Once, walking down High Street, near the bank, Johnny Miracle was sitting there on the revolutionary war cannons that had been rolled out on the cobblestones as a relic of old Stonehaven. He shouted the very same scripture at Stony, and it gave him the creeps. “No!” Johnny had shouted, “Don’t run, boy! I wanna talk with you! God wants to talk with you, too!”
Such incidents made up his childhood memories.
And there was his favorite comic book, called The Storm King. The Storm King had once been an ordinary farm boy in Kansas, but by accident had discovered his true abilities. He was a Rainmaker sent down by the inhabitants who lived beneath the frozen seas of Yog Arren, a moon of a distant planet. They were water element people, and the boy had been sent to earth since he was the last living son of the greatest of the Aquamers. All of his other sons had been slaughtered in the wars with the people of the Quillian Desert. But the boy who became Storm King found his powers, and took storms and lightning with him wherever there was injustice, wherever a wrong had been committed, “Wherever Evil Takes a Foothold, the Storm King and His Powers of the Cosmos Shall Find and Destroy It!” So said the advertisement in the back of each magazine. The Storm King had even gone to Hell and made the Devil beg for mercy as the rain came down and put out Hellfire...the Storm King had gone to the ancient garden of Eden, which was now a desert, and he’d brought rain to make it grow...the Storm King had gone to Mississippi and had called the great flooding river up, up, up into the sky so that it would cause no more damage. Storm King had taken the tail of a cyclone and wrapped the water up into it like it was a handkerchief. No one on earth was more powerful than the Storm King, but he had one weakness, what he called his Achilles’ Heel.
He was alien, and a loner. There was no place upon the world he’d been sent which would accept him, for although he was a savior, he also brought fear, and his very touch might mean death...
And one thing alone could destroy him:
Moonfire, the Fire That Burns In Water, In Air, In Earth.
IT IS AN ELEMENTAL FIRE, NEITHER SPIRIT NOR FLAME, IT SEARS AND TRANSFORMS THOSE IT TOUCHES.
ONCE THE STORM KING IS TOUCHED WITH IT, HIS POWERS LESSEN, AND HE BECOMES LIKE ALL MORTAL MEN.
He was an outcast from his own kind, and a creature that had to disguise his inner alien nature with a hooded cloak. The Evil Men and Women of Earth, when they discovered his Achilles’ Heel, would steal Moonfire from a Sacred Vault and use it against him. He would weaken, and they would then capture him. But he usually got away eventually and righted more wrongs. The Moonfire Effect, as it was called, was only temporary.
Someday, the little boy knew, the Storm King would come to Stonehaven, too, and right all the wrongs and vanquish those who caused Evil to exist. The Storm King could use the winds to suck out evil like bad blood from someone, or he could bring rain on a dying land, or he could chase evildoers with lightning bolts.
Stony Crawford had all nine of The Storm King comic books, and knew each practically by heart. He took comfort in all this whenever the bad seasons came on and his father began drinking. Stony had favorite TV shows, and movies that made him roll in the aisle of the theater in Mystic, laughing his head off; he had the world of his books which he read over and over again, especially The Count of Monte Cristo, his favorite. He had his childhood friends, at Copper Ferry high school on the other side of Wequetucket. He had his Special Places, like the rotted-out old tree in the woods that doubled as a fortress, and the dock down by the Cove where he could sit back and watch the swans while he plotted his future escape from Stonehaven. He had his dreams of the future, and of rockets and jet-packs and intergalactic missions—all the things that boys growing up in the last gasp of the twentieth century cherished.
So even in the worst of his young life, there were both hope and comic books.
The boy grew, and when he fell in love, his life seemed to open up with a radiance he had never before known.
Chapter Four
LOVE HURTS
* * *
1
* * *
Remember how it tastes? The first time you really fall in love, and you don’t know then, no matter what happens, that it’s that first taste of love that is always best. You don’t know that truth until you’re older and you accept what life offers, then you forget. You forget that once, when you were young, you burned with love.
Burned.
It’s almost like that first cigarette you tried, a Camel unfiltered, and it burned inside your throat just like love burned inside your heart.
