Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense

by Douglas Clegg

  Stony thought a moment. “Not really.”

  “That’s right. Scarecrows go way back. An old word, some folks say, goes way back: sacré croix or maybe croix sacrée, something like that. I get it confused sometimes. Means sacred cross, from what I can tell. They were statues of Jesus up in the middle of the fields. They protected the crops, at least once upon a time. But the scarecrow’s no Jesus. The scarecrow’s older. He’s thousands of years old. He’s the King that’s been killed and his blood makes things grow. He’s the Magic One. He’s the Harvest Lord. The Halloween Man. You got to understand that everything we know now is as under a layer of dust, centuries of hiding from us. But one day, each one of us sees clearly. I once saw…”

  “You saw?” Stony said, and then regretted it.

  “Ha! Yep, I used to see. I once saw a scarecrow out at the bog, let loose from its cross, looking for its mate.”

  Playing along, Stony asked, “So who’s his mate?”

  “The Corn Maiden,” Nora said, nodding her head as if this were perfectly logical. “You can’t have a King of anything without a bride for him. That’s why I have that.”

  She took up one of the candles, pointing it towards the doorway.

  Stony glanced over at the little cornhusk doll on the threshold.

  “It keeps him away from my place when he comes searching. He won’t cross over a house where the corn doll is.”

  “You’re making this up,” Stony said.

  “Maybe I am,” Nora chuckled, but something in her tone did not feel humorous to him. “And maybe there’s just a bite of truth in it. But when the scarecrow sees the corn doll, he respects her. He must die to be reborn, but she lives and is reborn through her children. She is the giver and taker of life. This is why male and female are separate: strength and recklessness together is a world-beater. But they’re like magnets—they both attract and repel each other. So he won’t ever cross my threshold.”

  “Wait. You said that this Halloween Man was the harvester of flesh. So, did he kill the Reaperman?”

  “Oh,” Nora’s voice dropped to a reverential whisper. “Something much worse than that.”

  * * *

  3

  * * *

  the rest of the story

  * * *

  So after midnight, he comes crawling across the land, the scythe in his mouth. Remember, this was both Imp and the Halloween Man in one body—the Halloween Man used his body to rise from the earth and water. Imp shoulda never been buried in that old bog, outside the cemetery, with no blessing of any kind on his head. So in the night, that most dreadful night of the year, he comes and into the twenty families he crawls up the stairs on all fours, leaving a trail of damp and leaves and leeches. What he did in the night was laid out for all to be seen on the Common in the morning. As the sun rose, people came from their houses, victims of terrible nightmares. And since back then, all the houses of the borough were around the Common, even those who did not leave their houses could see the terrible handiwork of the Halloween Man:

  Strung like pigs, by their legs, twelve of the men and women from town, the most devout, those who in church cried out in tongues to God, those who kissed the foot of the cross daily, those who were most godly and worshipful, their throats slit, their blood dripping down, strung from the two great oak trees, the ground soaked with their blood. And between the trees, a great cross had been erected, and on it, nailed with spikes, Old Reaperman Crowninshield—his eyes and mouth sewn horrible shut, and his nightshirt torn open.

  On his chest, carved the words:

  I came to save you.

  In his one hand, his left hand, tied as if a hook, the scythe that had butchered the villagers. This hand was not nailed to the crossbeam.

  Of course, the white people thought it was Reaperman who had done the killing. They always thought he was crazy, even though he was rich and mighty in the village.

  But we knew. We who had been here since Man had first been on this land. We who had avoided planting on the Magic land, and instead planted near it, but away from it. We who buried our dead not in bogs but in sacred, protected earth—we knew it was the Old One, risen again for his night in the flesh of Imp.

  It was a wicked time.

  It was a great stain of death on Stonehaven, that night and morning.

  And it took one of my own people to go find the body of Imp the next morning and do the work that would seal the Old One into that flesh until it returned to the damp earth and slept again.

