“What was it?” his son asked, but Stony didn’t answer. He felt what the boy had said; the Crown place was breathing, and as he looked at the jagged empty eyes where the stained glass windows had been, he saw how the membrane had grown across it, a stained glass of its own, a pulsing life taking over the house, unable to die, unable to do anything but survive.
As he unpacked the small bomb that the mail-bomber Swink had taught him to construct, the boy watched carefully. It was a cheap device, and he might’ve used it earlier, but he knew that he owed it to Lourdes and to their son, to do this here. This earth, this place, was tainted with the past crimes against nature. This was the unholy sanctuary. To bring it back to where it had begun, just as Fairclough’s ritual had tried to do. To bring it to a cursed spot, an unclean place, a land even the natives had shunned because it was the Devil’s playground, it was the place of Walks Alone. As he brought the bomb out, careful of the wires, careful of the small timing device that would set off the spark, his son whispered, “Dad, I love you, don’t do it, I don’t want to hurt—”
He set the timer down. Ten minutes. That was enough time to say goodbye to the world, to his son, to what had taken over this house.
9:33
He glanced at the digital watch, at the melting liquid that pooled around the altar of the chapel.
9:25
He heard the breathing, as of some monster, architecture of a being, all around them, containing them.
8:00
Eight minutes, and it would be over.
Eight minutes, and then peace.
It was an eternity until the timer got to five minutes, and Stony felt as if he could no longer hold in what he’d held for so many years, over so much pain and distance.
“There must be some redemption!” he shouted at the darkness. “It can’t be for all this pain! It can’t be for all this...this nothing! There must be a purpose!” He slammed his fist down, bringing his son’s hand down too, and the boy cried out as if hurt. “There must be some redemption! I don’t believe that I would come this far and not find it! I did not imagine it! I know what happened here! I know what I set free!”
Then, all around them, encompassing the chapel and its shadows, a woman’s voice, “I knew you would come back.”
Stony turned, and saw her face for the first time in twelve years, the face that lay beneath the face, like the developing butterfly inside the sac, beneath silken layers of cocoon.
A vision of a ghost of a shred of memory, and then gone.
Lourdes.
In less than seconds, Stony Crawford relived that night, so many years buried, so quickly resurrected in her glance.
COMES THE HALLOWEEN MAN, REAPING
Chapter Twenty-Eight
ALL HALLOW’S EVE
* * *
1
* * *
Halloween night, and Stony is fifteen, and he watches as the nearly clear liquid pulsates along the blue and red veins within the outer covering, the thin sac, that surrounds Lourdes’ body. He is weeping, unable to touch her, afraid of hurting her with that thing—that liquid environment floating around her, pulsing and flashing with red and pink and blue. When his weeping is over, the other one, the one called Diana Crown, touches him lightly on his shoulder.
“She’s more beautiful now than any human being has been since the dawn of mankind. Your son won’t let her die,” Diana said. Her breath was warm on his neck; he moved forward slightly to get away from it.
“What have you done,” Stony gasped, and felt as if he were choking on his own words. He could not take his eyes off Lourdes. It reminded him for a moment of Snow White, the fairy tale he’d read as a kid, sleeping in her glass coffin, that’s what it was like, it was like she was sleeping under glass, or under some stream—
Diana chuckled lightly, but her voice was strangely soothing. “Nothing. It’s your child inside her that does this. If you were to try and open the covering, it would kill her and the baby instantly. This keeps her safe. That’s what you want, isn’t it? What you—and I have—within us, you were able to pass on, to ensure our survival in this species—”
“This species? You and me?”
He turned to face her. He was beyond shock, beyond tears. He felt a coldness grow within, as if he were turning to stone.
Diana Crown was beautiful. Sure, he’d seen her around town in the summers, not often, but now and then while he rode his bike past her house, or saw her in town picking things up at the Package Store. Sure, she’d always been beautiful but in a cold and not appealing way to him, but now he saw something else. Like smoldering ashes beneath the surface of her pale skin. She wore a thin white dress, opened down the front so he could see the curved edges of her breasts, her smooth whiteness—
Her eyes, pale blue and full of some inner radiance.
“Who the hell are you, anyway?” he asked, or thought he asked, but could not hear his own voice.
Her smile curved, and she seemed warm and more familiar than he wanted her to be. It’s a dream. I’m in some dream.
“I’m your sister,” she said, reaching her hand out to touch his. When she touched him, he felt a jolt of electricity. He struggled to pull away from her, but it was as if the electric current held them fast together.
Then it stopped.
And he knew.
* * *
2
* * *
She spoke inside him now, as she spoke images played across his mind—
“We are half-brother and sister, Stony. I was born five years earlier than you, and my mother was my flesh and blood mother. My father—well, this will be difficult to understand—but there’s something not right in me that is right in you, I did not turn out as well as they wanted, the Crowns, but they loved me and raised me since I was of their flesh, too. But I was there when you were conceived, and when you were born, Stony. It was the most beautiful act ever committed with a human being, it was a moment of triumph for those who live only in the flesh, these animals all around us. Your father—”
“Johnny Miracle?”
