight of starlings take off over head and then vanish into fog. “Starlings carry the soul to heaven, but if a hawk was to get even one of ‘em, than the soul remains earthbound,” she’d tell folks outside the Stonehaven Baptist Church after Sunday service. She fudged on the story, because she had actually seen a hawk take out one of the starlings, and she suspected that Old Man Randall still tried to pull up her skirt when she made the rounds of her patients down at the nursing home in Ledyard. When Tamara Curry’s widowed sister Jerusha gave birth to twins, they weren’t just stillborn, they were exhumed from Jerusha’s forty-six-year-old body and breathed one gasp of Stonehaven air. Then in their angelic wisdom, they got the hell out of this awful world as soon as they could. Jerusha followed several minutes later. Even at a distance, myth bloomed like an April crocus. It was said that when Chad “Mad-Dog” Madigan died in Viet Nam back in the ‘60s, he raised his hands to heaven and called out to his girl Martha Wight at the distance of all those thousands of miles. She sat up in her chair on the front porch, clutched her heart, and heard his dying words which were, “I’m gonna miss those tits of yours, baby.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 4