“You’re loony tunes man.”
“Shut up,” Van snapped. “And then, it was like she gave me permission and I had this knife, this knife—”
Del glanced over at Van. Van drew a large hunting knife from his belt.
Several strands of dark hair were stuck to the blade.
“And it was like she gave me permission, like that bitch Lourdes gave me permission to jab her, only it didn’t seem like a knife it seemed like my wang each time I entered her and it didn’t seem like I was stabbing her, it was like—like—I was doing her—” Van caught his breath. Del wasn’t sure if he was weeping or laughing, but suddenly Van raised his hands over his head, the knife held high. “I’m gonna kill myself right now, right now, man, I need to take myself out!”
“Shit!” Del said, pivoting to the side to make sure that he didn’t get stabbed.
Van dropped the knife. It clattered to the dock. Then be bent down, wobbling as he went, to retrieve it.
“You really kill her?” Del asked, and wondered if he could get up and run fast enough to get away from his friend who looked like he was Charles Manson on a bender. “You really really kill her?”
“I stabbed her so many times, dude, that she squished when I hugged her,” Van whispered. Then, exhausted, he grabbed another beer, sinking back onto the dock. “What the fuck am I gonna do?”
Del, considering his options, shrugged. “What you do with the body?”
Van, a gulp of beer in his mouth, sprayed it. “Shit!”
* * *
2
* * *
Alan Fairclough took his time walking up the stairs. His morning glass of whiskey still in his hand, he glanced out the windows onto the stables. It was good to be alive at the end of the two thousand years since the God had descended; it was good to be alive when the Age of the Spirit was upon the world.
It was good to be the priest of the new age.
When he came to the bedroom on the second floor, he felt the old excitement. The tumescence in his groin. The feeling of youth within his muscles. That surge of energy that always accompanied his blood sport. The Crowns had, over the years, supplied him with a steady stream of youths and maidens, and it brought out the Minotaur in him. He loved sparring with an athletic young man, a young man who felt that he could easily take out the old bastard who tried to punch him.
But Fairclough enjoyed the sport too much. He’d let the boy have a hit or two at his expense, and then he’d begin the battering. The bewildered youth wouldn’t even understand what was going on, what this would lead to. Wouldn’t even guess at the power that grew in Fairclough, the pleasure that burst from his brass-knuckled hands as he pummeled a face into pulp. Or the girls, how he could torture them just by holding them down and doing nothing but slicing a gentle razor against their fine brows.
Killing was not his game.
The youths were paid, and sent on their way, hustlers and whores all to some degree, paid handsomely for the privilege of Fairclough’s brutal touch.
But this one, this boy, this Van Crawford, who had done the sacred duty, who had shed the innocent blood of the lamb—
Who had unwittingly begun the work of the gods—
He would be delicious.
His pain would be like communion wine.
To know the light of God, one had to know darkness first.
Alan Fairclough, opened the bedroom door, and saw the blood-soaked sheets, the indentation where Van had rested his head in the night, and the bloody footprints to the window.
Out the window, he saw the red stains along the flagstone walk.
“Damn it,” Fairclough said, setting his glass down on the windowsill.
“He’ll be back,” Diana said minutes later when Fairclough came storming downstairs, shouting curses. “He needs me too much. He needs what we have. I know him inside and out now. He’ll want me again.”
* * *
3
* * *
Within a matter of minutes, her words proved true.
Glancing up, Diana saw what seemed at first the face of a deranged clown, his hair matted, his face pale with redness around his eyes and nose. Van. He’d been crying. He was incinerating himself from the inside out with his need for her. His hunger. What he got from her was like an addiction, and he needed his fix.
She leaned over the sink, reaching up to push the window out slightly.
“Please,” he said. “We need to talk. Let me in.”
* * *
4
* * *
Van’s hunger for her was immense. Away from Diana, he felt weak and spent, but close to her...breathing the same air...
His brain felt as if it were at war with itself. The blood dripped from his scalp, blinding him as he went down the hall. Always, the house was in shadow, as if the Crowns did not want too much light in their sanctuary.
Van wiped at the blood on his forehead. He tasted the fire of his own fever.
The fuckin’ bitch! Look what she made me do! She sent me to Hell! She’s such a fuckin’ cunt! Oh my GOD what she made me do!
He looked down at his hands. The blood burst and suppurated like lava wounds, flowing across the palms, trickling down his fingers. Stigmata fountains—and in each of his hands, a mirror. In the mirror, a reflection, not of a face, but of a mask. A mask ripping apart like paper, it showed the yellow fat of life beneath it. Something gibbered and spat like a creature made entirely of nerve endings.
That’s me!
That’s fuckin’ me!
He screamed, slamming his hands against the walls. “No! You can’t do this to me, you fuckin’ bitch!”
Diana came out into the hall. Reaching over, she flicked on the hall lights so the morning shadows were wiped clean.
He had expected to see her in the light of day, a monster.
