“Well, I am Alan Fairclough, and I am buying the Lewis place out on the island. I wanted to meet your father if I may.”
“Mr. Spencer Lewis?” she asked, eyeing him almost suspiciously.
“Yes, the very same.”
“He was a very tedious man,” the girl said. He chuckled at her words. “And just what is so funny?” she asked imperiously.
“Not a thing,” Fairclough said. “You’re charming.”
She gave him a slight pout, and then turned to call out to her father. “Daddy, there’s a Mr. Faircough here—”
“Clough, Fair-Clough,” Alan said, emphasizing the sound.
Diana grinned impishly. “Yes, I know. I was playing with it. I prefer Faircough.” As Alan Fairclough stood there, listening for the sounds of Darius Crown’s footsteps, the little girl turned back to him, staring up at him soulfully with her nearly transparent blue eyes. “Last night I dreamed you’d come here, Mr. Faircough. I dreamed that I was standing up in my bedroom and I saw you driving up here in your black car. Only it was a nightmare. Someone else got out of the car.”
“Oh?” he asked, wondering if she had ever felt much pain in her life yet, or if the pleasure of it was to come as she reached adolescence. “And who was it who was driving my car?”
“The Devil,” she said. “But he looked like you. His eyes were like yours.”
“I’ll tell you,” Fairclough chuckled. “He’s a distant relative, from my mother’s side. No wonder you saw a resemblance.”
* * *
9
* * *
That had been years ago, and Alan still felt the chill of that first meeting with Crown and his family. The slow beginnings of trust that grew between them. Alan bought the Lewis place and fixed it up and found himself living more and more on the island, spending time visiting the Crowns in the summer and at their midwinter holiday.
He showed them the image that had been burned into the stone from the French cave, and they in turn showed him their secret, a treasure more valuable than all the riches in Christendom.
And he taught them the words of bondage, and what language their treasure understood.
Only Fairclough’s appetite as well as his many financial dealings drew him back to cities, to London, Rome, New York, to the places of teeming masses where a half dozen or more bruised youths or violated maidens would not cause more than a raised eyebrow...where he could practice his form of spiritual growth in relative anonymity...
But the Shields, and the Crowns, always called for him in this little borough of darkness.
What he helped them do.
The atrocity, the glorious atrocity, the use and misuse of power beyond the sphere of human endeavor—he was part of something greater than anything any man had ever been part of.
If it took and held, as it seemed to be doing, the world would transform and slough off its old tired skin.
Alan Fairclough would shepherd the new age into being.
* * *
10
* * *
FROM ALAN FAIRCLOUGH’S DIARY, SEVENTEEN YEARS PREVIOUS
I felt only impatience as Crown led me into his study. I wanted to see. I wanted to experience. But he told me that he had matters to discuss with me first. The usual talk, the suspicious glances. My assumption is that Crown believes the bullshit he’s spouting, his falling back on Judeo-Christian mythos, his reliance on words like Satan and Fiend, as if this could possibly describe what his treasure held. He is perhaps a madman, and his immense wealth has separated him from his fellow men. He believes his own hogwash. He has even created a chapel for it. He says that it remains trapped by the symbols of religion, but he must be mistaken.
If it is trapped, it is for some other purpose. For nothing in the world could hold this creature if it needed to escape this house.
Finally, after showing me the ancient drawings of Hell and Heaven and the conjuring of demons and all the arcane foolishness that Crown in his megalomania believes, he took me into the chapel.
I can only describe the emotion that held me in its thrall as I entered that sanctuary. Fear? No.
Pure terror. I felt as if I were a child again, a little boy walking into some great and mysterious cathedral.
Crown has the accoutrements of his belief strung around what once must have been a quaint family chapel.
But I barely noticed the perverse nature of the place.
Instead, there it was. Caged and held like some sideshow freak.
It spoke the ancient language known only to those most Holy Sisters, and who knows before them.
The celestial language of demons and gods and all those who are the fire at the heart of the cave and are not the shadows dancing about it.
Its golden eyes opened and watched me as I stepped nearer. My bowels released involuntarily, and I felt a shudder of electric energy shoot up my spine. My nose began bleeding, but I didn’t bother to wipe at it with a handkerchief.
I felt suspended.
For a moment, I felt disembodied and could not be sure that my feet touched the ground or that I was even breathing.
All sound ceased.
Should I write here of the great sorrow in those eyes? Of the weariness, and yes, even fear, but most of all, the sorrow?
And in that sorrow something more terrifying than this vision of a creature from either nightmare or fantasy:
It began speaking with my dead father’s voice.
What was it, what did it show me, what did it say?
All this it destroyed within my memory, and all I’m left with is the image burned indelibly in my mind after this first encounter.
* * *
11
* * *
The picture that he could not remove from his brain, no matter through how many sleepless nights, nor during those nameless hours before the first sunlight when all the world seemed in the same state of sublime panic that he felt within, that picture conjured itself in the blackness whenever he shut his eyes.
A man screaming from a great oak tree, red sparrows pecking at his palms, feet and eyes. Upon his head, a crown of fire.