“Yes, he was handsome and smart and—”
“Johnny was smart?”
“The act of a human coming in contact with divine fire can destroy that human, but it did not destroy Johnny. He was forged from the bloodline of a god older than any human knows to worship—the same bloodline the Crowns came from. They were originally Crowninshields, Stony, a noble family, and before that, their name was SacreeCrois, and before that it was—”
“You’re joking. You’re crazy—” Stony gasped and in his mind he saw a thick nail being driven in by a flat rock to a man’s wrist on what might’ve been a cross in a large and seemingly endless garden. “Jesus Christ—”
“No, not Jesus Christ, Stony. Far older than that, in the fields of western France, a god that walked the granaries and gardens and all that was planted, a god who was king for a season and then was inhaled by certain men, ritually killed every season, whose blood drained into the earth—”
“Stop!” Stony pressed his hands over his ears, opening his eyes to try and stop the sounds and images that came after him.
“It is only legend that says that Johnny is from the same bloodline, it is only legend that says that Johnny is the first son of the first son of the first son—going back to all the Sacre-crois —”
Scarecrow, Nora’s words came back to him, the words spat across his mind. Sacre-crois, Scare-crow, Crowninshield, Crown, the lineage of the Halloween Man.
“And you, too, are the first son, Stony, and so is your child in Lourdes’ belly. You are descended from the Kings of the Gods. Do you know why they call him Johnny Miracle? Do you? Do you know that he died when he was seventeen, hit by a car out on the highway? And they took him for dead, these people. They took him for dead and they buried him and he rose from the dead, he scraped his way up from the earth like a madman, and he came back to town covered with the dirt of his own grave, smiling as if none of it mattered, all
his wounds seemingly healed. That was his miracle. But only his first, Stony. His second was his fertility with your mother.”
“Who is my mother?”
She grinned. “Your mother and my father are the same being. There is no differentiation of sex in the realm of pure radiance. But you are finer than I am, Stony. I was not born of her womb but of the seed of her loins. You were born from within her, you were nourished from her blood, and you were made flesh from that which is without flesh. I have waited so long for us to meet, to talk, Stony. I have waited so many years to truly love my brother.”
* * *
3
* * *
The voice died within his head.
Diana stood there, seeming more ordinary now. The dim light from the bedside barely illuminated the bedroom.
“It’s in you, Stony,” Diana said. “The reason she won’t die. It’s in you. You planted the seed of greatness, of divine fire inside her...She is no ordinary human now, she has been touched by the gods.”
“What the hell—” Stony said. “What are you talking about?”
“You are the Halloween Man, Stony. You have the bloodline within you, and your mother was—”
Stony pressed his hands to his ears to drown her out, his body shaking involuntarily, the sound of wild horses stampeding inside his head, the feeling that a crack in the world had taken hold and was growing, and all of hell was seeping from it.
Diana reached up, touching the center of her forehead. “It’s time, Stony. Time to take off the mask, to show who we are, to run free, the feeling you’ll get will be like breathing for the first time in your life. Both of us. The rituals—”
“Rituals?”
“Rituals are the keys that unlock the many doors,” she whispered, her fingernails pressing into her skin. A thin line of blood ran down from where her fingernail cut into her skin. “Fairclough knew them. He knew how to open—”
She smiled, her teeth shining white. “You know Stony, I was there when your brother stabbed her. Your girlfriend was beautiful, too, with blood. He slammed it into her over a hundred times. Her blood burst out from all over her body, soaking us through, baptizing us—”
Stony felt something surge within him, and he brought Van’s knife up. “Just shut up!”
“That’s the knife,” Diana said. “That’s the one. Did your brother tell you how he felt when he killed her? How he got aroused from it? How he felt wave after wave of—”
Stony stepped close to her, holding the knife threateningly. “Just shut up! I don’t want to hear—”
Her voice within him, and the images, telling and showing him everything—
Van slicing the knife into Lourdes’ breast—
The look of terror, the pain, the fear as Lourdes tried to scream but the knife went into her throat—
“No!” Stony screamed, squeezing his eyes shut, and when he opened them he had already brought the knife down into Diana’s flesh.
He stared at it a moment. His fist around the knife.
He looked into her eyes.
A calm flooded him, as he saw warmth and yes, even love within the blue pools of her eyes.
“You have done what you needed to do,” she whispered.
Coming to his senses, he drew the knife out and opened his mouth to speak but only a thin stream of air escaped his lips.
He heard a tearing as of paper, and then the sounds like liquid and mud splashing—
Diana Crown tore at the place around her heart, where the knife had come out—
A split of flesh ran from it in spider web patterns, up to her face, around her eyes—
She was—
Oh god no
—Pulling off her skin, while splits in her face ran down the length to her chin, and then her neck, and where the openings grew—
MOONFIRE!
MOONFIRE!