But she was not one. She was still beautiful, too beautiful, too damn alluring, her hair falling loose along her shoulders, her eyes full of sunlight. She wore a beautiful sheer white dress, showing off her pale thighs; didn’t she know what she was doing to him? She probably had not even slept, yet she looked stunning.
“You didn’t even say goodbye, Van Crawfish,” she said.
Couldn’t she see the hell he was in? Couldn’t she feel the pain that shot out around him like an aura?
“I almost called the police on you,” she added.
“Ha!” He laughed, clapping his bloodstained hands together. “That’s a good one!”
“Look at you,” she said, her voice low, “coming in here, out of control, tracking blood, reeking of dead meat.”
She stepped forward and he saw what he had seen in her in the dark the previous night, the thing that had zapped his brain somewhere, the thing that didn’t seem right, for when he looked at her, it wasn’t like looking at a woman at all, not a woman named Diana Crown, but it was like looking at a dark creature with golden eyes that shot fire—
He remembered then all that he had seen, all that had been wiped clean from his brain in the past month, since he’d met her, all that had somehow hidden in his mind, as if it was too terrifying to contemplate—
“You’re a fuckin’ devil worshipper!” He screamed. “You made me do that last night! And that thing you got in the chapel! That thing from Hell! Oh my god, I’m gonna go to Hell! You’re makin’ me go to Hell!”
Then, Van thought he heard footsteps coming up swiftly behind him, but when he turned to look someone slugged him hard in his jaw and he thought:
Damn, it’s true! You really do see stars—
A tall skinny old man stood over him, holding what the oar of from a boat. “You piddling little fuck. Time for me to have a little fun.”
Van tried to push himself up, but could not.
“There’s nothing I like better,” the man said in a clipped British accent, “than a local boy with a high tolerance for pain. Ah, what I will do with you, Mr. Crawford, will open up vistas you now only imagine. When the pain becomes too intense
, like fire, it numbs. Then you don’t feel anything. I would never want to get to that point. I want to almost get there, Mr. Crawford. Almost. Just to the brink. Just enough so your nerve endings continue to scream for as long as possible. But don’t worry. I never kill a boy unless he begs me to do it.”
The man dropped the oar. It clattered on marble. The man crouched down over him, holding his face up. “You know what I get from this? No, of course, you don’t. Let me tell you my little secret. I get closer to God, Mr. Crawford. I get a little closer to the secret of creation. It’s one of the rituals that’s necessary for me to feel anything at all. I get what you might call a ‘charge’ from it. Permit me to introduce myself. I’m Alan Fairclough, and this, my friend, is your finest hour.”
The man raised his fist and brought it down, but that was only the beginning.
* * *
5
* * *
Eventually, it was over.
Eventually, the man named Fairclough who Van had begun to call God stopped slapping him, hitting him, whacking him, kicking him.
Eventually, Van lay in a heap, and was not sure just how long he lay there, or even if he was still alive.
The last words he heard from Fairclough were a wormy whisper in his ear:
“Now, Van, you have proven satisfactory. Thank you. Should you live, I’d advise you to get out of this house soon before my appetite returns. If you’re too weary to leave, I’m sorry, but as you know, sometimes the blood and the fight are enough of a charge, even without the kick inside, that little feeling you must’ve gotten when you stabbed her—what was it? One hundred and six times, yes that was the number, one hundred and six times, but you know, that was part of the ritual too, Van, that was part of opening up something that God has sent to us, and I thank you.”
Perhaps an hour, perhaps two, passed, before the will to live flickered within Van Crawford’s soul. All that was left within him longed to just make it right, to just somehow make it right again.
Chapter Twenty-Four
GOD, STONY AND JOHNNY MIRACLE
* * *
1
* * *
“You said I looked like my mother,” Stony Crawford said, his face flush, his eyes almost wild, his hair falling across his face as if windblown.
The priest glanced up from his desk. “Stony,” Father Jim Laughlin said. He closed the magazine he’d been reading. Picked up the rosary, fingering the first bead.
“You said I looked like my mother,” Stony repeated. “What did you mean?”
“I—” Father Jim began. Then, “Have a seat.”
“Just tell me.”
Father Jim nodded. Closed his eyes. “All I meant—”
“Not Angie Crawford. I already know. I know Johnny Miracle is my father. Who is my mother?”
“When I was younger,” the priest began.
Stony interrupted. “Listen, I don’t want to hear your private history, Father. I want to know who my mother is.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Well then who can?” Stony asked.
* * *
2
* * *
Johnny Miracle climbed down from the tree when he saw God coming with the teenager. God always wore a smile for him, and God always took care of him and brought him food.
Johnny ran across the Common, and greeted God with a great big bear hug that made God groan slightly. Then, God said, “Johnny, I want you to meet someone. Someone you probably have watched grow up here—” and Johnny looked at the boy, the tall gangly kid who he’d seen ride his bike down the streets so many times. Johnny nodded to the boy, whose face seemed to be set in stone.
Then, God said, “Johnny, this is your son.”
Johnny Miracle felt as if his breathing had stopped, as if his whole body had split apart, as if God were touching the lining around his heart as it beat. Tears came to his eyes without his knowing fully why; he bit his lower lip to keep from shouting.