* * *
2
* * *
“You know what’s cool about being fifteen?” his buddy Jack Ridley from Copper Ferry High asked. Jack’s breath an eternal cheeseburger-with-onions, his face peppered with zits, his good looks still shining through undefeated by adolescent ravage. Jack had grown up down the block from Stony, and only recently, when his folks divorced, had he moved out of the village halfway down the road to Mystic. Still, Jack was a villager, and sometimes Stony felt as if they were more brothers than Stony’s brother Van would ever be to him. But they were hardly alike. Jack was cool, unlike Stony. Jack had always been cool; it was s a halo around him, ever since third grade. He even smoked Kool cigarettes, and flashed the pack at Stony.
“What?” Stony said, but didn’t give a damn because he was wondering when he was going to see that pretty girl again, the one who passed him the note in third period that read, You’re cute. You want to call me? That pretty girl who just a few years ago had braces and no make-up and hair pulled back and worn in a braid so she looked dorky, only now she looked like the Babe of the Universe as far as he was concerned with her slightly crooked smile, those red lips, the Spanish eyes. How could a guy resist?
“Here’s what’s so great about being fifteen: Abso-fuckin’-lutely nothin’,” Jack said, laughing. “Jesus, I just want to be away from all this...this bullshit!” He withdrew a cigarette from the pack, as if he didn’t care if any of the teachers caught him on the last day of classes. He offered one to Stony, but Stony patted the pack of Camels in his breast pocket. They’d both begun smoking just because it was something they knew they weren’t supposed to be doing. “Hey, what you doin’ this summer? I gotta work for my mom in her office. New London here I come. Pisses me off.”
“Just gonna do the boring stuff.”
“You gonna get some?”
“Please,” Stony laughed, punching him in the shoulder. “I will die a virgin. My dick’s gonna fall off before I’m sixteen from lack of use.”
“Sure it will the way you beat it five times a day, ya wanker.” Jack grabbed the last of his books from his locker. He held each one up as if weighing their sins. Biology was the heaviest. Jack had drawn a picture of Mickey Mouse on the back of it. “Man, I just want to burn these. Burn fuckin’ bio, fuckin’ geometry, fuckin’ Spanish. Wanna do a bonfire in my backyard? Bring your own lighter fluid.”
“Look at her,” Stony said, nodding as the Girl of His Every Thought passed by. “Huh?” he added, as if waking from a dream.
Jack nudged him. “I saw the way that Spanish babe winked at you. Lourdes Maria. She’s sweet. She’s fine. Fine as fine can be. But watch out—I hear she’s got a ton of brothers all of whom want to make sure she doesn’t date till she’s forty. And you know those Catholic girls, it’s the wedding ring or it’s—” Jack kept talking but his voice became indistinct, and then Jack stepped off the edge of the world—at least as far as Stony was concerned, because there she was again. Looking at him. Moving in front of him so he could get another glimpse. As if from some great distance, he heard Jack’s words, “She looks mighty fertile, Stony, she looks like she wants you too, kiddo, those breasts, those hips, those beautiful lips, her eyes—”
She was a goddess—
Like a dream passing by.
Lourdes.
Her soul was in her eyes; her depths were there, her mystery. Her body was small and perfect, her breasts cuppe
d gently within her thin sweater, her hair sparkling with black diamonds, her grin infectious, her warmth like the sun.
She glanced back at him for a second, her dark hair falling across half her face. He just wanted to touch her hair and maybe talk to her. He wanted to be near her so badly he could taste his own frustration.
Time stopped. He felt it. His heartbeat was the only sound, and all the other kids, they froze, even the air froze with motes of dust hanging...
All that moved were her eyes, looking into him, opening him up, freeing him.
Then, time returned, noise returned, all the students scrambled to clear out their lockers, and Lourdes was halfway down the corridor.
Stony raced after her, practically knocking down Ariel Seidman and Ellen Tripp (“Sorry, Ariel, sorry Ellen, I didn’t—”), then he tripped over his Nikes and his big floppy blue shirt came half-untucked as he caught up to Lourdes and asked her out, and then summer began, summer and the end of all things of childhood for him.
The beginning of manhood.
When love hits a guy whose hormones are already haywire, it hits hard and fast, and love can be the most enthralling of demons.