  Not in the history books, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen just like I said it did. Or maybe, Stony, it hasn’t happened yet, but will one day. That’s how legends go.

  * * *

  4

  * * *

  “Even if you made it up, it’s a great story,’ Stony said, wiping his dusty hands off on his jeans.

  “I don’t have to make these things up,” Nora said, her voice tinged with a serious tone that made Stony look at her strangely.

  “But I don’t believe in a Halloween Man or in the devil,” Stony stated, slightly embarrassed.

  “You believe in God?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “I guess so.”

  “God’s no guess. Either He is or He ain’t.”

  “Well, I don’t know yet,” Stony said.

  Nora grinned. “Good enough.”

  “Do you believe in the Devil?” he asked, trying to tease her. “The horny-tailed red Devil with the pitchfork in his hand?”

  Nora stood slowly and went over to her front door, opening it. The last of the sunlight was merely a whisper through the tree branches along the bog beyond her property. “The Devil won’t be just one thing, Stony. He’s an army. ‘I am Legion,’ he says. He can be a woman, too. He can even be a summer’s day. But the one thing you can be sure of about the Devil. He’s the reflection of what we want.”

  “I’m not sure I get that,” Stony said. He walked out to stand beside her on the porch. A flock of dark birds flew across the sky, blocking all light for a few seconds.

  “You ever want something so bad you forgot everything else?”

  Stony nodded. “Do you?”

  “Ah,” she sighed, and her sigh was like an ache on the breeze. “To have my sight back. To see you, the young man you are, the boy you were, the man you’ll become. That I would want badly enough to kiss the Devil himself.” Then, she shivered slightly. “Next time you want something that badly, look in the mirror and see who’s gonna be waiting there for you. Could be the Devil, could maybe be the Halloween Man. Halloween’s comin’ up, maybe someone here’s gonna take off his mask and show himself again, who knows?”

  Nora grinned, her eyes seeming to sparkle even with their emptiness. She held her hand out for him.

  Her hand was warm and strong. Her voice softened. “Tell me about your girl. Why didn’t you bring her? You never bring her to see me anymore.”

  “We’ve had some problems,” Stony said.

  “Stony,” Nora said, pulling her hand from him. “You’re hurting me a little with all that squeezing.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t know I was doing it.” He wanted to not talk about Lourdes. He wanted to not think about what he’d narrowly escaped. About what he had wanted more than anything else. “People think I’m nuts to like you so much, you know that?”

  “Oh yeah,” Nora said, her husky voice breaking like a wave on a rock as she laughed. “The weird old blind lady in the woods who won’t get a phone or electricity. I bet they think you’re nuts. I bet they’re gonna start calling you by your Indian name, Crazy-Moon.”

  “Maybe I am,” Stony said. “Yeah, I am Crazy Moon.”

  He stood there with her for several minutes until she told him it was time for her to go to bed.

  * * *

  5

  * * *

  “Do you like to hunt?” Diana asked, riding beside Van on her steed, while he rode the mare. Van was having a hard enough time staying on the horse. He wasn’t much of a rider,
but he was not about to show her any weakness. Not her. She wore a tan riding outfit, her dark boots as shiny as a storm trooper’s. Over her shoulder, a quiver full of arrows, and a small bow.

  Are we gonna play Cowboys and Injuns? He wondered. I’ll be the big bad cowboy coming upon the helpless squaw. She will beg for mercy, and I will give it to her. Give it to her. Over and over. Give give give...

  “Yeah!” he shouted. “I love to hunt. Bagged lots of deer over at Blue Point last year.”

  “What else?” she shouted.

  “What do you mean?”

  “What other kinds of prey?” Diana slowed her horse to a trot, and then finally a walk. She kept perfect form upon the saddle.

  Rich bitch probably’s been riding since she was three. Van watched how her hips undulated as her thighs pressed into the saddle. Mmmmm.

