The sign up ahead indicated that the turnoff to what had once been Stonehaven was coming up. It didn’t read: Stonehaven Borough, which it once upon a time did.
The sign merely read: Land’s End Lighthouse.
Stony took the exit. Dawn clung to the trees along the potholed road, the ghostly light of five A.M. filtered through trees and thin fog. When he hit one of the many bumps in the road, the boy called Prophet groaned in the backseat.
“You okay?” Stony asked.
“Yeah,” the boy said groggily. “We there yet?”
“Almost. About seven miles.”
“Good,” the boy said. “I’m hungry.”
“Still have some doughnuts back there. Water’s in the thermos.” Stony reached over and grasped the thermos, handing it back to the kid.
“I have to pee,” Prophet said. He took the thermos and a moment later, Stony heard him gulping down water.
“Okay, I’ll pull over.” Stony slowed the car to a stop.
“You trust me?”
“To pee? Sure.”
“No, I mean to not run away.”
“You haven’t run yet.”
The boy got out and stepped into the woods. Stony opened the glove compartment, and checked to make sure the timing device was still there. He hadn’t checked it since Texas, mainly out of an abnormal fear that he would take the small sphere and throw it out and forget his plans. Forget why he was bringing this boy back to this place. Why he intended to protect the world from what had begun when he was fifteen-years-old.
It was not much of a bomb, actually, something he’d learned about by accident when the Feds from Phoenix had come into a small Arizona burg that to handle some old fart building a bomb in his outhouse. Stony had been called in to help, on a local level. The old fart was named Jaspar Swink, and had spent half his middle age building small bombs and then sending them in gift-wrapped packages to little old ladies in Tucson and Phoenix from the HEAVENLY FUDGE FACTORY. The little old ladies, delicately pulling off the ribbon, and then unwrapping the gold paper, could not have been more surprised when the first thing they saw was a tiny clock and some C-6 all bound together. Swink had timed his devices perfectly. He was an amateur mathematician and logistician, and had determined at precisely what time the ladies would get their packages, and approximately what time they would open them. “They first have to look for a card,” he had told Stony, sitting in the backseat of his patrol car. “They look for a card because they want to know who to thank. They hope it’s their son or daughter or an old beau they’d forgotten about. Then, they take one minute and look at the gold wrapping paper as if it tells something about the sender. Then, they take two minutes unwrapping, to save the paper and ribbon. When they see the timer, either they will know what it is and throw it, or they will look at it curiously for the sixty-seconds margin of error I give myself. And then, my friend, kaboom. Kaboom. Little-old-lady confetti in every direction.”
Kaboom.
Stony had salvaged one of the small bombs. He knew as soon as he saw it what he would do with it. He knew, in the months ahead, when he finally found the boy, what he needed to do.
It hadn’t made him nervous having the device in the glove compartment. Swink had told him that he kept six of them regularly in the back of his Chevy truck. “You can have these C-6 devices for twenty years. You can toss ‘em in the air, you can smash ‘em with hammers. Nothing. Not until you attach a detonator. A spark is the only thing. You can even get it hotter than hell, but until it sparks, you got just a lump of shit in your hand.”
Stony had asked him, “How big is the explosion?”
Swink winked at him. “How big do you want it to be?”
* * *
2
* * *
The boy opened the front door. “Can I get in up here with you?”
Stony shut the glove compartment. “Sure.”
“Cool,” the boy said. He slid into the seat, reaching back for the seat belt. “Your seat belt’s broken.”
“It’s a lousy car. I bought it for practically nothing.”
“Yeah, I noticed it’s a piece of shit but I was too polite to say it.”
“Actually you said it a few times.”
“Oh, I guess I did,” the boy grinned. “I feel I can tell you anything. Your car’s a piece of shit and you are one twisted bastard.” The boy chuckled. “It’s just a joke. I don’t mean it.” The tattoos on the boy’s arms looked like eels wriggling. It was just the morning’s dim light playing tricks. Stony glanced back to the road ahead.
Stony felt a trickle of sweat at the back of his neck. He started the car up again, putting it in drive. They drove in silence for a few minutes. Then the boy said, “Why are we coming here anyway?”
Stony, trying not to think of the bomb in the glove compartment, said, “To end something that should’ve ended a long time ago.”
“Oh,” the kid said. “All that stuff you told me last night.”
“I told you?” Stony felt his throat clutch.
“Yeah, I mean, this stuff about town and your girl and all that.”
“Funny,” Stony began, but stopped. Funny, I thought you were the one telling me.
“You know that man,” the boy said.
“Which?”
“The one who took me to Texas in the first place. We had to call him the Great Father, but that was a crock. I mean, I remember him a little. When I was like three, and four maybe,” the boy continued. They passed farmhouses, in disrepair, off the wild fields beyond the trees, like sentinels at the outer edge of town. The village. It was coming up. It was coming. He hadn’t been there since he was fifteen. He hadn’t been physically in this town in all those years. The memories should’ve been wiped clean, but they were fresh wounds. The sign to Wequetucket at the crossroads—where Lourdes had lived. The sign for the opposite direction to the community college. A small truck passed in front of him, narrowly missing him.