* * *
3
* * *
A flash from early June—
Sitting on the big rock by the pond in the woods, his hand up her blouse, his lips on hers, the pounding of sweet love in his head as he whispers too soon, “God, I love you baby I love you more than—”
“Hush—” she stops up his mouth with her kisses. Then, laughing, she pulled away. Buttoning up her blouse, shrugging his hands away. “Give up those damn cigarettes, Stony, it’s like licking an ashtray!”
He nods, and picks up the rest of the pack and its cellophane wrapper and flings them out across the pond.
“That’s littering,” she says, sternly.
“I can’t win,” he grins, and for her (anything for her!) he jogs along the narrow path to the far side of the pond to pick up his trash. When he turns to look at her again she shouted, “You are nuts!”
A flash from late June—
Laughing, both of them, him wearing his big goofy swimming trunks, and her in her bikini that shows too much and all the other guys on the slim strip of beach out at Land’s End are staring at her. Running through the water, the spray bursting around their calves. He splashes water at her, and she shrieks, and then chases him deeper into the icy water while some little girl floats by on a rubber raft shouting that there might be sharks in the sea.
A flash from late July—
Drinking ice-cold beer stolen from his fridge, just enough to get a buzz, not enough to do damage, and they’re out on the Cove in a little boat also stolen from a neighbor’s dock. He says to her, “I never thought I’d feel like this about someone.” She repeats it back to him. He kisses her big toe and tells her that she has got to have the most beautiful feet he has ever seen, with such perfect toes. She calls him a pervert, and he laughs, “Yeah, I’m so perverted I think I love you.”
And then it all begins.
* * *
4
* * *
Dear Stony,
I have heard that everyone has one GREAT LOVE in their life. ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I didn’t know till I met you that I would have one. I thought I’d always feel alone and maybe get married and have kids someday but never really know REAL LOVE. I look at my mother and I think, THAT’S GOING TO BE ME IN TWENTY YEARS. Married with kids, cleaning, keeping my mouth shut, wishing something better for my kids. But when I saw you the first time, last spring, I knew just by looking in your eyes. I mean, I’d seen you before, you know that. But I had never really SEEN you. Did you know it too? It was like there was a chalk outline, or maybe a halo around you. When I looked in your eyes it was like looking into an ocean that was there just for the two of us. I knew that you were the one. I knew that there would be no others. You are my ONE GREAT SECRET LOVE. I don’t know if we will always be like this, but I know that I will never ever forget you. NEVER. I want it always to be like it is between us right now. ALWAYS. No matter what happens. And things do happen. I know that. I know that sometimes love is not enough of a miracle to cure everything. I just wanted you to know. What we did together is what I wanted. It was PERFECT AND RIGHT.
LOVE
LOURDES
p.s.
I don’t love your smoking those nasty things. Kick that habit. I mean it.
* * *
5
* * *
“Your hair,” she says.
“Your smile,” he says
“Your muscles,” she laughs.
“Your legs,” he grins. “Whoa, baby, those legs!”
“Your sweetness,” she whispers.
“You,” he murmurs. “I love you best about you.”
Fifteen! And it’s your first time. You know what that means, you know how forbidden and natural and mind-blowing it is, you remember the half-can of beer that gave you courage, and the way your first love looked at you.
Beneath a tree thick with summer green, so thick it has milk, not leaves, milk in the tree, mother’s milk sap running down its humid bark. The heat of August on your back, the crawling humidity of night, the heat of August inside your own body as it moves like liquid. Fifteen! You lie beneath the spreading tree with your girl, not just your best girl, your only girl, and it’s after midnight, and this is the experience that will blow your mind, the moment that takes both of you and binds you to each other and throws away convention and bursts your boy and girl consciousness until your branches grow heavy with the green of man and woman. You want it, not just the sensation, but to get out of your skins, to change, to be more than what you were a few moments before. You notice how hairy you are, and how smooth and fresh her skin feels, and you let that part of you, that delicious animal part, take over and you let nature command. You close your eyes because you want to be somewhere other than in the sensation you feel, you want to be inside and outside at the same time, you want to be cosmic and you want to be small, and afterwards, as the two of you lie wrapped in each other’s arms, you shrink and the tree seems larger above you, its hungry leaves flowing all around you. Through its branches, you see the world now, filtered through the veins and stems and twigs. Your hands feel scored like the leaves, like the hands of an old man. It has taken something from you, this summer night, this act of passion.