Something within him smashed like a doll, and he felt himself curling up in a fetal ball—
DON’T WANT TO LOOK AT HER
DON’T WANT TO SEE HER
NOT WHAT SHE’S BECOMING
NOT THAT
The nausea rose in his stomach, up to his throat, but he held it in, forced it back down—
DON’T LOOK AT HER, IF YOU DON’T LOOK YOU WON’T SEE—
“Flesh is just a covering, it’s our upholstery,” the thing that had been Diana gibbered, as the last of the MOONFIRE shed the bleeding elastic skin—
THE OUTCAST STARED AT HIM WITH EYES OF MOONFIRE
What the hell are you?
What the hell IS that?
Her body turned to what seemed like spinning and burning molecules, thousands of tiny fireflies spiraling amongst themselves in the shape of the body of the young woman who had been.
Had been...
Opened. Set free.
Inside his mind, she answered him. We are what men have only dreamed. We are touched by the divine fire, Stony, you and I. Thousands of years ago men and gods mated, but the age of magic and gods has long died, until now—until now, Stony! You are the strongest, but you don’t know it, you have within that weak flesh of humanity the divine fire of other worlds! We are the first to take, and your child, growing inside her, is the future. Do not fear for her, for she feels nothing. It is like a deep sleep, and when she awakens, she will remember none of this, but she will give you a child, and that child will be of our kind—
They tried for decades for births, but none took. Young girls burned up from the fire, and could not conceive...but then we took, you and...they thought I wouldn’t make it, but I did...and now you, too...and they...
Stony shouted, “Who are they?”
The creature that stood before him, fire like an aura around its form, opened its mouth and said, “The devout. The faithful. Those who believe and have been touched by it.”
“By what?”
The creature’s light wavered, turning blood red, its eyes feral and sharp. “Your mother. Your real mother.”
“Who is my mother?” he shouted, and as he did a strong wind smashed against the window, bringing with it a small bird that broke its neck, as it shattered the glass.
Then, the thing that was Diana was caught up in a gust of wind, and shimmered before him—
What was beneath her skin, fragile as glass stained red and yellow—
Like sparks, separated—
Let your mind go, Stony. Be free. Let the Halloween Man out of his prison, you who are most sacred, most loved of the Eternal, you are part miracle and part human and part God, rain down on them all, your torture is in the secret, let it out, let it go—
You are Holy.
Like red poppies bursting into bloom, petals blowing—
Humans sacrifice themselves for us, Stony. We are Gods. We are the future of life. We are creation itself!
—Out across the night sky, like blood spattering along a sheet of wind, and then the thousands of bits of red light that had been Diana returned and glowed across the surface of the ceiling, which began dripping with crimson droplets.
He felt fear in the back of his throat, a tickling up and down his spine as the blood spattered the top of his head.
It’s in the blood, our power, our light, it’s mixed with what humans have now, we are eternal and we are mortal at the same time.
Stony was no longer afraid, no longer terrified, and no longer within the grasp of a nightmare.
The flesh that had contained what was inside Diana Crown, fell like dust. Her skull cracked as it hit the floor.
He turned to what Lourdes had become, to the bedside, and knelt down beside her.
The sweat had dried on the back of his neck. He clasped his hands in prayer and said the two or three prayers he could think of.
Above him, red sparrows flew from the ceiling, reforming across the bed from him, forming again as Diana Crown, in a vision of molten silver, an aura of yellow fire around her body. “The rituals are complete, brother. And now it’s the night of the harvest. We own all of St
onehaven, and all who dwell there are meant for our pleasure.”
“What the hell are you?” he gasped.
“I am a god,” she licked her shiny lips. “And I hunger for my flock.”
Her metallic skin glowed red, and burst again like sparks from a fire, like fireflies, no, like burning wasps all heading to the open window. Her voice, a humming of words, “Join me, brother, join me, and I will show you the pleasures of freedom that even the gods don’t know!”
Stony rose up and ran towards the swarm, but the spiraling lights flew out into the night, across the strip of water, to the village. “No! Diana!”
He heard a single scream, as of a child who has thrust his hand into a nest of yellow jackets.
* * *
4
* * *
He prayed to Lourdes, I am not going to let them hurt you. I know you can hear me, Lourdes. I love you. God, I love you more than anything. You, me, and our baby will get out of this somehow. Somehow...
Then, he began to hear more screams, echoing across the water, coming from the village.
He reached out and touched the shimmering edge of the sac across Lourdes’ face. A thin ripple, like gelatin, ran across its surface. Her eyes opened, blank, staring out into the watery nothing surrounding her.
It’s protecting her.
“Lourdes, I’m so sorry. I need to go. I need to go find help. Somehow...” Stony wasn’t even sure where to go for help, who to turn to. He thought about the cop from Mystic, but it was too far. Part of him wanted to run off into the woods and just hide. He thought of Nora, wondering if she could help—but how? How can you fight a nightmare? How can you stop what Diana had become?
And then, his own voice within him told him:
You are the Halloween Man.
Remember the story.
Remember what he did.
The story wasn’t everything, was it? The story wasn’t about Imp killing children, or about crucifying an evil man. The story was not about revenge, even though that’s how Nora told it.
Halloween Chillers: A Box Set of Three Books of Horror & Suspense Page 26