“My son,” he said. “My son.”
* * *
3
* * *
Stony felt nothing but pain in his head, and a feeling as if he were somehow a ghost and not real anymore.
“All I want to know,” he began, but before he could say another word, Johnny Miracle grabbed him up in his arms, hugging him tight. Stony pulled away, but Johnny’s grip was stronger than he’d expected. It was like being hugged by a grizzly.
“My son!” Johnny shouted, weeping, his smile as big as a jack-o’-lantern’s. “My son!”
After Stony managed to extricate himself from Johnny’s grasp, he asked, “Who’s my mother?”
Johnny Miracle didn’t seem to hear. He raised his hands up to the sky and shouted, “Thank you!” Then, looking at Father Jim, “Oh, God, thank you thank you thank you!”
Stony waited for the shouting to die down.
“Who is my mother?”
“Oh,” Johnny tilted his head to the side as if rattling the marbles around in his skull. When he spoke, his voice was its usual slurred nonsensical sound. What Stony’s mother—not my mother, not anymore, he reminded himself—had called “Village Idiotese.”
“Oh, your mother, your sweet mother, she was sent by God Himself, she was an angel, she was all beautiful and pretty and when they mated us—and they were all there, my son—oh, when they mated us, it was like heaven and hell meeting in the middle.”
Stony glanced at Father Jim. “Who are they? Who’s he talking about?”
Father Jim hung his head down. “I can’t speak of it, Stony. All I can tell you for now is, you were brought into this world, and you needed a family. You needed the Crawfords. You didn’t need the Crowns—”
“Fuck you,” Stony said, suppressing an urge to punch out the priest, feeling his fifteen years bubbling with steam that needed to get out and quit with all this bullshit adults were passing around.
“Don’t you talk to God that way!” Johnny Miracle shouted, his idiot grin turning maniacal. He raised his arms and swatted at Stony, clipping him on the chin. “Don’t you ever talk to the Lord Your God that way!” He swung his fist through the air wildly, but Stony ducked. “No son of mine is ever gonna—”
Stony was already running, running but not knowing where he would go, running past pumpkins piled in doorsteps, past the Blue Dog Tea Shop, past the Package Store, past the policeman who shouted for him, past the streets, back to the light house at Land’s End, back to where he could forget that this morning had ever occurred.
Wake up! Wake up! He shouted inside himself. It’s a dream! It’s a nightmare! You’re gonna be late for some math test! You had too much of that Cat’s Claw tea at Nora’s and now you’re hallucinating in her shack! None of this can be real, none of this can change so quickly! Nobody has been lying to you all your life!
When he reached the tall yellow grass behind the lighthouse, he looked across the Sound and screamed at the top of his lungs just to get it out of himself, just to let it go.
He looked back to Juniper Point, to the Crown house—
The Crowns.
He sat down on the ground, and lay back, staring up at the hazy sunshine.
Oh Lourdes, wherever you are, I hope you’re far from this, I hope you’re at school sitting in Chemistry class wondering why I’m not there. Wondering why, because you decided not to run away with me, that it was all foolishness. And you’re sitting there wondering why you can’t tell me about how you couldn’t slip out of the house this morning, or how you had to tell your mother you were pregnant and she and your dad threw a major fit and now they won’t let you talk to me anymore...
Lourdes Maria, I know you’ll understand all this, all this bullshit. I know you will.
And then, something snapped inside him, so loudly, it was as if a twig had been stepped on near his ear.
Something snapped, and he felt the world going black.
“See? I knew it was a dream. I knew it,” he muttered, and then pinpoints of dark and lig
ht fluttered in front of his eyes. A pain inside his head seemed to burst—
He thought he heard the hoof beats of distant horses galloping along a shallow surf.
Then, he blacked out.
Inside a dream, he saw the Cove, and Lourdes stood out on the water, wearing the dress she wore to church. She held her arms out to him, but when he stepped onto the still water, it turned red, and the swans all rose, their wingspans enormous, as they took to the skies.
He glanced up, watching the beautiful white birds, and saw fire erupt from their wings until the entire world burned from their beating.
Then, Stony Crawford opened his eyes. His head was throbbing. He wiped at his dripping nose. His hand came back bloody. “Shit,” he muttered, sitting up. He’d only been out a few seconds. He felt exhausted.
Officer Dennehy said, “Hey, kid. Stony, right?”
The policeman stood on the edge of the path by the lighthouse.
“You okay, kid?” the cop asked.
Stony sat up, heaving a sigh that felt larger than his six-foot frame. “Yeah, I guess.”
Dennehy stepped off the path, walking over to him. “Let me help you up, okay?” He squatted down, and put his hand under Stony’s elbow.
Chapter Twenty-Five
THE COP
* * *
1
* * *
“I’ve been looking for you all morning,” Dennehy said. “You want some rock candy?”
Stony shook his head. He leaned back in the seat, glancing out the window to the Sound. Seagulls dove down and up from the choppy waves. “I’ve been around.”
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 23