“Your lights are off,” the boy said.
“Oh damn,” Stony reached forward and popped the headlights on.
“He should’ve seen you, but it is a little dark still.”
“A little. Sun’ll be up in ten minutes completely.”
“You think?” The boy glanced out the window to his right. They passed an old gray barn beside a pond, a light steam rising from it. “This is nothing like Texas.”
“Why do you think he took you to Texas?”
“Well we were in Mexico first. He had a place down there. It was nice. A big old house. I don’t remember a lot of it, just that this one maid was really nice to me. We used to even play marbles sometimes. She liked kids. She had two kids, too, she told me, further south.”
Out of nowhere, Stony flashed on a memory he had never had:
A short woman, her face nearly serene, her hair tied back and up, her thick body covered in a blue dress.
Someone had taken a needle and thread and sewn her lips together.
When she opened her eyes, he saw that one of them had been replaced with a cat’s eye marble.
The world flashed back to him, the road ahead. He slowed down as they drove beside the cove.
“This is where I grew up,” Stony said, ignoring the damning vision he’d just had a moment before. The cove was placid. The thickets had grown up and wild and died down with the death of summer. It was a dead place. No swans glided upon its surface. No seagulls circled overhead.
The boy gave a cursory glance to the cove, but his mind was on other things. “I remember when we went to El Paso because it was so hot that day. We had to wait forever at customs. It was so hot I could barely breathe.”
“It gets hot down there, huh,” Stony said. He searched the cove for swans, but there were none.
“Yeah, especially in the trunk.”
Stony laughed. “You weren’t in the trunk.”
“Yeah. They put me in there. He told me that no one was supposed to know I was alive. I don’t know why. But he tied m
e up and put me in the trunk. It was hot as hell. It felt like I was in there for nine hours.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And even then they opened the trunk.”
“Customs?”
“Yeah.”
Another vision:
A man in a tan uniform lifting the trunk lid, and his face beginning to turn waxy, and then his lips began to melt down like a burning candle.
Then, his eyes bubbling with heat.
Then, the screaming begins.
“Why Texas?”
“Search me,” the boy shrugged. “He had this thing about the Wild West or something. When I was six he told me that there were people out there who were believers. That’s about all I remember. Sometime around then, he took off. Down to Mexico I think. The people who got me, the Rapturists, I heard them talk about the old guy was a pervert and he did drugs and shit. They said he was useless and old. Some of them told me that maybe the Azriel Light got him, but between you and me I always thought it was a bunch of bullshit. He’s probably just livin’ down in Chihuahua. It wasn’t like I was real attached to him.”
“Alan Fairclough.”
The face of Alan Fairclough, its pockmarked skin, its shiny pallor, its eyes like mirrors.
Alan Fairclough was an It.
“Maybe,” the boy said. “Could be. I just always called him the Great Father. Ever since I can remember.” Then, “Hey!”
Stony slammed his foot on the brake. “What?”
“You almost hit it.” The boy pointed to the thin slice of road. A stag leapt from the woods, darting across the road. In the headlights and fog, it was a shadow of antlers and a blue-gray blur.
“Christ,” Stony gasped.
“Whew. Hey, can you read?”
A sign on the old bridge that led to the borough:
PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO TRESPASSING. VIOLATORS WILL BE PROSECUTED. NO HUNTING. NO FISHING.
Someone had spray-painted at the bottom of this:
no nothing
“Pretty funny,” the boy said. “Hey I got a joke.”
“Not up for jokes right now,” Stony said. His unease grew as he drove across the bridge. The vibration felt bad here. It felt like no one had come here, no one would ever trespass here, if he could help it.
You’re a fool to do this.
Worse than a fool.
You are the most despicable being who has ever existed. You are the bogeyman and this boy is an innocent despite himself. You are an abomination on the face of the earth and you can’t keep hiding behind who you make other people think you are.
You are the Devil and Hell doesn’t even want to let you back in.
You will do something terrible to this boy.
“Here’s my joke. Okay? It goes, this guy is like a punker freak and he’s on this train. And his hair is all orange and spiky and he has tattoos and he has nose rings and nails through his hands and feet and eyebrows and stuff. This old man is staring at him. Real rude. And the punk guy goes, why the hell are you staring at me old man? Didn’t you ever do anything wild when you was a kid? And the old man goes like, Yeah, I did, when I was in the army I got stationed in Singapore and I got drunk and screwed a parrot. I thought maybe you was my kid.” The boy howled with laughter.
Stony smiled. “That’s a nasty joke.”
The boy kept laughing. “Only if you think about it. Think about it.” His laughter was infectious. “I bet if someone screwed a parrot for real they’d kill the parrot. Or get their pecker bit off!” He roared louder, slapping his stomach when he laughed. “Oh man that was a good one!”