It was not until much later, replaying this image in his head like a dreaded movie, that Alan Fairclough recognized that the man on the tree was himself.
Chapter Eight
IN THE SUMMER HOUSE
* * *
“Can’t you stop it?” the young woman gasped, as the servants held her down on the bed. She was trembling, her body spasming, and sweat pouring off of her. Her back arched, and her blouse was shredded where she’d clawed at herself before they got to her. “Can’t you stop it?” she began shouting, her voice soon going hoarse. “Somebody stop it!”
Her father stood over her, wiping a sheen of perspiration from his brow with a handkerchief. “Please, Diana, it will pass. You must let it pass.”
“It’s burning me,” she cried, her arms breaking free of those who held her down. Tears streamed down her cheeks. Her skin flashed with an ashen glow. “Daddy, it’s burning me! Get it out of me! Why can’t you get it out of me?”
Her father stepped forward with his handkerchief and pressed it against her lips. Her eyes went wide with terror as she looked up at his calm face.
“You must fight it. Keep it in. You have to.”
“It wants out!” she screamed.
Then, he stuffed the handkerchief into her mouth, gagging her.
Chapter Nine
NIGHTMARE
* * *
Stony awoke in a sheet-soaked fever, the sweat so filmy and thick it was like pond scum. Someone was whispering a phrase over and over, and he realized with a start that it came from his own lips. He felt a tickling around his nose, and when he felt it, he also felt the blood that dripped from his nostril to his lips. Grabbing a Kleenex from the box on the windowsill, he wiped at it. Shit. He sat up in bed, the end of the dream, just a hypnogogic trace, left hanging over him like a spider web:
A memory of being four-years-old, and hav
ing cut himself accidentally with his brother’s hunting knife while he was playing with it. But the blood didn’t terrify him, what terrified him was he thought he saw a small fire burst from his skin, from his blood, a momentary flash. Then it was gone.
He sat up the rest of the night, unable to sleep. He looked out over the shingled rooftops of the neighboring houses, out beyond them to the sea, to its vast darkness. The light of the moon cut across it, like yellow lightning, and the word that he uttered seemed at first alien to him. It was the word he’d heard when he was half in the dream, the word that he’d said on waking. He said it three times like an incantation, as if it would bring comfort to his thoughts. “Moonfire,” he whispered, “moonfire, moonfire.” Something in the word itself terrified him, as if it were something more than a phrase from a favorite comic book. As if it insinuated something to him, something about the world around him that lay just beneath its surface. Moonfire fuels the world. The thing that destroys the Storm King is the very thing that flows in the veins of all creation.
At fifteen, he felt again like a very small boy, not like the man he knew he was becoming. What was a man anyway? A walking erection? A fur-covered cave man? His father? Sometimes Stony wondered what the hell it meant to grow up and be a man when he still felt like a little kid on the inside half the time.
He got out of bed, pulled on his briefs and went to use the bathroom. In the bathroom mirror, he looked at the teenager staring back and wondered why the hell the little kid from long ago hadn’t vanished from his features. One final wipe at the last of the blood beneath his nose.
Moonfire, he thought. Christ, all this stress is getting to you. Lourdes is pregnant, your school grades are dropping, your parents are assholes, and you’re having nightmares like there’s no tomorrow.
The words of his English teacher came back to him, “These are the best years of your life.”
If these are the best years, Stony thought shaking his too long hair in the mirror, looking at the last bits of Kleenex still stuck underneath his nose, what the hell is the rest of it gonna be like?
As if a threat were contained within the words, but he could not decode what that threat might be.
In the back of his closet, he found the old half-empty pack of Camels that he hadn’t touched for over twelve weeks. He had promised Lourdes he would never touch them again, but this was different. He wasn’t going to get through this night without some nasty little crutch.
He lit one, and inhaled deep. It was good. It burned in his throat. The nicotine kicked in, and he coughed. Then, he put the damned thing out. Even a cigarette wouldn’t do it for him. His head pounded, and he felt ancient.
He watched the moon until the first light of day came up.
PART TWO
MOONFIRE
* * *
“As the Outcast held up the metal sphere, a curious light came from within. ‘Weep, O Storm King! I hold the mastery of the cosmos! Behold, THE RADIANCE!’”
From THE STORM KING: CHAMPIONS OF DARKNESS, Vol. 6
Chapter Ten
INITIATIONS INTO THE MYSTERIES
* * *
1
* * *
All human tragedies are tragedies of innocence waking. Stony spent most of September brooding, when he wasn’t delivering papers and groceries and going to school. He felt as if he were living underwater at the public school over in Copper Ferry, a good five miles out of town. He’d sit in class, nod his head during Geometry, doodle during American History, watch his lab partner do all the chemistry assignments and then just copy from his notes, and pretty much sleepwalk from one end of the long corridor to the other. Half the time in gym class, while he was running cross-country, his mind was elsewhere, off in a private zone of worries and musings about raising a kid, or aborting a kid, or just ignoring the whole damn thing. When the bells rang between classes, he no longer saw the individual students, he saw the sea, the melting tide of faces, intoxicated with secrets or half asleep and moving zombie-like from English to Geometry to Spanish—through the dingy, dirty halls, their giddy excitement at some scandal of adolescence, their surliness, their many faces making one face. Even his old best friend Jack Ridley was lost in the crowd, and he shunned talking too much to anyone. And there, among all of them, Lourdes Maria. Her face, the first time he’d seen her, the tan of her Spanish and Portuguese forebears, the hair dark as night, and her lips sweet. He was still wanting her. Her yellow sweater, and the small gold cross on the slender chain around her neck...But now, in the sea of others, between classes, he turned away from her, from the one he thought he had loved but now knew he had destroyed. Stony felt caught between a dream and a reality too complicated to handle.