  “Well, shit, I’ve fished. I’ve shot some rabbits,” Van said, but kept watching those thighs. Pressing down and in. Clinging to the horse’s side.

  “Little bunnies, how adorable,” she said, her words dripping with sarcasm. “Brave of you. I come from a long line of hunters.”

  “Girls don’t hunt,” he said.

  “Of course not,” she laughed, riding ahead of him. “Come on, Crawfish!”

  She was a bitch, but he had to follow. They had been fucking so much, he felt drained of any will to resist her. He wanted to be with her, inside her, around her. He hated most of the local girls, but Diana Crown was different. He wanted her to want him. Badly.

  He pressed his heels into his horse’s flanks, and the animal took off after its companion.

  When they came to the edge of the cove, she held her hand out to indicate that he should stop. “Stay in the shadows,” she whispered, as his horse approached hers.

  The cove was full of swans. It looked to Van like a mirror with a bunch of zit pops on it, or the little flecks that hit the bathroom mirror when he flossed once a month. It looked like his mother’s round mirror in fact, the one she kept in the bathroom, the one that made your face large and when Van looked in it, he could see all the pores and zits and invisible whiskers and ugliness on his face.

  “They’re like angels,” Diana said. “Angels on the water.”

  She reached back and drew the bow from her back. It was crudely made, and fairly small. She took an arrow and set it, tightening the bow, her shoulders drawing back.

  “Watch this,” she said, letting an arrow fly.

  Van thought she was magnificent.

  Birds flew up, their white wings spreading as if one great white bird were bursting upwards to heaven.

  As Van watched the arrow go, he saw the girl out on the dock.

  It was that bitch that was going to ruin Stony’s life. That fuckin cunt girl from out of the borough who had got herself knocked up. Probably not even by his brother, but by some immigrant boyfriend of hers.

  He wished he could shoot an arrow at her.

  He closed his eyes. He wished Diana would miss the bird.

  Hell, he prayed she would miss the goddamned bird and hit that bitch in the heart.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Diana said when she was done. Her breathing accelerated, and her face displayed the ruddy glow that Van had seen after he’d done her good and hard. “I got one. Let’s ride back, I want you now.” Quickly, she turned her horse around, and they raced back through the woods, Van clinging to his saddle horn, having lost the reins. He kept his head low and felt that at any second he’d be thrown to the ground.

  Somehow, he made it back to the Crown place.

  Somehow, he ripped her riding pants open and pressed his face into that salt-sea moist garden that grew wild at the center of her womb.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE SWAN

  * * *

  1

  * * *

  Lourdes stood at the edge of the dock, watching the cove as if half expecting some secret of life to be revealed to her.

  Stony crossed the bridge, and waved, trying to get her attention. They often met here, for his family didn’t like her calling, and hers often left the phone off. He couldn’t wait to hold her. It had been too long.

  He knew that despite the fact that they’d had a scare about the baby, they were lucky.

  Damn lucky.

  Look at her, he thought, shielding his eyes from the last of the sun. The sky sprayed pink and yellow light across the distant clouds. The trees along the opposite side of the cover seemed deep blue. Seven swans glided across the slightly choppy water, colored a blue-green like marble rippling. Lourdes wore her blue jeans and an orange sweatshirt, but might as well have been wearing the most beautiful gown—or nothing at all as far as Stony was concerned. He stepped off the bridge, onto the flattened yellow grass. Moving through the drying thickets that had, in the summer, been blackberry tangles, now just dry twigs. In his hand, a small flower he’d plucked from a garden on his way to see her. The closer he got to the small dock, the more he sensed something not quite right. Something about the way she stood, like a statue at the edge of the water, made him think he shouldn’t give it to her. He pressed it into his pocket, crushing it.

  When he called to her, she turned and he saw, even at some distance the tears on her face. Later, he couldn’t remember how he’d moved from one end of the dock to the other, but suddenly—it seemed—he was there, his arm around her shoulder, as if time had skipped.