“I guess kids are different now. When I was a kid I would never have talked like that to a grown-up.”
“Kids are different now,” he said. “Well, I’m different.” Then, the boy’s laughter died. Quickly, he rolled down the window. Inhaled deeply. “Oh man, I really smell the ocean! It’s so clean! Oh man!” he shouted, holding his hand out the window as if trying to catch the wind. “Smell it?”
Stony nodded. “Smells good.”
“Smells like everything,” the boy said. “I can smell crabs and fish and all that clean cleanness.” He laughed at his words. “Cleanness of sea-ness.”
“Look,” Stony said in a hushed tone.
Stonehaven Borough came up with the sunlight over the sea.
What was left of it.
Again, he stopped the car.
“Looks like God smushed it,” the boy said.
“You believe in God?”
The boy shrugged, looking at the ruins of the buildings. “No. I just said it because you were thinking it.” Then, the boy began shifting uncomfortably. “I don’t want to go here. Please. Not this place.”
* * *
3
* * *
“Don’t do this to me,” the boy said.
“Don’t do what?”
“Don’t take me in here.”
“Why?”
“I can feel it.”
“Feel what?”
“You son of a bitch. You brought me here because you want me to die here. You want me to know everything about what you did. All the evil things. All the nasty things. You brought me here to kill me.”
“What is it you feel?”
“Torture.”
“Is it the pictures on your skin?”
The boy nodded. His face was threatening to crumple, as if he had tears or nightmares or pains in his mind that rippled across his scalp and down his nose and eyes and lips.
“Take off your shirt. I want to see.”
“Leave me alone.”
“Just calm down. Take off your shirt. I want to see the pictures. I’m not going to hurt you.”
The boy pulled the T-shirt off over his head. He looked sullen. No longer that happy kid of five minutes past. He looked up at Stony with sunken eyes. He seemed younger with the shirt off, more like a boy of nine or ten than his twelve years.
“On my back,” the boy said. He turned around in the car seat.
His back was scrawny, his ribs stuck out, his shoulder blades jutted as if not quite in place.
Stony had not fully understood the extent of the tattoos. They were swirls of color all across his skin, interconnecting stained glass windows, faces, houses, the sea, and the heavens.
“Who the hell did this to you?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he did. He always said I was born like this.”
“Holy—” Stony gasped.
From the swirl of earth tones on the boy’s shoulders, a face began to emerge as if from a pool of oil-slick water.
It was a face Stony had not seen in twelve years.
“Lourdes,” he whispered. His eyes felt heavy. A fog in his mind blurred his vision. He felt the tears as they coated his face, tears as he watched her slowly open her mouth in a silent cry.
Then the boy’s back seemed to grow, his skin stretching, the picture of her face deepening, enlarging, until it was as if the skin was a canvas of the world, and he was watching her. No, it was as if he was in someone else’s skin, raising a knife on a night of an orange-yellow moon, a knife that glinted and flashed and made a noise like a fist going into mud as the knife went into her breast.
* * *
4
* * *
At first, it was the orange-yellow moon
The Moonfire grew pale from this and stretched and burst
The Moonfire
And at its cold blue heart:
The past.
Alan Fairclough stood before him, his hand out. “Come on, Stony. Let’s go. It’s all over here. It’s time now. You’ll understand. You need to know what this is really about.”
Then, the other pictures swirled around this one, Our Lady of the Sea, as he held Lourdes’ hand, the stained glass windows dissolving in the rainbow of colors and then reforming as Nora Chance’s old shack, the tarpaper roof peeling back in a strong wind. Stonehaven itself, was there, with the lighthouse at Land’s End, and the summer homes on Juniper Poi
nt, all mixing and then reforming into other shapes, other colors, other remembrances of a place of years ago—
And then he saw his brother, Van, who was still seventeen, his body soaked in blood, his hand up, and a hunting knife gleaming in the moonlight.
Chapter Seventeen
SKINNING THE BITCH
* * *
1
* * *
Time was a river of blood and fire. Van Crawford waded through it, the jagged pebbles cutting his feet, his arms raised above his head. It was only clear, clean water, and he was up to his waist in it now.
He looked about. For a moment he thought he’d been in the woods near Stonehaven at night, but now he was in a place that was like a summer’s day, with the heavy sun beating down on him. He leaned over and grabbed something that flashed and shimmered in the clear water. It eluded him.
Diana stood on the far bank, her blond hair hanging past her shoulders. She looked perfectly natural there, as if this is where she should be, naked at a river’s edge waiting for him. “Catch it!” she said, when he glanced up at her. “We need it!”
He looked at her for a long moment, not wanting this dream to disappear...
(He knew it was a dream, it had the feeling of dream, and he knew that a river of blood and fire could not suddenly transform into a clear beautiful summer river full of silvery fish.)
Then, he reached again into the rushing sparkling water, and grabbed it, wriggling, bringing it up to the sunlight.
A knife.
It’s not a knife, but a silver fish wriggling in his grasp.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 16