Lourdes finally grabbed his arm one day, and he felt like he might wake up.
“We need to talk,” she said. He could barely look at her. He resisted, and instead looked at her hand as she grasped him. Her fingers, with their red nails, the two rings on her finger—the one her grandmother had given her, the one that she had bought for twenty dollars at a flea market in Mystic...the olive cast to her hand...
Stony looked at her for only a second, but as soon as he saw her eyes, those dark stones brilliant with an inner sun, and the curve of her lips, bright red lipstick glossing them, he could not look away again.
“We do?” he said, feigning good humor. He still loved her. He felt that in his heart. He knew he loved her. But he also knew that her having a baby meant that what he wanted his life to be, the Dream of what he wanted his life to be, was not going to happen. What was going to happen: he would work at the cannery or on the lobster boats like his dad, and he’d stink of fish and come home to some cramped apartment or worse, a trailer out by Route 63—the trailer park nicknamed The Lightning Rod of God because of the way it always got destroyed during the frequent summer hurricanes—Lourdes would be prematurely old by twenty, there’d be another baby, he’d be in a prison of his own making.
Still, he loved her, and he wanted to try to find a better Dream for the two of them. He followed her outside, and they sat along the concrete steps overlooking the blacktop where the ninth graders were doing calisthenics.
Lourdes pressed her hand in his. “You’re afraid of all this, aren’t you?”
He shrugged. “I know I love you. I know that.”
She leaned against him, kissing him on the cheek. “Good. I love you, too.”
Silence. She let go of his hand.
“You haven’t come over much in the past few days,” she said.
Another shrug. “I had a lot to get done.”
He could practically feel her trembling, even though they were not touching.
“I found out something today,” she said.
“What’s that?” he asked.
“I was wrong.”
“Huh?”
“I was just late. That’s all.”
“You mean...”
“Yeah. It’s not what we thought.” Then, she amended this. “What I thought.”
For the first time in a week, he looked in her eyes again. He felt like he’d been a jerk. He was happy, but something inside tugged him downward. He’d shown his true colors. Yellow. Cowardly. Chickenshit. She shaded her eyes with her hand—from the sun, not from his stare. He wished she’d smile. He wanted her to smile and throw her arms around him.
“I guess you’re thrilled, huh?” she said.
“No,” he shook his head, throwing his arm around her. “I guess I was just scared. I mean...I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“Me neither,” Lourdes said. “My father would’ve killed me. Thank God, huh?” He thought her eyes were getting watery, and knew it had been a terrible experience for both of them. Dumbass! Stupid! Two idiotic kids getting in trouble. Thank God she wasn’t pregnant!
“Yeah,” Stony said, and tossing his head back he stared up at the cloudless blue sky. “Thank you, God!” Then he kissed her. “Do you think I was acting like a jerk?”
Lour
des shrugged. “A little. I guess I would’ve too. But it’s different when you think it’s inside you. It must be hard to understand if it’s not inside you.”
At that moment, Stony felt alive again. Engaged in life, where he had disengaged two weeks previous, when she’d first told him. “I really do love you. I was just trying to figure out how we were going to handle...all this shit...”
“Let’s not talk about it again,” she whispered. “I need to get back to English. See you on Friday?”
Stony nodded. As she got up, he grabbed her hand again. Squeezing it. Something seemed cold when he touched her.
He looked up at her face. “Are you telling the truth?”
She turned away and walked back into the building.
* * *
2
* * *
Van Crawford, hanging out on the steps of the Package Store on Water Street in Stonehaven, tossed back a Pabst Blue Ribbon, neatly wrapped in a small brown bag. His buddies Del and Rich the Roach took turns watching for Officer Dennehy, and then swiped the can of beer and passed it back and forth.
“I need some pussy, bad,” Del said, wiping the sweat off his neck, watching one of the local girls go by in her daddy’s Volkswagen. “It’s been two weeks.”
“Bullshit,” Van laughed, making another grab for the can of beer. It was empty, so he tossed it in the trash and reached into the green backpack resting on the pavement. “Like you ever get any.” Then, as he popped up the tab on the can, he saw her, walking out of the Stonehaven Country Store, a basket in her arms, her dress all of summer and sheer audacity—for he could see through it to her creamy thighs, and her breasts, too, like twin scoops of ice cream.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 10