  “What is it? What’s wrong?” he asked. He felt a shuddering from her. “What’s wrong?”

  She turned her face into his neck. Her hair smelled always of spice and lavender—he would know her from her smell. Sometimes she smelled of cigarettes, too. He didn’t like this odor, except from her, on her lips. “What is it?”

  She whispered something so faintly he barely heard. Had she said, “I’m dead?” What flashed through his mind was the baby they’d thought had been within her. “It’s dead?” That was what she’d said. He kissed the top of her head.

  She pointed to the water that lapped at the pylons. Something small and white floated there—like an old towel, thrown to the sea by some bather.

  Then he saw it more clearly. It was a swan. Not as large as the others that glided along the water near them, it was dead. An arrow through its back.

  “It’s dead,” she repeated. Her tears became a current from her eyes to his throat as she pressed against him. “I was feeding it.” She unclenched her fists and balled-up Wonder Bread dropped onto the docks. “Someone shot it.” She pointed across the water to the thick woods. “Over there.”

  Her voice trembled, but what trembled within Stony was not the dead swan but his love for Lourdes. “It’s all right,” he said. “Probably some asshole over at the Parkinson place. Someone should shoot an arrow at one of those jerks.” It was all he could think to say. When he looked at the swan, its blood black in the water, its feathers so brilliant white and somehow untouched by blood...All he could see was that something that had seemed so pure—something so innocent and wild—that had been cupped in his hands—in his and Lourdes’ hands—now lay dead with an arrow through its heart.

  The sun began to diminish against the sweeping clouds. Like dust whisked across a room—the light scattered. It was as if the world had turned over, a restless sleeper, and woke momentarily as Stony woke at that moments—a millisecond of time—a photograph of her face. Lourdes. He knew. She didn’t have to say it. It was like a sudden flash of telepathy between them, or perhaps merely intuition.

  You knew all along. You knew even when she lied to you.

  Lourdes was still pregnant. He was sure.

  “Why did you lie?” he asked, holding her closer. Now her tears blotted at his cotton shirt, mingling with his sweat. The river was between them—she cried, he sweated—and the reservoir held the truth. “Why?”

  She didn’t speak. She wasn’t like him in that way. She couldn’t go on and on with words and phrases and well-articulated thoughts. All she had was a telepathy in her silence. All
that needed to be said was in the warmth and tears.

  Finally, “Because I was thinking of getting rid of it.”

  Silence.

  The wind was icy and bitter, as it came down suddenly, and then the air calmed.

  “But I can’t do that. I just can’t.”

  Silence.

  “Christ,” he said. “What are we gonna do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know.” The crying stopped. He felt their two hearts pounding together—and then he remembered the third one—the baby. Would the heart be pounding there, somewhere between them? It had been four months. The baby was four months old now.

  “Other people do this. All the time,” he said. He reached up to stroke her thick dark hair.

  “Yeah. I guess they do.”

  Then she said, “I don’t want us to get married or anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “That would be dumb. We’d be divorced in less than a year.”

  “Maybe,” he shrugged. “Maybe not. People get married all the time. If it lasts, it lasts. You can’t predict anything with much accuracy.” He felt something overcome him; a feeling of how good life was despite the terrible parts. Despite the fact that at fifteen, he knew his life would change whether he wanted it to or not.

  A curious calm came over him. He wanted her. He wanted their child.

  He wanted what life was throwing at him.

  He loved her smell, her warmth, and as he held her close, he thought: I could wake up to her next to me, her face, her smell, her warmth, every single day of my life. I could do this. I really could.

  “Shit, you can’t even predict the weather,” Stony laughed, feeling the rain come down fast and furious. “See? God is pissing on us!” The heavens opened up with rain, suddenly, a crackle of thunder, and a flash of light...pure rain began pouring down on them as they stood on the docks. He lifted his face up to the rain, laughing at its chill, opening his mouth to take in the drops.