Then, you begin to look at her differently. She is already not who you thought she was. Maybe it’s love.
Maybe it’s fear that there’s a dream you’ve entered into now, a dream from which you will one day awaken.
But now, you’re fifteen.
After awhile, you say, brushing off the dirt, buttoning your shirt while she discreetly dresses, “It’s almost morning. We better go home.”
“Yeah,” she says.
You say, “Tomorrow, we’ll meet at Nora’s. Okay?”
“Sure,” she says, and you watch as she picks bits of a leaf, crumbled up like ash, in her trammeled hair. You reach up and touch the edge of her face. You both have gone over into the land of secrets.
Fifteen, Stony, fifteen, and already you wish you’d waited because there’s a closeness and a distance that comes with the secrets. There’s someone else living inside you now, and what is left of you is only the cocoon that won’t yet shed itself.
* * *
6
* * *
Dear Lourdes,
I love you like no guy has ever loved a girl before. You are the light of my world. You got my heart in your hands and I want you to have everything really good there is. I wish I had lots and lots of money to shower you with lots of gifts—like a Corvette or something! Or a trip somewhere just the two of us! It’s going to be u + me till the end of time. I never felt this way before either. Want to go see a movie this weekend down in Mystic? And also I want you to meet my friend Nora. She’s an old lady but she’s really cool.
STONY, YOUR STORM KING!
Within th
is note, a crushed purple iris blossom
* * *
7
* * *
You can’t know Stony Crawford at fifteen without knowing the old blind woman who lived in the tarpaper shack in the woods. He met her when he was a little boy, not long after his grandfather had died. Certain times of the year his father and mother fought more than usual, and those times Stony found it best just to make himself invisible by being wherever other people were not. She’d been outside doing her wash, deep in the old woods. He thought she might be an evil ogre, but she convinced him with the smell of a blackberry pie cooling on her windowsill that she was actually just a human being. When they got acquainted, she told him how she’d been there at his birth. He had not believed her, but found that he wanted to believe her despite the fact that people lied all the time. He knew they did, even in grade school. His father lied, too. He’d seen his father down at the Boatwright Pub drinking when he was supposed to be out on his trawler. He’d seen his mother lie, too, when she put him to bed at night and told him his father hadn’t caused the bruise on her face.
But this woman, in the woods, she told him what sounded like the truth.
She was named Nora Chance. People said she had been blinded when she was making soap with her mother, back when soap was made of lye and suet and the lye had splashed up. She had rocked it, and it had sprayed across her forehead. Before she could even scream from the pain, it had gotten in her eyes. But she never told this story herself. When asked, she would avoid the question and instead go into one of her spins. It was what she called them—her spins, her stories, she’d sit down at her loom, blind and yattering away as she tossed the boat through the threads, making one of the blankets or rugs that could be sold down at Mystic. She did nothing the modern way. She would not have electricity, she would not have a telephone, and she would not have anything but the fresh running water and modern toilet, which according to her, were the only true conveniences of the past one hundred years. She had a clothesline of candles, made the old way with rolls of beeswax, hanging beneath the eaves of her low roof. (“Who the hell buys all these candles?” he’d asked once when he was fourteen and feeling bold, and she had scolded him for his language but had not answered his question. Then, once she told him that she didn’t care if the candles were bought or not, she made them out of devotion. “Candles bring light to darkness,” she said.) She was three-quarters Indian and one quarter African-American, a smart and nimble woman who had survived four husbands over sixty years. She had spent forty of those years weaving and taking in laundry, which she washed behind her home in a great black pot—thus she had been called the Witch, for she had spent many an afternoon stirring the boiling-over pot with a great long stick, singing her songs. Spied by malicious children in the crackling woods, she was a wraith seen through the bog mist, calling to her demons beside the crumbling cemetery of the town’s outcasts of yore. But Stony had known her since the days she’d saved his pet cat from drowning in the bog, and had brought the two of them in—boy and cat—to dry and warm themselves by her stove while she took out her knitting and wove the first story he’d ever heard another human being weave. It was like magic.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 6